Free Republic

Loukas Zisis, the deputy mayor of Distomo, a village nestled in the hills about a two hour drive from Athens, says he thinks about the Germans every day. On June 10, 1944, the Germans massacred 218 people in Distomo, including dozens of children. Zisis, who is just 48 years old, wasn't yet born at the time of the attack. "We can't forget the Germans," Zisis says. They came to Distomo 71 years ago with their guns. "Today they are exerting power over our village with their banks and policies," he adds. He's standing in the wind on a rocky ledge,...

President Barack Obama failed to shift French President France Hollande from his objections to the nuclear accord taking shape between the US and Iran in the call he put through to the Elysée Friday night, March 30. US Secretary of State John Kerry fared no better Saturday, when he met British, French and German Foreign ministers in London for a briefing on the talks’ progress intended to line the Europeans up with the American position. He then found, according to debkafile’s sources, that France was not alone; Germany too balked at parts of the deal in the making. The French...

The Interior Ministry is planning to beef up its terror response capacity by setting up an new elite unit to be deployed in emergency situations, on top of Germany’s existing GSG 9. The government is taking the step as a response to the recent terror attacks in France and Denmark, believing that Germany’s current reaction capacity is too limited, reports Der Spiegel. Germany needs “a robust unit that can confront such situations,” said the Christian Democrat (CDU) specialist for the interior, Armin Schuster. …

Journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on Thursday that the USA told the German government it would cut off intelligence sharing if the country offered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum. Writing at The Intercept, Greenwald said he was told of the threats by Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel after an award ceremony in Homburg on Sunday, where the journalist received the Siebenpfeiffer journalism prize. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said. “If the threat were carried out, the Americans would literally allow the German population to remain vulnerable to a brewing attack… by withholding...

Real German incomes, or gross wages adjusted for inflation, had not developed evenly in recent years across different wage sectors, a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Munich-based IFO economic research institute showed Wednesday. […] The authors of the study said one of the reasons for the increasing wage disparity had been a creeping decline of collective bargaining deals with binding wages. […] “We need to redouble our efforts to scale back wage disparities again without losing too many jobs,” Bertelsmann Foundation chief Aart De Geus said in a statement, pointing out that the recent introduction of a minimum...

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble confirmed on Tuesday that Germany has agreed to join the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), despite pressure from the US.Germany, France and Italy “want to bring our long experience … to help the bank build a solid reputation,” Schäuble said at a joint press conference in Berlin with Chinese vice-premier Ma Kai. “We want to make a contribution to the positive development of the Asian economy, in which German companies are actively taking part,” he said. France and Italy have also agreed to become members of the $50-billion institution, seen as a rival to the...

Around 70 police officers searched the Sahabe Islamic Education and Cultural Center in Stuttgart on Tuesday, looking for connections to terrorist organization ISIS. “There is concrete suspicion that the association fulfills the criteria for being forbidden under the law,” Baden-Württemberg interior minister Reinhold Gall said in a statement. “We’ve been watching the association for a long time, but the suspicions of breaching the law have grown more serious recently.” […] Gall said the Sahabe association “supports the use of violence to assert religious values and supports a foreign organization, the so-called Islamic State, which provokes attacks against people or property.”...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he considered activating nuclear forces to annex the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine after the fall of a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv early last year. “We were ready to do it,” Putin said of putting nuclear forces at the ready, in a nearly three-hour documentary that aired on state television Sunday. The president added that he had fielded many calls from foreign leaders and told them “that this is our historical territory and Russian people live there, they were in danger, and we cannot abandon them.” He said: “It was a frank and open position....

Unearthed, the prince of Stonehenge By Roger Highfield (Filed: 21/08/2002) A prehistoric prince with gold ear-rings has been found near Stonehenge a few yards away from the richest early Bronze Age burial in Britain. Earlier this year, archaeologists found an aristocratic warrior, also with gold ear-rings, on Salisbury Plain and speculated that he may have been an ancient king of Stonehenge. The body was laid to rest 4,300 years ago during the construction of the monument, along with stone arrow heads and slate wristguards that protected the arm from the recoil of the bow. Archaeologists named him the Amesbury Archer....

