Beer consumption hits 20-year low

Germans may be famous around the world for their beer, but they drank less of the amber nectar in 2009 than at any time in the past 20 years, according to official statistics published on Thursday.

Sales of German beer, which includes the likes of Becks, Warsteiner,Radeberger and countless other brands, dropped to just under 100 hectolitres (2.2 billion gallons) in 2009, a fall of 2.8 percent on the previous year.

There has been a steady downward trend in beer sales in Germany, with a small blip in 2006, when the football World Cup, hosted by Germany, boosted consumption.

Peter Hahn, from the German Brewers Federation, said he hoped the World Cup in South Africa this year, would once again spur Germans to enjoy a few cold ones. 

"We hope that the weather this year will again play ball, that Germany does well at the World Cup and that plenty of people go to the pub or beer garden to watch the matches with a good beer," Hahn said.

The federation blamed the desperate economic situation in Germany last year for the decline. Germany, Europe's top economy, suffered a five percent contraction in 2009, the worst slump since World War II.

A longer-term trend towards less manual work and more office-based employment had also reduced Germans' after-hours thirst, the federation said.

AFP

The Local | Germany

Don Martin: Stephen Harper on the road to Damascus

When she's not slinging cocktails as Ottawa's favorite bartender to MPs of all parties, parliamentary staff and the odd thirsty journalist, Julie McCarthy fundraises for a small African village.

In the last four years, she's raised $8,000 from an annual golf tournament and auction, enough to pipe clean water to 110 crowded houses in an dusty corner of rural Kenya.

She exemplifies what Prime Minister Stephen Harper means when he insists a little money can deliver a big improvement to the wretched lives of women and children in Africa. 

With 500,000 women dying in pregnancy and nine million children perishing before their fifth birthday, Mr. Harper has vowed to lead a unified effort by G8 countries to deliver simple solutions, such as clean water, to the slow the easily-preventable carnage.

The obvious temptation is to ooze cynicism, viewing Mr. Harper's World Economic Forum speech on Thursday as a channel-changing epiphany for a prime minister suddenly sagging in the polls.

It has all the elements of a desperate makeover, the policy equivalent  of his blue sweater vest in the 2006 campaign or his Beatles singsong routine last fall.  

After all, to fend off opposition attacks of being a hard-nosed control freak, there's nothing so motherhood as helping the downtrodden in Africa or as apple pie as vowing to end the suffering for women and kids. 

So Mr. Harper clearly has to back up his priority with more than words if he's to be taken seriously. That means plenty of bucks to backfill what is, so far, empty rhetoric.

Perhaps the missing detail is understandable. These are early days in Mr. Harper's transformation from cold-hearted parliamentary tactician to global humanitarian giant. 

It's been a very sudden conversion for a prime minister who just celebrated four years in power this week with nary an earlier mention of this plight as a political crusade.

He did not raise humanitarian causes in Africa during his last campaign or in the Throne Speech. His government has, in fact, turned away from the continent as a foreign aid destination, lopping seven of its 14 countries off his government's priority list, winding down its African fund in 2008 and closing an embassy in destitute Malawi.  

Success will, the prime minister noted, require a ‘unity of purpose' by the developed nations, so it was curious that he apparently failed to flag his plan to G8 partners in advance. 

Barack Obama certainly appeared in the dark before his State of the Union address on Wednesday. The U.S. president vowed action on every conceivable file except restarting a global crusade against stricken women and children. In fact, President Obama left the distinct impression that exporting cash around the globe is at or near the bottom of his agenda.

The other six G8 leaders have not exactly leapt to the cause with enthusiasm, although delegates did give Mr. Harper's challenge the loudest applause during an address that was, it must be said, nicely crafted and solidly delivered.

More confusing is why this won't be an agenda item better suited to the larger and more influential G20 group of nations, which includes countries experienced at channeling aid for maximum benefit.   

Earlier Canadian precedents are not encouraging for this initiative.  The last Canadian-hosted G8 in Alberta's Kananaskis saw then-prime minister Jean Chretien promoting African assistance as his legacy project. He sought $64 billion from the summit's partners and pledged Canada to a $6-billion contribution, a plan that fell far short of delivery. 

