Last week I was making up PDF maps of various countries. This week I am trying something new, with an interactive maps featuring major cities and states in different countries. Today I start out with Germany. Hotter color balloons are larger cities, click for their name and population.
This is a tale that any parent of a high-school-age kid can probably relate to, but with a twist: A woman in Hagen, Germany, returned home earlier this month to find her living room thoroughly trashed, the culprit on the sofa, feet-up and utterly unrepentant. Well, the perpetrator of this domestic disaster was no surly teenager, it was a 130-pound wild boar. My Truck Gun: A Scout Rifle From Scratch
On February 4, the woman entered her home to discover the lounging hog less than 10 yards away from the front door. She was able to close the door and back out of the house without disturbing the boar. She then called the Hagen Police and several officers responded to the incident. According to a press release, the officers began strategizing how to remove the pig from the premises. The solution they settled on was quite simple. They propped open the front door, and the boar voluntarily made its way out of the house and was allowed to wander “back into nature” without further incident. The police theorized that the pig got in through a patio door, which then shut behind the animal, trapping it inside.
IT’S FEBRUARY 1944, AND BERLIN is attempting to recover from American aerial bombing. But life and industry continues on the city’s outskirts. In farmhouses, bottles clang and a mix of ex-convicts, Chinese laborers, and other workers fill glass bottles of what was likely a cloudy, brownish liquid. This is one of Coca-Cola’s makeshift bottling operations, and they are making Nazi Germany’s signature beverage. Even during war, Germans want their Fanta.
War can be a horrifying thing but so can it be relief be knowing that it's over.
Germany's Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is constantly on the lookout for potential threats to Germany's democratic constitutional system, and it has wide-ranging powers when it finds them.
"This agency has the power — and not only to do surveillance on fringe groups, domestic terrorist threats, but also to keep an eye on any political institution, like a political party," explains Melanie Amann of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the author of a book about the AfD. "Like if their program becomes more radical or if they notice that a political party, maybe that's even sitting in the parliament, goes into a direction that might be harmful to our political system."
The agency has wrapped up a two-year investigation into Germany's largest right-wing opposition party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and is expected to announce soon that it will place the entire party under surveillance for posing a threat to Germany's political system and violating the constitution. The unprecedented move would mean that all AfD lawmakers, including several dozen in Germany's parliament, would be put under state surveillance.