Tests reveal Amesbury Archer ‘King of Stonehenge’ was a settler from the Alps The man who may have helped organise the building of Stonehenge was a settler from continental Europe, archaeologists say. The latest tests on the Amesbury Archer, whose grave astonished archaeologists last year with the richness of its contents, show he was originally from the Alps region, probably Switzerland, Austria or Germany. The tests also show that the gold hair tresses found in the grave are the earliest gold objects found in Britain. The grave of the Archer, who lived around 2,300BC, contained about 100 items, more than...

The Obama presidency is fond of issuing apologies for America on the world stage, but very rarely makes them at home to Americans. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer has just issued one to Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, who last week wrote an op-ed berating the Obama administration for removing a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when it came to power. Pfeiffer had issued a stinging attack on Krauthammer, alleging that his Churchill bust reference was “100 percent false.” Krauthammer was of course 100 percent correct, and the British Embassy in...

Sales of new kitchens are up more than 10% already this year at German kitchen maker Haecker as local consumers start to spend their money due to its robust economy. For those who would rather someone else did the cooking, roasted monkfish and turbot with truffles are flopping onto plates at Berlin's Michelin-starred restaurant Fischers Fritz. A blizzard of corporate good news shows that famously frugal Germans are now snapping up soccer shirts from Adidas and electronics from retail chain Media-Saturn. With interest rates on savings low, unemployment falling, oil prices sliding and pay rises outpacing inflation, economists say German...

<p>Today German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed Greek Diplomatic Offensive Is Failing.</p> <p>Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc in parliament has agreed not to give in to any “bad compromise that “defacto adds up to a debt writedown,” Hans-Peter Friedrich, a deputy leader of the caucus, said in an interview today.</p>

Once again the crisis in Greece is threatening the unity of the entire euro zone. Many analysts are asking what must be done to restore viability to the Union's weakest link. Lost in this discussion is that modern Greece, formed in 1830, has never really been required to stand on its own. Generations of support from abroad, typically given for strategic reasons, has created a false sense of prosperity in the country and has prevented the Greeks from accepting the realities of their current situation. When Greece fought for its independence against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, the struggle...

The political centre across southern Europe is disintegrating. Establishment parties of centre-left and centre-right - La Casta, as they say in Spain - have successively immolated themselves enforcing EMU debt-deflation. Spain's neo-Bolivarian Podemos party refuses to fade. It has endured crippling internal rifts. It has shrugged off hostile press coverage over financial ties to Venezuela. Nothing sticks. The insurrectionists who came from nowhere last year - with Trotskyist roots and more radical views than those of Syriza in Greece - are pulling further ahead in the polls. The latest Metroscopia survey gave Podemos 28pc. The ruling conservatives have dropped to...

Greece's justice minister said on Wednesday he was ready to implement a High Court ruling allowing Athens to seize German state-owned property to compensate victims of a Nazi massacre in a small Greek village. Nikos Paraskevopoulos' comments come against a backdrop of rising tensions between Athens and Berlin as Greece's new leftist government struggles to persuade its European Union partners to renegotiate a 240 billion euro bailout package. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday accused successive German governments of using legal tricks to avoid paying reparations for the brutal Nazi occupation of Greece and said he would support efforts to...

Brussels- European leaders agreed on Friday to extend Greece's bailout for four months after weeks of terse negotiations.

Germany has been sacking Greece and other Mediterranean economies for years, and the Hellenic revolt against austerity is overdue. When the euro was established in 1999, prices were translated from the mark, franc and other currencies into euro at prevailing exchange rates. (Greece joined the Eurozone in 2001, giving up the drachma.) National prices reflected differences in labor costs and efficiency across countries, but owing to a variety of social and demographic conditions, productivity improved more rapidly in Germany and other northern countries. Making goods in the South became too expensive, and Greece and others could no longer export enough...

Europe faces yet another recession, and the prospect is shaking global financial markets. To eliminate the persistent threat of collapse, Europe must drop the euro, and Germany must abandon mercantilism. When the euro was adopted in 1999, domestic prices -- the face values for bonds and loans -- and bank accounts were translated into euros according to prevailing exchange rates for national currencies at the time. Initially, the single currency posed few significant problems. Over time, however, differences in labor market policies and geographic conditions that are difficult for governments to alter caused productivity to grow more rapidly in Germany...

This is a shocker. According to reports, the Bundesbank — Germany's famously hard-money loving central bank — might be willing to engage in more stimulus if inflation forecasts decline. The WSJ says the Bundesbank is open to "significant" stimulus, including possibly negative rates. The euro is diving