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BERLIN (JTA) -- A Dresden politician was fined for playing loud klezmer music outside City Hall to disturb a neo-Nazi march. Stephan Kuhn of the Green Party was ordered Wednesday to pay a $210 fine, which will benefit an organization that helps victims of right-wing violence. Neo-Nazis held a commemorative march on Feb.13, 2008, on the anniversary of the World War II firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces, which right-wing extremists have taken to calling the "bombing Holocaust." In protest, Kuhn blasted the music at the neo-Nazis from the windows of the Green Party parliamentary fraction offices. According to the...

Many of you will know Aldi, the international retail giant owned by two reclusive German billionaires (hence the "Deutsche Küche" German delicatessen special purchases from time to time). Some because you shop there regularly, others because you read in the Wall Street Journal how they drove Walmart out of Germany (Legend has it that Aldi is the only company Walmart is afraid of because their overhead is so very low that they cannot beat them on price.). Of course they offer 4th of July BBQ items on their US web page as well. But did you know that Aldi celebrates...

Meet the "wonder weapon" that could have won the war for Hitler. Called the Horten 229, the radical "flying wing" fighter-bomber looked and acted a lot like the U.S. Air Force's current B-2 — right down to the "stealth" radar-evading characteristics. Fortunately for the world, the Ho 229 wasn't put into mass production before Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945. But American researchers boxed up and shipped home the prototypes and partially-built planes that existed — and now the same company that builds the B-2 has rebuilt one.

As the summer begins, White House watchers have spotted a new look by President Obama: The Evil Eye! Staffers have joked about the menacing glance, which comes when the president meets with world leaders who are not aligned with his progressive view. White House photographers have captured the "evil eye" in recent weeks, during sessions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Colombia's Alvaro Uribev. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got hit with the commander's malocchio last week in the Oval office. And at least one White House reporter has been on the receiving end of the daggers during a press...

BEWARE THE OBAMA 'EVIL EYE' Tue Jun 30 2009 07:43:56 ET As the summer begins, White House watchers have spotted a new look by President Obama: The Evil Eye! Staffers have joked about the menacing glance, which comes when the president meets with world leaders who are not aligned with his progressive view. White House photographers have captured the "evil eye" in recent weeks, during sessions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Colombia's Alvaro Uribev. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got hit with the commander's malocchio last week in the Oval office. And at least one White House reporter...

Navy Drops US Warship for Made-in-Israel Option by Yehudah Lev Kay (IsraelNN.com) The Israeli navy has dropped plans to purchase U.S. made warships and instead is exploring the possibility of a home-grown military shipbuilding industry, according to the website of Defense News. The Ministry of Defense had originally planned on purchasing either the small Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) from Lockheed Martin or similar corvettes built by Northrop Grumman. However, costs for the LCS ships skyrocketed to $637 million, and costs for the corvettes were estimated at $450 million, both deemed prohibitive to the navy. “As much as we sought commonality...

ON TV Hitler's Stealth Fighter airs Sunday, June 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. Preview Hitler's Stealth Fighter >> July 25, 2009--At a Northrop Grumman facility in California, top stealth-plane experts admire their handiwork in late 2008—a full-size, though flightless, replica of a Horten 2-29, aka Hitler's stealth fighter, created for a documentary airing June 28 on the National Geographic Channel. (Read the full story.) The team tested the re-created Nazi jet against World War II-style radar. With its radar-resistant design and 600-mile-an-hour (970-kilometer-an-hour) speed, the team concluded, the Ho 2-29 would have allowed British antiaircraft...

Despite the president's claim at a joint appearance this afternoon that "I like Chancellor Merkel a lot," President Barack Obama and Germany's Angela Merkel are widely believed to have a somewhat frosty relationship. The biggest perceived rift between the two? How best to respond to the global financial crisis. Mr. Obama, of course, has pushed through a massive stimulus package and pressed for greater government spending worldwide to end the recession. Merkel, who helms the largest economy in Europe, has resisted such spending; her government has passed only a pair of small stimulus packages in response to the economic crisis....

LANDSTUHL, Germany, June 26, 2009 – The boxes arrive daily from the United States, 15 to 20 each day, along with $8,000 to $12,000 in cash every week from Americans and U.S. nonprofit groups. Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael D. Dubie, the adjutant general of the Vermont National Guard, stands in the Wounded Warrior Ministry Center -- nicknamed the "Chaplains' Closet" -- at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, June 17, 2009, during a visit to wounded warriors. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The boxes and the money are meant for the...

