Finance ministers say Europe is increasingly dependent on Chinese and US technology
It boasts the world’s second biggest economy, a huge consumer market of about 500 million people and prodigious pools of talent and capital, not to mention two of the world’s most important financial centres.
But Europe is struggling to match its great rivals, the US and China, in creating the kind of global firms that increasingly dominate the 21st-century marketplace.
Continue reading...Electric scooters could be on roads by June, leaving UK last major European country not to have approved use
Germany’s upper house of parliament is due to vote on Friday on whether to allow electric scooters on to the country’s roads, following a feverish debate spanning everything from road safety to air quality.
The transport minister is behind the plan, but he has faced a barrage of protests from lobby groups, representing both car drivers and bike riders, who have warned of chaos and accidents if the so-called e-scooters – known locally as e-rollers – are allowed.
Continue reading...Investigation is linked to Panama Papers and part of money laundering allegations
Eleven banks and eight private homes and offices across Germany have been raided by police and tax investigators as part of a wide-ranging investigation into tax evasion.
The raids, which began at dawn on Wednesday and went on into the afternoon, were part of the same investigation started last November over money laundering allegations linked to the so-called Panama Papers scandal, alleged to involve Deutsche Bank.
Continue reading...German chancellor also shares views on Brexit and climate crisis in interview
Europe must reposition itself to stand up to the challenges posed by its three big global rivals, China, Russia and the US, Angela Merkel has said before her final European election as German chancellor.
Facing challenges that range from Russian interference in elections to China’s economic clout and the US’s monopoly over digital services, Europe needs to get better at putting up a united front, Merkel said in a wide-ranging interview shared with the Guardian.
Continue reading...Rightwing populists to launch attack on climate science in vote drive before EU elections
Germany’s rightwing populists are embracing climate change denial as the latest topic with which to boost their electoral support, teaming up with scientists who claim hysteria is driving the global warming debate and ridiculing the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as “mentally challenged” and a fraud.
The Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) is expected to launch its biggest attack yet on mainstream climate science at a symposium in parliament on Tuesday supported by a prominent climate change denial body linked by researchers to prominent conservative groups in the US.
Continue reading...Pair discovered dead in flat owned by one of three victims of hotel shooting
Two more bodies have been found during investigations into the deaths of three people discovered in a Bavarian hotel room who had been killed by crossbow bolts.
Two women were found dead at a flat in Wittingen, northern Germany, belonging to one of three people who died at a hotel 400 miles away in Passau, near the Austrian border, on Saturday.
Continue reading...In December 1984, a group of teenagers on a school trip from West Germany crossed the border into East Germany. When they returned, an East German defector was hiding under a seat on their bus. Sophie Hardach speaks to those involved 35 years on and revisits their incredible story. Plus: Jo Holdaway on the GM anti-virus drug that saved her daughter’s life
It began as a typical 1980s school trip: a group of teenagers piled on to a bus, Duran Duran were on the stereo and spirits were high. What happened next caused a sensation: it was part The Famous Five and part John le Carré thriller.
The teenagers were from Marburg in West Germany, crossing the border into East Germany. While they were there, they managed to evade their minders and hatched a plot to smuggle a young defector out of the country with them. It was a plan fraught with danger: leaving East Germany was a criminal offence and hundreds of people had been killed making the attempt.
Continue reading...Old allies accuse former Greek finance minister of splintering leftwing vote at a time of far-right revival
Four years after Greece’s former “rock-star finance minister” clashed with his northern European counterparts over austerity measures and debt relief, Yanis Varoufakis is once again taking the fight to his old enemy.
This time, he hopes to make friends rather than foes: at the end of this month, Varoufakis will try to convince voters to elect him as a member of the European parliament – not in his native Greece, but in Germany.
Continue reading...A judge has sentenced the fake German heiress Anna Sorokin to four to 12 years in prison for defrauding hotels, restaurants, a private jet operator and banks out of more than $200,000.
Related: Glitz, glamour, now guilty: spectacular fall of New York's socialite scammer
Continue reading...Repeated attempts by police to clear dealers from Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg prompts move by park manager
Drug dealers in Berlin are to be given designated spaces in a city centre park to carry out transactions, leading to criticism that authorities have capitulated to criminal gangs.
For years there has been a heated debate about Görlitzer Park, a popular meeting point in the trendy southern Berlin district of Kreuzberg, which has been attracting an ever increasing number of drug dealers. Local people said they were reluctant to let children and pets roam free there.
Continue reading...Secretary of state abruptly pulls out of Berlin meeting and is silent on his next destination
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has abruptly cancelled a long-established plan to hold talks with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Berlin, citing unspecified “international security issues”.