This prime minister's ambitious plan is complicated by factors that didn't exist when Mr. Chretien was in power. Canada has just declared devastated Haiti a 10-year assistance priority and Mr. Harper plans to unleash a massive developmental aid effort in Afghanistan after our troops pull out of combat duty next year.  All that effort is played to the soundtrack of a deficit elimination project that will sheer billions of government spending off the bottom line.

U2 singer Bono famously declared ‘the world needs more Canada' before he soured on former prime minister Paul Martin's potential as a world leader in humanitarian aid.  

Unless Mr. Harper wants that song to remain the same, Africa need more bucks. In the current wobbily economic environment, that means it needs a political miracle.

National Post

Controversial model goes on display

Artist’s piece commemorating the holocaust draws hefty criticism from survivors and their families.

With more than one million people killed at its concentration camp, Auschwitz serves as the most powerful reminder of World War II’s wanton slaughter.

On Wednesday, Copenhagen City Council held its commemoration of ‘Auschwitz Day’, an event that pays homage to those who died at the camp and their descendants, with the theme ‘Farlige forstillinger’ (‘Dangerous exhibitions’).

The event included open discussions with photographer Jacob Holdt, films about suppression and genocide, such as ‘Hotel Rwanda’, and – not least – ‘Rolexgate’, a small model of the Auschwitz concentration camp created by Danish/Chilean artist Marco Evaristti, displayed at Nikolaj Plads square.

A proportion of the model’s materials come from gold teeth fillings of the camp’s prisoners, which included Evaristti’s own grandmother. It also includes a train car made of diamonds, while a Rolex watch showing the time a five minutes to 12 adorning the model’s entrance.

The exhibit was first displayed in late October at a gallery in Berlin, where it created such a furore that it was removed after just a few hours.

Evaristti said the exhibit wasn’t just a reminder of the death associated with the Holocaust, but also of the looting the Nazis conducted. He said he bought the teeth from an Austrian man a couple of years ago.

‘I had to appear to him to be a Nazi myself,’ said the artist. ‘I disguised myself and cut my hair very short’.

But not everyone believes Evaristti’s exhibit – or the city council’s event on the whole – is a proper expression of remembrance.

‘The Holocaust was a gravely serious event, a genocide that just decades ago cost millions of people their lives,’ wrote Tom Hermansen, art critic for Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

‘Evaristti’s model is unpleasant to me because it uses extremely sensitive material from the Nazi’s victims, whose family members are still living. By building an Auschwitz model in gold from the teeth of dead Jews, in my opinion he’s saying that the Jewish people themselves were responsible for the Holocaust,’ Hermansen argued.

Another article in the newspaper, attributed to Jutland-based vicar Uffe Westergaard Pedersen, also expressed concern that the city’s event was off the mark.

‘You shouldn’t publicise a people’s suffering through a pop-smart commemoration,’ his article states.

But deputy mayor Pia Allerslev, head of the city’s culture administration, defended the city’s take on Auschwitz Day.

‘We’re questioning the ethical challenges connected with the information disseminated about the Holocaust and World War II,’ she said.

‘We realise that this exhibit might offend some people, but a work of art should be allowed to do that. For me it’s important that we never forget what happened, and so we need to turn to things such as art to get us to reflect over the actions committed during the Holocaust,’ Allerslev said.

Evaristti himself argued the exhibit was not designed to offend anyone, but rather provoke thought. He said people often looked at the work as just an object and never thought about the symbolism behind it.

‘If you know what the model’s all about, then you should react positively to it,’ he told The Copenhagen Post.

‘But I can’t say for certain whether I’d have created it if I didn’t have Jewish blood myself or if my grandmother hadn’t been a concentration camp survivor,’ he added. ‘I really can’t answer that question, although my gut instinct is to say “of course”, because I’ve done works about Muslims and other groups’.

‘But I’m just glad I was able to buy those gold teeth myself, rather than them ending up in the hands of Nazis’.

The Copenhagem Post

Among Hitler's Executioners on the Eastern Front

As a young woman, Annette Schücking-Homeyer served as a Red Cross volunteer on the Eastern Front in Ukraine. In an interview with SPIEGEL, the retired judge discusses the horrors committed against the Jews there, how everyone knew about them and why, even after the war, most people just wanted to forget.

