Free Republic

Germany’s first burial area for lesbians will open on Sunday in Berlin. One of the founders told The Local that the leafy resting spot is for homosexual women to be buried as they lived—with those of the same sex. “We are the first real generation of emancipated, feminist, open lesbians, and we need somewhere to be buried,” said Dr. Astrid Osterland from Safia, an association for older, mostly gay women. Hitting back at criticism of the burial area in the Georgen-Parochial-Friedhof, Osterland explained that the project had “absolutely nothing against men”. They are welcome to have their urns here, but...

German woman, dead six months, found in front of TV BERLIN (Reuters) - The corpse of a 66-year-old German woman who died more than six months ago was found in her apartment, in front of a television set that was still on, the Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper reported on Tuesday. The woman, in the town of Oberursel near Frankfurt, died of natural causes in a nightgown while watching TV. There was a program guide from September nearby, the newspaper said, describing the body as "partially mummified". Police said residents in the 30-apartment block had noticed an unpleasant smell in the...

Cars were set alight and stink bombs set off after a far-left demo against “state repression” descended into chaos in Berlin over the weekend. Two policemen were injured and 17 protesters arrested in the 12-hour long police operation across the city, which saw almost 2,000 officers deployed. Organizers said they were protesting against heavy-handed police tactics such as those seen in Hamburg in early January, where disturbances led to a long crackdown and police restricted zone. Over the course of the weekend, an estimated 1,300 people took to the streets in Kreuzberg, Moabit and Friedrichshain including feminists, members of the...

Leadership comes in many forms and with many levels of risk, but history gives us a few moments when leaders stood alone and were proven right. [...] In late June 1948 the Soviets cut all road, rail and water access to Berlin, a city controlled by the Western Allies yet surrounded by Soviet-controlled territories. The Soviet’s goal: take Berlin from the Allies by forcing the US-UK-French alliance into one of two options: try to protect a city of 2.1 million starving Germans, or war. The Soviets expected the West to surrender the city quickly. [...] The US was in the...

Berlin has become the world's first city to have its own internet domain name. Companies and individuals in the German capital can now request web addresses ending in .berlin as alternatives to the more traditional options of .com, .org or the German national suffix .de. Addresses will be granted on a first come, first served basis and will each cost about €50 (£42) a year.

BERLIN, A postcard dated May 17, 1913, and found in a bottle by German fishermen appears to be the oldest such message ever found. Konrad Fischer, captain of a fishing boat from Schleswig-Holstein, told Kieler Nachrichten, a local newspaper, that he was about to throw the bottle back in the sea when someone told him it was not empty, the Local.de reported. "When I saw the date I got really excited," he said. The postcard, from Denmark, had German stamps on it. It was signed by Richard Platz and addressed to his own home in Berlin with a message asking...

Google has apologized after its mapping service renamed a road in Berlin after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The intersection, usually called Theodor-Heuss-Platz, temporarily regained its Nazi-era name—Adolf-Hitler-Platz. The area carried Hitler’s name after he came to power in 1933 until the end of the Second World War. …

US consulate staff in Berlin found a package on Friday containing white powder and a threatening letter addressed to president Barack Obama.According to Berlin newspaper the BZ, three members of consulate staff came into contact with the unidentified powder, and a suspicious liquid. …

Berlin antiquities museum wants Holocaust survivor's family to return ancient gold tablet A Holocaust survivor's family urged New York's highest court Tuesday to let them keep an ancient gold tablet that their late father somehow obtained in Germany after World War II. Attorney Steven Schlesinger argued that the estate of Riven Flamenbaum has a legal claim, whether the native of Poland bought the relic from a Russian soldier or simply took it to compensate for losing his family at Auschwitz, the concentration camp where he spent several years. "Under the Soviet rules at the time, there was permission to pillage...

