When Katrin Himmler was 15, a classmate at her Berlin school asked her during a history lesson if she was related to Heinrich Himmler, the feared head of Hitler’s SS and a key architect of the Holocaust. When she told them that he was, in fact, her great-uncle, the whole class fell silent and the teacher carried on as if nothing had been said.
In the spectrum of corporate incentives, the cabbage and the cauliflower don’t figure too prominently. Except in Scotland, where managers at two branches of the Bank of Scotland made staff sit the vegetables on their desks to try to prompt improved performance. The move prompted outrage instead.
Details for one of Britain’s biggest rallies against poverty were released on Tuesday, as organisers stressed that the event involving up to 200 000 demonstrators before the G8 summit in Edinburgh would not be hijacked by radical anti-capitalists.
Curled in a chair in his hotel suite in Glasgow, the Dalai Lama was asked what he might have said to British Prime Minister Tony Blair had he been invited to Downing Street during his visit to the United Kingdom. Leaning forward, he chuckled: ”Nothing in particular.” Despite the fury of his followers that the prime minister refused a request to meet him, he insisted it made little difference to him whether he got to see Blair or not.