| June 12, 2008 | - A German sportswriter, late for a flight to Vienna to cover the European soccer championships, was arrested for calling in a hoax bomb threat from his cell phone in an attempt to delay his plane.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 5, 2008 | - DNA tests revealed that a skull long thought to be that of German playwright Friedrich Schiller was not his. “Such an exact double,” said anthropologist Ursula Wittwer-Backofen, “couldn't have got into the coffin just by accident.”
| Source:
Der Spiegel
|
| May 5, 2008 | - Police in Germany discovered the bodies of three dead babies stored in a freezer in the cellar of a family home, after two of the family's older children went rummaging for a frozen pizza.
| Source:
CNN
|
| March 29, 2008 | - A German TV station aired segments from recently discovered top-secret Stasi porno movies with names like Private Werner's Big Surprise and Fucking for the Fatherland. “I didn't recognize myself,” said a former actor/soldier. “Neither did my wife, thank God.”
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| March 25, 2008 | - The village of Roecken, Germany, debated moving Friedrich Nietzsche's grave in order to extract the coal underneath his remains.
| Source:
Der Spiegel
|
| March 20, 2008 | - An elderly German woman filed a lawsuit against a hospital in Bavaria after she checked in for a leg operation and was instead given a new anus.
| Source:
Fox News
|
| March 18, 2008 | - It was reported that Petra, the German black swan who fell in love with a swan-shaped paddleboat two years ago, has moved on to a new relationship with a live white swan. The two are now building a nest together.
| Source:
Cnews
|
| March 17, 2008 | - Horst Rippert, an 88-year-old former German fighter pilot, told the biographer of Antoine de Saint-Exupery that one of the 28 planes that Rippert gunned down during World War II was piloted by The Little Prince author. “If I had known,” Rippert said, “I wouldn't have fired.”
| Source:
The Scotsman
|
| March 17, 2008 | -
Israel and Germany vowed to strengthen political, cultural, economic, and social relations between the two countries.
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 14, 2008 | - The cubicle turned 40, Viagra turned 10, and Hotel Luxor, the oldest whorehouse in Germany's red light district, announced that it would close for lack of business.
| Source 1:
Time
Source 2:
Yahoo News
Source 3:
Associated Press
|
| January 20, 2008 | - A German merchant ship set sail for Venezuela partially powered by a fuel-saving kite.
| Source:
Reuters via IHT
|
| January 9, 2008 | - Keepers at the Nuremberg Zoo, under criticism for allegedly allowing polar bear mothers to eat and abandon their young, announced that they would hand-rear an at-risk cub but also made clear that they do not want a repeat of the Berlin Zoo's Knut-mania.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| November 21, 2007 | - Armin Meiwes, a convicted German cannibal, was elected leader of his prison's Green Party chapter and announced that he had become a vegetarian.
| Source:
Scotsman
|
| October 18, 2007 | - A poll revealed that a quarter of Germans think National Socialism had “good sides,” including low crime, low unemployment, and “the encouragement of the family.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 18, 2007 | - A poll revealed that a quarter of Germans think National Socialism had “good sides,” including low crime, low unemployment, and “the encouragement of the family.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 22, 2007 | -
Germans were reading “Interview with a Cannibal,” the story of Armin Meiwes. In the book, Meiwes urges other would-be cannibals to seek psychiatric help, expresses disappointment that the experience was not as “romantic” as he dreamed it would be, and cites the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel as inspiration for his 2001 slaughter and ingestion of Bernd Brandes, who volunteered over the Internet to be eaten. “For him,” said Meiwes “it was a sexual thing. But he also thought like me he would live on in me.”
| Source:
The Scotsman
|
| September 6, 2007 | - Police in Germany claimed to have foiled a massive terror plot that would have targeted U.S. facilities in the country.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 16, 2007 | -
German
physicists claimed to have broken the speed of light.
| Source:
TelegraphUK
|
| August 13, 2007 | - The discovery of a 1973 document proved that it was Stasi policy to “stop or liquidate” defectors attempting to escape East Germany over the Berlin Wall, especially those accompanied by women and children.
| Source:
Scotsman
|
| August 10, 2007 | -
Germany's leading regulator warned that the country risked tumbling into its worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
| Source:
Wall Street Journal
|
| July 24, 2007 | - A blonde woman wearing only stilettos and a gold bracelet bought a pack of cigarettes at a German gas station before climbing back into the passenger seat of a waiting Ferrari.
