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Stealthy Italian submarine will train with U.S. Navy The ITS Scire is paying a visit to Mayport to take part in a Joint Task Force Exercise. By Timothy J. Gibbons From its high-tech fuel cell engine to its automated torpedo loading system, the ITS Scire proudly shows off the advanced technology crammed into its narrow body. But being on the crew of a cutting-edge fighting vessel doesn't mean one has to ignore the comforts of life - which perhaps is why cans of extra virgin olive oil manage to find a corner amid the fearsome torpedoes. From the espresso machine...

Aboard the 'INS Dolphin' Sep. 24, 2009 yaakov katz, reporting from the mediterranean sea , THE JERUSALEM POST 'Dive, dive, dive," yells Cmdr. M. into a loudspeaker that rattles throughout the navy's Dolphin submarine. A second later, the helmsman pushes hard on the vessel's steering system as the submarine dips into a 45-degree angle and descends to almost 300 meters below the choppy Mediterranean. The submarine is on a routine training exercise a few dozen kilometers off Haifa and the 40-man crew is extinguishing fake fires that erupt in the engine room while searching for leaks among the thousands of...

Israel gets two more German submarines (AFP) – 14 hours ago JERUSALEM — Israel has taken delivery of two German submarines ordered four years ago, a military spokesman said on Tuesday. "We have received two Dolphin-class submarines built in Germany," he said, on condition of anonymity. The submarines, called U212s, can launch cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads, although when it confirmed the sale in 2006 the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The subs were ordered in 2005 and delivery was initially expected in 2010. Including the two new ones, Israel has five...

Turkish hopes of joining the EU appeared to be all but over after Germany gave warning it was ready to join France and Italy in outright opposition to the country's membership. Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Free Democrats (FDP) are both hostile to the accession of the overwhelmingly Muslim country of 71 million. The CDU is against the Turks joining for cultural reasons while the FDP leader, and probable new foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle has said the country's economy is too far below European standards to integrate comfortably with other members. With almost three million ethnic Turks living...

Much of the modern social welfare state (which liberals in the U.S. seem intent on expanding) dates back to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the late 1800s. But now, even as the U.S. moves toward more government, Germany may be on the verge of a giant leap in the opposite direction. Angela Merkel, the current premier of Germany, won re-election this weekend. Back in 2005, Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU--a "center-slightly right" group), had gained power by forming a coalition with the "liberal" Social Democrats (SDP). This time, the SDP saw their worst election returns in 60...

EUROPE'S CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS Monday, May. 25, 1953 ooking out over devastated Europe at war's end in 1945 the journalists of the world—plain reporters and exalted pundits—considered the future and, to a man, came to the same conclusion: Europe would go left and socialist. The right, dishonored by the Petains and Papens, and by its devotion to 19 century capitalism, was doomed. The center, caught between the stridencies of right & left, and forced to choose, would have to go left. Communists and Socialists had made a name in the undergrounds and concentration camps. And in the end, Socialism, the wave...

Thousands of World War II prisoners ended up in mills, farm fields and even dining rooms across the United States In the mid-1940s when Mel Luetchens was a boy on his family’s Murdock, Nebraska, farm where he still lives, he sometimes hung out with his father’s hired hands, “I looked forward to it,” he said. “They played games with us and brought us candy and gum.” The hearty young men who helped his father pick corn or put up hay or build livestock fences were German prisoners of war from a nearby camp. “They were the enemy, of course,” says...

The Taliban have a new target: beer and bratwurst. In perhaps their most bizarre threat to date, Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan have threatened to bomb the Oktoberfest festival in Munich, Germany, which attracts millions of visitors ever year, along with several landmark buildings and government officials. The threats, while perhaps farfetched, follow a series of warnings from the Taliban and Al Qaeda and underscores a concerted effort by the insurgents to weaken Germany’s resolve for the fight in Afghanistan. Germany has responded by banning all air flights over Munich for the rest of the 16-day festival, which ends Oct. 4....

It was a victory for tax cutting, pro-business, labor union reform that swept the field in Germany! German Chancellor Angela Merkel savors conservative victory. Results in this weekend's parliamentary election in Germany has achieved what some in Europe call a "resounding triumph" for conservatives. One which saw the Social Democrats (socialists), who were part of the former governing coalition with Merkel, getting beat worse than at any time since World War II. Merkel can now govern without compromise with socialists. All of this on a low tax, pro-business, labor reform platform! Merkel's victory follows on the trend in other western...

