A key message at this week’s COP 23 climate conference: the fight against global warming requires protecting the natives who’ve known the rainforests for centuries.
Tag: germany
In the gruesome attack in Egypt on Nov. 17, 1997, three key elements came together that have driven Islamic terrorism over the past two decades.
The new Reality Show ‘Curvy Supermodel’ is supposed to be about body positivity. But the reality is that it’s just positively offensive.
Eco-friendly national legislation and hard work on the local level has made it possible for wind farms to blossom throughout Germany. But it’s not without costs.
To some, it is simply a delicious chocolate hazelnut spread; to others, it is a key factor for understanding the difficulties of the European common currency.
This year’s Frankfurt Book Fair was marred by violence amid protests against a far-right publishing house. It’s time to rethink our relationship with literature.
The success of the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany in this week’s parliamentary elections has prompted comparisons to the rise of Nazism. There are in fact similarities, but also key differences. An overview.
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Germany, Welcome To The New Normal
The success of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the election is history’s revenge against the idea that Germans had to be a model for the rest of the world.
Though Angela Merkel has secured a fourth term with Sunday’s election, the populist party Alternative for Germany will be the first far-right party since 1961 to enter parliament.
China, for one, sees the incumbent German Chancellor as the ‘mother if not grandmother’ of all of Europe. Her likely victory will be good news for her nation, and the planet.
German elections will see the results of a seismic change within the German political landscape, as Merkel’s moderate policies have opened space on the right for extremists.
Writers, artists, journalists and others fleeing oppression in Turkey are settling in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. But the dream is always to go back home.
Miami’s beaches and boardwalks have become waterways. Houston’s highways looked like lakes just two weeks back, while halfway around the world boats were replacing buses as the streets of Mumbai were turned into rivers. The scientific literature has a clear explanation for these dramatic images: global warming is bringing more rain and more floods, and […]
For months, the news media couldn’t stop talking about them. But now the so-called ‘disenfranchised’ have again gone quiet. Did they ever really exist?
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North Korea, Time To Face The Music
-Analysis- As Kim Jong-un again edges the world closer to an unthinkable nuclear showdown, the tribulations of a humble music store owner in Berlin may help explain why it’s so hard to figure out what to do with North Korea. German daily Die Welt spoke last week with Andreas Schmucker about a court case pending […]
Morning She wakes early, usually at 6 a.m., and fetches the newspaper. A morning without Sudoku is not a morning worth facing. After she solves the puzzle, she takes her medication, eats two sandwiches with butter and jam and climbs back into bed. Once she’s under the covers, Rosemarie Achenbach, aged 93, frees her laptop […]
Take a bite out of this juicy scandal. In eastern Germany, there’s a contest for an “Apple Queen”, where the title goes to a lady who poses with the produce. For years, the town of Guben has bestowed the honor to a woman but last year, due to a lack of female entrants, local authorities […]
Mario Draghi didn’t give much away in his opening remarks at the 6th Lindau Meeting on Economic Sciences in southern Germany. In his highly anticipated speech Wednesday morning, the president of the European Central Bank kept mum on the most titillating topic in Europe: upcoming stimulus negotiations. However disappointing, his silence was not altogether surprising: […]
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Germany, Time And Time Again
I live in France near the border with Germany. The proximity has meant that my wife and I have visited Germany 32 times — yes, 32. On these trips, we were able to discover many of the country’s hidden jewels, such as this church, St. Bartholomew’s, on the western shore of Bavaria“s beautiful Königssee lake.
*Note: grosse (große) means great in German…
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German Folklore In The Flesh
Is that you, Rübezahl? See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
When a woman doesn’t drink, we all suspect her of being pregnant. But what happens when that’s true?
SpongeBOZZ’s new album quickly shot up the German hip-hop charts, but his irreverence is telling, part of a growing trend to treat World War II as distant history.
Britain, Poland and even Germany are all examples of how having women in power doesn’t necessarily translate into greater social or economic power for women.
