Free Republic

The middle classes in Germany and the USA are both in sharp decline, while top earners on both sides of the pond reap the rewards, a study by the German Institute for Economic Research shows. The number of Germans counted as belonging to the middle classes sank by six percent between 1991 and 2013, the study released on Friday found. The trend in the Federal Republic closely matches a similar drop seen in the USA over the same period. While in Germany people from all migrant backgrounds were most likely to have fallen out of this income group, in the...

BERLIN -- IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. It was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,83o records. That's 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting... The metadata of 80 million Germans was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause... In the end, the Constitutional Court [of Germany] ruled that the implementation of the European directive [allowing this] was, in fact, unconstitutional... Given our...

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...

US President Barack Obama has shelved his plans to attend festivities marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will reportedly take his place at the Nov. 9 celebrations. Germany is going to have to wait longer than expected for US President Barack Obama's first official visit. Citing government sources in Berlin, Reuters reported on Friday that Obama will not attend the anniversary festivities marking two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The event will take place on Nov. 9 -- just two days before Obama embarks on a long-planned...

US President Barack Obama will visit the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany on a trip to Europe in June, following in the wartime tracks of his great uncle, press reports said Wednesday. A spokesman for the German government said that Obama "is possibly planning a longer trip to Europe this summer with several different stops," but that Berlin had received no confirmation yet. The Bild and Thueringer Allgemeine Zeitung dailies reported that Obama would visit the eastern city of Dresden and Buchenwald.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,623130,00.html#ref=nlint On Tuesday, the news became public that a White House advance team is currently in the eastern German city of Dresden, where they are looking for possible accommodations for the president. In addition to a short visit to the city on the Elbe River, the president is also intending to visit the memorial at the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. Obama's great-uncle, Charlie Payne, served in the 89th Infantry Division during World War II and participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a forced labor camp that was a satellite camp of Buchenwald. But see: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2008/05/27/recollection-of-obama-familys-service-missing-key-details/