German News, Slowly Spoken: Every day, Deutsche Welle's news service reads the 10 o'clock news -- slowly -- in German, and puts it on the Web as an MP3 file.
I don't need this as badly as I once might have -- man, I would have killed for this when I was first learning German! -- but it's nice to know that it's there, should I need a slow, patient voice to speak to me. (From PapaScott's sidebar of links.)
Raiders of the Lost Bonds: As a stamp-collecting kid, I was fascinated by German stamps of the 1920s, printed and overprinted with fantastical values -- five million Marks, five hundred million Marks, five billion Marks -- as a result of the hyperinflation that Germany was undergoing during the Weimar Republic.
Now, it seems that another relic of that 1920s hyperinflation is coming back to haunt the current German government -- some people in possession of Weimar Republic bonds are trying to get the Bundesbank, Germany's current state bank, to pay them off.
The German government's liability is far from clear -- should all of the worldwide claims turn out to be valid, it may be on the hook for 500 billion dollars. A strawberry farmer from Florida can't wait; he's holding 750 bonds and is suing the German government for $382.5 million. Adding to the murk is the fact that many of these bonds may have been stolen by the Russians from government vaults during their sack of Berlin at the end of the war -- but since the paperwork of the department responsible for keeping track of these bonds was also destroyed, nobody knows for sure!
(From Crooked Timber.)
Posted by Kevin at December 10, 2004 09:50 AM