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You Tube Video: Germany begins controversial swine flu vaccinationSpiegel: Germans Unhappy with Alternative Swine Flu Vaccine for Politicians "Damage control is the name of the game in Berlin on Monday as politicians rush to deny that they are receiving a better, safer swine flu vaccine than ordinary Germans. The first of 50 million doses arrived in Germany on Monday. One might think that the arrival in Germany of the first of 50 million doses of swine flu vaccine on Monday might be cause for celebration. But with news breaking over the weekend that top government officials in Berlin will be...

Damage control is the name of the game in Berlin on Monday as politicians rush to deny that they are receiving a better, safer swine flu vaccine than ordinary Germans. The first of 50 million doses arrived in Germany on Monday. But with news breaking over the weekend that top government officials in Berlin will be injected with an alternative vaccine -- one widely seen as safer -- a debate about an alleged two-class medical system has erupted. The controversy centers on an additive included in the vaccine manufactured by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. The additive includes an inactive strain of...

For years the Germans have been the undisputed champions of holiday rudeness. But it seems their long reign has at last come to an end. The Russians are now considered the most unpleasant holidaymakers in the world, a survey revealed yesterday. They won first place thanks to their appalling taste in fashion, terrible table manners, and – worst of all – habit of hiding sunloungers in their rooms overnight to ensure a spot at the pool. Those who holidayed in Spain, France, Cyprus, Malta, Italy, Turkey, Greece and Portugal took a dislike to Russians, claiming they: * Took hotel sunloungers...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the Nazi term 'Judenrein' in a recent meeting with the German foreign minister to condemn the Palestinian demand that West Bank settlements be removed, a confidant of the premier has said. "Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," the confidant quoted the prime minister as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier earlier this week. Asked how Germany's top diplomat responded to hearing the term used by the Nazis to refer to areas "cleansed of Jews", the confidant said, "What could he do? He basically just nodded." According to the confidant, Netanyahu had encouraged cabinet colleagues to deploy the term...

So many technologies of Code Encrption were used and could have been used in WW2 by both sides. David Kahn in his book THE CODEBREAKERS stated why did not the Germans, some of whom relaized that their Enigma Code Machine was far from infallible, did not adopt new dissimilar machines. Well his(Kahn's) answer was:"they did they not have another machine" That is far from true. The above are alternatives to Enigma: The Hitler-Muhle(Mill). Mill is German slang for 'typewriter'.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the German firm's shady dealings with the Iranian regime, which included helping the country develop "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale." This story was even more shocking the first time I read it in the Washington Times.

German soldiers are softies who lack discipline, hate responsibility and show an inadequate desire to serve their country, according to the army's chief inspector. General Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, the general inspector of the Bundeswehr, told the German parliament that depite their positive contribution in Afghanistan, complaints from troops about their conditions were an "embarrassment". "We have given a good account of ourselves in Afghanistan, but we cannot guarantee an all-round feel-good feeling for soldiers," said the general, before going on to detail the less dignified side of the country's armed forces.

Note from Ravnagora: Since there have been numerous discussions about "Nazis and Serbs" and "Tito and Mihailovich" on FR, this piece by Carl Savich on the Kragujevac Massacre during WWII goes a long way in shedding light on these issues. IntroductionIn the summer of 1941, Serbian guerrillas launched an uprising in central Serbia against the German occupation. The Serbian uprising spread and increased in intensity threatening the German military occupation of Serbia and endangering the German southern flank in Europe. The Serbian uprising came at the time of the German invasion of the USSR. Adolf Hitler immediately perceived the danger...

To my Conservative Friends: Did anyone catch the parade in Germany with a GIANT-sized Obama Angel float??? They idolize this guy so much is it bordering on Creepy... In the parade, the Germans decided to "salute" America's new President that has done nothing other than write checks and promise every Harry Hard Luck and Sally Sob Story a Prime-Rib in every pot with a side of mortgage payments and free health-care for dessert... If you did not catch the parade, here is the, more than weird, pic:

I found the negatives for these pictures in a box of darkroom items at a garage sale 15 years ago. I have been haunted by them ever since. I have scoured these pictures looking for clues as to the identity of this family. Now I will ask my Flickr friends to help Seems nobody really knows.