The unusual last-minute schedule change follows brief talks between Pompeo and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, on the sidelines of an Arctic Council meeting in Finland on Monday.
Continue reading...Arrests in Germany, Brazil and US relate to sale of drugs, stolen data and malicious software
German police have shut down one of the world’s largest illegal online markets in the so-called dark web and arrested the three men allegedly running it, prosecutors said on Friday.
The “Wall Street Market” (WSM) site enabled trade in cocaine, heroin, cannabis and amphetamines as well as stolen data, fake documents and malicious software.
Continue reading...Porsches and Lamborghinis spotted doing high speeds on unrestricted part of autobahn
German police have seized 120 sports cars that were taking part in a suspected road race across Europe.
Cars including Porsches, Lamborghinis and Audis were stopped on Thursday on the A20 east of Wismar, in north-east Germany, on a stretch of the autobahn without speed restrictions.
Continue reading...Worst violence occurs in Paris but trouble also flares in Berlin, Gothenburg and St Petersburg
Police and protesters have clashed, sometimes violently, in cities across Europe as tens of thousands of trade unionists, anti-capitalists and other demonstrators marched in traditional May Day rallies.
The worst confrontations were in Paris, where riot police fired teargas and stingball grenades as a 40,000-strong crowd, included gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters and an estimated 2,000 masked and hooded “black bloc” activists, marched from Montparnasse station to Place d’Italie.
Continue reading...One shop sells nothing but buttons, another sells only liquorice, and another is ‘the world’s first textile butcher shop’. In the age of Amazon, it seems the way to thrive is to specialise
On the first floor of a nondescript 1,000 sq metre industrial unit in Berlin’s Steglitz district, four workers are cautiously placing pregnant queen ants into test tubes in order to dispatch them across Europe. This is Antstore, the world’s first specialist ant shop, a business with around two dozen employees, a glass-cutting workshop, plastic and plaster modelling studios and a full-time social media manager.
It is just one of the surprisingly large number of shops in Berlin that sell only one thing, be it crawly insects, salty sweets, sticky tape or miniature string instruments. With online retail sales changing the face of high streets in cities around the world, many wonder if this hyper-specialisation could be more than an accidental side effect of the German capital’s tumultuous history, and also a blueprint for the high street of the future.
Continue reading...Veggie 2.0 hopes to cater for growing appetite for plant-based food in Germany’s capital
Berlin’s first vegan canteen for students has opened its doors, reflecting a growing interest in eating only plant-based food in Germany
Veggie 2.0 is an experimental initiative of the Studierendenwerk Berlin, the state-run organisation governing student affairs. Its backers say they are responding to a growing trend towards veganism.
Continue reading...Measure on sexual violence in conflict passes after Trump administration threatened to veto document over references to reproductive health
The UN has backed a resolution on combatting rape in conflict but excluded references in the text to sexual and reproductive health, after vehement opposition from the US.
The resolution passed by the security council on Tuesday after a three-hour debate and a weekend of fierce negotiations on the language among member states that threatened to derail the process.
Continue reading...German MEP begins campaign in Athens after Alexis Tsipras claims he is ‘anti-Greek’
Manfred Weber has launched his campaign to become president of the European commission in Athens, but faced excoriating criticism from the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, before he had even arrived in the Greek capital.
In a tweet intended to cause maximum embarrassment for the German leader of the conservative European People’s party group in the European parliament, Tsipras insinuated that Weber harboured racist and authoritarian tendencies. He said that at the height of Athens’ debt crisis, Weber had pushed for “Grexit” and thus proved himself to be “anti-Greek”.
Continue reading...UN says arrest and detention of Moncef Kartas violates diplomatic immunity
A UN-appointed expert on breaches of the Libyan arms embargo has been arrested and kept in a Tunisian jail for nearly a month.
Moncef Kartas, a Tunisian-German dual national, was arrested on 26 March. He is one of six UN experts appointed to investigate breaches of the UN-imposed embargo on arms to Libya first introduced in 2011. The UN says his detention is a violation of his diplomatic immunity.
Continue reading...Exclusive: in confidential internal report seen by the Guardian, bank says scandal has hurt global brand
Germany’s troubled Deutsche Bank faces fines, legal action and the possible prosecution of “senior management” because of its role in a $20bn Russian money-laundering scheme, a confidential internal report seen by the Guardian says.
The bank admits there is a high risk that regulators in the US and UK will take “significant disciplinary action” against it. Deutsche concedes that the scandal has hurt its “global brand” – and is likely to cause “client attrition”, loss of investor confidence and a decline in its market value.
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