The Curonian Spit, the thin strip of land in the Baltic Sea, half of which is Lithuanian and half of which is Russian, is a beautiful place. Large sand dunes covered with pine forests, beautiful little fishing villages with wooden houses and of course sunsets.
If you can read this
Now enjoy your day!
There are things which you would never want to touch. But then somebody puts up a sign “Don’t touch!” and you suddenly feel the urge to see what happens when you do touch.
In that case, I did not feel that urge at all.
(Seen in Venice, Italy)
I used to think that the UK, consisting mainly of one large island, shouldn’t have that much of a problem with illegal immigration as countries with many long land borders. After all, you only have to control the airports, a handful of seaports and the one train going through the Channel tunnel. You don’t need to build a fence or patrol the forests or mountains all night.
Then I moved to Britain and saw how messed up the system was. Not only were some border posts not manned at all and you could just walk through (especially at seaports at night), but the UK doesn’t perform any exit controls. That means they roughly know who is coming into the country, but they have no idea who is overstaying their visa. Worse, they are not even trying to have an idea. Another trick is to book two international flights which connect at two different of London’s five airports or at different terminals at Heathrow, get a transit visa for the UK and disappear on the way to the second airport or terminal.
But all this immigration mess lies in the past. The future is now! The British government has found the magic bullet for fighting illegal immigration.
What is this? A truck?
Yes, it’s a truck. But not a normal truck! It’s the official “Go home or face arrest” truck commissioned by the UK Home Office to drive around parts of London with a high immigrant population.
There have been many reports about the effectiveness of the truck, which has already caused thousands of illegal immigrants to quit their job and leave to Somalia or Pakistan immediately. Airlines have had to charter extra flights to Afghanistan and Syria. Zamira A., 28, from Iran said: “I always wanted to stay in England and never thought of leaving before. But then I saw this truck driving past me, while I was buying chicken wings in West London. It made me reflect on my life and I will leave the UK right away. Thank you, truck!”
Government by billboards – for governments who have absolutely no idea what to do. (Disclaimer: The UK Government does not accept any responsibility if its policies cause or increase anti-immigrant, xenophobic or racist sentiment and lead to violence.) There are no reports about a similar truck with the sign “Pay taxes or face arrest” being commissioned to drive around the City of London.
(This is an update to my FAQ about child custody law in Germany.)
For a long time, child custody in Germany was automatically awarded to the mother of the child if the parents were not married at the time of birth. For a long time, a great many people found this to be unfair, both to the fathers and to the children who were often deprived of one of their parents. For a long time, people petitioned the Department of Justice and Parliament to amend the law. I myself represented a fathers’ rights group in a meeting with then Secretary of Justice Ms. Zypries in 2005. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled the law to be unconstitutional.
Now, in 2013, the child custody law was finally amended and a new child custody law came into effect on 19 May 2013:
So far, unmarried parents could obtain joint custody if they both signed a joint custody declaration. This gave the mother a veto, which many mothers unfortunately abused (to obtain financial benefits, to force the father to do things he otherwise wouldn’t want to do, to move away from the father to disrupt or prevent contact).
Now, the Family Court can rule that both parents have joint custody. (Joint custody does not necessarily mean that the child spends equal time with either parent, it only gives the parents the same legal rights and forces them to come to an agreement about all major decisions in the child’s life.)
This requires a petition from one parent (typically the father). The court has to award joint custody to both parents unless joint custody would contravene the welfare of the child. It is hard to imagine cases where the welfare of the child would be endangered by having two guardians instead of one. The law assumes that joint custody is in the interest of the child (§ 1626a II BGB).
The petition will be served on the other parent (typically the mother) and the court gives them a deadline to respond. For the mother, this deadline has to extend at least to 6 weeks after the birth of the child (§ 155a II FamFG). If the responding parent does not provide any reasons against joint custody, the Family Court will render its decision in writing and without a hearing (§ 155a III 1 FamFG).
This is far from the changes that I would have liked to have seen (total equality between married and unmarried parents and between mothers and fathers), but it is a considerable improvement for unmarried fathers. I am curious to see how it will play out in contested proceedings.
