Return of the Lomo
The Lomo brought cheap and cheerful photography to our household for a while in the 1990s, but unbeknownst to us it kicked off a worldwide marketing fad known as “Lomography” which encouraged arty spontaneity instead of technical achievement.
Which is just as well because technical achievement is one thing the Lomo is scarcely capable of. It’s about as sophisticated as the box it comes in, and a good deal less reliable (my Dad bought a second one because the first one just plain broke).
But today I walked into the brand-new Lomo Embassy in Berlin, intrigued as to how all this was happening again. Having had a word with the nice manager I walked straight out again on learning that they were flogging the humble Lomo LC-A (above) for an astonishing €250.
Buy your own shoebox, insert pinhole for free.
Berlin counting the cost of Afghan civilian dead
Filed under: Politics, Security & Defence | Tags: Afghanistan, Kunduz
Leave a Comment Berlin – Somewhere in the depths of the Defence Ministry in Berlin, lawyers and officials are engaged in the uncomfortable business of putting a value on human lives.
On December 7, the German government said it would compensate the civilian victims of the September 4 airstrike in Kunduz, in which according to NATO up to 142 people were killed or injured.
Now it is negotiating with Karim Popal, a German lawyer of Afghan ethnicity who has taken power of attorney for 78 people from the district of Chahar Dara who he says are relatives of civilians who died.
Popal claims he has evidence to show that exactly 137 people can be confirmed dead, 22 are still missing, and 20 were injured, when the German commander in the area ordered a US Air Force strike on two fuel tankers he thought were being hijacked by Taliban to use as mobile bombs.
Only five of the dead were Taliban, Popal says.
‘Eight hours after the bombing happened I got a call from people who had brought their children to hospital. It was absolutely clear there were civilian victims,’ Popal told ARD radio.
But it has not since become clear, nor, according to analysts, can it ever become clear, exactly how many civilian victims there were.
When a War Isn’t a War (ISN Security Watch)
Filed under: Security & Defence | Tags: Afghanistan, Defence, Kunduz
Leave a Comment Germany is fast becoming the political weak link in the West’s engagement in Afghanistan, and it’s time for the chancellor to lay the cards on the public table, Jeff Black comments for ISN Security Watch.
The US and Britain have already said, more or less, what they plan to do: Send more troops (30,000 more from America, 500 from the UK); build up the Afghan security forces; leave as soon as possible.
Germany – which with up to 4,500 troops there has the third largest contingent – wants to wait for another seven weeks, until an international conference on the Afghan conflict planned for 28 January in London, before saying what it will do.
Berlin is playing for time.
This is because Germany has the most problematic relationship between the public and military action abroad of any NATO state – for historical reasons primarily, but now because of the scandal that engulfed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government in the wake of the 4 September Kunduz airstrike.
Read Full Article Here
“If the reactor was on, we wouldn‘t be in here”
Filed under: Economy | Tags: Climate, Copenhagen, Energy, Germany, Nuclear
Leave a Comment Kruemmel, Germany (dpa) – To stand underneath a nuclear reactor is a rare, unnerving experience.
In the control-rod drive chamber at the Kruemmel Nuclear Power Plant near Hamburg, where spars of boron carbide and hafnium are pushed upward into the reactor to regulate the fission of uranium nuclei that happens a few metres above, everything is dead quiet.
“This room is normally filled with nitrogen gas instead of air to prevent fire,” the engineering guide from plant operator Vattenfall calmly explains.
“If the reactor was on, we wouldn‘t be in here,” she says.
The fact that the plant, which, rated at 1,400 megawatts is the largest nuclear power station of its type in the world, is currently switched off goes a long way to explaining the intensity of the nuclear-energy debate in Germany – and what is at stake for the industry as the world meets next week at the climate conference in Copenhagen.