German voters re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday and allowed her to ditch the center-left Social Democrats from her government and form a coalition with her preferred partner, the pro-business Free Democratic Party, instead, according to reliable projections. German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a second term in Sunday's federal election and will be able to form a government with the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), dumping the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) with which she ruled since 2005 in an uneasy coalition, projections showed. She will have a comfortable center-right majority in the Bundestag lower house of parliament with an...

BERLIN – German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a second term on Sunday, along with the center-right majority that eluded her four years ago — nudging Europe's biggest economic power to the right as it claws its way out of a deep recession. Voters sent the nation's main left-wing party, the Social Democrats of Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, into opposition after 11 years in government. It was the party's worst parliamentary election result since World War II. The conservative Merkel ended her four-year "grand coalition" with Steinmeier's party thanks to a record showing by her new coalition partner, the pro-business Free...

And so it begins. Angela Merkel and her conservative coalition scored a huge win in the German parliamentary elections today, handing the the lefties (the German version of the Obots) their worst defeat in years. It must have killed the New York Times to report this story.

Germany's Chancellor claims victory The voters of Germany have handed Chancellor a second time in office, a historic victory for center-right political parties in the Nation, a slap in the face towards terrorists who had threatened Germany with terrorist attacks, in an attempt to win the election for the leftist candidate, and for once in the history of Germany, a pro-business coalition. While the official results are not in, Merkel is the re-elected Chancellor in the Nation of Germany, her plans for tax cuts, and keeping nuclear power active in the Nation will move forward, an pro-war on terrorism Germany...

Merkel 'Heads For' New Coalition Angela Merkel said she wanted to be a chancellor "for all Germans" Chancellor Angela Merkel has been returned to power in Germany, exit polls suggest, after her conservative bloc won more than 33% of the vote. Mrs Merkel told supporters they had achieved "something magnificent", but said she wanted to be a chancellor of all Germans at a moment of crisis. Mrs Merkel's bloc now looks set to form a centre-right alliance with her preferred partner, the pro-reform FDP. She says the alliance will get Germany out of its worst crisis in 60 years. Her...

BERLIN -- Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed victory in national elections Sunday, with projections by public television stations putting her conservative party on a path to form a new center-right government and achieve Mrs. Merkel’s goal of ending the country’s “grand coalition” with Social Democrats. If the slim lead for her conservative Christian Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats holds after all the ballots are tallied, Mrs. Merkel will finally have the chance to enact the kind of liberalizing economic reforms she proposed when she first ran for chancellor four years ago. The celebration will be muted by the knowledge that...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives appear to have won enough votes in a German election to form a center-right government with their preferred partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), exit polls showed on Sunday. An exit poll from ZDF television put support for Merkel's conservative bloc -- her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) -- at 33.5 percent and showed the FDP on 14.5 percent. A poll for ARD television gave the center-right an even clearer win.

Travel Alert U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Bureau of Consular Affairs This information is current as of today, Sun Sep 27 2009 02:36:27 GMT-0700 (PDT). Germany September 23, 2009 The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens that Al Qaeda has threatened it will conduct terrorist attacks in Germany immediately prior to and following the federal elections on September 27. This Travel Alert expires on November 11, 2009. Al Qaeda recently released a video specifically warning Germany of attacks. German authorities are taking the threat seriously and have taken measures to enhance the level of security throughout the country. The Department of...

A German trucker suspected of driving under the influence of drugs crashed his vehicle near Borås in western Sweden on Tuesday. He subsequently admitted to masturbating at the time of the accident. The trucker, apparently unable to reach a satisfactory climax, then proceeded to continue to pleasure himself while in the midst of a police interrogation, according to the local Borås Tidning newspaper. "He was masturbating while the police interrogated him," police prosecutor Åsa Askenbäck told the newspaper. "He has admitted that he was not paying full attention at the time of the accident. He was playing with himself instead...

Economic recovery is the main issue in Germany's elections Sunday, and Chancellor Angela Merkel says tax cuts should be used to spur more growth — something her challenger disputes. The conservative leader's current government — a "grand coalition" with the center-left Social Democrats — has won respect for taking a levelheaded approach to the crisis in Europe's biggest economy, launching massive bank bailout and stimulus packages and keeping unemployment down. But Merkel says her Christian Democrats need a different political partner to get the economy back on track — the pro-business Free Democrats. Polls suggest that the combination may win...

