Free Republic

The collapse of communism: Reagan, Thatcher and the pope By Joseph A. Cannon Deseret News Published: Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009 12:12 a.m. MST Twenty years ago, my wife, Jan, and I were in what was then called West Berlin for a conference. One pleasant afternoon we walked along the Berlin Wall from the Brandenburg Gate to Checkpoint Charlie. During that time, there were significant rancorous anti-Communist demonstrations in East Germany, primarily in the southern part. A German friend, with typical Prussian hubris, dismissed them. "Nothing will come of this, these are just the ineffective rumblings of a bunch of Bavarians."...

Hillary Clinton Scrubs Ronald Reagan From History Nile Gardiner November 10th, 2009 It’s bad enough that President Obama could not be bothered to attend the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Hillary Clinton’s refusal to even acknowledge the role played by Ronald Reagan in the Wall’s demise as well as the downfall of Communism was highly insulting towards one of the greatest figures of our time, and reeked of petty and partisan mean-spiritedness. The Secretary of State’s remarks yesterday in Berlin completely erased from history the huge contribution played not only by President...

WHAT THEY SAID: In honor of president Reagan's funeral, here's a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn't what was said at the time. Here's a smattering of commentary from the 1980s. "A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today." - Arthur "Always Wrong" Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988. "I wonder how...

Berlin is to be the only state in Germany to introduce rent controls immediately after the law allowing them comes into effect on June 1st. While other states have said that they’re interested in the law, none of them have set a firm deadline for when they will introduce controls. The new measures allow state governments to define areas with high upwards pressure on rents and set limits on year-to-year increases. Landlords won’t be allowed to charge rent more than 10 percent higher than the local average in the region. …

A 65-year-old teacher from Berlin has given birth to quadruplets after a pregnancy that was widely criticized by medical professionals because of her age, RTL television said Saturday. Annegret Raunigk, gave birth to a girl — Neeta — and three boys — Dries, Bence and Fjonn — by cesarean section at a Berlin hospital Tuesday, RTL said. The newborns weighed between 655 grams (1 lb., 7 ounces) and 960 grams (2 lbs., 2 ounces) each. A spokeswoman for RTL said the babies stood a strong chance of survival but possible complications couldn't yet be ruled out, because they were born...

That's how it looked like just after the Second World War in Berlin! Fascinating moving pictures in color show the situation of the city in summer 1945, just after the Second World War and the capitulation of Germany. Daily life after years of war. Pictures from the destroyed city, the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor, Adlon, Führerbunker, Unter den Linden, rubble women working in the streets, the tram is running again. A collage of archive material produced by: Kronos Media

The Forty Martyrs were a group of soldiers from the Roman Twelfth Legion, who died for the Faith at Sebaste in Armenia in the year 320. This is seven years after the Edict of Milan and the Peace of the Church under Constantine, whose brother-in-law Licinius at that point ruled in the East, and after a period of tolerance, renewed the persecution of Christians. When the Forty had been called to renounce the Faith and refused, they were sentenced first to various tortures, and then condemned to die a particularly horrible death, stripped naked and left on the ice...

The Israeli embassy in Germany, led by Ambassador Ya’akov Hadas, has decided to come forward and reveal the shocking German anti-Semitism it is subjected to on a daily basis. Channel 10 reports that a Berlin newspaper this week published a video of Hadas reading to reporters anti-Semitic letters sent to the embassy every day, which have swelled in number in the months since Operation Protective Edge to at least 20 letters and e-mails daily. “Israel murders,” “I’m happy Hitler destroyed you,” and “humanity will live in peace when the last Jewish rat is in a grave” are just a small...

After the president of the Central Council of Jews warned against anti-Semitism in Muslim areas of German cities, his Muslim opposite number agreed that “these fears are justified”. Aiman Mayzek, president of the Central Council of Muslims, told the Berliner Zeitung on Friday that he and his organization were taking a stand against anti-Semitism among Muslims. “Attacks on Jews are an attack on our society,” he said. …

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, said on Thursday that Jewish people should avoid making themselves too visible in “problem neighborhoods”. “Hiding isn't the answer,” Shuster told rbb radio. “The question is... whether it makes sense for Jews to make themselves recognizable by wearing a kippah (skull cap) in what I would call problem neighborhoods.” Schuster clarified that he meant “neighborhoods with a large proportion of Muslims in the population”, and pointed to Berlin as a city with an especially large number of such areas. “This is a development that I didn't expect five years ago and...

