In Germany, Sex Workers Get Special Training To Serve The Disabled

By Dietrich Mittler

The cozy office of the Kassandra counseling center for sex workers in the southern German state of Bavaria, features one bright red sofa, a large wooden table and pastel-colored painting on the wall. This is usually where men and women who wish to leave the sex industry come in search of training classes to change careers.

But a different kind of training is underway this evening. Seven workers have come to earn their diplomas in “qualified sexual accompaniment and assistance.”

Barbel Ahlborn, who heads the Nuremberg counseling center, is proud of the courses that Kassandra developed with Pro Familia, a family planning center. “This is a unique model project for the nation,” she says.

The training has taught sex workers Erika, Birgit, Kai, Elisabeth and Romy, as well as Richard and Kurt (all names have been changed), how they can help disabled people to blossom their sexuality.

The end of the course is celebrated with some sparkling wine, pizza and salad. But participants know that their having a certificate in accompaniment and assistance is not going to change what many people think – because their very line of work, i.e. prostitution, is still taboo.

Even more alienating to many, they believe, is the idea that paid services should be available to those with physical and mental disabilities. Says Romy: “Public opinion will be split – some will welcome this, but the many who have always been against sex workers will say it’s perverse.”

Simone Hartmann, deputy head of Pro Familia in Nuremberg doesn’t see things quite so pessimistically. “Today, the sexuality and sexual autonomy of disabled people is no longer a taboo subject, even if it isn’t yet absolutely normal to actually deal with it,” she says.

That much was clear at a Munich conference on the sexual and reproductive rights of disabled people, which was held a few months ago. While many heads of facilities for the disabled no longer disagree with the fact that handicapped people have a right to express their sexuality, to publically acknowledge that their establishment allows sex workers to operate in it is an image issue, they say.

Meanwhile there are frequent discussions on Internet forums about the sexuality of the disabled. Can paraplegic men, for example, have sex? And if so, how? In her blog, the female partner of one such man reveals that: “Over time, by learning to caress parts of the body we didn’t use to find erotic, we rediscovered each other in new, more intense, ways.”

Prostitution or “sexual accompaniment”?

Erika, who moonlights as a sex worker, says she thinks people have the wrong idea about “sexually accompanying” the disabled. “It’s not always about intercourse, but also touch and tenderness,” she points out. She tells the story of her first visit to an old man in a retirement home, an experience she calls one of the very best she’s had as a sex worker because of something he said. When she left, he whispered: “If the others only knew how wild we were being!” And yet: “All we did was dance and touch each other a little.”

Now the Nuremberg native will be providing services to physically and mentally disabled people as well, for which she charges 150 euros. Her partner knows what she does: “He’s a grown man, not a boy, and he knows me and knows I’m not crazy – just a little different from other people.”

Social worker Kurt says that he first became aware of the sexual needs of the disabled from working as a group leader in a facility for the mentally handicapped. “Sexuality is something that must be experienced but these folks don’t have the chance,” he says. He doesn’t have concrete ideas about his new line of work yet – “I think a lot of it will be about explaining, helping people learn about their bodies, letting them see and touch a naked man, that kind of stuff,” he says.

Unlike Richard, who only wants to work with female clients, Kurt says he can see himself with men although it would depend on whom. Kurt has grown children. They know about his plans, “and it’s no big deal, they think it’s cool,” he says.

But Birgit, a lively slim woman who’s been earning her living as a sex worker for the past 26 years, says that her daughter did not welcome the news when she told her.

While qualifications in sexual accompaniment and assistance may be a new milestone, several therapists in Germany have been urging awareness of the issue since the 1990s , and there are individual practitioners around the country offering services – as a general rule, caressing, body contact, massage, in some cases sexual release but without kissing, oral sex, or intercourse. Indeed, to the annoyance of Kassandra’s Ahlborn, Pro Familia has even drawn a line between prostitution and “sexual accompaniment.”

“Prostitution is legal in Germany. Sex workers are independent business people. They pay taxes,” she says.

Course participant Kai, who has worked as a professional for many years, believes that the prejudice against sex work is unfair. “It’s serious work,” she says, pointing out that not all men are lucky enough to find life partners and sex workers bridge a need. She adds that she’s happy that the joint effort by Kassandra and Pro Familia has lent an open “note of seriousness to our work.”

For her part, Pro Familia’s Hartmann is aware that prostitution is a sensitive issue. If Pro Familia teamed up with Kassandra to run the course, she says, it was because it was necessary: “Particularly in Bavaria, the need for appropriate and qualified people to work with the disabled in this regard was becoming ever more pressing,” she says.

(Translation by Worldcrunch, photo by Florian Peljak)

This Little Piggy Helped Children… But The Neighbors Wouldn’t Let Her Stay Home

By Katja Auer

It’s a common scenario in Bavaria: somebody wants to keep pigs at home, often because doing so anywhere else wouldn’t be worth it. But then the neighbors inevitably get into the act. Pigs stink. Pigs grunt.

Nothing against a nice piece of pork, mind you, but raising them… No, NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) you don’t. Citizens’ initiatives, petitions – some even go to court to try to prevent a pig farm from opening. Sometimes they win, sometimes they don’t. Nothing new there.

But there is something very different about the latest pig issue that has come up in Bad Kissingen, a spa town in south-central Germany. This is not about a pig farm, but two small pigs named Bella and Paula who live in the garden of a physiotherapist who works from home.

For four years, therapist Heide Balzer-Ruhl has been using the pigs in sessions with disabled children. “I let the children pet the pigs,” she says and the effect on the children is positive. “You can see it on the expressions on the children’s faces.” She has been working as a therapist in the spa town for nearly 40 years. She also uses dogs in her work with the children.

Apparently, nobody was disturbed by the presence of the pigs, at least not for a long time. But Balzer-Ruhl recently moved the location of the pen in the garden and it now borders directly on the terrace of neighbors, who say they were surprised by the change when they returned from a vacation.

The therapist had apparently told other neighbors about the planned change, and none of them had any issues with it, or with the animals. But the one couple who apparently had not been advised took things amiss and complained to local authorities. The couple did not wish to comment on events.

Awfully cute

“The pigs are right in front of their nose,” town spokesman Thomas Hack stated, intimating that “nose” was the operative word here and not only the sight of Bella and Paula but their smell were offensive. Balzer-Ruhl maintains that the pigs have less of an odor than a dog because they are given a vegan diet that includes corn, carrots and crisp breads. She adds that excrement in their pen is cleaned out three times a day.

Local authorities are going to have to take a decision in the case, and Hack indicates that there is sympathy for both parties. Legally however the matter is cut and dried: even though a veterinarian has stated that the small pigs have the best care and living conditions, keeping them is not on. “You’re not allowed to keep pigs in a residential area,” Hack says.

So for the past four years Bella and Paula have been living in a legal grey area. “It shouldn’t have been going on, but nobody complained,” the spokesman says, adding that down at the municipal offices they are hoping the neighbors will find a mutually acceptable solution to the problem. One couldn’t lose sight of the fact that the neighbors have rights, on the other hand Bella and Paula are awfully cute, he said.

Therapist Balzer-Ruhl is also hoping for a harmonious outcome. There must be a way to find to common ground, she says; she certainly doesn’t want any unpleasantness with her neighbors. If only they had complained directly to her first before alerting authorities. She finds it difficult to contemplate having to part with the animals.

So right now, Bella and Paula’s fate hangs in the balance. Meanwhile the German media – both the papers, and now television – have picked up the story. Stay tuned.

(Translation by Worldcrunch, photo by Siegfried Farkas)

In Ukraine, Where Homophobia Runs So Deep ‘Gay’ Doesn’t Even Exist

By Cathrin Kahlweit

The way his dad found out was not good. On the other hand it was his own fault. He’d left his laptop open, and when his father came to visit him at his student apartment he started clicking around on it and found pictures of him kissing his boyfriend Petja.

First reaction – fury. Then shame. After that came the disciplinary measures: no more apartment, back to mom and dad’s where he was grounded and sent to therapy to “cure” him. Shenja’s father reasoned that it was a phase; if he could just keep his 21-year-old son from seeing his boyfriend then the perversity would stop. A main concern for his father, Shenja says, was “making damn sure nobody found out about it.” Including Shenja’s mother. A gay son? Unthinkable. The disgrace!

Actually, “gay” is not a term used in Ukraine. It’s too direct. “Men who have sex with other men” is the way it’s officially put, so that it sounds more like a practice rather than an orientation. Practices can be changed. In this country, homosexuality is still taboo, and many Ukrainians – including many politicians – consider it a sickness. As regards acceptance of same-sex relationships, Ukraine is behind even Russia. It is the most homophobic country in Europe.

That France, the U.S., Germany are presently legislating on marriage for gays and lesbians, adoption rights, and other issues pertaining to legal homosexual unions, sounds – in Kiev, Donetsk, Lviv or Odessa – like news from Mars.

Anna Dogopol, of the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Kiev, who works “for sexual democracy and the rights of lesbian women” and is herself a lesbian, says that: “In the Ukraine, even civil partnerships are considered a perversion of European law.”

Which may be the reason why two drafts for legislation – one that would make “homosexual propaganda” in the arts and media, the other that would make any suggestion that homosexual relationships are equal to traditional ones, jailable offences – are currently in development. Both drafts take their inspiration from the Russian anti-gay bill and aim to ensure that the subject of homosexuality is silenced in public, in schools, and in the medical community.

According to the initiators of the competing laws, this is about protecting children. What they’re not saying is that Ukraine is the country in Europe with the most steeply climbing rate of HIV infection. Homosexuals are a high-risk group. So logically, one should be talking about homosexuality, at least in the context of AIDS prevention and treatment. That would protect children.

In Shenja and Petja’s case, the attempts at silencing and covering up ultimately didn’t work. For about nine months, the lovers could only meet for walks when 27-year-old Petja, a manager, had his lunch break. But now they have found a way to live together – incognito, outside the city, and with a live-in girl as a front. They tell people they’re flat sharing, but both men profess anxiety in case somebody finds out the real situation.

Can they walk down the street holding hands? They’ve tried it. People stare. Can they kiss in public? Out of the question. “It’s too dangerous, even in the city you’d probably get beaten up, and elsewhere you would for sure,” says Petja. And it’s only gotten worse since plans for the new laws got underway. “What the laws say to people here – who in any case are overwhelmingly homophobic – is that it’s okay to hate gays and lesbians. They cement and strengthen prejudice.”

The men refused to be photographed for this article, even for a German paper. There was a skinhead cousin in Germany, he might see it, and let people back home know.

“Love Against Homosexuality”

Thirty percent of the parents of gays and lesbians in Ukraine don’t know their children are homosexual, and of those parents who do know only about half accept the situation. That’s according to a poll conducted by Nash Mir, a human rights organization that supports gays, lesbians, bis and transsexuals. The group is largely financed from outside Ukraine, and its spokesperson, Andryi Maymulachin (pictured above, center, with his partner), says that he is ever more cautious, “even more so than I already was.” The 42-year-old Ukrainian says it took him a long time to come out, and that before he took a trip to Russia he didn’t even know that gays or lesbians existed. Then in Moscow in an illegal magazine he saw a picture of two gays touching each other and knew instinctively that “this was about me.”

