Latest news with #Wittenberg
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Germany launches 'cultural buildings offensive' to restore landmarks
Germany's culture authorities have pledged to restore the country's worn and crumbling architectural heritage, with a slew of eminent buildings from various eras in line for renovation. "The cultural infrastructure needs strengthening," new Culture Commissioner Wolfram Weimer said on Saturday during a visit to the Venice Biennale of Architecture. "That's why we are promoting and accelerating numerous construction projects in the cultural sector," he added. Weimer said some projects are already under way, such as the renovation of the Luther House in the eastern German city of Wittenberg and the synagogue in the southern city of Augsburg. St Paul's Church in Frankfurt, completed in the 19th century, and more contemporary buildings such as the German Photo Institute in Dusseldorf, for example, will now qualify for renewal under a so-called "cultural buildings offensive," he said. Others under consideration for refurbishment or new construction include Richard Wagner's festival theatre in Bayreuth, the German Port Museum in Hamburg, the Görlitz city hall and the extension of Leipzig's German National Library, according to Weimer. Weimer, who took office in early May under the government of new conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, also mentioned the planned German-Polish House in Berlin and the remodelling of concentration camp memorials in Dachau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. "Due to their high visibility, cultural buildings make a direct contribution to the appeal and strength of Germany," he said. "Cultural buildings are part of our identity as a cultural nation. They promote social cohesion, as they make stimulation and encounters possible," he added. Investments also promote employment in construction and the skilled trades, the minister said. With opposition support, Germany's previous government authorized new infrastructure spending of €500 billion ($567 billion). Exactly how this money is to be spent is still under discussion.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Laracuente-Huebner is first Bearcat to win Big 12 track and field title
Highland graduate Juliette Laracuente-Huebner, who was a multi-time state champion in high school, continues to add to her trophy and medal collection as a member of the women's track and field team at the University of Cincinnati. Laracuente-Huebner won the Big 12 Indoor Track and Field Championships in the pentathlon while competing earlier this season in Lubbock, Texas. She scored a 4,182, which was one point from advancing to the NCAA Division I national championships, according to her high school coach Chip Wendt. Advertisement College Notebook: Pair of Presidents earn All-American honors in track and field College Notebook: Juliette Laracuente-Huebner makes All-America for Cincinnati At the Big 12 Championships, she was second in the long jump at 19 feet, 4 inches, third in the high jump at 5-7 3/4 and third in the 60-meter hurdles in 8.56 seconds. She took fifth in the 800 in 2:16.47 and eighth in the shot put at 36-10 1/2. She is the first Bearcat to win an individual Big 12 title, and it was the second-best score ever posted in the pentathlon by a UC athlete. Here are results from other Marion-area college athletes as they competed in indoor track and field this winter: Highland grad Juliette Laracuente-Huebner is an athlete on the University of Cincinnati's women's track team, where she competes in the pentathlon among other events. Mount Gilead's Allison Johnson is a junior on the women's track team at Penn State. She ran the 1000 meters in 2:43.05 to take second at the Nittany Lion Challenge, and she was fifth in the 800 in 2:05.36 at the Big Ten Indoor Track and Field Championships. Ohio Wesleyan's Hazel Jolliff is another pentathlete. The junior from Cardington finished 10th at the North Coast Athletic Conference Indoor Championships with a score of 2,221 where she was third in the shot put at 32-1 1/2, eighth in the high jump at 4-5 1/2, 10th in the 60 hurdles at 10.74, 14th in the long jump at 13-6 and 15th in the 800 at 3:04.84. In the same competition, River Valley's Lainee Valentine , who is a senior at Wittenberg, posted an eighth-place finish in the pentathlon with a 2,590. She was third in the long jump at 16-0 1/2, sixth in the shot put at 28-8 1/2, seventh in the 60 hurdles at 9.82, eighth in the high jump at 4-5 1/2 and 13th in the 800 at 2:56.7. OWU sophomore Alexis Eusey of Highland was seventh in the NCAC's women's shot put at 36-7, which is a personal record. Another Highland grad, Mason Duncan , a junior at Wittenberg, was fifth in the men's distance medley relay at the NCAC meet, helping his team to a 10:32.83. River Valley's Emma Hawk is a junior at Wittenberg, and she produced a PR in the 3000 meters at the NCACs with a 10:34.75 for seventh. She was also eighth in the 5000 at 18:19.29. Aaron Gannon , a freshman from Mount Gilead, competes for Mount Vernon Nazarene, and he was 16th in the 800 in 2:04.43 at the Crossroads League Indoor Track and Field Championships. Northmor's Julia Kanagy ran the 5K in 19:34.62 for 15th at the Crossroads. She is a senior on the MVNU women's team. Another MVNU runner, sophomore Lauren Garber of Highland posted a PR of 3:25.31 for 16th in the 1000 at the Crossroads. Competing for Walsh as a freshman on the men's track team, Mount Gilead's Quade Harris