Sharing a kiss with your kid should be the most natural thing in the world. Clodagh Finn observes the backlash as some chose to criticise Victoria Beckham for doing just that

OPENING its gates in May, 1939, four months before the outbreak of the Second World War — to be liberated by the Russians six years later — Ravensbrück, 50 miles north of Berlin, in Germany, was the only concentration camp the Nazis built to house only female political prisoners.

BY this time of year they were dog-eared. Full of scribbles. The first one you had attempted, months ago, had seemed so simple and trivial. You had bigger fish/questions to fry/answer.

A councillor expelled by Ukip after saying she had a problem with “negroes” has insisted she is not racist and did not regret making the comments.

No woman has ever told me she had an abortion. I find that quite amazing.

Germany is investigating a suspected US spy in its military days after the arrest of a member of its foreign intelligence agency as a double agent tested US relations already strained by espionage.

Germany’s top public prosecutor has launched an investigation into the bugging of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone by US intelligence in the light of revelations by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, authorities announced last night.

Commentary based on speculation, or speculation based unconfirmed reports, is usually best avoided but exceptional circumstances very occasionally make it unavoidable.

Masters of the Word

Valley of Unknowing

I MUST have been the only Courtmacsherry resident not to have seen the flock of 16 glossy ibises that made the bay shore their home from October 4 to October 15.

Cormac O’Keeffe says advances in cars and mobile phones may compromise right to privacy

SWEDISH retail giant Ikea used political prisoners in East Germany as “slave labour” to make furniture, secret police files unearthed by a German broadcaster appear to show.

SATURDAY

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev today crossed a former fortified border to cheers as Germans recalled the night 20 years ago that the Berlin Wall gave way to their desire for freedom and unity.

THIS weekend we celebrate the 20th anniversary of a great victory for human instinct and visceral ambition over an evil and degenerate system.

ARCHITECTURAL plans for the Auschwitz death camp discovered in Berlin last year were handed over yesterday to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for display at Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

EUROPEAN Parliament heads will today discuss setting up a committee of inquiry into whether anti-EU elements helped fund the Libertas campaign in Ireland.

‘The Lives of Others’ (Lions Gate, €24.99) is a terrific work of terror, paranoia and betrayal set in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

German authorities are using scent tracking to keep tabs on possibly violent protesters against next month’s Group of Eight summit – a tactic that is drawing comparisons with the methods of former East Germany’s secret police.

A German court today approved parole for one of the last jailed members of the Red Army Faction in a case that has helped revive painful memories of the left-wing terrorist group’s 1970s heyday.

THE timing was ironic on many fronts. He died in his sleep, 17 years to the day after the Berlin Wall came down.

DO YOU remember the phrase ‘Ich bin ein Berliner?’ Most people of my generation do because it was uttered by John F Kennedy a day or two after he completed his famous visit to Ireland in 1963.

ON the night of February 13, 1945, Dresden was drenched in bombs by the Royal Air Force. Raids by the Americans followed on the 14th and 15th.

The former East Germany’s secret police used a total of eight agents over the years to report on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, the agency that oversees the Stasi’s files said today.

Four Greek left-wing terrorists were each jailed for more than 1,000 years today – then the judges reduced the sentences to 25 years.

A special court convicted four Greeks today for membership in a far-left terrorist group that for 20 years carried out a bombing campaign against both domestic and American targets.

East German secret police files on former Chancellor Helmut Kohl must remain largely sealed, a court ruled today handing Kohl a boost in a years-long legal battle.

US civil liberties groups today warned an appeal for millions of citizen informants could lead to ‘‘government-sanctioned peeping Toms’’.

Figure skating star Katarina Witt stepped up her resistance to the release of her East German secret police file today, as the government agency that controls the files confirmed she was ‘‘significantly supported’’ by the Stasi.

Dissidents in communist East Germany were given radioactive "tags" that allowed them to be tracked with Geiger counters.