German 'heatball' trick outwits EU light bulb ban

by Reuters

Berlin: A German entrepreneur is bypassing a European Union ban on light bulbs of more than 60 watts by marketing his own brand as mini heaters.

Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs - by producing them in China, importing them as "small heating devices" and selling them as "heatballs".

To improve energy efficiency, the EU has banned the sale of bulbs of over 60 watts - to the annoyance of the mechanical engineer from the western city of Essen.

Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realised that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light - he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent - they could be sold legally as heaters.

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17% of Germans believe Jews have 'too much influence'

                                                                                   by Eldad Beck

Sixty-five years have passed since the end of the Second World War, but even today it would seem that many Germans still cling to the prejudice and racism which the Nazi party identified with.

A new poll conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation for Political Education, a foundation with close ties to the German Social Democratic party, has found that one in 10 Germans wants "a new Fuehrer to lead the country with an iron fist", and that every third German thinks all foreign immigrants should be expelled from Germany if unemployment becomes a problem.

As for anti-Semitism, 17.2% of the survey's participants supported the statement that "Jews have too much influence in the world today".

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Chancellor Merkel: Multiculturalism has 'utterly failed'

by Sean Sinico, Martin Kuebler

Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed," according to Chancellor Angela Merkel. "This approach has failed, utterly failed," said Merkel, head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in a speech to the party's young people's association in Potsdam on Saturday. "The failures of the last 30 or 40 years cannot be resolved so quickly," she said.

The comments followed a similar speech from Horst Seehofer, head of the CDU's Bavarian sister party to the CSU. On Friday he declared his party's stance against multiculturalism: "Multiculturalism is dead," he said, to delegates' applause.

In her speech, Merkel stressed that immigrants must learn to speak German in order to be able to compete on the job market. "Those who want to take part [in our society] must not only obey our laws, they must also master our language," she said.

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