German and Polish hooligans will present the biggest risk of violence at the World Cup finals in Germany, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said in a newspaper interview on Monday. ”The biggest problem we have is with German hooligans. We must not place the blame on neighbouring countries,” Schaeuble told Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.
It has soft lights, gleaming red and blue surfaces and a soothing video projection on the wall showing swirling underwater bubbles. Welcome not to an art hotel, but to Europe’s trendiest public toilet. The super-loo, which opened in Berlin on May 4, is the last word in chic public architecture.
German health experts on Friday warned football fans coming to the World Cup to have themselves vaccinated against measles, following an outbreak in a state that will host 11 matches. More than 1Â 100 people in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia have caught the disease in the past ten weeks, according to authorities in the state.
It has been acclaimed as the best German film of the year and nominated in 11 out of 15 categories for the German Prize, Germany’s version of the Oscars. But The Life of Others, a film about the Stasi, East Germany’s ubiquitous secret police, is at the centre of a row after its lead actor […]
Two German engineers who were held hostage in Iraq for more than three months said they were glad to be alive after they returned home on Wednesday. Rene Braeunlich (32) and Thomas Nitzschke (28) landed at Berlin’s Tegel airport after spending the night at the German embassy in Baghdad following their release on Tuesday.
Paul Spiegel, who fled the Nazis as a child during World War II and returned to Germany to eventually become the influential — and at times contentious — head of its main Jewish organisation, has died. He was 68. Spiegel died overnight of cancer in a hospital in Duesseldorf where he had been seriously ill for weeks.
Will our grandchildren spend their vacations on the moon, or their honeymoons in a hotel orbiting Mars? A few dreamers at the International Tourism Fair say space tours for average travellers could come sooner than we think. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are rumored to have booked tickets on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Spaceship, which is due for lift-off in 2010.
A bank run by women for women is being launched in Germany to tailor financial services to female needs in a sector traditionally governed by a very male suit-and-tie brigade. Its name? What else — Frauenbank, or Women’s Bank. The idea was the brainchild of Astrid Hastreiter, a 41-year-old information technology specialist who said she was spurred on by a few observations.
Researchers in Berlin have come a step closer to developing a device that will enable people to write and manipulate objects by reading their mind. The so-called mental typewriter that translates thoughts into cursor movements on a computer screen will be on display at the computer technology fair CeBIT, which opens in the German city of Hanover on March 9.
The football World Cup kicks off in Germany in exactly 100 days with the organisers determined to use the tournament to improve the country’s image abroad. The organising committee has dismissed criticism about stadium safety, but the question of whether the army should be allowed to help the police reinforce security is still unanswered.
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/ 13 February 2006
German police had to resort to shutting down a highway to stop an elderly man driving down the wrong side of the road, apparently so convinced he was in the right that he continually blinked his lights at oncoming traffic, authorities said. The man continued along at 110kph for about 70km before stopping.
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/ 2 February 2006
Formula-one supremo Bernie Ecclestone reignited his row with the sport’s constructors on Wednesday, blasting them for failing to keep spiralling costs under control. Ecclestone told German weekly magazine Sport-Bild that teams should be able to remain competitive on a budget of €50-million a season.
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/ 27 January 2006
At Berlin’s Herbert Hoover High School, roughly 90% of the pupils come from immigrant families, but in a step that has caused political ripples they have been told to speak German and nothing else. ”German is the language spoken in our school. Every pupil is therefore obliged to communicate only in German,” reads the rule that was adopted at the school.
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/ 26 January 2006
Franz Seitz, one of Germany’s most prolific film producers, has died at the age of 84, his son said on Tuesday. Seitz produced about 80 films, including <i>The Tin Drum</i>, an adaptation of the novel by Nobel laureate Guenter Grass that in 1980 became the first German picture to win an Oscar for best foreign film.
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/ 19 January 2006
A dead whale was lying in front of the Japanese embassy in Berlin on Thursday after Greenpeace brought it to the German capital to protest Japanese whale hunting for scientific research. The whale was brought to Berlin by the environmental group after it was found beached near Wismar on Germany’s Baltic coast on Saturday.
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/ 18 January 2006
Deep in provincial Germany, Mohammed Coubageat Sherif Toure has prepared hard for the biggest year of his life — the almost unknown centre-forward of the Togo national team will play in both the African Nations Cup, starting on Friday, and the World Cup finals.
