Thieves make off with $20,710 worth of the sweet hazelnut spread.

12 shiny new off-shore turbines in Germany are a reminder of just how far behind the U.S. lags in race for clean offshore energy.

Germany has spent the last 5 years making solar power a mainstream business. It is poised to spend the next 10 years doing the same for offshore wind — and sh

In the wake of the worst nuclear disaster in a generation, Germany doubled down on a decade of success, pledging to eliminate nukes by 2022 and switch almost ex

Increased renewables, decreased emissions and falling energy prices. Germany's ambitious energy plan may be starting to pay off.

insects in German forests and grasslands have declined by about one-third in just the past decade.

Once critical for survival, Germany's allotment gardens now provide a different type of health and wellness.

Ashton Whiteley: Despite persistent political uncertainty, the German economy looks set to continue its upward trend in 2018.

Motorcycle enthusiasts are encouraged to take advantage of the European riding season and attend the world's largest BMW motorcycle party.

Pandemic-time party pioneers in Germany have been holding social-distance-obeying drive-in raves. The cars line up in rows and no one gets out of the cars, so presumably your dancing is limited to whatever you can pull off in a seated position. Also, since all cars have built-in noisemakers, attendees aren't shy about using them.

I'm sure it was fun for the people who went, but between the honking, the flames and whatever that music is, it looks and sounds like a living hell to me. But I recognize I'm not the target market, and I hope this helps attendees blow off steam.

In a statement marking Europe Day, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that initially most countries, including Germany, were focused on coping with the outbreak at home. While defending the national response as “necessary, in order to safeguard our ability to act and then also help other,” he added that the European Union had “grown in the crisis.”

Victory in Europe sparked scenes of delirium across Britain as people flooded on to the streets to toast the downfall of Hitler’s regime.

A majority of IKEA stores are or have been temporarily closed in recent months. A few stores in Germany and Israel, as well as the one in Wuhan, the city in China where the coronavirus was first discovered, reopened this week.

Germany's top court on Tuesday ruled against the European Central Bank's bond purchases and gave the bank three months to explain how the scheme can be justified.

Factory orders from Germany and final composite Purchasing Managers' survey from euro area are due on Wednesday, headlining a light day for the European economic news. At 2.00 am ET, Destatis is set to release Germany's factory orders for March. Economists forecast orders to fall 10 percent on month after falling 1.4 percent in February.

A threat to close the Yallourn coal-fired power station earlier than planned has some asking whether Australia should look to Germany as a model for transition.

Apple today announced that it will begin reopening its retail stores in Germany on May 11, nearly two months after they were closed due to the global health crisis.


In a statement shared with German website Macerkopf, Apple said the stores will initially be focusing on Genius Bar service and support. Enhanced health and safety measures will be implemented, such as body temperature checks prior to entry, limits on how many customers can be in the store at once, social distancing, and reduced hours of operation.

Apple operates 15 retail stores in Germany and will be posting specific hours of operation for each location on its website.

Apple closed all of its retail stores outside of the Greater China region in mid-March. The company has since started to reopen some locations, including in South Korea, Austria, and Australia. All locations in the United States remain closed.

Amid the current public health crisis, hospitals and grocery stores have a growing demand for more security personnel. The guards will help to limit access to buildings -- and stop possible fights over goods.

The head of Angela Merkel’s Chancellery has warned that people’s behavior this weekend will be pivotal in determining whether strict shelter-in-place curfews are imposed in Germany to control the spread of the coronavirus.

The German health-care system is considered one of the best in the world. But the coronavirus is mercilessly exposing its weaknesses, with some hospitals already facing difficulties. Can Germany prevent the kind of collapse seen in Italy?

Germany's federal and state governments have agreed to further tighten restrictions on public life. Here's an overview of what's now allowed and what's not.

The German chancellor is staying home after being exposed to a doctor who tested positive for the coronavirus. A first test came back negative, but Merkel will keep governing remotely for the time being. What does Germany's line of succession look like, and who would jump in if Merkel gets sick?

Every day, tens of thousands people in Germany seek to get tested for the novel coronavirus. Often, though, they run up against a lack of testing capacity. And it is likely to only get worse. By DER SPIEGEL Staff

The German government failed to obtain enough protective masks for the country. That's one of the reasons Germany has so far refused to require its citizen's to wear them in public. But those facial coverings could be critical in lifting restrictions on public life.

All of Germany is looking forward to Easter this year, with hopes that the government will soon be able to loosen coronavirus restrictions. But will it? And if so, which ones? By DER SPIEGEL Staff

The German government's rejection of eurobonds is selfish, small-minded and cowardly. Existing mechanisms will not be enough to contain the crisis we are facing. We need to act now.

Clouds are gathering on the horizon of the global economy and the risk of a recession is growing. Many experts believe that the international banking system is unprepared and Germany has begun getting ready for the worst.

Freelancers and small companies are getting hit especially hard by the corona crisis. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the federal government is planning a massive financial aid package. It would mark the end of Germany’s balanced budget policy.

