Salon.com > Luke Harding

Invasion of the body pleasers

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:38:00 +0000

The giant red phallus billowing from the roof is a bit of a giveaway. Just next to a busy main road and tucked incongruously behind a tire repair workshop is Artemis, Berlin's newest, most luxurious brothel. There is, as such, nothing remarkable about the vast four-story bordello that opened its doors two months ago in an anonymous industrial estate in Berlin. Except, perhaps, for its location. The sex facility is a short drive from Berlin's Olympiastadion, the famous stadium used by the Nazis to host the 1936 Olympics and -- more important -- the venue for next year's World Cup.

Some six games, including the final, will be played at the stadium. More than 100,000 England fans are expected for the tournament -- which will be played at 12 city venues around the country next summer -- together with thousands of other supporters from all over the world.

After the riots

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:20:00 +0000

Some 40 French towns and suburbs, ravaged by 13 nights of rioting, were Wednesday given powers to impose emergency measures, including curfews, as further details emerged of a government aid package for depressed suburbs.

Officials said France's worst urban violence in 40 years seemed to be running out of steam, with half as many cars going up in flames in half as many towns as on previous nights. "We are seeing a sharp drop in hostile acts," said the national police chief, Michel Gaudin.

The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered the deportation of all foreign nationals found guilty of participating in the riots, including those with residence permits. "When one has the honor to have a permit, one should not be caught provoking urban violence," he said.

Copycat arson attacks were reported in Germany and Belgium for the third day running, though police said they were small-scale incidents and not gang related.

Nine cars have been set alight in Berlin since the weekend, compared with hundreds a night in France. "These appear to be individual acts," said a German police spokesman. "Our situation is nothing like Paris. There is only a marginal connection."

“Exquisite” discovery

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:26:00 +0000

For three centuries it was hidden in an old shoebox, concealed beneath a couple of blank pages. But Tuesday music experts across the world were hailing the discovery of a previously unknown work by the German composer and genius of the Baroque era, Johann Sebastian Bach. The work, for a soprano and harpsichord, was written in October 1713 as a birthday present for Bach's patron, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar.

Bach, then the court organist in Weimar, penned the composition to go with a 12-stanza poem dedicated to the duke, but its existence was swiftly forgotten. The manuscript was apparently swept away into a box, together with numerous other poems and letters written to celebrate the duke's 52nd birthday.

The library in Weimar where the music was stored for several centuries recently burned down, but by chance, the box containing the score had already been removed. Two weeks ago a member of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany, Michael Maul, stumbled on the composition while looking through material relevant to Bach's tempestuous but thinly documented life. The box contained more than 100 poems and verses, together with a mysterious "strophic aria."

The final hours

Mon, 02 May 2005 15:37:00 +0000

She is the last witness. For 60 years, Erna Flegel said nothing about her starring role in the Third Reich. Her family knew that in the last, desperate weeks of the Second World War she had lived in Berlin. But she never spoke of her job as Adolf Hitler's nurse and of her time in the Führer's Berlin bunker. Now, as the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe nears, Flegel has spoken out for the first time about her experiences -- of Hitler's final hours, of her friendship with the "brilliant" Magda Goebbels and of her jealous loathing for Eva Braun. Her testimony casts fresh light on the last days of the Nazi era and has never appeared in the countless books written about Hitler.

In an interview with the Guardian, Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in northern Germany, Sunday described how she began working as a Red Cross nurse at the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin in January 1943. She had been transferred there from the eastern front.

Unsolved mystery

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:05:00 +0000

It has inspired numerous expeditions, several mysterious deaths and plenty of books. But 60 years after Nazi officers hid metal boxes in the depths of Lake Toplitz, a new attempt is being made to recover the Third Reich's fabled lost gold. The Austrian government has given a U.S. team permission to make an underwater expedition to the log-infested bottom of the lake.

Treasure hunters have been flocking to Lake Toplitz ever since a group of diehard Nazis retreated to this picturesque part of the Austrian Alps in the final months of the Second World War. With U.S. troops closing in and Germany on the brink of collapse, they transported the boxes to the edge of the lake, first by military vehicle and then by horse-drawn wagon, and sunk them.

Nobody knows exactly what was inside. Some believe the boxes contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany. Others think that they contained documents showing where assets confiscated from Jewish victims were hidden in Swiss bank accounts.

The state company that controls the lake, Bundesforste AG, has signed a contract with Norman Scott, an American treasure hunter, who hopes to solve the mystery.

Neo-Nazis in the Bundestag?

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:10:00 +0000

It is one of Germany's most picturesque regions. There are mountains with bizarre rock formations, formidable castles and the Elbe River, which winds its way majestically through steep gorges and forests of birch. Germans call it Saxon Switzerland. Until recently, this alpine region in former Communist East Germany was best known as a center for walking and kayaking. Now, it is famous for something else: as Germany's new Nazi-land. Sixty years after the demise of the Third Reich and the end of the Second World War, Germany's far right is back in business.

