Free Republic

Berliners have been given an unprecedented public holiday on Friday, to mark the end of World War Two but also liberation from Nazi rule. Not since reunification has a German city acknowledged 8 May as a day of liberation and some Berliners are unaware of the date's significances. A street party and several events have been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The holiday is one-off and is not being held outside Berlin. But there are growing calls for a public holiday to be held across Germany.

A Berlin official, who accused the U.S. administration of “piracy” after 200,000 masks for the city police went missing, backtracked Saturday and said the masks were ordered from a German firm. In a statement distributed by the city mayor’s office and senate a day earlier, Andreas Geisel, Berlin’s senator for the interior, was quoted as saying a delivery of FFP2 masks only made it as far as Bangkok before it was “confiscated.” He had said the consignment was ordered from a U.S. firm and “we are currently assuming that this is related to the U.S. government’s ban on mask exports.”...

Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler's profits slumped by almost two-thirds in 2019 as the legal costs of the "dieselgate" scandal and heavy investments in electric technology took their toll. The German carmaker's net profit fell to €2.7bn (£2.3bn) for 2019, it announced on Tuesday, almost €5bn worse than the previous year's performance. It also slashed its dividend from €3.25 per share to only 90 cents to help preserve cash to plough into electric vehicle technology. Daimler is carrying out swingeing cuts to its global workforce as it tries to save more than €1bn in costs. In November it said it would cut...

Drag Queen Story Hours started out as niche events on the West Coast, but these events—aimed at children as young as age 3—have spread to libraries and schools across the United States, dividing local communities. These story hours are “just what they sound like,” Drag Queen Story Hour’s official website states: drag queens reading to children. The events are designed to be about 45 minutes long for children aged 3 to 8 years old, intended to capture children’s imagination and help children explore their gender fluidity through “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” Books used during Drag Queen Story...

Berlin police are trying to find out who opened the unmarked grave of SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, a top Nazi killed by Czechoslovak agents in 1942. An employee at the Invalids' Cemetery in central Berlin found on Thursday that the grave had been opened. No bones were removed, police say. Heydrich was a key organiser of Nazi Germany's mass murder of European Jews. He chaired the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where Hitler's genocidal "Final Solution" was planned. Tampering with a grave can be prosecuted under a German law against "grave defilement".

Even the biting chill of Berlin’s already wintry fall weather wasn’t enough to hold protesters back on Friday as they took to the streets in their thousands to demand more action against climate change. One group of students even plunged into the icy waters of the Spree River, holding up a white box in a symbolic attempt to rescue the government’s climate-change package. The latest global climate strike comes just three days ahead of the COP25 Climate Change Conference in Madrid. People were set to march in 2,400 cities across 157 countries. […] Across town on Friday, the Bundesrat —...

Berlin’s first Arabic-language radio station will have the potential to reach more than 100,000 Arabic speakers living in the German capital. The MABB media council for Berlin and the surrounding state of Brandenburg announced the approval of Radio Arabica on Thursday. Radio Arabica’s programming will cover life in Berlin, culture, news, comedy and sport. It will also play a mix of Arabic folk music, pop and modern music. Hansjürgen Rosenbauer, the head of the MABB media council, praised the expansion of “diversity” in the radio landscape. …

South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg is being slammed — and also defended — after a 2017 Instagram post of him at a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, with the caption “This guy,” resurfaced Sunday on Twitter. The Democratic presidential candidate’s husband, Chasten Buttigieg, posted the photo of Buttigieg at what appeared to be the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Germany’s capital. Users on Twitter called the photo and caption “tone-deaf,” “inappropriate, “tasteless” and “disrespectful.” […] Buttigieg’s campaign did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment. …

The Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, has said Brexit uncertainty played a role in the firm’s decision to build its first European factory in Germany rather than the UK. The billionaire entrepreneur revealed that the firm’s European battery plant would be built on the outskirts of Berlin. Speaking to Auto Express after making the announcement, Musk said: “Brexit [uncertainty] made it too risky to put a Gigafactory in the UK.” The US electric carmaker also plans to locate a research and development base in the German capital.

