WorldcrunchDie Welt (“The World”) is a German daily founded in Hamburg in 1946, and currently owned by the Axel Springer AG company, Europe’s largest publishing house. Now based in Berlin, Die Welt is sold in more than 130 countries. A Sunday edition called Welt am Sonntag has been published since 1948.
BERLIN – There are more and more healthy food snobs in our society – and I’m probably one of the worst. It all began when I was sick and a friend showed up with a green smoothie, telling me that drinking it would bring “pure light” into my body. I got better right away, and […]
BOCHUM – Intensive sports make our muscles grow – nothing new there. But now clinical neurophysiologists from Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) have shown that sports can change our brain too. For their research, 26 high-performance athletes (half of them practitioners of judo and karate, the other half marathon runners and triathletes), and 12 non-athletes, had […]
Silvio Berlusconi bad-mouths Angela Merkel, while Mario Monti tries to woo her. But there are deeper reasons the German factor is at play as Italians go to the polls Sunday.
BERLIN – In late 2011, a former German television correspondent in Tel Aviv, Sebastian Engelbrecht, reported some sensational news: Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal had “renounced armed combat against Israel,” conflicts among Palestinians were in the process of being resolved and “by early May in Gaza and the West Bank a new president and parliament will […]
BERLIN – Europeans are in a virtual state of paralysis about the future, frozen by a fear that – were they to turn away from Brussels – the result would be a rise of reactionary nationalism. Not surprisingly, these new chauvinisms are perfectly suited for some political agendas – on all sides of the ideological […]
In our distracted, over-connected society, diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been the rage for more than a decade. The case for a hard rethink.
BERLIN – In my local video store, they’ve just created a new section for TV series. The very great majority of the series are American: The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, Girls, Modern Family, Lost, 24, various CSIs, and so on and so forth. The dominant culture in Europe […]
MARKTL AM INN – Not a lot of folks out on the streets on this day after the news arrived. But not because of the wind that slices right through you, or the icy temperature. The 2,700 residents of Marktl am Inn in the German region of Bavaria are holed up inside to avoid the […]
BERLIN – People who were there said he cried for several minutes at the executive committee meeting on the morning after his defeat. As party members analyzed what had gone wrong in the state election campaign, the governor of the German state of Lower Saxony, David McAllister, burst into tears. Angela Merkel comforted him, and […]
ISTANBUL – Four heavily made-up, peroxide blondes are sitting on a talk show set. In broken German, they’re trying to prove that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong. It’s a particularly bizarre bit of religious propaganda – but since 2011 creationist theories have been packaged this way for Western viewers and broadcast by the […]
“This is the saddest moment in my 45-year career as a psychiatrist…” Dr. Allen Frances wrote this in a December blog post on the Psychology Today website. The reason was the approval by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) of the new edition of psychiatry’s bible – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM […]
Egypt and Syria are edging toward failed state status, while the West asks how all the hope has faded so fast.
The taste of Alsace deep in the Malaysian heartland.
A reversal in direction of the traditional route of remittance payments – now family members in Turkey are sending money to relatives in Germany.
BERLIN – In the musical “My Fair Lady,” Professor Henry Higgins expresses outrage at the “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” The guilty parties are the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh – and of course Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl from London with whom the linguistic purist falls in love. If Americans escape his […]
BERLIN – Social networks like Facebook make many things easier. You can find out right away if Alex got the job or not, and you can not only read about Marie’s vacation, but you can also see all those pictures of her on the beach, too. There’s also a downside to this. Researchers have conducted […]
Awash in cash, the Swiss National Bank has been making major direct investment in the private sector and the bond market. It’s a frightening level of financial sway.
BERLIN – Chinese censors have made some significant changes to several parts of the latest James Bond film “Skyfall.” One scene, showing a French hitman killing a Chinese guard in a Shanghai skyscraper, was cut out entirely. So was a mention of prostitution in Macau. Other changes are reflected in the subtitles. In the original […]
After UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s support for a referendum on pulling out of the European Union, a German viewpoint on what it means for a country and a continent.
BERLIN – Asir’s life was preprogrammed. The North African Muslim was to be trained to be a jihadist in a Palestinian terrorist camp. There he would learn how to build bombs and kill non-believers. But just before he was due to leave, he started to have doubts. “I realized that there were several versions of […]
Some skeptics, though, wonder whether all the enthusiasm for the developing world has created a sort of emerging market “bubble”.