SPIEGEL: After World War II, most Germans denied having known about the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1943, you were a volunteer with the German Red Cross behind the lines on the Eastern Front. When did you discover that Jews were being murdered?

Annette Schücking-Homeyer: In the train on the way to the front. It was October 1941. I had been sent with another nurse to run a so-called soldiers' home in Zwiahel, a small city 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Kiev. After Brest-Litovsk, two soldiers joined us in our compartment, but I don't remember whether they were with the SS or just regular soldiers. All of a sudden, one of them told us how he had been ordered to shoot a woman in Brest. He said the woman had begged for mercy, pleading that she had to take care of her handicapped sister. He had someone get the sister, and then he shot them both. We were horrified, but we didn't say anything.

SPIEGEL: Was the man trying to show off?

Schücking-Homeyer: I don't know.

SPIEGEL: Before you arrived in Zwiahel, the city's Jewish community -- which had numbered in the thousands -- was annihilated. When did you learn of this?

Schücking-Homeyer: On the day we got there, an older officer told us that there weren't any more Jews, that they were all dead and that their houses were empty.

SPIEGEL: Did the man tell you this in private?

Schücking-Homeyer: No, he told us at the dinner table. I described it in a letter I sent to my parents soon thereafter. I also wrote that other nurses had told me that I had shouted in my sleep: "But that's impossible, it's completely impossible, it's against all international laws".

SPIEGEL: What did the town look like?

Schücking-Homeyer: The houses that had belonged to the Jews were ransacked, and you could often find Hebrew texts lying in the dirt on the floors. We were told that we could find nice Jewish candlesticks there. One of the officers took one home with him.

SPIEGEL: Did you see any mass graves?

Schücking-Homeyer: One day, the director of the combat engineering staff offered to show us the historic fortifications of Zwiahel. He pointed to a spot on the bank of the Sluch River and said that 450 Jewish men, women and children were buried there. I didn't say anything in response.

SPIEGEL: Do you know how many people were killed in Zwiahel?

Schücking-Homeyer: A few local Ukrainian girls helped us out in the soldiers' home; they said 10,000 people had been murdered. In any case, it was a large number, as I realized a few weeks later when the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) opened a huge clothing warehouse in Zwiahel. Since our Ukrainian helpers always had so little to wear, one of the officers asked me if they wanted to have any of the clothes. So I went there with the girls. There was a lot of children's clothing. Some of our girls didn't want to take anything; others said "Heil Hitler" when thanking the soldiers. I wrote to my mother about it and immediately informed her nurses in Hamburg that under no circumstances should they take any clothing from the NSV -- because it was coming from murdered Jews.

SPIEGEL: Did you ever witness any of these crimes with your own eyes?

Schücking-Homeyer: No. But it almost happened once. Every week, I would travel to Rivne, about 100 kilometers away, to pick up food and beer for the soldiers' home. There was a large ghetto there. One day -- it was in July 1942 -- the brewery where many Jews had worked was closed for business. Then we drove through the ghetto, but it was deserted. It had apparently been cleared just a short time before. And then we saw Germans soldiers herding together women and children who had apparently been hiding. There was no doubt that they were about to be shot. When I got back to Zwiahel, I was still crying. All I wanted to do was go home.

SPIEGEL: Rivne saw several waves of murder, and thousands were killed. Do you know anything about the circumstances?

Schücking-Homeyer: I would often go to the office of the military administration in Rivne to pick up ration coupon books. The soldiers discussed the resettlements so nonchalantly that I had to ask. "What's this resettlement all about?" I would ask. "When do they find out about it…"

SPIEGEL: At that point, had you already figured out that "resettlement" was just a polite way of saying "murdering Jews"?

Schücking-Homeyer: Yes, but I don't remember exactly when and how I found out. At any rate, the people at the military administration in Rivne said: "We are notified on the evening before it happens that a resettlement is going to take place at a specific location, and that it could get violent. The locally stationed troops aren't supposed to worry about it or get involved". Today, we know that special task forces and police officers carried out the shootings.

SPIEGEL: Did you also talk to any of these men in the soldiers' home?

