Leon Mangasarian worked as a news agency reporter and editor in Germany from 1989 with Bloomberg News, Deutsche-Presse Agentur and United Press International. He is now a freelance writer and tree farmer in Brandenburg, eastern Germany
German chancellor Olaf Scholz still doesn’t get it. ‘Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf’ (the fish stinks from its head) is a popular German saying. It’s proven right by Scholz’s abysmal failure to lead since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He’s failing again with Israel, declaring the Jewish state is Germany’s ‘Staatsräson’, or raison d-etat, but
Germany’s Robert Habeck might well be an excellent children’s book author but he is proving to be a dismal economy and climate minister. Habeck, who also serves as the Greens vice-chancellor in the country’s coalition government, rode to power in 2021 promising to speed up the transition to renewables. At the heart of his pledge:
‘Ku Klux Klan Brandenburg’ was emblazoned across the black T-shirt on a guy in line behind me at the Total petrol station in Peitz, 90 minutes south of Berlin. I considered asking why he liked the KKK but thought better of it after noting his girth and the grimace he gave me. Popularity of the
The lion or elephant in the photo should be stone-cold dead. The hunter posing with it should be ugly, fat and preferably American. Cue to social media outrage from celebrities, journalists and online nobodies. Few things generate more furious likes and retweets than old, white men killing African mega-fauna. Yet, as Barack Obama once said:
