The riots spread from Hamburg to Wuppertal, but the terror reigns over an entire nation. Or a municipality, at least: Lower Saxony could ban Facebook parties following a string of violent incidents involving open party invitations.
The Burschenschaften are secretive, mostly-male German student groups whose members wear 19th-century outfits, hold beer-drinking and sword-fighting contests, and prove their manhood via facial scars. This week they've been making headlines because of some leaked documents that shed light on the racist views held by many of their leaders.
Nothing sounds more liberating than spraying your genitals with DEET, then trekking through tick-infested woods amid patches of poison ivy, thorns and other underbrush totally naked, no? That's how they roll in Germany these days. A year ago, the country's "first hiking trail for nudists" opened near Dankerode to much fanfare and now, the trend could be spreading to Switzerland if the Supreme Court there approves it.
A recent online poll asked 30,000 thousand users of social networking site Badoo (so, not Americans basically) to pick the funniest and least funny countries from a list of fifteen, and the good old Red, White & Blue came out on top.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is on a state visit to the United States, and earlier today she held a press conference with prominent American leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She came bearing a gift for her old pal Hillary, too — a framed German newspaper with a picture of their midsections, allowing readers to compare. Uh... thanks, Merk? It's that old Prussian sense of humor about ladies' hips, we guess. Germans are nuts. Anyway, Hilldawg got a good laugh out of it.
After all of the trash talking and "cucumber slurs" between Germany and Spain over where the deadly "mutant" E. coli outbreak originated, we may finally have the culprit: sprouts from a farm in Uelzen, Germany. Samples from the farm are being tested now. A German agriculture official told the BBC that "a connection has been found involving all the main outbreaks" and the farm in Uelzen. Uh, sorry Spanish cucumber farmers!
A German teenager named Thessa forgot to make sure the Facebook "event" for her 16th birthday was set to private. So 15,000 people confirmed their attendance, and more than 1,500 showed up on her doorstep.
For those of you rejoicing in bloodlust over Osama bin Laden's death, a piece of advice: Don't go to Germany! They have this bizarre cultural thing about dancing on peoples' graves with blood pouring out of your mouth. And it's entrenched enough that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's statement about being "glad" to hear about bin Laden's death has become a major national scandal, even landing her a criminal complaint from a Hamburg judge today.
Today, in news from Germany: A 24-year-old man looking for a shortcut somehow managed to trap himself in a women's prison, only to be rescued by a passing cyclist, and the town mayor, who was apparently taking a jail-side constitutional. The police, The Guardian reports, believed a jailbreak was taking place, until one of the guards recognized the mayor and quickly freed their errant prisoner. Apparently, the man had imprisoned himself by "entering a metal door on the outside of the prison, only for it to close behind him"; an examination revealed that the door "had not closed properly" thanks to a "wobbly" bolt. "We see this... as something to laugh about," said Ministry for Justice Spokesman Georg Wessling. Indeed. [Guardian]
PhD student Alex Davies has set out to discover the happiest places in the world by analyzing Tweets. A noble project! But one that may need some tweaking, given that according to his data, the happiest U.S. state is Tennessee (tied with Arizona as the eighth most-unemployed state in the union) , and the happiest country is Germany (which, c'mon, it's Germany; if it were a happy country we wouldn't have had two different world wars).
A seven-year-old girl in Germany discovered seven-foot boa constrictor in her toilet, according to police. The snake was likely a former pet that had escaped into the sewer system; animal control officers apparently snapped the above photo before it slithered off to make more psychologists in the future very rich. The girl is, as far as we know, safe. The takeaway from this story (and a similar one from the Bronx last year) is: Always look in the toilet bowl before you sit down. [German Herald; AFP via The Daily What]
NATO agreed on Thursday night to take complete command of military operations in Libya. Psych! NATO is only leading the part that involves flying jets around, while the U.S., France and the UK are stuck doing the "actual war stuff" (technical term).
A bus carrying U.S. soldiers was attacked by a gunman this morning outside the Frankfurt airport. Two people are dead. The Guardian, citing German news reports, says that the bus driver and one soldier are the victims. German reports also say that "police arrested a 21-year-old male suspect from Kosovo following the attack." There's no official word yet on motives or anything else.
Here's a video that someone took over the course of an hour of a roundabout in Erfurt, Germany. After recording the massive, embarrassing confusion that occurred during the hour, our videographer edited it down to the best (worst) two-and-a-half minutes.
