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/ 6 November 2006
New rules forced air travellers to pack perfume, toothpaste and other liquids into small plastic bags in their hand luggage before going through security checkpoints at Europe’s airports on Monday. Queues were longer than usual at terminals in Frankfurt and Paris as passengers got to grips with the new regulations.
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/ 6 November 2006
Haiti, Burma and Iraq are perceived as the most corrupt countries in the world, while Finland is seen as the cleanest, a respected global graft watchdog reported on Monday. South Africa was 51st among 163 countries listed in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, down from 46th last year.
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/ 2 November 2006
Hundreds of euro bills in Germany have mysteriously disintegrated in the past several months, apparently due to exposure to sulfuric acid, police and the German central bank said on Thursday. The first case surfaced in June in Berlin when a €20 bill crumbled upon contact.
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/ 31 October 2006
Forget all those books that say the Irish invented Halloween and that Irish-Americans popularised it in the 20th century. Experts in Germany say Halloween was invented by witches in the Black Forest of Germany. Long-forgotten in Europe, the ancient Celtic holiday has become trendy among post-unification Germans.
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/ 30 October 2006
Greenhouse-gas emissions by the industrialised world are still rising, with the United States firmly entrenched as the biggest polluter. In an annual update on global-warming pollution, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said that, compared with the benchmark year of 1990, the 41 industrialised countries it monitors trimmed their emissions by 3,3% by the end of 2004.
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/ 24 October 2006
Iran is unlikely to be able to develop a nuclear bomb before 2015, the chief of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency said on Tuesday. His estimate falls within the three to 10 year range of forecasts given by most international experts. ”It is difficult to give an exact estimate of the time,” BND head Ernst Uhrlau told a security conference.
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/ 23 October 2006
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday paid tribute to seven-time Formula One champion Michael Schumacher, saying he was one of the biggest German sports stars of all time and had ”brought a bit of genius” to racing. ”You are on the list of the great names of German sport …,” the chancellor told the retired racing ace in a letter published in Bild daily.
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/ 20 October 2006
A fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor, and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday. Burkhard Rick, a spokesperson for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn, said the fire gutted the cottage.
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/ 11 October 2006
The facts are well-known — from 1933 the Nazis murdered more than 200Â 000 physically and mentally disabled people, including a cousin of Adolf Hitler believed to have been schizophrenic. But it has taken more than 60 years for an exhibition to trace in detail the fate of the first victims of Hitler’s sinister "health" policies, based on his obsession with racial purity that led to the Holocaust.
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/ 10 October 2006
An 80-year-old German motorist obediently following his navigation system ignored a motorway ”closed for construction” sign and crashed his Mercedes into a pile of sand further down the road. ”The driver was following the orders from his navigation system and even though there was a sufficient number of warnings and barricades, he continued his journey into the construction site,” a police spokesperson told Reuters.
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/ 25 September 2006
Germany’s seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher is determined to sign off with an eighth Formula One title this season but said he would not underestimate the threat posed by Renault and their reigning champion Fernando Alonso. Schumacher (37) announced his retirement after winning the last Grand Prix in Monza.
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/ 6 September 2006
Seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher will announce at this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix that he is retiring at the end of the season, Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper reported on Wednesday. The 37-year-old Schumacher will announce that he will complete the season by racing in Shanghai, Suzuka and São Paulo before hanging up his helmet and overalls.
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/ 3 September 2006
Europe’s first spacecraft to the moon ended its three-year mission on Sunday by crashing into the lunar surface in a volcanic plane called the Lake of Excellence, to a round of applause in the mission control room. Hitting at 2km per second, the impact of the Smart-1 spacecraft was expected to leave a 3m-by-10m crater.
It is known as Denglisch, a hybrid of Deutsch and English, and cultural purists say it is an insult to the language of Goethe and should be purged from the vocabulary. Denglisch has spread steadily as Germans adopted United States phrases in business, advertising, technology, and everyday speech.
A German woman who was held up and robbed in her Berlin apartment earlier this month was astonished to see the thief waiting to board her flight from Antalya in Turkey to the German capital, police said on Tuesday. The 37-year-old woman telephoned her husband who alerted the authorities, police spokesperson Joerg Kunzendorf said.
Borussia Dortmund’s South African striker Delron Buckley is moving to Swiss club Basel on a season-long loan deal, the German side announced on Tuesday. Buckley joined Dortmund last year after scoring 15 league goals for Arminia Bielefeld in the 2004/05 season but he failed to find the net even once in the Bundesliga last term.