Schücking-Homeyer: I can't say. They were all wearing uniforms and did everything that normal soldiers do.

Part 2: 'Oh, What an Enormous Slaughterhouse the World Is'

SPIEGEL: On Nov. 5, 1941, you wrote to your parents: "What Papa says is true: people with no moral inhibitions exude a strange odor. I can now pick out these people, and many of them really do smell like blood. Oh, what an enormous slaughterhouse the world is." Did you think you could detect the murderers?

Schücking-Homeyer: Yes, at least I thought so at the time. If you are a master over life and death, you behave and move differently than other people do. You give off the impression that you are the one making all the decisions.

SPIEGEL: Did you avoid these men?

Schücking-Homeyer: Well, you could at least choose the people you wanted to talk to.

SPIEGEL: Your letters contain many passages like "But the Jews, who ran most of the shops, are all dead" or "There aren't any more Jews here in Zwiahel". You write nothing about killing or murder. Were you afraid you might be censored?

Schücking-Homeyer: Of course. You know, I was an anxious girl. I wrote to my mother -- who was completely different from me -- that she wouldn't have lasted there a day. And I'm sure she would've found a way to get away from there. By staying there, you were basically supporting the system. But I didn't know what reason I could give for wanting to leave, and I needed a permit to go back to Germany.

SPIEGEL: Do you think your family got your hints?

Schücking-Homeyer: Of course.

SPIEGEL: Could you talk about these things with the other nurses?

Schücking-Homeyer: No, we didn't discuss such things.

SPIEGEL: But did everyone know what was going on?

Schücking-Homeyer: I can't say for sure whether soldiers at the front knew. But everyone behind the lines -- and especially those who'd been there for a while -- knew about it.

SPIEGEL: What makes you so sure?

Schücking-Homeyer: Because, in conversation, it was always assumed that everyone knew. I haven't told you yet, but one day I was in a car with a sergeant named Frank. He said he was from Münster and that he was going to be part of a major campaign in the coming weeks in which people would be executed by firing squad. He said he was doing it because he wanted a promotion. I told him not to do it, that he wouldn't be able to sleep afterwards.

SPIEGEL: And?

Schücking-Homeyer: He did it anyway, and later he complained to me about not being able to sleep and about how bad he felt. "I told you so," I replied.

SPIEGEL: Why do you think he confided in you?

Schücking-Homeyer: Oftentimes, conversations with soldiers got personal fast. They were all men who hadn't been around women for a long time. There were the Ukrainian women, of course, but they couldn't talk to them -- and they all had an intense need to talk. On another occasion, I was riding in a truck when, all of a sudden, the driver started telling me that in Kasatin, a village southwest of Kiev, they had allowed several hundred Jews to go hungry for two days before shooting them to death because the firing squads had been busy working somewhere else.

SPIEGEL: And that was just something he said to you in private?

Schücking-Homeyer: Yes. But there was another story that everyone knew about. German farmers controlled the Zwiahel area, one of whom was a certain Mr. Nägel from Hesse. There was an oft-told story about how one time, when a group of Jews was being herded past the house, his housekeeper -- who was also a Jew -- laughed. He reportedly then pushed her into the line with the other Jews. It didn't take long for me to figure out that I was dealing with criminals.

SPIEGEL: You wrote to your mother: "Soon, I'll get to the point where I'm past all the justified outrage, and then it'll be much easier for me to process things. Even the most decent people here have already reached that point. Once you don't have to see everything -- and, in general, things are already over here -- you can forget. But I still get terribly upset when I see a child and know that it'll be dead in 2-3 days." It reads as if you were searching for a way to deal with the horrible things that were happening.

Schücking-Homeyer: I don't remember exactly. I might have also written that to mislead the censors.

SPIEGEL: Of course, your letters also contain passages that lead one to believe that you let yourself be infected by your surroundings.

Schücking-Homeyer: No. My father had been an attorney, but he had been barred from practicing since 1933, so I was very afraid of censorship. I was never an anti-Semite. On the contrary, on several occasions later in the war, we helped out persecuted Jews.

Part 3: 'Former Nazis Were Everywhere'

SPIEGEL: After the war, what did you do with your knowledge about what had happened in Zwiahel?

