trees & rivals

Festival of the Trees
the new issue of Festival of the Trees is up at Kind of Curious. the Festival is a blog carneval, i am still glad i came across a note on it in time to join with "cutback/ backcut" (link, or just scroll down 3 posts). make sure to take a stroll through this blogged landscape of trees, and meet ancient oaks in Georgia, sunriese tree dwellers from Hungary, city trees in Bangalore, and a river tour in Australia, just to pick some of the trees and places included. (link to the main page: Festival of the trees).

trees shake german government
connected to the tree theme, a note on the current political news here in germany, which is partly caused by trees:
since weeks, there are ongoing protests against the mega-railway construction site in the centre of Stuttgart. despite all protests, the construction works began a month ago, first with the removal of a part of the train station. now the situation turned violent - the construction plans also include the cutting down of more than 100 old trees in the city park - some of the trees survived both world wars. now, just at the day when teenagers organized a demonstration, they tree cutters moved in, guarded by heavy police forces. there were thousands of citizens demonstrating, families and retired persons included, who basically were there to guard and protect the trees. the police told them to leave. people stayed wih the trees. so the police used water cannons, pepper stray, beating sticks - and started to physically push and remove the tree guards. more than 100 persons got injured.

this now lead to some political turmoil, especially as the whole project now also turned into a symbol. all national and local newspapers here have front page articles on the protests, Spiegel (a leading German newspaper) now has an English version of their main article with images: "Merkel's Water Cannon Politics".

(there's more on the railway construction project in this blog: Stuttgart21)

52/250: rivals
and more words and places: the new 52/250 flash is up, the theme of this issue is: Rivals.
the flash i have in it is: rivals are - a text installation based on googlism.
next week's theme is "unseen", submissions are open until Sunday (3.10.)