Monday 8 February, 2010
In a letter to the Nobel Foundation, Herta Müller expresses her support for the nomination of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize, "because in the face of countless threats from the Chinese regime and great risk to his life, he has fought unerringly for the freedom of the individual."
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Monday 11 January, 2010
Thirty years of superficial reporting by the Western press neglected the build up to the current turmoil in Tehran. Iranians are not risking their lives because of an alleged election fraud last June, but because they have endured thirty years of brutality, humiliation and frustration. By Haideh Daragahi
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Friday 18 December, 2009
To advocate the Swiss minaret ban with the arguments of Anne Applebaum, Henryk Broder and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is to apply to the sort of fundamentalist logic which the west left behind - historically speaking - an amazingly short time ago. If we don't want to return to a pre-1648 world, Gustav Seibt argues, what we need now is two-way tolerance.
photo:hewy
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Tuesday 17 November, 2009
On November 11, Ehsan Fattahian, a 28-year old Kurdish freedom fighter, was dealt 'sudden death' in a prison in the Kurdish province of Iran. Nobody was present at the execution and no medical certificate was released. The same fate has befallen any number of demonstrators who took part in the protests after the elections, and lays ahead for 12 other political prisoners in jails throughout Iran. By Ahmad Eskandari
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Thursday 21 October, 2009
Claus Leggewie and Harald Welzer have written a book about the end of the world as we knew it. Jan Feddersen grills them on climate change and the role of democracy in a political system that has had no new ideas since the fall of the Wall.
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Monday 31 August, 2009
UPDATE: Herta Müller wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009. Twenty years after Ceausescu's execution, his secret service is still active - only its name has changed. Secret files are being manipulated; shadowing and smear campaigns continue. For the first time, Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller describes her long history of Securitate persecution, uncertain of how much she has yet to endure.
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Wednesday 5 August, 2009
Shadi Sadr, an Iranian feminist and human rights activist working as a lawyer and journalist, was released on bail from Tehran's Evin prison last Tuesday. Haideh Daragahi looks at an article written by Sadr, which may have triggered her arrest. It is a blueprint for the future of the Iranian women's movement and how it should relate to the new movement for change that is rocking Iran.
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Friday, 31 July, 2009
In a footnote to his latest book, Timothy Garton Ash distances himself from the term "Enlightenment fundamentalism", which he had used in reference to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. John Gray picked up on the ammendment immediately and took him to task in The New Statesman. Perlentaucher editor Thierry Chervel is baffled by Gray's twisted pessimism.
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Monday 20 July, 2009
Alham Abrahimnejad is a women's rights activist who fled Iran two years ago and now lives in Berlin. She talks to Waltraud Schwab about her fear of being sent back home, the soul of the Iranian protest and her lack of freedom in Germany.
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Monday 20 April 2009
Politicians are turning Istanbul's year as European Cultural Capital 2010 into a programme for promoting real estate and tourism. By Dragan Klaic
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Monday 15 March 2009
In local elections at the beginning of the month, the Austrian state of Carinthia effectively granted a governing majority to a dead man. Eva Menasse looks at an idyllically beautiful corner of the world that has been dumbed-down to death. Photo by pixel0809
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Monday 16 February, 2009
The fatwa against British Indian author Salman Rushdie was issued 20 years ago. Today, says Thierry Chervel, Islamism has the West more firmly in its grip than ever before – thanks to our left-wing intellectuals.
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Wednesday January 14, 2009
Tunisian-born writer Abdelwahab Meddeb depicts the pain and sadness afflicting Gaza, where the horror of the human race appears in all its nakedness.
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Wednesday 26 November, 2008
The age of privatisation is over. Politics not the market is responsible for promoting the common good. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas talks to Thomas Assheuer about the necessity of an international world order. (Photo: Wolfram Huke)
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Monday 11 November, 2008
Dragan Klaic was in Moscow to run a theatre workshop. He was overwhelmed by the sense of impending financial disaster and nearly missed his plane home.
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