The Money Was Real, Though

Fake news reporters may fake their news like there’s no tomorrow but they rarely want anything to do with fake money.

Fake

Der Spiegel said Sunday it would file a criminal complaint against a disgraced reporter after it emerged he may have embezzled donations intended for Syrian street children.

Claas Relotius, 33, resigned this month after admitting to making up stories and inventing protagonists in more than a dozen articles in the magazine’s print and online editions.

Spiegel said it now had information that Relotius allegedly launched a campaign for readers to give money to help subjects of an article he wrote but that the bank details he gave directed the funds to his own account.

Spiegel said concerned readers had in recent days reported Relotius’ call for donations purportedly for orphaned Syrian children living on the streets of Turkey.

“Der Spiegel will give all the information it collects to public prosecutors as part of a criminal complaint.”

PS: And on that happy note, Merry Christmas!

Santa

Institutional Bias?

At Der Spiegel? At CNN? And systematically practiced by practically everybody else out there working in the media’s “mediation” machine?

CNN

No way. Or… Way? Wow. Who would have thought that possible?

The US government has waded into the scandal of the German journalist for Der Spiegel magazine who faked stories on a grand scale over years, calling it proof of “institutional bias” in the media against America.

In a scathing letter to the magazine’s editors, Richard Grenell, US ambassador to Germany, claims the journalism of Claas Relotius, who resigned from the German news magazine last week, was symptomatic of anti-American bias across the mainstream media. “It is clear that we were the victims of a campaign of institutional bias,” Grenell wrote to Der Spiegel, in a letter also seen by the daily newspaper Bild. He said he was aghast at the way “anti-American coverage” had been facilitated by the magazine.

“We are aware that the Relotius case makes the fight against fake news that much more difficult. For everyone. For for other media outlets that are on our side and for citizens and politicians who are interested in an accurate portrayal of reality.”

German Fake News Scandal Reaches Fergus Falls, Minnesota

“Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.”

Fake News

“In 7,300 words he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct, and a few other basic things, like the names of businesses and public figures, things that a child could figure out in a Google search. The rest is uninhibited fiction (even as sloppy as citing an incorrect figure of citywide 70.4% electoral support for Trump, when the actual number was 62.6%), which begs the question of why Der Spiegel even invested in Relotius’ three week trip to the U.S., whether they should demand their money back from him, and what kind of institutional breakdown led to the supposedly world-class Der Spiegel fact-checking team completely dropping the ball on this one.”

If It’s Not In Der Spiegel, It Didn’t Happen

Unfortunately, that’s also the case even when it is in Der Spiegel.

Spiegel

And here y’all thought that fake news was fake.

Award-winning journalist Claas Relotius wrote fake news, German magazine Der Spiegel says.

An award-winning journalist who worked for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s leading news outlets, has left the weekly magazine after evidence emerged that he committed journalistic fraud “on a grand scale” over a number of years, the publication said Wednesday…

Spiegel’s revelations echoed past instances of journalistic fraud by reporters elsewhere, including Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Christopher Newton of The Associated Press and Janet Cooke, whose 1980 piece about a child addicted to heroin won The Washington Post writer a Pulitzer Prize before it was exposed as untrue.

Er hat nach Meinung der Jury des Deutschen Reporterpreises 2018 wieder die beste Reportage des Jahres geschrieben, über einen syrischen Jungen diesmal, der im Glauben lebt, durch einen Kinderstreich den Bürgerkrieg im Land mit ausgelöst zu haben. Die Juroren würdigen einen Text “von beispielloser Leichtigkeit, Dichte und Relevanz, der nie offenlässt, auf welchen Quellen er basiert.”

German Of The Day: Weihnachten

That means Christmas. You know, like the word for Christmas that the German Integrationsbeauftragte (Integration Commissioner) purposely left off of her official Christmas card greeting this year?

Weihnachten

“No matter what you believe in…” She writes, “We wish you a peaceful holiday season and a good start in the coming year.” But no mention of the word Christmas. You know, for like, I dunno, Christians?

You certainly couldn’t call Weihnachten a dirty four-letter word. It’s way bigger than that. But it’s sure dirty enough because in the Germany of 2018 it’s the kind of word you do not to want to put into your mouth, much less into writing, during the Christmas, I mean holiday season. At least not when you’re the Integration Commissioner here.

