Zeina Nassar is already a national featherweight champion. But to reach greater heights, she’ll have to overcome international boxing’s restrictive dress-code.
country: Germany
Stay updated on Germany with Worldcrunch. Comprehensive articles on German politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural highlights with translations from leading international sources. Focus on Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, German engineering, philosophy, modern art, and events like Oktoberfest and Art Basel.
MUNICH — Do machines replace humans? Since the beginning of industrialization 200 years ago, we earthlings have been plagued by this fear. From the early uprisings of the weavers to the 1970s “job killer computer” slogan, and up until the 2013 thesis of researchers Michael Osborne and Carl B. Frey, according to whom machines could […]
Many women in Munich were active in the resistance against the Nazis, but hardly anyone knows their names today. Traditional gender roles are partly to blame.
-Essay- The Moon’s cultural history is one of disenchantment. Thousands of years ago, people still believed that it was a deity, there were legends about beautiful Moon girls and a man in the Moon. But its proximity to Earth made the myths around it one of the first victims of the scientific worldview. Already in […]
Bioplastic sounds like a welcome eco-alternative to the many plastic products we use daily. But the reality isn’t so simple.
Going all out on the autobahn may be part of the German way of life, but speed limits are necessary to limit road accidents and lower CO2 emissions.
Voice messages are unilateral and time-consuming: this is bad communication innovation.
VW’s ‘hippie’ buses are more than just cult classics. They’re also valuable collectors items, especially the luxury Samba model, with its special roof windows and two-tone paint job.
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The Dirty Truth Behind Electric Vehicles
The procurement of raw materials and the difficulties in recycling batteries show that electric vehicles are not as green and sustainable as we’re prone to believe.
Patric Fassbender and Marcus Stahl are struggling to keep up with demand for their ‘Toniebox’ devices, which are now set to break into the English-speaking market.
KATOWICE — As a member of Germany’s federal government, Gerd Müller knows what UN climate change conferences cost. The Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development spearheaded the organization of last year’s edition in Bonn. At that time, the COP23, which Germany hosted to help the financially troubled Fiji Islands, cost around 60 million euros. And […]
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Why Dieselgate Was Really An IT Problem
If cars are supercomputers, why are we not programming them for fewer emissions and speed?
Critics worry that by partnering with Palantir, a Silicon Valley company with ties to the CIA, police in the German state of Hesse are opening themselves up to a potential security breach.
MUNICH — The past snuck up on Adidas last spring when it issued a retro jersey for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia that copied the last Soviet Union national team shirt. It included the USSR lettering and breast emblem with the hammer and sickle. Given the millions of victims of the Soviet dictatorship, […]
Fathers who took parental leave spend an hour and a half more with their children every day during the first few years of their life compared to fathers who work continuously.
-Analysis- MUNICH — Angela Merkel has seldom sounded so straightforward and genuine. It was a clear speech, it was an honest speech. It was such a remarkably clever speech too that you could almost believe that after retreating as party chief, Merkel actually wants to and will remain chancellor until Germany’s next general election. But […]
German car makers must change their entire model, and even accept lower short-term profits.
There is much to admire about Germany’s nearly 70-year-old constitution. But it also contains a serious flaw.
Etienne Mallard has spent a lifetime venturing far and wide. A retired high-school philosophy teacher, he has always considered himself nothing more or less than an amateur photographer — with decent equipment.
Refugees who are allowed to stay in Germany must attend an integration course. But many of them fail the language test. Why is that?
Even in economically powerful Germany, poverty threatens the social fabric. And neither the left or right has any real solutions — except to play to fears.
Amazon is upending the commercial status quo. And yet, as much as people like to complain about it, the temptation to use it can be irresistible.
BERLIN — On the bus I now take to university in Berlin every day, I reach compulsively for my phone to check Facebook for updates from Egypt. I see that someone else has been arrested, this time a PhD student like me, who was also doing his fieldwork in Egypt. I get flustered and feel […]
-Analysis- BERLIN — World politics is currently dominated by “strongmen,” those leaders who see themselves anointed to negotiate “deals’ among themselves to chart the world’s destiny. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, in alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, has stifled the Syrian people’s rebellion against Bashar al-Assad, allowing his Damascus regime to regain almost complete control […]
Wind power has its drawbacks, especially in central German region of Hesse, where developers want to erect generators in wooded areas like the Reinhardswald, of Brothers Grimm fame.
