Category Archives: Germany

Joe Biden set to visit Germany to discuss Ukraine and Middle East

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US president likely to meet Chancellor Olaf Scholz within next week during rescheduled trip, say sources in Berlin

Joe Biden will visit Germany this week, government sources in Berlin said, after he cancelled a planned trip last week due to Hurricane Milton.

The senior German officials who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed media reports that the US president would travel to Berlin, probably within the next week, but declined to provide further details. Planning for the visit was believed to be ongoing.

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Three-armed robot conductor makes debut in Dresden

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German city’s Sinfoniker says aim is not to replace humans but to play music human conductors would find impossible

She’s not long on charisma or passion but keeps perfect rhythm and is never prone to temperamental outbursts against the musicians beneath her three batons. Meet MAiRA Pro S, the next-generation robot conductor who made her debut this weekend in Dresden.

Her two performances in the eastern German city are intended to show off the latest advances in machine maestros, as well as music written explicitly to harness 21st-century technology. The artistic director of Dresden’s Sinfoniker, Markus Rindt, said the intention was “not to replace human beings” but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible.

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Hospitals evacuated in Cologne after discovery of second world war bomb

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1,000kg US ordnance to be defused at building site after complex evacuation that also included thousands of homes

Authorities in the German city of Cologne have evacuated three hospitals and thousands of homes after the discovery of an unexploded second world war bomb during construction work on a new medical campus.

The 1,000kg US aerial bomb, equipped with a front and rear impact detonator, is due to be defused on Friday.

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18 treated for severe nausea in Stuttgart after opera of live sex and piercing

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Florentina Holzinger’s bloody Sancta was criticised by Austrian bishops and is now a sellout in Germany

Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

“On Saturday we had eight and on Sunday we had 10 people who had to be looked after by our visitor service,” said the opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling, about the two performances of Sancta, a work by the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger. A doctor had been called in for treatment in three instances, he added.

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European summit to discuss Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ‘victory plan’ is postponed

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World leaders pull out from talks in Germany after Joe Biden withdraws due to Hurricane Milton

An international summit on Ukraine where Volodymyr Zelenskyy was going to present a “victory plan” to western leaders has been formally postponed – though the Ukrainian president will try to organise a tour of European capitals instead.

Organisers said that the Saturday meeting of about 20 world leaders at the US Ramstein airbase in Germany would be rescheduled, a day after Biden had said he had to stay at home to respond to Hurricane Milton’s landfall in Florida.

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Zelenskyy ‘victory plan’ summit in doubt after Joe Biden pulls out

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US president prepares for arrival of Hurricane Milton as German chancellor says meeting will be rescheduled

Joe Biden has called off a four-day trip to Germany this week that had been intended to culminate in a summit to discuss Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “victory plan” for Ukraine.

The White House said on Tuesday evening that the president would stay at home “to oversee preparations for and the response” to Hurricane Milton, which is expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday.

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Prosecutors to appeal after Madeleine McCann suspect acquitted in separate rape trial

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Christian Brückner found not guilty in Germany of three charges of aggravated rape and two of sexual abuse

The main suspect in the disappearance of the British toddler Madeleine McCann is likely to be released from prison next year after he was found not guilty of all charges in a separate rape and sexual abuse trial.

Christian Brückner, who is serving a seven-year sentence for rape, was acquitted by the district court in Braunschweig, northern Germany, of three separate charges of aggravated rape and two of sexual abuse of children in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

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Interpol campaign to identify remains of women in Europe expands to 46 cases

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Police forces in France, Italy and Spain join cold-case initiative after launch last year of Operation Identify Me

Police have expanded a cold-case campaign aimed at identifying dozens of women who were murdered or who died in suspicious circumstances across Europe, taking in three new countries and more than doubling the number of cases.

The international policing organisation Interpol said on Tuesday that forces from France, Italy and Spain had joined those in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, which last year launched Operation Identify Me to help name 22 female victims.

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Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval

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Linguistic body has relaxed rules on use of apostrophe to show possession, not traditionally correct in German

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.

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How remigration became a buzzword for global far right

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Electoral success of parties in Germany and Austria backing mass deportation linked to the term’s growing use by mainstream politicians, say experts

They poured on to streets across Germany in the tens of thousands, wielding placards that read “Nazis out” and “Never again is now”.

Appalled by revelations that some among the far-right Alternative für Deutschland had attended a meeting in Potsdam at which “remigration” had been on the agenda, the protesters offered a powerful rebuttal to the idea that the mass deportation of migrants – including those with German citizenship – was a valid policy option for any decent politician.

