Graphic: TP

The new U.S. president bombs Shiite militias in Syria after the missile attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq

Early today in Central Europe, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby announced that the U.S. military had launched airstrikes against infrastructure in eastern Syria on the orders of Joseph Biden, the new U.S. president who has been in office for more than five weeks. These facilities had been used by "Iran-backed militant groups" such as Kait’ib Hezbollah and Kait’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, which had also carried out attacks in Iraq.

"I’m well over two meters rough, I’m made of rubber, and people point with your finger to me."

Pop Literature – Bah! Benjamin of Stucuzzi Barre – Extra Bah! No trend in the German literature landscape was so heated and vehemently discussed as the so-called pop literature. No young German author has in the last ten years with his appearance and work in such a polarized as Benjamin of Stuckrad Barre. Admiring or contempt for the self-billed young writer – there was not much. Now the column author, MTV moderator and prose-pop star has written a new book. And everything is different.

The book is called "German theater". It is almost 300 pages thick, the envelope looks like with ink hastily painted and inside there are in addition to about 40 texts (partly already published in the FAZ, in the star and the world on Sunday) numerous photos, the stucco bare bar with one Digital camera has taken. The author himself is (unfortunately) to see on any picture. The book is about Germany, of campaign events, shareholders’ meetings, Formula 1 race, musicians and drug apparelers. It does not act from Benjamin of Stucuzzi Barre. It is a very word-minded book, only one word rarely occurs in it: I.

After the decision of the Kammergericht, it is now open what will happen to the collected data from 77 "screened" People happens

The Berlin Court of Appeals has ruled that the highly controversial dragnet search for potential Islamic terrorist attackers, initiated by the country’s police president in September 2001 after the attacks on New York and Washington, was legal. In a decision published yesterday, Monday, it states that it is not a matter of a present and concrete danger to carry out such a search with a coarse sieve on a computer basis. In the last instance, the judges thus diametrically opposed their colleagues at the Regional Court, who had ied a contrary ruling in January, declaring the dragnet inadmissible in view of an unproven acute danger situation (dragnet in Berlin declared inadmissible).

The search history after "Sleepers", The fact that the two groups of people, who up to now have lived an apparently normal everyday life as students, for example, and could thus at most be conspicuous by commonalities in their lives, is thus once again enriched by a contentious chapter in Berlin. It had begun on 17. September with unlegitimized data collection from agencies such as the Hahn-Meitner Institute, the water utilities, as well as universities: the required court order was missing at that time. She was only born on 20. September after an initial rejection of the criminalists’ request and a renewed justification by the police.

The future is entirely created by old people

‘The worst thing about the future,’ said a young friend of mine, ‘is that it’s so boring. It’s in the Sunday Times every week, and if you miss that it’s always on Tomorrow’s World or Discovery. What’s really interesting is the past. The guys just can’t get enough of it. Everyone I know is obsessed with shooting radar into the ground to find old tombs, digging up plague pits, reconstructing Roman cities, X-raying skulls, counting teeth…’

A typical young person’s view I thought, and I made the following reply.

Image: ROverhate. License: CC0

Discussion about detention for those who have to leave the country and criteria for the classification of danger

After the asylum seeker Ahmad A. When a man stabbed a 50-year-old man to death in an Edeka supermarket in Hamburg-Barmbeck on Friday and subsequently injured another seven people, some of them seriously, media outlets such as the Hamburger Abendblatt spoke of a failure of the authorities. Among other things, they refer to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which did not send the man, who entered Germany in 2015 via Scandinavia and Spain, back to Sweden, even though Sweden is part of the Dublin area and even though Ahmad A. had previously been resident there for so long that an interview with the Hamburg foreign office on 3. November was partly conducted in Swedish. The same question arises with regard to Spain, where he lived afterwards. It is possible that the BAMF failed to take such measures because the Palestinian, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, claimed to the authorities that he wanted to leave for the Gaza Strip and had papers ied by the representative office of the Palestinian autonomous authority in Berlin for this purpose.

