The two biggest climate catastrophes going on now – namely the floods in NW Pakistan and the drought/forest fires throughout Russia – both threaten to have serious follow-on political consequences from the perceived incompetence on the part of the governments involved when it comes to reacting to these disasters in time and with sufficient effort and resources. The main difference between them – other than their finding themselves at opposite extremes of the wet/dry spectrum – is that in Russia there is no organized opposition present to take advantage of the situation politically.

In Pakistan on the other hand, and particularly in that part of Pakistan affected by the floods which happens to border Afghanistan, you have the set of varying Muslim extremist elements loosely characterized by the label “Taliban” (and in some cases even “Al-Qaeda”). As an article in the German commentary newspaper Die Zeit now reveals, those Taliban are indeed moving to profit from the situation, offering $20 million worth of flood-relief assistance on the condition that the Pakistani government refuse all other aid coming from foreign countries, particularly America.

According to the article, US aid on offer already totals $35 million and that has also now been raised by another $20 million, with the prospect held out for even more if necessary. (And it will no doubt be necessary: Oxfam has termed these heavy floods a “mega-catastrophe,” while a UN spokesman called their collective impact worse even than the Asian tsunami of 2005 or this year’s Haiti earthquake.) Then again, there are good reasons for any impartial observer to favor the Taliban’s offer nonetheless: as the Zeit article details, the inundations make sheer access to the area very difficult, while many of the helicopters that are supposed to be available don’t work anyway. (The article does not explain why.)

For now, it’s a “donkey or on foot” situation for getting help to where it’s needed, and of course the Taliban are already there in the area and offering to assist with distribution as well – provided that authorities promise not to arrest their personnel! And then this other article on the subject from the Danish daily Politiken gives another good reason: you can be sure that much of any outside aid will ultimately go to the bank accounts of corrupt local officials rather than to the victims for whom it was intended, while that is less likely to be the case with the local Taliban.

Going to Berlin in the next month or so? Looking for a unique tourist experience? Here’s one that comes not out of some guidebook, but rather from no less than Die Zeit: the lobby-tour, a tour of the German capital from a lobbyist’s point-of-view.

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out. (more…)

Today is the day EU heads-of-government convene in Brussels for yet another summit. There will be an elephant in the room, a problem that needs to be handled – Greece, of course – but which some (mainly, but not only, Germany) don’t want to handle just now. So, bizarrely, the summit meeting itself will not have Greece on its agenda; rather, there will be a meeting called of all Eurozone heads of government (16 of them) just prior to the main summit event to address the Greek problem.

I learn this from the preparatory blogpost to the summit provided by the Economist’s “Charlegmagne” correspondent, and I have to admit that, here, that source (in English, of course) is the best provider of information and analysis that I have been able to find. Among other things, his main insight (as embodied in his column’s title, “Why Greece is not suffering enough yet”) that Greece will only be bailed out after it has been forced to suffer considerable economic pain – namely to set an example to other potential fiscal miscreants – is spot-on. And he also reports (although indirectly, from FT sources) the very valuable information of what Germany is demanding to help Greece: 1) Greece must first exhaust all other sources of finance from the markets; 2) It must then get as much as it can from the IMF; and 3) Then Germany will help, but will at the same time demand “tough new rules on debts and deficits that will impose more budgetary discipline than before, even if that involves changing the treaties.” (more…)

In Germany it has become a fixed tradition that, in a coalition government, the leader of the second-largest party becomes Foreign Minister. This has happened ever since Willy Brandt did so in 1966 as leader of the SPD (Socialist) party, as that party formed a so-called “Grand Coalition” government with the Christian Democrats (CDU), and it has never mattered whether that specific leading politician has any particular affinity for diplomacy, or whether the party he heads has any new ideas or policies on that front. No, the leader of the biggest party becomes Bundeskanzler (or Bundeskanzlerin, in the current case for Angela Merkel), and the leader of the second-biggest becomes Foreign Minister, and that’s that.

And so since late last October we have had Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Free Democrats (FDP), as German Foreign Minister. Just four months – and he already is not having an easy time of it. Indeed, I’ve already had the occasion twice to write about him in this space, once just in passing as I explored the larger question of the new and awkward relation of top German officials with the English language, but also in a more focused way here where, during the time when the current ruling coalition was being formed after the last national election, I discussed an article in Die Welt that examined Westerwelle’s past and psychological formation to question whether he really had the right temperament to serve as his country’s top diplomat.

In that light, the latest Westerwelle flap is rather interesting: In the future Westerwelle wants to travel in peace. (more…)

Here’s another obscure blast from the past – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better-known by its initials (in French) CERN. Do you happen to remember the brief stir of publicity from around two years ago when that institution’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was finally built and could start smashing sub-atomic particles into each other along a 27 kilometer-circumference magnetic track? That fleeting bit of excitement (among those who cared, at least) quickly evaporated when the huge thing didn’t work quite right when they first flipped the proverbial switch, and so had to be repaired.