KAISERSLAUTERN – It’s been more than two years since 21 people were killed and more than 500 injured in the Duisburg Love Parade, a tragedy that shocked Germany and reopened wider questions about how to control large crowds. In an article published in the EPJ Data Science journal, physicist Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal […]
The killing of three Kurdish activists in Paris shines new light on a longstanding fact of a millions of people spread across large swaths of terrritory, but with no nation of their own.
VATICAN CITY – The last few days before he was ordained archbishop at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, “Don Giorgio” Gänswein was without his iPhone or PC, and also well away from the landlines and fax machines and the Vatican’s old-fashioned pneumatic and courier mail systems that are still so much a part of his […]
HAMBURG – When a Chinese customer with a lot of money buys a Ferrari, as soon as the salesperson hands over the keys, the fun can begin. When a Chinese with a lot of money buys a Steinway, the grand piano is delivered, placed in the living room – and then what? “Friends come over, […]
Forget New York, Washington, Boston, Houston, Miami and Chicago. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Hooters, Checkers, Target, Best Buy, 7/11, CVS, Wal-Mart, Family Dollar? Well, forget them too. If you’re looking for the soul of America, get in your car and drive out to back country. Where nothing happens. Nothing at all. Like Hollywood, […]
In the 17th and 18th centuries, opera performers could take any role they wanted. Sopranos were kings, countertenors their lovers; although, in an old theater tradition that went back to the Greeks, wet nurses were always played by men, and the character was re-written if no male could be found to play it. Only in […]
BERLIN – What is the first thing Chinese people think about when asked about Germany? Sure, Oktoberfest, the Cologne carnival, but mostly: the car industry. German automakers Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen were mentioned spontaneously by nearly 25% of Chinese people polled in a recent survey. Asked about China, Germans made associations like “economic power” and […]
PRETORIA – Jacob Zuma sang in the choir when he was a political prisoner on Robben Island in the 1970s. South Africa’s president has a remarkable voice, and these days he uses it particularly effectively during election campaigns. Not necessarily when he gives speeches (he tends to read these) but in the songs he sings; […]
BERLIN – She’ll never know why, on August 7 1970, her father was in the border area near the Berlin Wall. The only thing she knows is that East German border guards fired 177 shots at him. Monika N. was 13 when she lost her father. Her sister was a year older. The worst thing […]
Exclusive investigation: The terror network in Syria includes dozens of European members, and wants to get its hands on Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons.
-Essay- BERLIN – My five-year-old son Finn goes to an American kindergarten – a place just like Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Bethlehem in Pennsylvania is about as far from Philadelphia as Newtown is from New York – in their own way, both are typical U.S. East Coast towns. Finn’s school even looks […]
KIRKUK – Fifty kilometers out of Kirkuk, an oil city in Northern Iraq, the main road from Baghdad is already lined with tanks, artillery, Humvees and patrolling soldiers. Life has returned to the military barracks and checkpoints from the Saddam Hussein era that locals had thought were left behind for good. Tents have also been […]
BERLIN – Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former Prime Minister who harbors ambitions to return to his old job, has had a year to adjust reality to his private world view. And now he’s letting fellow Italians and Europeans know how he thinks. The widening of the Italo-German government bond “spread” shortly before his government fell last […]
BERLIN – Uri Chanoch has sent a statement to the Committee on Labor and Social Affairs of the German Parliament reminding them of the historic significance of the task they now face. The 12 members of the Committee are debating whether to make an amendment to the Ghetto Pensions law. The law, enacted in 2002 […]
BERLIN – Inner tension mounts. Heart rate increases, breathing is faster, small body hairs stand on end. Sudden muscle contractions, spasms, indescribable feelings of pleasure: an orgasm, over relatively quickly for men but sometimes lasting up to 30 seconds for women. Along with intense feelings of release following an orgasm, come feelings of happiness and […]
BERLIN – Yes, he has investigated cases of murder by poisoning, says Burkhard Madea. The forensic pathologist at the University of Bonn, an expert in unexplained causes of death, recalls “a series of deaths about 20 years ago when a nurse deliberately gave old, helpless patients the wrong medication. The victims all died suddenly, but […]
In December 1984, this Indian city suffered what is considered the world’s worst industrial accident ever.
BERLIN – In the Qatari capital of Doha, the decisive phase of the UN Climate Conference has begun. Ministers and government representatives from over 190 countries have until Thursday to adopt concrete measures to save the world’s climate. Part of the ritual at conferences like this is that shortly before the end of negotiations, the […]
MEXICO CITY – There are a lot of good restaurants in Ciudad de México – Mexico’s capital city (its name sounds a lot more dashing in Spanish than the English Mexico City used by most). Authentic Mexican cuisine is excellent, and Mexicans like to eat well – with little room to spare. So forget everything […]