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/0902/090205boston.htm February 5, 2009 Two German nationals and a German company indicted for conspiring to export U.S. origin goods to Iran BOSTON - Two nationals of the Federal Republic of Germany and a German company were charged today in U.S. District Court with conspiring to unlawfully procure from the United States, and export to the Islamic Republic of Iran, 26 pump parts, worth more than $200,000, for use in centrifugal sulphuric acid pumps and sulphur pumps, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Iranian Transaction Regulations and the Smuggling Statute....

Germany has been threatened with attacks for its presence in Afghanistan in a video released yesterday by the US centre for surveillance of Islamist sites (SITE). In the 30 minute Video message, a man calling himself Abu Talha Al-Alamani and presumed to be a member of al Queda says the Germans are "gullible and naive" if they thought they could "escape unscathed when they are the third occupation force in Afghanistan." The man, whose face is hidden by a black turban in the video, adds: "Letting me blow myself up in the name of Allah has been my wish since...

WARSAW - The remains of 1,800 German civilians who perished in 1945, towards the end of the World War II, have been exhumed from a mass grave in Malbork, northern Poland, officials said Wednesday.

Cruise is just fine as Stauffenberg, keeping his signature quirks and grin in check. He generates enough charisma to reflect why people were willing to follow Stauffenberg quite literally into Hell, without turning the film into Tom Cruise Takes on Hitler. Whatever problems people have with his performance, they brought with them into the theater. I suspect if mainstream media darling George Clooney had made the very same film, he would be no better in the role, but the tone of the critical commentary would be very different. David Bamber is a very scary Hitler who resists the urge to...

NOTE: The following text is a quote: https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=94759 YOU ARE HERE: Home > Reports > Consular Affairs Bulletins > Report Warden Message: Yemen Kidnapping Alert CONSULAR AFFAIRS BULLETINS Middle East / N. Africa - Yemen 16 Dec 2008 Printer Friendly Email Article RELATED REPORTS 12 Dec 2008 WARDEN MESSAGE: YEMEN ALERT FOR WESTERN HOTELS 8 Dec 2008 WARDEN MESSAGE: CONTINUED THREATS, YEMEN 18 Sep 2008 WARDEN MESSAGE: YEMEN AUTHORIZED DEPARTURE 17 Sep 2008 U.S. EMBASSY SANA'A ATTACKED 17 Sep 2008 WARDEN MESSAGE: U.S. EMBASSY SANA'A ATTACK U.S. Embassy Sana’a issued the following Warden Message on December 16: The U.S. Embassy...

November 26, 2008 BERLIN (AP) — Two German citizens suspected of distributing propaganda over the Internet supporting al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations were arrested Tuesday, German prosecutors said. The men — identified only as Daniel P., 26 and Harun Can A., 23 — were among eight suspects whose homes were raided on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said in a statement. A 19-year-old German citizen identified as Irfan P. was already in custody on separate charges before the morning raids in cities including Augsburg, Duesseldorf and Bremen, where investigators combed through the suspects' computer equipment.

<p>German lawmakers embarrass their envoy in S.F. Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross Sunday, August 24, 2008 They came. They shopped. And they embarrassed the hell out of us.</p> <p>That was the reaction of the German consul general in San Francisco, Rolf Schütte, to a group of lawmakers from his homeland who recently traipsed through the city, leaving a lot of bad feelings in their wake after using a racial slur and choosing sightseeing and shopping over meetings with their U.S. counterparts.</p>

The planned construction of over 180 mosques in Germany is mobilizing right-wing xenophobes but also an increasing number of leftist critics. They fear the Muslim places of worship will facilitate the establishment of a completely parallel society. ... the media reported "turmoil" and an "enraged" audience in a school auditorium in Ehrenfeld, a district of the German city of Cologne. The mood was almost comparable to that of the protest gatherings once held against nuclear missiles or reactors. Instead the outrage was directed at a huge mosque planned for the area. Still, the words used by the project's opponents called...

Three German tourists kidnapped in eastern Turkey Three German tourists were kidnapped in Turkey's eastern province of Agri, CNNTurk reported on Wednesday. They were kidnapped by terrorists, it added quoting the governor of Agri. (UPDATED) Three German climbers on Mount Ararat were kidnapped in Turkey's eastern province of Agri, CNNTurk reported on Wednesday. The three, who were party of a 13-member team, were kidnapped by terrorists, it added quoting the governor of Agri

A blog following the unearthing by Pistonhead.com member CY88 of the german bunker at the bottom of his garden _____________________ Monday, 2 June 2008 Background People visiting this blog from Pistonheads.com may recall that in the "Secret Room" thread in early 2008, I said that I thought I had a nazi bunker buried in my garden. Well, since then I decided to get off my backside and excavate it. Our house is in an old quarry, and when we bought it five or so years ago, the previous owner told us that there was a tunnel built by the germans...