Please keep my daughter and other pro life marchers in your prayers tonight and tomorrow as they present a visible witness for life in Berlin tomorrow. Unlike the US Marches for Life, the pro abort forces in Europe are a lit more active...and violence on pro lifers is not unheard of. Thanks for your prayers

Recently, I wrote about a ban on the use of Christian symbols in the public celebration of Christmas in the German city of Solingen. Now the virus has spread to Berlin. As of now, Christmas is banned in Berlin's Kreuzberg - at least as far as celebration in public places is concerned. Christmas is only allowed in the home, so that the religious feelings of others are not injured. No April Fool: the district office of Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg is doing away with Christmas. The authorities are allowing no more Christmas celebrations in public places or streets. A Christmas tree may...

Trans-Atlantic relations plunged at the weekend as Berlin, Brussels and Paris all demanded that Washington account promptly and fully for new disclosures on the scale of the US National Security Agency’s spying on its European allies. As further details emerged of the huge reach of US electronic snooping on Europe, Berlin accused Washington of treating it like the Soviet Union, “like a cold war enemy”. … The reports of NSA snooping on Europe—and on Germany in particular—went well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying said to be focused on identifying suspected terrorists, extremists and organized criminals. Der Spiegel reported that...

It’s always interesting to notice what the mainstream media emphasizes when reporting on a speech delivered by Barack Obama – and always even more interesting to notice what they choose not to bother questioning. Here’s ABC News on Obama’s speech last week at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Today President Obama will invoke two of the most memorable presidential speeches in modern history — Kennedy’s 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and Reagan’s 1987 “Tear down this wall” speech — both delivered here….The idea, White House officials say, is to tap into the energy and legacy of those great Cold...

On Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized President Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The speech was sparsely attended compared to the speech Obama had made at the same venue back in 2008 during his first presidential election campaign. And as part of the “All-Star Panel” Friday “Lightning Round” segment, Krauthammer won the privilege of posing the question to his colleagues on how to define the speech. “Obama gave a speech in Germany this week,” Krauthammer said. “Was it a) a stirring defense of the United States...

Barack Obama showed up again in Berlin. Sadly, 194,000 of the fawning devotees that cheered him like a rock star in 2008 chose to skip the 2013 encore. Nonetheless, directly out of the Brandenburg gate, the president commenced with injecting race and gender into the conversationwhen he said "Angela and I don't exactly look like previous German and American leaders." Obama then informed the audience, consigned by invitation to stand in the blistering heat listening to his blather, that Michelle, Malia, and Sasha, rather than endure his grueling speech, chose instead to experience the "beauty and the history of Berlin"...

When John F. Kennedy delivered his “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech in front of the Schöneberg Rathaus on June 26, 1963, 450,000 people flocked to hear him. Fifty years later a far more subdued invitation-only crowd of 4,500 showed up to hear Barack Obama speak at the same location in Berlin. As The National Journal noted, “he didn’t come away with much, winning just a smattering of applause from a crowd that was one-hundredth the size of JFK’s,” and far smaller than the 200,000 boisterous Germans who had listened to his 2008 address as a presidential candidate. JFK had a...

... Obama is set to lay out his vision for advancing toward a world free of nuclear weapons during a speech Wednesday at the historic Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A senior administration official says Mr. Obama will propose the United States and Russia cut their number of strategic nuclear warheads by up to one third below the level agreed to in a 2009 treaty. That pact, called the New START agreement, calls for the two countries to reduce their arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads by 2018.

In stark contrast to that of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama’s message on Wednesday was pure mush, another clichéd “citizens of the world” polemic with little substance. This was a speech big on platitudes and hopeless idealism, while containing much that was counter-productive for the world’s superpower. Ultimately it was little more than a laundry list of Obama’s favourite liberal pet causes, including cutting nuclear weapons, warning about climate change, putting an end to all wars, shutting Guantanamo, ending global poverty, and backing the European Project. It was a combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic...

Appearing on MSNBC´s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Wednesday, NBC´s chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd came up with a long list of excuses for President Obama´s poor speech performance in Berlin: "I want to give you a little context here....there was an attempt to shrink the crowd size....Maybe they would have gotten 25, 30, 40,000 people....President Obama feeds off a crowd very well." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Todd then grasped at other reasons for the lackluster event: "...you had that very distracting glass and you could just see that the President