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/ 26 September 2005
The surprise announcement by German luxury sports car maker Porsche that it plans to buy a stake in Europe’s biggest car maker Volkswagen sparked scepticism among investors and analysts, triggering a sharp sell-off in both companies’ shares on the stock exchange on Monday.
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/ 23 September 2005
The post-election power struggle between Germany’s political parties became bitter on Thursday, with Angela Merkel’s conservatives accusing the Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, of trying to stage a ”putsch”. Merkel’s Christian Democrats reacted furiously after senior members of Schröder’s Social Democrats called for a change in the way in which the seats held by political parties are counted.
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/ 20 September 2005
Europe’s newspapers agreed on Tuesday that Germany was in an ”awful mess” after a weekend election left it politically adrift rather than at the helm of a long-anticipated economic recovery. Editorials in Germany focused on the likely makeup of a new government, with many facing the dreaded possibility of a so-called grand coalition.
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/ 17 September 2005
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his conservative challenger, Angela Merkel, launch into the final day of the German election campaign on Saturday championing rival visions for the future of Europe’s biggest economy. Polls show Merkel is well on her way to becoming Germany’s first woman chancellor.
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/ 16 September 2005
BMW have signed Nick Heidfeld to drive for their new formula-one team on a three-year contract beginning next year. The 28-year-old German currently races for Williams, who part company with BMW at the end of this season. The German manufacturer has bought the Sauber team, and Heidfeld is the new outfit’s first driver signing.
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/ 15 September 2005
Barcelona got their Champions League campaign off to a winning start on Wednesday with a comfortable 2-0 defeat of Werder Bremen in group C. Wednesday’s other winners included Udinese, Arsenal, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Benfica, and Manchester United drew 0-0 with Villarreal.
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/ 14 September 2005
Many German car buyers shrug their shoulders at the mention of ”hybrid” vehicles. Cars with a petrol engine augmented by an electric motor are virtually unknown in Germany. In stark contrast to the United States, there are exactly 2 096 hybrid vehicles on German roads out of a total of 45,4-million cars, according to the Federal Office of Transport.
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/ 13 September 2005
Angela Merkel is bidding to become the first woman, and the first citizen of the former communist East, to lead a modern, reunified Germany. Her rise from being an obscure East Berlin physicist to leading Germany’s conservatives, her pledge for economic reform and her no-nonsense dress sense have led to comparisons with Margaret Thatcher.
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/ 8 September 2005
Russian energy giant Gazprom and German firms EON and BASF signed a deal on Thursday to build a $5-billion pipeline linking the Russian Federation and Germany, at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The North European Gas Pipeline will allow the world’s largest gas reserves to be piped directly to the western European market.
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/ 8 September 2005
South Africa coach Stuart Baxter admits he is on borrowed time following Wednesday’s 4-2 friendly defeat by Germany. The visitors conceded three goals in the first five minutes of the second half at the Weserstadion and the manner of the defeat has convinced Baxter that his time is up.
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/ 6 September 2005
Bafana Bafana coach Stuart Baxter knows it’s just a matter of time before he is sacked. ”After one-and-a-half years, I’ve passed the sell-by date of most coaches — they’ve had 12 coaches in 11 years,” Baxter said on Monday. ”Sooner or later, I’ll be sacked. It may be now or maybe they’ll wait until the end of the campaign.”
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/ 6 September 2005
World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) president Dick Pound said it is ”highly probable” that seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong did test positive for the banned blood booster erythropoietin. Armstrong has been forced on the defensive since a newspaper detailed test results from the Tour de France in 1999.
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/ 5 September 2005
You need a tough backside and points are awarded for hiding your pain when you flop into the water — welcome to the weird world of "dive-bombing", which held its world championships on Sunday. The event attracted competitors from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands.
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/ 5 September 2005
Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest car maker, said on Monday that it planned to step up job-cutting measures, particularly at its main plant in Wolfsburg, north Germany. "Despite rising sales, the Volkswagen group still has considerable overcapacity and will therefore be intensifying its efforts to cut back manpower," the car maker said in a statement.
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/ 1 September 2005
The exploits of seven-times Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, who is alleged to have used the banned blood booster erythropoietin in 1999, are also down to the use of other banned substances, including anabolic steroids, according to one expert.
The two rival camps in the battle over next-generation DVD standardisation are looking forward to the International Radio and TV Exhibition in Berlin from September 2 to 7. Since consumers will likely decide the winner — Blu-Ray or HD-DVD technology — producers are eager to impress them with devices in the new formats.