Last year a Gay Pride Parade was supposed to take place in Kiev but the police said they couldn’t guarantee security so it was cancelled. Instead there was a press conference in a parking lot around the corner from the Nash Mir office attended by journalists and rowdies who beat two activists up badly.

This year in May there’s supposed to be a demonstration in favor of human rights and minorities. The first threats against the demonstration are starting to appear on extreme right Russian websites. In Kiev right-wingers and “right-thinking” folks demonstrate regularly, their slogan being “Love Against Homosexuality” as if the former were an opposite pole from the latter.

Kiev Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church says with regard to homosexuals that Christians shouldn’t forget why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Archbishop Sviatoslav of the Greek-Catholic Church says that homosexuality is “as grave a sin as murder.”

According to the UN, some 400,000 people in the Ukraine are infected with HIV. That’s ten times as many as in Germany, although Ukraine’s population (46 million) is only a little over half the size of Germany’s.

Ukraine is a country where many doctors are reluctant to treat AIDS patients, where international donors invest three times what Ukraine does in the prevention of and fight against HIV and AIDs, and where people with AIDs either keep quiet about it or don’t even know they have it. This is a country where drug addicts, street kids, and prostitutes are increasingly passing the virus on to heterosexuals. Homosexuals are one of many high-risk groups but not the largest. However – as if one stigma weren’t enough – all the blame is placed at their door.

Shenja deals with this every day. After he got his law degree, he started doing outreach work for the Gay Alliance. Afternoons and evenings, when gay couples take walks in downtown Kiev – here amid all the tourists they’re less noticeable – he goes up to them to offer help, tells them what the risks are, hands out condoms as discreetly as a dealer hands over drugs. Being a homosexual in Ukraine often makes him feel bad, he says, “but if I didn’t do anything I’d feel worse.” 

(Translation by Worldcrunch, photo by Anastasia Wlasowa)

On The “Trip Of Death” From North To South Korea

By Reymer Klüver

The distance between the North Korean border town of Hyesan and South Korea’s capital Seoul is 440 kilometers (273 mi) as the crow flies. It took Park Kun-ha five years to complete the journey.

His way turned out not only to be a lot longer but tortuous, taking him through the jungle of large Chinese cities, Southeast Asian rain forests, labor camps, and even prison. It was a modern odyssey during which he became the victim of crime and a thief himself, as well as rag collector, beggar, harvest hand and tile carrier. He made it to his destination in the end – only to discover that he wasn’t really welcome.

Park, a native of North Korea now living in Seoul, is one of 25,000 refugees who have managed the perilous escape from the Communist country isolated from the rest of the world to seek a new life in the south.

“The trip of death” is what refugees like Park call the risky North-South trek. Nobody knows how many give up along the way, are arrested by North Korean officials, or are arrested in China and kicked out. Only the ones who actually make it know how dangerous the journey is. Park left in June 2000 and got to Seoul in June 2005.

The easiest part was fleeing across the border to China on foot, the 50-year-old man says. He was a customs inspector at the border, so it was relatively easy to find a moment when he could wade across the Amrok River unobserved. But he had to make sure not to be discovered by Chinese officials because they send North Koreans right back where they came from where, if they’re lucky, they end up in a labor camp and if they’re not they are executed as traitors.

Park made it through China. In the border region he was helped by members of the Korean-Chinese ethnic group known as Joseonjok. During the day, he slept in hideouts, and at night he walked as far away from the border as he could get. In the fall he got work as a harvest hand. In the southern part of China, he worked for several years on University of Yunnan construction sites before continuing further south.

In Laos, all his savings were stolen off him – which meant he had to beg to survive, sleep rough. Desperate, he stole a fishing boat one night and rowed across the Mekong River to Thailand. He begged his way to Bangkok where the South Korean embassy organized accommodation for him, and after nearly another year of waiting he was finally flown to Seoul.

Park’s “trip of death” lasted a little bit longer than usual: most last between ten months to a year, following the same route via China and Southeast Asian countries although some opt to go via Russia or the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. But whichever way they travel, the long flight is full of risk, all the way.

There is the constant fear of being denounced to authorities. Women particularly all too often become victims of sexual abuse. Yet from 2006 to 2012, between 2,000 and 3,000 North Koreans made it to South Korea every year. Last year, however, the North Koreans tightened controls along the border with China, thus reducing the flow of refugees seeking a new home in South Korea to 1,500.

Disinterest and prejudice

Although the refugees seek a new home, that’s not necessarily what they find. What Park found when he finally reached the land of his dreams – disinterest and prejudice – shocked him deeply. He doesn’t know which was worse. “They are completely indifferent,” he says about South Koreans. “They live their own lives, they couldn’t care less about the North.” He wasn’t expecting that. He thought people would be interested in him, as someone who put his life on the line to come South.

The first job Park found in South Korea was as an assistant janitor. After a few days, his boss expressed relief that his new helper turned out not to be as “aggressive” as he’d feared. Many South Koreans take their lead from the behavior of North Korean leaders and assume that all North Koreans are bellicose – a prejudice that is only encouraged by the fact that, when speaking, North Koreans have accents they perceive as hard.

