A Left Party politician has been accused of calling for the return of the Stasi as protection against “reactionary forces.” Christel Wegner, Left Party representative in the state parliament of the western German state of Lower Saxony, appeared to suggest this return to East German policy in an interview with German broadcaster ARD.
Norway has taken far-right clothing brand Thor Steinar to court for allegedly abusing the Scandinavian country’s national symbols. Scandinavia is cherished by neo-Nazis as a source of Aryan purity.
Deutsche Post, Germany’s former mail carrier monopoly, now the world’s largest logistics group, confirmed on Thursday that CEO Klaus Zumwinkel is being investigated by prosecutors and his offices have been searched. The public prosecutor’s office is investigating whether or not the high powered business man has evaded taxes by placing €10 million in Liechtenstein.
<b>A woman from the eastern German state Brandenburg told a court that isolation and alcoholism drove her to kill nine of her newborn babies over the years.</b>
Public clinics across Germany will be staffed only by essential personnel on Thursday due to a strike by health workers. The strike by members of the Ver.di united services union has been called to press for an eight percent pay rise. The German Business Institute calls the claim “unserious.”
The German government announced that it intends to lead a €1.5 billion bail-out of the German small business lender IKB. Minister of Finance Peer Steinbrück (SPD) said that the state would contribute €1 billion to save the bank.
Dresden is bracing itself for large neo-Nazi gatherings as it marks the anniversary of its destruction by Allied bombing in 1945. Every year a wreath is laid at the Heiderfriedhof, a cemetery where 5,000 victims of the bombings are buried. This year civilians are not the only ones to publicly resist the neo-Nazis. The eastern state of Saxony also wants to tighten the right to assemble.
Hessian Minister of Education Karin Wolff has resigned, after coming under fire in the recent state parliamentary elections for her rapid pace of reforms. On Wednesday, Wolff published a letter to Hessian Premier Roland Koch (CDU), saying that she will not be in the next state government.
Berlin is going crazy for Madonna after the American singer arrived to promote her new movie. Madonna arrived at Tempelhof airport on Tuesday evening and went to the French Brasserie “Entrecote” in the Mitte district of Berlin. The American singer dined there for two hours as photographers stood there waiting.
Yahoo has gained ground over its arch rival Google in the hotly contested mobile Internet market after sealing an exclusive partnership with T-Mobile in Europe. T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, is a mobile operator who is present in 11 European countries, as well as in the USA. It has roughly 31.4 million European subscribers. Google has had an exclusive partnership with T-Mobile until now.
Administrative and maintenance staff at Berlin public transport operator BVG are to go on strike on Wednesday in a protest over pay. Subways, commuter trains, trams and busses will run, however administrative offices and garages will strike on Wednesday from 5am to 3pm.
Scientologists in Germany will face closer scrutiny after a decision in a higher constitutional court of North Rhine-Westphalia. The court found that Scientology is engaged in activities that are subversive to freedom and democracy and thus should be subject to further surveillance.
A 58-year-old man in the northern German town of Uslar starved himself to death after he stopped receiving unemployment benefits and suffered from isolation. Two hunters found the former sales representative’s mummified corpse in a tree house. The man had kept a dairy outlining his slow death.
Turkey’s suitability for membership in the EU has been seriously questioned by Erwin Huber, chairman of the CSU, the Christian Social Union of Bavaria, following Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s warning against assimilation and loss of Turkish identity. The CSU operates only in Bavaria and is in alliance with the CDU. Generally, the CSU is the more socially conservative of the two.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told Turks living in Europe that they do not need to assimilate into their host societies. Erdogan was addressing an audience of 20,000 Turks gathered in Cologne on Sunday. The audience included Turks living in France, Belgian and the Netherlands, as well as in Germany.
Berliners will have to live with almost three days of closed streets and heightened security measures, as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visits the German capital. Olmert arrived in the city on Sunday for the three day trip. During this time Berlin will be on the highest security level.
Computer giant Apple is to open its first store in Germany, the company has announced. A link on Apple’s homepage put an end to speculation over the company’s plans for Germany by announcing plans to open the republic’s first Apple store in Munich. Apple is also looking for store employees over the Internet.
Plans to turn a three story Berlin sex shop into a huge brothel have been shelved after local protests. The venture at the LSD sex store on the boarder between the Mitte and Tempelhof-Schöneberg districts of Berlin, was halted by 3,400 signatures of local residents. The neighbourhood is known as a haunt of prostitutes, however, residents found the thought of a mega-brothel on a prominent corner overwhelming.
German users of online auction house Ebay are planning to boycott the site in protest of changes to its rating system. More than 5,000 users have already added themselves to the list of sellers who will not use Ebay between the 18th and 25th of February. Germany is the second most important market for Ebay.
The Berlin police have searched the headquarters of the rightwing extremist party, NPD, and arrested a senor party official. The raid took place on Thursday at the offices in the Köpenick district of Berlin. The national treasurer and director of the party newspaper Deutsche Stimme – German Voice - Erwin Kemna was arrested.
Suspected neo-Nazi graffiti has been found at a building housing a Turkish cultural centre and residential apartments in Ludwigshafen in which nine people died in a fire last night. The graffiti has fuelled speculation that the fire was a result of xenophobic arson. The German word for hate –hass – was written twice on the wall in SS-rune style writing. Police claim that the graffiti must have been put there before the fire.
Germany is to send an extra 200 soldiers to Afghanistan as part of a NATO Rapid Reaction Force. The troops will be based in northern Afghanistan, replacing 250 Norwegian troops who have been there fore two years this summer. Despite substantial pressure from the US and NATO, Germany will not send soldiers to southern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban insurgency.
“Once a chief physician’s wife, always chief physician’s wife”; a German matrimonial maxim has been consigned to history after the Bundetag passed new alimony laws.
Career, computers and mobile phones all demand so much energy from men that there is almost nothing left for sex by the time they are 40, according to a study conducted by the University Clinic Hamburg. The results show that Germen men have only one third as much energy for sex today as they did in the 1970s.
