The ringing endorsement for the 47-year-old Westerwelle, who is widely expected to be tapped for the high-profile post of foreign minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new government, in the Bild daily also highlighted his personal life in a way he rarely has.

“His man makes him so strong,” Bild wrote about Westerwelle, declaring that his 42-year-old partner Michael Mronz was not only his most important adviser during the campaign, but also “gives him security and … supports him when he suffers a setback.”

Despite eight years as leader of the pro-business Free Democrats, Westerwelle’s homosexuality has generated relatively little discussion. But with his party set to become kingmaker to Chancellor Merkel’s conservatives and him foreign minister, it has been thrust into the spotlight.

On Monday, a local official had to apologize for an anti-gay remark he made about Westerwelle on election night. Peter Langner, the city treasurer of the western city of Duisburg and a Social Democrat, had said that “I don’t want a gay foreign minister.”

Germans have been generally tolerant of openly gay politicians and others have paved the way, including Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who already declared back in 2001 that “I’m gay, and it’s good that way.”

While Westerwelle’s certainly no gay activist, he has said before that his lifestyle may be “encouraging for some young gays.”

“I can only tell all young gays and lesbians to not be disheartened, if not everything goes their way,” Westerwelle told the Berlin’s gay magazine Siegessaeule this month. “This society is changing for the good in the direction of tolerance and respect … though slower than I would wish.”

Westerwelle has been known to be gay since 2004, when he brought his partner to Merkel’s 50th birthday party.

“I’ve never been hiding my life,” Westerwelle said back then. “I just lived it.”

Mronz, who met Westerwelle in 2003 according to Bild, is an event manager who also organized the athletic world championship in Berlin this summer. He recently joined the Free Democrats, saying that after having listened to 120 speeches of his partner, “I am completely convinced.”

Westerwelle, who has led the Free Democrats since 2001, also spoke out for stronger civil rights during the election campaign and has criticized in the past that German law does not give complete adoption rights to gay couples.

The Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany welcomed Westerwelle’s victory and hoped his election would become a motor for gay rights in Germany.

“We think it’s awesome that it has become so normal that an openly gay man becomes foreign minister,” said Klaus Jetz, the head of the association, adding that the gay community expected him to advocate gay rights in Germany and abroad as well.

“It’s important that as foreign minister he will openly talk about human rights and the persecution of gays and lesbians in other countries.”

Bremerhaven zoo veterinarian Joachim Schoene says the egg was placed in the male penguins’ nest after its parents rejected it in late April. The males incubated it for some 30 days before it hatched and have continued to care for it. The chick’s gender is not yet known.

Schoene said the male birds, named Z and Vielpunkt, are one of three same-sex pairs among the zoo’s 20 Humboldt penguins that have attempted to mate.

Homosexual behavior has been documented in many animal species.

The zoo said in a statement on its Web site Thursday that “sex and coupling in our world don’t always have something to do with reproduction.”

Screenings of the movie “Rohtenburg” were banned in March 2006 -  just before it was due to open in German theaters – after a lower court ruled that the film infringed the personal rights of Armin Meiwes.

Meiwes is serving a life sentence for murdering and eating Bernd Juergen Brandes in 2001. Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter in 2004 and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison after the jury found Brandes had been a willing victim.

Prosecutors appealed the conviction, arguing the court should have found Meiwes guilty of murder. In 2006 at his second trial Meiwes was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

Meiwes and Brandes met through an internet bulletin board for gay men interested in a cannibalism fetish.

“If you are between 18 and 25 years old you are my boy. Come to me and I eat your horny flesh” his ad said.

The case came to light when Meiwes posted more ads after Meiwes death for additional victims, and readers of the postings contacted police.

When police searched Meiwes’ home they discovered neatly wrapped body parts in plastic bags which were labeled “according to cuts.”  Bones and other “non edibles” were found buried in the garden. Meiwes told police he already had  consumed about 40 pounds of Brandes’s body.

He told police that the two men had enjoyed a final meal together.  Brandes had agreed to be castrated and the two sautéed his penis and testicles.  They washed down the meal with a German white wine.

Testifying in his own defense Meiwes said that he hoped Brandes, 43, would “die all by himself” from having his penis cut off.

Meiwes, who was been dubbed the “Cannibal of Kassel” after the town where he lived, told the court that he had prayed for God’s forgiveness for both himself and for Brandes just before he severed the man’s throat.

The case both fascinated and appalled Germany, leading to the film “Rohtenburg,” directed by Martin Weisz and starring Thomas Kretschmann as a cannibal named Oliver Hartwin.

When it was banned from theaters, Weisz went to court arguing that Meiwes’ case did no more than provide inspiration for the movie.

Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruled this week that the producers’ right to artistic freedom outweighed Meiwes’ personal rights, adding there was “a public interest in information” on the case.

The film did not misrepresent the facts of the case, which were in any case widely known, the court statement said.

But despite the ruling it is not clear whether the movie will now be screened in German theaters.

Berlin police say a window on the outside of the memorial has been broken, probably with a stone.

