Word: berliner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tone of the recent letter from the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the German government urging Germany to pony up more troops for the NATO campaign in southern Afghanistan was "stern," according to a German government spokesman. Unnamed Berlin officials were quoted in the German press calling it an "outrage" and even, in one case, an "impertinence." Nonsense, retorted a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity this week: "It was a request by one member of the alliance to another: It was not a demand." Maybe so, but the chilly reception to the missive augurs poorly...
...recalcitrance is partly political. "After Iraq, after Abu Ghraib, after Guantanamo, it is very, very difficult for Germans to agree to put their troops under U.S. command, " says Henning Riecke, a security specialist at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin who advocates sending more German troops to Afghanistan. "Most Germans don't like the U.S. way of doing war." Germany, like many European countries, is also arguing that more emphasis be placed on reconstruction and less on combat, although some acknowledge that the two are not always separable. There has to be a peace to keep...
...when Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia announced it was shutting down its plant in the Rhineland city of Bochum to move to Romania, threatening 2,300 German jobs. When the local SPD branch called for a nationwide boycott of Nokia products, billboards blared NO NOKIA all the way to Berlin. Some 56% of Germans in one poll say they're ready to sign...
...remained largely in the political center, left-wing economic policies are winning votes again, marking a break with a decade of cautious reformism. That sets a new tone for elections in Hamburg and Bavaria later this year, as well as for federal elections in late 2009. In Berlin, it makes further economic reforms unlikely until a new government is sitting in the Bundes-tag. "Germans fear the negative effects of globalization," says Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University. "The political parties have sensed that...
...have heard about John F. Kennedy's pronouncement at the Berlin Wall, "Ich bin ein Berliner" - which some people insisted could have been understood as, "I am a jelly doughnut...