Neo-Nazis in Germany are applauding the repression of protests in Iran and publishing statements supporting the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hard-line government. Two extremist parties, the NPD and DVU, have managed to contort their racist thinking to embrace the Iranian leader because Ahmadinejad openly advocates the elimination of Israel – and presumably has no plans to move to Germany. The NPD website defended Ahmadinejad against what it called a “media attack on the Iranian people’s spirit,” referring to widespread doubts being expressed about the president’s reelection and described him as the “true leader of his people,” according...

A Turkish dad stabbed his own 15-year-old daughter to death in an honour killing which has shocked Germany. Mehmet Ö. (45) sneaked into Bürsa’s bedroom at 3.30am and repeatedly struck the helpless teen with a knife. Her grandparents called an ambulance but medics could not do anything for Buersa as she bled to death.

The Czech social democrat party is discussing the possibility of suspending president Vaclav Klaus' powers if he does not sign the EU's Lisbon treaty. The temporary suspension would require a simple majority of 41 votes in the country's 81-seat senate and would allow caretaker prime minister Jan Fischer to sign the document instead. Social democrat senator Alena Gajduskova is leading an "intensive debate" on the subject in her party, the secretary of the senate's constitutional commission, Jan Kysela, told EUobserver. Ms Gajduskova's campaign is also linked to president Klaus' refusal to sign off on the Rome Statute of the International...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is traveling to Washington this week to discuss the financial crisis and climate change with US President Barack Obama -- two issues where Germany and the US are deeply divided. In the new world order, Europe is looking increasingly irrelevant for the US.

Three German soldiers died on Tuesday amid heavy fighting in northern Afghanistan. The casualties are just the latest indication that security in the north, the region in which Germany leads the peacekeeping effort, is deteriorating. For months, attacks on German troops operating in the northern Afghanistan region around Kunduz have been increasing. On Tuesday, three Bundeswehr soldiers died in yet another Taliban offensive. According to the Defense Ministry in Berlin, Islamist insurgents attacked a patrol six kilometers southwest of Kunduz with grenade launchers and small arms fire. In the ensuing firefight, an armored personnel carrier plunged into a deep ditch...

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 chancellor Angela Merkel has urged the ruling regime in Tehran to allow a full recount of the disputed presidential elections of June 12. “Germany sides with those Iranians who want to exercise their right to freedom of expression and assembly”, Merkel declared on Sunday; making it one of the strongest messages sent by any Western leader to Iran so far. Chancellor Merkel also called on Tehran to allow peaceful demonstrations, to refrain from using force against protestors, and to release imprisoned opposition figures. “Human and civil rights have to be fully respected,” she stated. Merkel further demanded that restrictions...

MOSCOW, June 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russia remembers on Monday the start of the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War, the term used in Russia and other ex-Soviet states to describe WWII. Nazi Germany and its allies attacked the country's west, delivering massive air strikes on key air, railroad and military facilities and advancing 250-300 km deep into Soviet territory on June 22, 1941. The war, planned to be a matter of months, lasted for four years and became the world's bloodiest conflict in history. At least 26.5 million Soviet civilians and soldiers died during the conflict, according to official statistics. Veterans,...

Two European companies — a major contractor to the U.S. government and a top cell-phone equipment maker — last year installed an electronic surveillance system for Iran that human rights advocates and intelligence experts say can help Iran target dissidents. Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran's state-owned telephone company.

The fate of three of nine foreigners abducted in Yemen last week is known — their bodies were found, shot execution style. The whereabouts of the other six — including three children under the age of 6 — remain a mystery. But terrorism experts say their abductors and killers are almost certainly not a mystery. They say the crimes bear the mark of Al Qaeda, and they fear they are the handiwork of the international terror organization's No. 2 man in the Arabian Peninsula: Said Ali al-Shihri, an Islamic extremist who once was in American custody — but who was...

A GROUP of foreigners were warned against going on an outing before a kidnapping which led to the killing of three of them, Yemen's interior minister said. "The authorities received the threat of an attack and there was a warning given to the Germans asking them not to travel outside their area of work," Muttahar al-Masri said. The killing of three women, identified as two German nurses and a South Korean teacher, coincided with a rise in separatist and militant tensions in Yemen whose instability has alarmed Western countries and Saudi Arabia. The nine were seized last week outside the...