ran second in the 500 at 1:10.9 and fourth in the 200 at 23.68 during an indoor meet at Muskingum. At the Great-Midwest Athletic Conference's indoor meet, he was part of the sixth-place 4x400 relay that ran 3:20.15. He also posted a 51.04 in the prelims at the G-MAC. Kelsey Kennon , a grad student at Findlay, finished third at the Ashland Jud Logan Light Giver with a 43-7 in the shot put. The Mount Gilead grad had a PR of 57-2 1/4 in the weight throw during a home meet and claimed second. At the G-MAC, she was seventh in the shot put at 43-4 1/4 and 10th in the weight throw at 53-6 1/2. River Valley grad Grant Butler , a sophomore at Ohio Northern, was eighth in the long jump with a 21-4 3/4 at the Ohio Athletic Conference Indoor Championships. He was also 17th in the high jump at 5-9 3/4. Connor Robins , another RV product who competes at Ohio Northern, was seventh at the OACs in the shot put at 48-0 and ninth in the weight throw at 53-10 1/4. The junior set a PR in the shot put with a 48-9 1/2 for eighth place at Grand Valley State. He also set a PR by finishing third in the weight throw at 53-10 1/4 during a home meet. Highland's Landon Remmert is another ONU competitor. The senior was eighth at the OACs in the 60 hurdles with a 9.44. His indoor PR was set during the OAC prelims when he ran 8.89. Advertisement This is the second of four winter sports college notebooks for Marion-area athletes. Anyone with information on a local college athlete and send material to the Marion Star's Rob McCurdy at rmccurdy@ 419-610-0998, X @McMotorsport and Instagram @rob_mccurdy_star. This article originally appeared on Marion Star: Cincinnati's Laracuente-Huebner wins first Big 12 title
Telegraph
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
A former chef declared himself King of Germany. This week Germany arrested him
As dawn broke over Germany's eastern state of Saxony on Tuesday morning, heavily armed police massed outside a property in the picturesque village of Halsbrücke and prepared to smash down its front door. It was 6am, and inside the house was a declared enemy of the state. But this was no ordinary criminal, but a monarch, a self-described one at least. Peter Fitzek, a 59-year-old former chef and karate instructor, has spent more than a decade denying the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and advocating for a return to the borders established during the Second Reich of 1871-1918. Following his arrest, it now seems likely that 'Peter I's' political aspirations as 'King of Germany' will meet a similarly ignominious end to those of his hero, the Kaiser. 'This is illegal and unlawful,' he told reporters on Tuesday as he was ushered into a police car. According to the rules of his own self-proclaimed seat, the so-called Kingdom of Germany, he may have been right. A kingdom 'two and a half times the size of the Vatican' The son of a digger driver, Fitzek was brought up in East Germany. Having failed to secure elected office, either as a mayor or member of the German Parliament, he felt he had no choice but to proclaim an independent kingdom from the grounds of a former hospital in the city of Wittenberg. Fitzek filmed his own coronation in 2012, adorned in ermine robes and holding a mediaeval sword. No stranger to publicity, he has continued to be the subject of bemused profiles in media outlets from New York to Tel Aviv to Sydney in the years since. Life under a king, he told one interviewer, was 'the natural state of the German people'. The country's borders should, he argued, expand to reclaim countries like Poland 'if the people there wanted it'. His own constitution 'came through God – I just dictated it'. And he, himself, was, of course, the reincarnation of the Archangel Uriel. For all the attention he generated, Fitzek and the disparate grouping of nostalgic, anti-state conspiracy theorists who made up his following were largely dismissed as harmless eccentrics prior to the Covid pandemic. But after purchasing a 300-acre estate in Saxony in 2022, he boasted that his kingdom was 'now two and a half times the size of the Vatican'. Embezzlement, tax avoidance and anti-Semitism As his influence grew, there were plenty of signs that the divine right of Peter I to rule small pockets of eastern Germany risked coming into conflict with the secular rights of the federal German authorities. In 2017, Fitzek was convicted of embezzlement of £1.2 million, although a higher court overturned the verdict the following year. He has subsequently been convicted for driving without a licence (the court didn't recognise the one issued by his own kingdom), running his own health insurance programme and assault, a district court taking a dim view of his attempt to claim immunity as a head of state. By 2022, he had claimed 5,000 'citizens', many of them refusing to send their children to school, which is illegal in Germany, or pay tax, which is illegal almost everywhere. Instead, some of his subjects joined his 'system drop-out' seminars, priced at £295 and payable in 'Engelgeld' (angel money), his own currency. Despite Fitzek's protestations that his kingdom simply stands for a 'willingness to take responsibility', it was designated an extremist organisation in 2022 by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency. Three years of close observation culminated in this week's raids involving 800 security personnel in seven states. After being arrested along with several other senior 'subjects', Fitzek was accused by Alexander Dobrindt, German's interior minister, of 'undermining the rule of law' and spreading 'antisemitic conspiracy narratives to back up their supposed claim to authority'. His organisation, the Kingdom of Germany, has been banned. 