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/ 20 December 2004
At speeds reaching 50 000kph, even the smallest bits of space debris, such as flakes of paint, can cause serious harm to spacecraft. At the end of 2003, there were about 10 000 catalogued objects in orbit around Earth. There are many thousands more uncatalogued objects larger than 1cm, perhaps more than 500 000.
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/ 18 December 2004
He is better known for invading Poland and starting World War II. But according to new records discovered in a Munich archive, Adolf Hitler was also an inveterate tax dodger, it emerged on Friday, who systematically evaded paying his tax bills both before and after he became Germany’s dictator.
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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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/ 20 November 2004
For most Germans, its demise was regrettable. But three years after the Deutschmark was abolished, the currency is to make a surprise comeback in the run-up to Christmas. The move has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with hard-headed economics.
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/ 19 November 2004
Authorities in Germany, where animal rights are anchored in the federal Constitution, issued a disability pass on Friday to a wheelchair-bound pooch. Eight-year-old Teddy, a wire-haired dachshund, will now be permitted to roam freely off-leash in his custom-made canine wheelchair in any and all public parks.
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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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/ 11 November 2004
Recently sighted at a lifestyle trade show in Germany: a gizmo by the name of ”Nemo” that flashes and beeps at you from inside the fridge when the milk has gone off or the meat is bad. Older people don’t smell or see as well as they used to, but they will notice the fishy warning after learning to love the little fish from Finding Nemo.
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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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/ 9 November 2004
A man in Germany received a tax bill for the equivalent of -million after filing a tax return for income of just 000 dollars, a court heard on Tuesday. The bill was the result of a simple typographical error by the Federal Tax Office in the Bonn suburb of Sankt Augustin, a judge at Bonn State Court heard.
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/ 9 November 2004
A man in Germany might have escaped with murdering his wife had it not been for a telemarketer’s call, police said on Tuesday. The husband had just stabbed his wife when the phone rang and she grabbed the phone and stammered, ”Please help me, my husband’s killing me,” before he wrenched the receiver out of her hand.
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/ 8 November 2004
An internet auction house in Germany on Monday featured what was said to be the bronze lower left leg of the statue of Saddam Hussein that was toppled in the heart of Baghdad last year as millions of television viewers watched. The 170cm cast-bronze leg from mid-thigh downward was all that was left standing on the plinth at al-Ferdaous Square in Baghdad.
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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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/ 1 November 2004
A Pakistani’s naturalisation as a German has been revoked after it emerged that he has a wife in each country, court officials said in the northern city of Lueneburg on Monday. Judges said that at the time he gained his citizenship in 1998, he was approaching his 20th wedding anniversary in both nations.
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/ 21 October 2004
Technology has conquered the latest winter fashions with clothing keeping you not only warm and dry but fitted with anything from a cellphone display to multimedia or lighting systems. An integrated control pad can be found in the sleeve of a winter jacket produced by O’Neill to operate an MP3 player or cellphone.
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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.
A rising generation of African comic book artists are tackling the bloodshed, corruption and absurdities of daily life, winning adoring audiences at home and a growing fan base abroad. Comics from Sudan to South Africa are on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest show of its kind, giving some an unprecedented opportunity to reach a global audience with their biting observations.
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/ 16 September 2004
They came to dine at an expensive restaurant along the normally calm harbour in Hamburg. Instead, they got soaked. About 50 patrons found themselves up to their waists in water on Wednesday evening when a 195m-long cargo ship entered the harbour at high tide, creating a giant wave that inundated the chic eatery.
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/ 8 September 2004
In a freak chain of events, a burning wasp triggered a fire in the attic of a house in an eastern German town, police reported on Wednesday. Police in the town of Drebach said a roofing worker was set on by a swarm of wasps. To protect himself, he used his blow torch against the insects, setting one of the wasps on fire.
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/ 3 September 2004
Up to 30 000 priceless books may have been destroyed by a fire that swept through a historic library in the eastern German city of Weimar, authorities said on Friday. The blaze broke out late on Thursday, destroying part of the roof and the top floor of the 17th-century Anna-Amalia library and spreading through the lower floors.
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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>.
The first of a new generation of airships designed by Germany’s Zeppelin corporation was forced to abort its maiden flight from Germany to Japan on Tuesday following delays owing to Russian red tape. In an embarrassing turnaround, the airship will be transported to its new owners in Japan by sea.
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.”
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.
Microsoft’s XBox video game system will team up with software maker Electronic Arts to stage an online interactive world cup tournament later this year, the companies announced on Thursday. The project is part of XBox’s sponsorship for soccer’s 2006 World Cup in Germany.
A pesky wasp triggered an accident on a German superhighway when a driver lost control of his lorry and spilled 15 tons of marmalade jars on the road, police reported on Tuesday. The accident happened on the A1 autobahn near Greven in north-western Germany late on Monday.
Film historians have found a rare Laurel and Hardy short that the famed comedy duo filmed for German audiences — speaking their lines in phonetic German. The 1931 short is being hailed as one of the rare examples of the fad in early talkies of having stars speak their own lines in another language for foreign audiences.
A new variant of the Bagle virus is spreading quickly around the world on computers connected to the internet, reports the Munich-based magazine PC Professionell. The latest variant, Bagle.AI, attaches itself to e-mail on infected computers and sends itself to all e-mail addresses contained in a user’s address book.
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.
The first United States soldier charged with murder in Iraq is maintaining his innocence as he faces hearings that could lead to his court-martial for the shooting of a man during the hunt for Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Captain Rogelio M Maynulet (29) is due to appear on Wednesday before a US military court in Hanau, outside Frankfurt.
Germany has nominated fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Memory of the World list to preserve the gothic stories adored by generations of children, officials said on Wednesday. Memory of the World is an initiative to defend the world’s cultural and documentary heritage.
Korgo, a new virus that can infect Windows 2000 and XP systems simply by connecting them to the internet, continued to spread worldwide on Friday, installing a tiny spy that can record what keys were pressed at secret moments such as typing passwords.