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| June 6, 2007 | - A “clearly deranged” German man attempted to board the Popemobile in the Vatican and was beaten by the Vigilanza, the pontiff's security force.
| Source:
New York Times and Washington Post
|
| June 4, 2007 | - In Bautzen, Germany, three teenagers were found not guilty of impairing the sex drive of an ostrich.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 27, 2007 | - Nazi-released raccoons continued to wreak havoc from the Baltic Sea to the Alps. “We like the United States of America,” said retired German orthodontist Dieter Hoffmann, “but we do not like your Waschbaeren!”
| Source:
Washington Post via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
|
| May 21, 2007 | - A zoo in Germany hired a clown to cheer up bored monkeys.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| April 14, 2007 | -
German national television released a videoclip of an army instructor in Schleswig-Holstein telling one of his soldiers during a machine-gun drill, “You are in the Bronx. A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother in the worst ways . . . Act.”
| Source:
AP via CNN
|
| March 30, 2007 | - In Germany, a black Australian swan named Petra was in love with a paddleboat.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| March 27, 2007 | - It was suggested that Yan Yan, a panda at the Berlin Zoo, died from stress in the wake of intense publicity generated by Knut, his polar-bear-cub neighbor.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| March 23, 2007 | - In her denial of an application for divorce filed by a battered Muslim woman, a female judge in Frankfurt, Germany, quoted a verse of the Koran that suggests husbands may beat unchaste wives. “It's a religious thing,” she explained.
| Source:
The Sun
|
| February 19, 2007 | - Thousands of spectators at the Rose Monday parade in Mainz, Germany, watched a float of President Bush being spanked by the Statue of Liberty.
| Source:
Yahoo News
|
| January 31, 2007 | - A German court issued an arrest warrant for 13 CIA operatives involved in the abduction and torture of a German citizen.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 25, 2007 | - The perjury trial of former vice-presidential aide I. Scooter Libby began. Cathie Martin, former communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney, testified that the government often releases bad news late on Friday. “Fewer people pay attention to it,” she explained. CIA official Craig Schmall testified that Libby had met with Tom Cruise to discuss the treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Libby “was a little excited about it,” he recalled; Schmall said that he too had been excited.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| January 25, 2007 | -
Scientists in Jena, Germany, who had been using spaghetti and cucumbers as bait to make a sloth climb up and down a pole, gave up after three years.
| Source:
AP
|
| January 15, 2007 | - A German breeder was selling giant rabbits to North Korea in the hope of relieving famine.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| November 15, 2006 | - A researcher in Germany claimed that the swords of Damascus, which were made from a type of steel known as wootz, have a microstructure of carbon nanotubes.
| Source:
Nature
|
| October 25, 2006 | -
German soldiers serving in Afghanistan snapped commemorative photographs of themselves with the skull of a reputed Taliban militant.
| Source:
Deutsche-Welle
|
| October 17, 2006 | - A Gypsy pressure group filed suit to stop British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film from being shown in Germany. The group accuses him of antiziganism, or hostility to gypsies; Cohen's fictional alter-ego Borat claimed that Gypsies had molested his horse.
| Source 1:
Reuters via Yahoo
Source 2:
Wikipedia
|
| October 11, 2006 | - A pile of jelly left over from a wedding party's jelly-fight sparked a terrorism alert near Leipzig, Germany.
| Source 1:
One Bakersfield Online
Source 2:
Mumbai Mirror
|
| September 18, 2006 | - Neo-Nazis won seats in the regional parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany.
| Source:
Australia Herald-Sun
|
| September 7, 2006 | - Many Germans were “startled” to learn that they could be terror targets.
| Source:
Los Angeles times
|
| August 15, 2006 | - In Germany a man was struck on the back of the neck by projectile human feces, then robbed of $9,554 by three people who offered to clean him off.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 14, 2006 | - It was pointed out that the United States has been fighting in Iraq for as long as it fought Germany during World War II.
| Source:
The Chicago Tribune
|
| July 14, 2006 | - A German man, on trial for robbery, was caught stealing from the judge during his hearing.