Investigators have discovered a "Jihadi village" of white German al-Qaeda insurgents, including Muslim converts, in Pakistan's tribal areas close to the Afghan border. The village, in Taliban-controlled Waziristan, is run by the notorious al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which plots raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan. ... Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistan intelligence officer, who describes himself as a friend of Osama bin Laden, said he was aware of a German contingent and that there were a number of Swedish converts too who had arrived in Pakistan "for Jihad". "The Europeans are there [in Waziristan]. The most dedicated people there...

FRANKFURT — In a new audio recording, the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, urged European nations on Friday to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with a veiled threat of reprisals and an allusion to past bombings in Madrid and London. The message came as European nations, and particularly Germany, have come under increasing public and political pressures to reconsider their part in the Afghan war. Germany has 4,200 troops in Afghanistan, and domestic pressure to rethink its mission has mounted since German forces called in a NATO airstrike this month that left scores of Afghans dead. For Germany,...

That was how Sotsial-Demokrat posed the alternative with regard to the German Social-Democratic Party, back in its issue No. 35[1] , when it elaborated the fundamental ideas of the Manifesto on war issued by our Party’s Central Committee.[2] Notice how the facts bear out this conclusion. The German Social-Democratic Party is clearly disintegrating. Otto Ruhle, Karl Liebknecht’s closest associate, quite apart from the I.S.D. group (International Socialists of Germany),[3] which has been consistently fighting the hypocritical Kautskyites, has openly come out for a split. Vorwarts had no serious, honest answer. There are actually two workers’ parties in Germany. Even in...

Germany Declares Economic War By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard September 23rd, 2009 If there are any German readers of this blog, I would like to know what they think of the latest breath-taking provocations of German finance minister Peer Steinbrück. Ill-informed belligerence: Peer Steinbrück Remember that Herr Steinbrück is not a journalist, pundit, or back-bench maverick. He speaks officially for the German government and for the German nation on the international stage. Every assertion that he made about Britain in his interview with Stern is either factually wrong, or such a serious distortion of events that it amounts to a smear. Furthermore,...

A senior al Qaeda leader has threatened to attack Germany just days before the nation will go to the polls to choose a new Chancellor. Bekkay Harrach, alias Al Hafidh Abu Talha al Almani, resurfaced Friday in a chilling new video produced by al Qaeda's al Fajr Media Center and distributed across the major jihadi Web forums. Dressed in an ill-fitting black blazer, blue tie, and shoulder-length greased hair - looking more like a teenager dressed for his first job interview - he slammed Germany for its military presence in Afghanistan and warned that if Chancellor Angela Merkel is reelected...

Hesse unveils fragments of Roman emperor statue found in streamPublished: 27 Aug 09 15:55 CET Hessian Science Minister Eva Kühne-Hörmann on Thursday presented fragments of a 2,000-year-old bronze equestrian statue of Roman Emperor Augustus found recently in a stream near Giessen. “The find has meaning beyond Hesse and the north Alpine region due to its quality and provenance,” Kühne-Hörmann said during the presentation with state archaeologist Dr. Egon Schallmayer and Director of the Roman-German Commission Dr. Friedrich Lüth. “We’ve rediscovered the remnants of early European history. The unique horse head is a witness to the broken dream of the Romans...

Al-Qaeda warned Germans on Friday to change their government in the September 27 election, saying they will face a "bad awakening" if they do not, according to two intelligence monitoring services. Germany was also told to withdraw its 4,200 troops from Afghanistan or face being attacked at home, the US-based groups said.

Note: Photos included. SNIPPET: "Basically he’s saying if Germany pulls out of Afghanistan, al Qaeda will turn a blind eye to Germany and not attack it, which he intimates it will do soon otherwise."

NICOSIA - Al Qaeda warned Germans on Friday to change their government in the September 27 election, saying they will face a ‘bad awakening’ if they do not, according to two intelligence monitoring services. Germany was also told to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan or face attacks at home, the US-based monitoring groups said. In video footage a man identified as Abu Talha the German, and speaking in German, asks his Muslim ‘brethren’ to ‘stay away from anything not vital for two weeks after the election,’ according to IntelCenter. Abu Talha, whose real name is said to be Bekkay Harrach,...

BERLIN - An ambitious project was unveiled in Germany on Wednesday to install mini gas-fired power plants in people’s basements and produce as much electricity as two nuclear reactors within a year. The Hamburg-based renewable energy group Lichtblick and its automaker partner Volkswagen say the plants would produce not only heating and hot water but also electricity, with any excess power fed into the local grid. The two firms said the concept of “SchwarmStrom” (literally, “swarm power”) would allow Germany to abandon nuclear and coal power stations sooner and help compensate for the volatility of renewables like wind and solar...