German investigators said on Friday they suspected that homemade bombs found on two trains last month were a failed terror attack. It was first thought that the devices packed into cases in trains in the western cities of Dortmund and Koblenz on July 31 were a blackmail attempt, but analysis of the contents has revealed a possible link to Lebanon.
Parks and pavements in Germany are full of cyclists this summer, but not bicyclists. Almost everywhere, children, teenagers and adults are riding about on unicycles as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Unicycles, long associated with circuses, are making a comeback.
Car makers are developing increasingly sophisticated driver-assistance systems to boost safety, comfort and the fun factor. Some technology that is already standard in many vehicles, such as ESP (electronic stability programme), can significantly reduce the number of injuries and deaths in road accidents, according to tests conducted by the German technical testing authority Dekra
A neo-Nazi organisation is poised to purchase a hotel in a town in Germany after local residents failed to come up with enough money to stop the sale. In a race against the clock that made headlines around the world, people in Delmenhorst near Bremen held bake sales and staged fund-raising barbecues to try to scrape together money to thwart a rich, neo-Nazi lawyers’ organisation from buying property in their town.
Germany is honouring Bertolt Brecht with fanfare on the 50th anniversary of his death, hinting that the country is ready at last to embrace the playwright and poet as a national hero and forgive him for going to his grave a communist. There is no ignoring Brecht as theatres from Berlin to Bonn to Hanover dust off his plays.
Roland Schoeman became the first man to dip under 21 seconds as he shattered the world short-course record in the 50m freestyle at an invitational meeting in Hamburg on Saturday. The triple Olympic medallist swam a blistering 20,98 seconds in the morning heats, bettering the previous mark of 21,10 set by Frenchman Fred Bousquet in March 2004.
Work on three of South Africa’s new stadiums for the 2010 soccer World Cup can be completed in three years, though such a tight timetable would not have been feasible in bureaucratic Germany, says a German architect involved in the project. ”By 1999, we were already planning for the Olympic Stadium. That’s seven years before the event took place,” he told journalists in Berlin.
German cyclist Jan Ullrich was supplied with a potent cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs by the Spanish doctor accused of running a doping ring that has left the sport in crisis, it was reported in Germany on Saturday. The allegations were made by anti-doping campaigner Werner Franke in a newspaper interview.
Police in the German city of Aachen received an unusual call for help late on Wednesday when a woman telephoned to complain her husband was not fulfilling his sexual obligations. After the couple had been sleeping in separate beds for several months without intimate contact, the 44-year-old woman woke the husband (45) in the middle of the night and demanded he satisfy her needs.
Defending world champion Fernando Alonso is not worried about Michael Schumacher’s current dominant form, despite being beaten by his rival for the third race in a row. Schumacher’s fourth victory in his home race, the German Grand Prix, helped him slash Alonso’s championship lead from 17 points to 11.
Michael Schumacher could not hide his surprise at Ferrari’s dominance after he won the German Grand Prix for the fourth time at Hockenheim on Sunday. The seven-times world champion German led home his Brazilian teammate Felipe Massa for his third win in a row.
Michael Schumacher is confident of continuing his superb recent form in front of his home crowd at the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, Germany, this weekend. The seven-time world champion (37) has cut Spaniard Fernando Alonso’s championship lead from 25 to 17 points after winning the last two races in dominant fashion.
Manchester United’s Dutch striker Ruud van Nistelrooy wants to play for Bayern Munich next season according to Bild newspaper, though Spanish press claim he will join Real Madrid. Bayern club president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, quoted by Thursday’s Bild, said the offer was for â,¬13-million.
The top World Cup official in Berlin has died four days after shooting himself in the head just hours after the final, the German press reported on Friday. The <i>Berliner Morgenpost</i> quoted a spokesperson of the Charite hospital as saying Juergen Kiessling (65) passed away on Thursday.
As the charismatic, 41-year-old Jurgen Klinsmann on Wednesday stunned about 82-million Germans by declaring he was stepping down as national soccer coach after a tenure of two years, South African observers in Germany gathering ideas for the hosting of the 2010 World Cup were echoing the sentiment: ”Where can Bafana find another Klinsmann?”
It is designed as an ongoing, sometimes routine meeting between President Thabo Mbeki and his team of advisers on the one hand, and the captains of South African industry on the other. But when all the camaraderie is completed at Wednesday’s get-together, Mamelodi Sundowns president Patrice Motsepe intends to exhort big businesses to support South African soccer to the hilt.