When you get to a place and you think “I have been here before” but you know that you haven’t, then either the place looks eerily similar to one to which you have been (like most of the seaside towns in Britain look similar), or you have been watching a movie too often.
Walking the West Highland Way in Scotland, I came into this valley that cuts through some mountains close to Glencoe.
If you have the same taste in movies as I do, you will easily have recognized this road from the finale of Skyfall, where James Bond and M return to Bond’s birthplace in Scotland. (A click on the photo below will take you to the video.)
And finally, this is me exploring the scene and wondering how many hikers pass this place every day who are oblivious to the fact that a piece of art was filmed where they are treading along with a heavy rucksack:
He loved getting calls from Russia. The international country code was 007. He always wondered what had come first: the assigning of that dialing code to the Soviet Union or the first James Bond novel. He knew that the latter had been published in 1953 (Casino Royale), but the calls from Russia usually lead to some job which needed to be undertaken immediately, so that by the end of the call he had always forgotten to check the former on Wikipedia.
The number was +74955788026. He recognized neither the area code nor the number, but once more he was dismayed at modern technology, which needlessly abbreviated 007 to +7. After three rings, he had decided against answering in Russian. With his knowledge limited to around 20 words, he couldn’t fool anyone for longer than one sentence.
“Yes, this is Andreas.” He always introduced himself when answering the phone, out of politeness, out of habit and to indicate to the yet unknown caller in which language he would prefer the conversation to be continued.
“Is that Andreas Moser?” Good. The caller spoke English without any discernible accent, except for the butchering of his name to which he had gotten used. So he wouldn’t need to get an interpreter involved, which would have been problematic on a Sunday evening. Oddly enough, some of these guys insisted on spending time with their families.
“Yes, that’s me,” he replied, not at all surprised that somebody who knew his current phone number also knew his name. He was always far more concerned when people who called him asked “where are you?” because he thought this was nobody’s business and because he had grown up in a time when phones were fixed to the wall with a cable, so that this question would have sounded ridiculous. Also, Moser was always worried that one day a sniper could call and ask him to confirm his own location before taking him out. There was no immediate reply from the other end of the line, so he added “how can I help?”
“Do you have a few minutes?” Very good. He liked people who were as polite and considerate as he deemed himself to be.
“Sure, go ahead.” Moser sat down in one of the comfy chairs in his Soviet-era apartment on Savanoriu prospektas in Vilnius, ready to listen to a new story and wondering for a second if he should already grab a pen and a notebook, but deciding against it for now.
“I may need your help.” No surprise so far. People only ever called to ask for help, for favours or for advice. They never called to say something nice, to express gratitude or appreciation or to suggest seeing a movie together. Never. And if they did, it was only because they needed another favour again.
“I am stuck in one place and I might need some help getting to another place.” Moser had to smile at the understatement with which the caller described his situation. Rarely had somebody delivered such a succinct job description of what his line of work was.
He was an extraction specialist and he sometimes wondered if he might as well put that on his business card. People would probably assume that he was a dentist then and it might be as good a cover as any of the other ones that he used, from lawyer to translator to graduate student. But Moser hated dentists. It was beyond him how anybody would want to look at rotten, smelling teeth and cause immeasurable pain to patients. He tried not to look down on anyone because of their job, but with dentists, he just couldn’t help it.
Extraction is the business of removing somebody from a place where they don’t want to be or shouldn’t be to a place where they are supposed to be or want to go. Usually, this involves the crossing of international borders and the goal is to avoid detection by at least one, if not both, of the countries involved. Extraction can be performed with or without the consent of the subject. The second alternative is rather like kidnapping and Moser didn’t do that. Not due to moral objections, but because it required far more resources and it was impossible to pull it off alone. One would need a team. He preferred to work alone. A lone wolf in his private life, a lone wolf in business. But extractions of cooperative subjects were fun. One got to know the subject really well, spent a lot of time together, often in a confined space and always under stress. The planning required creativity more than anything else. No plan was the same, every operation had to be put together from scratch. In the implementation, coolness was paramount. Working together with the subject for several days, Moser’s main task was to keep the subject calm, to give him the necessary confidence. He often felt more like a psychological counselor than a spy and he almost liked that part of the job most. It was a good feeling to help the subject to achieve something that a week ago they would never had thought they were capable of doing. On the downside, a nervous subject could wreck the best plan.
