Berlin

BERLIN — The birthplace of bohemia and a certain inimitable street style, Berlin is best seen on foot. In the city center, the area of Mitte — German for "middle" — was one of the first districts in the former East to be gentrified after the fall of the Wall in 1989; surprisingly, it is still reinventing itself today. The lively style and constant change converge to create a kind of urban shopping paradise that centers on hip, trendy Mitte and its surrounds, featuring a collection of everything from edgy boutiques and organic cafes to upscale jewelry shops and galleries (like one...

Will Smith says he supports U.S. President Barack Obama's position on gay marriage. The Hollywood actor says the question of whether gay people should be allowed to legally marry is "about semantics. " He told reporters in Berlin on Monday that "if anybody can find someone to love them and to help them through this difficult thing that we call life, I support that in any shape or form. " Still, Smith says the president's support for gay marriage was a "brave" move in an election year.

BERLIN - Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, who stepped down as the Berlin’s archbishop earlier this year, has died. He was 75. The Berlin Archdiocese said Cardinal Sterzinsky died early yesterday. It did not give details, but the cardinal had long been ill; in February, Pope Benedict XVI accepted his resignation. Cardinal Sterzinsky was born in 1936 in what is now Poland and studied in communist East Germany. He became bishop of Berlin - then a divided city - in 1989 and was later promoted to archbishop and cardinal.

Town Meeting voters Monday night approved the local share of a $62.4 million repair project for the Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School. The project's cost will be offset by $33.1 million in grant funds, with the balance provided by the school district's seven member communities, which include Berlin. Matt Gunderson

BERLIN - Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Well, you should, at least according to Germany’s foreign minister. Guido Westerwelle drew plenty of sarcastic remarks when he insisted on speaking German to a British reporter just after his election to Parliament four months ago. Now, he’s making it his official mission to promote his mother tongue. “German is the language at the heart of Europe,’’ Westerwelle said yesterday at the outset of his new global campaign for the “Language of Ideas.’’ Europe counts about 101 million native German speakers, according to the Foreign Ministry,...

Anna Whittington is a Harvard University senior who is spending a year studying at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow (www.rggu.com) and at Freie Universität in Berlin (www.fu-berlin.de). Her travels have done wonders for her Russian and German, and she can now recommend a great Depeche Mode-themed bar in Estonia. You can read more about her adventures at her blog, anyamarie.wordpress.com/. TWO CAPITAL IDEAS: I was drawn to the idea of studying in these countries' capitals, and I was especially attracted by Middlebury College's language program, which...

A Berlin man has been convicted of the 1996 strangulation of a Fitchburg woman. A Worcester Superior Court jury found Alex Scesny, 42, guilty of murder and aggravated rape Thursday on the third day of deliberations, after a weeklong trial, The Telegram & Gazette reported. The body of Theresa Stone was found on a rural road in 1996, but Scesny was not charged until he was tied to her death by DNA evidence a decade later. The defense said evidence pointed to one of two other men acquainted with Stone.

‘The human social brain wasn’t designed to understand the human social terror,’’ asserts the narrator of Ida Hattemer-Higgins’s emphatically monomaniacal fiction debut. “And the more it tries, the more it dies.’’ While the full panoply of mankind’s social outrages surges between the lines of “The History of History,’’ set primarily in post-2001 Berlin, the particular horrors that consume its 25-year-old protagonist, Margaret Taub, are the human spoils of the Third Reich.

Town Meeting voters Monday night approved the local share of a $62.4 million repair project for the Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School. The project's cost will be offset by $33.1 million in grant funds, with the balance provided by the school district's seven member communities, which include Berlin. Matt Gunderson

Berlin's city government plans to levy a new tax on hotel stays — tapping the capital's healthy tourist trade to help improve its strained finances. The plan is part of a deal reached Wednesday for center-left Mayor Klaus Wowereit to form a coalition with the local branch of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats. Wowereit's party says the tax could bring in some euro20 million ($27 million) a year. It will be levied starting January 2013 in the form of a 5 percent tax on hotel stays.