Telegraph reporter Stephanie Gutmann describes her reaction to Barack Obama’s appearance in Berlin: “After it was over I picked up the phone and called a friend back home. ‘It’s worse than we thought,’ I told him. ‘The guy’s actually crazy.’” Guttman was talking about candidate Obama’s agenda as he presented it that day, in which he promised to take on the terrorists in Afghanistan, take on the drug dealers, rebuild Afghanistan, eliminate the building nuclear threat, secure all loose nukes, decrease arsenals from another era, form a new global partnership that will end terror networks, redistribute wealth, save the planet,...

The hostility toward Pope Pius XII in the years following World War II was the unjustified result of his firm stance against communism and an unfair comparison with his successor, Pope John XXIII, said the editor of the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. In the introduction to a compilation of essays by historians and church officials, editor Giovanni Maria Vian said that the esteem awarded Pope Pius during and immediately after the war changed after his death into criticism over his failure to strongly condemn the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews. The book, "In Difesa di Pio XII," ("In Defense of...

They have a beer ration of up to a litre a day, and wurst for dinner. Taleban or no Taleban, Germans take a little bit of home with them when they serve in trouble spots. Even their carefully sorted rubbish gets dumped in wheelie bins before being sent from Afghanistan to Germany for recycling. Now Germany’s most senior officer has berated his troops for going soft. “We cannot guarantee soldiers that they will have an all-round feel-good experience,” said General Wolfgang Schneiderhan. His outburst follows complaints made by German soldiers to the official ombudsman about their tours abroad. Some have...

SAN'A, Yemen — A Yemeni security official says three German women hostages have been found dead, their bodies mutilated.

At least three foreign women, thought to be part of a group which was kidnapped in Yemen, have been found dead, local officials have said. The group of nine foreign hostages - mostly women and children - was kidnapped by Shia rebels in a mountainous area in the north. It included seven Germans, a British engineer and a Korean female teacher. One unconfirmed report citing unnamed security officials said the bodies of more of the foreigners had been found. Yemen's Interior Ministry earlier said the foreigners were kidnapped while on a picnic on Friday in the north-western province of Saada....

A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and spun fantastic stories about himself during three decades in the United States was convicted Friday of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter and sentenced to four to five years in prison. Rockefeller, whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, snatched the girl on a Boston street during a supervised visit last July and fled to Baltimore with her. The jurors, who began deliberating Monday, rejected the theory put forth by Gerhartsreiter's lawyers: that he was suffering from a delusional disorder and was legally insane. Prosecutors called the diagnosis "preposterous" and said he planned...

France and Germany have decided to delay for six months a decision on the future of the problem-plagued Airbus A400M military transport plane, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday. Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed the fate of the plane being built by Airbus, a subsidiary of European aerospace giant EADS, during a meeting at the Elysee presidential palace. "We talked about the A400M and decided that it would be good to give ourselves a small delay of six months to continue discussions and to find the best possible solution," said Sarkozy at a joint news conference.

SNIPPET: "There was an unexpected twist in Germany's high-profile terror trial when the four men accused of planning massive car bombs on US targets in Germany took a time out for several hours. When they returned, their lawyers said they wanted to make full confessions." SNIPPET: "Adem Yilmaz was the first to show a change of attitude, asking the court for permission to talk things over with his three co-defendants. The judge was happy to oblige." SNIPPET: "Yilmaz told the court on Tuesday that he wanted to meet with the other alleged members of the so-called "Sauerland Cell" -- Fritz...

BERLIN (Reuters) – A new, superheavy chemical element numbered 112 will soon be officially included in the periodic table, German researchers said. A team in the southwest German city of Darmstadt first produced 112 in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms through a 120-meter-long particle accelerator to hit a lead target. "The new element is approximately 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element in the periodic table," the scientists at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research said in a statement late on Wednesday.

ECB fears bank crisis in 2010 as recession drags on The European Central Bank is paying close attention to mounting difficulties at 25 banks deemed crucial to the health of the eurozone financial system, fearing another wave of bank turmoil next year if the recession drags on. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor Published: 10 Jun 2009 Europe's financial woes are dragging on and causing concern for the European Central Bank . Dejan Krusec, the ECB's financial stability expert, said the banks are strong enough to weather the current downturn so long as there is a rapid "V-shaped" recovery but...

