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Käse closed: How a German court tried to fix a neighbourly cheese dispute

A woman who lives above a cheese shop in a German Alpine village has kicked up a stink over the smells wafting up to her apartment, forcing a judge to step in.

Käse closed: How a German court tried to fix a neighbourly cheese dispute
Wolfgang Hofmann, boss of Tölzer Kasladen, stands with a photo of the protest signs in front of his shop. Photo: DPA

A Munich court ruled on Tuesday that Manuela Kragler, who lives on top of the Tölzer Kasladen shop in Bad Heilbrunn, can no longer display signs depicting a nose and a warning sign.

But a court spokeswoman, quoted by national news agency DPA, said the unhappy neighbour could still voice her opposition that “there is an odour that is a nuisance and that she finds it stinks” because it was “an expression of opinion”.

The feud has been going on ever since the shop moved into the premises in 2016 and, in a separate legal case, shop owner Wolfgang Hofmann is trying to argue that he should be allowed to mature cheese there.

Neighbours have said the shop, which stocks around 200 types of cheese and supplies high-end restaurants, is maturing up to three tons of cheese on the premises.

Photo: DPA

The Bad Heilbrunn municipality, which has a total population of around 4,000 people, is in Germany's southern Bavaria region which is famous for its dairy produce.

But the shop's arrival got up Kragler's nose and she complains that the smells drift up through open windows, staircases and even electric sockets.

The owner Hofmann “denied there was a smell problem right from the start… The dispute has escalated more and more,” Kragler was quoted by Süddeutsche daily as saying.

Hofmann has said the smell is in fact emanating from nearby farming activity rather than his shop and has accused his neighbours of hiding some old cheese behind a fuse box to pin the blame on him.

“It is logical that it smells like cheese in the cheese shop itself,” he was quoted as saying.

A solution to the problem may be on the horizon, as Hofmann added that he was seeking new premises.

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French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts

A French court has ordered Twitter to give activists full access to all its documents relating to efforts to combat racism, sexism and other forms of hate speech on the social network.

French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts
Photo: Alastair Pike | AFP

Six anti-discrimination groups had taken Twitter to court in France last year, accusing the US social media giant of “long-term and persistent” failures in blocking hateful comments from the site.

The Paris court ordered Twitter to grant the campaign groups full access to all documents relating to the company’s efforts to combat hate speech since May 2020. The ruling applies to Twitter’s global operation, not just France.

Twitter must hand over “all administrative, contractual, technical or commercial documents” detailing the resources it has assigned to fighting homophobic, racist and sexist discourse on the site, as well as “condoning crimes against humanity”.

The San Francisco-based company was given two months to comply with the ruling, which also said it must reveal how many moderators it employs in France to examine posts flagged as hateful, and data on the posts they process.

The ruling was welcomed by the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), one of the groups that had taken the social media giant to court.

“Twitter will finally have to take responsibility, stop equivocating and put ethics before profit and international expansion,” the UEJF said in a statement on its website.

Twitter’s hateful conduct policy bans users from promoting violence, or threatening or attacking people based on their race, religion, gender identity or disability, among other forms of discrimination.

Like other social media businesses it allows users to report posts they believe are hateful, and employs moderators to vet the content.

But anti-discrimination groups have long complained that holes in the policy allow hateful comments to stay online in many cases.

French prosecutors on Tuesday said they have opened an investigation into a wave of racist comments posted on Twitter aimed at members of the country’s national football team.

The comments, notably targeting Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe, were posted after France was eliminated from the Euro 2020 tournament last week.

France has also been having a wider public debate over how to balance the right to free speech with preventing hate speech, in the wake of the controversial case of a teenager known as Mila.

The 18-year-old sparked a furore last year when her videos, criticising Islam in vulgar terms, went viral on social media.

Thirteen people are on trial accused of subjecting her to such vicious harassment that she was forced to leave school and was placed under police protection.

While President Emmanuel Macron is among those who have defended her right to blaspheme, left-wing critics say her original remarks amounted to hate speech against Muslims.

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