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/ 15 January 2006
The man who was to direct the multi-million euro World Cup gala, which was cancelled in acrimonious circumstances, demanded an apology from football world governing body Fifa on Saturday. Andre Heller, the Austrian who was to direct the 90-minute show in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on June 7, two days before the start of the World Cup, said the decision to call off the extravaganza had caused a public outcry.
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/ 10 January 2006
German consumer protection watchdog Stiftung Warentest warned on Tuesday of ”serious deficiencies” in security at four of the 12 to be used during the soccer World Cup finals starting in June. The study, presented at a news conference by one of its authors, Hubertus Primus, found that there was no plan to allow fans to enter the pitch in case of a mass panic.
Michael Schumacher has threatened to end his formula-one career if he can’t win with Ferrari. The seven-time world champion had a poor past season. The latest edition of Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine quoted him as saying he may quit if the Italian team can’t build a winning car.
A German documentary to be aired this week claims to have found new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot United States president John Kennedy on the orders of the Cuban secret services. ”It was [Cuban leader Fidel] Castro’s vengeance for the CIA bid to assassinate him with a poisoned pen,” award-winning German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann says in the film.
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/ 26 December 2005
It was July 2 1938, start of the school summer holidays, and Erwin Goldberg, a 24-year-old teacher, was cheerful as he strode home. His mood changed minutes later. In his post box was a letter from the Berlin police president’s office on the Alexander Platz. It informed him he was to be taken into custody and had to ”leave the country within 24 hours”.
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/ 6 December 2005
Football-mad Germany is ready and willing to host the World Cup finals next year but minor problems are plaguing the build-up to the biggest sporting event in the world. The glitzy draw in Leipzig on Friday will decide where and when the 32 nations will play in six months’ time, but the country has been ready for months.
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/ 2 December 2005
Fifty-three years after it was founded by a French soldier, Berlin’s legendary Paris Bar that has hosted stars such as Madonna and Leonardo DiCaprio risks closing because of crushing debts and a criminal investigation. It is being investigated for tax arrears, unpaid social charges and employing illegal immigrants, according to prosecutors in Berlin.
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/ 1 December 2005
Football’s world governing body Fifa will wait until March next year before deciding whether to use an electronically chipped ball at the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany. Fifa spokesperson Markus Siegler said there would be a meeting in March to discuss the tests of the chipped ball and decide whether it is ready for the 2006 finals, running from June 9 until July 9.
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/ 30 November 2005
Angela Merkel addressed Parliament for the first time as German Chancellor on Wednesday, faced with an urgent test over a kidnapped German woman in Iraq and the long-term challenge of reviving the country’s moribund economy. Merkel said the government will set to work to return the country to its status as an economic powerhouse.
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/ 29 November 2005
Franz Schoenhuber, a former Nazi SS soldier who became a prominent figure on Germany’s rightist fringe, has died, the son of another far-right leader said on Monday. He was 82. Schoenhuber was best known as a co-founder of the small, anti-immigration Republikaner party.
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/ 29 November 2005
Namibian officials refused on Monday to sign a deal under which Germany would pay reparations to its former colony for the massacre of the local Herero and Dama populations during the colonial era, which lasted from 1884 to 1915. ”I regret this,” said German Minister for Development and Cooperation Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul.
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/ 28 November 2005
Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba on Monday defended his country’s controversial land-expropriation policy at the start of a five-day visit to Germany. Pohamba said that 15 years after shaking off South African rule, land reform to redistribute land from white farmers to black landless people is essential.
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/ 22 November 2005
On becoming Germany’s new Chancellor on Tuesday, Angela Merkel joined a club of women leaders whose members can still literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. Along with leaders such as Helen Clark of New Zealand and Begum Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh, Merkel is henceforth one of only five women worldwide to head their country’s government.
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/ 22 November 2005
Angela Merkel was sworn in as Germany’s first woman Chancellor before the Bundestag Lower House of Parliament following her formal election by the chamber on Tuesday. The pastor’s daughter became Germany’s eighth post-war leader and the first person from the former communist east to take the helm of the reunited country.
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/ 10 November 2005
When WBC champion Vitali Klitschko called it quits on Tuesday because of his broken-down body, a big dream of the two Klitschko brothers died. Tuesday’s operation for torn right-knee ligaments, which forced the cancellation of Saturday’s title defence against Hasim Rahman, was Klitschko’s fifth major surgery in five years.
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/ 19 October 2005
She may not have a government to preside over yet, but incoming German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already been turned into a doll. Dressed in a version of the blue trouser suit and pink T-shirt she wore on the tense election night of September 18, the baby-faced miniature Merkel is on sale for €189 (R1 480).