In general, North Korean refugees don’t enjoy much of a good reputation in the South. Most of them find menial jobs – they can forget whatever it was they learned in the North (Park had studied biology). Twelve percent are unemployed (in 2012, the unemployment rate in South Korea was an estimated 3.8%). According to a study, one in ten of the North Korean refugees has had trouble with the law in South Korea. One in nine female refugees in South Korea has been sexually harassed or raped, and a third are said to have prostituted themselves at least once. Sixty percent of all new arrivals prefer not to reveal their origins.

There is a very popular dating reality show on Korean TV called SBS Jjak. One episode that aired about a year and half ago threw a revealing light on the way North Korean refugees are perceived by South Koreans. A pretty young woman had become the absolute favorite of the men on the show. In tears, she confided that she’d left something important out of her biography: her North Korean past. All the men then lost interest in her, except for a poor farmer’s son.

Park – despite money he received when he arrived, and a generous state subsidy to help him integrate into South Korean society that works out to the equivalent of nearly 30,000 euros – says he still doesn’t feel completely accepted in his new homeland. Yes, he acknowledges, “I can say what I want and make my own decisions.” But he hasn’t yet been able to forge deeper links within South Korean society.

Five years ago, together with some other North Korean refugees, he formed NK Intellectual Solidarity (NKIS), which helps North Koreans integrate. The NKIS also puts relevant information about living in the South together for North Koreans who are thinking of making the “trip of death” and smuggles the USB sticks into North Korea.

Park Kun-ha has also found great personal happiness in South Korea – he’s remarried. Like him, his new wife is a refugee from the North.

(Translation by Worldcrunch)

Beirut, Where Art And Bling Meet Civil War

By Frederik Obermaier

Somehow, the shots missed Jesus. He survived the rampage by armed men in St. George’s Cathedral during the Lebanese civil war. But since the mosaic of which he is a part is otherwise shell-pocked, his figure has become something of an attraction.

The cathedral is not far from downtown Beirut’s posh hotels, and just steps from the famous Ottoman Clock Tower and Grand Serail (now the office of the prime minister). It and its mosaic are a good example of the way Beirut deals with its history: its bloody heritage is claimed, not whitewashed. You see it everywhere. Forgetting is not an option. 

In the recent past, war was a daily reality in Lebanon. From 1975 until 1990 the Lebanese fought each other. Sunnis fought Christians. Communists fought nationalists. The fronts not only ran straight across the capital but through all levels of society.

The “green line” divided Beirut in two – the Muslim western part of the city, and the Christian east. St. George’s is located on the line. The cathedral is named after Saint George, who is supposed to have been born not far from Beirut. So is the St. George Hotel. Prime Ministers and princes used to stay at this cosmopolitan venue; everyone from Brigitte Bardot to David Rockefeller sunned on its terrace, as the tabloids avidly reported. That was in the city’s golden age, before the civil war.

Except for its beach club and pool, the hotel today stands empty waiting for an investor – a savvy one, who can revive its former glory out of the dust and rubble of war. But that day may never come.

“The St. George stands for the old Beirut, the one before the war,” says Mohamed Malik, who with his girlfriend is out enjoying an ice cream on the newly rebuilt promenade and admiring the yachts. “But things will never again be the way they were.” The wounds are too deep, he says. Sure, rich Arabs – even the jet set – have retuned. But even so, it’s not the way it used to be. Malik’s girlfriend has a gold chain nestled in her cleavage with a rhinestone-enhanced bullet cartridge hanging from it. War meets Bling.

A few meters away, on the street in front of the hotel, bronze flames rise skywards. They are the work of an artist, a memorial to Rafik al-Hariri – the former Lebanese Prime Minister loved by some, hated by others. On February 14, 2005 his convoy was driving past here when a bomb went off sending him and 22 other people to their deaths. It may have been an attack on Hariri’s policies – but it was also attack on tourism. The power of the explosion blew out the windows of the Phoenicia Hotel across the street, glass splinters flew across the lobby, and many of the rooms suffered serious damage.

The mess has long been cleaned up, and at least some of the Phoenicia’s regulars are back. In the hotel’s Eau de Vie restaurant on the 11th floor diners sitting in comfortable chairs enjoy foie gras and lobster and – past the heavy draperies framing the windows – the view out over the Mediterranean, the night lights of the city, and the empty building across the way; its walls scarred by mortars, its jagged ruins profiled against the sky. Another reminder of war. “But isn’t that part of Beirut’s charm?” asks Janet Abraham, the Phoenicia’s marketing director.

She prefers to talk about the city’s boutiques and galleries, the cathedral-like Jeita Grotto, one of the country’s biggest attractions, the ancient city of Byblos and the mountains nearby. “Here you can ski in the morning, and go to the beach in the afternoon.” All this is straight out of a tourism brochure. These were the must-see places in all the guidebooks before the war. The country’s beautiful facade. And the tourism industry would rather those places were the only ones discussed – after all, the war is over, they point out.

Art is booming

Near Martyrs’ Square, not far from Rafik Hariri’s tomb, new boutiques are springing up. The sounds of hammering and welding fill the area. Elie Saab, the famous Lebanese fashion designer, opened here years ago and boutiques and galleries have followed in his wake. As have rich local buyers. “This is a place where you should be able to shop without thinking of the past,” says the salesgirl in a gallery.

But if she’s offering art as a way of forgetting, something else is going on a few kilometers south in the Baabda district. Here there’s a ten-story artwork aimed not at forgetting but at remembering. In 1995 – after the civil war ended, although some Lebanese will tell you it still hasn’t – Franco-American artist Armand Fernandez, a proponent of New Realism better known as Arman, inaugurated a tower of stacked up Russian tanks and other military vehicles set in concrete. The artist called the structure of over 30 meters (100 feet) Hope for Peace.

