Grosz was a prolific artist. He created about 450 paintings and more than 15,000 works on paper. Pictures from his Berlin days are worth millions today, and Jentsch has traced some of them to prestigious museums in New York, Vienna, Tokyo and Bremen. But their directors are opposed to returning the works to Grosz's heirs. They see themselves as the rightful owners.

This claim, however, is at least up for debate. Since the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, there has been international agreement that works of art stolen or "confiscated as a result of persecution" during the Nazi years should be returned to their former owners. In the Grosz case, this would be his son Marty, 78, who lives in Philadelphia, and his sister-in-law Lillian, in Princeton, New Jersey. The Grosz heirs agree that they do not want to place restituted works on the market. Instead, they hope to exhibit the paintings and drawings confiscated in the Nazi era at a George Grosz museum, and they are considering Berlin as a possible location.

We’ll be in court soon to try and overturn this. Canada remains a free country with an independent judiciary. They will have to review whether he has acted reasonably in these circumstances.

This may be a rather desperate election ploy by a conservative government reaching the end of line, or by a minister who has not cottoned on to the fact that the George Bush era is over.

All right-thinking Canadians, whether they agree with me over the wisdom of sending troops to Afghanistan or not, will oppose this outrageous decision.

On a personal note – for a Scotsman to be barred from Canada is like being told to stay away from the family home.

This is not something I'm prepared to accept.

Typical cases include the beating of a 44-year-old Pakistani asylum seeker in the town of Brandenburg near Berlin last May. He was attacked from behind by men shouting "Get out of here you pig" and sustained serious head injuries, according to Opferspektive, a government-funded group that monitors such attacks.

In Niedergörsdorf near Berlin in June, a man who was overheard speaking Russian in the street was punched by a neighbor who yelled: "You Russian Jew pig, Hitler would have gassed something like you!"

On March 7 in the eastern town of Mügeln, two men assaulted an Indian man outside a pizza restaurant and broke his nose. Prosecutors aren't ruling out a racist motive. Outside that same restaurant in August 2007, eight Indian men were assaulted by a mob chanting "Foreigners Out" in a case that attracted international attention.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.

... audiences cheered at the preview screenings. "It's the most beautiful and most upsetting film I have ever seen," said Laure Ducastel, 31, a local resident. "It shows how the refugees and the charity workers are heroes and what dirty work the French state does to make their lives a misery."

The report states: "Israeli 'facts on the ground' - including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions - increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank."

The EU says settlement are being built in the east of the city at a "rapid pace". Since the Annapolis peace talks began in late 2007, nearly 5,500 new settlement housing units have been submitted for public review, with 3,000 so far approved, the report says. There are now about 470,000 settlers in the occupied territories, including 190,000 in East Jerusalem.

The EU is particularly concerned about settlements inside the Old City, where there were plans to build a Jewish settlement of 35 housing units in the Muslim quarter, as well as expansion plans for Silwan, just outside the Old City walls.

The goal, it says, is to "create territorial contiguity" between East Jerusalem settlements and the Old City and to "sever" East Jerusalem and its settlement blocks from the West Bank.

This is the equivalent to the start of the Vietnam conflict, there is much more to come.

We hold tiny areas of ground in Helmand and we are kidding ourselves if we think our influence goes beyond 500 metres of our security bases.

We go out on operations, have a punch-up with the Taleban and then go back to camp for tea. We are not holding the ground.

We were there for 10 years and we lost more than 14,000 soldiers, but what was the result? Nothing,