Free Republic

BEIJING, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The drug scandal engulfing 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva is inhumane and the adults responsible should be banned forever, skating legend Katarina Witt said. "What they knowingly did to her, if true, cannot be surpassed in inhumanity and makes my athlete's heart cry infinitely," said Witt, an Olympic champion in 1984 and 1988. Valieva on Monday won Olympic gold with her Russian team mates, but it was revealed on Friday that she had earlier failed a drug test. The 15-year-old's gold medal and Games future now hangs in the balance as the International Olympic...

Last May, Katarina Witt lost a court battle to keep her Stasi file a secret. Witt, the figure skater who won Olympic gold for East Germany in the 1980s, co-operated with her country's dreaded secret police, the heirs to the Nazi Gestapo. Few Communist countries had a secret police as brutal as the Stasi. They were the ones who killed more than 1,000 of their own countrymen who tried to cross the Berlin Wall to freedom in the West; they were the ones who kept a bizarre warehouse of jars filled with the body odor of political dissidents -- so...

The Olympic skating champion Katarina Witt will bring to a climax a wave of Communist-era nostalgia sweeping Germany with a television show next week highlighting the bright side of life in a totalitarian state.A batch of films, TV shows and series is cashing in on a wave of popular sentiment for the East German Communist era, and nearly all have avoided painful subjects such as the infamous Berlin Wall.The programme's uncritical stance has angered those who suffered under Communism. Former dissidents who have studied East German Stasi secret police files say the shows are an insult to the more than...