The rate of infanticide in Germany varies widely between the regions of the former West Germany and East Germany. Der Spiegel reports that the issue has become a political hot potato, and that the suggestion by the governor of the formerly communist-run state Saxony-Anhalt that communism could be the cause has people demanding his resignation: Wolfgang Böhmer, governor of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, faces opposition calls to resign after he said women in the east had "a more casual approach to new life" than in the west. Böhmer, who trained as a gynaecologist, was responding to research showing that...

One day after this report was submitted, however, German troops marched into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. In a spectacular move that fully exposed the weakness of the western democracies, Hitler could celebrate his greatest triumph in foreign policy to date. The domestic problems of previous months — shortage of foodstuffs, high prices, low wages and, in Catholic areas, much antagonism towards the regime over the struggle between the church and state were temporarily forgotten in the euphoria.

There's an old joke that says inside every German there's a Nazi yearning to get out. While a gross overstatement, there is, I'm unhappy to report, more than a little truth to that old chestnut.

Three people have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of planning terror attacks. Two of the suspects were Germans who had converted to Islam while the third held Turkish and German passports. The sources said the three all had links to Pakistan and that they had been experimenting with explosives and trying to build car bombs. They were arrested during a series of raids carried out overnight. A German radio station said the suspects had been planning to bomb Frankfurt airport and the US military base at Ramstein in western Germany.

Last Updated: Saturday, 21 July 2007, 10:37 GMT 11:37 UK Taleban 'kill captured Germans' Two Germans kidnapped near Kabul in Afghanistan this week have been killed, a spokesman for the Taleban has said. The spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said the Taleban's demand that Germany withdraw its 3,000 troops in Afghanistan had been ignored. Afghan and German officials say they have no confirmation of the killings and are seeking evidence. The Taleban has also threatened to kill at least 18 hostages from South Korea, captured separately on Thursday. Deadlines pass Local police said the Germans, whose identity has not been revealed,...

COLOGNE, Germany — In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations. Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires. Predictably, an extreme-right local political party has waged a noisy, xenophobic protest campaign, drumming up support from its far-right allies in Austria and...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Seventeen-year-old Eberhard Fuhr was taken out of his high school classroom in Cincinnati during 1943, and arrested by FBI agents. He was sent off to an internment camp in Texas for so-called "enemy aliens" and spent the next four and a half years there with his family. Thousands of Germans experienced a similar fate. But they were detained in far fewer numbers in this country than Japanese. The stories of the Germans have gotten little attention so far. But the US Senate took a step toward changing that this week, voting to look into the treatment of...

WASHINGTON - In 1943, 17-year-old Eberhard Fuhr was taken out of his high school classroom in Cincinnati, arrested by FBI agents, and sent off to an internment camp for "enemy aliens" in Texas, where he spent the next 4 1/2 years with his family. Thousands of Germans experienced a similar fate. They were detained in far fewer numbers in this country than Japanese. The stories of the Germans have gotten little attention so far, but the Senate took a step toward changing that this week, voting to look into the treatment of Germans and other Europeans in the U.S. during...

ROME, MARCH 23, 2007 (Zenit.org).- For harboring Jews, the nine members of the Ulma family were executed by firing squad in 1944 in their German-occupied Polish village. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, mentioned the Polish family in a speech given recently in Rome on the occasion of the publication of a book by British historian Martin Gilbert entitled "The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust." The Ulmas' story was also told recently in an interview with the magazine Inside the Vatican and Mateusz Szpytma, a Polish historian and co-author of the book "The Sacrifice of the Just:...

A German legislator has moved to strip Adolf Hitler of his German citizenship, Der Spiegel reports. Isolde Saalmann, a deputy in the state legislature of Lower Saxony, plans to file a motion to investigate whether Hitler's citizenship can be revoked. Hitler, an Austrian, was granted German citizenship on Feb. 25, 1932 in the city of Braunschweig just months before he became Germany's chancellor, according to the report. Click here to read Der Spiegel's story. "If the state of Lower Saxony as the legal successor of the then free state of Braunschweig distances itself from it, it could be helpful," Saalmann...