Don’t worry, though, because the scientists finally got the LHC to function properly late last year. Or rather, if you do need something to worry about, consider the possibility out of theoretical physics that has been looming ever since the LHC finally started operations, and which was also certainly known about before the gigantic thing was even built. When it smashes these sub-atomic particles into each other, you see, one by-product is black holes – small black holes, to be sure, but there has always been some possibility of one or more of them getting bigger and basically swallowing up the whole Earth. (more…)

Greece has been having its well-known fiscal problems, but there’s no way that it should resort to going to the International Monetary Fund for money to help out. Quite apart from some technical problems with that approach (e.g. the IMF generally tells you what to do with your monetary policy, in exchange for getting its money; as a member of the Eurozone, Greece has no control over its monetary policy), that would simply be an intolerable political gesture showing the world that the European Union is incapable of cleaning up its own financial problems.

But then what is the EU to do in light of continuing Greek fiscal weakness? Why, set up its own version of the IMF! Call it, for now, the EWF (Europäische Währungsfonds) – yes, using the German term, since it was German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble who got the whole idea started with remarks he made this past weekend. But the idea was further endorsed (at least in a vague way) yesterday by the EU’s man-on-the-spot Olli Rehn, the new EU Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs. For now, it is still nothing but an idea, but that also means it can go in any of a number of directions, something pointed out in the very title of an analysis in the German commentary newspaper Die Zeit: The Fund can be a savior or a bankruptcy-administrator. (more…)

Need a job? Well, do you speak Chinese – in particular, Cantonese? While throughout most of North America and Europe the financial crisis and its dire economic effects are still on-going, as Germany’s Die Zeit now reports, In China manpower is lacking.

I make reference there to “Cantonese” because the really acute labor shortages are showing up in those regions of the southeast that have long claimed the lion’s share of China’s export-oriented industry. Guangdong city alone (it used to be known as “Canton”) is said to lack 2 million workers. But everywhere in that part of China there are phenomena which point clearly to increasing desperation from employers when it comes to finding workers. Unemployed-looking people are accosted on the street and at train stations, by eager recruiters wearing “Welcome!” T-shirts; local authorities stage job-fairs, but nobody bothers to show up. And the like. For, to hear this piece tell it, China certainly is not suffering from any recession, not any more: exports are now back to their 2008 levels and rising.

Keep in mind, it’s also not especially highly-trained or -educated workers that are sought (although, if you’re seriously thinking about making the move yourself, learning the language could indeed be a complicating factor). Remember, that has not been China’s traditional manufacturing paradigm in any case, which instead has been based on cheap, simple manufacturing, performed by basic, lowly-paid workers – reinforced annually by as much as 150 million new people moving in to the big cities from off the farm to find a job and sample urban life. Presumably that stream from the countryside is still there, but businessmen are still having problems recruiting a work-force, even as wages rise 10% a year and even 20% annually in the “hardest hit” (in terms of worker-shortage) areas.

If conditions are indeed anything like how they are reported here, all this has to call into serious question that “simple, cheap manufacturing” economic model. China may be about to lose its reputation as the place you go to have your stuff made at rock-bottom costs; time to go elsewhere for that. (Myanmar? Mongolia?) Still, not only is there indeed a new Chinese capability coming on-line for higher-value, quality production, but business leaders there are also convinced that the country has accumulated an expertise in supply-chain management that should keep it very competitive for some time to come.

The American government has approved a new sale of made-in-America arms (including Black Hawk transport helicopters and Patriot air defense missiles) for the “Republic of China” (i.e. Taiwan), and Chinese officials are making clear their displeasure, including their intention to “punish” those companies behind these sales. Already, all Sino-American military exchanges have been canceled. This hardly represents the first such American arms-sale to Taiwan, and the Chinese have reliable protested against all previous ones as well. But some observers view this latest episode as something slightly different, as perhaps expressing some sincere Chinese anger this time that could lead to trouble.

Steffen Richter of Germany’s leading commentary newspaper, Die Zeit, takes a look at this question in A case of new self-awareness, and agrees that things do seem to be a bit different this time. Of course, as he points out, one could make a case that China should just shut up, that such protests are pointless. China has long been aware of the firm American policy of support for Taiwan’s independence, enshrined in the Taiwan Act of 1979 (enacted right at the same time that Sino-American relations were coming around to a sort of cordiality, with the visit of then-Chairman Deng Xiaoping to meet President Jimmy Carter). Indeed, back in 2001 Taiwan was even angling to get submarines and F-16 fighters from the Americans (they did not, in the end), while this time they knew better than to even ask for such things.

But of course the People’s Republic is not shutting up, its public tone is rather becoming even more angry and threatening. Richter ascribes this to a new Chinese wave of self-confidence, leading to the notion that now is the time to test President Obama to see just what he is made of. There would seem to be so many areas of international policy where the US depends on China to play along, headlined by the fact that China is America’s largest creditor but then going on to issues such as climate change, Iran, North Korea, and the whole broad area of trade policy, international economic equilibrium and the pegging of the yuan against the dollar.

