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The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn

The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files.

Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife’s urging, he made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem. “Bismarck was a very, very witty man” and reciting the Marseillaise “would tickle him,

Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance. "It all started, I guess, in the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars and the inability of the Europeans to do anything basic about a war in their backyard."

"I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong."

After World War II, Europeans set about forming a union along three axes: politics, defense and economics. Britain quickly rejected political union, however, and soon enough NATO came along to become the only defense union Western Europe needed. An economic union—the European Economic Community, established in 1957—was the only remaining pillar of integration left to pursue.

Critical negotiations between the embattled Ukrainian government and opposition leaders were thrown into disarray on Thursday when President Viktor F. Yanukovych went on sick leave, complaining of a respiratory infection.

But he has found himself caught between the competing demands of the protesters in the streets of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities and his allies in the Kremlin, who suspended the loan deal on Wednesday after disbursing only $3 billion.

Vitali Portnikov, an opposition journalist, suggested that rather than a virus, Mr. Yanukovych was falling prey to internal political pressures, perhaps losing power to a hard-line faction in his government, a development that could presage a coup d’état.

Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?

At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.

France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.

Germany's parliament has reconvened for the first time since September's election which saw a surge of support for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

She is trying to forge a deal between her Christian Democrat bloc and the centre-left Social Democrats.

Women make up 36% of the new MPs, where one-third of members are new to the Bundestag.

“Blood has been spilled in Ukraine again,” wrote Mr. Medvedev, once favored in the West for playing good cop to the hard-boiled president, Vladimir V. Putin. “The threat of civil war looms.”

It is an extraordinary propaganda campaign that political analysts say reflects a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials. And in recent days, it has largely succeeded — at least for Russia’s domestic audience — in painting a picture of chaos and danger in eastern Ukraine, although it was pro-Russian forces themselves who created it by seizing public buildings and setting up roadblocks.

In a report released Tuesday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that threats to ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, cited repeatedly by Russian officials and in the Russian news media as a potential rationale for Russian military action, were exaggerated and that some participants in the protests in the region came from Russia.

Moving quickly to envelop Crimea in the Russian bureaucracy and economy, the Kremlin said Monday that it had nearly doubled pensions paid to retirees on the peninsula, raising them to the average levels paid in Russia.

President Vladimir V. Putin signed a decree raising pensions and another increasing salaries for public sector workers like teachers and doctors, according to a statement posted on the Kremlin’s website. Officials also announced a number of new investment plans and tax breaks for Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine two weeks ago after a rushed vote in the Crimean Legislature. The Crimeans even realigned the clock, moving theirs ahead two hours, to be identical with Moscow’s time zone.

the German government released a statement saying Mr. Putin told Chancellor Angela Merkel in a telephone call that he had ordered a partial withdrawal of Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern border, a source of great tension with Western governments in recent weeks.

It is a measure of how low American-Russian relations have sunk that a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Secretary of State John Kerry that achieves nothing is perceived as good news. But good news it was when they met for four hours in the southern Russian city of Sochi on Tuesday, following talks between Mr. Kerry and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

That is not to say that the Cold War redux is over, despite the optimistic headline in Russia’s business daily Kommersant that read, “A new season is beginning in relations between the United States and Russia.” Nobody seriously expects Russia to cede Crimea, and the Minsk II cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, brokered by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in February, is brittle at best, with constant clashes along the separation line.

Yet the United States and Germany seem more intent at this juncture on getting the Minsk agreement to stick than to push for a final settlement on the secessionist provinces, giving Ukraine time to gain control over its ravaged finances and get moving on needed reforms.

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has said it is "really not on" for friends to spy on each other, referring to alleged US snooping on her phone calls.

The spying row threatens to overshadow EU talks on economic growth and migration to the EU. Mrs Merkel has demanded a "complete explanation" of the claims, which came out in the German media.

In a separate development, Italy's weekly L'Espresso reported that the US and UK had been spying on Italian internet and phone traffic.

France and Germany want to hold talks with the US by the end of the year to settle a row over spying, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.

It follows claims that her mobile phone and millions of French calls have been monitored by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

"It's become clear that for the future, something must change - and significantly," Mrs Merkel said.

The angry allegation by the German government that the National Security Agency monitored the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel may force President Obama into making a choice he has avoided for years between continuing the age-old game of spying on America’s friends and undercutting cooperation with important partners in tracking terrorists, managing the global economy and slowing Iran’s nuclear program.

The pressure to make such a choice builds each day, as some of the United States’ closest allies have demanded explanations from Washington after similar disclosures about the breadth and sophistication of American electronic spying.

The tension with Germany built last week after German officials were given evidence of the cellphone monitoring by Der Spiegel, the German weekly newsmagazine. The first protests to Washington came in an angry phone call to Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, from her German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen.

Fresh reports in German media based on leaked US intelligence documents are prompting damaging new questions about the extent of US surveillance.

Another report says Mr Obama was told in 2010 about the surveillance and failed to stop it.

The spy row has led to the worst diplomatic crisis betweeen the two countries in living memory.

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.

as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.

Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Israel appears to have edited out female world leaders from a photograph of Sunday's anti-terrorism rally in Paris, Israeli media reported.

Israeli site Walla!, however, noted that when ultra-Orthodox paper HaMevaser (The Announcer) ran the iconic photo, female leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo were all of a sudden missing from the scene.

In fact, it's not the first time in recent years that an ultra-Orthodox publication has cut a female leader from a photo in its print. The New York-based paper Di Tzeitung decided in 2011 to erase then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the image showing American leaders during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, The Telegraph noted.

Few Germans question the achievements of the Iron Chancellor, as Bismarck was known

But many have come to associate him with the far right because of his politically authoritarian style of government and strong belief in nationhood.

He was embraced as a hero by Hitler

Russia’s relations with many Western nations, including the United States, may be at their worst levels since the Cold War, but its relationship with North Korea is blooming faster than the famously lush flower beds of Moscow’s Alexander Garden.

On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced an agreement to designate 2015 a “Year of Friendship” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is regarded by much of the world as a pariah state.

Tellingly, news of the Year of Friendship came on the same day that Berlin officials said that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had declined Mr. Putin’s invitation to attend the ceremony. The German government cited Russia’s policies in Ukraine, where the Kremlin has annexed Crimea and backed violent separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, as the reason for her refusal to attend.

It’s now increasingly obvious that the Germans and Greeks are on completely different pages when it comes to moving forward together. And there’s a very specific group to blame: Nazis.

The historic reference here is specific to the role debt played in the rise of the Nazi party after World War I.

from 1924 to 1929, “the Weimar Republic lived on credit and even borrowed the money it needed for its World War I reparations payments from America.

Migrant crisis: EU meeting seeks to heal growing rifts

Ministers from EU and Balkan nations are meeting in Brussels to try to heal rifts over migrants that have plunged common policy into chaos.

More than 100,000 migrants have entered the EU illegally this year.

Turkish and EU leaders have gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit on tackling Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

The EU has pledged €3bn (£2.3bn; $3.3bn) to Turkey in return for housing migrants and stemming the flow.

Last year, more than a million entered the EU illegally by boat, travelling mainly from Turkey to Greece.