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| June 28, 2006 | -
English
soccer fans, said German breweries, were endangering the German
beer supply.
| Source:
Mirror.co.uk
|
| June 27, 2006 | - Bruno the bear was shot and killed by German authorities, ending his seven-week rampage through Germany and Austria; Bruno, officially tagged Rampant Brown Bear JJ 1, had killed sheep and rabbits, stolen honey, eluded Finnish bear trackers and elkhounds, and squashed a guinea pig. “Sexual frustration,” said a German official, “may be a reason for the random killings.”
| Source:
Times Online (U.K)
|
| June 15, 2006 | - At the World Cup in Germany over 400 people were arrested for violence and drunkenness related to the Germany-Poland soccer match (which Germany won 1-0).
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 7, 2006 | - A report by the Council of Europe charged that European countries (including Germany,
Spain,
Sweden,
Greece, and Italy) served as a “global spider web” for the CIA's secret abduction and unlawful transfer of terrorism suspects to its network of torture camps around the world.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 6, 2006 | - The United States issued a report on the global sex trade and rebuked Germany for being “a source, transit, and destination country” for prostitutes.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 2, 2006 | -
British police were patrolling seaports and airports in order to prevent football hooligans from attending the World Cup in Berlin.
| Source:
This is London
|
| May 30, 2006 | - The first wild bear seen in Germany since 1835 continued to attack farm animals and elude capture. “For security purposes,” said Bavarian Environment Minister Werner Schnappauf, “the permission to open fire must be maintained.” Authorities said the brother of the bear had killed Swiss
sheep last summer.
| Source:
Fox News
|
| May 29, 2006 | - In Germany, at the official opening of the Hauptbahnhof, the largest railway station in Europe, a man went on a rampage and stabbed 35 people. Because one of the first people he stabbed was HIV positive, concerns were raised that some of the subsequently stabbed may also become infected.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| May 18, 2006 | -
Scientists in Germany said that apes can plan ahead.
| Source:
AP via Breitbart.com
|
| March 24, 2006 | -
German
scientists announced that cells from mice testes can act like embryonic stem cells; a private company in California said that it had achieved similar results with cells from human testes, and that it had grown new brain, heart, and bone cells from the human testes cells.
| Source 1:
CBS News
Source 2:
Reuters
|
| March 7, 2006 | - A farmer in Germany said that he got the idea of feeding a friend's corpse to pigs from a lecture about Buddhism.
| Source:
MSNBC
|
| February 28, 2006 | - A cat died of bird flu in Germany.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| February 22, 2006 | - A Bavarian village was flooded with over a foot of pig
manure.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 18, 2006 | - Another person died from bird
flu in Iraq. The flu was also found in poultry in Germany, France, and Egypt, and 50,000 chickens died from the disease in India.
| Source 1:
Bloomberg News
Source 2:
People's Daily Online
Source 3:
BBC News
Source 4:
China View
|
| January 19, 2006 | -
Greenpeace dumped a 55-foot fin whale in front of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin.
| Source:
Fox News
|
| January 3, 2006 | -
Russia shut down a natural-gas pipeline to Ukraine; as a result, natural-gas supplies were diminished in Hungary, France, Italy, Poland, and Germany.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 3, 2006 | - A collapsing ice rink in Germany killed 11 people.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| November 24, 2005 | - A German woman named Petra Ficker threw her husband, Frank Ficker, out of the house after her parrot cried out the name of Mr. Ficker's mistress, Uta. “It's just me and my parrot now,” said Petra.