Maybe, in the face of all of this, Obama will blink and cancel the arms-sale; maybe he’ll even be intimidated enough to withdraw the US troops in South Korea and Japan. In the end, though, just as with currency issues, China is really not in any position truly to force any new “Ice Age” in its relations with the US, since it is still reliant on America for things like technology and know-how. Richter expects no truly serious consequences to arise from this latest flap.

Germany confronts the Chinese threat – and all within the pages of the leading German commentary weekly Die Zeit! That is what we can now find on-line in the form of the article Should I learn Chinese now? Look closer, though, and the treatment is not quite what it might seem from the title; the piece actually originates from the Zeit Campus spin-off magazine, and so the article (by Nadja Kirsten and Philipp Schwenk) in its essence explores what the authors describe as “China as learning-factory that spits out cheap competitors into the world academic market.” Ultimately, as they show based on interviews conducted with a handful of German students actually studying in China and other available experts, this image is hardly true at all – despite that photograph of massed ranks of identically-clad graduates (yes, mostly in red) that the Zeit Campus editors chose to adorn the space just below the article’s headline and lede.

Kirsten and Schwenk do bring forth amazing facts about Chinese schools and Chinese students, some of which we have surely all heard before. The idea is that, seemingly throughout the entire breadth of the 1.3 billion citizens making up Chinese society, education is attended to fanatically as the best (and for many the only) means to advance oneself. So students routinely show up at school in the morning up to an hour before classes actually start, to get some preparation time in; and throughout their academic careers they have to deal with a constant stream of publicly-posted lists of class-rank and who scored precisely in what order on any individual examination. (more…)

Yes, and the German weekly Die Zeit is already on the ball and ready with its coverage. To start with, the schedule of prize-announcements is here; it lets us know that the Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry prizes will be announced around noon on Monday (today), Tuesday, and Wednesday, respectively. As perhaps befits subjects not belonging to the exact sciences, the Peace and Literature prizes are simply supposed to be out sometime by the beginning of next week (meaning presumably by next Monday). That is also when the winner of the Economics Prize will be announced – also not an exact science, many will say, but in any case the one “Nobel Prize” that is not a Nobel Prize, since Alfred Nobel never provided for any economics prize in his will and it was rather set up in parallel to the Nobel Prizes by the Swedish Central Bank in 1968.

If you’d like a scorecard to follow along with as the award-announcements proceed through the coming days, the Die Zeit piece links to this survey of potential winners, in English, from Thomson Reuters. This time it’s the “exact sciences” plus economics about which the (unnamed) Thomson Reuters reporters speculate, not the “softer” subjects that are more interesting for this observer, namely Peace and Literature. Still, it should be interesting to see whether anyone on their candidate-lists actually wins the respective prize.

Back to Die Zeit, it tops its pre-coverage off, in the hope that the next week will swell the ranks of German winners, with this picture-gallery of the German Nobel winners since 1979. Or at least what it wants to label as such – they somehow neglect to include Günter Grass, winner of the Literature Prize in 1999. In setting that arbitrary cut-off year they also exclude probably the most famous German Nobel prize-winner of them all, namely Willy Brandt, winner in 1971 (for his Ostpolitik reconciliation policy).

One final complaint I have to add is that, although that 1979 cut-off does allow the possibility of the German winners being East German winners, the descriptions of each person don’t usually provide enough information for one to be able to assume or to exclude that possibility, at least in many cases. On the other hand, the 18th winner in the picture-series (out of 21), Ernst Ruska who invented the electron-miscroscope, is described as having done his most important work “five decades ago,” i.e. in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This hardly invalidates the magnitude of his achievement, of course, nor would any connection on the part of any of the other prize-winners to the DDR; it just would be interesting to know.

Germany’s Die Zeit allowed itself yesterday a bit of gloating: Europe takes over from North America as richest region. It’s all due to the Great Recession: North American wealth is to a much greater proportion held in equities, whose values lately have plummeted, so that assets under managment (AuM) there fell by 21.8% in 2008 to $29.3 trillion, while in Europe AuM fell in the same period by merely 5.8%, to $32.7 trillion. Latin America was the only region where AuM increased despite the adverse economic conditions, by 3%.

All of this, and more, is information forthcoming from a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, which the BCG is kind enough to discuss at length here, in English, so you can consider those previous and the study’s other findings at your convenience. (For example, the US still has the most “millionaire households,” at almost 4 million, although they are thicker on the ground in Singapore, where a full 8.5% of all households own more than $1 million.) Indeed, not only is the BCG itself willing to state figures to one decimal place, while Die Zeit for whatever reason tends to round up to the nearest whole number, but the former also makes use of the American/British system of big numbers (thousands, millions, billions, trillions) that you are probably more used to (and whose differences with the continental European system I had occasion to discuss here previously).

