Süddeutsche Zeitung 10.08.2007

"What has the civilised world not done to stop the city of Dresden from building the four-lane Waldschlösschen bridge in one of the most peaceful, beautiful sites on the inner-city shores of the Elbe?" asks Gottfried Knapp. "Unesco has openly threatened to revoke Dresden's status as World Heritage site should the city dare to construct the unwieldy bridge with its monstrous steel frame.… Not only Unesco's efforts, but also desperate petitions by Nobel Prize winners, artists and conservationists have all remained without effect." Now, however, Dresden's administrative court has granted an injunction to postpone the construction start planned for Monday morning for an additional two years. The reason: "It can only be seen as a miracle – or a joke – that while so many organisations have striven in vain, the regional conservation groups have been able to put their foot in the rapidly closing door with a petition to save the local population of lesser horseshoe bats."

In an interview with Jonathan Fischer, former senator and now writer Tom Hayden is pushing for a solution to the gang problem. Since 1980, 25,000 people have been killed in gang violence Hayden says. "The state seems to think it is cheaper to insure shop owners, employ more police, build new prisons and wait for the gang members to swim into the net like fish. A few years later they are released and the whole thing starts up again. On any given day in California, 200,000 people will be sitting behind bars, the majority of them young gang members who grow up and grow old in these cages. "


Die Welt 10.08.2007

Polish journalist Adam Krzeminski analyses the current situation in his country, where the conservative nationalist coalition is hurtling towards disaster: "The opposition is in a real predicament. What is more in their interest? Waiting until the dream of an authoritarian Fourth Republic, based on the personal power of the Kaczynski brothers, conclusively discredits itself and is irretrievably lost? Or striving for fresh elections, either to force the PiS into the opposition or to bring it into a grand coalition with the Civic Platform and lead the country back to more fitting democratic and civil practises? Both have their pros and cons. Leaving the Kaczynski party to stew in its own juices for another two years may be tempting. However 2008 is also the year when three new constitutional judges will be appointed." See our feature " From closed circuits to communicating tubes" by Adam Krzeminski.


Die Tageszeitung 10.08.2007

Robert Misik comments on Michael Ignatieff's apology published in The New York Times for having supported the Iraq War (more here), but has a hard time with Ignatieff's distinction between thinking intellectuals and acting politicians: "The new politically active intellectual is, let's face it, really an intellectual politician. He knows, in the best cases, more about the complexities of the world and the conundrums of social systems than normal politicians. But as opposed to the 'mere' intellectual, at the end of the day he has come down on one side or the other: as a commentator, as an advisor. Certainly, he is exposed to other stimuli – and a wholly other degree of stress – than politicians. Yet 'at the end of the day' their roles are not really all that different."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10.08.2007

Kerstin Holm outlines the case of Russian journalist Larissa Arap, who following her research into the forced psychiatric institutionalisation of young people, is herself being held in a clinic. Holm also learns from an independent psychiatrist Juri Savenko that "only state psychiatrists are allowed to testify in court today on defendants' sanity. Independent psychiatrists like himself are not permitted to enter medical courts. The 'therapists' in charge of Larissa Arap told her daughter Taissia that the patient needed long term treatment and might never leave the clinic."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 10.08.2007

As the Locarno Film Festival draws to a close, Alexandra Stäheli picks out the highlights. Alongside Masahiro Kobayashia's 'Ai no yokan' ('The Rebirth'), "a masterpiece in narrative asceticism", and George Ratliff's 'Joshua', "which starts as a traditional family story and soon turns into a subtly directed psychothriller", Günter Schwaiger's documentary "El Paraiso de Hafner" "is a substantially researched and brilliantly montaged tour de force which attracted much attention in the Semaine de la critique. The portrait of former SS officer Paul Maria Hafner, who like countless other Nazis found a home in Franco's Spain, evolves into an intelligent and layered psychogram of a shrewd, calculating old man who sees Hitler as the 'most rational figure in history' and who lives in a perfectly constructed illusory world in which the body cult and the iron will replace all other emotional impulses. (...) In the film, Schwaiger's analytical observation allows him to extend Hannah Arendt's category of the banality of evil by one facet, one which might also pertain to the neo-Nazi movement: that of the self-admitted meaninglessness of evil."