The window allows visitors to see inside the concrete memorial and view a video of a same-sex couple kissing

The memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten park was inaugurated in May and suffered similar damage to the same window in August.

A protest held after that attack to denounce intolerance and homophobia drew more than 100 people including Berlin’s openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit.

(Berlin) An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said Wednesday.

While researchers – and the doctors themselves – caution that the case might be no more than a fluke, others say it may inspire a greater interest in gene therapy to fight the disease that claims 2 million lives each year. The virus has infected 33 million people worldwide.

Dr. Gero Huettler said his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he no longer shows signs of carrying the virus.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Huettler said.

It has not come. Researchers at Berlin’s Charite hospital and medical school say tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues have all been clean.

However, Dr. Andrew Badley, director of the HIV and immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said those tests have probably not been extensive enough.

“A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it’s not present,” Badley said.

This isn’t the first time marrow transplants have been attempted for treating AIDS or HIV infection. In 1999, an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses reviewed the results of 32 attempts reported between 1982 and 1996. In two cases, HIV was apparently eradicated, the review reported.

Huettler’s patient was under treatment at Charite for both AIDS and leukemia, which developed unrelated to HIV.

As Huettler – who is a hematologist, not an HIV specialist – prepared to treat the patient’s leukemia with a bone marrow transplant, he recalled that some people carry a genetic mutation that seems to make them resistant to HIV infection. If the mutation, called Delta 32, is inherited from both parents, it prevents HIV from attaching itself to cells by blocking CCR5, a receptor that acts as a kind of gateway.

“I read it in 1996, coincidentally,” Huettler told reporters at the medical school. “I remembered it and thought it might work.”

Roughly one in 1,000 Europeans and Americans have inherited the mutation from both parents, and Huettler set out to find one such person among donors that matched the patient’s marrow type. Out of a pool of 80 suitable donors, the 61st person tested carried the proper mutation.

Before the transplant, the patient endured powerful drugs and radiation to kill off his own infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system – a treatment fatal to between 20 and 30 percent of recipients.

He was also taken off the potent drugs used to treat his AIDS. Huettler’s team feared that the drugs might interfere with the new marrow cells’ survival. They risked lowering his defenses in the hopes that the new, mutated cells would reject the virus on their own.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases in the U.S., said the procedure was too costly and too dangerous to employ as a firstline cure. But he said it could inspire researchers to pursue gene therapy as a means to block or suppress HIV.

“It helps prove the concept that if somehow you can block the expression of CCR5, maybe by gene therapy, you might be able to inhibit the ability of the virus to replicate,” Fauci said.

David Roth, a professor of epidemiology and international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said gene therapy as cheap and effective as current drug treatments is in very early stages of development.

“That’s a long way down the line because there may be other negative things that go with that mutation that we don’t know about.”

Even for the patient in Berlin, the lack of a clear understanding of exactly why his AIDS has disappeared means his future is far from certain.

“The virus is wily,” Huettler said. “There could always be a resurgence.”

The ruling Friday by the Federal Constitutional Court is the end of the appeal process for Armin Meiwes, who is serving a life sentence for murdering and eating Bernd Juergen Brandes in 2001.

Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter in 2004 and sentenced to more than eight years in prison after the jury found Brandes had been a willing victim.

Prosecutors appealed the conviction, arguing the court should have found Meiwes guilty of murder. In 2006, at his second trial, Meiwes was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

In his appeal to the Constitutional Court, Meiwes argued the Brandes’ death should have been classified as a mercy killing and maintained that his sentence was disproportionate.

Meiwes and Brandes met through an internet bulletin board for gay men interested in a cannibalism fetish.

“If you are between 18 and 25 years old you are my boy. Come to me and I eat your horny flesh,” his ad said.

The case came to light when Meiwes posted more ads for additional victims, and readers of the postings contacted police.

When police searched Meiwes’ home, they discovered neatly wrapped body parts in plastic bags which were labeled “according to cuts.”  Bones and other “non edibles” were found buried in the garden. Meiwes told police he already had consumed about 40 pounds of Brandes’s body.

He told police that the two men had enjoyed a final meal together. Brandes had agreed to be castrated and the two sautéed his penis and testicles.  They washed down the meal with a German white wine.

Testifying in his own defense, Meiwes said that he hoped Brandes, 43, would “die all by himself” from having his penis cut off.

Meiwes, who was been dubbed the ‘Cannibal of Kassel’ after the town where he lived, told the court that he had prayed for God’s forgiveness for both himself and for Brandes just before he severed the man’s throat.

The ruling by the German high court came less than a week after a gay man in Britain was handed a life sentence for murdering a male sex partner and then cannibalizing part of the body.

Anthony Morley was guilty in the killing of Damian Oldfield, 33.

During the trial, Morley – the winner of the Mr. Gay UK contest in 1993 – told the court that he had been grappling with his sexuality and had snapped on the night of the murder. He also testified that he did not remember most of the events after the murder.

A stunned courtroom was told by prosecution witnesses that, based on forensic tests on parts of Oldfield’s body found in Morley’s apartment, portions of Morley’s leg and chest had been sliced off.

