Villich News
The Guardian - 19-Feb-2014

s calls by NSA might be judged 'politically unwise' Intercepting the telephone calls of Angela Merkel would have been "politically unwise" and "certainly illegal under German law", according to a former senior British secret intelligence officer. However, he says that under international law, tapping into the German chancellor's telephone conversations "would appear to be fair game". Nigel Inkster,...

The Guardian - 19-Feb-2014

s gifts amid public revulsion at German art but now exhibition asks visitors to judge for themselves One of the most extraordinary and excruciating episodes in the National Gallery's history is laid bare in an exhibition opening to the public on Wednesday: the state-sanctioned sale of paintings because they were German. Susan Foister, co-curator of the show, Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance,...

The Guardian - 18-Feb-2014

s lawyers, states that the collector had been unaware that pictures he inherited from his father could qualify as looted art, and that he is prepared to work out fair and just solutions in cases where "qualified, comprehensible and justified claims from the descendants of Jewish owners were made". The lawyers claim that such conditions apply to only 3% of the seized works, and say there is no argument...

The Guardian - 01-Feb-2014

s Your Country Needs You. There are war poems, war propaganda, war nurses, war horses everywhere. And there are four years of it still to come. David Cameron has found £50m to celebrate the Somme, Gallipoli, Passchendaele, Jutland and anywhere else that comes to mind. He has compared the occasion to the jubilee of 2012 and even appointed a minister, Andrew Murrison , for remembering the first world...

The Guardian - 01-Feb-2014

s Oktoberfest, but Germans are losing their thirst for their national beverage. New figures show that domestic beer sales have sunk to their lowest level since reunification. In 2013, German breweries sold 94.6m hectolitres, according to the federal statistics agency Destatis – 2% less than the year before, and the seventh consecutive drop in as many years . Sales of mixed drinks – beer with lemonade...

The Guardian - 30-Jan-2014

s more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914," he said before a documentary based on his book The Pity of War, which will be screened by BBC2 as part of the broadcaster's centenary season. The Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard University rejected the idea that Britain was forced to act in 1914 to secure its borders and the Channel ports. "This argument, which...

The Guardian - 30-Jan-2014

s economic policies have created in the Mediterranean. The "criticism of Europe" that Frank-Walter Steinmeier attributes to nationalist rhetoric should not be so casually dismissed. The institutions of the EU remain opaque and unaccountable. Rather than turning their ire on those who complain about the lack of democracy in the EU, European leaders should accept the need for reform as an immediate priority....

The Guardian - 30-Jan-2014

A programme in which the end justifies all means … violates trust,' German chancellor says Angela Merkel has used the first, agenda-setting speech of her third term in office to criticise America's uncompromising defence of its surveillance activities. In a speech otherwise typically short of strong emotion or rhetorical flourishes, the German chancellor found relatively strong words on NSA surveillance,...

The Guardian - 29-Jan-2014

s 150-metre building off Alexanderplatz given go-ahead, but critics doubt regenerative claims of project The tallest residential block in Germany is to rise up next to Berlin's needle-like TV tower by 2017. Designed by the US architect Frank Gehry and paid for by US real estate firm Hines, the 150-metre (492ft) building on Alexanderplatz will have 39 floors, with about 300 apartments, restaurants,...

The Guardian - 29-Jan-2014

ve picked up over the last five years. These nuggets of wisdom have been passed on to me by various Berliners, young and old, often in an overly helpful (aka slightly condescending) manner. As such, feel free to read this list aloud with a strong German accent and an "I-told-you-so" tone. How to survive (and thrive) in the most unbearable of winters: 1. Two words: kidney warmers. Or, auf Deutsch ,...

The Guardian - 28-Jan-2014

s great powers has been told many a time. On the centenary of the catastrophe, numerous new studies have been published which try to render the incomprehensible comprehensible. They detail the calculations of those then in power in Europe's capitals, the rash predictions of a swift military campaign and the misjudgments on all sides. The history of the outbreak of war 100 years ago and of the collapse...

The Guardian - 28-Jan-2014

s new grand coalition cabinet, comes as David Cameron moves to head off a rebellion by Tory backbenchers who want to put Britain in breach of its EU obligations by re-imposing work restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians until 2018. Tory MPs reacted angrily after the home secretary, Theresa May, tabled 50 amendments – many of a highly technical nature – to the immigration bill for debate on Thursday....

The Guardian - 26-Jan-2014

s documents, authenticated by German federal archive, to be published over eight days in Welt am Sonntag Lost letters, photographs and diaries by Heinrich Himmler have been discovered in Israel, shedding new light on one of the men most directly responsible for the Holocaust. The stash of documents from the Nazi era is currently held in a bank vault in Tel Aviv, but has been authenticated by the German...


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