We have not been keeping up with the news in the way we should. Here are some links from Spiegel that we should have posted when they came up.

First, a large treasure find?

Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.

If this is true, Indian Jones was wasting his time. Who wants a holy grail when you can find this much gold?

Also fish with weird dangly things?

“We had some of the world’s experts on Antarctic fish, and they were completely, completely flabbergasted,” said Martin Riddle, the lead researcher of the Australian ship, Aurora Australis. “Many of the fish had very large eyes…[and] fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths.” The fish experts on board, Riddle said, “were unable to name them.”

Who knew that dangly things was technical term that cold be applied to biological phenomena? Not that we are casting stones. In fact, we heartily approve of this approach to learned discourse. Shortly, we shall all sound educated.

Moving on to more boring news, Germany’s state own banks are having problems….

Matthäus-Maier’s bank KfW has already had to provide IKB with close to €5 billion in a series of three bailouts. With KfW itself gradually running out of cash, the federal government has now contributed another €1.9 billion.

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has injected €1 billion into WestLB, another state-owned bank, as well as providing the ailing bank with another €3 billion in loan guarantees. The situation is even worse in Saxony, where the state has issued €2.73 billion in loan guarantees to Sachsen LB, that state’s Landesbank, as Germany’s state-backed regional banks are known. The other state-owned banks are providing another €14 billion in guarantees. Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank urgently needs €1 billion in fresh capital, while BayernLB last week reported a €1.9 billion write-down as a result of subprime exposure. BayernLB announced Tuesday that the bank’s chief executive, Werner Schmidt, will be stepping down as of March 1 as a result of the crisis.

The situation for Germany’s public banks has become so dramatic that it threatens to topple what has been one of the key pillars of the country’s banking system. The state-owned banks are supposed to bail each other out when necessary, but the problem is that many are in trouble themselves and hardly in a position to help their peers. And things could get even worse.

Germans used to be known for the soundness of their banking system. But now a days, everyone is sub-prime.

Speaking of the world being turned up side down, who would ever have thought that Europeans would be telling America that we are underestimating the likely hood of Iran getting the bomb? This from a group of experts who work for the European Union……

As part of a project to improve control of nuclear materials, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy set up a detailed simulation of the centrifuges currently used by Iran in the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium. The results look nothing like those reached by the US intelligence community.

For one scenario, the JRC scientists assumed the centrifuges in Natanz were operating at 100 percent efficiency. Were that the case, Iran could already have the 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary for an atomic device by the end of this year. Another scenario assumed a much lower efficiency — just 25 percent. But even then, Iran would have produced enough uranium by the end of 2010.

For the purposes of the simulation, the JRC modelled each of the centrifuges individually and then hooked them together to form the kind of cascade necessary to enrich uranium. A number of variables were taken into account, including the assumption by most experts that Iran isn’t even close to operating its centrifuges at 100 percent efficiency. What is known, however, is that the Iranians are operating 18 cascades, each made up of 164 centrifuges. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself said last April that the country had 3,000 centrifuges in operation. At the time, most Western observers discounted the claim as mere propaganda. But the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Ahmadinejad’s assertion in November.

This would not be news, except for the fact that EU is telling the US that it might not be hawkish enough.