Germans demand compensation from Poland over war losses A German group has filed claims against Poland with a European court over property lost in the aftermath of World War II, a member said today. The Prussian Claims Society, which represents some Germans who were expelled from Poland after the war ended, filed the complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, the society’s deputy leader Gerwald Stanko said. “Twenty-two individual complaints have gone to the European Court of Human Rights,” Stanko said. He said the aim was to secure either compensation or the return of property. The Prussian Claims Society...

NAZI REPRISAL POLICY IN SERBIA SHAMELESSLY EXPLOITED BY THE YUGOSLAV COMMUNISTS By Aleksandra Rebic On September 6, 1941, following the successful attacks by Mihailovich forces against the Germans in Western Serbia, Adolph Hitler issued the decree that for every German killed, 100 Serbian hostages would be shot. For every German wounded, 50 Serbs would be shot. This decree would be posted throughout Belgrade, Serbia on September 13, 1941. The Germans were not kidding. General Boehme, the German Commanding General of the occupation forces in Serbia from September 16 to December 2 of 1941, issued three orders to supplement Hitler’s decree....

Israeli warplanes fired shots over an unarmed German vessel backing up the UN mission off the Lebanese coast, the German defence ministry has said. The incident, which Israel has so far denied, was one of two involving the Israeli military and German forces in the region this week, defence spokesman Thomas Raabe told reporters Friday. "There have been two incidents, one involving a helicopter and another the Alster" a German electronic surveillance and reconnaissance ship. Raabe said six Israeli F-16 fighter planes had fired shots into the air over the Alster on Tuesday while the ship was in international waters...

Germany’s Defense Ministry announced Wednesday that two Israeli Air Force jets fired at a German navy vessel off the coast of Lebanon. The IDF denies the claim. The report was initially printed by the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, which quoted a German official telling a parliamentary committee that two Israeli F-16s had flown low over a German ship and fired two shots past it. The official also said the F-16s used infra-red flares, part of their anti-missile systems, to protect the planes from being shot down. It is unclear whether the German ship may have fired at the planes first,...

WHEN the sun sets over Angeles City, the neon glow from a single street illuminates everything around it. Set away from the smoke-filled traffic jams of the city's main thoroughfares, Fields Avenue comes alive after dark. This dusty street, which stretches for a kilometre, is lined on both sides with bars and nightclubs, each attempting to out-do the other with gaudy lights and tasteless names. Outside each bar stand groups of up to 10 girls. Their job is a straightforward one: they must encourage passing tourists to come into their premises for a drink. Once inside, the tourist will encounter...

Ressam at times defiant in 2 days of questioning By Mike Carter Seattle Times staff reporter After more than a year of cooperating with federal prosecutors, Ahmed Ressam has become a sometimes difficult and defiant government witness. Ressam was at times surly and evasive during two days of closed-door questioning this week in Seattle by German lawyers who need his help prosecuting Mounir el-Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of helping the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers. Ressam, convicted of conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism, might be endangering his deal with federal prosecutors to serve as few as 27 years...

GERMANY was poised yesterday to shatter its most enduring postwar taboo by sending troops into the cauldron of Lebanon, where they risk coming into direct conflict with Israelis. As troops from France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and other donor nations prepared to deploy in southern Lebanon, Germany’s late decision to participate ranked as its most delicate foreign policy move since it was held to account for the Holocaust in 1945. Since then, it has been unthinkable that Germany would put itself in a combat situation in which its soldiers could shoot at Jews. The decision to deploy troops to join the...

Yesterday I visited Buchenwald concentration camp, the largest such camp in Germany (the larger ones Germany put outside of Germany.) Since it is my 4th time in Germany I felt kind of an obligation to visit it...a duty to face the truth in this beautiful land. Most of the camp is gone, almost all of the prisoner's barracks are. Outside the fence, about half the SS barracks are there--nicely painted yellow, with red tile roofs, resembling ten thousand other German buildings in other places. I had heard that birds don't roost inside the camp , and I think it may...

SOEST, Germany – More and more Germans are converting to Islam. Last year approximately 4,000 persons became Muslims. According to the Central Islam-Institute in Soest, the numbers have been rising since the turn of the century. Up to the year 2000 the annual number of conversions stagnated at 300, but it has been rising ever since. The institute’s director, Salim Abdullah, has no plausible explanation for this trend, as he told the evangelical news agency "idea." In the past, converts were chiefly women, who married Muslims, or academics with an "affection for the Orient."