PRISTINA — In front of socialist era high-rise blocks, Bill Clinton waves to the Kosovars. Kosovo Albanians built the statue in the capital, Pristina, in gratitude for the bombing of then Yugoslavia by NATO in 1999, which a few years later led to independence. U.S. and Albanian flags flutter alongside each other on the rooftops. […]
“I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.” These wise words were written by American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, born 200 years ago on Wednesday. A quiet journal entry […]
-Analysis- On Sunday, the G20 summit concluded in Hamburg with a lot of hoopla but scant results. Seen by many as an opportunity for Donald Trump to advance his international agenda, the gathering of world leaders petered out when it became clear that few, if any, were willing to follow the American President’s lead on […]
-Analysis- Hamburg is a sleepy place most days. When the G20 isn’t in town, the port city churns with the comings and goings of large, steel barges in its spacious harbor. To the millions of visitors who arrive in the city each year, for business or pleasure, Hamburg appears as a sort of peaceful locus […]
Seyran Ates, a German-Turkish lawyer, has opened the first “liberal” mosque in Berlin, where she herself is the imam. The goal is nothing less that the worldwide reformation of Islam.
Despacito, by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi, is 2017’s runaway worldwide hit. Muy bien! It follows a long, though not-so-frequent history of non-English songs breaking down language barriers to elbow aside the Beatles or Michael Jackson. From Volare, which was Italy’s entry for the 1958 Eurovision contest to Gangnam Style, from South Korean YouTube sensation […]
Paul is 14 years old. For months, he was assaulted and bullied by his classmates, and finally had to leave the school. Anti-Semitism lives on in Germany — but it’s changing.
-OpEd- BERLIN — Last year Angela Merkel said that “the welfare of Africa is in the German interest.” Since then, the Chancellor has spoken more about Africa than any of her predecessors and has made the continent a priority for Germany’s G-20 chairmanship this year. On Monday, the German Chancellor invited eight African leaders to […]
From bulky satellite corpses to tiny metal splinters, the Earth is surrounded by a cloud of space debris. But now there are plans for a groundbreaking clean-up.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel came back Monday from Ankara empty-handed. German military personnel currently stationed at NATO air bases in Turkey will likely soon follow. Amid a growing rift between Berlin and Ankara, Gabriel had failed to convince his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu to lift Turkey’s ban on German lawmakers visiting the approximately 250 […]
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Trump v. Merkel, In Any Language
The ruins left behind by President Donald Trump’s first foreign trip don’t look anything like the archeological wonders in Taormina, Sicily, site of this past weekend’s G7 summit. The rubble left in Trump’s path can be reassembled in brutal words of German, French, Italian, English and other languages spoken and written in different European and […]
-Analysis- BERLIN — When they want Donald Trump to grasp a topic, his advisers have learned to keep things simple. Visual aids help. Unfortunately, global economic imbalances — the massive trade deficits of the U.S. and U.K. and surpluses of Germany and China — are complicated and intractable. No matter, Trump has found a simplistic way to frame the problem: Americans buy lots of German cars, whereas mean Germans don’t buy many from the U.S. Ergo, the overall U.S. trade deficit with Germany was about $65 billion last year. And deficits are bad. Germany’s auto industry makes an odd target […]
Germany was once considered the world’s pharmacy. Venerable companies such as Bayer and Höchst were market leaders. Now, distribution of production is global, and that means the black market puts lives at risk.
-Analysis- Some new presidents wait three months until they make their first overseas trip. Not Emmanuel Macron. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, the freshly-elected, 39-year-old French president headed to Berlin today, just 24 hours after his inauguration. A stronger, more united Europe sits at the top of Macron’s […]
Macron seemed to save the EU all on his own with his bold pro-European victory over Le Pen. But he needs Germany to make a stronger Europe a reality. And Angela Merkel has her own elections to worry about now.
Germany’s jet set loves this island and yet we have it almost all to ourselves. What makes Sylt so special?