| Source:
All Headline News
|
| November 24, 2005 | -
German scientists discovered a singing iceberg in Antarctica.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| November 20, 2005 | - The German intelligence officials who interrogated “Curveball,” an Iraqi who provided intelligence that the Bush Administration used to justify the war in Iraq, said that they repeatedly warned the United States that Curveball (who may have been lying in order to obtain a German visa) could not be trusted. “Mein Gott!” said an intelligence official. “We had always told them it was not proven.”
| Source:
The Los Angeles Times
|
| November 2, 2005 | - A U.S. Army captain stationed in Germany was sentenced to five years in prison for forcibly sodomizing three U.S. soldiers; the soldiers had asked him for counseling in his capacity as an Army chaplain and Roman Catholic priest.
| Source:
TheDenverChannel.com
|
| October 12, 2005 | -
Gerhard Schroeder announced that he would quit the German government.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 5, 2005 | -
Germany surpassed the United States to become the world's number-one exporter.
| Source:
The Daily Telegraph
|
| August 27, 2005 | -
Europe, previously burning, was flooding. Floods killed 33 people in Romania, and parts of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Poland were under water.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 26, 2005 | - A German man was arrested for scratching penis drawings on up to 330 vehicles.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 22, 2005 | - A fourteen-year-old German boy was ordered to tear down the 300-foot-long roller coaster he had built in his back yard.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| August 16, 2005 | - In Germany a man drowned while trying to get his fishing pole back from a fish; a police spokeswoman described the fish as "ordinary."
| Source:
Reuters
|
| July 25, 2005 | -
German
archaeologists reconstructed a 28,000-year-old stone phallus nearly eight inches in length. There was evidence, they said, that the phallus had been used as a tool.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 22, 2005 | -
Michael Jackson announced that he would build another Neverland near Berlin.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| July 22, 2005 | - A German magazine published a coupon for free sex with prostitutes.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| July 20, 2005 | -
Germany declined to finance a bald man's toupee, even though the state covers the costs of wigs for women who have lost their hair.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| July 15, 2005 | - Four six-hundred-year-old papal seals were found in a toilet shaft in Germany.
| Source:
Mail & Guardian Online
|
| June 8, 2005 | - Officials in Dortmund, Germany, were preparing to host a game of the upcoming World Cup by setting up "sex garages" for assignations with prostitutes.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 8, 2005 | - In Augsburg, Germany, zoo officials were being criticized for a planned attraction that will show elephants and rhinos in their "natural environment" by surrounding them with black men in grass skirts.
| Source:
The Scotsman
|
| June 8, 2005 | - A new Bach aria was discovered in Germany.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| June 3, 2005 | -
Berlin police, acting on a kidnapping tip, stopped a car and pulled a man from the car's trunk; it turned out the man, wearing only a thong and collar, was a voluntary sex slave.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 30, 2005 | - It was revealed that the aviator Charles Lindbergh had seven illegitimate German children by three German mistresses.
| Source:
CNN
|
| May 30, 2005 | -
France rejected the proposed constitution for the European Union, Germany ratified it,
| Source 1:
BBC News
Source 2:
BBC News
|
| May 13, 2005 | - The state economy and culture senator of Bremen, Germany, resigned under criticism for pouring wine on a homeless man's head.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 10, 2005 | - A Holocaust memorial opened in Berlin. Some people were upset that it only commemorated the deaths of Jews.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 8, 2005 | - It was the 60th anniversary of VE Day. The German ambassador to London called on Britain to change its attitude towards Germany. “They continue to see us as Nazis,” he said, “as if they have to refight the battles every evening.”
| Source:
The Independent
|
| May 8, 2005 | - Around three thousand neo-Nazis rallied in Berlin.
| Source:
Knight-Ridder
|
| April 25, 2005 | - It was revealed that Condoleezza Rice ordered a German citizen released from an American-supervised prison in Afghanistan after it was determined that the man had been wrongly detained and tortured.
| Source:
SMH.com.au
|
| April 23, 2005 | -
German
toads were exploding for unknown reasons.