But wait. Shouldn’t that be one of the first words somebody interested in integration in Germany would want to use?

“Es ist bedauerlich, dass falsch verstandene Toleranz augenscheinlich dazu führt, dass Weihnachten, das Fest der Liebe, unsichtbar wird.”

German Of The Day: Moschee

That means mosque. You know, like the one in Berlin Wedding that got raided today for suspected terror financing?

Mosque

Ask Thilo Sarrazin. He’ll tell you why this type of thing comes about.

Police raided a mosque and several other buildings in Berlin on Tuesday morning in an operation into suspected terrorism financing, prosecutors said…

State criminal police, intelligence officers as well as special police forces took part in the raids, which included the As-Sahaba mosque in the Berlin neighborhood of Wedding.

The As-Sahaba mosque is under surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency and is considered an important meeting point for members of Germany’s radical Salafist scene, according to the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper.

The mosque was founded in 2010 by the German-Egyptian Islamist Reda Seyam, who is accused of taking part in a terror attack in Bali, according to the paper. He later left Germany to travel to Syria to become the “education minister” for the militant “Islamic State” (IS) group.

Thought Crime Doesn’t Pay

Not even if you’ve been a member of the SPD for forty-five years, Thilo.

Sarrazin

The SPD party leadership wants to exclude author and former Berlin Finance Minister Thilo Sarrazin from the party. Again. For the third time.

His thought crime? He is critical of Islam and the islamizing of Germany. I know, right? In this day and age? But worse still, he has been critical of this process for decades, not just the past few years. And, worst of all, he refuses to go away.

From an earlier post: To sum it up his latest book (Hostile Takeover) Sarrazin maintains: Islam is a backward religion incapable of reform, inherently violent (the step from Muslim believer to Islamist terrorist being merely one of degree), intolerant and xenophobic and that the Muslims in Germany are openly attempting to out-populate the Germans, which of course isn’t terribly hard to do.

So… Which part of that is getting everybody over at the SPD all upset about? I thought this was mainstream thinking.

“Ich habe keine SPD-Grundsätze verletzt.”

PS: Speaking of thought crime, Berlin’s Waldorf School just turned down a child because his father is in the AfD.

Back To Nature

Or don’t turn your back to it, I should say.

Ah, the wolf. What a romantic, wonderful, mythical creature. Until recently, that is, when things started getting real again. Wasn’t nature supposed to be warm and cuddly and friendly and nice? These new wolves are turning out to be real pricks, however. They must have been ruined through their contact with human civilization.

Wolves

Wolves are making a big comeback in Germany, which is making some Germans uneasy.

Farmers and hunters drove the species out of the country over 150 years ago, but conditions for wolves became more welcoming in 1990, after Germany’s reunification extended European endangered species protections to the eastern part of the country.

… He says government officials are insensitive to the worries of people living in the countryside. He thinks urban Germans have come to romanticize the returning wolves. “They think, ‘Aww, it’s a nice wolf, and he needs to be in nature and be free.’ But people raised in the countryside, they don’t need the wolf anymore.”

Don’t We Already Have A Generation X?

Or maybe I just don’t understand x-actly what that means anymore.

Generation X

The German parliament was forced by the courts to make “diverse” an option on the birth register. Critics are split on whether the law goes too far, or not far enough.

I’ll go with too far. I would even be OK with x-tremely too far.

The “third gender” option places Germany in line with other countries that have introduced measures to recognize intersex people or a third gender, such as Austria, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada and Portugal.

Right. So that’s when the next “logical” step follows…

The Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany also hit out at the law, saying it was disappointing it only took into account physical characteristics when determining gender.

I really feel like an x-traterrestrial on this planet sometimes.

If It Wasn’t For No-Deal I Would’t Have No Deal At All

Germany Prepares for No-Deal Brexit to Avert Financial Turmoil

May

Tick-tock, tick-tock… Wake up and smell the tea, people.

“The only thing I can tell citizens in Germany is that we’re working hard on ensuring an orderly Brexit and that, in parallel, we’re preparing for the eventuality that it won’t be orderly.”

Mays bitterer Sieg – Brexit-Hardliner forderten Theresa May heraus – in einer Vertrauensabstimmung hat sich die Tory-Chefin durchgesetzt. Doch ein Befreiungsschlag gelingt ihr nicht.