They were then rubbed with olive oil and herbs and fried. Morley, who had worked as a chef, then consumed portions of the “meal.”

The article, titled “A flesh-eating bacteria and sexual abnormality,” appeared in al-Salam, a free publication available in businesses throughout Berlin.

“One never knows what kind of bacteria and germs are found on them,” it said of gay men.

The article contained quotes from people the publication said were authorities on skin diseases, and was accompanied by photographs of various skin infections.

The LGBT Association of Berlin-Brandenburg filed an official complaint with police this week.

“It is now being examined to determine whether it should be dealt with as defamation or incitement,” said association spokesperson Alexander Zinn.

Zinn also called on Germany’s large Muslim community to disavow the article.

Incitement against minorities, including gays, is illegal in Germany, but in the past similar cases were not prosecuted after Muslims complained that to do so would infringe on their religious rights.

“The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand,” Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.

“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand,” he said.

Obama said he was speaking as a citizen, not as a president, but the evening was awash in politics. His remarks inevitably invited comparison to historic speeches in the same city by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and he borrowed rhetoric from his own appeals to campaign audiences in the likes of Berlin, N.H., when he addressed a crowd in one of the great cities of Europe.

“People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time,” he said.

Obama’s speech was the centerpiece of a fast-paced tour through Europe designed to reassure skeptical voters back home about his ability to lead the country and take a frayed cross-Atlantic alliance in a new direction after eight years of the Bush administration.

Republicans, chafing at the media attention Obama’s campaign-season trip has drawn, sought to stoke doubts abut his claims.

In Die Welt, the German publication, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., said: “No one knows which Obama will show. Will it be the ideological, left-wing Democratic primary candidate who vowed to ‘end’ the war rather than win it, or the Democratic nominee who dismisses the progressing coalition victory as a ‘distraction’? Will it be the American populist who has told supporters in the United States that he will demand more from our allies in Europe and get it, or the liberal internationalist hell-bent on being liked in Europe’s salons?”

Obama met earlier in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a discussion that ranged across the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, energy issues and more.

Knots of bystanders waited along Obama’s motorcade route for him to pass. One man yelled out in English, “Yes, we can,” the senator’s campaign refrain, when he emerged from his car to enter his hotel.

Obama drew loud applause as he strode confidently across a large podium erected at the base of the Victory Column in Tiergarten Park in the heart of Berlin.

Police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said the speech drew more than 200,000 people, more than double the estimated 75,000 he drew in Oregon this spring.

He drew loud applause when he talked of a world without nuclear weapons and again when he called for steps to counter climate change.

Obama mentioned Iraq, a war he has opposed from the start, only in passing. But in discussing Afghanistan, he said, “no one welcomes war. … But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success.”

He referred repeatedly to the Berlin airlift, launched by the Allies 60 years ago when the Russians sought to isolate the Western part of the city. If they had succeeded, he said, communism would have marched across Europe.

“Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun,” the presidential candidate said.

Now, he said, the enemy is different but the need for an alliance is the same as the world stares down terrorism and the extremism that supports it. “This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it,” he said.

He said Europeans sometimes view America as “part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right …” And in America, “there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe’s role in our security and our future.”

He said both views miss the truth, “that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe.”

In any event, he said, there will always be differences.

“But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more, not less.”

Barack Obama with German chancellor Angela Merkel in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on July 24.

If Germans could vote for president of the United States, Barack Obama would win in a landslide. “He will be in Berlin this Thursday, when Germans will hail him as a magician with the ability to transform a gloomy world into a brighter place,” says Der Spiegel, the most respected news magazine in Germany. “Never before has there been so much excitement in Germany over the visit of a presumed US presidential candidate,” adds Spiegel. “Obama may be running for the White House, but judging by the commotion, one would think that he had already advanced two steps further and were the president of the world,” says Spiegel, which calls Obama ‘An American Idol in Germany.’

Of course, Barack Obama is still only the junior senator from Illinois and not yet even formally nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, but “Mr. Obama may well be the first American presidential candidate to deliver a speech in Berlin,” as Jeff Zeleny notes in the New York Times politics blog, The Caucus.

The German enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential candidate is hardly surprising, given the low regard in which George W. Bush is held in Mitteleuropa. In Germany, Bush is reviled as an ideologue and an imperialist who launched a disastrous war in Iraq and plunged US relations with European allies to their lowest point in decades. With Republican presidential nominee John McCain viewed by Germans as offering more continuity than change, Germans are hoping his Democratic rival replaces the Dummkopf who has occupied the White House for nearly eight years now.

But downing some beer and bratwurst with Angela Merkel is not only good trans-Atlantic politics, it is also good politics for a presidential candidate such as Barack Obama, given the deep connections between Germany and America. “Often overlooked is just how German the United States really is,” says Nicholas Kulish on The Caucus page of the Times, pointing out that nearly 43 million Americans are of German descent, many of them in key battleground states in the Midwest, such as Wisconsin, which is 43% German American.

Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung calls today ‘Obama-Day in Berlin.’ Deutschland has succumbed to Obama mania. The question is, will Mittelamerika demonstrate the same Obama mania in November…?