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/ 11 February 2005
Café King, a bar in Berlin’s fashionable Charlottenburg district, is at the centre of a match-fixing scandal that has sent shockwaves through Germany’s football establishment, and has heaped growing embarrassment on the nation as it prepares to host the 2006 World Cup.
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/ 3 February 2005
Germany’s higher education system was heading for its biggest shake up in decades late last month after the country’s high court overturned a ban on tuition fees.
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/ 28 January 2005
Gerhard Schröder this week used a ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago to declare that ordinary Germans were responsible for the Holocaust. Speaking to an audience that included several Auschwitz survivors, Schröder said that the horrors of the concentration camp could not be explained by merely blaming the ”demon Hitler”.
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/ 13 January 2005
Until the tsunami arrived Mr Saiful was the caretaker of Banda Aceh’s junior high school three. He was responsible for tidying up. But on Wednesday he found himself giving a class in religious education. ”I’m teaching the students about 7th-century Islam,” he said. But did he know anything about it? ”Oh yes. I used to be a student myself.”
Two French journalists being held hostage in Iraq on Monday night warned that they faced death if France refused to yield to their kidnappers’ demands to repeal legislation which will ban Islamic headscarves in schools. Their captors extended the deadline for the government to overturn the law by a further 24 hours.
In an alleyway next to Najaf’s Imam Ali shrine, Commander Sayed Haider rested on Friday. For more than three weeks he and his fellow fighters from the Mahdi army had battled against the vast firepower of the United States military. Now was a time to reflect. ”We believe that we are right. This is our country. This is our city. We will not accept that people come and occupy our land,” he said.
The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003 a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Most of the coverage of abuse has focused on male detainees. But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in Iraq?
This week US presidential hopeful John Kerry claimed that foreign leaders had told him they could not publicly offer him their support, but added: ”You’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy.” Hostility towards a second George W Bush term is assumed to be widespread throughout the world because of the Iraq war, the concept of pre-emptive strikes and bullying of small countries.
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/ 12 February 2004
He is one of Germany’s hottest young novelists. And, until last week, few in Germany’s literary world doubted that Thor Kunkel’s latest novel, Final Stage, was going to be anything but a rip-roaring success. The novel had all the right ingredients — sex, a lot of sex, Nazis, more Nazis, and a spectacular romantic finale.
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/ 12 December 2003
Wednesday’s poll has ensured that Switzerland is being run by the most right-wing government in its post-war history, after Christoph Blocher, the controversial anti-immigrant populist, won a seat in the country’s Cabinet.