Two youths beat a businessman to death at a Munich train station on Saturday as he tried to defend a group of children. The crime has shocked Germans, and politicians are calling for tighter youth laws and increased video surveillance. Some are threatening to prosecute passersby who do not act to stop such crimes.

Wittenberg, Holy Roman Empire, 1517. A young monk marches up to the castle church and nails a piece of parchment to the massive wooden door. He is Martin Luther, and the parchment is his famous 95 theses, written in Latin. With this document, an open challenge to the power and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, the brash cleric sets off one of the greatest upheavals in human history: the Protestant Reformation. Wittenberg, Germany, 2009. I walk down the long, cobblestone Collegienstrasse to All Saints' Church, the castle church that stands at one end of the street, eager to see...

Hanover, Germany (dpa) -- A German state is to begin training its own Muslim clergy next year, offering a course at the University of Osnabrueck, an official said Monday. The course will be the first ever for German-language imams and will be similar to theology-degree courses for Catholic priests, Lutheran ministers and Jewish rabbis at public universities. Uwe Schuenemann, interior minister of Lower Saxony state, said the locally trained men would replace Turkish prayer leaders who usually only served three-year assignments at mosques in Germany and did not integrate. Lower Saxony is funding the courses because local training for imams...

A giant imperial power, destined to soon dominate the globe, is suddenly emerging from behind its benign facade! ************************************************************************* In February 1934, Herbert W. Armstrong launched a magazine, using biblical prophecy as his guide, and history and current world events as his frame of reference. It was to become the most widely circulated of all periodic publications during the 20th century. Called the Plain Truth, the first edition of that fledgling publication carried a cover article headlined dramatically, “Is a World Dictator About to Appear?” By August of that year, Adolf Hitler, whose declared goal was global rule, became the...

The British tend to forget about the importance of Germany, our most significant European partner. There are, of course, memories of the world wars of the 20th Century. Relatively few British people speak German; we like to enjoy Mediterranean holidays, so we have come to know the French, Italians and Spanish. Yet Germany is a stable Northern democracy and a major trading partner. The sale of Opel and Vauxhall, which make up the the European branch of General Motors, this week demonstrated the significance of German bargaining power Historically, Britain and Germany have had a more significant relationship than many...

Documents published last week highlight the former prime minister's concern that the fall of the Berlin Wall could be a risk to Britain's national security. "We do not want a united Germany," Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev at a lunch meeting in the Kremlin in September 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. "This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the whole international situation and could endanger our security." Among the 1,000 transcripts of Politburo and other high-level papers smuggled out of Russia by...

LONDON — Britain's late queen Elizabeth the queen mother revealed in a letter published on Sunday how she and her husband king George VI came close to being killed during World War II in a German bombing raid. Written only hours after the incident, the letter tells how the royal couple leapt when they heard the "unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane" and then the "scream of a bomb" 69 years ago. The bomb exploded in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and three servants were injured in the attack, the queen wrote to her mother-in-law. "My darling Mama. I hardly...

If you have a look at the world of today from an economic point of view, you'll quickly find out that the Nordic countries (Scandinavia + Finland) is the richest part of the Globe (mesured by nominal GDP per Capita). This is not a matter of coincidence and neither is it a matter of oil, at least not to a large extent. For instance, the Danes earn the highest salaries on Earth and very few of them work for oil companies. The Nordic countries are immensely wealthy because we focus on things in life like R&D, economic growth, education, infrastructure,...

Court rules anti-Polish slogans lawful 12.09.2009 10:29 A German court in Greifswald, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has ruled that anti-Polish posters, displayed by the far-right NPD do not constitute a hate crime. The posters, displayed in the city of Loecknitz near the Polish border, as part of the NPD’s federal election campaign, include slogans such as “Stop the Polish invasion,” and “Border closed to criminals”. The German Ministry of Interior has notified the court in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern that it will be appealing against the decision, which it regards as an, “attack on human dignity and the peaceful coexistence of nations”. Germans go to the...

German anatomists plan a new show dedicated solely to dead bodies having sex as part of the Body Worlds exhibitions. "Switzerland is the first country that already said from the outset that we could show whatever we wanted," said von Hagens. "Zurich is ready ... but it's maybe not so easy in every other town," he said. "We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject." Von Hagens and Whalley said they both intended to donate their bodies for plastination, but would not leave instructions about how to display...