In the Pakistani border areas, the war is being waged remotely with robots, partly for political reasons

The situation in Pakistan, especially in the areas bordering Afghanistan, is unclear and the country is increasingly becoming a powder keg. The government, under prere from the U.S. to bring the border areas under control and fight the militants, is trying a constant balancing act. Again and again, efforts are made to expel or retreat Taliban and other armed groups, which are also responsible for the resistance in Afghanistan, but on the other hand to rely on talks in order not to further destabilize the situation domestically.

After many years of the U.S. government and the Pentagon supporting and rousing the Pakistani government as an ally in the fight against terrorism, but the border areas continue to be a "Wild West" The US President Bush, the supreme commander, has reportedly ordered that troops on the ground and in the air are allowed to cross the border and attack targets in Pakistan. This has already happened at least once, prompting the Pakistani government and military to insist on sovereignty and announce that invading soldiers will be repelled as popular opposition grows.

Record published by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

In the race of Syrian troops and US-backed SDF units on the strategically important city of Deir-ez-Zor, the conflict between Russia and the US is intensifying

As has long been clear, the defeat and expulsion of the Islamic State in Syria does not lead to a resolution of the conflict. There is too much divergence between the geopolitical interests of the U.S. and Russia and their allied regional powers, which in turn are linked to Syrian parties on the ground (power poker in Syria). The conflict is currently dominated by Iran’s interest in building a land bridge to Lebanon through Iraq and Syria, which has met with strong opposition from the United States. In addition, the city is also strategically important in Syria, with oil wells in the surrounding area.

Putin on state visit to Budapest – new supply agreement with Gazprom – Rosatom builds two reactor units

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Budapest at the invitation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to lay a wreath at a World War II memorial to the Red Army and to negotiate energy cooperation. According to Orban, a new contract for the supply of natural gas, which was agreed upon in the process, stipulates that in the future Hungary will only have to pay Gazprom for the amount of gas that is actually consumed there. This individual contract has been met with criticism, especially in Poland, where they wanted new energy supply agreements with Russia to be negotiated by the EU Commission, where Warsaw can have a say.

Already on 1. January 2015, a contract signed last year with Rosatom to build two new 1,200-megawatt reactor units to the Paksh nuclear power plant, scheduled to come on line in 2023, came into force. The twelve billion euros that this construction will cost will be financed to 80 percent with a Russian loan that must be repaid by 2045 with 4.5 to 4.9 percent interest.

Palaontologists have discovered the oldest human footprints to date in southern Italy

Researchers from the Institute of Geology, Palaeontology and Geophysics of the University of Padua have discovered what are probably the oldest human footprints in southern Italy. These are the traces of three hominids found in the fossilized ash on the western rim of the Roccamonfina volcano, about 40 kilometers north of Naples. As the team of scientists led by Paolo Mietto reports in the current ie of Nature, the tracks date back to the middle Pleistocene and are dated between 385.000 and 325.000 years old.

The early ancestors of man, who left their traces at Roccamonfina, according to Mietto and his researchers, were already characterized by an upright gait and used their hands only to keep their balance on the difficult terrain. The footprints, popularly known as the devil’s footprints, went down a slope, a handprint indicates that one of the prehistoric hikers had a lurch on the descent and had to cut himself off. The feet of the early mountain climbers were only 20 centimeters long and 10 centimeters wide, according to today’s measurements this corresponds to a shoe size of 33 to 34, so the early climbers were probably not more than 1.50 meters tall.

Memories of a fruit fly studied in the laboratory

The fruit fly can recognize patterns and remember them. Neuroscientists at the University of Wurzburg have now discovered where this process takes place in the brain and which nerve cells are involved in it.

Drosophila melanogaster has a visual memory. It recognizes patterns and can remember them by analyzing them on the basis of five different parameters. Like humans, fruit flies are able to recognize optical impressions even if they appear in a completely different place in the field of vision. Using genetically modified fruit fly strains, researchers at the Biocenter in Wurzburg, Germany, have now discovered the neuron groups involved in remembering two of these parameters. In the current ie of Nature (Vol. 439, no. 7076 from 2.2.2006) they report.