It has staged a remarkable comeback here, among the pretty timbered villages close to the Czech border, and along the banks of the Elbe. In federal elections in Saxony last September, the neo-Nazi National Party of Germany (NPD) won a stunning 9.2 percent of the vote, giving it 12 M.P.'s in the new Saxon parliament in Dresden. Since then, the NPD has staged a series of parliamentary stunts -- for example, walking out last month during a one-minute silence for Holocaust victims. This Sunday, the party and its supporters intend to carry out their most flamboyant protest yet: a "funeral march" to mourn the 35,000 Germans killed during the raid on Dresden 60 years ago by Allied bombers. According to Holger Apfel, the NPD's 33-year-old leader, the allied attack on Dresden during Feb. 13-14, 1945, was a war crime. It was a "Holocaust" of Germans, he said last month, and an "act of gangster politics."

For volunteers, a grisly task

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:06:00 +0000

When news of the destruction reached Asep Santosa, the 33-year-old tourist guide decided he had to do something. He set off from his hometown of Bogor, just south of Indonesia's capital of Jakarta, and flew to Banda Aceh, the town flattened by last week's tsunami.

Wednesday Santosa had a new role: collecting the dead. He is one of an army of middle-class volunteers who have converged on Banda Aceh to offer their help and who are now burying its victims. "This is my country. I'm very sad about the situation. There are so many bodies here," he said. Santosa spent Wednesday afternoon combing through the hellish ruins of Banda Aceh's riverside Lambura district, together with eight other volunteers and two soldiers. Most houses have disappeared; others are still engulfed in an apocalyptic tangle of masonry, mud, palm trees, fishing boats and corrugated metal.

It did not take them long to find the first corpse -- buried inside a shattered house. "We've found men, women, girls," Santosa said, as the other volunteers, all them from Bogor and wearing gas masks and rubber gloves to protect against the stench, carried out the sagging body on a piece of wood. "I've lost count of the dead," Santosa said. "There are too many."

More revealing than a wet sari

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:17:00 +0000

To the Indian schoolboy, it must have seemed like an ingenious if indelicate use of new technology. But when the 17-year-old used his mobile phone camera to record his girlfriend giving him oral sex he could have had little idea of the far-reaching global consequences. By Monday, his ungentlemanly act had provoked a scandal that dominated every Indian newspaper, the chief executive of a major company had been jailed, and a diplomatic row was brewing between India and America, with Condoleezza Rice reported to be at the fore.

The boy has been tracked down by police, faced court Monday and has been expelled from his school. The trouble started a few days after the teenager made the recording, when someone tried to sell a video clip of him and his 16-year-old girlfriend on the Indian online auction site Baazee.com. The firm is a subsidiary of U.S. auction giant eBay.

On Friday detectives arrested Baazee.com's chief executive, Avnish Bajaj, a U.S. citizen and Harvard graduate. On Saturday a court bundled him off to jail for a week. On Sunday night, the police arrested the 17-year-old boy as well. Both he and his girlfriend were students at the elite Delhi Public School, one of India's most prestigious institutions.

Grim times for Iraq

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 14:45:00 +0000

The video posted Monday night showing the beheading of American hostage Eugene Armstrong is the latest example of the ruthlessness of the Iraqi militant group responsible. Six months ago, Tawhid and Jihad (Unification and Holy War) was just one of numerous militant groups operating in the chaos of Iraq. But in recent weeks, as the insurgency has spiraled out of control, the group has established itself as the most sophisticated and brutal in the country.

Armstrong and his colleagues Jack Hensley and Briton Kenneth Bigley were seized last week in a carefully planned operation that had all the hallmarks of Tawhid and Jihad. The three Westerners had been living in an anonymous two-story house in Mansour, an affluent suburb of Baghdad that is home to foreign embassies and Iraqi politicians.

Gunmen from the group had clearly been tipped off about the men. Last Thursday morning, they pulled up outside the house in an unmarked minivan and another car. At 6 am the power in the street failed, and two of the Westerners wandered out of their unguarded compound to start their generator. The gunmen grabbed them, bundled all three into their minivan and drove off.

“I already feel I’m dead”

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:02:00 +0000

Lying amid the debris strewn near Al-Karkh police station was the photo of a young man in a blue T-shirt. The passport snapshot had been part of his application to join Iraq's police force. Tuesday, however, he and dozens of other recruits queuing outside the station in central Baghdad were blown to pieces by a car bomb. Near the photo, someone had heaped the shoes of the dead and injured into a neat pile.

The destruction from the suspected suicide blast that killed 47 people and injured 114 was everywhere: bits of metal, glass, a broken billiards table, a dead bird and pools of blood.