'Today, a significant blow was struck against the so-called Reich Citizens and Self-Governors,' Dobrindt wrote on X. 'With the so-called 'Kingdom of Germany,' the largest association of this scene, which has been growing for years, was banned.' Dobrindt's tweet is a reminder of the strange, overlapping world of extremist German nostalgics. Abutting the Venn diagram of Fitzek's 'subjects' is the much larger circle of some 25,000 Reichsbürger ('Reich Citizens') who also deny the legitimacy of the country's 1949 constitution and want to re-establish a monarchy that was deposed in 1918. They have been under observation by the BfV since 2016, when one of its members shot dead a police officer during a raid at his home. The Covid lockdown in 2020 swelled their ranks – and their extremism. An attempted coup 'People spent a lot of time in isolation, in front of computers,' explains Jakob Guhl, an expert in far-Right extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. ' Chat forums, such as Telegram, which are [largely] unregulated, saw a huge inflow of anti-vaccine people and far-Right groups. Part of that mix was Reichsbürger, and there was suddenly a far larger audience.' According to German government figures, Reichsbürger committed 1,000 extremist criminal acts in 2021, a twofold increase from the previous year. Officials estimate that 10 per cent of its members are potentially violent and five per cent Right-wing extremists. 'The ideology of rejecting state authority and holding historical revisionist ideas, many of them anti-Semitic, always had the potential to unload itself very badly,' says Guhl. As Covid ebbed and flowed, this first manifested itself in protestors attempting to storm the parliament building in Berlin in August 2020, while waving the pre-1918 flag of the German Empire. The following April, the police foiled a plot by a group calling themselves United Patriots, a subset of the Reichsbürger movement, who wanted to kidnap the health minister, foster a civil war and overthrow the democratic system. Four men aged 46 to 58 and a 77-year-old former teacher were jailed in March this year. The most infamous manifestation of the Reichsbürgers' violent, revisionist intentions was an attempted coup in December 2022, foiled by 5,000 police officers operating in 11 of Germany's 16 states, the largest such operation since 1945. The plot contained many farcical elements, notably a belief that Elizabeth II was part of a global, child-abusing elite and a cast of conspirators that included minor aristocrats, a chef and an opera singer. However, its deadly intentions were apparent from the discovery of 380 guns, 350 bladed weapons and more than 148,000 rounds of ammunition. Its alleged members, whose trials started last year and are still ongoing, included a former AfD member of the Bundestag and a founding member of the German special forces. Interviewed by the BBC shortly after the attempted coup, Fitzek said he had no intention of doing something similar himself (although he did describe the German state as 'destructive and sick', adding he had 'no interest in being part of this fascist and satanic system'). It is, however, interesting to note that some of the conspirators espoused the same historical views as the 'Kingdom of Germany', notably the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, a 73-year-old prince from the House of Reuss, who was alleged to have been central to their plans. Under-35s most likely to want return of the monarchy Prince Reuss, whose family ruled parts of Thuringia until 1918, has recorded videos complaining that his '1,000-year dynasty' had been unjustly usurped. His co-conspirators allegedly shared a vision of returning Germany to elements of its Bismarckian constitutional settlement – a sentiment which enjoys a low but substantial level of support across Germany. Recent polls have shown that almost 10 per cent of the population would like to see the return of the monarchy, a figure that doubles for those under the age of 34. 'The Second Reich is a bit less problematic than harking back to the Nazis,' explains Guhl. 'It doesn't have the same level of toxicity attached to it. The symbols don't tend to be banned; the flags won't necessarily get you into trouble. It's a past that's easier to idealise for movements that want an idealised version of the past.' But this idealised version of the Second Reich ignores the reality of a new country riven by political and cultural divisions and destroyed in the First World War by the Kaiser's ham-fisted Weltpolitik. And as Dobrindt, the interior minister said of Fitzek's arrest this week: 'We are not talking about a group of harmless nostalgics, as the title of the organisation might suggest, but about criminal structures and a criminal network.' There is also an argument that these German nostalgics, however ill-intentioned, would benefit from a better grasp of the historical period they claim to fetishise. The Kaiser died unhappily in exile in 1941, rejected by his own people. Even at the start of the second Reich, a mere Prussian aristocrat knew how to put minor royalty in its place. When Bismarck, the German chancellor, was unifying Germany in 1870, he placated the reluctant King Ludwig of II of Bavaria by offering him his own separate postal service – and little else.