It’s long overdue. A statue of former President Ronald Reagan was unveiled and dedicated on Friday at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Germany. The seven-foot statue overlooks the site of the Berlin Wall. In an unforgettable speech for those old enough to remember it, on June 12, 1987, President Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and delivered this demand of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” He was calling for Gorbachev to open the Berlin Wall which had separated West and East Berline since 1961. Reagan’s speechwriter, and current Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson noted...

BERLIN (AP) — Germany marked the 30th anniversary Saturday of the opening of the Berlin Wall, a pivotal moment in the events that brought down Communism in eastern Europe.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will unveil a statue of former US President Ronald Reagan at the US Embassy on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. […] For over 10 years, the United States has wanted to honor Reagan with a statue in Berlin. However, the administration of the capital had till now rejected numerous applications from US officials and dignitaries. Berliners had mixed reactions to the new statue. One older woman told DW that she was not opposed to a statue of Reagan as the US had been a “protecting power” over West Germany. But a man...

Seven-foot replica of former president to be inaugurated at U.S. Embassy, overlooking site of Berlin Wall

Nearly twenty Berlin police were said to have been brutally attacked by far-left Antifa extremists during a demonstration in one of the city’s strongholds for leftist extremism. The unidentified Antifa members attacked police in the Friedrichshain area, throwing heavy paving stones at the officers along with bottles and other projectiles, with a total of 19 officers injured during the rioting, Focus reports.

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

Grainy images of 70,000 protesters in Leipzig carrying candles and chanting "Wir sind das Volk" -- "We are the people!" -- were beamed across the world on October 9, 1989. The rally was a turning point in the fall of the Iron Curtain a month later. Kühne was one of the demonstrators who, in his words, "longed for a free and united country." Then a 21-year-old locksmith working at the state railway company, he said the uprising in his hometown was "the greatest thing I've ever experienced." Today he is again drawing inspiration from Germany's peaceful revolution -- this time,...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The suspect detained over the killing last week of a Georgian citizen in Berlin had a passport whose number linked him to Russian security services, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Friday. Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, who had previously fought alongside anti-Moscow separatists in the province of Chechnya, was shot twice in the head last Friday as he headed through a central Berlin park to the mosque. If confirmed, the report could add to problems between the European Union and Moscow, which are already at odds over the apparent murder attempt against a Russian defector in Britain last year.

A 9-year-old girl is suing a centuries-old Berlin boys choir, arguing that her bid to join was only rejected because of her gender, in a case that has sparked debate over equal rights versus artistic freedom. The State and Cathedral Choir is one of the most renowned boys choirs in Germany, founded in 1465 by Fredrick II of Brandenburg. Over its 554 years, it has never admitted any girls. The girl, whose identity was not revealed to protect her privacy, auditioned with the choir in March and was rejected, according to the Berlin administrative court that is to rule on...

NEW YORK, August 2 (C-Fam) The White House confirmed the launch of a global U.S. campaign to promote acceptance of homosexual acts last week after several months of confusion and misinformation surrounding the administration’s position on LGBT issues. “The Trump Administration has launched a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality and invites all nations to join us!” read a tweet from the White House last week. The tweet was a message of support for the LGBT advocacy of openly gay Richard Grenell, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. The tweet confirmed conservative concerns about the Trump administration’s position on LGBT issues. Last...

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters snaked through the streets of the German capital on Saturday shouting anti-Israel slogans against the backdrop of rising concerns about anti-Semitism in the country. Of the 2,000 banner and flag-waving protesters in the al-Quds march some chanted “Child murderer Israel” and “Zionism is racism,” while others in the same protest expressed support for Palestinians with signs reading “Free Gaza” and “Palestine will be reborn!” At the same time, demonstrators sought to dispel accusations they were anti-Jewish by shouting, “Anti-Semitism is a disgrace.” The annual al-Quds Day march, or Jerusalem Day in Arabic, came as German officials,...