Moser had a feeling this would not be a problem with this guy. He sounded cool, exactly the right combination of controlled and relaxed. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Somewhere in South America would be nice.” The bell that had already begun to ring in Moser’s head when he had heard the extraction request made from a Russian telephone rang louder. He wanted to be sure, so he asked: “Are you the computer guy by any chance?” No need to use names over the phone. “I am indeed,” the reply came in a lower voice than anything he had said so far, almost with a hint of regret.
So this was Edward Snowden on the line, a former contractor for the NSA, who had leaked a wealth of documents and information about domestic and international surveillance programs to two newspapers. He had last been seen at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, at least according to media reports. Moser had of course been following the case and had not understood why Snowden had picked Moscow among the many possible destinations from Hong Kong.
Moser had both been expecting and dreading this call. In a way, it was to be expected because of his experience with extractions and because he was working in Eastern Europe already. He was also curious. This Snowden seemed like a nice guy. His approval ratings were probably higher than those of Madonna or Beyoncé, which should make it easy to find safe houses and get help. On the other hand, Moser was worried. He didn’t like working in Moscow and only six weeks ago, a CIA spy had been uncovered there by the FSB. Under Putin’s authoritarian grip, it had become dangerous territory again for foreigners in this line of work. Even if Russia wouldn’t want to pose a problem (after all they might be happy to get rid of Snowden), it’s a long way from there to South America. And finally, and this gave Moser an uneasy feeling, this would be the first time that he would not be working for the side that he usually worked for.
“Are you still where the news say you are?” Again, no need to mention specifics.
A short pause, then: “Not exactly, but I am still in the wider area.” Moser wondered what that meant: somewhere in Moscow? Somewhere in Russia? Possibly Belarus which had a customs union with Russia and no border checks?
The latter would mean that Snowden was only 35 km away, with only one border to cross. A border with plenty of forests (helpful), but an external border of the Schengen Area and the European Union, and thus closely watched (not helpful). It is one of the ironies of European history that in the Soviet Union people could travel from Vilnius in Lithuania to Minsk in Belarus without any restrictions. The distance is less than 200 km, the time by car or train around 3 hours. Then Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, thereby rewarding its citizens with visa- and border-free travel to Spain, Italy, Germany and France among other countries, but putting up a fence on its eastern border which now makes every day-trip to close-by Minsk a hassle.
Next question: “Do you still look the way you used to look?”
“I haven’t been shaving.”
“Good. Keep it that way.” The subject’s appearance was important, obviously for disguise or for fake photo IDs. But Moser didn’t like fake documents, he was always worried that they wouldn’t be good enough or that the data had not been entered into the respective database. There was no point in having a perfectly looking passport if the immigration officer couldn’t find it in his computer when he swiped the passport at the airport. Moser’s preference was to work with doubles: real people with real identities and real passports who looked like the subject. They would be convinced – to use a neutral term – to hand over their passport for a while and the subject would then assume their identity. Moser already sensed that it wouldn’t be hard to find Snowden look-alikes in Lithuania or elsewhere in Eastern Europe. He was white, pale, shy-looking, nothing that would stand out on first sight, and had just turned 30. Moser was sure that if he went to Vilnius University, he could find several look-alikes in one day. Winning their trust was what would take time.
“How tall are you?”
“5 foot 10.”
The biggest worry usually concerned the subject’s language skills, especially with Americans.
“Do you speak any other languages?”
“Some Japanese and some Mandarin.”
“Mhhh”, Moser thought and uttered. Not very useful in this part of the world. “Problem is: you can speak both of these languages as well as you want, you ain’t gonna fool the Chinese or the Japanese with your looks.” Let alone that we would never find an Asian look-alike for you, he added to himself.
“Are you getting any help where you are now?”
“Yes, some. But they don’t know what to do from here on.”