Schücking-Homeyer: I had concluded that soldiers would file legal complaints, but then I didn't hear anything about it. And so, in 1945, I suggested to the public prosecutor in Münster -- who had trained me in 1943 and was the senior public prosecutor by then -- that he should take legal steps to prevent evidence from being destroyed. After all, at the time, the facts were all still available, including information about which units … were stationed there. But he responded that we should leave it up to the English. I suppose he was too cowardly. Three or four weeks later, I informed the Jewish community in Dortmund, where I was living at the time, but no one there was interested, either.

SPIEGEL: And later?

Schücking-Homeyer: It was impossible to talk about it openly in the court system with any colleagues who had been in the East. Former Nazis were everywhere. It wasn't until a few years before I retired that the subject of Zwiahel came up again. In 1974, I was a judge at a social welfare court in Detmold. I was handed a retirement pension insurance case that had to do with an ethnic German who wanted credit for his service in 1941 with the German police in Zwiahel. He had been part of the so-called Ukrainian protective team, which I assumed had taken part in the so-called resettlements. I wrote to him that I knew exactly what had happened in Zwiahel in October 1941 and that it would be better for him to file a challenge against my taking the case on the grounds that I was biased. He did so right away. My substitute gave him the credit, as the law unfortunately required.

SPIEGEL: You didn't report the man to the police?

Schücking-Homeyer: No, he was just a little cog in the wheel. But then I contacted the central office in Ludwigsburg to find out whether it had investigated the murders in Zwiahel yet (ed's note: The Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes has been located in this southwestern German city since 1958). Then, when I testified, I told them everything I knew. Still, as a witness, I could only testify against Sergeant Frank. But he couldn't be located.

Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Klaus Wiegrefe

Spiegel Internacional

Catcher in the Rye author J D Salinger dies aged 91

Reuters

The reclusive U.S. author J.D. Salinger, who wrote the American literary classic "The Catcher in the Rye," has died in New Hampshire aged 91, his agent said today.

"He died yesterday at his home in New Hampshire," said literary agent Phyllis Westberg.

"The Catcher in the Rye" was published in 1951, and its story of alienation and rebellion, featuring the teenage hero Holden Caulfield, immediately resonated with adolescent and young adult readers.

The work has been translated into the world's major languages and sold more than 65 million copies.

Salinger has been a recluse since 1953, though, ferociously protecting his privacy in Cornish, a small town in northwest New Hampshire.

Besides "Catcher" he published only a few books and collections of short stories in his literary career, including "9 Stories," "Franny and Zooey," "Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters" and "Seymour: - An Introduction".

His last published work was in 1965.

Neighbors in Cornish rarely saw him and he never returned phone calls or letters from readers or admirers. Only rumors, infrequent sightings, lawsuits and rare, brief interviews brought him to public attention.

As such, Salinger would have been a disappointment to his most famous creation.

"What really knocks me out," Caulfield said in "The Catcher in the Rye," "is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it".

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1919.

The Independent

Ten Things Missing From the iPad

By Charlie Sorrell

The iPad was supposed to change the face of computing, to be a completely new form of digital experience. But what Steve Jobs showed us yesterday was in fact little more than a giant iPhone. A giant iPhone that doesn’t even make calls. Many were expecting cameras, kickstands and some crazy new form of text input. The iPad, though, is better defined by what isn’t there

Flash

Many people will bemoan the lack of Flash in the iPad. It wasn’t mentioned, but eagle-eyed viewers would have seen the missing plugin icon on the New York Times site during yesterday’s demo, and given that Apple clearly hates Flash as both a non-open web “standard” and as a buggy, CPU-hungry piece of code, it’s unlikely it will ever be added, unless Apple decides it wants to cut the battery life down to two hours.

Who needs Flash, anyway? YouTube and Vimeo have both switched to H.264 for video streaming (in Chrome and Safari, at least — Firefox doesn’t support it), and the rest of the world of Flash is painful to use.

In fact, we think the lack of Flash in the iPad will be the thing that finally kills Flash itself. If the iPad is as popular as the iPhone and iPod Touch, Flash-capable browsers will eventually be in the minority.

