Aides had downplayed the rendezvous as simply aimed at getting to know one another rather than about hammering out any policy. Yet the future of Europe could hinge on whether these two leaders find a way to work well together.

Rarely have two people met for the first time with so much baggage. Merkel refused to meet with Hollande during his election campaign, and made the highly unusual step of publicly backing his rival, fellow conservative Sarkozy. Hollande for his part seemed to be campaigning as much against Merkel as the incumbent, pledging to renegotiate the fiscal pact that she had championed.

Now the two have finally met face-to-face and the encounter seemed cordial if hardly warm. Following the ceremonial reviewing of the guard of honor – during which Merkel had to gently nudge Hollande in the right direction on the red carpet – the two held an hour -long meeting. They then addressed the throng of international journalists in a joint press conference during which Merkel remained stony-faced during much of Hollande’s comments, interspersed with the odd smile.

Continue Reading...

I spent a few days at Landstuhl recently, one of a group of writers from the Writers Guild Initiative, part of the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation (Full disclosure and just to add to the confusion: I’m president of the Writers Guild, East, the union with which the foundation’s affiliated).

For the last four years, the foundation has been conducting writing workshops. The project began with professional writers from stage, TV and movies mentoring veterans from the Iraq and Afghan wars, working with them on writing exercises and projects ranging from memoirs and blogs to children’s books, screenplays and sci-fi novels. Recently, in collaboration with the Wounded Warrior Project, the foundation started similar workshops with caregivers, the loved ones of veterans helping them through the aftermath of catastrophic injuries.

Continue Reading...

That was made evident yet again on Sunday when her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) suffered their worst ever result in Germany’s most populous state of North-Rhine Westphalia. The party only managed to get just over 26 percent of the vote in the snap election, shedding almost 9 points since securing 35 percent in the last vote there in 2010.

Her junior coalition partners the Free Democrats did manage an impressive comeback, securing a surprise 8 percent and managing to return to the state parliament thanks to its dynamic leader in the state, Christian Lindner. However, the disastrous performance by the CDU will allow the Social Democrats and Greens to form a stable coalition, after operating as a minority government for the past two years.

Continue Reading...

While workers in many other countries fear for their jobs as their economies tumble into recession, here newly confident labor unions are demanding massive pay rises — and going on strike to get them.

On Wednesday around 30,000 workers in Germany’s vital manufacturing sector downed tools in a coordinated action that affected over 100 companies, including Daimler and Bosch. The strikes continued on Thursday with an estimated 115,000 workers staging a walk out in around 400 companies, including Porsche and Audi, as part of industrial action to secure a hefty 6.5 percent pay rise forGermany’s 3.6 million metalworkers.

Yet, while some workers in troubled countries may look with envy at their German comrades’ brazenness, in fact the action taking place from Berlin to Bavaria could end up being to the benefit of workers in Madrid, Athens or Lisbon.

Continue Reading...

Especially in a country with so much Jewish blood on its hands, this is – or was – a question that no Good German should ask in public. It was even more verboten when asked by someone who had belatedly admitted that as a teenager he had served, however briefly, in the Nazi paramilitary unit, the Waffen SS. But the 84-year-old Grass dared to break the taboo. He spoke out and said “What Must Be Said.”

Yet why do I hesitate to name
that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a growing nuclear power has existed
beyond supervision or verification,
subject to no inspection of any kind?

Continue Reading...

As we move further into the fourth year of the global financial crisis, the questions of where it will end are becoming ever more insistent. When will political leaders finally come up with a solution? When will the atmosphere of dread and panic subside? Put most simply, when will life get back to normal?

There have been recessions before. Unemployment has risen, government revenues have dropped, but after a couple of years some combination of economic policy and new consumer demand has turned the tide and Western democracies have reverted to politics as usual, with parties of the left and right arguing over the distribution of social goods within their own countries. Why isn't that happening again?