“Eick is being rewarded for a task that he did not fulfill!” is the complaint from labor-council chairman Ernst Sindel featured prominently in a new article in Die Zeit by David C. Lerch over the bankruptcy of German retail-giant Arcandor. Welcome to the Anglo-American business culture, Herr Sindel! Isn’t that something that Germans have always been striving to emulate? Well, now you’ve arrived, complete with around 38,000 company employees about to lose their jobs and unsure about where their next paychecks will come from, while Arcandor’s CEO (one Karl-Gerhard Eick) also loses his job but receives a €15 million “golden handshake” to help ease his transition. At least that money will not come directly out of Arcandor’s empty coffers, but rather from those of the private bank Sal. Oppenheim, the bankrupt concern’s majority shareholder.

Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free: that peculiarity has now also reached Deutschland, although at least – thank Goodness – there it does not (yet) involve financial institutions or taxpayer monies. But Arcandor’s plight typifies the way the German economy has been hit hard by the Great Recession, since that business-speak, focus-grouped moniker dates back only to March, 2007, and encompasses two more-serious names, venerable pillars of (West) Germany’s post-war retail world, namely the ubiquitous department-store chain Karstadt and the mail-order house Quelle. Karstadt, in particular, is like Sears in America: every city and town has had one for decades on end, so that you could never even imagine life without it (although, for that matter, Sears has itself been suffering financially for rather a long time now). In another way it is like Macy’s: just like that department-store chain’s world-famous flagship store in New York City’s Herald Square, Karstadt itself boasts of the renowned KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) in the center of former West Berlin, a gigantic and opulent department store in its own right and the very symbol of Germany’s 1950s-60s era Wirtschaftswunder.

The exact occasion for Lerch’s article is not the sudden discovery of Eick’s generous “golden parachute,” but rather the fact that the three-month “freezing” period, mandated by German law, after Arcandor filed for bankruptcy on June 9 is shortly to come to an end. This means that it will soon be time to liquidate Arcandor, erase that particular business-speak, focus-grouped name from the official business-register, and find buyers for the firm’s component-pieces (or for pieces of those component-pieces, if necessary). Surely someone will be willing to purchase jewel-in-the-crown KaDeWe! It also seems that another big German retailer, Metro, is willing to take up most of Karstadt’s stores to fuse with its own Kaufhof chain. But the mail-order concern Quelle might have a harder time finding a buyer. No interested parties have stepped forward as of yet, and you’d be excused for suspecting that such a business-model might be somewhat outdated, unless it can re-make itself more along the lines of Amazon (which itself certainly already has a robust presence in Germany).

Close observers of the NATO effort in Afghanistan (including EuroSavant) have always been aware that there is something strange about the deployment of German troops there, which now has passed the eight-year mark. For starters there is their exclusive placement in the north of the country, when all the meaningful anti-Taliban action is in the south (or at least used to be!), this deployment also features fairly absurd rules-of-engagement designed to restrict the German Army (or Bundeswehr) there to defensive duties only. Now you can add into this mix a strong and growing skepticism among the public back home whether the Bundeswehr should be there in the first place, if we can credit an article by Hauke Friederichs in the prestigious German opinion newspaper Die Zeit, entitled Germany’s self-delusion in the Hindu Kush.

That caustic title is actually the very same as that of a new book out by Stefan Kornelius, head of the foreign affairs department at Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The expanded list he provides of “defense-only” rules under which the German troops have to work is truly ridiculous. They may fire at targets only after they have first been attacked, and even then may not pursue those enemy forces if they should then try to flee; no night flights are allowed by either fixed-winged or helicopters – and, in any case, anything German pilots may learn up there in the way of intelligence on the enemy cannot be radioed back directly (i.e. in “real-time”), but must be debriefed only after that aircraft is back on the ground. For the rule that takes the cake I almost chose the one reading “No counter-narcotics activity; you’re not here for that,” which among other things supposedly has resulted in opium poppies for harvesting being grown right next to a German base! But no, that has to yield pride-of-place to Friederichs’ mention that German government lawyers are still filing legal complaints against soldiers who fire their weapons in self-defense when it’s not clear that the Taliban have indeed fired first! (more…)

Here’s a serendipitous find from out of today’s wanderings in Die Zeit: Viewers of the new film “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” could find themselves being viewed at certain movie theaters in Germany. “But it’s dark in there during the show!” you might object. No problem: the one or more people down off to the side of the movie-screen (usually private security firm employees) will be using night-vision devices to keep tabs on the audience. It’s not anything like over-passionate canoodling they’re there to stamp out (or for that matter people talking on mobile telephones in the middle of the showing – damn!); it’s those who have brought camcorders or similar devices along and are trying to record the film.