BERLIN - Berlin police announced Tuesday that they had found three improvised pipe bombs near a huge May 1 protest march in what a prominent German lawmaker called an act of terrorism. The aluminum pipe devices were filled with an explosive but were not detonated, police spokesman Stefan Redlich said. If any had exploded, they could have caused injuries up to 50 feet away, he added. Experts are still investigating the explosive substance and do not yet know whether it could have burst the pipes into pieces, creating a shrapnel bomb, Redlich added.

THE UNDETERRED: Germany and the European Commission on Tuesday called on European Union nations to stick to their agreed budget cuts despite mounting voter discontent. THE BACKGROUND: In elections on Sunday, voters in France and Greece strongly supported parties who want to roll back or slow down the spending cuts and tax increases that have defined Europe's response to its debt crisis. Labor unions and some governments want to boost economic growth to offset the impact on jobs that austerity measures are having.

Berlin police said Tuesday officers found three improvised pipe bombs on the sidelines of a huge leftist protest march in an incident that a prominent lawmaker called an act of terrorism. The devices of about 40-centimeter (16-inches) each were filled with an explosive but were not detonated, police spokesman Stefan Redlich said Tuesday. An explosion of the aluminum pipes could have caused serious or deadly injuries within a perimeter of 10 to 15 meters (49 feet), he added. Experts are still investigating the explosive substance and do not yet know whether it would have...

Germany and the European Commission on Tuesday called on EU nations to stick to their agreed budget cuts despite mounting voter discontent, but promised some new efforts to boost growth to alleviate economic hardship. In elections on Sunday, voters in France and Greece gave strong support to parties who want to roll back or slow down the spending cuts and tax increases that have defined Europe's response to its debt crisis. That added to cries from labor unions and some governments for more measures to boost economic growth to offset the devastating impact on jobs that austerity...

Town officials have unveiled new regulations governing the use of a new community garden this spring, an innovative venture designed to bring organic farming into a community-oriented hub. The garden is off River Road West. Residents can apply to have a plot at the garden every April at the Town Hall or via the town website. Matt Gunderson

HANDEL: "Water Music" Suite (arr. Harty) MOZART: Symphonies Nos. 36 ("Linz") and 38 ("Prague") Boston Symphony Orchestra Charles Munch, conductor (ICA Classics DVD) BEETHOVEN: "Egmont" Overture TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 5 Boston Symphony Orchestra Erich Leinsdorf, conductor (ICA Classics DVD) ICA Classics continues its welcome series of video recordings that the Boston Symphony Orchestra made back in the 1950s and 1960s, in conjunction with WGBH-TV, under music directors Charles Munch and Erich Leinsdorf, often in repertoire with...

BERLIN - Berlin voters gave Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right coalition a drubbing in regional elections, returning the center-left Social Democratic mayor to his seat and welcoming a young, new party in balloting yesterday. The technology-friendly Pirate Party made its debut in a German Legislature, capturing 8.9 percent of the vote. Formed in 2006, the party was able to win widespread support from young Berliners. The Pirate Party has expanded its platform from its original push from file sharing and data protection on the Internet to include education and citizens rights.

THE UNDETERRED: Germany and the European Commission on Tuesday called on European Union nations to stick to their agreed budget cuts despite mounting voter discontent. THE BACKGROUND: In elections on Sunday, voters in France and Greece strongly supported parties who want to roll back or slow down the spending cuts and tax increases that have defined Europe's response to its debt crisis. Labor unions and some governments want to boost economic growth to offset the impact on jobs that austerity measures are having.

Voters will be asked to weigh in on two land purchases at the upcoming annual Town Meeting on May 7. The first, costing $200,000, would be to purchase 10.25 acres near the intersection of West Street and Route 62. The other would be a $417,000 purchase of 57 acres off Ball Hill Road. Matt Gunderson

Progress is moving ahead rapidly on the renovations to the Tahanto Regional Middle/High School , district officials have reported on the project's website. The walls of all classrooms at the school have been repainted and retiled, and new heating and plumbing systems are in place, officials said, with the project remaining on schedule and on budget.