MOSCOW, June 10 (RIA Novosti) - Russia could abandon nuclear weapons if other nuclear powers - official and unofficial - scrap them, the Russian prime minister said on Wednesday. Asked by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier if he believed Russia could be secure without nuclear weapons, Vladimir Putin said: "You bet." "Why do we need nuclear weapons?" he said. "Did we invent them or did we ever use them? If those who made the atomic bomb and used it are ready to abandon it, and if, as I hope, other powers that possess them [weapons] officially or unofficially are ready...

WHEN Europeans wish upon a star, they get an American president with a huge Third World chip on his shoulder. Those "sophisticated" Europeans dismissed "cowboy" Bush as a rube beneath their contempt. If the continent's opinion-makers could've changed their voter registrations, they would've flown to Chicago to vote for Barack Obama last fall. They got what they wanted. But it isn't what they expected. President Obama may be the least Europe-friendly occupant of the White House since James Monroe (the guy who put up a "Keep Out!" sign on our hemisphere). Bam clearly doesn't like Europeans. A big chill has...

Stimulus: With the votes tallied from a weekend election, it's now apparent that the European Union has taken another step to the right. There's a message in this for both the White House and the U.S. Congress.Results from the vote for the EU Parliament showed huge disaffection among Europeans for state-directed answers to the economic crisis — specifically, for the kinds of massive stimulus programs pushed by the U.S. Parties allied with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy — who have both made a point of opposing any kind of U.S.-style stimulus — made big gains. Even...

A vending machine selling tiny gold bars was launched at the main railway station in Germany’s Frankfurt-am-Main. The ATM machine, the size of a phone-booth and shaped as a gold bar, was installed in the financial metropolis of the European Union, Itar-Tass news agency reports. The new service appeared because of the aspiration of the Germans to rescue their savings during the crisis converting the funds on their bank accounts to gold bars. About 59 tons of gold bars and coins were sold to natural persons during the first quarter of the current year in Germany. The gold sales exceeded...

PARIS (Reuters) - Barack Obama's trip to Europe this weekend revealed deep anxieties among the French and Germans that the U.S. president, hugely popular in both countries, doesn't really like them. After years in which France and Germany happily distanced themselves from the unpopular policies of former President George W. Bush, Obama appeared bemused as he tried to reassure French and German journalists they should not read anything into the brevity of his 2-1/2-day trip.

President Barack Obama spent a few hours as a tourist this weekend, seeing Paris with his wife and two young girls after his trip to the Middle East, Germany and the beaches of Normandy. Obama on Sunday was wrapping up a six-day trip abroad that took him to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany and France. The tour included a speech to Muslims on Thursday and a trip to a Nazi concentration camp a day later. On Saturday, he marked the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion at Normandy. After the D-Day ceremonies at Omaha Beach, Obama returned to Paris with wife...

They gave us ‘nothing less than full victory.' June 6, 1944, "D-day," is a day that lives in glory. "D-day" in military history stands for the "day" of invasion. On this "D-day," obscure beaches on the French coast of the English Channel became the hallowed ground on which heroic men fought and thousands died to end tyranny and liberate millions from Nazi oppression and death camps. These are the beaches renamed, remembered and revered as "Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno." Normandy is the most inspiring, humbling and historically important place to visit in France. Standing above Omaha Beach looking...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Al Qaeda is planning a major attack on Germans before September's election to wreak revenge for the deployment of troops in Afghanistan, a German magazine cited security officials as saying on Saturday. Der Spiegel said German intelligence officials and the Federal Crime Office believed German firms based in Algeria and German citizens in northern Africa were in particular danger. The officials also warned of attacks in Germany. The new assessment is largely due to a warning from the U.S. government, believed to be based on information from al Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, said the weekly.

(obama) ...facing criticism for not staying longer in Europe... said on Saturday he was too busy for gentle strolls or picnics in the park....Obama spent less than a day in Germany on Friday and is due to leave Paris on Sunday after a brief stay in France where he is enjoying a short private break with his family.. ....commentators have questioned whether his short stay indicated a lack of interest in Europe, and French officials have expressed surprise, in private, that he could not even find the time for an official reception at Sarkozy's Elysee Palace

Ministers and MKs on the Right expressed outrage on Thursday at US President Barrack Obama's comparison of the suffering of the Palestinians to what Jews endured in the Holocaust. In his Cairo speech, immediately after talking about the Holocaust, Obama said that "on the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." "Obama shockingly equated the destruction of European Jewry to the suffering Arabs brought upon themselves when they declared war on the nascent state of Israel," National Union MK Arye Eldad said. "If he doesn't...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Do you know how sick I am of Obama? I'm going to get to Obama. I'm going to get to the sham of a show in Germany. We're going to talk more about the sham of a speech yesterday in Cairo. Did you see Angela Merkel standing next to the guy? Put this in perspective. She was standing there, and she's not happy because they're not getting along and they haven't gotten along ever. So there he is, he's at Buchenwald today, the concentration camp, and he is beating Germany up, he's ripping them to shreds over...

