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Germany Finds 1,500 Masterpieces Looted by Nazis

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Photo Credit: AFP/John MacdougallNearly 1,500 priceless paintings including works by Picasso and Matisse that were stolen by the Nazis have been discovered in a flat in Munich, a news report said Sunday.

The German weekly Focus said police came upon the paintings during a 2011 search in an apartment belonging to the octogenarian son of art collector Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had bought them during the 1930s and 1940s.

The search was carried out because the son, Cornelius Gurlitt, was under suspicion for tax evasion, Focus said.

The report said the works were thought to be worth around one billion euros ($1.3 billion dollars) on today’s market.

The artworks lay hidden amid old jam jars and junk in darkened rooms in Gurlitt’s apartment in the southern city for more than half a century, the paper said.

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Germany Outraged Over Bugging of Merkel’s Phone

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Photo Credit: Medienmagazin proThe United States may have bugged Angela Merkel’s phone for more than 10 years, according to a news report on Saturday that also said President Barack Obama told the German leader he would have stopped it happening had he known about it.

Germany’s outrage over reports of bugging of Merkel’s phone by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) prompted it to summon the U.S. ambassador this week for the first time in living memory, an unprecedented post-war diplomatic rift.

Der Spiegel said Merkel’s mobile telephone had been listed by the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 — marked as “GE Chancellor Merkel” — and was still on the list weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June.

In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a “not legally registered spying branch” in the U.S. embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to “grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government”.

From there, NSA and CIA staff were tapping communication in the Berlin’s government district with high-tech surveillance.

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Germany, Brazil Turn to U.N. to Restrain American Spies

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Photo Credit: Foreign Policy Brazil and Germany today joined forces to press for the adoption of a U.N. General Resolution that promotes the right of privacy on the internet, marking the first major international effort to restrain the National Security Agency’s intrusions into the online communications of foreigners, according to diplomatic sources familiar with the push.

The effort follows a German claim that the American spy agency may have tapped the private telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and dozens of other world leaders. It also comes about one month after Brazilian leader Dilma Rousseff denounced NSA espionage against her country as “a breach of international law” in a General Assembly speech and proposed that the U.N. establish legal guidelines to prevent “cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war.”

Brazilian and German diplomats met in New York today with a small group of Latin American and European governments to consider a draft resolution that calls for expanding privacy rights contained in the International Covenant Civil and Political Rights to the online world. The draft does not refer to a flurry of American spying revelations that have caused a political uproar around the world, particularly in Brazil and German. But it was clear that the revelation provided the political momentum to trigger today’s move to the United Nations. The blowback from the NSA leaks continues to agonize U.S. diplomats and military officials concerned about America’s image abroad.

“This is an example of the very worst aspects of the Snowden disclosures,” a former defense official with deep experience in NATO, told The Cable, referring to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. “It will be very difficult for the US to dig out of this, although we will over time. The short term costs in credibility and trust are enormous.”

Although the U.N.’s ability to fundamentally constrain the NSA is nil, the mounting international uproar over U.S. surveillance has security experts fearful for the ramifications.

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Merkel’s Call to Obama: Are You Bugging my Phone?

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Photo Credit: Yves Herman/ReutersThe furor over the scale of American mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden shifted to an incendiary new level on Wednesday evening when Angela Merkel of Germany called Barack Obama to demand explanations over reports that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her mobile phone.

Merkel was said by informed sources in Germany to be “livid” over the reports and convinced, on the basis of a German intelligence investigation, that the reports were utterly substantiated.

The German news weekly, Der Spiegel, reported an investigation by German intelligence, prompted by research from the magazine, that produced plausible information that Merkel’s mobile was targeted by the US eavesdropping agency. The German chancellor found the evidence substantial enough to call the White House and demand clarification.

The outrage in Berlin came days after President François Hollande of France also called the White House to confront Obama with reports that the NSA was targeting the private phone calls and text messages of millions of French people.

While European leaders have generally been keen to play down the impact of the whistleblowing disclosures in recent months, events in the EU’s two biggest countries this week threatened an upward spiral of lack of trust in transatlantic relations.

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Thousands Show for German anti-NSA Protest

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German_protestThousands took to the streets in Berlin Saturday in protests against Internet surveillance activities by the US National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, and the German government’s perceived lax reaction to them.

Organisers, among them the opposition Greens, The Left and Pirates parties, said 20,000 people turned out. Police would not confirm the figure, saying only their “tally differs from that of the organisers”.

