Lloyd Gedye takes a tour of BMW’s Munich research and development laboratory.
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/ 9 February 2008
Russia did not want a revived arms race with the United States, and has been forced to start a new weapons programme in response to Washington’s planned missile shield in Europe, a Kremlin spokesperson said on Saturday. ”Russia had no intention of getting into an arms race. It is just a necessary response,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
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/ 17 October 2007
One of Germany’s greatest treasuries of books, the Bavarian State Library in Munich, said on Tuesday it had set a robot to work ”reading” the books and storing more than 7,5-million images of the pages in its digital memory. The device uses gentle suction and a breath of air to turn the pages.
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/ 22 September 2007
Formula One team McLaren-Mercedes will not appeal against the -million fine and exclusion from the 2007 constructors’ championship over the Ferrari spying charges, Mercedes said on Friday. McLaren had until 3pm GMT on Friday to lodge an appeal over the decision by the FIA, world motorsport’s governing body.
Airbus plunged into its first-ever operating loss in 2006 and will be in the red again this year, parent company Eads said on Friday in another twist of the crisis at the European plane maker. Analysts at Citigroup investment bank said that prospects for Airbus were now "awful" after management warned about vast cost problems.
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/ 17 December 2006
Revolutions are rarely announced so far in advance. But after years of tinkering and publicising, Nintendo’s new games console has finally hit the market. The Wii, long known on the internet under the working title ”Revolution”, is Nintendo’s new entrant into the gaming field.
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/ 24 November 2006
A former manager from German engineering and electronics giant Siemens who was arrested this month has admitted paying massive bribes to the regime of late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. The manager is among six current and former Siemens employees detained in a huge embezzlement probe into one of Germany’s leading companies.
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
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This World Cup, which was expected to provide a festival of youth, has turned into a celebration of experience. While Kaka faded, Lionel Messi was deprived of his rightful chance and Wayne Rooney simply self-destructed, the old men grabbed the stage for a final parade of their talents.
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Luiz Felipe Scolari says Portugal can be proud of its football team despite their agonising loss to France, as he goes about the difficult task of picking them up for a third-placed play-off match. He warned Italy they will have their work cut out against France in the final in Berlin on Sunday, while paying tribute to his players who matched Portugal’s best World Cup campaign.
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Zinedine Zidane fired France into their second World Cup final appearance in eight years on Wednesday, scoring the only goal in a 1-0 semifinal victory over Portugal. The French captain shattered Portugal’s dreams of a first appearance in the final after coolly converting a hotly disputed penalty midway through the first half at the 62 000-seat Allianz Arena.
Laptops aren’t great for note-taking. But who wants to write everything down and then decipher their scribbles before typing it all into their computer? Enter Tablet PCs, possibly the perfect solution to this problem. Users can input handwritten notes directly and many models even have a record audio option.
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Germany are starting to get that championship look. It took the hosts a mere 12 minutes to break down Sweden 2-0 on Saturday, becoming the first team to reach the World Cup quarterfinals. It was a one-sided win over what was billed as one of the top European teams heading into the tournament.
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Another 2-0 deficit wasn’t enough to stop orange-clad Côte d’Ivoire from stomping away in its elephant dance. Taking advantage of two handballs by Milan Dudic, Côte d’Ivoire beat Serbia-Montenegro 3-2 on Wednesday night through Bonaventure Kalou’s penalty shot in the 86th minute.
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Coming into the World Cup, Côte d’Ivoire was widely regarded as the most talented team coming out of Africa. Now Ghana is the lone African team with a chance to qualify for the second round of the tournament, and the vanquished Elephants of Côte d’Ivoire are pulling for them.
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Defender Radhi Jaidi headed an injury time equaliser on Wednesday as Tunisia scrambled a 2-2 draw with Saudi Arabia, which left both teams waiting for an elusive World Cup win. After a defensive mix-up, forward Zied Jaziri put a high ball into the six-yard box which Jaidi nodded home.
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Germany got the win they wanted at the start of the World Cup. The hosts beat Costa Rica 4-2 on Friday in the opening match of the tournament, hoping to inspire enough confidence in the team for the rest of the World Cup. Striker Miroslav Klose celebrated his 28th birthday by scoring two goals.
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An army of police and stadium guards met tens of thousands of partying soccer fans at the World Cup’s opening games on Friday — and aside from a handful of arrests the biggest problem was long lines caused by tight security. Officers on horseback patrolled outside the stadium where Germany played Costa Rica.
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The 2006 World Cup officially began on Friday, kicked off by a colourful ceremony celebrating football lore and the 32 nations taking part in the globe’s biggest single sporting event. From a stage at Munich’s dazzling new stadium, German President Horst Koehler declared the start of the championship’s 18th edition since 1930.
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Hours to go before the World Cup started on Friday, the streets of Munich were alive with exuberant fans singing, showing their colours and waiting for the whistle to blow as hosts Germany meet Costa Rica in the curtain-raiser. A giant screen set up by German public television station ZDF in Munich’s central Marienplatz counted down the seconds.
Teamgeist (team spirit) is the unusual name of the adidas match ball that will be used in the upcoming World Cup. For the ball colours, however, the designers stuck with traditional black and white — except for the final in Berlin. The teams fighting for the championship title on July 9 will be kicking a gold-and-white ball.
The BMW Z4 coupé is available from this month at European dealers just a year after the first design study was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show. Prices start at â,¬38 900 (about R335 000) and are between â,¬1 500 and â,¬2 000 cheaper than the convertible, depending on the engine size.
Bayern Munich admit they are resigned to losing Germany captain Michael Ballack to Chelsea at the end of the season. Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho revealed on Monday that the west Londoners had made Ballack, out of contract at the end of the season, a lucrative offer and Bayern general manager Uli Hoeness conceded defeat.
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/ 8 February 2006
BMW engineers are working on a steam-powered auxiliary drive system that reduces fuel consumption by up to 15% and boosts performance at the same time, the car maker said. The ”Turbosteamer” concept applied to a 1,8 litre, four-cylinder petrol engine recycles the waste heat in the exhaust gases and cooling system.
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/ 22 January 2006
From eBay and Skype access to personal identification numbers for online banking — passwords are an everyday part of life with computers. Experts advise against using the same user name and password for all accounts, so security-minded internet users need an extraordinary memory to keep all of their various access codes straight.
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/ 28 September 2005
German champions Bayern Munich put themselves in a commanding position to qualify from Champions League Group A with a 1-0 home win over FC Bruges on Tuesday. It was the first European match at Bayern’s new Allianz Arena and the German champions rewarded a 66 000 capacity crowd with a narrow victory.
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.
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.
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.
Chelsea advanced to the Champions League semifinals on Tuesday despite losing 3-2 at Bayern Munich. Chelsea conceded two late goals, but still advanced 6-5 on aggregate, having won last week’s first leg 4-2. Frank Lampard, who scored two goals in the first game, put Chelsea ahead before Claudio Pizarro made it 1-1.
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/ 23 February 2005
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has acknowledged his team need to defend much better if they are to have any chance of overcoming Bayern Munich to reach the quarterfinals of the Champions League. Arsenal fell to a 3-1 defeat in the last 16 encounter in Munich on Tuesday as their brittle defence was torn apart by Bayern.
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/ 27 January 2005
Heinrich von Pierer, outgoing chief executive of multinational Siemens, made a virtue of modesty on Thursday by telling shareholders in Munich how he had discovered one company employee in his 12 years at the helm who had never heard of him.