Perry rose to fame with "I Kissed a Girl" in 2008. The song topped the charts in several countries in the world before she managed to repeated the triumph with follow-up single "Hot n Cold".

Both songs reached number one on the Austrian Singles Chart. Her third album "Teenage Dream" was released earlier this month.

Perry’s performance of her two biggest hits sitting in a huge shell sailing down from the roof of Vienna City Hall is regarded as the highlight of the opening ceremony of last year’s Life Ball.

The annual festival runs 11 days and will screen entries from 34 countries. Films include Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere," "Essential Killing" by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, and "Three" by German director Tom Tykwer.

A mystery contender is expected to be announced on Sunday.

Travel ban

A Beethoven enthusiast, she recently played the Piano Concerto No. 5, known as the “Emperor”, in Berlin.
She said: “I think that the tools available to Beethoven to write his music were insufficient for him.

"He’s someone who very often composed by pushing the boundaries – beyond the instruments available at the time, and even beyond the ‘reality’ of the musical matter.

Participants were asked to describe why they loved a certain German-language book, with prizes promised for the most vivid accounts. Ende's 1979 novel about a boy's quest to save the land of Fantastica with the help of a dog-faced dragon named Falkor was crowned the winner by people writing in from 57 countries.

"Come! Into the open, Friend!" is the opening line of Friedrich Hoelderlin's poem Der Gang aufs Land (The Walk in the Country). Written around 1800, it's an invitation to a place somewhere in the future where conventions are overcome and boundaries tested: an ethos and a zeitgeist indicative of Beethoven's time and the dawn of the 19th century, when social upheaval went hand in hand with dreams of utopia.

The Karlsruhe-based Federal Constitutional Court court said on Tuesday the fact that heterosexual marriage could produce children did not justify higher taxation for homosexuals over inheritance.

Germany has permitted civil unions for homosexuals since 2001.

According to the law, surviving partners had to pay higher inheritance duties, and were also granted a lower tax exemption threshold than their heterosexual counterparts.

Winter Vacation tells the story of four teenagers hanging out in a village in northern China. Last year, the screenplay won a prize in the festival’s Open Doors section. The $85,870 Locarno prize was awarded on Saturday evening. It will be divided evenly between the film's director and producer.

Nearly 50 young people from around the world applied for the 30 slots, according to academy head Gregory Catella. “We wanted to be able to have a balance of film students, filmmakers, production designers, music composers – and we have really different profiles all together,” Catella said.

What do former world leaders do once they've said goodbye to their bodyguards and handed back the keys to the presidential palace? Some start working on weighty memoirs; others devote themselves to their favorite charity.

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel, on the other hand, is currently directing his first feature film. Based on his most recent play, entitled "Leaving," it tells the story of a politician trying to adjust to a new life after leaving politics.

Public broadcaster SWR said the instrument was built in 1775 and acquired in the 1980s by piano manufacturer Martin Becker in the southern German city of Baden-Baden from an antiques dealer in Strasbourg, eastern France.

Author Peter Kilduff of New Britain, Connecticut, was having lunch in April 2009 with his British book editor, John Davies, in the restaurant of the J.P. Morgan Library in New York City. Davies asked if he had thought about his next book project.

Kilduff, a respected author of aviation history, pointed to a painting on the wall. It showed Nazi air leader Hermann Goering in his World War I fighter pilot gear.

I recall one summer a couple of years ago lying in the grass in Berlin's Tiergarten park, enjoying the fragrant breeze on my face, the warm smell of fresh summer grass and the playful twitter of birds in the trees.

Christian Thielemann, the conductor of the current production of the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, told Deutsche Welle that this enthusiasm is shared by the artists as well.

The case of Israel’s National Library versus the estate of Esther Hoffe pits the government of Israel, eager to preserve Jewish historical heritage, against a pair of 80-something sisters determined to keep for themselves thousands of Kafka letters, diaries, stories and drawings never before shared with the public or literary scholars.

