trips to Europe for "Holocaust education" that are essentially five-day vacations. In 2012, these subsidies totalled 8 million shekels ($2.3 million). Zimbabwe: calls for government to trim civil service and cultivate the economy Civil servants...
s finest conductors, with La Scala, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, and his own orchestra in Lucerne Claudio Abbado, who has died aged 80, was not only among the greatest of conductors; in his last decade, after suffering from very severe illness, he raised a superband of players all gathered together for his sake, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, to heights that many listeners have never experienced...
s mindset – were determined to crush "the Serbian snake", and knew this risked provoking war. They took that risk and therefore bear a large portion of blame for events spiralling out of control. The elitism of Austria-Hungary...
t been the shooting in Sarajevo, it would have kicked off three weeks later somewhere else." The fatal shooting of the Austrian archduke on 28 June 1914, by the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, is widely held to have triggered a chain reaction that dragged Russia, Germany and eventually France and Britain into war. Habsburg-Lothringen said he believed there was no need for his family to show...
s bright bell-like tones and charming personality provided a welcome relief from ruinous inflation, world depression and the approaching sound of Nazi jackboots. The leading operetta composers of the day, Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, Robert Stolz and Paul Abraham, all wrote songs for her films. However, by 1938, after the Anschluss, with the exception of Lehár, all of them, being Jewish,...
unions finally agree on negotiators Civil servants' unions finally agreed on nine representatives to negotiate salaries for public sector workers after days of in-fighting and an ultimatum from the government. The unions previously failed to agree on who should represent them in salary talks with the government, despite meeting in Harare for more than seven hours. There were 12 civil service unions...
s emergency anti-avalanche airbags had been used successfully, but failed to save the 16-year-old's life. The spokeswoman continued: "The father and son activated the so-called said avalanche airbags, but they were buried anyway. The equipment is not a guarantee of safety. "There was an avalanche warning in place. In Austria we have four different warning types – one for the lowest and four is the...
s punishments were weakened in 1992, amid a neo-Nazi revival, by President Kurt Waldheim, who won the Iron Cross in Russia and of whom the late Austrian politician Fred Sinowatz said: "Let us acknowledge that Waldheim did not serve in the SA, only his horse did." There are countless Mussolinis in Italy, whether in cellars, in enclosed villa gardens, or at Termini station in Rome, where a 2011 statue...
s attempt to reclaim a multimillion-pound stake in her husband's company has been thrown out by an Austrian court, in the latest round in a bitter dispute between the two over ownership of the Glock brand. Gaston Glock, a former radiator engineer, made his fortune after creating the plastic pistol that saw off competition to become Nato standard issue by the early 1980s. The now legendary pistol was...
s essays shows his virtues and vices are two sides of the same coin Is Stefan Zweig a) "the incarnation of humanism"( Clive James ), or b) a "professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector", whose work "just tastes fake" ( Michael Hofmann )? The publication of Zweig's Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927/1940) in a new English translation by Anthea Bell may help answer the question, even...
s moral infamy. I then read three or four of his novels, which all revolve around the same theme: the deep-rooted corruption of Austrian society, especially the farming society into which Winkler was born in 1953. The themes of medieval Catholic traditions, the hardships of rural life and a loveless family are explored over and over again. Winkler's prose reads like a palimpsest of angry stories, each...
s Dominique Taboga tackled the Salzburg winger Dusan Svento in the area. Salzburg's players appealed for a penalty but the referee waved play on. Salzburg were leading 3-0 at that point, so few people bothered to complain afterwards. But there are plenty of reasons to scrutinise that tackle now. Last Monday Taboga told his club that he had been blackmailed for more than €87,000 (£73,000) by a criminal...
Vienna concert highlights music the Nazis detested on 75th anniversary of the attacks on Jewish businesses The £800m hoard of "degenerate" art confiscated by the Nazis and only revealed to the world last week has thrown new light on the nature of Nazi prejudices against Jewish painters and the modernist movement. However, as the world marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938...
On 9-10 November 1938, Nazi stormtroopers led a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property throughout Germany and Austria, which the Nazis had annexed. During these pogroms, 91 Jews were killed, thousands were taken from their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps, 267 synagogues were destroyed, and some 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were smashed and looted. The Kristallnacht pogroms...
s view of European politics is coloured by Germany's terrible interwar years. But that period is no model for today Until recently – the watershed came somewhere around the millennium – British perceptions of modern German politics focused not on Germany's government or its main political parties, which were boringly democratic and law-abiding, but on the increasingly distant Nazi past and...
t allowed. He explores his upbringing and the idea of family in a documentary film, for which he's just won a major award Paul-Julien Robert was born into a commune in 1979 and spent the first 12 years of his life there. "Everything in the outside world was described to us as evil. I knew what a nuclear family was, but it was something distant and seen as destructive." His idealistic Swiss mother,...
t as clearcut as it seems A lawyer who has been involved in the restitution of art stolen by the Nazis to its former owners has called on the National Gallery not to return a painting in its exhibition Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 to the Austrian gallery that loaned it. Gustav Klimt's unfinished portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl was illegally seized from Jewish collector Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer,...
The Front National's victory in a local election at Brignoles in France underlines a rise in anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments among voters across the continent ...
Gustav Kilmt, Egon Schiele and Arnold Schönberg all feature in the National Gallery's new exhibition devoted to portraiture in turn-of-the-20th century Vienna ...