AfD being sued after it tweeted photo of Plattenhardt with their party leader !!

There has been some gap between Bengaluru andRanchi - whatever the case, the week of waiting is over, and the Border-Gavaskar Trophy is potentially up for grabs in Ranchi. Should Australia win the Test, they retain the trophy; if India win, it will be decided in Dharamsala. We expect Murali Vijay to be back, playing his 50^th test and Virat Kohli back to his scoring ways.. .. ..  it is common for people to have photos / posters / flex of their standing next to politicians ~ rare to see the same with a sportsperson, though Cricket is so much adulated; here is one of a political party putting up a poster with a sportsperson !!

There are just under 20 minutes remaining at the Olympiastadion and Hertha Berlin have a free-kick just outside the penalty area. The ball is dead centre – hardly an ideal place for either the right-footed Salomon Kalou or left-footed Marvin Plattenhardt, but both are lining up a shot. The position of the Borussia Dortmund wall suggests they are expecting the latter to take aim, while goalkeeper Roman Bürki is covering the rest of his goal. Or at least he thinks he is.  As Plattenhardt makes his run, teammate Niklas Stark ducks to the ground beside the Dortmund wall, freeing just enough space for the ball to arrow just beyond Bürki's reach, right into the one place the 25-year-old defender wanted it to go; precisely where he had been encouraged to put it.

Happy moment for Hertha;  Hertha, Berliner Sport-Club is a German association football club based in the Charlottenburg locality of Berlin. Hertha BSC play in the Bundesliga, the top-tier division of German football, after finishing at the top of the 2. Hertha BSC was founded in 1892, and was a founding member of the German Football Association in Leipzig in 1900. The team won the German championship in 1930 and 1931. Since 1963, Hertha's stadium has been the Olympia stadion. The club is known as Die Alte Dame in German, which translates to "The Old Lady”.

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) is a right-wing populist and Eurosceptic political party.  Founded in April 2013, the party won 4.7% of the votes in the 2013 federal election, narrowly missing the 5% electoral threshold to sit in the Bundestag. As of September 2016, the AfD had gained representation in ten of the 16 German state parliaments.

The Rightwing populist party would unpick several postwar safeguards put in place to constrain the power of Germany’s national executive if it took power, the party’s draft manifesto suggests. The campaign programme was presented by the AfD’s co-leaders Frauke Petry and Jörg Meuthen at a press conference in Berlin.  It demands that Germany should be able to revoke citizenship of “criminal migrants” who join terror groups or criminal gangs within 10 years of becoming German nationals, even if this renders them stateless – a move that would not only break with the German constitution but also international law.

Denaturalisation was used as an instrument of repression against political enemies, including prominent figures such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, during the Nazi era and in the GDR. In reaction to these abuses, West Germany banned denaturalisation into statelessness in its basic law in 1949 and later signed up to a UN resolution on the reduction of statelessness. The AfD’s draft manifesto further pledges to introduce a Swiss system of direct democracy, whereby citizens can propose plebiscites on changes to the constitution, and promises the German people “a vote along the British model on whether Germany should stay in the eurozone and, if need be, the EU”.

Berlin’s top football club is suing the populist rightwing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) after it tweeted a photograph of one of the team’s star players with an AfD politician. Hertha Berlin said it had filed for a court injunction to force the anti-immigration AfD to delete the picture showing its defender Marvin Plattenhardt with Frank Scheermesser, a lawmaker in the city-state’s parliament.

Plattenhardt, who scored the winning goal to beat Borussia Dortmund 2-1 on Saturday, told reporters he had been signing autographs for fans after the game and was not aware that the man next to him was an AfD politician. Hertha’s lawyer, Christian-Oliver Moser, said the tweet – which has the caption: “Our lawmaker with the winning scorer” – breached Plattenhardt’s rights, and the AfD’s Berlin branch that posted it could be fined up to €250,000 (£218,000).

Some Germans who view the arrival of more than a million mainly Muslim refugees over the past two years as a threat to their culture have helped the party enter 10 of Germany’s 16 state parliaments. It is expected to be the third largest party in the Bundestag lower house after the September general election. Hertha Berlin are fifth in Bundesliga.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

16^th Mar 2017