There are plenty of answers that speak to the immediate causes: the economic stimulus packages on both sides of the Atlantic have been too small to restart substantial growth; the European Union bureaucracy has been dysfunctionally slow to respond; the euro zone lacks a process for countries to give up the currency.

Continue Reading...

As they tried to enter the city-state's legislature the day after their historic win, a stern woman at the security desk told them, "nein," those party symbols are strictly "verboten."

And so began the first day of the Pirate Party's newly changed status as legislators, after an unexpected election result that has shaken up the staid world of German politics.

The band of internet-freedom activists shocked themselves and pretty much everyone else when they won close to 9 percent in the Berlin state election on Sept. 18, allowing them to send 15 very unconventional new politicians to the regional parliament.

And a recent opinion poll gave the Pirates 7 percent nationally, enough to make it into the federal parliament.

A week after their Berlin triumph, however, it was clear the astonishment had not worn off. They hadn't prepared to win or to take office.

Continue Reading...

Yes, $534 million is a lot of money, and 1,100 jobs is a lot of jobs, but Solyndra represents just 1.3 percent of the Department of Energy's loan portfolio. America's investment in renewables, and particularly solar, lags behind that of many other G-20 countries as a percentage of GDP. Yet sheer investment isn't enough to ensure a robust renewable sector; it has to be smart investment. And that doesn't mean fussing over individual companies; instead of picking the right companies, we need to pick the right policies. We need to look at what's worked elsewhere, particularly in Germany, which continues to blaze the trail in solar innovation, production and installation.

Continue Reading...

Health Minister Daniel Bahr spoke before an emergency meeting in Berlin with health officials from the European Union, which is getting concerned about Germany's handling of the crisis.

"I cannot yet give an all-clear, but after an analysis of the numbers there's reason for hope," Bahr told ARD television. "The numbers are continuously falling -- which nonetheless means that there can still be new cases and that one unfortunately has to expect new deaths too -- but overall new infections are clearly going down."

Bahr said the death toll has risen to 26 -- 25 in Germany plus one in Sweden.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the number of reported cases in Germany rose by more than 300 to 2,648. Nearly 700 of those affected are hospitalized with a serious complication that can cause kidney failure. Another 100 E. coli cases are in other European countries and the United States.

Continue Reading...

All four were in northern Germany in May and officials are confident that they were infected with E. coli in that country. Three of them -- two women and a man -- are hospitalized with a kidney complication that has become a hallmark of the outbreak.

Officials said Friday they are also checking two possible E. coli cases in U.S. military service members in Germany.

The source of the outbreak hasn't been pinpointed but salad vegetables are suspected.

An official from the Food and Drug Administration says produce in the U.S. remains safe. The government has stepped up testing of imported food from Germany and Spain, but very little is imported from those countries.

.

Continue Reading...

It's not as if the global wave of radical violence, extending from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in the United States to the Irish Republican Army, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and various Palestinian and/or Arab groups in the Middle East, is a brand-new topic for film and literature. (I assume that various Ph.D. candidates have already noticed and explored the fact that the defeated Axis powers -- Germany, Japan and Italy -- produced the scariest varieties of left-wing wackos.) Headline-grabbing events like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro or the 1972 Olympic massacre in Munich have been retold several times. But as the global political chaos of that era has faded into collective memory -- and if you weren't there, it's nearly impossible to convey the level of craziness -- filmmakers have given themselves permission to reexamine it from formerly forbidden points of view.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

The country's seven oldest reactors already taken off the grid pending safety inspections following the catastrophe at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in March will remain offline permanently, Norbert Roettgen added. The country has 17 reactors total.

Roettgen praised the coalition agreement after negotiations through the night between the governing parties.

"This is coherent. It is clear," he told reporters in Berlin. "That's why it is a good result."

Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed through measures in 2010 to extend the lifespan of the country's 17 reactors, with the last one scheduled to go offline in 2036, but she reversed her policy in the wake of the Japanese disaster.