BreakingNews.ie
13-05-2025
- Politics
- BreakingNews.ie
Germany bans the largest ‘Reich citizen' group and arrests four leaders
The German government has banned the largest 'Reich citizen' group, an extremist far-right organisation that calls itself the 'Kingdom of Germany' and seeks to undermine the country's democratic order, and arrested four of its leaders. Since early Tuesday morning, 800 police officers in several states have been searching the association's properties and the homes of leading members. Advertisement Interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said: 'The members of this association have created a 'counter-state' in our country and built up economic criminal structures.' He added that the members of the group underpinned their supposed claim to power with antisemitic conspiracy narratives — a behaviour that the country cannot tolerate. 'We will take decisive action against those who attack our free democratic basic order,' Mr Dobrindt said. The so-called 'Reich citizen', or Reichsburger' movement, does not recognise Germany as a state. Advertisement Many of them claim that the historical German Reich still exists and ignore the country's democratic and constitutional structures such as parliament, laws or courts. They also refuse to pay taxes, social security contributions or fines. The so-called 'Kingdom of Germany' was proclaimed by its leader Peter Fitzek in the eastern town of Wittenberg in 2012 and says it has around 6,000 followers, the interior ministry said in a statement. It claims to be a 'counter-state' that seceded from the German federal government. Advertisement 'This is not about harmless nostalgics, as the title of the association might suggest, but about criminal structures, criminal networks,' the minister told reporters later in Berlin. 'That's why it's being banned today.' The group's online platforms will be blocked and its assets will be confiscated to ensure that no further financial resources can be used for extremist purposes. It is not the first time that Germany has acted against the 'Reichsburger' movement. In 2023, German police officers searched the homes of about 20 people in connection with investigations into the far-right Reich Citizens scene, whose adherents had similarities to followers of the QAnon movement in the United States. Advertisement Last year, the alleged leaders of a suspected far-right plot to topple Germany's government went on trial on Tuesday, opening proceedings in a case that shocked the country in late 2022.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany bans the largest 'Reich citizen' group and arrests 4 leaders
BERLIN (AP) — The German government has banned the largest 'Reich citizen' group, an extremist far-right organization that calls itself the 'Kingdom of Germany' and seeks to undermine the country's democratic order, and arrested four of its leaders. Since early Tuesday, 800 police officers in several states have been searching the association's properties and the homes of leading members. 'The members of this association have created a 'counter-state' in our country and built up economic criminal structures,' Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said, adding that the members of the group underpinned their supposed claim to power with antisemitic conspiracy narratives — a behavior that the country can't tolerate. 'We will take decisive action against those who attack our free democratic basic order,' Dobrindt added. The so-called Reich citizen, or Reichsbürger, movement doesn't recognize Germany as a state. Many of them claim that the historical German Reich still exists and ignore the country's democratic and constitutional structures such as parliament, laws or courts. They also refuse to pay taxes, social security contributions or fines. The 'Kingdom of Germany' was proclaimed by its leader Peter Fitzek — who was among those arrested on Tuesday — in the eastern town of Wittenberg in 2012 and says it has around 6,000 followers, though the interior ministry said that the group has about 1,000 members. It claims to be a 'counter-state' that seceded from the German federal government. 'This is not about harmless nostalgics, as the title of the association might suggest, but about criminal structures, criminal networks," the minister told reporters later in Berlin. "That's why it's being banned today.' The group's online platforms will be blocked and its assets will be confiscated to ensure that no further financial resources can be used for extremist purposes. It's not the first time that Germany has acted against the 'Reichsbürger' movement. In 2023, German police officers searched the homes of about 20 people in connection with investigations into the far-right Reich Citizens scene, whose adherents had similarities to followers of the QAnon movement in the United States. Last year, the alleged leaders of a suspected far-right plot to topple Germany's government went on trial on Tuesday, opening proceedings in a case that shocked the country in late 2022. Kirsten Grieshaber, The Associated Press