| Source:
AFP
|
| April 4, 2005 | - Archaeologists in Germany uncovered a 7,200-year-old pornographic statue.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| March 14, 2005 | - Edeka, a German supermarket chain, announced that shoppers would soon be able to pay using their fingerprints.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| March 11, 2005 | - Paul Schaefer, a former member of the Luftwaffe who emigrated to Chile, founded a cult, provided torture facilities for Pinochet, and molested many children, was captured in Argentina.
| Source:
Inter-press Service News Agency
|
| January 20, 2005 | - A poll of thousands of people in 21 countries revealed that just 26 percent consider Bush a positive global force. Three quarters of respondents in France and Germany and 64 percent of Britons felt that U.S. actions would have a negative impact on the world, and for the first time it appeared that an international dislike of Bush is metamorphosing into a dislike of Americans in general. The three countries that approved of Bush's reelection were the Philippines, Poland, and India.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| January 17, 2005 | -
German police were searching for the those responsible for sticking miniature American flags into thousands of piles of dog excrement in public parks over the last year.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| January 6, 2005 | - The song "Snappy the Little Crocodile" made the Top Ten in Germany, with its signature lyric "Schni schna schnappi schnappi schnappi schnapp."
| Source:
Ananova
|
| November 9, 2004 | - A train carrying nuclear waste from Valognes, France, to Gorleben, Germany, arrived late after being delayed by protestors, one of whom died after he chained himself to the tracks and was run over.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| November 8, 2004 | - Samples of Arafat's blood were sent to the United States and Germany to test for poison.
| Source:
Jerusalem Post
|
| August 18, 2004 | -
German men were being admonished to pee sitting down by a gadget called the WC ghost; when the device detects a lifted toilet seat, it says, in German: "Hey, stand peeing ("Stehpinkeln") is not allowed here and will be punished with fines, so if you don't want any trouble, you'd best sit down." It was reported that the term for a man who pees sitting down, "Sitzpinkler," is a synonym for "wimp."
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| June 27, 2004 | - A German
zoologist announced that bees are really quite lazy,
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| May 19, 2004 | -
German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was slapped in the face at a campaign rally.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| May 9, 2004 | - President Akhmad Kadyrov of Chechnya was killed along with a dozen more officials in a bomb attack at Dynamo stadium in Grozny, where a celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany was under way.
| Source:
CNN
|
| May 5, 2004 | - A German ornithologist discovered that urban nightingales, forced to compete with noise pollution, can sing so loud they break the law. The loudest recorded was 95 decibels, which is as loud as a chainsaw.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 7, 2004 | - A piranha was found in a petting-zoo aquarium in Berlin.
| Source:
ABC.net.au
|
| April 3, 2004 | - The Department of Homeland Security announced that visitors from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Australia, and 21 other countries will be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the United States.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 13, 2004 | -
Germany said that it accepted "moral responsibility" for the 1904 massacre of 65,000 Hereros in Namibia, its former colony.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 8, 2004 | -
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was chased from a building in Leipzig by a mob of student demonstrators chanting "First education, then games!"
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 7, 2004 | - A wild boar invaded a Berlin apartment and bit the owner on the leg.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 17, 2003 | -
France and Germany agreed to cooperate on restructuring
Iraq's debt.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 10, 2003 | - U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz decreed that Canada, Germany, France, Russia, and other nations that opposed the conquest of Iraq will be ineligible for $18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts. The announcement was greeted with astonishment by the blacklisted countries; Russia said that it would now refuse to consider restructuring Iraq's $8 billion debt, and Canada said the decision would probably rule out further reconstruction aid.
| Source:
Boston Globe
|
| November 23, 2003 | - A German cannibal named Armin Meiwes said he was sorry for killing and eating another man, who supposedly agreed to be eaten and shared a meal of his own penis with his killer. Prosecutors have charged Meiwes with "murder for sexual satisfaction," because cannibalism is not a crime in Germany.
| Source:
BBC
|
| November 15, 2003 | - Newly declassified files from MI5, the British intelligence agency, revealed that in 1940 German
saboteurs had planned to attack Buckingham Palace with exploding cans of French peas.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 22, 2003 | -
German
chemists discovered the secret ingredient in the preservation of Egyptian mummies.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| July 16, 2003 | - A German tourist was arrested for trying to steal a crematorium door from a former Nazi
death camp in Poland.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| July 16, 2003 | - Newly declassified documents revealed that during the Cold War British
scientists planned to bury ten nuclear land mines in Germany.