For many Lebanese, art is like a steam valve. It reduces the pressure, helps digest what’s happened, and also offers a way to criticize those responsible. It’s a kind of therapy.

The country is traumatized, and art is booming. In fact, Beirut has become something of an art capital. In galleries like Tanit in the Mar Mikhael area you can buy modern art that would do any western museum proud. The Agial and Sfeir-Semmler galleries get similarly high marks. But the beating heart of Beirut’s art scene is off the beaten track – such as the Quarantina industrial zone, where the Beirut Art Center is located in an old furniture factory.

“We’ve created a space here for experimental art,” says the gallery’s director – for art whose value cannot necessarily be measured in money. Recently, photographer and installation artist Eric Baudelaire staged an exhibit here called Now Here Then Elsewhere, a mixture of video installations and printed material devoted to the Japanese Red Army, a Communist militant group founded in Lebanon by Fusako Shigenobu that killed dozens of people in the 1970s.

This is art that processes a relatively unknown but no less bloody part of Lebanon’s past. But even more exemplary is another gallery, and it’s not in cool Gemmayze, on Hamra Street (often called “Beirut’s Champs Elysées”), or in a “designy” industrial zone – it’s in a Hezbollah-run Shiite section of the city, Haret Hreik. Many locals have never set foot here; it’s considered disreputable, and many taxi drivers refuse to come here. On the way, you pass bomb craters, pocked walls. Behind the al-Mahdi mosque is The Hangar, originally a large factory hall, now one of the city’s most cutting-edge galleries.

The Umam Documentation and Research art center, an NGO, is co-directed by German journalist and filmmaker Monika Borgmann. Its best-known exhibit is a rusty old 1960 bus, full of bullet holes. On April 13, 1975 it drove through the streets of Beirut carrying members of the PLO. Christian Falangists started shooting. Nearly 30 people died. It marked the beginning of the Lebanese civil war.

(Translation by Worldcrunch, photo by AFP)

In Germany, Bribery Charges Imminent For Formula One Boss Ecclestone

By Hans Leyendecker and Klaus Ott

In early July, Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone may come to Germany to attend the F1 race hosted by the Nürburgring south of Cologne.

Ecclestone, the British mogul who has turned motor sports into a billion dollar business, enjoys showing up for the racing events to chat with the drivers, meet sponsors, and work deals. But if he does show up, the visit will be the last comfortable one he takes to Germany. The one after that is a court date in Munich.

Ecclestone has been under investigation for over two years because he secretly gave $44 million to a top banker with a lot of say in F1. Now the investigation phase has been completed and according to information obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung, the long-planned bribery charge planned against Ecclestone should be filed at a Munich court this month, perhaps as early as this week.

But it will still be some time before the indictment reaches Bernie — as he is mostly referred to. The document has first to be translated into English, so that Ecclestone can read what he is accused of. And then his lawyers, Sven Thomas and Norbert Scharf, get accorded some time to respond.

The lawyers will do everything to convince the court at a preliminary hearing that the charges do not apply and that therefore no trial is necessary. Thomas and Scharf have already tried to prevent an indictment, without success. If the court reaches the decision that the charges warrant a trial, it will most certainly not begin before the fall.

Bribery or blackmail?

Will Ecclestone still be the F1’s big boss by then? Months ago, as it became clear that he might be charged, top managers started thinking about how they could get around this, and the idea was to get Ecclestone to step down. The official reason given would be that he needs all his time and energy to deal with the case. The unofficial reality is that the sponsors and heads of state with whom the racing entity negotiates will not want to deal with someone charged with a crime.

In October, Ecclestone will turn 83. However, he is fit, and retirement is not on the agenda. He also vehemently denies any wrongdoing and says that he only gave BayernLB chairman Gerhard Gribkowsky the $44 million because he was being blackmailed.

BayernLB was at one time majority shareholder in Formula 1 and made life difficult for Bernie, until Gribkowsky suddenly let up on him. The former banker now claims to have been bribed by Ecclestone. He has been condemned to eight and a half years in prison for accepting bribes and other charges. The case will not be appealed. However, the banker’s sentence does not mean that the F1 boss will be found guilty.

The Ecclestone trial is a brand new — and separate — proceeding. Neither the prosecution in Munich nor Ecclestone’s two lawyers wished to comment on the filing of the charges.

(Translation by Worldcrunch, photo by Getty Images)

Loveless Marriage And The Spectre Of Engineered “Singularity”

By Norbert Blüm

Marriage and family are evolution’s great stabilizers. The core family unit has held through natural catastrophe and revolution. Neither Robespierre nor Hitler, not Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot managed to wipe out the family, however much they may have tried. Marriage and family have survived any and all assaults launched their way.

Until now. More threatening than the violence of the past is the silent undermining going on today. Outsourcing is sapping the core of marriage and family to the point where only their empty husks remain.

What can marriage and family still be good for in our day and age? Cohesion? When each person suffices unto him or herself, and self-realization means realization of the self on its own, the need for social cohesion evaporates.

For offspring? You don’t need marriage to bring children into the world. Not only are out-of-wedlock births on the increase, but ways of “perfecting” babies are as well. Creating artificial people is possible, as Ray Kurzweil has written in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Imagine a reality where people can be “optimized” as per economic requirements, genetically engineered for whatever way they will later be productive. Joblessness thus becomes obsolete: everybody occupies the professional role he or she was programmed for. Society is stabilized: no striving for upward mobility, no fears of falling off the social ladder.

