Word: germanize
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Twenty years ago, a question posed by Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrmann prompted an East German official to say the words that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now new facts have emerged that shed a different light on that fateful press conference...
...press conference hosted by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) on Nov. 9, 1989, was about to come to an end when Ehrmann, who worked for the Italian news agency ANSA, inquired about the new travel law for East German citizens. Gunter Schabowski, a ruling party official, replied by announcing the introduction of new regulations that would make it possible for the people of the GDR to travel abroad. When will this take effect?" a voice from the auditorium demanded. Schabowski, after taking a quick look onto his notes through his frameless glasses, haltingly replied: "That...
...notion that the end of the old German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was properly known, was an accident triggered by a journalist's spontaneous question has now been challenged. In an interview with the German regional public broadcaster MDR Riccardo Ehrmann, 79, who last year was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the German government, revealed that a ruling party official had called him before the press conference urging him to ask about the new travel...
...interview, broadcast on April 16 in Germany, Ehrmann said: "The question concerning the travel law: that was no coincidence." He had received a "mysterious phone call," he said, from the "submarine" - a reference to the conference room of the East German state news agency ADN. Although Ehrmann in the interview didn't reveal the identity of the caller, he has since been identified as Gunter Potschke, general director of the ADN and a personal friend of Ehrmann...
...including American President Barack Obama. During a lunch with a group of French legislators Wednesday, Sarkozy reportedly described Obama as inexperienced, ill-prepared by advisers, and thus far "not always up to standard on decision-making and efficiency." And those turned out to be relatively kind words. Sarkozy said German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been reluctantly forced by economic realities to copy his own policies for dealing with the recession. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, said the French President, was simply "not very clever." (Read why Jacques Chirac is more popular than Sarkozy...