Germans

The German shepherd was lashed to a fence inside an abandoned junkyard. With no food and water, he began drinking his own urine. Part of his right ear was torn or bitten off. A too-small collar was embedded into his skin. Lesions and scabs dotted his back where there should have been fur. When an unidentified good Samaritan brought the dog through the front door of the Emergency Pet Clinic of San Gabriel Valley last winter, a stench filled the room. Dr. Jeffrey Patlogar took one look and thought the animal needed to be euthanized, immediately, to end its suffering.

PARIS - France and Germany have launched a series of raids on the offices and homes of bank officials and their wealthy customers in an ongoing inquiry aimed at cracking down on those who evade taxes by using Swiss banks. On Tuesday, German police searched the homes of an unspecified number of Credit Suisse bank customers suspected of tax evasion. In France, detectives raided the offices of Swiss banking and finance house UBS in three major cities: Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg.

Stage 5: A mostly flat 122.1-mile trek from Rouen to Saint-Quentin. Winner: Andre Greipel of Germany, who earned his second stage victory in a row after a crash-marred bunch sprint to the finish. Yellow jersey: Fabian Cancellara of Switzerland. He leads Bradley Wiggins of Britain by seven seconds. Defending champion Cadel Evans of Australia is seventh, 17 seconds off the pace. Stat of the day: 4. The number of riders who have withdrawn from the Tour so far after young German sprinter Marcel Kittel abandoned the race with a sore knee and a stomach bug that plagued him all week.

There is a photograph of Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler seated at a table warily ignoring each other in Bayreuth during the 1931 Wagner festival. The perfectionist Italian was at the time the most famous conductor in the world. The transcendental German conductor was the most revered. Theirs was perhaps the greatest conducting rivalry of all time, and on it goes. Now we have the battle of the big boxes. "Arturo Toscanini: The Complete RCA Collection," 84 discs strong, will be released this week.

BERLIN - As European leaders gather in Brussels on Thursday for a two-day summit aimed at resolving the Eurozone's debt crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's response to the most aggressive proposal pushed by her neighbors is, in essence: Over my dead body. With borrowing costs for Spain and Italy approaching unsustainable levels, European Union leaders have stepped up their pressure on Germany to accept solutions it has long resisted. But Merkel, whose country has Europe's largest economy and probably will foot the highest share of the bill for rescuing its struggling neighbors, has dug in her heels.

Several days after the fact, George Soros' speech describing the euro crisis as a bubble still has economic eggheads in a tizzy of admiration. The address -- delivered by the financier in Trento, Italy, over the weekend -- has been praised as an " absolute dynamo" by Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal. Felix Salmon at Reuters said " it's really good . " Twitter users have referred to the talk as "quietly terrifying," "extraordinary" and "probably the most important thing you're going to read all month.

Siegfried Klinsmann was planning a future for his sons when he opened the doors to a three-story bakery in the hilly woodlands west of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1978. "A father's dream is always that one of his sons carries on his business," says Juergen, the second of those four sons, who was 14 at the time. Unfortunately for Siegfried, young Juergen had dreams of his own - and they tended more toward sport than strudel. "I said 'I'm out,'" he remembers. " 'I'm going to go play soccer.' " The two eventually hammered out a compromise.

His output was staggering, as were his excesses. And even though he died 30 years ago at age 37, his influence on the next generation of edgy, distinctive filmmakers remains powerful today. In his brief life, Rainer Werner Fassbinder cut a wide swath through German and international cinema. By the time he died from a combination of sleeping pills and cocaine, Fassbinder had made 40 feature films, two TV series, three short films, four video productions, 24 stage plays and four radio plays.

Make jokes about flute players all you want, but it's looking more likely that our earliest musical impulses may have been fed by a variation on just such an instrument based on recent discoveries in caves in southern Germany. Exploring a human cave settlement along the Danube with the tongue-twisting name Geißenklösterle, researchers have discovered flutes dating back to as much as as much as 45,000 years ago using radiocarbon-dated bones found in the same layer of the archaeological dig. The discovery marks the earliest example of such instruments found to date, which points to early humans showing artistic impulses far earlier than initially belived.

BERLIN - If it seems to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the world is against her, she may be right. Her insistence that debt-ridden European nations cut their way out of financial crises helped cost her conservative political party two state elections this month, exposed her to criticism as an inflexible taskmaster across the Eurozone and unleashed a torrent of anti-austerity venting that has toppled like-thinking national and regional leaders...