The plan, code-named Blue Peacock, was abandoned in 1958, after it was judged to be "politically flawed."
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| July 12, 2003 | -
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder cancelled his Italian vacation in retaliation for insulting remarks about German tourists made by Italy's tourism minister; regional officials asked the Italian government to declare a "state of calamity" to compensate for the anticipated loss of German tourist business.
| Source:
New York Times, BBC
|
| July 4, 2003 | - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy created an uproar when he said that a German member of the European Parliament (who challenged Berlusconi's use of a new immunity law to avoid corruption charges) would make a good Nazi concentration-camp commander.
Berlusconi later refused to apologize to Germany but said that he was sorry that his ironic little joke had been misunderstood.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| July 2, 2003 | - President Johannes Rau of Germany had the word "Luftwaffe" removed from his two government airplanes to avoid upsetting people in countries conquered by Germany during World War II.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 24, 2003 | - A German gardener lost his driver's license for driving a lawn mower while intoxicated.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 18, 2003 | - A naked headless corpse was found near the castle Frankenstein in Germany.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 2, 2003 | -
Bush gave Vladimir Putin a big hug and invited him to a sleepover at Camp David; Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder received perfunctory handshakes.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| April 23, 2002 | -
A Roman Catholic bishop in Germany was forced to resign because of accusations that he molested a woman during an exorcism.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | -
Germany's
Green Party, rejecting one of its defining principles, voted to go along with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's decision to send troops to Afghanistan.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | - The Society for the Protection of Wolves said that a pack of wolves had wandered into eastern Germany and settled there.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Retreating Al Qaeda
terrorists in Afghanistan left behind nuclear designs written in Arabic, German, Urdu, and English; foul-smelling liquids; and a recipe for building a nuclear bomb that included detailed descriptions of how TNT can cause plutonium to begin its deadly chain reaction.
| |
| October 30, 2001 | -
Germany, for some reason, was not included in the study.
| |
| October 30, 2001 | -
German
police
arrested a man who was holding his girlfriend hostage in exchange for a crate of lager and two packs of cigarettes.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - It was revealed that in 1944 Britain manufactured 5 million anthrax
cattle cakes that were to be airdropped (in “Operation Vegetarian”) over Germany; the expectation was that the disease would kill all the cattle and then kill all the Germans.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - A historian claimed that Mata Hari was made a scapegoat by the French, who falsified evidence against her and executed her as a German spy 85 years ago.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | -
Germany gave its 400,000 prostitutes working rights, including the right to unemployment benefits, job training, health insurance, and a pension.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - Lothar Machtan, a German historian, revealed that Hitler was gay.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - Crowds of fishermen in Germany were trying to catch a giant catfish that ate a pet dachshund in a lake near Moenchengladbach.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | -
Germany's minister for cultural affairs released an official definition of rock music: “an entity of all musical forms that are usually created with the help of electronic amplifiers and follows the broader taste in music, usually for dancing, that is spread through the media and live concerts.” Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was overheard humming a tune by his favorite band, The Scorpions.
| |
| September 25, 2001 | - After four concerts of his music were cancelled, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German avant-garde composer, apologized for describing the attack on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art one can imagine . . . the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos.”
| |
| September 4, 2001 | - Puff Daddy, a rapper, told a German magazine that the Queen of England has a poor fashion sense: “She should stick to muted shades and combine gray, black, and earth tones,” said Mr. Daddy. “Those pastel shades she wears don't suit her at all and she has to do something about that haircut.”
| |
| August 14, 2001 | - A German businessman was planning to sell toilet paper in Britain printed with images of the Queen and Margaret Thatcher.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | -
German
beer consumption was down to 1.4 billion gallons during the first half of this year.
