Die Welt 09.03.2007

A Greek-Turkish video war on YouTube has attracted the attention of Boris Kalnoky. After a Greek user posted a clip in which he described the great Atatürk as "the father of the gay Turks", a court in Istanbul blocked YouTube access. This did not prevent 129 anti-Greek videos being posted (here the results for an Atatürk gay search). "Now the Turkish blogosphere is furiously debating whether it was right to block YouTube. On one side are the back-patters: 'Thanks to all of you who taught YouTube a lesson," writes Lalpay in a reader comment on the Internet station KanalTürk. On the other are numerous voices who don't want to live without YouTube. A group of students wrote to the court requesting that the decision be reversed, arguing it was not the maker of the video who was being punished, but the citizens of Turkey who wanted to use YouTube.... Then there are some outsiders from the grin-and-bear-it school: 'What a beautiful fatherland. The world is insulting us but are we solving the problem just by not watching it? We are a joke,' writes Bulba."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 09.03.2007

Jürg Altwegg reports from France on the sympathies of former leftist intellectuals for right-wing presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, recommending people shouldn't let outsider Francois Bayrou out of their sights: "Around 20 percent of voters now openly support Bayrou in the polls. And he only stands to gain from attacks levelled at him by the increasingly nervous favourites. It could well be, for example, that Alain Finkielkraut, angered by rumours that he was siding with Sarkozy, will come out in favour of Bayrou. His biggest hurdle remains the first ballot. In a run-off second ballot, all the polls are giving Bayrou the lead over both Royal and Sarkozy."

Martin Wittmann writes that the dachshund, long Germany's most beloved dog (photos here), is now threatened with extinction: "With its sausage body and crooked legs, the dachshund is basically a very silly-looking pet, whether long, short or wire-haired... And now the romance is over. In the hard-nosed global competition, our long-standing but unattractive companion has no chance against the gorgeous golden retriever. Owners bronze themselves in the tanning salons, while in the dog parlours hair is being bleached. People are getting darker, their dogs are getting lighter. Germans always walked behind their dachshunds, and now they're letting them be the first reach the happy hunting ground in the sky."


Die Welt 09.03.2007

Peter Zander speaks with director Volker Schlöndorff, whose Solidarnosc film "Strajk" has just come out in Germany. Asked whether Polish dissatisfaction with his telling of the story led to problems during shooting, Schlöndorff replies: "On the contrary, the film was incredibly easy to shoot, with Katharina Thalbach in the lead role and the shipyard as our only set. Every morning we walked by the clocking-in machine, the dockyard was like a huge studio for us. Of course the workers were delighted someone was telling their story once again. And for me it's also important that people come away thinking, aha! so that's how you build a ship! (...) The Polish actors were fantastic, and incredibly eager to help Kati when she spoke German, and when they spoke Polish. And now the paradox is that there are two original versions. From an artistic point of view the German version is simply better, because Kati is just stunningly good, and her voice is like a dream. But the Polish version is more authentic, that adds a lot of colour."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 09.03.2007

In the series "Yesterday's future" author Georg Klein remembers John Wyndham's novel "The Day of the Triffids" from 1951. "People knew that the plants could spread their roots and lurch forwards on their three stalk stumps. But suddenly they were beginning to understand the extent of their perception and communication abilities, not to mention their collective intelligence. It is as if the strange green stuff had just been waiting for the opportunity to strike out. The blind and the seeing, the whole human race and its proud culture was on the verge of succumbing to the will to kill of a man-sized plant, which when preparing for attack, drums its stem with three short shoots. (...) In a plant's even green, in the serial variety of its shoots and leaves shines the radical brutality of the very principle of 'life' itself. 'It', or life, desires nothing more than just to go on."