Do we need marriage, a family unit, to give kids a childhood, an upbringing, an education? In Germany, the debate over child care subsidies has shown that the model of parents bringing up kids, being a part of their education, is obsolete. Parents are regarded as dilettantes; and if children are to have equal opportunity, they all have to receive the same level of professional education. Our system is thus geared now to turning kids over as soon after birth as possible to “experts.”

Children will be schooled one way or another by “experts” all through childhood. Time for non-didactic activity, all the space for childhood adventure and discovery, will be squeezed out of their existence even during holidays when learning camps — supervised by “pros,” of course — take over. Families are where kids spend the night.

Limits of marriage

As for marriage: a long marriage has come to be seen as a limitation of one’s freedom of choice. In fact any type of commitment is perceived as compromising freedom. Freedom to choose is considered the highest form of freedom. So, marriages are not contracted for life but basically until somebody better comes along.

An “until death do us part” marriage has morphed into a temporary partnership for a particular tranche of one’s life, and one with relatively little legal protection – certainly less than with rent or job contracts. “Irreconcilable differences” in a marriage is enough grounds for dissolving the union. All you need to do is get through a separation period successfully. It would not be possible to get any lighter than our divorce laws.

Western monogamy has come to resemble Eastern polygamy, except that the latter is simultaneous and the former is consecutive: instead of several people in a marriage together at the same time, we have several people filling different chunks of time separately over a lifetime. The western model is also gender neutral in that it is available to women.

Temporary marriages also mean separation of goods – and income. Anybody who puts more energy into the marriage than into earning money is quite simply the stupid one when divorce time rolls around. “Advanced” couples thus contractually plan the end of the union as they enter into it: for Homo economicus even “love” requires lawyering up.

In this day of uninhibited looking out for Numero Uno, working for others and unpaid to boot – as family members do – is quite simply not on the agenda. Only working for money and for one’s own advancement counts.

So marriage has become a temporary link-up of working people who choose to spend some free time together. The model is not well-adapted to down times. And at the end of the day, the people losing out are both the parents and the kids. Children progressively grow up without parents. Parents progressively experience their kids as secondary phenomena. Children are fast becoming creatures of the state.

One of the perhaps unexpected results of this type of emancipation is more single older women. As they get older, husbands prefer younger second wives. It’s the bitter revenge of a narrow-minded patriarchy. Is there some form of feminism that is unwittingly working as a secret agent for male hegemony?

Today’s successful person is untouched by love – self-sufficient in every respect, emotional issues dealt with pharmacologically: if genetic engineers ever manage to wipe out all trace of tendencies toward togetherness, autism will become the official order of the day.

To a modern understanding, marriage is the addition of two independent individuals, whereas in the old sense it’s a community that is more than the sum of its parts (Aristotle).

The “new human” is spared the disarray of love, its joy and pain, and hence knows nothing of the happiness that comes from the enriching experience of sharing, and the dependence of love that —paradoxically — sets people free.

*Norbert Blüm (1935) is the former Chairman of Germany’s liberal-conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) political party and a former Minister for Labor and Social Affairs.

(Translation by Worldcrunch)

A Trip To Chiloe, The Island At The End Of The World

By Sebastian Schoepp

You probably couldn’t live any further west than Don Orlando does.

He lives in Punta Pirulil on the western edge of the green island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile. In his book In Patagonia, British writer Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) described Chiloé as an island of “black storms and black soil.”

Until recently, the storms were one of the reasons it was so difficult to get out to Don Orlando’s place — to his pale yellow wooden house, with its vegetable patch, geese and chickens, and blackberry bushes.

Now there’s a road that runs through the mountains which, not only makes it easier for him to go shopping or to the doctor in nearby Cucao, but also attracts more visitors.

A rocking chair is beside the window that looks out to the ocean and Don Orlando says his favorite thing to do is look out to see the marine life — whales, black and white Commerson’s dolphins, Humboldt penguins, Patagonian sea lions, fur seals and Magellanic Flightless Steamer ducks (yes, that’s really what they’re called!).

On the other side of the body of water, some 8,600 kilometers away, lies New Zealand. Somewhere out there the west stops and the Far East begins. 

Orlando gives us a tour of his home, where animal skins decorate the walls. Some of his favorite topics of conversation are things that would make an animal conservationist speechless. He kills Darwin foxes and Chilean wildcats — a kind of bonsai leopard — before they even can think about sinking their teeth into his flock of sheep. Another collection he’s particularly proud of are fossils he has found in the estuary of the copper-colored river that runs beneath his window.

Don Orlando says that the “Springboard to Heaven” is not far from here and suggests that we go and see it. As we leave his house, we cross a wooden bridge that has seen better days, past the pans that his sons use to wash pieces of gold out of the sand, climbing up through the damp, misty forest where flowering plants and wind-bent trees are abundant. It’s here that the last Huilliche live — Chiloé’s natives — who survived the appropriation of their land by Spanish colonists and Chilean settlers.

In Huilliche mythology, the end of the earth is where the ferryman Tempilcahue waits for the souls seeking to get into heaven. To aid the dead to get to Tempilcahue, an artist named Chumono built a wooden ramp — the aforementioned “Springboard” — on Don Orlando’s property that fast-tracks souls into the nothingness beyond the Pacific. This Springboard is beloved by esoteric folks who come here to meditate. Some weep, others say that they can feel their soul wafting across the water. Either way, the springboard brings a nice little bit of extra income for Don Orlando.

Darwin’s observation

People also come to animal-watch here — there are plenty of species unique to Chiloé, like the Rufous-legged owl, the pudú (the smallest deer in the world), mountain monkeys, and the Chilean shrew opossum. 

