Karl's Weird News

Japanese politician launches attack on ‘River Kwai’ Britons :

A politician tipped as a future Japanese prime minister has said the British are not very likeable, but admitted the way British prisoners marched in The Bridge on the River Kwai demonstrated their best qualities.

Ichiro Ozawa, the former secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party, also said he values US democracy but dismissed the American people as “simple-minded”.

The 68-year-old veteran politician, who resigned as the second most important official in the ruling party in June after coming under fire for campaign finance scandals, reportedly said: “I don’t like British people,” before praising British democracy and their discipline, citing the 1957 Second World War II film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which British prisoners of war march in orderly ranks.

The film, based on the novel The Bridge over the River Kwai starred Sir Alec Guinness, William Holden and Jack Hawkins. Guinness won an Oscar for his portrayal of Colonel Nicholson, who convinces the other British prisoners of war to build a bridge for the Burma-Siam railway as a means of boosting British morale but which eventually turns into a monument to himself.

The film won six other Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Veterans of the Second World War who fought against Japan said Mr Ozawa’s comments about Britain were insensitive but they would “not get into a sweat about it”.

School sorry for Hitler costume:

A Perth Catholic school has apologised to parents who were offended by a Year 4 student pretending to be Adolf Hitler being awarded first place in his class at a school dress-up day.

The inner-city school sent out a letter of apology on Wednesday after parents complained about the boy’s character portrayal at a book-week assembly.

The principal said a handful of parents had approached or emailed him after the event to say the costume, which included a swastika, should not have been allowed in the school.

Children had been asked to dress up as a famous character. “He (Hitler) was a fairly famous person,” he said. Two children from each class were judged as having the best costumes.

The principal was one of a group of teachers who decided who would win. He said claims that other children had been chanting “Hitler” while the student was on stage were untrue.

“It was a form of voting,” he said. “I would strongly deny that the children were chanting ‘Hitler’, I take strong umbrage to that.”

Other characters’ names were also called out as part of the voting process.

“Some people got upset because kids called out Hitler,” he said. The principal said he did not see anything “sinister” in the student’s choice of character.

“To me it’s a mountain out of a molehill,” he said.

Anger as ex-finance minister warns Muslims ‘making Germany stupid’

A LEADING German Social Democrat has written a book with an apocalyptic vision of his country sliding into poverty, stupidity and Muslim domination.

Thilo Sarrazin, 65, a former Berlin finance minister and current Bundesbank board member, is already under investigation by a public prosecutor for allegedly inciting racial hatred by blaming immigrants for making Germany “dumber” and calling Muslim children “underclass citizens.”

Now his book, Germany is destroying itself: How we are gambling with our country, threatens the strained social fabric of the “multi-culti” Fatherland once more at a time of rising racial tensions and the radicalisation of Islamic youth.

“I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to become, in large part, Muslim, that over wide areas Turkish and Arabic are spoken, where the women wear headscarves and the daily rhythms of life are dictated by the call of the Muezzin,” he writes.