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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Linda Pearson who wrote (34522)	11/5/1997 5:42:00 AM
From: Teddy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 58324

International News Dog droppings help unite once-divided city BERLIN (Reuters) - Seven-year-old Davio Muth was playing on the grass outside his east Berlin classroom when he suddenly slipped and landed in a giant pile of dog droppings. The brown stain that ran the length of his new blue jeans drew laughter from his classmates but a worried look from his teacher who was running out of spare clothes for such emergencies. "We didn't have this problem before the (Berlin) Wall fell," said Gudrun Flugbeil, Davio's teacher, as she tried to help the embarrassed boy clean off the muck. "Almost no one had a dog and the streets were a lot cleaner. "Everyone had a job and no one had time for dogs. Now it's not even safe to walk on the grass any more." Eight years after the Wall tumbled on November 9, 1989, and seven years after German unification, Berlin is still split by east-west resentments. Easterners disdain westerners as arrogant, money-grubbing invaders and are in turn disparaged as ignorant, lazy ingrates who have damaged the west's once booming economy. But when it comes to dog excrement, the city has become truly united. With the Cold War-era Wall that divided the city between 1961 and 1989 gone, canines can do their business wherever they please and it is driving Berliners crazy. The dogs, unlike their masters, seem not to care whether the tree they are about to fertilize is in the east or west. City officials say an estimated 40 tons of the brown waste is deposited every day on Berlin's streets and parks, a mountain of smelly leftovers produced by the city's 135,000 dogs. "There probably isn't a major metropolitan city anywhere in Europe with more dogs than Berlin," said the city's deputy minister for the environment, Wolfgang Bergfelder, who has put his foot in it more than once. "Everyone who moves to Berlin is confronted with the problem," Bergfelder told Reuters. "It takes about two years to get used to it. But you learn a technique of walking with one eye always scanning the ground." The city government recently launched a clean-up campaign to make the streets safe for pedestrians before Germany's federal government moves to Berlin from Bonn. They plan to acquire 21 specially designed "poop-scooping" vehicles, costing 70,000 marks ($39,000) each, that will suck up the piles which Berliners, with their wry sense of humor, sometimes dub "land mines." An advertising campaign reminding dog owners of their duty is also in the works. "It has long been an emotional matter for west Berliners and now the problem is big in the east too," said Bernd Mueller, a spokesman for the city's street cleaning agency, BSR. Berlin collects a stiff annual dog tax of 240 marks, but Mueller said that, contrary to what many dog owners think, the money does not cover clean-up costs. Since 1988 dog owners have been legally required to dispose of their dogs' droppings. It is probably the most widely ignored law in Germany.