Charles Darwin visited the island in 1834, and wrote that it was just one big forest with a visually pleasing variety of green tones, where winters were dreadful and summers only marginally better. He noted that whilst the natives had enough to eat, they were desperately poor because they had no way of earning any money.

The Chiloeans remained loyal to Spain for eight years after Chilean independence was granted in 1826, so the young country punished the island with complete isolation. Even up until the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) opponents of the regime were sent here in exile, as writer Isabel Allende described in her 2012 novel Maya’s Notebook.

Even so, as often happens, a place once considered inadequate, became celebrated. The island has astonishing vegetation, concrete is almost non-existant, and the wooden architecture, including many churches, are on UNESCO world cultural heritage lists and this makes Chiloé attractive to visitors. In 2012 the New York Times put the island on its list of 45 places to visit quickly before they become overrun with tourists. 

Current Chilean President Sebastian Piñera — who owns property on the island — feels differently about the isolation of the archipelago, and now the government is on track to develop Chiloé, and fast. Soon it will be linked to the mainland by the construction of the first commercial airport. Of course, this has been highly criticized by the residents here, who fled Santiago’s neoliberal society to settle here, where they’ve opened up small hotels, come to take care of the penguin colonies, rent kayaks, and offer their services as guides. People like Fernando Claude and his wife, who rent out holiday huts, rely on sun and wind energy as much as possible. 

Claude recommends kayaking at the crack of dawn, when the reflections in the water take on aspects of characters in the island’s myths. It’s said that the Brujos — the warlocks who are the real rulers of the island — meet regularly in a cave near the east coast village of Quicavi. 

In Ancud, we asked the owner of a snack place for directions to Quicavi but he said, “no way”. Outsiders are kept away from this cave area by powerful invisible energies against which not even the most powerful SUV stands a chance, much less our small rental car. So, we decided to swap magic and myth for a plate of crabs caught straight from the sea. You’d be hard pressed to find another place on the planet with crabs as fresh and tender as they are here, at the end of the world. 

(Translation by Worldcrunch, photo by Sebastian Schoepp)

A Longtime Haven Of Internet Freedom, Is Iceland Set To Ban Online Porn?

By Thomas Kirchner

Mid-February this year, British tabloids published the news that Iceland’s leftwing-green Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson wanted to limit access to online porn on the island.

Ways of doing that, according to the minister, could be to block certain IP addresses, or to make it impossible to pay certain sites with an Icelandic credit card. Another option – and this was the one that got the most public attention – the government could install a filter that would remove all unwanted content from the Icelandic net.

The reaction from net activists was outrage. First of all, they said, such filters are never technically perfect, and secondly putting them in place would open the door in Iceland to a Big Brother state, like China or Iran, that censors large parts of the Internet. A filter in a country that saw itself as a “haven” for Internet freedom and freedom of information in general? Smari McCarthy, Director of the International Modern Media Initiative in Reykjavik, called the plans “fascist” and the minister crazy.

But the idea wasn’t actually the minister’s – it’s that of his political advisor, Halla Gunnarsdóttir, 32, a teacher and former congressional reporter. Talking with her in a Reykjavik café, Halla (in Iceland first names are more important) expresses irritation that people keep referring to a new “law” when things are nowhere near that far yet. “The whole thing started when we were looking at how we could lower the number of rapes,” she explains. “Then at a conference there were reports by investigators, social workers and academics on how brutal pornography affects children. They had observed that kids imitate violent scenes. So we formed a commission and we’re currently discussing their suggestions.”

It has been forbidden for decades to disseminate porn in Iceland. But there is no clear-cut definition of pornography, and the government is working on one that will separate “okay sex” and “brutal and demeaning” images – a task that has so far defeated the jurists working on it.

To Halla’s mind, however, there is hardly any “okay sex” on the net. When kids search under the word sex, results aren’t “cuddly porn with consensual sex,” she says, but rather “brutal, revolting trash.” She thinks it’s legitimate to consider prohibiting access to that – “you don’t let heroin dealers into a schoolyard, do you?” She adds that she realizes that everything that is prohibited somehow makes its way out there anyway, “but if we could manage to keep 80% of 11-year-olds away from that stuff wouldn’t it be worth a try?”

Scientists have differing views on the effects that hard porn has on children and young teens. While some psychologists note that trauma and disturbed relations with the opposite sex can be a consequence, a 2009 study published by the University of Montreal disagrees.

Sex or violence?

“I’ve had enough of people like Halla,” says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, 45, a Pirate party MP who became known as a Wikileaks activist. “My boys are 12 and 21 and spend a lot of time online. I checked their browser, and they haven’t been looking at brutal porn. We protect our kids not with things like filters but by explaining to parents how to teach their kids to interact in a healthy way with computers.”

If the government gets involved in this, she believes, the danger of abuses will actually rise. Or there will be goof-ups like what happened in Denmark last year, where the child sex filter ended up blocking access to Google.

To this Halla says: “It’s against the law to drive when you’re drunk. But nobody says that’s the first step to banning driving.” She wants the Internet discussion to go further: “It can’t be that the medium determines content, we have to be able to talk about content.”

Halla’s not just concerned about protecting children. As a feminist, she wants to see a stop to women being discriminated against, exploited, and raped. And so – like British anti-porn activist Gail Dines – she sees the sex film industry as a major enemy. “This isn’t about a couple of home-made videos. The heads of these companies are young men in suits, who attended some of the world’s top universities.”

