European Salon de News, Discussion et Klatsch - 16 October | 85 comments (85 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

LIVING ON THE PLANET
Society, Culture, History, Information

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Oct 15th, 2010 at 02:30:12 PM EST

France24 - Retired French woman on trial for ripping veil off a Muslim woman

A retired French woman is on trial and faces a two-month suspended sentence as well as a €750 fine for ripping the full face veil off of an Emirati tourist before biting, slapping, and scratching the Muslim woman in a rare case of "burqa rage".

What a stellar defense of women's rights...

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Oct 15th, 2010 at 02:30:26 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living on the Planet (4.00 / 3)

Europe's Capital of Anti-Semitism: Budapest Experiences A New Wave of Hate - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Budapest survived fascism and communism and blossomed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But the Hungarian capital is experiencing a rebirth of anti-Semitism. The far-right Jobbik is now the country's third largest party and Jews are being openly intimidated.
...The New York Times recently dubbed Budapest "Hollywood on the Danube." More international films are produced there than in any other European city...
But there is also news from the real Budapest, and the real Hungary of recent months.
Neo-fascist thugs attacked Roma families, killing six people in a series of murders. The right-wing populists of the Fidesz Party won a two-thirds majority in the parliament, while the anti-Semitic Jobbik party captured 16.7 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Hungary, next to the Socialists. Unknown vandals defiled the Holocaust Memorial with bloody pigs' feet. A new law granted the government direct or indirect control over about 80 percent of the media. The television channel Echo TV showed an image of Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertész together with a voiceover about rats. Civil servants can now be fired without cause. Krisztina Morvai, a member of the European Parliament for Jobbik, suggested that "liberal-Bolshevik Zionists" should start thinking about "where to flee and where to hide."
...Now, in the wake of the Fidesz victory in communal elections on Oct. 3, the capital is getting a right-wing mayor for the first time, the 62-year engineer István Tarlós.
What's going on in Budapest?

No they aren't exaggerating, though the rhetorical focus on Budapest (where Jobbik again 'underperformed' and stayed behind the Greens) is off.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Oct 15th, 2010 at 02:34:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living on the Planet (4.00 / 2)

Lev Raphael, Author and Son of Holocaust Survivors: 'I Find Myself Defending Germany' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Lev Raphael, a New York-born author and the son of Holocaust survivors, had nothing but instinctive hatred for Germany until he paid a visit several years ago. He has penned a memoir about his change of heart, "My Germany," and this autumn he returns to once-frightening German cities for a book tour.
... Raphael: I grew up with this image of Germany as the ultimate source of evil in the world, so the thought of even crossing the German border was anathema to me. We never bought German products, even something as simple as a Deutsche Grammophon record album. My parents were music lovers, but they would not buy Deutsche Grammophon. The irony is that we lived in a German-Jewish neighborhood -- Washington Heights in New York, which at the time was called Frankfurt on the Hudson. So I heard German around me. But somehow I was able to dissociate that from my parents' own experiences.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: How did Germany surprise you when you finally crossed the border?
Raphael: What surprised me first was my own reaction -- I felt more like an American than the son of Holocaust survivors. But I also can't imagine anything more wonderful than being an author on tour in Germany. Audiences treat you differently than they treat you in America; you're taken seriously. I also found people very forthcoming about their own struggles with Germany's past, and how it affected them personally. It's a more intellectual culture than the American culture in general, so people discuss things at greater depth.
And my sexual orientation was a non-issue. Compared to puritanical America, that's very nice. E. M. Forster, who was also gay, said Anglo-Saxons have never accepted the realities of human nature.
I think there's still a clichéd belief in the United States that says, "The Germans haven't really faced up to World War II." And I say, "Have you been to Berlin?" Have you seen how many museums and memorials there are? If you want an example of a country that hasn't really faced its past, how about Japan? How about even France, which seems to have had much more difficulty facing its complicity with the Nazis? So I find myself in the strange position of defending Germany against people who say, "Oh, they haven't changed." It's a very different culture now. The militarism that really didn't die in 1918 is long gone.

And, apparently, how about Fidesz-Hungary?

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Oct 15th, 2010 at 02:35:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living on the Planet (4.00 / 2)

Neolithic Immigration: How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture -- and their miracle food, milk.
Wedged in between dump trucks and excavators, archeologist Birgit Srock is drawing the outline of a 7,200-year-old posthole. A concrete mixing plant is visible on the horizon. She is here because, during the construction of a high-speed rail line between the German cities of Nuremberg and Berlin, workers happened upon a large Neolithic settlement in the Upper Franconia region of northern Bavaria.
The remains of more than 40 houses were unearthed, as well as skeletons, a spinning wheel, bulbous clay vessels, cows' teeth and broken sieves for cheese production -- a typical settlement of the so-called Linear Pottery culture (named after the patterns on their pottery).
This ancient culture provided us with the blessing of bread baking. At around 5300 BC, everyone in Central Europe was suddenly farming and raising livestock. The members of the Linear Pottery culture kept cows in wooden pens, used rubbing stones and harvested grain. Within less than 300 years, the sedentary lifestyle had spread to the Paris basin.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Oct 15th, 2010 at 02:35:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living on the Planet (none / 1)

2,700-year-old royal loyalty oath discovered in Turkey - News, Archaeology - The Independent

Archaeologists excavating a 2,700 year old temple at the ancient city of Tayinat, in southeastern Turkey, have discovered evidence that its inhabitants prominently displayed a tablet which bore a pledge of loyalty to the heir of an Assyrian king.
The city of Tayinat was built on the Amuq plain, on the Orontes River near the modern day Syrian border. The Assyrian Empire conquered it in 738 BC, with a governor being appointed to oversee it. The city's temple is about 12 meters by six meters in size, and pre-dates the conquest. The excavations at Tayinat are led by Professor Tim Harrison of the University of Toronto.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Oct 15th, 2010 at 02:35:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living on the Planet (4.00 / 2)

New species of fish discovered in ocean's deepest depths - Nature, Environment - The Independent

A new species has been discovered in a part of the ocean previously thought to be entirely free of fish, scientists said yesterday.
The new type of snailfish was found living at a depth of 7,000m in the Peru-Chile trench of the South East Pacific Ocean.