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Greetings From The Instagram Hotel
MUNICH — From a digital point of view, the Norwegian Erik Nissen Johansen is at the forefront: Even his cat has Instagram. No wonder then that the hotel designer also pays attention to Instagram on the professional front. Johansen is the founder and creative director of the design agency Stylt Trampoli, based in the Swedish […]
The U.S. president wants to impose his will and whims on all partners. The EU, for the sake of its own security, needs to resist.
There’s a potentially sinister side to the crush of data we unwittingly feed into systems like Google, which can use the information not only to make money, but ultimately control us.
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Watch: OneShot — Back From The Gulag
He was born three years before Russia’s October Revolution, and served in the Red Army during World War II. But in 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin, and spent eight years in a labor camp. The experience reshaped his political opinions and inspired his most famous works, including The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but was hounded by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He remained in exile for 20 years, before being allowed back in Russia in 1994 — after the fall […]
DaWanda will soon disappear, clearing the way for its top competitor — the U.S. firm Etsy — to dominate the e-commerce market for homemade goods.
-OpEd- In Germany, there are many people who criticize the policies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan — rightly so. Many of his toughest critics here are Germans with Turkish roots, who also denounce the German government’s political deals with Ankara. And many of them are now expressing their solidarity with Mesut Özil, the German-Turkish player who […]
-Analysis- MUNICH — As far as industrial strategies and international competition are concerned, there’s no greater contrast than that between Europe’s resignation and China’s iron determination. It’s not surprising that it was China — and not Europe — that proposed to form an alliance against Trump’s raving protectionist madness. With little success: Even Washington’s harassment […]
AUGSBURG — One moment you’re the globetrotting head of a corporation with an army of subordinates to execute your every order, the next you’re behind bars and required to file requests for items as banal as toilet paper. While jailing executives, particularly those of global companies, is an almost unheard of occurrence in Germany, that’s just what happened to Audi Chief Executive Officer Rupert Stadler last month. One of the few other corporate leaders to suffer a similar fate was Thomas Middelhoff, and he has some words of advice to adapt to the circumstances. “You need humility, otherwise you’ll crack,” […]
BERLIN — Angela Merkel has yielded. It was just this past Saturday that the chancellor’s sticking to her guns had brought her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to the threat of resignation over the government’s migration policy, the issue that has created a deep wedge between the pair. For her relentlessly tough stance on the matter, […]
BERLIN — They lined up in motorcades, honking horns, waving flags. It was as if Turkey had just won the World Cup, except that Turkey isn’t even in the tournament this year. Instead, these enthusiastically noisy German-Turks were fans of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the just re-elected Turkish president who earned a particularly clear victory in […]
Computers that can perfectly mimic the human voice? Hyper sensitive surveillance cameras? Advances like these are already a reality, and need to be regulated now.
The German pharma giant wants to do a bit of ‘rebranding,’ after the mega merger with the U.S.-based agro-giant. But anti-Monsanto sentiment is bound to remain no matter what it’s called.
Built on a soggy bed of sand, the German capital isn’t an ideal place for underground infrastructure. And yet, there’s a relatively unknown maze of tunnels, bunkers and other surprising spaces down there.
-Essay- MUNICH — Artists are now using anti-Semitism and Islamism to shock, and that’s not surprising. But if both listeners and rappers started to finally take music seriously, this could change. Since Germany’s top music prize, the Echo awards, honored the rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang, there has been a misunderstanding that both sides of […]
BERLIN — This past week marked the beginning of a period of peace and quiet for Muslims around the world. It is Ramadan, a month dedicated to reflection, prayers, and fasting, where disputes are meant to be avoided wherever possible. But instead of harmony, conflicts around Ramadan itself have increasingly been coming to the fore […]