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Shares in Greek banks crashed by more than a quarter yesterday as Athens urged Berlin not to go on humiliating a ‘proud nation’. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new finance minister, issued an extraordinary defiant statement invoking the rise of the Nazis when Germany was crippled by debts between the wars. After a tense meeting with his German counterpart in Berlin, Wolfgang Schaeuble, he declared: ‘We didn’t even agree to disagree.’

End 'Gross Indignity', Greek FM Varoufakis Tells Germany Yanis Varoufakis is in Berlin attempting to renegotiate Greece's debt Greece's new finance minister has urged Germany to help end the "gross indignity" of the Greek debt crisis. Yanis Varoufakis said "too much time, hopes, lives" had been wasted by Greece's forced austerity programme. He was speaking after talks with his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who said a reduction of Greece's debt was off the agenda. Mr Varoufakis has been seeking support for Greece's plan to renegotiate its massive international bailout. On Thursday evening, thousands of people gathered in front of the...

So here’s Obama’s opinion: Ukraine should not get military aid from the West because even with American help, Russia would still mop the floor with them. And this, according to the Times, is what Obama thinks will intimidate Putin into signing a peace treaty. I’ll offer the president some free advice: telling Putin the world is too weak to stop him isn’t very intimidating. Yet even if the West got Putin to sign on to a new agreement, nothing will have been accomplished. Putin has been violating the last ceasefire agreement, because there’s no one to enforce it. What Obama,...

Members of the Russian parliament are creating a task force to estimate the damages inflicted on Russia by Germany during WWII, in a bid to demand financial compensation from the German state almost 70 years after the end of the conflict, Russian daily newspaper Izvestia reported on Tuesday. The initiative is a direct response to trade sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and EU, for its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March and continuous support of separatist fighters in Eastern Ukraine since, according to Mikhail Degyaterov, an MP from the Liberal Democrat Party of Russia, who has proposed...

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...

Hundreds of thousands of German Christians are formally renouncing their faith and leaving the church in order to escape a controversial change in the tax laws. Up to 200,000 Germans are believed to have filed official declarations last year renouncing their membership of the Protestant church, the highest number in almost two decades. A similar number are thought to have left the Catholic Church. Church members in Germany are required by law to pay tax to fund church activities, which is collected by the government. Under German law, anyone who was baptised as a child is automatically a member of...

On Jan. 29, 1945, First Sgt. Leonard Funk, Jr. faced a determined German army officer ready to kill him with a pistol. Armed with a Thompson M1A1 submachine gun, the U.S. Army paratrooper had just led an assault against 15 houses occupied by German troops in Holzheim, Belgium. It was part of an operation by the 82nd Airborne Division to clear German soldiers from the area following the Battle of the Bulge. Leading a makeshift headquarters platoon of clerks, Funk and his unit captured 30 prisoners. He left them with several dozen more prisoners—under guard—and returned to the fight. While...

While anti-Islamic supremacy have erupted in Germany, it looks like it is spilling over to Prague where thousands gathered in the central square of Prague and protested against Islamization and Muslim immigration in the Czech Republic today. This amidst continual persecution of Christians who speak out. One pastor, Olaf Latzel, in Germany is being charged of sedition for simply saying that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God. The story is gaining momentum which has not been reported in English speaking media, yet, while the German media slander and ridicule him. PEGIDA as well is being accused of...

The mainstream media in both the U.S. and Europe have done a stellar job protecting the identities of two men who committed a gruesome atrocity against a 19-year-old pregnant woman and her unborn child, and for good reason: the men are Muslims. Not wishing to fuel the “Islamophobia” that liberals claim is so dangerous, the cowardly media bows to Sharia law by safeguarding the very ideology that contributed to these two criminals’ violent choices. This political correctness continues to protect the offenders, subsequently victimizing the innocent and creating more potential victims. According to German newspaper KOPP, a 19-year-old German woman,...

Now that Greece has elected a new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, he’s announced his first order of business: receive the money owed to them from Germany in part of unpaid World War II reparations, reported The Washington Post. Tsipras is part of the Greek left-wing Syriza party, and, according to the Post, the Syriza party has been “outspoken about the need for Germany to atone for its past in Greece.” In a move symbolic of that sentiment, Tsipras visited the Kaisariani rifle range to honor 200 Greek activists who were murdered by Nazi soldiers in 1944. A two-year-old study estimated...