There was nothing left of the recruit in the photo. "The bomb went off at 10 a.m. A lot of people were queuing up to join the police," said Allah Hamas, 31, who owns Allah's Famous Falafel Stand, next to the police station. "I handed a customer a sandwich. Suddenly there was an explosion and a piece of metal ripped off the top of his head.

"After that I ran out to help. We covered the dead with blankets. I saw at least 30 bodies. Thirteen of them were burned completely. Some people were scattered into pieces. We found them among their files and photos."

“Women of peace are hostages of war”

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 13:41:00 +0000

The remaining international aid agencies in Iraq are reportedly considering pulling out of the country after the kidnapping of four humanitarian workers, including two Italian women, from their headquarters in Baghdad.

Jean-Dominique Bunel, a coordinator for the agencies, said the abduction on Tuesday had already prompted some aid workers to leave and others would follow by the end of the week. "We are reviewing the situation," he told Reuters. Speaking to Agence France-Presse, he said: "It seems that most of the international nongovernmental organizations are preparing to leave Iraq and some expatriate [staff] already left this morning. "More will follow in coming days. The flights are full until Friday."

Bunel said he was speaking for about 50 international agencies operating in Iraq. He said he had no idea who had abducted the Italian women, Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, who work for Bridge to Baghdad, an organization helping children across the country.

However, an Iraqi militant group called Ansar al-Zawahri said it had kidnapped the women. In a message posted on an Islamist Web site, the group claimed that "this is the first of our attacks against Italy." The name Partisans of Zawahri appears to refer to Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahri. But there were doubts last night about the authenticity of the statement, which made no demands.

No end in sight

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 14:35:00 +0000

The number of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq reached 1,000 Tuesday, with no sign of an end to the insurgency amid the news that gunmen abducted two Italian aid workers and two Iraqis in Baghdad in a brazen attack that will alarm foreigners already on edge.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the latest Pentagon figures showed that 997 American troops and three civilian employees of the Defense Department had been killed in Iraq.

At least 36 Iraqis and one U.S. soldier were killed, and 203 people injured, in renewed clashes between U.S. troops and supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr Tuesday. The upsurge of fresh fighting occurred in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed sympathy for the 1,000 U.S. dead and said he was confident the interim Iraqi government would find a way to retake cities now in the hands of insurgents.

However, in the latest of a spate of kidnappings, about 20 men with Kalashnikovs and pistols with silencers drove up to a private house belonging to the humanitarian organization Bridge to Baghdad in a busy commercial area of the Iraqi capital and rushed inside in broad daylight Tuesday.

In shadow of sacred mosque, defiant uprising nears climax

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:01:00 +0000

In the colonnaded doorways of Rassul Street, several fighters of the Mahdi army had made their final stand. Their bodies lay in small groups two here, two there, and five here. For three weeks militia loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have defied the extraordinary firepower of the US military, hiding in the network of alleys surrounding Najaf's Imam Ali shrine. Yesterday, however, their uprising appeared to be well into the last act.

"American tanks are extremely close to the shrine. There are several bodies in the narrow alleyways around it," Faridh Karim said yesterday, after escaping from the battle zone on his bicycle.

"The dead fighters are scattered everywhere. Some are wearing black headscarves, others just dish dash."

He added: "They tried to attack the helicopters using Kalashnikovs and rocket propelled grenades. The helicopters just mowed them down." From early morning two US Apache helicopter gun ships circled above Najaf's old city. The few Mahdi army fighters left alive tried to shoot them down sending mortars crashing out across an angry white sky.

The gunships responded mercilessly, with rasping machine gun fire.

Al-Sadr Winning Battle of Najaf

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 13:44:00 +0000

Asked how the battle was going, Commander Abu Mohammad Hilu showed off his latest trophy - a blood-drenched American boot. There was a large bullet hole in the middle. "We found it after last night's battle," the commander explained. His colleague, Abu Ali, added: "Originally there was an American foot inside it and a bit of the leg. But we took it out and threw it to the dogs." But the most tangible evidence of the Mahdi army's extraordinary self-confidence yesterday, however, came too close for comfort half an hour earlier. We had been driving through the high street in Kufa, another stronghold of the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr, some three kilometres from the shrine where he and his supporters are still holed up.

We stopped to inspect a building - this was a mistake. Mahdi army soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs spotted us, then targeted us. In a convoy of two cars, with guns pointing and pushing at us, we were taken to Kufa's mosque.

Ten minutes later The Observer's Iraqi fixer got us released after phoning a high-ranking Sadr aide.

The aggression disappeared, the fighters turned profusely apologetic. More than two weeks after launching their uprising in Najaf, the Mahdi army was - despite reports to the contrary - still in control of Najaf's Imam Ali shrine - and much of the rest of Iraq. Yesterday fighting carried on.