Boy, are people on the web waxing rhapsodic about Barack Obama's speech in Berlin today or what? It seemed like business as usual to me — Barack Obama gives amazing speech, inspires hundreds of thousands of fawning admirers. The only difference is that this time the crowd — the biggest of his campaign — was made up Germans (waving American flags!) and he spoke about the world coming together, not just our country. Also, there were some fitting metaphors about walls coming down.

Meanwhile, a pouty John McCain said, "I'd love to give a speech in Germany. But I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate for president." He was speaking from a German restaurant called Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio.

The German magazine Der Speigel reported Saturday that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki supported Barack Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan. This put the White House into such a panic that an aide accidentally emailed the news story to an extended media distribution list instead of an internal email list. The story — that Maliki approves of Obama's plan, not that the White House emailed the news to the world — made international headlines, but this morning, Maliki's camp seemed to have backtracked. An aide to the prime minister announced that his boss had been "misinterpreted and mistranslated," although he didn't cite any specific comments. The aide's statement might have had something to do with a little call the officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad put in to Maliki's office to "express concern and seek clarification." I'm just going to take a wild guess that Der Speigel stands firmly behind its reporting. [WP]

This will probably go down as the most racist, ill-advised, well-meaning ad campaign in the history of the world. Somewhere in Germany, an ad agency told UNICEF that the best way to call attention to the needs of children in Africa was to slap some dirt on Aryan kids' faces and stick their pictures next to captions like, "I'm waiting for my last day in school, the children in Africa still for their first one."

Something may be lost in translation, but are we supposed to take from these ads that no African children go to school and that a little bit of face paint is all a white Western European kid needs to feel at one with an African kid? Where did they get this stupid idea from? Oh. Maybe here.

[BWIE via TAN]