German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer, the charismatic left-wing revolutionary who became an international statesman, is embroiled in the most serious crisis of his career. A scandal over relaxing the requirements for visas allowed tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans to flood into Germany from 2000 to 2003.
The International Olympic Committee ethics commission summoned the leaders of the cities vying for the 2012 Olympics on Tuesday to examine whether any of them have broken bidding rules by offering financial and other incentives. New York and London have promised subsidies, free marketing and other benefits.
Four schoolgirls held by an Iranian man armed with two knives were freed by police after a five-hour hostage drama in western Germany on Tuesday, a police spokesperson said. Police said one of the girls was slightly injured by a knife but they were otherwise unhurt.
Organisers of a performance-art show featuring 100 naked women had to call in police reinforcements to control a long and impatient queue of people, police said on Saturday. Scuffles broke out late on Friday as people tried to jump over the barriers to get closer to the women.
A German businessman suspected of taking part in an international smuggling ring to supply nuclear know-how will face trial in South Africa, the German weekly Der Spiegel reports in its Monday issue. Gerhard Wisser (66) was arrested last September in South Africa and charged with four counts of contravening the Nuclear Energy Act.
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/ 20 February 2005
A South African take on Bizet’s tragic opera Carmen set in a township captured the Golden Bear for best picture at the 55th Berlin film festival on Saturday, edging out a clutch of hard-hitting political dramas. It was only the second South African feature ever to compete for a Golden Bear at the Berlinale, which ranks along with Cannes and Venice among Europe’s top film festivals.
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/ 14 February 2005
Bizet’s tragic opera Carmen has been translated for the first time into the South African language of Xhosa and turned into a stunning film shot in a Cape Town township. The film premiered on Sunday at the Berlinale film festival in Germany.
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/ 7 February 2005
People who feel the need to talk to their near and dear even after they have passed away can now do so quite literally, thanks to a special cellphone invented by a German who wanted to keep in touch with his late mother. The system consists of a one-way phone and loudspeaker device that can be buried close to the person’s coffin.
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/ 2 February 2005
A Bundesliga player on Tuesday said that he was offered a €15 000 bribe by a mystery caller if his team won a match during the 2003 season. The revelation made by Ranisav Jovanovic is the latest twist in the match-fixing scandal that has rocked German football as it prepares to host the 2006 World Cup.
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/ 1 February 2005
The corruption scandal engulfing the Bundesliga shows no sign of dying down with bookmaker Oddset accusing the German Football Federation of failing to heed a tip-off they gave on August 23 of last year. That was two days after SC Paderborn’s 4-2 win over SV Hamburg in the league cup — one of the four matches Berlin official Robert Hoyzer has since admitting to manipulating.
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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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/ 24 January 2005
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder condemned on Monday a far-right party whose members refused to observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the Nazis, marring Auschwitz anniversary commemorations. ”This attitude hurts us and is not the image of Germany we want to project,” he said.
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/ 13 January 2005
Dictators sometimes pride themselves on making the trains run on time, but Germany’s rail company on Wednesday partly attributed a sharp improvement in punctuality to perky hostesses in red caps who tell travellers to skip the fond goodbyes and get aboard.
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/ 13 January 2005
To the dustmen of Frankfurt, they were a mess that needed to be cleared from the streets of their spotless city. The yellow plastic sheets were swiftly scooped up, crushed and burned. But the diligence of the rubbish collectors was little consolation to the city’s prestigious art academy, which is now ruing the loss of an important work.
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/ 12 January 2005
With her white chef’s hat, Claudia looks at home in the kitchen of this Berlin restaurant, but her culinary talents are being used to feed people who, like her, suffer from eating disorders. The owner of Sehnsucht, or Nostalgia, in the German capital’s Tiergarten quarter is Katja Eichbaum, and she too has come a long way back from the brink.
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/ 3 December 2004
The German parliament unanimously agreed on Friday to provide up to 200 troops to help transport African Union (AU) soldiers into the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur. Germany will use two of its military transport planes to fly Tanzanian African Union troops into Darfur from Tanzania and a third plane will be put on standby.
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/ 21 November 2004
Browser hijacking is the latest plague to hit the internet. It most commonly shows up as ad banners from dubious companies that suddenly appear during every visit online, even after the computer is restarted. The problem is particularly common with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser.