Am I required to work if I can't find alternative childcare with daycare centers now closed? Will I still get my salary? What happens to my health insurance? Answers to the most pressing questions about labor law in times of the coronavirus.

German carmakers are going to have to open up their factories and car dealerships again soon – otherwise they could face a widespread collapse. And that would be disastrous for the German economy.

Racing in Germany will restart at Hanover on Thursday after being given clearance from the authorities.

A second-generation surivivor whose grandparents died in the Holocaust blasts a newspaper publisher for comparing coronavirus restrictions to Nazi Germany.

Shapira burst into Germany’s consciousness on New Year’s Eve 2015, when several Arab men beat him on a Berlin metro train because he had objected to their singing anti-Israel and antisemitic chants.

Tensions boiled over this month when a Porsche Macan jumped a curb in central Berlin and plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, killing four.

TWO of Germany's local authorities will bring back certain lockdown measures in some areas following an increase in infections after the government's easing of restrictions.

TWO of Germany's local authorities will bring back certain lockdown measures in some areas following an increase in infections after the government's easing of restrictions.

GERMANY is worried about the possibility of a hard Brexit as trade negotiations between the UK and the EU have so far resulted in very little progress.

The Western world remains where it has been for some time, delicately poised between anaemic recovery and a shock that could tip us back into economic contraction.

Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of the instability is that investors can't make up their minds whether the greater risk comes from surging inflation that stems largely from China's irrepressible growth or the deflationary impact of the unsustainable burden of debt on peripheral and not-so-peripheral eurozone (and other) economies.

And whence do investors flee when it all looks scary and uncertain, especially when there's a heightened probability of specie debasement - to gold, of course.

Unsurprisingly, with the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, implying that a writedown of Greece's sovereign obligations is an option, and with consumer inflation in China hitting 5.4% in March, there has been a flight to the putative safety of precious metal: the gold price hit a new record of $1,480.50 per ounce for June delivery yesterday and could well break through $1,500 within days (say the analysts). Silver is hitting 30-year highs.

In a way, if a sovereign borrower were to turn €100bn of debts (for example) into an obligation to repay 70bn euros, that would be a form of inflation - it has the same economic impact, a degradation of value, for the lender. But it is a localised inflation; only the specific creditors suffer directly (though there may be all sorts of spillover damage for others).

And only this morning there was another blow to the perceived value of a chunk of euro-denominated sovereign obligations. Moody's has downgraded Irish government debt to one level above junk - which is the equivalent of a bookmaker lengthening the odds the on that country's ability to avoid controlled or uncontrolled default.

Some would say that the Irish government has made a start in writing down debt, with the disclosure by the Irish finance minister Michael Noonan yesterday that he would want to impose up to 6bn euros of losses on holders of so-called subordinated loans to Irish banks.

But I suppose the big story in the eurozone, following the decision by the European Central Bank to raise interest rates, is that the region's excessive government and bank debts are more likely to be cut down to manageable size by a restructuring - writedowns of the amount owed - than by generalised inflation that erodes the real value of the principal.

The decision of the ECB to raise rates has to be seen as a policy decision that - in a worst case - a sovereign default by an Ireland, or Greece or Portugal would be less harmful than endemic inflation.

But is that right? How much damage would be wreaked if Greece or Ireland or Portugal attempted to reduce the nominal amount they owe to levels they felt they could afford?

Let's push to one side the reputational and economic costs to those countries - which are quite big things to ignore, by the way - and simply look at the damage to external creditors from a debt write down.

And I am also going to ignore the difference between a planned, consensual reduction in sums owed - a restructuring that takes place with the blessing of the rest of the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund - and a unilateral declaration of de facto bankruptcy by a Greece, Ireland or Portugal (although the shock value of the latter could have much graver consequences for the health of the financial system).

So the first question is how much of the impaired debt is held by institutions and investors that could not afford to take the losses.

Now I hope it isn't naive to assume that pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and central banks that hold Greek, or Irish or Portuguese debt can cope with losses generated by a debt restructuring.

The reason for mild optimism in that sense is that those who finance investments made by pension funds and insurers - that's you and me by the way - can't get their money out quickly or easily. We simply have to grin and bear the losses to the value of our savings, when the stewards of our savings make lousy investment decisions.

As for hedge funds, when they make bad bets, they can suffer devastating withdrawals of finance by their investors, as and when the returns generated swing from positive to negative. But so long as those hedge funds haven't borrowed too much, so long as they are not too leveraged - and most aren't these days - the impact on the financial system shouldn't be significant.

Finally, if the European Central Bank - for example - ends up incurring big losses on its substantial holdings of Greek, Portuguese and Irish debt, it can always be recapitalised by solvent eurozone nations, notably by Germany and France.

However this is to ignore the node of fragility in the financial system, the faultline - which is the banking industry.

In the financial system's network of interconnecting assets and liabilities, it is the banks as a cluster that always have the potential to amplify the impact of debt writedowns, in a way that can wreak wider havoc.