"We want the electricity of the future to be safe, reliable and economically viable," Merkel told reporters on Monday.

Germany's energy supply chain "needs a new architecture," necessitating huge efforts in boosting renewable energies, efficiency gains and overhauling the electricity grid, she added.

Continue Reading...

That's the point. In the book's prologue, Larson tells of his long-standing interest in what it was like to witness the "gathering dark of Hitler's rule." Certain perceptive individuals could see exactly where Germany was going, but the vast majority did not. You could even say that the rise of the Third Reich is primarily a story about what regular people failed to notice or to take seriously until it was too late. The two Americans Larson has chosen to focus on in this book are William Dodd, who was the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his daughter, Martha, who socialized with many crucial figures of the period.

Continue Reading...

Today, a German court declared Demjanjuk (91) guilty on 28,060 counts of acting as an accessory to murder at the Sobibor extermination camp, and sentenced him to five years in prison. For a man who has been fighting similar accusations for decades -- facing, at various points, punishments that ranged from solitary confinement to hanging -- a five-year sentence might not seem very long.

The AP explains the verdict:

Demjanjuk was charged with 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for each person who died during the time he was accused of being a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. There was no evidence he committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing -- the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

Continue Reading...

The zoo said Tuesday that initial results from the necropsy examination performed by an institute in the German capital did not show changes to any other organs.

It didn't elaborate but said further tests, including bacteriological examinations, will take several days.

The 4-year-old polar bear died Saturday afternoon in front of visitors at the zoo, turning around several times and then falling into the water in his enclosure.

Polar bears usually live 15 to 20 years in the wild, and even longer in captivity, and the zoo is hoping the investigation will clarify what happened.

Continue Reading...

The Obama administration said it wouldn't block other nations from building support for the vote. However, there is a growing consensus in the White House that it's too late for a no-fly zone to have an effect in hampering Gadhafi, according to The New York Times, as the dictator's forces prepare to launch an assault on the rebel capital of Benghazi.

President Obama met with his National Security Council on Tuesday to consider a variety of other options to respond to the deteriorating situation.

Among those options are jamming Libyan government radio signals and financing the rebel forces with $32 billion in Libyan government and Qaddafi family funds frozen by the United States. That money could be used either for weapons or relief. The meeting broke without a decision, the official said.

Continue Reading...

Spokeswoman Maj. Beverly Mock said German police have the suspect in Wednesday afternoon's shooting in custody and that she could not release any further details on the victims until their next of kin have been notified.

A gunman fired shots at U.S. military personnel on a bus outside Frankfurt airport on Wednesday, killing two people and wounding two before being taken into custody, authorities said.

Kosovo's interior minister told The Associated Press that German police have identified the gunman as a Kosovo citizen.

The attack came as the bus sat outside Terminal 2 at the airport, Frankfurt police spokesman Manfred Fuellhardt said.

The two killed were the bus driver and a passenger, and one person suffered serious wounds and another one light injuries, Fuellhardt said. The spokesman could not confirm whether any of the casualties were U.S. military personnel.

The U.S. Army in Europe referred calls to the Air Force, but a spokeswoman said she could not immediately confirm that the casualties were airmen nor give any details of the incident. The bus had a U.S. government license place marked "AF" for Air Force.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

I don't mean that Aladag's film defaults to some pseudo-neutral cultural relativism, or suggests that women's freedom is negotiable. Far from it -- she depicts Umay's clannish and patriarchal family, which is divided between Istanbul and Berlin, as a cruel and inexorable machine determined to crush her resistance. But the individuals in that family, like Umay's blustery father (Settar Tanriogen), her sharp-eyed mother (Derya Alabora) and even her thuggish brother, Mehmet (Tamer Yigit), are plagued by anxiety and guilt. In fact, they still love Umay and wish her no ill, but they feel nearly as imprisoned by the power of their misogynist culture as she does.

Continue Reading...