OLED

One of the biggest rumors said that there would be two iPads, one with an OLED screen and one without. But as our own Apple-master Brian X Chen pointed out, an OLED panel of this size runs to around $400. Add in the rest of the hardware and even the top-end $830 model wouldn’t be making Apple much money.

OLED also has some dirty secrets. It may be more colorful, but it uses more power than an LED backlit screen when all the diodes are lit up (white on black text is where OLED energy savings shine). It is also rather dim in comparison, and making an e-reader that you can’t use outdoors would be a stupid move from Apple.

USB

The iPad is meant to be an easy-to-use appliance, not an all-purpose computer. A USB port would mean installing drivers for printers, scanners and anything else you might hook up. But there is a workaround: the dock connector. Apple has already announced a camera connection kit, a $30 pair of adapters which will let you either plug the camera in direct or plug in an SD card to pull off the photos.

The subtle message here is that it’s not a feature for the pros: the lack of a Compact Flash slot says “amateurs only”.

Expect a lot more of these kinds of accessories, most likely combined with software. How long can it be before, say, EyeTV makes an iPad-compatible TV tuner?

GPS

Apple put a compass inside every iPad, so you’d think that there would be a GPS unit in there, too. The Wi-Fi-only models get nothing, just like the iPod Touch, but more surprising is that the 3G iPads come with AGPS. Assisted GPS can be one of two things, both of which which offload some work to internet servers and use cell-tower triangulation. The difference is that some AGPS units have real GPS too, and some don’t. We’ll know which the iPad has as soon as we get our hands on one.

Multitasking

From the demonstrations at the Jobsnote, it appears that, like the iPhone, we can’t run applications in the background. This will annoy many, but it will not matter at all to the target user, who will be using the iPad to browse and consume media. In fact, this user will benefit, as the lack of CPU-cycle-sucking background processes is likely a large part of that ten-hour battery life.

If you are authoring content, like this post, then multiple browser windows, a text editor, a mail client and a photo editor all make sense. If you’re reading an ebook, not so much.

Keyboard

Nobody really thought the iPad would have a physical keyboard. That won’t stop the whining, though. The difference, again, between the iPad and a MacBook is that one is a multi-purpose device and the other is a media player. The fact that Apple actually has made a keyboard for it is the biggest surprise (apart from the $500 price).

In fact, this little $70 accessory will mean that, despite its simplified nature, the iPad is enough laptop for many people. Why bother with a $400 netbook when you can have this instead?

Camera

No video camera, no stills camera, and no webcam. The first two will likely never make it into a future iPad, as we all have our iPhones or actual cameras with us, too. But the lack of a webcam is odd. I have this down as a straight cost saving measure, and it is the only thing that stops me buying an iPad for my parents, who I talk to on Skype. There seems to be no other reason not to have a webcam in the bezel other than price. We expect to see one in v2.0.

Verizon

iPhone users hate AT&T, but the only alternative is T-Mobile, whose coverage isn’t as good. Until Verizon switches to the world-standard GSM SIM card, don’t expect to see an Apple product on its network. You can forget all those Verizon iPhone rumors right now.

16:9

The iPad screen is a relatively square, by today’s standards, 4:3 ratio. This is not ideal for watching widescreen movies: you get a thick black bar top and bottom. But take another look at the hardware: the Apple on the back, and the position of the home button both tell us that the iPad is meant to be used in portrait mode, at least most of the time. And a 16:9 ratio in this orientation would look oddly tall and skinny, like an electronic Marilyn Manson.

It’s a compromise, and a good one. If you really do spend most of your time watching movies on the iPad, maybe you should think about buying, you know, a big TV.

HDMI

There will be video out, likely through the dock connector, as we were told in the presentation that you can hook the iPad up to a projector. But no HDMI out? How do you hook it up to your HD monitor?

The short answer is that you don’t. The maximum audience for an iPad screening is two. You want more? Use your laptop and hook that up, or your desktop machine. Remember, there are two kinds of people who will buy the iPad. One, nerds like you and me, who care about things like HDMI and also already owna computer that can do that.

And two, people who are buying this instead of a computer. Those people will probably still have DVD collections, or even VCRs. They don’t even know what HDMI is. I think I can guess what Apple thought about putting another expensive connector into the machine just to please a few geeks.

Photo: Jon Snyder

Wired