Military delegations from European countries which have ordered the A400 military transport plane, a replacement for the C-130 Hercules, will meet in Berlin Dec. 2 to discuss cost overruns and delays.
The A400M project has incurred billions of Euros in cost overruns and development problems that have delayed delivery by more than three years. France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Turkey have [...] Continue Reading…
The German cabinet Minister Franz Josef Jung, resigned today because of his “political responsibility” for the German military having withheld damning information on an Afghan airstrike which went terribly wrong and killed many civilians. In actual fact he misled the public.
Because dead people do not leave ID cards claiming they are/or are not members of the Taliban those supporting the military claim most [...] Continue Reading…
Germany – for what almost seems like the first time – has today publicly criticised Israeli plans to build settlements in the occupied West Bank. This a week before both countries’ leaders will meet in Berlin.
The modern Germany Federal Republic has a special bond with Israel and has always been extra careful to avoid any criticism of the country. The legacy of [...] Continue Reading…
26-XI-2009
The new German defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, has told the Bundestag, the Parliament today, that General W. Schneiderhan, along with a senior official in the Ministry of Defence, Peter Wichert, were resigning with immediate effect following German media reports which claimed that important information regarding civilian casualties had deliberately been withheld from both the German public and state prosecutors.
Their resignations have [...] Continue Reading…
British troops would be pulled from Germany – nearly 70 years after the end of WWII – if the Conservatives win the next British election according to their shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox. He said it was no longer necessary to maintain the presence of more than 20,000 military personnel and ending the commitment would free up forces to carry out [...] Continue Reading…
Thousands of curious Berliners and scores of young students lined the centre of the German capital in the pouring rain last night to watch nearly a mile of giant 2.5 metre-high coloured polystyrene dominos topple over as an ersatz-Berlin Wall.
The Goethe-Institut – the German government’s cultural institution which operates worldwide – distributed the huge Styrofoam dominoes around the world so they could [...] Continue Reading…
James Oestreich the critic of the “New York Times” wrote that during the recent Berlin Philharmonic’s concert “upstairs” at Carnegie Hall, the concert from Zankel Hall underneath Carnegie Hall could be heard and “wafted through the auditorium”. That means in the background of Brahms 4th symphony, one could hear a concert of Cape Verdean music with percussion and, yes, amplification!
While I cannot [...] Continue Reading…
The state court in Duisburg said prosecutors there have on Tuesday charged a 90-year-old former SS soldier with for the murder of 58 Jewish forced labourers near the town of Deutsch-Schuetzen in Austria on the last days of World War II.
The remains of the victims of the Deutsch Schuetzen massacre were found in 1995 in a mass grave by the Austrian Jewish [...] Continue Reading…
The CDU right-wing government of Angela Merkel has in principal approved a one-year extension of its NATO deployment force in Afghanistan, however the size of troop level will stay the same.
The cabinet decision will have to be confirmed by the German Parliament next month when the current mandate expires. For various reasons -probably related to back-door agreements with the US- this decision [...] Continue Reading…
The German film-maker Werner Herzog, aged 67, will head the committee that select the winners of the 2010 Golden and Silver Bear awards next February.
Werner Herzog is perhaps the most mediocre, vacuous and tedious of modern German directors – not as cerebral and intellectual as his German contemporaries directors Rainer Werner Fassbaender and Volker Schlöndorff and not as popular and dynamic as Wim Wenders [...] Continue Reading…
“I like Angela Merkel, but I don’t much like the company she keeps -her Bayern friends!” many people in Berlin and in the rest of Germany are often fond of saying – a direct reference to her CDU party based in Munich. One perfect example is the 66 yr old fellow Christian Democrat, Erika Steinbach who finds herself at the centre of a [...] Continue Reading…
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