No, this is even better than having a German Pope.
Lena delivered and brought home the Eurovision 2010 crown – or whatever the hell it is Eurovision winners get when they, uh, win.
Knock yourselves out or something already!
PS: I don’t want to spoil your cornflakes or anything, Germany – she’s a cutie pie, really – but there’s something slightly wrong with her english/Englisch. I’m just sayin’, OK?
But at least divided we stand together, in “broad agreement.”
It goes like this: Tim Geithner is all for imposing more conservative rules on financial institutions too, Germany, as long as they’re not too conservative. Germany’s Wolfgang Schäuble, on the other hand, wants kind-of-sort-of the same thing, he says, as long as it’s more conservative than not too conservative and, above all else, international. And as long as it’s German unilateral at the same time too, of course.
Other than that though, they couldn’t agree on much of anything.
“We have a lot in common. We are going to have slightly different approaches. I don’t think we’ll know what separates us until we get to the next stage.”
Well welcome to the club, Germany. Like what took you so long?
Now, at the worst possible moment, Germany is turning to nationalist illusions. Europe’s past economic successes are now viewed as German successes.
Europe’s current deep problems are everyone else’s except Germany’s. That is neither realistic nor sustainable. But German politicians and commentators are callously and self-destructively feeding these ideas.
721 000 folks moved to Germany last year, 734 000 left. That’s 13 000 in the red, which is kind of a lot, I guess (especially when you consider the birth rate here these days), but at least it’s less red than the 43 000 in the red the year before, which is good, I guess.
So what does all this mean? Hell if I know. Give the people what they want or something and then they’ll stay. Or maybe they won’t. Hard to say for sure.
Besonders beliebt sind die Schweiz und USA.
What’s five years late these days? Too much for even the German Defense Ministry, it seems.
They’re mad as hell and aren’t going to wait it anymore for an order of 80 EADS/Eurocopter/Tiger helicopters to be delivered – five years behind schedule and counting.
Well, that’s not the whole truth. Eleven have actually arrived already (probably driven in on trucks), but these Tigers weren’t the ones they ordered. Hey, Rome (and the EU) wasn’t built in a day either.
Eurocopter, the world’s largest maker of helicopters by units, is a subsidiary of European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co., which also makes Airbus SAS commercial and military planes.
SPIEGEL: But most German politicians are committed to Europe.
Fischer: Only as long as it remains very abstract. But we have to give people enough credit to deal with unpleasant truths. No one explains why the euro is important for Germany and what its failure would mean. And no one explains why Germany has always paid — because it happens to be the big winner in Europe.
SPIEGEL: A community of solidarity means that Germany must pay for the failures of others.
Fischer: What nonsense! The European Union was a transfer union from the very beginning. The common market and the agrarian market were and still are primarily transfer guarantees for Germany and France!
SPIEGEL: How should Merkel have reacted?
Fischer: The chancellor should have put forward her own proposal to rescue the euro, in coordination with France. We have a responsibility as Europe’s strongest economic power. The EU cannot solve its problems in the long run if Germany hides itself. We are paying a high price for our resistance. We are viewed with suspicion in the entire Mediterranean region, and are seen as villains in Greece.
And besides, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Or of the lack of law, as the case may be.
Berlin’s own 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti – a tourist attraction some claim to have been whisked away from Egypt with fraudulent documents way back when – won’t be “loaned” to Egypt anytime soon. At least not if Germany has anything to say about it.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle – a famed Egyptologist too, I think – says that Egyptian requests for the bust are unrealistic because, well, it’s simply too fragile to move. At least in the direction of Egypt it is.
Egypt is campaigning to retrieve thousands of antiquities spirited out during Egypt’s colonial period and afterward.
“Ground zero of Europe’s debt-currency-banking crisis isn’t in Greece, or Portugal, or Ireland or even Spain. It’s in Germany.”
“At one end is a powerful and highly efficient industrial export engine that generates a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, including most other countries in the eurozone. Instead of spending this new export wealth on a higher standard of living, however, parsimonious Germans prefer to save it, handing it over to thinly capitalized German banks that have proved equally efficient in destroying said wealth by investing it in risky securities issued, not coincidentally, by trading partners that need the capital to finance their trade deficits with Germany.”
“What Germans won’t accept is that they wouldn’t have been able to sell all those beautifully designed cars and well-engineered machine tools if Greeks and Spaniards and Americans hadn’t been willing to buy those goods and German banks hadn’t been so willing to lend them the money to do so. “
Germany has more influence than you thought. More than I thought too.
World markets slid Wednesday while the euro hovered near four-year lows against the dollar after Germany announced new curbs on traders in a unilateral attempt to shore up the ailing single European currency and prevent the continent’s debt crisis from getting out of control.
Boy oh boy. Does Germany’s ever have big Google by the little googles now.
Caught accidently (Google says) collecting private data while collecting WLAN data for their Street View photo archive (the first Google mess-up vis-a-vis Germany, as far as I’m concerned – other than offering Google here in the first place, I mean), Hamburg’s data protection supervisor dude has demanded that Google hand over their hard drive for inspection, or else.
Good thing for Google he doesn’t know that they actually have more than one.
Google apologized for collecting what it described as fragments of information from unsecured WLANs, saying its actions were inadvertent and the result of a programming error.
Observing Hermann 