“I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you… Beat or cheat or mistreat you… Simplify you, classify you… Deny, defy, or crucify you… All I really want to do… Is, baby, be friends with you…” – Bob Dylan
Just another WordPress.com weblogToo much!!!
Too much!!!
Top Stories – Wednesday Nov. 11, 2009
Cat’s demise prompts rumours of Thatcher death
.slideImage{filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Fade()}
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gestures to members of the media as she stands on her house doorstep, following her return home from hospital, in central London, Monday June 29, 2009. (AP Photo / Lefteris Pitarakis
==
The Canadian Press
Date: Wednesday Nov. 11, 2009 7:59 PM ET
OTTAWA — A brief message about a felled feline really caused the fur to fly this week, prompting erroneous rumours about the demise of no less than Margaret Thatcher.
The brouhaha at a gala Toronto tribute to Canada’s military is a cautionary tale about how modern instant messaging and good old-fashioned gossip can combine to shake things up at even the highest levels.
Some 1,700 luminaries, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, were in the middle of dinner Tuesday night when smart phones throughout the room began to buzz with the news: “Lady Thatcher has passed away.”
Dinner chatter abruptly veered to expressions of shock and reminiscences of Margaret Thatcher, the 84-year-old former British prime minister, as news of her apparent passing spread like wildfire.
It eventually reached the ears of Harper, or someone close to him. Harper aide Dimitri Soudas, back in Ottawa, was dispatched to confirm the news and start preparing an official statement mourning the death of the Iron Lady, an icon to many in Harper’s Conservative party.
Soudas immediately emailed his contacts at Buckingham Palace and in British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office.
They had no idea what he was talking about. Lady Thatcher, they informed an embarrassed Soudas, was still very much alive.
About 20 minutes after the rumour mill started churning, a corrective email message began to circulate among the diners at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Turns out it was Transport Minister John Baird’s beloved 16-year-old cat — whom he’d named Thatcher out of admiration for one of his political heroes — who had ceased to be.
Soudas is said to have quipped since: “If the cat wasn’t dead, I’d have killed it by now.”
It was a fine moment in history, the tearing down of that wall in Berlin, but, now, 20 years later, where do all stand?
I remember the footage and the news items… Jubilation… and then the invariable selling off of bits and pieces of the wall…hmmm…. I just recently saw something online that STILL sells bits and pieces of the wall (this time in jewellry… double-hmmmm)… Anyway, my thought then as it remains today is that this was terrific news. Great news…Wonderful news! That maybe this event might help to kickstart, that might spark the another attempt at beginning of the tearing down of all sorts of other walls, physical and, basically, emotional ones, being intangible walls that people put up, whether by will or circumstance, and which are the stubbornnest to penetrate through… and, of course, maybe those walls are up there for a very very good reason so they should not be penetrated through from the outside and blah blah, all boiling back to how the universe still is what we make of it from the inside and we are still responsible for how we form and create our own beings and interactions with others… It’s a vicious cycle. Yes, I am, was, an idealist…
The point is, it was a fine moment in history the tearing down of that wall…
And where are we all now, 20 years later?
(I feel like stream-of-consciousness writing these days.. I can’t stop!!! argh!!!! Little energy for anything else…)
The Associated Press
Date: Sunday Nov. 8, 2009 5:18 PM ET
BERLIN — Twenty years ago Monday, they danced atop the Berlin Wall, feet thudding on the cold concrete, arms raised in victory, hands clasped in friendship and giddy hope.
On that cold night, years of separation and anxiety melted into the unbelievable reality of freedom and a future without border guards, secret police, informers and rigid communist control.
This weekend, Germans celebrate with concerts boasting Beethoven and Bon Jovi; a memorial service for the 136 people killed trying to cross over from 1961 to 1989; candle lightings and 1,000 towering plastic foam dominoes to be placed along the wall’s route and tipped over.
On Nov. 9, 1989, East Germans came in droves, riding their sputtering Trabants, motorcycles and rickety bicycles. Hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands crossed over the following days.
