Salon.com > Berlin

Bomb from World War II defused near Berlin’s main station

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:32:00 +0000

BERLIN (AP) — A World War II bomb was defused near Berlin's main railway station on Wednesday after trains were diverted, nearby houses evacuated and flights to the city's main airport briefly disrupted.

The 220-pound (100-kilogram) bomb was found Tuesday evening at a building site near the station, which stands in a relatively sparsely populated area near what used to be the border between West and East Berlin.

Experts decided to defuse the Soviet bomb on the spot, a former freight depot. They evacuated people from a few dozen nearby buildings and diverted trains heading north toward Hamburg. Most trains, however, were able to continue running undisrupted.

As a precaution, authorities also decided briefly to stop planes landing at the city's Tegel airport, a few miles away, while the bomb was defused — an operation that took half an hour. It wasn't immediately clear how many flights were delayed.

Some 150 people who lived nearby waited at a nearby school while the bomb was defused, police spokesman Jens Berger said.

Allied airplanes dropped huge quantities of ordnance on Germany during World War II in an effort to cripple the Nazi war machine.

Jews are now works of art

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:44:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, my sister was in the Passover aisle of her local supermarket when a woman came up to her and asked if she knew where the tahini was. She didn’t. The woman explained that it was always in this particular aisle but now wasn’t, which led my sister to explain that it had likely been moved because it isn’t kosher for Passover, which in turn led the woman to begin inquiring about Passover rules. That blossomed into a larger, nearly half-hour-long conversation about Judaism, with the woman asking lots of questions and my sister trying to answer them. “I did the best I could,” she told me. As anyone who’s ever been expected to represent their entire religion/race/ethnicity/gender/world view knows, it’s a pretty difficult task.

Grindr’s odd Holocaust fetish

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:25:00 +0000

Perhaps you had to be in the vicinity of arty Berlin to see them at first, but profile pictures on the gay hookup application Grindr increasingly include a surprise prop: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The blog Totem and Taboo aggregates photos taken at the Berlin memorial to the Holocaust, with its iconic, haunting gray slabs, and posted to Grindr -- a smartphone application used by gay men, that alerts users to the prowling presence of other men in their vicinity. Totem and Taboo captures a peculiar trend of saucy men using the slabs as backdrops to lean against, climb upon and provide ironic context for their come hither looks and shirtless poses.

How to survive the end of the world

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:24:00 +0000

SIRINCE, Turkey — For most of us, if you believe the doomsday theory, the world will end on Dec. 21.

The whole world, that is, except two small, seemingly random villages. Since some believe they possess high levels of “positive energy,” Sirince in Turkey and Bugarach in France will be spared the Armageddon.

For Sirince, a town of just 650 people, such beliefs are good for business.

“It’s a big event for Sirince. We could make it a tradition,” said a cheerful Ahmet Kocak, the owner of a boutique hotel here, as he sat on the hotel terrace overlooking the village’s historic Greek cottages.

For the first time ever in the history of his hotel, all of his rooms were booked eight months ahead of time — all by Americans.

China scrambles to censor discussion of Mo Yan

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:59:00 +0000

HONG KONG – It didn’t take long for the Chinese government to try to take control of the conversation about Mo Yan.

Days after the 57-year-old novelist thrilled his country by winning the Nobel Prize for literature, China’s central censorship organ issued a directive to media companies instructing them to strictly police online discussion for anti-party chatter or mentions of two other Chinese-born Nobel winners.

China Digital Times has a translation of the leaked directive:

“To all websites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the party and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details.”