Germany’s defense minister Ursula von der Leyen said Friday that her government planned to make the military one of the most sought after employers in the country. Von der Leyen was presenting a proposal for a more attractive Bundeswehr at the German parliament, the Bundestag. “This isn’t a sprint; rather, we have a marathon ahead of us,” the minister said. Von der Leyen, who belongs to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), proposed more part-time work, better promotion opportunities and legally-stipulated working hours—a first in the German military. …

When it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, the German government is unyielding—particularly when it comes to finding excuses for why it should do nothing when it comes to potential German perpetrators. For more than 16 months, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has been in possession of a list containing the names of German companies thought to have helped Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his father Hafis build up Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal over the course of several decades. Ultimately, it became one of the largest such arsenals in the world. […] Berlin immediately classified the list and has...

A top German body has called for a clear mechanism to force Greece out of the euro if the left-wing Syriza government repudiates the terms of the country’s €245bn rescue. “Financial support must be cut off if Greece does not comply with its reform commitments,” said the Institute of German Economic Research (IW). "If Greece is going to take a tough line, then Europe will take a tough line as well." IW is the second German institute in two days to issue a blunt warning to the new Greek premier, Alexis Tsipras, who has vowed to halt debt payments and...

Russia has suspended work in the PACE for a year following the adoption of a resolution depriving the Russian delegation of its voting rights in the organization until the April session. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted on Wednesday a resolution depriving the Russian delegation of its voting rights in the organization until at least the April session. The resolution stresses that the revision of the decision and other sanctions against Russia could be held during opening meetings of the April session if Moscow demonstrates substantial progress in meeting the PACE demands over Russia's alleged role...

More than 25 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall, Russian lawmakers are mulling a proposal to condemn West Germany’s 1990 “annexation” of East Germany as Moscow’s answer to Western denunciation of its seizure of Crimea. Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of Russian parliament’s lower house, on Wednesday ordered legislators to consider an appeal from a Communist Party deputy to denounce the reunification of Germany as an illegal land grab of East Germany by its western neighbor. The collapse of Socialist rule in East Germany—officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—heralded the end of the Cold War, and was met with jubilation...

The German government stuck to its view on Monday that a third haircut, or debt restructuring, for Greece was out of the question but opened the door to a possible extension of Greece's current bailout programme.

A Lubbock Texas judge made international headlines earlier this year for his prediction that if President Obama is reelected on Tuesday, it will open the door for a United Nations invasion. Judge Tom Head told a local radio station in September that the president will: “Try to give the sovereignty of the United States away. He’s going to call in the UN troops, personnel carriers, tanks and whatever.” The proclamation drew widespread scorn and ridicule both at home and abroad. Even the office of the Secretary General weighed in on Head’s prediction. “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said a spokesperson for UN...

he new far-left government in Greece dropped a bombshell on its first day in office by abjuring an EU statement on Russia. It said in a press communique on Tuesday (27 January): “the aforementioned statement was released without the prescribed procedure to obtain consent by the member states and particularly without ensuring the consent of Greece”. “In this context, it is underlined that Greece does not consent to this statement”. It added that its new PM, Alexis Tsipras, expressed “discontent” in a phone call to EU foreign relations chief Federica Mogherini. The EU statement on Russia, published on Tuesday morning,...

Speaking at a memorial service on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the infamous death camp, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Auschwitz was a symbol of the Holocaust, the "collapse of civilization" perpetrated by Nazi Germany. "We must not forget," the chancellor said. "We owe that to the many millions of victims."

The long-anticipated collapse of the euro is here. When European Central Bank president Mario Draghi unveiled an open-ended quantitative easing program worth at least 60 billion euros a month on Thursday, stocks soared but the euro plummeted like a rock. It hit an 11 year low of $1.13, and many analysts believe that it is going much, much lower than this. The speed at which the euro has been falling in recent months has been absolutely stunning. Less than a year ago it was hovering near $1.40. But since that time the crippling economic problems in southern Europe have gone...