BERLIN. Angela Merkel, the no-nonsense leader of Germany and protector of the euro, has a fearless new rival. Alexis Tsipras, the newly elected prime minister of Greece and the leader of the left-wing Syriza Party, who offers a different understanding of economics: Spend money whether you have it or not, and get someone else to pay up. Eager to reduce a multitude of problems to caricature, the Greeks regard themselves as caught between a stern German disciplinarian, the "austerity dominatrix," and the man playful Greek women call "Sexy Alexi." Nonsense is more fun, even if discipline is what welfare states...

A preacher at a mosque in Berlin’s southern Neukölln district has told worshipers that women should be confined to their homes and submit whenever their husbands demand sex. “A woman must turn her home into a flourishing garden for her husband, so that he does not flee from her like a leper or a lion,” Sheik Abdel Moez al-Eila told the congregation at the Al-Nur mosque. The sermon was delivered on January 23rd, but has only just come under broad public scrutiny after a video of the address surfaced on Sunday. The imam went on to say that women should...

BERLIN (AP) — Berlin police are investigating an attack on an Israeli citizen who was beaten by a group of young men after he asked them to stop singing anti-Semitic songs on the subway in the German capital on New Year’s Eve. Police spokesman Martin Dahms said Monday that police have not yet been able to identify the attackers, but are evaluating video footage of the incident. The victim, 26-year-old Shahak Shapira, who lives in Berlin, told The Associated Press that after he asked the seven men to stop chanting anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli songs and slurs, he recorded them on...

More than 150 kilometres of concrete, wire and guard towers ringed West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. But it’s not easy to carve up a city - and construction of the Wall threw up many freak instances. [....] "The owners had to pass through the death strip to reach their plots -- and for that there was an iron door in the Wall with a doorbell,...."

IRAN is facing an "international conspiracy" to over throw the Khomeinist re gime with a "velvet revolution," the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) claimed yesterday. The latest mascot of the plotters is supposed to be Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota now charged with espionage in Tehran. A US citizen with an Iranian father and a Japanese mother, the 31-year-old Roxana has worked in Iran on and off for years as a freelance reporter. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for Saberi's immediate release and safe return to the US. IRNA claims that the plot was first...

Lena Dunham is reportedly threatening to sue the right-wing website which last week accused her of sexually abusing her little sister Grace when they were children. In the wake of the allegations, the creator and star of HBO's Girls, has cancelled two stops on her book tour scheduled this week in Belgium and Germany for health issues. On Monday, she tweeted that she was 'deeply sorry' to miss the Antwerp Book Fair and a signing in Berlin, adding that she's 'so grateful for your energy and support'.

RUGEN, Germany. Americans groove on the exhilaration of argument and accusation as the midterm elections finally approach, but here in Germany there's the bitter remembrance of what it was like to have none of the above. Trading barbs and insults is the American way of campaigning, but East Germans recall fear, not free speech, as reams of barbed wire and blocks of cement turned into a wall and lookouts with guards who were ordered to shoot any of their own people trying to flee their encircled prison of a country. An American visitor quickly becomes aware of sharp contrasts in...

For more than a decade, Berlin has been governed by an openly homosexual mayor. But is the city, renowned for its tolerance, ready for a leader from a Palestinian background? It may have to be. […] … Berlin SPD parliamentary leader Raed Saleh only needs to open his mouth to stand out from the crowd. Saleh came to Berlin at the age of five with his Palestinian parents, and although his German is beyond reproach, he speaks the language with a distinct Arabic twang. “Berlin is a city of diversity; a city of 100 different accents,” Saleh told DW. “People...

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Fire authorities suspect “political motivations” for a late night blaze in a mosque in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. More than 60 firefighters were called to the scene of a burning construction site at the Mevlana Mosque. No one was at the site when the fire broke out and no one was injured. …