The protest was organised under the slogan “Freedom Rather Than Fear” and demonstrators carried banners saying: “Stop spying on us” and, more sarcastically: “Thanks to PRISM (the US government’s vast data collection programs) the government finally knows what the people want.”

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Police Storm Homeschool Class, Take Children by Force

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Four children, ages 7 to 14, have been forcibly taken from their Darmstadt, Germany, home by police armed with a battering ram, and their parents have been told they won’t see them again soon, all over the issue of homeschooling, according to a stunning new report from the Home School Legal Defense Association.

HSLDA, the world’s premiere advocate for homeschoolers, said the family of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich has battled for several years Germany’s World War II-era requirement that all children submit to the indoctrination programs in the nation’s public schools.

The shocking raid was made solely because the parents were providing their children’s education, HSLDA said. The organization noted the paperwork that authorized police officers and social workers to use force on the children contained no claims of mistreatment.

“The children were taken to unknown locations,” HSLDA said. “Officials ominously promised the parents that they would not be seeing their children anytime soon.”

The raid, which took place Thursday at 8 a.m. as the children were beginning their day’s classes, has been described by observers as “brutal and vicious.”

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Germany: We Have Good Cause to Abhor the Surveillance State

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Photo Credit: Jw WuOur grandparents’ generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany’s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism.

Germans who were born east of the Berlin Wall were careful to give the organs of the Staatssicherheit a wide berth. But it was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when the citizens who had brought down their government stormed the secret police’s headquarters and realised the full horror of the web woven by the Stasi: neighbours spying on neighbours; husbands spying on wives. Joachim Gauck, our current president, was the first head of the Stasi Archives, the government agency that, 20 years on, continues to painstakingly piece together a full record of East Germany’s surveillance of its citizens.

Yes, we Germans have better cause than many of our allies to abhor the secret state. It’s why we don’t like closed-circuit television cameras. It’s also why our constitutional court enshrined a fundamental right of data privacy, and declared it illegal for Germany to implement an EU directive on preventive data storage.

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German Railways to use Mini Drones to Stop Graffiti

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Photo Credit: France 24Germany’s railway operator plans to deploy mini drones to catch vandals who deface its trains with graffiti, with the aerial vehicles shooting thermal images of its train depots at night.

Deutsche Bahn plans to soon start testing the vehicles which have four helicopter-style rotors and can shoot high-resolution pictures.

“We are going to use this technology in problem areas, where taggers are most active,” a spokesman who asked not to be named told AFP.

A “pilot” remotely steers the vehicles at heights of up to 150 metres (500 feet) and speeds of up to 54 kilometres (33 miles) per hour.

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Obama Admin. Wins Appeal to Force German Homeschooling Family to Return to Persecution

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Photo Credit: WNDAn appeal is planned for a family of homeschoolers the Obama administration wants to deport to their home country of Germany to face persecution from education officials there who seek fines and jail for such individuals.

The word comes today from officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association, who have been arguing on behalf of the Romeike family since they fled Germany in 2008 and were granted asylum in the U.S. in 2010 by Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman.

The Obama administration was unhappy with that decision and appealed, and the grant was rescinded by the Board of Immigration Appeals in 2012.

A panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently heard arguments on the dispute, and ruled today that the asylum request should be denied.

“We believe the Sixth Circuit is wrong, and we will appeal their decision,” said Michael Farris, HSLDA founder and chairman. “America has room for this family, and we will do everything we can to help them.”

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Germany Defies Calls For Stimulus

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Photo Credit: European University Institute

Germany has ignored calls from its eurozone partners for more economic stimulus by tabling plans to cut spending and balance its budget ahead of schedule on the eve of an EU summit dedicated to growth.

Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, said on Wednesday that his budget for 2014, involving spending cuts of more than €5bn to trim the total below €300bn, was “a strong signal for Europe”.

The plan means Germany will reach budget balance in 2015, a year earlier than required under the “debt brake” written into its constitution.

He described the 2014 spending plan as “growth-friendly consolidation”, intended to prove to the rest of the eurozone that “consistent sustainable budgeting and growth are not mutually exclusive”. Philipp Rösler, economy minister, said Germany’s public finances were the “envy of the world”.

Publication of the budget was deliberately brought forward by a week to bring out the figures before the EU summit, according to German officials. In spite of tough cuts for health, social security and environment, the plan was rushed through the cabinet well ahead of schedule.

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