As you could imagine, it’s films that have just been released to theaters that are particular candidates for this treatment, and Die Zeit further notes that this is by no means a new measure, but has been used at least since back in 2005. This time, though, a powerful coalition of Warner Bros., the Society for Prosecuting Copyright Violations (in German, the GVU), the Federation of German Movie Theaters, and the Union of Film Distributors stand behind it; in response to customer complaints, one movie theater-owner could only plead “If we don’t allow it [the night-vision surveillance], we would never get any more films from Warner.” Nonetheless, officials from the Data Privacy Office of Sachsen-Anhalt (one of the federal German states where this practice has been going on) are now investigating whether Warner Bros., by insisting this way, has violated the law.

Coming up on 9 November of this year is a significant anniversary, namely 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Coupled with that will be all sorts of related 20-year commemorations: of the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, the fall of Ceausescu in Romania, etc., but also the end of West Berlin as a very unique enclosed outpost of the West in the middle of Communist-controlled territory. Writing in Die Zeit, Wolfgang Büscher wonders whether it wasn’t all just some bizarre dream:

Was there really a West Berlin – this walled-in, haunted city? Sunk into the past twenty years ago, she is to us today as distant and fantastic as the Moon.

Nice, but Büscher’s aim is ultimately not to wax lyrical about his forgotten West Berlin, as we can see from his piece’s simple title: “City of Spies.” Or, if you prefer, Operationsgebiet (“operations area”), West Berlin’s designation in the files of the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, the infamous East German secret police.

For it turns out that the Operationsgebiet was a veritable playground for the Stasi during the entire period back when there existed ideologically-hostile West and East Berlins. This shouldn’t be so surprising, though, if you think about it. One the one hand, West Berlin was a completely-enclosed area right at hand, in fact right next to what became the East German capital. And on the other, the Stasi was known to be very good at its job. Anyone who knows anything about what the DDR (“German Democratic Republic”) used to be like knows about the 100,000 or so inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (“unofficial co-workers,” or IM) the Stasi managed to plant among the East German population – basically police-spies tasked with reporting on anyone who expressed dissent, seemed planning to flee the country, and the like. This could be your child’s teacher or your neighbor (in fact, it probably was one of your neighbors) – it could even be your husband or wife. (more…)

You’ve noticed all the hype these days about the first manned landing on the moon, the Apollo 11 mission, forty years ago this month, right? Newspaper articles, radio programs, “Where were you then?” requests for viewer/listener feedback, etc. . . . Unfortunately, yesterday NASA had to put out word that might dampen the celebratory mood somewhat, as the Flemish newspaper De Standaard reports: Original video-pictures of the first moon-landing lost. Specifically, the space agency can’t find any of the 45 (!) tapes of the videos made on the moon of the first “moonwalk” (not involving Michael Jackson in any way, but rather Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin) on what back on Earth was the night of 20-21 July 1969. It’s not that they haven’t tried to find them: in fact, spokesman Dick Nafzger claimed they have been looking for three whole years, after first discovering that they were missing in 2005(!).

Bummer. A full investigation is planned, you’ll be pleased to hear. And there’s plenty of other moon-landing commemorative material out there on the Net, anyway, as you can see from this link-collection Kai Biermann has put together for Die Zeit. You’re right, that’s in German; for those for whom that presents something of a barrier, let me just recommend from among those NASA’s entertaining and informative animated comic, an image-gallery of pictures that the astronauts themselves took on the Moon, and Google’s own moon-map where you can specifically see where the Apollo 11 astronauts (as well as those of other Apollo missions) did their thing.

The De Standaard article also mentions that, as a way to reclaim those lost videos to a certain extent, video-recordings of the moonwalks taken at the time off of television back on Earth will be “cleaned up” to make them more viewable by a California firm specializing in that sort of thing called Lowry Digital. Actually, Lowry Digital is based in Hollywood – another unpleasant surprise to NASA executives, who fear that this “cleaning up” of those substitute tapes will only reinforce the suspicions of a cover-up by those who believe that this “moon landing” was never anything more than a Hollywood production designed to fool the world.

It’s interesting to see happening now in the on-line German press a vigorous discussion of that latest of modern-day philosophical questions: Of what use – if any – is Twitter? Granted, the Germans are probably coming around rather late to this subject, and you’d also have to think that their attention was attracted to it by the role Twitter played in the recent street demonstrations in Iran. But Fabian Mohr, writing in Die Zeit (Twitter: The media revolution that is not one), does provide some thoughtful arguments about this recent micro-blogging craze.

Now, as you might expect he has been driven to take up his pen by a spate of recent “What’s it good for?” attack-articles, such as in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (by Bernd Graff; the title is pretty untranslateable – Tschilp, tschilp, bla, bla – and yes, part of the caption under that picture up-top of the two parrots cuddling asks “whether these two have rather more to say [i.e. that's interesting than Twitter-tweeters]?”), and even in his own Die Zeit (by Jens Uehlecke: Stop with the chatter [already]!; Geschnatter basically = “chatter”). One rather perceptive point he makes is to point out the parallel between reactions to Twitter among many journalists (“highly hysterical”) and the reception that weblogs met with when they first came into prominence about five years ago (wasn’t it about then?). (more…)

