This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Die Welt. With the help of Saxony's Special Commission on Right-Wing Extremism , four young neo-Nazi men were arrested shortly before Christmas Eve 2010 on suspicion of murder and causing grievous bodily harm. Three of the men had allegedly beaten up two guests at the La Notte dance bar in Grlitz ...

Between 2003 and 2004, Marion Le, a Canberra-based lawyer, made regular trips to the remote island of Nauru in the South Pacific. But she wasn't going for a beach holiday. At the time, Nauru was part of the so-called Pacific Solution, Australia's policy of processing and detaining asylum seekers arriving by boat in offshore detention facilities. From 2001 to 2007, thousands of asylum seekers were in offshore detention centers while Australian immigration officials decided their fate. Le, who ...

Player's Club Dios is buzzing. The band is knocking out R.-and-B. Christmas tunes, waiters are bustling around with bottles of whiskey and plates of smoked duck, and the white leather banquettes are crammed with men in dark suits whooping it up with pretty young women. It's just another party spot in a city of party spots, except for one obvious difference: when a drink is poured, it's done by a very deferential man for a woman paying big money for ...

YOU MAY ALREADY BE A COLLECTOR Among the distinctions that painters covet--gallery shows, a high price for their work at auction, placement in a museum, a patron--being cited by the Guinness Book of World Records is not a must-have. But JANE WOOSTER SCOTT received that honor recently when she was named the "Most Reproduced Artist in America." "I heard I was closing in on the title; for a while I was running neck and neck with Picasso," says Wooster Scott, ...

JUST BECAUSE ABORTION IS LEGAL in Illinois doesn't mean that Sheela Paine can easily get one. At the age of 30, she already has five children. Last week she was in the 19th week of a pregnancy she couldn't afford; her husband is unemployed and the family lives on welfare. She also couldn't afford the reduced $425 price of a second-trimester abortion at the clinic near her home in East St. Louis. During her last pregnancy Paine tried to induce ...

Had the Rev. Brian Maguire hit on the idea 30 years ago, he might have found himself facing some very annoyed congregants. Four hundred and fifty years ago, someone professing similar notions might even have been hanged. The 35-year-old pastor's brainstorm concerned a scheduling conflict on the day of the Annunciation. The holiday, which celebrates Mary's learning from the angel Gabriel that she will give birth to the Messiah, always falls on March 25, precisely nine months before Christmas. But this year the 25th is also Good Friday, when Christians ...

Every child is a gift, as the saying goes. But in a case that has stoked outrage on two continents, a Dutch diplomat posted in Hong Kong has been accused of returning his eight-year-old adopted daughter like an unwanted Christmas necktie. The story, which first appeared in the South China Morning Post on Dec. 9, began seven years ago, when Dutch vice consul Raymond Poeteray and his wife, Meta, adopted then-four-months-old Jade in South Korea. The ...

Arthur Erickson designs an airy, elegant masterpiece North Americans have built handsome cities and grown tired of them, as children grow tired of their presents after Christmas. Few architects are as aware of such urban waste as Canada's Arthur Erickson, 54, and few have done more to restore vitality to the inner city. His latest and most ambitious undertaking is a combination of function and fantasy in the heart of his native Vancouver. Formally opened in September, the downtown complex ...

Michael and I had been together 7 1⁄2 years when I moved out in late 2006. We met at a bar just after Christmas 1998; I had seen Shakespeare in Love with a couple of friends, and I was feeling amorous, looking for Joseph Fiennes. Michael hit on one of my friends first, but the two didn't click, so Michael settled for me. That was one of our most reliable stories to tell friends over dinner. It never ceased to ...

Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Fhrer. These defiant words of Pastor Martin Niemoller were echoed by millions of Germans. And Hitler raged: "It is Niemoller or I."So this second Christmas of Hitler's war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps. Here men bear mute witness that the Christ—whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas—can still inspire a living faith for which men and ...