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Archive for the 'Europe' Category
RIP: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Much can be said about Alexander Solzhenitsyn who died this weekend in Russia, and many will certainly do. With a courageous person like him having left us a few words by us might be allowed as well. He was…
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Foodfight: Berlin - Unterfriedrichshein vs. Ostkreuzberg
After two years of a break the annual water / food fight between the two (former) Berlin “districts of Kreuzberg” and Friedrichshain was taken out again this weekend.
Almost a thousand combatants gathered around the “Oberbaumbruecke” that connects the two neighborhoods. The “battle” goes back to the 1990s when the Senate of Berlin in an administrative reform combined the two neighborhoods into one township/voting district most likely to block the left wing PDS party from getting a broader representation in government.
Within this battle only “weapons” like water, flour and everything that is wet, soft, splashy or slippery are allowed. According to that motto popular weapons included addle eggs, rotten vegetables or…
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Image: Where is Waldo with Obama
Yesterday Sen. Barack Obama held a speech in Berlin and 200,000 were listening in enthusiastically.
For those who want to get an impression how 200,000 people look like from the viewpoint of the speaker we found an excellent shot at Flickr.
Note that the image only shows the front rows of…
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Rants’n Raves: Euro 2008 Football (soccer) championship
Been sitting around this afternoon watching the semifinals of the Euro 2008 football championship via the Internet (there is no post on this site how to use a proxy to watch German TV from the US - go look somewhere else). Have to admit that I normally never watch football or golf or TV in general since they’ve replaced most of the interesting stuff with game shows, but today I made an exception.
So I’m sitting here nibbling on Lieber’s Kosher Winkies (that’s what my Deli had for sweets - not bad anyway, but full of artificial flavors) and watching parts of that game - the Germans win and there’s that big huha going on, everybody’s celebrating - besides the Turks of course - and dancing people anywhere as if they would have contributed to the result.
Then what would you expect German TV to do - interview some players, the coach, your grand uncle who knows everything about soccer - NO WAY!
They go straight ahead for some political schmoozing and…
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Nazi-Germany Anthem used at European Football championship
One event currently has, during evenings, swept almost half of Europe’s population off the streets (the other half is most likely watching it in so called public viewing zones) - the European Football championship.
Now this Monday, Swiss TV who together with Austrian TV for the two hosting nations Austria and Switzerland is transmitting the TV footage from the games, had a bit of a problem staying up to date with changes in neighboring Germany during the last 60 years. To be more precise it turned back time to the 1940s of Nazi Germany.
When the two teams at the beginning of the match between Germany and Austria were singing their National Anthems, Swiss TV used the verse for the German Anthem in its sub titles that was sung until the fall of the Third Reich.
The TV station mentioned in their apology, that it all happened by mistake. Officially the incident was blamed on two junior members of the TV team that have “copied the wrong text from the Internet“. And while these sub titles…
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UK High Court rules to continue government corruption investigations
It’s a stunning victory for the activist groups and in their today’s ruling the two UK High Court judges, with unusually harsh wording that in parts can only be described as scathing criticism of the Blair administration, have declared the stop of investigations by the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into corruption within a GBP 43 Billion (USD 88 Billion) arms deal between UK’s BAE and Saudi Arabia as unlawful.
The decisions of the SFO and the UK Attorney General to drop the case were due to massive political pressure from PM Blair and his administration. The decision to drop the case two years ago also prompted the OECD to start an investigation into international corruption.
I guess (sadly) that no-one these days will be surprised anymore that the argument used by PM Blair to defend the interferences with the law was of course the general excuse / Catch-22 “matters of national security“.
Nevertheless the judges today have stood up for the right of prosecutors to be independent and not subjected to political pressure.
You can read a…
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Street-Art: London as an Open Prison
These signs are currently popping up all over London.
An excellent idea to create awareness of the planned ID card project in the UK. You find more images of this great poster “here”, “here” and “here”.
We refrain from commenting on the subject directly (in our opinion the issues…
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Internet: Wikileaks.org ordered offline by US court
The BBC today has an article online about Wikileaks.org, a website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents.
The “BBC reports” that “…following a California court ruling, the site been taken offline in the US…” Well seemingly that’s not completely true. You won’t get access to the site via wikileaks.org but that’s because the DNS server entries have been deleted.
But hey - there are other ways. You can access the site’s content at other servers on the Internet (see image below). We suggest searching for the web site’s name and DNS and you might find it yourself. Popular bookmarking sites might also turn out helpful.
While you can question the motives why people upload documents to this site or even question the content of some of them, Wikileaks.org definitely had a rough ride the last days.
Within days they endured a fire in their server room, massive DDoS attacks and censorship threats…
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Data visualization: Leading surveillance societies around the world
Since 1997 two NGOs - the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International - have surveyed and assessed the state of surveillance and privacy protection in 47 countries. The annual Privacy & Human Rights Report compiled from their findings has by now become one of the most comprehensive surveys of global privacy and citizen rights.
Their “most recent report” published a few days ago has been created with the help of more than 200 experts from around the world and has grown to 1,100 pages. It shows trends of
“…an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance of privacy safeguards…“, and
“…an increasing trend amongst governments to archive data on the geographic, communications and financial records of all their citizens and residents. This trend leads to the conclusion that all citizens, regardless of legal status, are under suspicion…
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UK: What went wrong with the Civil Service
From a letter to the Daily Telegraph responding to the article “Why is the Civil Service a laughing stock?” by Philip Johnston
Sir - After a career of nearly 43 years in Westminster, I can tell Philip Johnston what has gone wrong with the Civil Service.
When I joined, it was a monolithic organisation, staffed by people who cared more for public service than for money, recruited with decent qualifications from an education system that worked, promoted in part by competitive examination, untainted by political bias and undiluted by endless useless management consultants.
Since then, the politicians have destroyed its public-service ethos by transferring so many to profit-making bodies, undermined its career structure by the wholesale importation of “here today, gone tomorrow” interlopers, forced party-political considerations to replace national ones and outsourced vital functions to private companies whose costs are exceeded only by their incompetence…
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