That's built into their main function, as maturity transformers. Since banks' creditors can always demand their money back at whim, but banks can't retrieve their loans from their creditors (homeowners, businesses, governments), bank losses above the norm can be painful both for banks and for the rest of us.

Any event that undermines confidence in the safety of money lent to banks, will - in a best case - make it more difficult for a bank to borrow and lend, and will, in the worst case, tip the bank into insolvency.

Which, of course, is what we saw on a global systemic scale from the summer of 2007 to the end of 2008. That's when creditors to banks became increasingly anxious about potential losses faced by banks from a great range of loans and investments, starting with US sub-prime.

So what we need to know is whether the banking system could afford losses generated by Greek, Irish and Portuguese defaults.

And to assess this, we need to know how much overseas banks have lent to the governments of these countries and also - probably - to the banks of these countries, in that recent painful experience has told us that bank liabilities become sovereign liabilities, when the going gets tough.

According to the latest published analysis by the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers'central bank), the total exposure of overseas banks to the governments and banks of Greece, Portugal and Ireland is "just" $362.2bn, or £224bn,

Now let's make the heroic guess that a rational writedown of this debt to a sustainable level would see a third of it written off - which would generate $121bn (£75bn) of losses for banks outside the countries concerned.

If those loans were spread relatively evenly between banks around the world, losses on that scale would be a headache, but nothing worse.

But this tainted cookie doesn't crumble quite like that. Just under a third of the relevant exposure to public sector and banks of the three debt-challenged states, some $118bn, sits on the balance sheets of German banks, according to the BIS.

For all the formidable strength of the German economy, the balance sheets of Germany's banks are by no means the strongest in the world. German banks would not be able to shrug off $39bn or £24bn of potential losses on Portuguese, Irish and Greek loans as a matter of little consequence.

This suggests that it is in the German national interest to help Portugal, Ireland and Greece avoid default.

If you are a Greek, Portuguese or Irish citizen this might bring on something of a wry smile - because you would probably be aware that the more punitive of the bailout terms imposed by the eurozone on these countries (or about to be imposed in Portugal's case) is the expression of a German desire to spank reckless borrowers.

But as I have mentioned here before, reckless lending can be the moral (or immoral) equivalent of reckless borrowing. And German banks were not models of Lutheran prudence in that regard.

If punitive bailout terms make it more likely that Ireland, Greece or Portugal will eventually default, you might wonder whether there has been an element of masochism in the German government's negotiating position.

The Bundesliga will resume behind closed doors on Saturday 16 May - becoming the first European league to restart following the coronavirus shutdown.

A chronology of key events

Key facts, figures and dates

The UK's chief medical adviser says there's "a lot to learn" from Germany, so what has it been doing?

Berlin, Germany

Rothenberg Germany, Zurich and Interlaken Swizterland

The Amateur Traveler talks to Jason and Janie about their trip to Bavaria and Southern Germany. Jason and Janie had perviously been on the Amateur Traveler on Travel to Barbados - Episode 109. The talk about visiting the Black Forest with its wineries, Geramany’s tallest waterfall and the world’s largest cuckoo clock. They also visited the walled city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Rothenburg (which may have been spared the ravages of the 30 years war by a hard drinking mayor) is the home to a wonderful Christmas market as well as a Christmas museum. The Rothenburg Nightwatchman’s tour is also something you should try. Jason and Jamie also went to Nurenburg with its wonderful market place and saw “Mad” King Ludwig’s castle Neuschwanstein. The finished the trip in the home of very large beer steins at Munich. In Munich they enjoyed the glockenspiel, the toy museum and some of the wonderful old churches.

The Amateur Traveler talks to Eleonora about visiting eastern Germany. Eleonora grew up in Dresden and starts our tour there with a city restored from the rubble of World War II to one that boasts beautiful baroque architecture. She takes up verbally to the Master’s Gallery and also to the Green Vault in the old palace. She recommends the famous opera house as well as the recent rebuilt Church of Our Lady (Frauenkirche). We climb to the old fortress (Festung Koenigstein) which protected the area. After Dresden Eleonora directs us to the mountains of Saxon Switzerland and to the Oer Mountains with its tradition Christmas wood carvings. From there we go to Leipzig and to Bauzen (capital of a slavic minority – the Sorbs). We make a sobering stop at Buchenwald concentration camp before hiking in the Hatrz Mountains. Then we head north to Saxony-Anhalt where we stop by the oldest chocolate factory in Germany in Helle. Eleonora encourages us to visit the palace of Sanssouci at Postdam and the Hanseatic cities Rostock and Stralsund. While in Eastern Germany we should try Christstollen, Baumkuchen, and Saxon Potato Soup. Two special tips from Eleonora are to visit the Hechtfest multicultural art festival in Dresden and the medieval Christmas market.

Hear about travel to Düsseldorf, Germany as the Amateur Traveler talks to Erik and Anne Hess about this city on the Rhine. Carnival, Christmas Markets and one of the most livable cities in the world.