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Cindy McCain accepted an award on behalf of her husband John McCain, who is ill with brain cancer, on Saturday night at the Munich Security Conference. She read a letter from her husband in which the Republican Senator and longtime foreign policy hawk urges America’s allies to stand by the values that won the Cold War. The Ewald Von Kleist Award is given for service to international peace and conflict resolution. It is named for a German who volunteered to wear a suicide vest in the attack on Adolf Hitler, and who founded the conference conference in Munich.

The German federal police are expanding its anti-terrorism unit GSG 9 and installing a special squad in Berlin. The move is a reaction to ongoing terrorist threats in the capital. The federal police squad that deals with terrorist attacks is to become significantly larger, and will set up a second base in Berlin. “We’re talking about around a third of the current strength of the unit,” GSG 9 commander Jérome Fuchs told Berlin state broadcaster RBB on Monday, before adding that finding the right personnel would be a “big challenge,” and that “fitness, strength of character, and teamwork” were particular...

Never go full Windows Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted (PDF, in Deutsche, natürlich) for the Windows migration on Wednesday, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hübner told The Register.Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised – mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange – and in February the...

Revellers from across the world braved the rain as they made their way to the annual Oktoberfest in Munich for the start of the famous German event. The world's most famous beer festival, which kicked off today and runs until October 3, is expected to welcome more than six million people to the Bavarian capital over course of the event. Both locals and tourists alike were greeted with downpours as they made their way to the Theresienwiese, an open space in the Munich which is used to host Oktoberfest, but partygoers soon seemed to perk up as the event officially...

SIERRA VISTA — Oompah-pah bands, brats and beer gave Sierra Vista a taste of Bavaria Friday and Saturday during the 22nd annual Oktoberfest. As the Sierra Vista Community Band filled the beer garden with such festive German favorites as the Chicken Dance, Beer Barrell Polka, Happy Wanderer and Hamburger Waltz on Friday, parents and youngsters danced along. Manuel Garcia and his 7-year-old granddaughter were particularly fond of the Chicken Dance. “I lived in Heidelberg for three years and really enjoyed Oktoberfest celebrations while I was there,” he said. “I’m sure my Chicken Dance could use a little work, but my...

Munich: German man films what a pedestrian zone looks like in 2017

A young police officer was “seriously injured” at a Munich subway station Tuesday morning after an individual was able to steal a police officer’s pistol and go on a shooting rampage, according to reports. Officers were called to Munich Unterföhring S-Bahn station this morning to intervene in a fight on the station platform, in which at least one party was wielding a knife, reports Welt. Officers got involved in the scuffle and an attacker attempted to push one member of the police from the platform onto the railway tracks. While wrestling on the ground, a 37-year-old male — reported to...

A 12 foot wall is being built in Munich to separate a housing estate from a new migrant centre that will house 160 unaccompanied minors. Locals living in the Neuperlach Süd housing development in Munich, less than 100 metres from the site at which young migrants will be staying, went to court to get the wall built. Germans living in the area fear bad behaviour among the newcomers, and concern over likely levels of noise when they arrive, will lower the value of their properties if the migrant centre remains for an extended length of time, reports Der Spiegel. The...

The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe by Lorenzo Vidino Middle East Quarterly Winter 2005 Since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood (Hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) has profoundly influenced the political life of the Middle East. Its motto is telling: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."[1] While the Brotherhood's radical ideas have shaped the beliefs of generations of Islamists, over the past two decades, it has lost some of its power and appeal in the Middle East, crushed by...

Integration into the job market for migrants has become a major ongoing task for the German government but in one town migrants are refusing to work entirely. One of the major issues of the migrant crisis is Germany and elsewhere has been the economic impact the massive wave of migrants will have in Europe. While some experts initially were optimistic about a potential vast new source of skilled labour, most economists have come to the conclusion that the migrants who have arrived are for the most part unskilled and poorly educated. Yet in own Saxon town, they have moved...

Israel's Defense Ministry on Friday responded to U.S. President Barack Obama's claims from a day earlier that the nuclear deal signed between Iran and the West had been successful in improving the security situation in the Middle East, and that even Israel acknowledges this fact. "The Israeli defense establishment believes that agreements have value only if they are based on the existing realities, and have no value if the facts on the ground are completely opposite of those upon which the agreement rests," the statement read. "The Munich Agreement did not prevent the Second World War and the Holocaust, precisely...

The perpetrators of two attacks in Germany claimed by the ISIS terror group were given advice on the separate assaults by members of the jihadist organization, German media reports. Without citing its sources, German weekly Der Spiegel said the two men exchanged messages with individuals using different phone numbers, including some that were registered in Saudi Arabia. The Afghan teenager who in July went on an axe rampage on a train, wounding four tourists from Hong Kong and a German passer-by, had reportedly discussed how he would carry out the attack with his ISIS contacts. […] In a separate attack...

According to research by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Munich gunman was proud to have been born on the same day as Hitler and hated Turks and Arabs. The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people before killing himself in Munich on Friday, was proud to be born on April 20th 1998 and thus share a birthday with Adolf Hitler, the FAZ has been told by people close to the investigation. David Sonboly, who was born to Iranian parents in Munich, was allegedly proud to be German and Iranian, which he considered to make him “Aryan,” people who knew him told...

Sonboly is no Iranian. He is Syrian. His Facebook page showed that he is pro Turkey’s Islamists. That, plus he had a record with the Interpol and was being watched. He is also not a teenager as they show us, but an adult as videos showed. What the reader should conclude after reading is this: why is the eye witnesses account (which is substantiated by material evidence) contradicts media reports

They initially introduced his name as a western name “David S”. Then his name changed to Ali David Sonboly (which sounds western) when his real name is Ali Daud Sonboly/Sunbuli which is an Arabic name (better pronounced Sunbuli) and has an exclusively Arabic meaning: ‘from the wheat kernel’. Sonboly is no Iranian. He is Syrian. His Facebook page showed that he is pro Turkey’s Islamists. That, plus he had a record with the Interpol and was being watched. He is also not a teenager as they show us, but an adult as videos showed. What the reader should conclude after...

Within seven days Germany has been hit by four bloody attacks on innocent people on its streets and on a train. What does this unprecedented string of murders mean for the country? […] … Public opinion turned strongly against the welcoming culture after sexual assaults in Cologne and Hamburg over New Year, around half of the suspects for which arrived as refugees over the preceding 12 months. The great influx of refugees which took place in the second half of 2015 came to an end months ago, with monthly arrivals now comparable to the numbers that crossed the border in...

Recorded classic style (just the PowerPoint). Today's update covers some political issues present in this year's election and then a look at Munich and Turkey.

An Afghan teenager was arrested on Sunday in Germany on suspicion that he was connected to Friday’s mass attack in Munich, police said. The 16-year-old male may have known about the plans of the gunman, who killed nine people, but the teen did not tell authorities, officials said. The teen is also suspected of having played a role in a Facebook post that invited the public to a location near where the deadly shooting later took place, Reuters reported.

The 16-year-old Afghan youth has been arrested for possibly having failed to report the plans of the gunman, according to a police statement issued on Sunday. ...

BERLIN/FRANKFURT, July 23 (Reuters) - An 18-year-old German-Iranian believed to have acted alone killed nine people in a shooting spree with a pistol at a busy shopping center in Munich on Friday evening. Here are some facts about acquiring and owning a gun in Germany. 1. Germany has some of the "most stringent" rules around gun control in Europe, according to the U.S. Library of Congress. 2. To own a gun in Germany, it is necessary to obtain a weapon license for which applicants must generally be at least 18 years old and show they have they have a reason...