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Current Affairs: Housing Rights of Workers
There are moves afoot to change things in the housing rental sector across Europe and especially in Berlin, Germany. There are moves afoot to block the changes suggested for housing rental properties in Berlin, Germany. What is especially interesting about these two actions is that they are political, and partially from the same political parties. The main political party elected to govern the City of Berlin, Die Linke, has been forced into building a coalition with two other political parties, the Sozialdemokratische Partie Deutschlands (SPD) and Bündnis 90 / die Grünen, in order to gain a parliamentary majority. Whether a working coalition will come to be remains to be seen,…
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It’s Cold Out, Baby
All of a sudden, the trees are bare. Their wealth of green leaves have briefly turned the colours of the rainbow, and then their autumn mantle has disappeared and they line the streets and pathways, a hazard for those areas where rain has plastered them to the ground and made their surfaces a slippery danger for the unwary. The weather has changed, and the temperature dropped into single figures (centigrade, for those using outdated measuring systems). Winter is staring us in the face, challenging us to fight it for a last few moments of sun and warmth before the frost coats our lawns and, perhaps, snows fall and obliterate everything.…
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Politics: Attributing Blame, Ignoring Solutions
The mass demonstrations across Germany on Saturday, 31 October 2026 have not gone without notice. The presence of tens of thousands of young demonstrators across the country have excited comment and attention through a very broad spectrum of the public and in politics, but not necessarily for the right reasons. The mass media, eager for a good selling story, but without wishing the hard work involved in research and of reporting the background to the demonstrations, has concentrated on the few outbreaks of violence around the periphery of some of the marches. It is this side of the many events which has garnered headlines, and been taken up by those…
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Journalism: Reading Beyond The Headlines
The headlines say it all: riots; looting; unrest; attacks against the police; police brutality; masked attackers; violence on the streets. Journalism, the mass media, is designed not just to inform and advise, but also to sell, whether it be advertising space or information, online or printed. Journalism is not there just to give the facts of an event, but also to give opinions and recommendations, depending on the bias of the publication, and what the journalists themselves – and their editors – believe they can get away with. A good headline sells more content, regardless of what the actual content is, because so many no longer read beyond the first…
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Journalism and Censorship: A Full Circle
The ideal of a Free Press, of a system of journalism reporting current events, politics, business, culture and social matters, is an ideal enshrined in modern society. It goes back over several hundred years to the smaller local news agencies, to hastily printed pamphlets, to the idea that the press, the newspapers they produced, the journalists working for them, should be able to report the facts without bias or fear for their lives. An ideal only, of course, as reporting the facts has always been a matter of interpretation, has always been subject to who we hear from and how the message is brought across. The press, regardless of its…