| |
| July 31, 2001 | - Pope John Paul II advised President Bush that the use of stem cells for research is an evil akin to infanticide; Bush reassured the pope that he would think long and hard about his own opinion: “My process has been, frankly, unusually deliberative for my administration.” A German court ruled a Hamburg citizen incapable of managing his affairs after he tipped a waiter $11,000 for a cup of coffee; the court impounded the tip.
| |
| July 3, 2001 | - The International Court of Justice rebuked the United States for executing two German brothers in 1999 without following established international law, which required the German consulate to be notified of the men's arrest and conviction.
| |
| July 3, 2001 | - Poles started getting checks from Germany to make up for having been enslaved by the Nazis.
| |
| July 3, 2001 | -
Police in Aachen, Germany, were called in to quell a domestic dispute that arose after a man visited a brothel and discovered his wife working there.
| |
| June 19, 2001 | -
President Bush went to Europe but avoided France and Germany, whose leaders are unlikely to go along with his missile-defense scheme. “There's some nervousness,” the President said, “and I understand that. But it's beginning to be allayed when they hear the logic behind the rationale.” In Sweden, at a meeting of the European Union, Bush told reporters that “we spent a lot of time talking about Africa, and we should.
| |
| June 12, 2001 | - The half-brother of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder lost his job as a sewage worker.
| |
| May 15, 2001 | - A German
researcher found that tall men have more children than short men; they also have more wives, because they are more likely to get divorced and their second wives are likely to be younger.
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| April 17, 2001 | - The Dutch legalized euthanasia; Germany's
Roman Catholic Church denounced the decision and warned against adopting a “culture of death.” China executed 89 people in one day.
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| April 3, 2001 | - The United States withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change; Christie Whitman, the administrator of the EPA, announced that “we have no interest in implementing that treaty.” President Bush told German chancellor Gerhard Schröder that “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.” North Korea's dear leader Kim Jong Il sent a large floral wreath to the funeral of Chung Ju Yung, the founder of the Hyundai group, in a further display of goodwill toward the south by the ruler of the Hermit Kingdom.
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| April 3, 2001 | - The German government took over control of Berlin's Jewish Museum.
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| March 27, 2001 | - A crazed German woman was arrested after she bit several people as she ran around screaming that she was a vampire.
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| January 16, 2001 | - An Iranian court sentenced several people, including a prominent journalist, to long prison terms for attending a conference in Germany that was deemed “un-Islamic” because a bare-armed woman danced there and a male protestor took off his clothes.
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| January 9, 2001 | -
Russian president Vladimir Putin was in Germany to discuss debt repayment with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder; Putin was also seeking German support for a multinational missile defense system as an alternative to the American scheme, which would violate the Treaty on the Limitation of Antiballistic Missile Systems and destabilize the world strategic order.
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| December 26, 2000 | - After a mad cow was discovered in Bavaria, Germany's health minister warned that the nation's supply of sausage might be contaminated with mad-cow brains; German consumers, who each devour about 55 pounds of sausage yearly, were near hysteria.
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| December 26, 2000 | -
Britain approved rules allowing researchers to clone human embryos; German officials called such practices “cannibalism.” Cheap Chinese
pigskin miniskirts were appearing in malls all over America.
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| December 5, 2000 | - Three American teenagers in Germany were being tried for killing two women by dropping stones on cars from a bridge.
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| November 28, 2000 | -
Germany was busy deporting Albanians from Kosovo who had overstayed their welcome, though the word deportieren, with its Nazi connotations, was avoided carefully; Abschiebung, sending away, was preferred.
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| November 21, 2000 | - In an attempt to stop the spread of CJD, German officials asked people who have lived in Britain to refrain from giving blood.
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| November 21, 2000 | - A German
general was named to head the European Union's “rapid reaction force.” Germans were horrified that Israeli soldiers had killed a German doctor outside his home in the West Bank.
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| November 14, 2000 | -
Germany's lower house of parliament passed a limited gay-marriage bill.
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| November 7, 2000 |