The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles. The Statue of Liberty, holding high its torch less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On nearby Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan. Ground zero itself -- a small island called Black Tom -- all but disappeared, "as if an atomic...

Germans hit road in search for jobs By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 08/07/2006) More Germans are emigrating than at any time since the war, driven from home by unemployment or the search for better job prospects. Around 145,000 mainly young people turned their backs on the country last year, more than at any time since 1945, and almost a three-fold increase since the 1980s, according to the Federal Office of Statistics. The favoured countries were America, followed by Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Britain and France. Doctors and academics constitute the largest groups of those leaving. Doctors in particular are choosing...

German stereotypes of Poles 29.06.2006 They are car thieving, backward and unemployed who can’t play football, apparently. Report by Slawek Szefs Although their image has been changing for the better, Poles are still negatively perceived by most Germans and are not fully accepted in the country of their Western neighbors. Those are the conclusions of a six-year study published in a report by the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw. In the eyes of an average German, Poles are mostly associated with car theft, cultural backwardness and unemployment. What's worse, they can't even play football! The latter opinion is fully...

Like most other local residents, Tricia Torrez didn't know that the Sahuarita area had a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. Until a couple of years ago, that is, when she overheard her grandfather, Joe Martinez, talking about it as they were driving along a stretch of Nogales Highway south of Sahuarita, near the community of Continental. "He said something to grandma like, 'Remember the POW camp here?' " Torrez said. "I couldn't believe it, because he wouldn't ever talk about it, his time in the military," she said.

EUROPE'S largest legal annual migration is under way with university professors joining roadsweepers and the jobless to pour into Germany from eastern Europe to pick asparagus.People come in their tens of thousands from Poland and the Czech Republic for two-months of plucking that which Germans love to see on their dinner tables, but of whose harvest they want no part. Once again the German government is throwing money at the nation's five million jobless, trying to persuade and cajole them into working for a change. But asparagus-picking is one job they refuse to do. The asparagus spring harvest is again...

Once I read that the number of Germans directly involved in the Holocaust — giving orders in Berlin, building the infrastructure of the death camps, rounding up victims, piloting trains, releasing the gas, hunting down escapees and so forth — was 100,000. In 1939 the population of the Reich was 80 million, so slightly more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Germans were actually involved in murdering Jews. Yet, somehow, I never see anyone trying to clear the German volk of the guilt of the crimes of Hitler's "tiny extremist minority." No, the verdict of history is that all...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germans are leaving their country in record numbers but unlike previous waves of migrants who fled 19th century poverty or 1930s Nazi terror, these modern day refugees are trying to escape a new scourge -- unemployment. Flocking to places as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia as well as Norway, the Netherlands and Austria more than 150,000 Germans packed their bags and left in 2004 -- the greatest exodus in any single year since the late 1940s. High unemployment that lingers at levels of more than 20 percent in some parts of Germany and...

Germans give chimney sweeps the brush-off By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 26/12/2005) In his top hat, white tie and brass-buttoned uniform, and dangling a brush on a chain over his shoulder, Erhard Feller might have walked off the set of a film about Victorian England. But the 51-year-old chimney sweep is a vibrant part of working life in modern Berlin and the uniform is standard for him and his 8,000 colleagues across Germany. Even though most German chimneys are too thin for Santa Claus to squeeze into, Christmas is still the busiest time of year for Mr Feller, who...

I'll reply to this with a chronology.

A German man has been arrested after a marriage guidance counsellor advised him to run around naked shouting at trees.Dieter Braun, 43, from Recklinghausen said the stress release technique had worked perfectly until he was arrested. He told police that venting his anger on the trees had stopped him shouting at his wife. "If I didn't go to the woods and scream at the trees then my marriage would probably be over," he said. He added taking his clothes off at the same time made him feel more relaxed. "For me it's a type of relaxation therapy. Feeling the breeze...

I am dismayed so far by the Republican response to Durbin's statements comparing our treatment of the Gitmo detainees to that given by the Nazi's, Soviets and Pol Pot. I heard Mitch McConnell and some other Senator on the Michael Savage Show debating and questioning Durbin in an entirely too civil manner. It is my opinion that Durbin's statements--and Hillary's and every Democrat who is suggesting that we are mistreating or torturing Gitmo detainees should, in turn, be responded to with nothing less than derision. It seems to me that by failing to do so, the Republicans are treating Durbin's...