Articles about General Events

Church Spire has been Stolen

In Göttingen, a famous town in Lower Saxony, the church spire has been stolen. It has a value of about 10,000€ and a weight of 30kg. There have been clean-up operations and the workers thought it had been removed by somebody else for restoration, too. However, some thieves had probably climbed the scaffold and removed the golden pike.

The theft must have taken place somewhen between October 5 and October 14, because there is a photography from October 5 on which it is still visible. I am however wondering if it was not very difficult to take a 4m long pike downstairs on a scaffold, because they usually do not have so huge ladders and gaps.

Summer Time Ended

The summer time has ended in Germany this night. Every year we shift the clock one hour forward in spring and undo everything in autumn. I think many people are annoyed by this law and do not really like it, even politicians agree that the former plan to save energy (compare English term daylight-saving time) was not really reached. Still, it has not been stopped, yet.

This night the clock has been switched from 3am to 2am and therefore the night was one hour longer.

There have been several periods in Germany for using daylight-saving time, the current one started in 1980 due to the oil crisis in 1973. The first introduction of daylight-saving time in Germany was in 1916.

One interesting aspect: According to researchers there are more traffic accidents on a Monday after switching time from normal time to daylight-saving time (one hour missing at night) than on a normal Monday. *

* http://www.zeitumstellung.de/warum-sommerzeit-winterzeit.html (German)

No Thin Models in Women's Magazine

A German women's magazine wants to stop printing pictures of very thin models. They say that they had to make the girls fatter with photoshop in the past to reach at least some reality. Now they want to hire readers of the magazine and take pictures of them, pictures of people from daily life. The magazine says: "The 18 year old high-school graduate, [...] the musician, the soccer player".

It is a very dangerous state that most professional models are much too thin, because some girls try to be like them and stop eating. Current model industry has a very wrong ideal of how people should look like. Therefore, it might be a good step of the magazine to take pictures of usual readers even though it is not a youth magazine. You can consider it as a first step.

Possible Reasons for the School Attack

New details about the school attack on September 17 have been revealed. Police said that the culprit had acted due to hate on people and school. A text containing plans on the deed has been found on his notebook. He wrote a letter to a non-existant person in which he talked about his emotions feeling excluded and unliked.

People from his school also said that he was a loner and did not have friends. They also admitted that nobody wanted to share a room with him on the class trip which should have taken place soon.

Personal comment

Yet, it never seemed like anybody of the schoolmates speaking on TV has thought only one second that it was not the fault of the guy to be alone. He was not really talkative of course, but this has started somewhen and before that you should have talked to him.

According to my opinion most school shooters (in this case not exactly a shooter) are very intelligent persons who do not care about fashion, style and brands. They usually have deeper thoughts.

At least, with regard to the school shooter of Emsdetten (2006), this was the case. The culprit in that case had been bullied by the other schoolmates and felt hatred about the need to own cool stuff. An interesting fact in this case is that he had a list of three people he hated the most (because they had bullied him most), but in interviews later one of these people did not want to know how he could get on the list.

Killing Spree in a School in Ansbach

If a student goes to school this is probably nothing special, but if he brings molotov cocktails, knives and an axe with him, there is nothing good to happen. In a Bavarian town called Ansbach this has happened today.

According to information of the police the student entered the school at 8:30a.m. He threw one molotov cocktail into both the classrooms of a ninth and an eleventh class. Two students were injured heavily (one due to fire and one due to attacks with knife and axe).

There have been some cases in which students invaded their school with guns and shot people, some also built bombs, but I never heard of somebody attacking his schoolmates with an axe. It also seems like this was the first culprit in such a case who did not kill himself afterwards (compare below).

Former cases of killing spree in school

In 2002 a student in Erfurt shot 16 people, most of them teachers. He had to leave school before and maybe wanted to have revenge for some injustice he felt. In the end he killed himself. The main problem probably was that in his region you do not receive any graduation certificate if you leave school earlier (other countries give you a secondary school level I graduation when you leave after tenth class), therefore he had no perspective for the future.

After some years of silence, another ex-student went to his former school in Emsdetten and shot around. He injured 37 people and then killed himself. The interesting aspect is that the culprit published a suicide note on the internet claiming that his classmates had molested him before.

In spring 2009 15 people had to die in a shooting in Winnenden. Unlike the culprit in Emsdetten, this one killed his victims with headshots. He also chose the classes he entered very selectively entering ninth and tenth classes who knew him. The culprit escaped about 40km far and shot somebody in a car shop. When the police had reached him, he killed himself.