Stores in West Berlin stayed open late and banks gave out 100 Deutschemarks in “welcome money,” then worth about $50, to each East German visitor.
The party lasted four days and by Nov. 12 more than 3 million of East Germany’s 16.6 million people had visited, nearly a third of them to West Berlin, the rest through gates opening up along the rest of the fenced, mined frontier that cut their country in two.
Sections of the nearly 155 kilometres of wall were pulled down and knocked over. Tourists chiseled off chunks to keep as souvenirs. Tearful families reunited. Bars gave out free drinks. Strangers kissed and toasted each other with champagne.
Klaus-Hubert Fugger, a student at the Free University in West Berlin, was having drinks at a pub when people began coming “who looked a bit different.”
Customers bought the visitors round after round. By midnight, instead of going home, Fugger and three others took a taxi to the Brandenburg Gate, long a no man’s land, and scaled the 12-foot (nearly four meter) wall with hundreds of others.
“There were really like a lot of scenes, like people crying, because they couldn’t get the situation,” said Fugger, now 43. “A lot of people came with bottles” of champagne and sweet German sparkling wine.
Fugger spent the next night on the wall, too. A newsmagazine photo shows him wrapped in a scarf.
“Then the wall was crowded all over, thousands of people, and you couldn’t move … you had to push through the masses of the people,” he said.
Angela Merkel, Germany’s first chancellor from the former communist East, recalled the euphoria in an address last week to the U.S. Congress.
“Where there was once only a dark wall, a door suddenly opened and we all walked through it: onto the streets, into the churches, across the borders,” Merkel said. “Everyone was given the chance to build something new, to make a difference, to venture a new beginning.”
The wall the communists built at the height of the Cold War and which stood for 28 years is mostly gone. Some parts still stand, at an outdoor art gallery or as part of an open-air museum. Its route through the city is now streets, shopping centres, apartment houses. The only reminder of it are a series of inlaid bricks that trace its path.
Checkpoint Charlie, the prefab that was long the symbol of the Allied presence and of Cold War tension, has been moved to a museum in western Berlin.
Potsdamer Platz, the vibrant square that was destroyed during World War II and became a no man’s land during the Cold War, is full of upscale shops selling everything from iPods to grilled bratwursts.
At a ceremony in Berlin Oct. 31, Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who presided over the opening of the wall, stood side by side with the superpower presidents of the time, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.
After the decades of shame that followed the Nazi era, Kohl suggested, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of their country 11 months later gave Germans pride.
“We don’t have many reasons in our history to be proud,” said Kohl, now 79. But as chancellor, “I have nothing better, nothing to be more proud of, than German reunification.”
In an interview in Moscow with Associated Press Television News, Gorbachev said it was a catalyst for peace.
“No matter how hard it was, we worked, we found mutual understanding and we moved forward. We started cutting down nuclear weapons, scaling down the armed forces in Europe and resolving other issues,” he said.
It all began with a routine late afternoon news conference.
On Nov. 9, 1989, Guenter Schabowski, a member of East Germany’s ruling Politburo, casually declared that East Germans would be free to travel to the West immediately.
Later, he tried to clarify his comments and said the new rules would take hold at midnight, but events moved faster as the word spread.
At a remote crossing in Berlin’s south, Annemarie Reffert and her 15-year-old daughter made history by becoming the first East Germans to cross the border.
Reffert, now 66, remembers the East German soldiers being at a loss when she tried to cross the border.
“I argued that Schabowski said we were allowed to go over,” she said. The border soldiers relented. A customs official was astonished that she had no luggage.
“All we wanted was to see if we really could travel,” Reffert said.
Years later, Schabowski told a TV interviewer that he had gotten mixed up. It was not a decision but a draft law that the Politburo was set to discuss. He thought it was a decision that had already been approved.
That night, around midnight, border guards swung open the gates. Through Checkpoint Charlie, down the Invalidenstrasse, across the Glienicke Bridge, scores of people streamed into West Berlin, unabated, unfettered, eyes agog.
