Berlin Wall

Now published as a book, Herlinde Koelbl's series of portraits follow Merkel's transformation from an obscure politician into Germany's first female chancellor. Her hairstyle is short and unfussy; she's wearing a simple, comfortable-looking cardigan over a turtleneck. As she stares straight into the camera for her first portraits with Herlinde…

The government must tear down the “Berlin Wall of digital literacy” between the UK’s richest and poorest households or risk increasing inequality, according to the chairs of two Westminster committees. Education Select Committee chair Robert Halfon and Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee chair Julian Knight said in a…

It’s been more than 50 years since biologist Roger Payne brought whale song into the lives of millions via the popular album, Songs of the Humpback Whale. At the time, commercial whaling had decimated global whale populations, and Payne’s record helped spark the anti-whaling movement, the haunting songs of the…

VATICAN CITY, Sept 1 - Pope Francis has defended the Vatican deal with China's communist government on the appointment of Catholic bishops, saying an uneasy dialogue is better than no dialogue at all. In an interview with Spanish radio network COPE broadcast on Wednesday, Francis compared the Vatican's dialogue with…

A LOBBY CAN shape the first impressions of a business. Guests at the building housing the New York headquarters of Jefferies, an investment bank, were once greeted by a section of the Berlin Wall purchased from the East German government. In the London office of Slaughter and May, a law…

The four great prose works of W.G. Sebald were published around the turn of the millennium, a period once perceived by some as the end of history. Vertigo was quietly released in Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Emigrants and The Rings of…

Former President Ronald Reagan delivered his famous Berlin Wall speech 34 years ago on June 12, 1987. Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and delivered the lines that echoed around the world, a direct challenge to the Soviet Union’s power in Eastern Europe: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this…

KOLKATA: Hilsa migration’s equivalent of the Berlin Wall — a faulty navigation lock on the Farakka barrage that straddles Bengal’s Murshidabad and Malda districts — is falling after 43 years of denying fish lovers their shimmering silvery catch from Bangladesh. Once found in abundance in Ganga till as far upstream…

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall from 1988 to ’91 spawned liberal democracies worldwide. By 2005, there were democratically-elected governments across Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.Totalitarian governments were swept away in Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany; and Argentina, Brazil,…

The BBC’s Intrigue strand has already produced two superb podcasts, Tunnel 29 (about Berlin Wall escapes) and The Ratline (Nazi hunting), said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. Now it has brought us Intrigue: Mayday – a “brilliantly produced” ten-parter about James Le Mesurier (pictured), the ex-British Army officer who led…