Mother's side » Longtime mayor and an army medic show up among his European ancestors. As President Barack Obama meets with German leaders Friday in Dresden, he may be walking among distant relatives. Provo-based Ancestry.com has found that Obama's lineage -- on his mother's side -- can be traced to Germany. Using online sources and microfilm from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, genealogists hunted down a document that went as far back as Obama's eighth great-grandfather. "One of the things that I love about this find is it really illustrates what you can find out about your...

<p>On his way to the 65th D-Day commemorations in France, President Obama plans a curious stop-over in Germany, my home country. He will travel to Buchenwald, the concentration camp his great uncle helped liberate, a visit that makes personal and historical sense. It is his other German destination, Dresden, that seems out of place. Will the president, who likes to apologize for America's alleged sins, now also apologize for World War II?</p>

I was watching the NBC special called "Inside the White House" last night and was struck by a meeting with Larry Summers and the President. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30892505/#31073805 It was touted as an "all access" day in the life of the President but at 7:15 minutes into Part 1 Larry Summers and a man who I believe is Austan Goolsbee come into the Oval Office for a call with "the Germans". Summers is obviously on edge and shuts down the cameras when he begins to discuss the problem. Summers: "Life has changed..ahh..since the briefing…ahh” Obama: "For the better or for the worse?"...

"The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belong to one category," hitler said. More photos at link. Obama calls for new beginning between U.S. and Muslims. "I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect," he said. "America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition."

A Spanish prosecutor called yesterday for international arrest warrants for three alleged former Nazi death camp guards living in the United States, saying evidence shows they acted as accessories to genocide. A final decision on whether to request the arrest and extradition of the three is up to Spanish judge Ismael Moreno, who has been investigating since July at the request of a human rights group representing Spaniards who were held at Nazi camps. Prosecutor Pedro Martinez Torrijos said Spain has jurisdiction under its principle of universal justice allowing grave crimes committed elsewhere to be prosecuted in Spain, and because...

President Obama will be visiting two places in Germany on June 5: the concentration camp at Buchenwald and Dresden. It is hard for me to convey how tactless, bad, and wrong I think this juxtaposition is. In fact, I do not think that Obama should go to Dresden at all. As I’ve noted in a paper just published by the Heritage Foundation, the Anglo-American bombing raid on Dresden on February 13, 1945, is the subject of a great deal of mythology, most of it concocted by the Nazis and spread by the Communists after the war. But mythology matters, because...

6/1/2009 - RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany (AFNS) -- Henry Bautista wasn't one of the U.S. servicemembers seven NCAA football coaches visited at a U.S. military hospital in Germany May 29, because servicemembers are not the only ones risking their lives in dangerous places like Iraq. Mr. Bautista, a field representative for a light armored vehicle contractor in Iraq, was injured May 26 when a vehicle mishap almost severed his leg. The doctors at the hospital pieced his ankle back together, but his tibia is still broken. He needs more surgery. Meanwhile, his family is back in Roy, Wash., on the...

MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told executives Monday that the rescue of German carmaker Opel by Canada's Magna and Russian state-owned bank Sberbank must help the Russian car industry. "The Russian government has its strategy of developing the car industry and the deal we are discussing must be embedded within the strategy for automobile manufacturing," Putin said in televised remarks. The strongman prime minister made the comments at a meeting with Sberbank head German Gref and Magna co-chief executive Siegfried Wolf. "For us it is important that this deal, if finalized, will have an impact on Russian...

A deal has been struck to save car manufacturer Vauxhall and Opel, the European wing of car giants General Motors. An agreement was reached in the early hours of Saturday morning between the German government and Magna International, a Canadian car parts maker, that will see the firm take over most of GM Europe. Under the terms of the deal, Germany is expected to provide an immediate loan facility of €1.5 billion (£1.3 billion). However, it is still feared that 2,500 jobs in Germany could be lost and unions in the UK expressed fears that jobs in the UK could...