The well-respected German opinion newspaper Die Zeit is now reporting that a spokesman for German Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel has announced that she is planning to visit President Obama in Washington on Thursday and Friday next week (25-26 June). The main items on the agenda are said to be coordinated preparation for the upcoming G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy (8-10 July) and the Mideast peace process – oh, and yes, what is happening in Iran, as well. (more…)

Now that all indications are that General Motors is heading for its own bankruptcy at the end of this month, in whatever specific form, this raises the question of what is to become of that firm’s several European subsidiaries, basically Opel in Germany, Saab in Sweden, and Vauxhall in the UK. As you would expect, there is widespread coverage of this issue in the German press. Particularly interesting treatments about the latest developments in the search for a solution are from Handelsblatt (GM pressures for nationalization of Opel) and Die Zeit (USA pressures Germany towards Opel nationalization). (more…)

Die Zeit today brings doleful news: Germany has a relapse! What the unnamed journalist (no by-line) is referring to here specifically is what he calls the “Maastricht Criteria,” according to which EU member-states are supposed to keep their government budget deficits to 3% of GDP or less. (That’s OK as a name, but it would be more accurate to call this requirement part of the Stability and Growth Pact that was agreed to as a pre-condition for the establishment of the euro.) Sure enough, the European Commission now calculates (in a report released today) that the German debt this year will amount to a full 3.9% of GDP – and next year even 5.9%! And all this, the Die Zeit article notes, just two years after Germany had managed to get itself out of the Commission’s bad graces (actually, out of a full-scale official EU “penalty process”) for violating this rule!

Well, to offer a quick bit of economic analysis: No sh–, Sherlock! (more…)

The time has come around again to address the issue of German radicalism. This has nothing to do with the national elections coming up there at the end of September. Nor does it have anything to do with the recent film The Baader Meinhof Complex, for that matter.

Rather, it’s about a guy – a fully-functioning adult, mind you, in this ninth year into the 21st century – who owns no mobile telephone whatsoever, and never has. Furthermore, he’s confident he never will. Can you beat that? His name is Selim Özdogan (Turkish, obviously; sounds like some sort of Middle Eastern radical to me), he writes for Die Zeit, and he tells us all about it in an article entitled Handy-Free Zone. (For those not in the know: Handy has been the literal German word for “mobile/cell phone” ever since they first appeared there on a widespread basis in the late 1980s.) (more…)

Heard about the new Star Trek film (title: “Star Trek”) coming out next month? For real: this one is apparently going to reveal the pre-history of that great space epic, i.e. the story of those times before the USS Enterprise embarked upon all those space-adventures depicted in the original late-1960s TV series, the period back when James Kirk, Mr. Spock and all the rest of the crew were still just . . . well, “space cadets” might be the best term. There must still be a healthy Trekkie community in Germany, for no less than the prestigious weekly Die Zeit has an article up about this (From Lad to Captain) by Bernd Musa. (more…)

Today we continue our impromptu series on “animals back in Europe that you wouldn’t expect” with an article by Helmut Luther from the German paper Die Zeit about the wolves that now roam in Italy, specifically in the northern reaches of the Apennine Mountains. Actually, Luther’s article (with the nearly-incomprehensible title “In a song with Isegrim” – it seems Isegrim/Isegrin is the name of a wolf-character out of German medieval fables) is located within Die Zeit’s Travel section, as it is oriented towards potential tourists interested in heading down to Northern Italy to try out the very limited wolf-searching commercial tours on offer there, and includes at its end practical information about the tours themselves, how to get there, and available hotel accommodation in the area.

But yes, wolves are back in Northern Italy, after all but completely dying out decades ago. They were officially made a protected species under Italian law back in the 1970s, but Luther writes that a more-helpful development was the economic development since then that prompted country-dwellers in that part of Italy to head away to the city for more lucrative jobs, and so opened the way for wild boars and deer – the wolves’ favorite snacks! – to spread and multiply, with the canines at the top of the local food-chain soon following. (more…)

“Sssssshhhhhh – keep it down, will ya? That’s exactly what Rush Limbaugh together with just about the rest of the Republican Party have been loudly declaiming these past few weeks, and we all know that is hogwash. Who is this guy who is piling on this organized campaign of slander against the President?”

Actually, it’s Josef Joffe, one of the publishers of the prestigious German weekly commentary newspaper Die Zeit, who in a new article (title: “The Monster Budget”) calls Obama a “social democrat,” i.e. in the European style. OK, he actually doesn’t call Obama a “social democrat” directly, but instead writes about the “social-democratization” of America that he detects Obama is aiming for on the evidence of the Federal government budget that he just submitted to the Congress. His lede reads “Barack Obama’s proposed budget drives expenditures, debts, and taxes to new heights.” It all sounds like we still might prefer to keep Rush Limbaugh in the dark about this, don’t you think? (Do you remember if Rush understands any German?) (more…)

OK, hold on, it’s only Guam (a US Pacific territory) that they can hit – so far. I know: that post-title was probably pretty cheap of me, and does no justice to the serious situation that is reported today by Germany’s Die Zeit. Because if they can hit Guam, they can also hit Alaska (I know, still no great loss, but bear with me here . . .) as well as Northern Australia and parts of India and Russia. (They’ve always been able to hit the People’s Republic of China and South Korea, but those are just a given, as respectively North Korea’s biggest ally and – ironically, bizarrely – its biggest enemy.) And I repeat that we are talking about nuclear warheads here.