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/ 17 November 2004
G7, G10, G20… International discussion groups appear to find their identity in numbers, a puzzling phenomenon given that some have the same name or a figure that does not equate with member numbers. Here is brief guide to decoding these ”Group of” numbers: conceived as a G5 of the finance ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States.
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/ 10 November 2004
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on Wednesday underlined his longstanding rejection of a demarcation line set in 2003 for his country’s border with Eritrea — but stressed he was ruling out any return to war. ”The bottom line for us is that this dispute must be resolved by peaceful means,” said Zenawi.
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/ 5 November 2004
Police in western Germany were called to a city church on Friday after two women began fighting outside because one of them could not stand the other’s incessant sneezing during a service. A 28-year-old woman began insulting another woman whose cold could not be controlled at the church in Kaiserslautern, city police said.
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/ 25 October 2004
Carmaker Porsche would like to get its employees to work longer hours for no additional pay, a German newspaper reported on Sunday. The company wants to do away with a five minute per hour break, which company officials say adds up to 18 work days a year, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily reported.
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/ 18 October 2004
A German has smashed the national record for the rarely contested sport of cellphone throwing by hurling his phone 67,5m, the organisers of the event announced on Monday. In the competition in Wehnde, Thuringia, on Sunday, Nico Morawa beat the former record of 65,8m, set four years by Heiko Scholl.
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/ 13 October 2004
The German version of the reality show Big Brother has run into trouble after one of its contestants told a series of offensive jokes about Jews on live national television, the broadcaster said on Wednesday. The head of pay-TV service Premiere, Georg Kofler, fired two employees who allowed the scene to be broadcast.
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/ 2 September 2004
It will inevitably result in a book and a film, but the story of Germany’s cannibal has already brought a summer chart hit to the country’s masters of the macabre: hard-rock band Rammstein. "The soft and the hard parts are all on the menu, it’s so good with seasoning and flambéd," go the not so subtle lyrics of Rammstein’s <i>Mein Teil (My Part)</i>.
A 31-year-old American man was in a Berlin jail cell on Thursday after allegedly running up 000 in bills at luxury hotels in the German capital by claiming he was a visiting dignitary or bank executive. The man reportedly told police when as they clamped handcuffs on him: ”Oh well, it was good while it lasted.”
Like everything built by Adolf Hitler the scale is huge. His Baltic Sea resort Prora for Third Reich workers sprawls 4,5km along pristine beaches on the island of Ruegen — and half of it has just been put up for sale by the German government. Historians say Hitler personally ordered construction of the complex which is a forerunner of mega-resorts opened around the world in the post-World War II era.
A German superhighway was closed down to one lane for hours on Thursday after a truck hauling 15 tons of eggs crashed, scattering its load and creating a slimy mess across the autobahn near Hanover. The truck swerved to avoid a metal object in the road and hit a barrier at about 1am local time.
Explosives experts defused an American World War II bomb in a Berlin suburb on Friday after authorities evacuated 9Â 500 residents from apartments, several retirement homes and a hospital. The 250kg bomb was recently discovered during systematic searches for unexploded ordnance in Oranienburg.
A wild-eyed Russian fires a revolver above his head. And they’re off. Ivan storms into the lead with Dukat and Olga III in hot pursuit, knocking into the walls of the little plastic corridors they are enclosed in, each beast straining for that winning edge. Welcome to the wild world of cockroach racing.
To those who knew him in the sleepy German village, he was a nice, shy young fellow who spent too long on his computer in his bedroom at home. For 18-million computer users, though, Sven Jaschan was not your average introverted teenager, but the author of an internet virus called Sasser that caused havoc from Britain to Australia and untold financial harm to businesses in between.
The only man to be convicted of participating in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States walked free from a court in Hamburg on Wednesday after winning an appeal against his imprisonment. The German federal court dealt the Bush administration’s war on terror a blow when it released the 30-year-old Moroccan student, Mounir el Motassadeq.
Afghanistan and its six closest neighbours inked a regional cooperation accord on Thursday to step up the fight against narcotics by creating a ”security belt” around the country. The accord was agreed in Berlin at an international conference designed to shore up the country’s rebuilding and reformation process.