Kimi Raikkonen has signed a pre-contract at Ferrari and is to replace record world champion Michael Schumacher at the famed Italian formula-one team from 2007 onwards, Germany’s Bild daily reported on Thursday. Bild said Schumacher could swap cockpits with Raikkonen as he is reportedly in talks with the Finn’s outfit.
Austrian champions Rapid Vienna returned to the Champions League group stage for the first time in eight years while Thun from their Euro 2008 co-hosts Switzerland qualified for the elite event for the first time on Tuesday. Jozef Valachovic was the hero for Rapid when the Slovakia defender headed home a corner kick.
Heavy rains triggered severe flooding in southern Germany overnight and authorities warned on Tuesday that worse is still to come. The city of Garmisch-Partenkirchen was the first to ring alarm bells after flooding near the nearby town of Eschenlohe prompted police to evacuate people from their homes in boats.
Germany’s seven-time formula-one champion Michael Schumacher refused on Monday to quash speculation that he has met McLaren sporting chief Norbert Haug to discuss a possible move from Ferrari. ”I do not want to discuss the rumours about me leaving Ferrari,” Schumacher said on his website.
An Australian musicologist has identified a major choral work by Italian baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi during research at the Saxony State library in Dresden, the library announced on Monday. The piece for solo voices, choir and chamber ensemble was based on the Biblical 110 Psalm and represents the most important Vivaldi work to have been discovered in nearly a century.
Pope Benedict XVI wrapped up his first foreign tour on Sunday with an uncompromising warning that Catholics must strictly follow the church’s teachings. Addressing nearly one million young pilgrims, many of whom had camped overnight in a muddy field outside Cologne, the pope said that Christians should not choose the bits of doctrine they liked and ignore the rest.
Over the past five years, average attendances in the Bundesliga have been recorded at a respectable 30 000, but crowds have soared since the introduction of World Cup stadiums last season. Many believe this is due to 2006 World Cup fever, but maybe there is another reason why German stadiums are full — affordability.
The voices that hallucinating people claim to hear are almost always of males, the Munich-based medical newspaper Aerztliche Praxis (Medical Practice) reported. Citing studies by researchers at the University of Sheffield, the report said that the reason for this phenomenon may lie in the different qualities of sound characteristic of male and female voices.
A new German book of popular legal errors seeks to end years of Anglo-German holiday bickering over the rights and wrongs of bagging the best sun loungers with the strategic deployment of towels. British tourists have gained an unlikely ally in the form of German lawyer Ralf Höcker, who said that his research had revealed that leaving towels on loungers was not legally binding.
Long considered a bastion of ethical integrity, Germany’s influential public broadcasters find themselves these days embroiled in a scandal involving kickbacks from advertisers and the practice of sneaking blatantly commercial promotions into supposedly non-commercial prime-time shows.
A two-year-old boy was found safe and sound after surviving for four days alone in a German forest, police said on Thursday. The boy named Nabil, whose parents are Yemeni, was found by two German soldiers sitting in a pool of water at a spot about 3km from the playground where he had gone missing on Sunday.
World Cup organisers are more concerned about terrorism than hooliganism. Outbreaks of hooliganism have hit Europe this year, but several key Germans said on Wednesday at an international soccer conference that they fear terrorism is the bigger threat.
The German Grand Prix resembled so many other races this season: a victory for Renault’s Fernando Alonso and a breakdown for Kimi Raikkonen. On Sunday, Raikkonen started from the pole and led comfortably until the 36th lap when his McLaren-Mercedes stopped on the track with hydraulic problems.
A stone phallus 28 000 years old has been discovered in a cave in Baden-Wuertemberg in southern Germany, according to archeologists with the University of Tubingen. In assembling 14 stone fragments found last year in the Hohle Fels cave, archeologists rebuilt the phallus, which is 20cm long and three centimeters wide
There may be one single penguin as the mascot for Linux, but there are countless Linuxes — different versions that aim to fulfill different niches. Some function as printer servers, while others as digital video recorders. And then there are also the large versions, complete with easy-to-use installation routines and large software packages.
McLaren showed their rivals the way ahead of Sunday’s German Grand Prix when test driver Alexander Wurz finished fastest in the opening practice session in Hockenheim on Friday. The British team are aiming to chase down championship leaders Renault this weekend.