“If you can stay where you are or move around between safe houses, that’s good enough for now. Keep a low profile, needless to say. I’ll figure something out, but I’ll need a few days. I don’t want to keep this conversation going too long. Use a different phone next time. And one last thing: if you have these Wikileaks guys helping you, don’t trust the clown. He has his own agenda and his own problems. Don’t make them your problems. The only thing you can learn from him is this: don’t trust women!” It was time for the standard instruction: “I will never contact you, so I need neither number nor address. You call me in two days. I might be coming your way.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck! You’re doing great so far.”
Moser had already been forming a plan in his mind and he knew that he would apply for a visa for Belarus the next morning. He also needed to come up with a cover story for a longer absence. Luckily, it was his birthday next week, for which he usually went away. Nobody would be surprised if he would be gone for a hiking trip in the mountains for a week. To lay a false trail he booked a flight to and from Scotland and e-mailed some friends that he would be hiking the West Highland Way for a week and attempt to climb Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. That sounded like something that he would really do, and where nobody would be surprised if they didn’t hear or read from him for a while.
Then he did what he always did at the beginning of a new job: he took a Rocky Patel from the cigar drawer in the heavy desk, cut off the cap and went for a walk in Vingis Park, which was more of a forest than a park and just a few minutes from his home. As the cigar smoke dissipated skyward through the pine trees like the smoke from the trains which used to make their way through the park in the time of the Soviet Union, he knew that he would have several extraction plans ready by the time he would return home a few hours later. This Snowden guy should be happy that my planning starts on a sunny day, he thought.
Next week I will go to Scotland and walk the West Highland Way from Glasgow to Fort William (154 km). At the end of the trail, I will attempt to climb Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the UK.
There is a live webcam to check the weather conditions, which at the moment look like this:
First I thought that the webcam was broken, but when I clicked on the views from other angles, I noticed that there is a little bit of landscape hidden among the fog. This doesn’t seem to be an extraordinarily bad day, because below the webcam it says: “During periods of bad weather in the Ben Nevis area, you may only see a grey picture. Don’t worry – this is genuine and is a natural phenomena called Scotch Mist!”
If this is what it looks like in the middle of summer, I am curious about autumn.
UPDATE: I am back from my walk across Scotland and on top of Ben Nevis and I had a wonderful week (from 4 to 11 July). It was beautiful weather almost for the whole time, with a lot of sunshine and great views. I did not have to wear my raincoat a single time.
Today is an important day for gay rights.
Washington, D.C., USA on 26 June 2013:
After two decisions by the US Supreme Court, one of which struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law which denied equal recognition to same-sex couples who had been married in states (both in and outside the USA) that allow such marriages, thousands of people celebrated outside of the US Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.
No one would have considered these celebrations to be dangerous or a threat to public order or safety.
In the other case, the Supreme Court opened the way for the State of California to resume gay marriages.
Vilnius, Lithuania on 26 June 2013:
On the same day, the City of Vilnius has again refused a request to hold the “Baltic Pride” march of LGBT and equality activists on the city’s main avenue, Gedimino prospektas, on 27 July 2013. The municipality cited security reasons and said that this street in Lithuania’s capital was too complicated to police for a march which had drawn a few hundred participants when it was last held here in 2010.
This comes in defiance of a first court case in the matter, which the City of Vilnius lost, and after the same municipality did not stop approximately 3,000 Neo-Nazis from marching on the same avenue on 11 March, and despite assurances by the police that they are ready to protect the march wherever it will be held.
Lithuania will assume the EU’s rotating presidency in 5 days. Meanwhile, a substantial number of Lithuania’s members of parliament have suggested to amend the constitution “to outlaw the propagation of homosexual relations” (whatever that is supposed to mean in practice).
Senegal on 26 June 2013:
President Obama heard the news of the US Supreme Court decisions while visiting Senegal, where homosexuality is a criminal offence, as it is in several African countries.
Living in Lithuania, it feels like we are closer to Africa than to the USA on some issues. Lithuanian legislators seem to have gotten their ideas from Africa, or from Russia at best.
“Hi”, said the guy, “I am the spy from Hawaii, but I had to get away. I went to Hong Kong, but I couldn’t stay long. I am still a spy and I would like to fly to Yungay before I die. This poetry is a form of mimicry. That’s like a code. Let’s hit the road and goodbye”, said the spy. “Ciao, Moscow!”
The Happy Hermit 