Raising awareness and educating is important but it’s not enough to fight the sex industry – more radical means are needed to do that. “I understand those who want to protect the net, I’m also for freedom of opinion, exchange of ideas and information. That doesn’t mean I have to accept a violent industry taking hold of a third of the Internet.”

There is a tradition in Scandinavia of high taxes, the welfare state, and emancipation as a responsibility of the entire society. The result? Scandinavian countries top all rankings involving equal rights, women in powerful positions, or protection from sexual exploitation, and their societies as a whole are more aware of the rights of women. That all of this means regulation that cuts into rights to freedom is something that is accepted by most people in northern European countries.

Birgitta doesn’t buy all this. “Iceland isn’t Scandinavia. When traffic wardens in Sweden went on strike, people parked properly anyway because they see themselves as part of a system. An Icelander wouldn’t see it that way. Our democracy is young and brittle, and there are abuses everywhere.”

She continues: “It boils down to individual responsibility. I don’t want the government to take me off the path to self-destruction; I want the relevant information so I can protect myself. The problem here is us – the Internet just reflects us.” If she doesn’t believe in more regulation, she does believe in more information: “If people smoke less today, it’s because we now know more about the consequences.”

Parliamentary elections are being held in Iceland this Saturday. According to polls, the majority of the country’s citizens will not be voting left, and hence will not be in the market for their policy ideas – including their Internet porn filters. The questions, however, remain. How much must a government do to protect its citizens from themselves? To what degree can it base itself on morality, and how much freedom can it take away in so doing?

(Translation by Worldcrunch)

China’s Love-Hate Relationship With The German Automobile

By Marcel Grzanna

Shanghai - For years, the People’s Republic of China has been carrying the German car industry through tough times.

In 2012, German manufacturers sold a whopping 15.5 million motor vehicles in China, and no end to that record is in sight.

In March 2013 alone they sold 1.4 million cars, a rise of 20%. The manufacturers cling to China like a shipwreck victim clings to a life buoy in the open seas. In the past decade, German companies have invested over 20 billion euros in new factories and development centers with partner firms in China. But there is a dark side to doing business in China: exaggerated regulation, ridiculous controls, forced technology transfers – and even a negative media campaign against four big German manufacturers.

At the Shanghai auto show (April 21-29), such issues are downplayed with a smile by German companies – at least publicly. As long as turnovers keep going through the roof, this is easy enough. But behind the scenes, there is increasing frustration.

Negative TV coverage over these past few months is a reminder of just how many uncertainties go along with investing in China. Within a week, Volkswagen was criticized for transmission system problems – and ended up recalling nearly 400,000 cars. Then it was the turn of Daimler, BMW and Audi, criticized for their use of supposedly toxic insulation materials. The companies have to take the accusations seriously whether or not they are actually true.

Car manufacturers in China are among those kept on the shortest leash. Their production is only permitted alongside that of state-owned companies, which is why managers and sector experts have been wondering if the criticism of the four German companies can be mere coincidence and why they believe that no, it is not coincidence – there’s method behind this.

However opinions diverge as to what the underlying reasons might be. Political reprimand? Are nationalistic Chinese journalists behind the reports? Perhaps the aim is to support Chinese car manufacturers. “What’s going on here is very ominous, and frustration is on the rise. But nobody wants to rebel openly while sales are still good,” says one representative of the German car industry, who like so many others didn’t want to go on record talking about the bad vibes.

Low-cost vs. luxury

The fact is that the car market in China is dominated by foreign companies. Only three of every 10 cars are made by Chinese firms. That’s a thorn in the eye of the government. The present Five Year Plan is supposed to shore up the Chinese manufacturers so that their market share reaches 40% by 2015. And all means are considered fair to that end.

The government has ordered civil servants across the country not to choose Audi for their official cars but to go with Hongqi instead. Apparently they are already seeing signs of success – the China Business Journal reports that several hundred advance orders for Hongqi’s H7 have been placed ahead of the market launch in May.

Every fifth car sold in China is German. In the luxury market, Daimler, BMW and Audi have no competition among Chinese manufacturers. “No Chinese producer within the 10 and maybe 20 next years will be in a position to compete with the German luxury car manufacturers,” says Yang Jian in Automotive News China.

Chinese cars are mainly successful on the low-cost market, where margins – and prestige – are thin. Even though foreign manufacturers have for nearly three decades been forced to produce in joint-ventures with Chinese partners, and their know-how is thus in large part no secret as a result, the People’s Republic still has had no “Made in China” sales hit. And that frustrates ambitious government officials who are impatiently trying to find what the secret to developing a top car is. They conveniently forget the decades of experience the Germans have under their belts.

The Germans mistrust the many regulations and controls – the feeling is that they mainly serve the Chinese to try and sniff out industrial secrets. Some complain it’s no longer possible to run an efficient business because there is constantly another inspector from yet another department knocking on the door. “The controls are getting ever stricter, and the amount of time they take is huge. But if you don’t play the game, you don’t get the necessary papers,” says one insider. Hence the smiling amenability, at least publically, of the manufacturers.

It should be noted however that not all of this is chicanery – many issues remain from the days of the controlled economy, and many paper-pushers still occupy the same posts they did 20 years ago when the state began to privatize companies on a broad basis. To expect these functionaries to have the same flexibility necessary for a multinational is unrealistic.

What’s particularly annoying to the Germans is the fact that the TV coverage of the supposed quality failings of German cars fails to point out that hardly any Chinese companies produce at equivalent standards of reliability.

Beijing car sector analyst Zhang Zhiyong sums the situation up this way: “The Germans have the biggest market share, so they also have a duty to build the very best cars. The TV coverage reminded them of that duty.”