An anti-Muslim party "for the majority of the society":
Xenophobe René Stadtkewitz
(Source: Junge Freiheit)

THAT’S WHAT I CALL inspired timing. Just when a group of American bigots are already gathering to burn Qurans in Florida, a German city councilman in Berlin today… Read full post »

 
You might think Cologne already had enough churches,
but that didn't stop the "Reverend" Terry Jones from
establishing a "Christian Congregation" in this ancient city

TOO LATE, GENERAL PETRAEUS: The Rev. Terry Jones’s plan to burn thousands of Korans at his “Dove World Outreac… Read full post »

  
Won't go quietly into the night:
Divisive author Thilo Sarrazin
(Source: Berliner Morgenpost)

THE WOLVES ARE CIRCLING Thilo Sarrazin. The knives are out. Yesterday, in an unprecedented step, the august board of directors of the Deutsche Bundesbank dismissed the renegade economist an… Read full post »

 
This diving expedition made the discovery of
their careers in the belly of a Baltic shipwreck
(Source: museum.ax)

EVERYONE LOVES A TREASURE hunt, particularly a successful one, and it looks as if a team of Swedish divers has really struck (liquid) gold this time. While excavating a… Read full post »

 
The finest ocean liner of its day: the SS France

SOME JOURNEYS STICK IN our memories for a lifetime, particularly when they are of the kind you can never take again. Forty years ago this week I embarked on a transoceanic journey aboard one of the world’s last… Read full post »

 
"Intellectual arsonist" or "The ghost writer of a frightened society"?
German economist and author Thilo Sarrazin (65)
(Source: Bild)

BACK IN THE RESTLESS 1990s, when the German far right was undergoing yet another short-lived rebirth into the political mainstream, the racist Republ… Read full post »

AS OUR SOCIETY BECOMES increasingly mobile and “global,” more and more of us are confronting the challenge of trying to take care of - or even keep track of - elderly and disabled family members living on the other side of the continent, or even on a different c… Read full post »

 
"One of the worst cases I've ever seen"
Swedish lawyer and crime author Leif Silbersky
spoke with journalists

THE RAPE AND MOLESTATION charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, which led to an arrest warrant in his name on Friday and its mysterious withdrawal on Saturday (I wrote… Read full post »

  
SPD leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife,
Judge Elke Büdenbender, in 2008
(Source: mz-web) 

SOMETIMES THE TERM “HUMAN interest story” doesn’t quite do a situation justice. Take the example of German politician Frank-Walter Steinmeier, wh… Read full post »

 
Australian Internet activist Julian Assange
(Source: Wiki Commons) 

WHAT A SHOCK TO the global antiwar movement: Yesterday, the Swedish chief prosecutor announced that Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, which had recently leaked more than 91,000 class… Read full post »

 
Dalì's "Femme aux tiroirs" ("the drawered woman")

IT SEEMS THAT TO be an art thief these days, you don’t need brains. Boldness will do the trick just as well. That’s what the guards at an exhibition in the Belgian town of Bruges learned on Wednesday. As r… Read full post »

‘After the first glass of absinthe, you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’ --Oscar Wilde

Atheism has made a spectacular comeback… Read full post »

 
Surprise! Your home - and maybe your face - is on Candid Camera!
A Google Street View camera
(Source: Wikipedia Commons)

GOOGLE HAS NEVER BEEN known for half-measures. A digital Napoleon, its corporate goal appears to be to drag the entire planet, with all its inhabitants, kicking a… Read full post »

RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, 1940-77
(Source: Nacionalistas)

I have not murdered a human being, I have murdered a principle. … I wanted to discover whether I was capable of crossing a boundary. 
              &n… Read full post »

 
German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle (left) and his
partner Michael Mronz
(Source: Bunte)

LAST OCTOBER, GERMAN POLITICIAN Guido Westerwelle grabbed world headlines when he was appointed as the world’s first openly gay foreign minister. In January, he nearly provoked a di… Read full post »

 
"I don't want to start a new crisis":
Danish artist Kurt Westergaard
(Source: makli.com)

THE MOHAMMED CARICATURE CONTROVERSY five years ago shook the world, although it’s hard to know which side of the world received more of a shaking: outraged Muslims across the globe… Read full post »

 
Busted: The driver of this Mercedes SLS
set a new Swiss highway speed record
(Source: Mercedes Benz Passion)

YOU KNOW, IT’S TRUE: Sometimes, when the sign tells you to slow down, it really wants you to slow the eff down. This is the lesson a thirty-seven year-old Swede/… Read full post »

 
"God punishes out of love":
Catholic Bishop Andreas Laun of Salzburg
(Source: zimbio)

SO WHAT TOOK HIM so long? Finally, more than two weeks after the Love Parade disaster in Duisburg last month, God himself has added his two cents’ worth to the ongoing debate over resp/… Read full post »

 
Scene of the crime:
The Dutch holiday island of Ameland

ONE STENCH DRIVES OUT another, as prankster Till Eulenspiegel used to say, and if that was true in medieval Germany, it is even truer in the high tech, post-reunification Federal Republic. This summer the vicious news dribble of the… Read full post »

 
You don't mess with Henning
(Source: henningmankell.se)

HENNING MANKELL IS NOT only Sweden’s most popular crime author, he is also a very stubborn man. On May 31, 2010, he was on board one of the ships taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. When his ship was seized by Isra… Read full post »

 
Actor Johannes Heesters circa 1937
(Source: return2style.de)

WHO COULD HAVE BELIEVED it? Tonight, in the world-renowned Berliner Ensemble on the capital’s Schiffbauerdamm, musical star Jopi Heesters will tread the boards once again in a much-anticipated premiere. Heesters, wh… Read full post »

Weapon of mass destruction:
Cooking pots like these have sped the demise of innumerable
octopuses around the world

IRANIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD regards himself as something of an authority on world affairs and twentieth century history. But who would have thought he was also an expert o… Read full post »

 
(Source: Verkstadsvagen)

WHAT A MONTH THIS has been for archeologists! First, a British team celebrated the discovery of a second vast Neolithic site just 900 meters from Stonehenge. Then, over the weekend, Swedish scientists announced the discovery of what may be one of the world/… Read full post »

 
Dance of Death from the Nuremberg Chronicles
(fifteenth century)

THEY COULD JUST AS easily have handed security over to BP's Tony Hayward and be done with it. He and his team certainly couldn't have done a worse job. After all, who could ever have imagined that allowing only one… Read full post »

How an idyllic island retreat became Lord of the Flies redux

 
Where summer dreams turned to nightmares:
A TV cameraman in front of the Zilvermeeuw ("Herring Gull")
youth hotel on the Dutch island of Ameland
(Source: Die Welt)

IT LOOKS AS IF William Golding of Lord of the Flies fame wa/… Read full post »