So you can see how the recent stop in Seoul by new American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes on a new after-the-fact significance after this discovery of what the North Korean are up to (which you have to presume that Clinton and other top officials were aware of at the time). For whatever reason, the degree of North Korean invective against South Korea has heated up tremendously in recent weeks, so much so that South Korean politicians are quoted in the Zeit article as speaking of a “war of words.” In reaction to which Clinton announced during her visit there: “North Korea will gain no other relations with the USA as long as it insults and refuses dialog with South Korea.” US and allied officials are concerned not only about the extended range of these new “Taeppodong-2″ missiles but also about the prospect that they could find their way to other bad actors like Iran or Syria; the North Koreans have been known in the past as willing sharers of their deadly technology, if the price is right.

News reports also noted how Clinton broke a “taboo” while visiting South Korea by openly speculating during an interview there over what’s happening with the North Korean leadership. For indeed, there seems to be something strange happening there, as the Zeit article describes. Some think dictator Kim Jong-Il might already be dead – for one thing, he didn’t bother to show up to the gala nation-wide celebration last week of his 67th birthday. In any event, his son and designated heir – named “Kim Jong-Un,” it seems – is preparing for his “coming out party” on March 8, which in North Korean dictator terms means taking up a position with the Supreme People’s Congress in preparation for the higher positions he is being groomed to take up later.

A notable article just appeared about that silly Californian woman, Nadya Suleman, who recently supplemented her fatherless family of six children with an additional eight, in one fell swoop: USA: Californian family-of-eight deep in debt. And this is from Die Zeit, about as far in the German context away from a cheap tabloid rag-for-the-masses as you could possibly think of! (Oh sorry, you were actually looking for that tabloid instead? Try here.)

Still, it’s easy to see how this is a story that even Die Zeit finds it impossible to divert its horrified eyes away from. It simply punches just about every ticket in what Germans think about America, more specifically about California. Ms. Suleman, she of the fourteen tiny mouths to feed, is unwed, unemployed, and up until recently has been supported mainly by public welfare funds and her parents, living in her mother’s house – of course! Yet now her mother, Angela, is behind by $23,000 on payments for that house and is in danger of losing it – of course! (There was no real-estate craze in Germany; housing prices there were generally stable over the past decade.) Yet Nadya herself recently complained to US Magazine that her mother’s place, with but three bedrooms, was getting rather small for her rapidly-growing family. (To which we all respond in unison, whether in English in German, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you . . .”)

Now, Nadya did recently come up with over $300,000 more after the birth-of-eight took place, from interviews and from the pictures she allowed for all the glossy-magazine photo-spreads. Unfortunately, there was also supposed to be some sort of TV special, which would provide even more dough, but that fell through. (Of course there was going to be a TV special! This is Southern California – show biz!) That prompted the PR firm she had hired (of course she had her own PR firm!) to withdraw its services. So now it seems that she is left with little to forestall impending doom for herself and her extensive brood than contributions she can solicit on her website. (Of course she has a website!)

Only in America? Actually, yes – at least something similar could never happen in Germany, as the article takes pains to point out at the end. Suleman was able to undertake her eight-baby feat in the first place because she had that number of embryos implanted at a Beverly Hills (of course!) clinic. However, “[i]n Germany such an intervention is forbidden. According to the German Law for the Protection of Embryos, a doctor can implant in a woman at most three Embryos per cycle.” And California authorities – if they’re still getting paid – are now investigating whether the doctor in question here violated his/her professional responsibilities.

UPDATE: Jimmy Kimmel comments: “If she loses the house, Nadya will be forced to get pregnant again so she can live in the hospital for another three months.” And from Jay Leno, after the California legislature finally passed a budget: “Now Californians can go back to doing what they do best — buying homes they can’t afford and letting murderers go free.”

Here’s a solution for dealing with hard times, from Germany’s Die Zeit: Game of chance: Rush on Lotto-shops – 25 million euros has its attractions. The lede:

The prospect of winning the Lotto-jackpot of 25 million euros has led to a rush on the sales-points in many places in Germany. Lotto-players file through the tobacco-shops and Lotto-shops one-per-second.

The report comes from on-the-scene in Stuttgart, mainly because the last big German Lotto winner – picked up a €4 million prize last 20 December – came from there. To win that €25 million you have to get the seven numbers picked exactly right; if no one does that in four further drawings, then it will be split among all those who pick at least six numbers correctly for the next drawing.

The article also passes along comment from Klaus Sattler, press-spokesman of the Deutscher Lottoblock that runs these lotteries: “It’s a misconception that people in hard times turn increasingly to games of chance.”