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Europe’s exhausted oyster reefs ‘once covered area size of Northern Ireland’

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Study uncovers vivid and poignant accounts of reefs as high as houses off countries including UK, France and Ireland

Only a handful of natural oyster reefs measuring at most a few square metres cling on precariously along European coasts after being wiped out by overfishing, dredging and pollution.

A study led by British scientists has discovered how extensive they once were, with reefs as high as a house covering at least 1.7m hectares (4.2m acres) from Norway to the Mediterranean, an area larger than Northern Ireland.

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Prosecutors call for 15-year sentence for McCann suspect in unrelated rape trial

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Prosecutors say Christian Brückner, main suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, should be kept in preventive detention

German prosecutors have called for a sexual offences conviction and 15-year prison sentence for a man who is also under investigation separately over the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann.

The 47-year-old German national, who has been identified by local media as Christian Brückner, is on trial at the Braunschweig state court in northern Germany over offences he is alleged to have committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

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German far-right politician accused of using political prisoners as cheap labour in Belarus

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Reports of dissenters working for £4 a day on onion plantation owned by Saxony state parliament AfD member Jörg Dornau

Midway through Nikolai’s shift sorting onions alongside other political prisoners in a warehouse in western Belarus, a tall and bald foreigner entered the building.

“He arrived in a car with German license plates. Then he came over and greeted us warmly,” Nikolai*, recalled in an interview with the Observer.

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Jens Lehmann fined €135,000 for damaging neighbour’s garage with chainsaw

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  • Incident took place in German’s hometown of Starnberg
  • Lehmann also settles unpaid Munich airport parking fees

The former Arsenal and Germany goalkeeper Jens Lehmann has been fined €135,000 (£113,000) by a court in his hometown of Starnberg for damaging his neighbour’s garage with a chainsaw.

Lehmann, who was accused by the public prosecutor of sawing off a roof beam in the garage, was initially fined €420,000 (£351,000) over the July 2022 incident, which was reduced on appeal.

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Stock markets hit record highs after news of a fall in US inflation

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S&P 500 index of major US companies registers near 100% gain on year ago amid expectation of interest rate cuts

A fall in US inflation expected to pave the way for further cuts in interest rates pushed stock markets to record highs on Friday.

Ending a week of gains that began when the Chinese authorities approved a huge economic stimulus package, the S&P 500 index of major US companies soared above 5,750 to register a near 100% gain on a year ago.

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Anti-immigration mood sweeping EU threatens its new asylum strategy

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The bloc’s migration pact, finally agreed after a decade of talks, is already in peril as states outdo each other in efforts to get tough

In 2015, when more than 1.3 million people headed to Europe, mostly fleeing a brutal war in Syria, the response of Germany’s then chancellor, Angela Merkel, was to say “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”), and open the country’s borders.

Less than a decade later, and faced with a flow of irregular arrivals less than 10% of what it was at the peak of the bloc’s migration crisis, EU capitals are increasingly saying, “No, we can’t”. Or, perhaps more accurately, “We won’t”.

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Three men charged in Germany over Michael Schumacher blackmail plot

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Chief suspect threatened to release private photos and demanded €15m from F1 star’s family, prosecutors say

German prosecutors are bringing charges against three men arrested this year over an alleged blackmail plot targeting the family of Formula One legend Michael Schumacher.

They said the chief suspect, a 53-year-old man from the western city of Wuppertal, had threatened to release private photos and videos and demanded €15m (£12.5m) from Schumacher’s family.

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UK economy to grow faster than Japan, Italy and Germany this year, says OECD

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Forecast upgrades UK to joint second after US but it is still expected to have highest inflation among G7 countries

The global economy is “turning a corner”, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has upgraded the UK’s growth forecast for this year to faster than that of Japan, Italy and Germany.

The OECD’s latest outlook ranked Britain joint second among the G7 developed countries in its latest outlook for the world economy. However, the UK is still expected to have the highest inflation in the group.

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High-speed Paris-to-Berlin rail link to launch in December

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Daytime service will take about eight hours and will complement the night route that launched last year

A new high-speed train linking Paris and Berlin is to launch in December, operators have announced.

The daytime service will complement a popular night train route between the two capital cities that relaunched last year to much fanfare but has since been beset by technical problems.

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Germany and France call for Europe-wide deal with UK on migration

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Letter sent to EU said Brexit had gravely affected ‘the coherence of policies’ on asylum and migration

Germany and France have called for a Europe-wide deal on migration and asylum with the UK government, to capitalise on Labour’s more “constructive” approach to EU-UK relations.

In a letter to the EU home affairs commissioner, the German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, and her former French counterpart, Gérald Darmanin, said Brexit had gravely affected “the coherence of migration policies”.

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