(IsraelNN.com) Jihadists close to al-Qaeda explicitly warned in new communications that Germany will be the target of the next 9/11-scale terrorist attack. The timing of the strike, they say, will be within the next few weeks. According to analysts with the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), a recently intercepted jihadist communication declares that "everyone knows" that the "next strike is very near, a strike that will surprise everyone in its effect, which will be much more shocking than that of 9/11/2001." The writer of the chilling message notes that this is the Muslim month of Ramadan and that...

SNIPPET: "According to ITRR, the latest jihadist communication was unusual in that it was very explicit and open in targeting the Germans, in discussing a coming attack, and in specifying its timing. Aside from Ramadan, which ends 19 September 2009, the upcoming German national election on September 27 has been marked as a "red flag date" by ITRR." SNIPPET: "German security services have also been cited in local media discussing stepped up jihadist chatter, threats and intelligence warnings aimed at the German state in recent months. Earlier this year, video messages delivered in German by an al-Qaeda fighter going by...

The German army has been inundated with international criticism for ordering an air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers in Afghanistan. But the governor of Kunduz province where the attack happened has now praised the German forces. "They made the right decision at the right time," Mohammed Omar told SPIEGEL.

End-times mania and wild-eyed apocalyptic predictions have long been a staple in certain sectors of the Protestant world. In addition to the more mainstream Protestant prognosticators who have made a very comfortable living off their end-times related books and broadcasts (e.g., Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, and Tim LaHaye, to name but three of the more prominent ones), groups which derive from Protestantism, such as Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, also spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to map out the contours of the rise of the Man of Sin and the dire happenings described in...

Climate Reparations: Western nations 'have already exceeded their quotas'...'The West would give back part of the wealth it has taken from the South in the past centuries' Sunday, September 06, 2009By Marc Morano – Climate Depot Excerpted From a September 4, 2009 article in The German Newspaper Der Spiegel. The interview was conducted by Christian Schwägerl and the article was titled: 'Industrialized Nations Are Facing CO2 Insolvency' Der Spiegel Excerpts: Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the German government's climate protection adviser, argues that drastic measures must be taken in order to prevent a catastrophe. Schellnhuber is proposing the creation of a CO2...

With the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party hoping to make inroads in three state elections this Sunday, a former member of Germany's far-right scene suggests how mainstream political parties should be confronting the extremists. The final stages of the campaigns in Saxony, Thuringia and Saarland have exposed the NPD's unvarnished xenophobia in recent weeks. The neo-Nazi party hopes to gain seats in all three state legislatures after winning an unprecedented 10 percent of the vote in the last Saxon poll four years ago. Emboldened by that success, the NPD has pulled few punches this time around, including mounting a racist campaign...

Berlin, Germany (AHN) - A German court has ruled that a suspected terrorist can name his son Djehad, the German word for jihad or holy war. The upper regional court in Berlin upheld Tuesday the rulings of two lower courts allowing Egyptian-German Reda Seyam, 49, to name his four-year-old son Djehad on grounds that it is a common Arabic name for males. Germany's birth registration agency, which implements the country's strict naming law, contested the name in court arguing that the father intended it to be interpreted literally and could harmful to the child, who would be associated with terrorism....

BBC Headline: The German invasion of Poland continues regardless of warnings from Britain and France to withdraw. Germany has bombed over 21 Polish cities since beginning her invasion of Poland yesterday. So far, it's estimated that 1,500 people have been either killed or wounded during the last two days. Throughout the day the German invasion forces have been penetrating further into Poland. The Polish forces are putting up a brave fight, but they are unable to stop the German advance. 'According to Germany, their army is sweeping through Poland ...' A communiqué from her High Command announced German air superiority...

Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions manage complex funds that buy up Americans' life insurance policies and pay their premiums in return for their payouts. But angry German investors are finding that Americans aren't dying as quickly as expected -- and that only the bankers are making a buck. snip -

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has run into problems with her attempt to save the troubled German carmaker Opel: The US government doesn't want a consortium featuring Russian investors to take over the GM subsidiary. Thousands of German jobs are hanging in the balance as talks drag on. snip

Bunker, Sweet Bunker 3:55 pm Tuesday Sep 1, 2009 by Caroline Stanley German-based architect Rainer Mielke has been repurposing old World War II bunkers into bright, airy apartments for the past ten years. In the future he plans to design a food bunker, office bunker, and music bunker — for bands having trouble finding practice space — as well. More images, including some cheery interior shots, after the jump. [via The Local]