Now that the German government has finally ditched its initial stance of taking only perfunctory measures in reaction to the economic crisis and has instead launched its own expensive stimulus program (as we discussed in the very last post, just below), it’s understandable that there would be some new Teutonic curiosity about how other countries are coping – I mean, now that Angela Merkel’s government has ceased writing everyone else off as a bunch of free-spending Nervous Nellies. So Die Zeit takes up the comparative economics assignment in fine style with a captioned picture-series entitled “Ways out of the crisis,” and dealing with the approach to recession-relief taken by seven of the world’s main nations, one page per country (pages 8 & 9 just have supplementary content).

Those without a facility in German will of course only be able to fully savor each page’s accompanying photo, which in each case presents a scene out of a soup-kitchen or other poor-relief facility in the respective country. Oh, and if your eye should happen to catch sight of the various numbers mentioned in the texts to the right, you will need to remember that Billion (plural: Billionen) in German actually denotes what Americans would call trillion; it’s Milliard in German (plural: Milliarden) that is “billion.” Note that I will, as usual, use the American terminology.

Otherwise, you can be sure that each country discussed (in order: USA, Russia, Brazil, the UK, France, China, and Japan) is taking active, although varying, measures to counteract the economic crisis. The prize so far goes to China which, when central government outlays are added to additional monies released for provincial governments, has committed to around €1.5 trillion in spending, or 2/3 of current Chinese GDP. Then again, they started earlier (the first major stimulus plan was announced in November), and they can afford it more, holding around €1.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. And it does seem that conditions there – except for foreign trade volume – are already starting to turn up. The US, in stark contrast, at this point according to the article can still point only to Barack Obama’s still-inchoate plans for an stimulus package of around €600 billion (no mention is made of recent suggestions to devote some of that to tax-cuts, and yes, the article cites it in terms of euros), which still will raise the federal budget deficit to 11% of GDP. So the Die Zeit editors here are ignoring the $350 billion of the TARP program already spent, as well as that stimulus-money (remember that?) that Congress spread around to all tax-paying citizens last spring – but, come to think of it, there’s not much room to object to them doing that anyway.

Notable mentions elsewhere in this article include the unique aspect of Russia’s relief approach which, other than devoting reserves to support the value of the ruble, features direct money-grants in State assistance to an eligible list of over 300 businesses. (What’s Russian for “corruption” again? How about продажность – “prodazhnost.”) And the brief entry on France points out that the public debt there has now risen to around 4% of GDP, i.e. above the 3% level that all euro-zone members, including also Germany, are supposed to keep below.

UPDATE: Regarding China, others are not so sanguine: Chinese Economy Faces 2009 “Hard Landing,” from Bloomberg (noticed at naked capitalism).

Ah yes, as I observed in a post a few days ago, when it comes to state funds made available to prop up failing banks, the German bank bailout demand is low. But “low” does not have to mean “non-existent,” and in fact on Thursday the German government made use of the Sonderfonds Finanzmarktstabilisierung (“Special Fund for Financial Market Stabilization,” or Soffin) it had established to provide Commerzbank with €10 billion in exchange for taking up a 25% ownership stake. More precisely, of that €10 billion €1.8 billion actually buys that equity quarter-stake while the remaining €8.2 billion goes to a “silent participation” that gains no voting rights. By the way, at roughly the same time Commerzbank also took advantage of that other facility offered by Soffin – namely State debt guarantees – to bring in another €5 billion in new capital via a guaranteed bond-issue.

If you were to use your imagination to put yourself in the German federal government’s place – say, if you were a German taxpayer in whose name all this money was being spent – you might very well wonder what those civil servants in charge of the Soffin were thinking by accepting in exchange for the lion’s share of that €10 billion amount a mere “silent participation.” After all, it’s clear that insisting on a 100% active participation would have resulted in the purchase of the entire bank, with money to spare. (Do the math: that €1.8 billion bought a 25% interest, yet constituted not even 25% of the €10 total spent.) Instead, the remainder of that money gains for the government the “silent participation” that is in effect a loan, charging 9% interest. (more…)

I’d like to take up again the subject of the rather unconventional German governmental response – so far – to the surging economic troubles to be found in Germany as well as more widely, prompted as I am to do so by the reader response I’ve received. You might recall that we can summarize that response as “Times might be tough, but there’s no need for this government or any other to spend huge sums, go way into debt, or otherwise endanger the EU’s Stability Pact that is supposed to underpin the euro.” (But also remember that this unorthodox position seems to be held only at the German government’s top levels, with plenty of insistent calls to start spending coming from elsewhere, including lower-down in that same government.)

This whole question in its broader sense – which could be phrased, ¡¿Caramba!, what can we do to stop the onrushing Great Depression? – is put into sharp relief by a commentary from Thursday in the Financial Times by the historian Niall Ferguson* (in English of course: The age of obligation, h/t to Naked Capitalism). (more…)