How it all came to such a bizarre confrontation is worthy itself of a novel by Kafka, who lived and wrote in Prague until his death in 1924 at the age of 40.

“This young selection is for young people and people who have remained young,” festival president Marco Solari said at a press conference in Bern, the Swiss capital.

The ten-day festival, now in its 63rd year, starts on August 4 with the world premiere of Au fond des bois by Benoît Jacquot on the 7,000-seat Piazza Grande.

The Swiss authorities decided Monday not to extradite the 76-year-old Oscar-winning director. Polanski was arrested in September 2009 in Zurich on his way to a film festival, before being placed under house arrest in his Gstaad chalet. (Photo: On his balcony in Gstaad)

On the other hand, Germans who have been here for a while say dialect opens up the secret places of the Swiss heart. Recently, there has been a wave of German immigration to Switzerland, mainly because of the EU-Swiss agreement allowing free movement of people to take up jobs.

Lausanne’s Hermitage Foundation, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, has brought together 160 Hopper works, including detailed sketches, oil paintings, illustrations, etchings and water colors.

Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney, helped assemble the collection, which spans Hopper’s career from his humble beginnings as an illustrator in the early 1900s to his later work.

The last Egyptian pharaoh, Cleopatra VII committed suicide in 30 BC. The tradition goes that she intentionally suffered a snake bite from what is now known as the Egyptian cobra.

But German historian and professor at the University of Trier Christoph Schäfer presents evidence to disprove the 2,000-year-old legend on ZDF’s educational show Abenteuer Wissenschaft (Adventure Science).

Her talent, admittedly a strange on, is mesmeric to watch. (Click on url below). The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears, and she won the top prize of about £75,000 ($125,000).

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple, sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear, and the happy scene is obliterated.

Swiss galleries and artists are hoping to make their mark as thousands of art lovers are descending on the Rhine city to find out what is going on in the art scene, make discoveries and – it is hoped – big purchases.

More than 300 galleries from 37 countries will be showing modern and contemporary works by 2,500 artists at the five-day “Art”, as it is known, which officially opened last Wednesday.

"The discussions which have been going on for six months between Stieg Larsson's heirs and his former partner Eva Gabrielsson have ended," the writer's brother and father said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, she did not want to accept all or part of our proposal," they wrote.

Grossman, 56, is author of The Yellow Wind, a non-fiction work that examined the lives of the Palestinians, and To the End of the Land, a novel that examines the cost of war.

The association said it chose to honor Grossman because is "one of Israel's foremost authors and an active supporter of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians."

In Germany, the history of design is tied to the social reform and industrialization, when mass production and standardization changed the nature of craftsmanship.

Design played a key role in the reconstruction of the country in the post-World War II years and, today, it is still seen as a key contributor to Germany's economic good heath and progressive image on the international stage.

For the last two months, the plant has been treating its biomass-eating microbes to Mozart played on a special stereo system designed to replicate the vibrations and sounds of a performance in a concert hall.

The thinking is that the sonic waves of Mozart, along with oxygen added in the treatment process, will spur the microbes to break down sewage more efficiently, saving money.

Please read the full story on Spiegel Online

Jenny described the book – set in London – as a documentary of the city following the 2005 terrorist attacks. Her prose has been praised for its detailed and precise images and her style has been compared with that of Plath and Hemingway.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung included Jenny alongside Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch as the three most important Swiss authors read in Germany.

Reich-Ranicki has become legendary for his quick wit and biting commentary. Having mellowed little with age, the sharp-tongued critic famously even refused to accept the German Television Prize in 2008, calling the award show and the state of TV “rubbish.”

But he still writes newspaper columns, and his opinion can either launch or torpedo a writer’s career.

Founded in 1911, Potsdam‘s Studio Babelsberg boasts a rich history of cinematic successes. The studios initially rose to fame with classics like Der blaue Engel, starring Marlene Dietrich, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.