Community gardeners and other activists in Berlin are helping the Transition movement to take root in the German capital as part of its worldwide campaign for a sustainable society.

Claas Relotius wrote many seemingly excellent feature stories for DER SPIEGEL, but unfortunately most of them apparently contain fabricated passages. We are sorry about what has happened and we are investigating with the requisite humility.

Maria Sharapova effortlessly managed to combine her life as a tennis player with that of a superstar. With the announcement of her retirement, we take a look back at her career.

The German cabinet on Monday agreed to an unprecedented aid package to prop up the country's economy as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold. Parliament is set to approve the package later this week.

The gravest threat posed by the coronavirus is that high-risk groups like the elderly and other high-risk groups will get infected by it. The pressure on staffs at nursing homes is growing. Some patient advocates are calling for emergency contingency plans. Are the facilities safe enough for the people living in them?

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging in social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and believe that strong policy measures, such as shop closures and curfews, are necessary. They also believe that their government and their country’s citizens are not doing enough and underestimate the degree to which others in their country support strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. The perception of a weak government and public response is associated with higher levels of worries and depression. Using both cross-country panel data and an event-study, we additionally show that strong government reactions correct misperceptions, and reduce worries and depression. Our findings highlight that policy-makers not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental health of their population.

European researchers have developed a new technology aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus. Called PEPP-PT, it has been designed to conform with EU data privacy rules. Its developers spoke with DER SPIEGEL about the app.

Europa es más que una coalición de ególatras. En una crisis como esta no existe alternativa para los eurobonos.

We study a novel policy tool—interest rate uncertainty—that can be used to discourage inefficient capital inflows and to adjust the composition of external accounts between short-term securities and foreign direct investment (FDI). We identify the trade-offs faced in navigating between external balance and price stability. The interest rate uncertainty policy discourages short-term inflows mainly through portfolio risk and precautionary saving channels. A markup channel generates net FDI inflows under imperfect exchange rate pass-through. We further investigate new channels under different assumptions about the irreversibility of FDI, the currency of export invoicing, risk aversion of outside agents, and effective lower bound in the rest of the world. Under every scenario, uncertainty policy is inflationary.

In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, 53, criticizes the U.S., China and Hungary for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He also promises not to abandon Italy and explains why he doesn't want to say that he's actually in favor of corona bonds.

We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

We explore whether minimum wage increases result in substitution from lower-skilled to slightly higher-skilled labor. Using 2011-2016 American Community Survey data (ACS), we show that workers employed in low-wage occupations are older and more likely to have a high school diploma following recent statutory minimum wage increases. To better understand the role of firms, we examine the Burning Glass vacancy data. We find increases in a high school diploma requirement following minimum wage hikes, consistent with our ACS evidence on stocks of employed workers. We see substantial adjustments to requirements both within and across firms.

Most jobs require teamwork. Are some people good team players? In this paper we design and test a new method for identifying individual contributions to group performance. We randomly assign people to multiple teams and predict team performance based on previously assessed individual skills. Some people consistently cause their group to exceed its predicted performance. We call these individuals “team players”. Team players score significantly higher on a well-established measure of social intelligence, but do not differ across a variety of other dimensions, including IQ, personality, education and gender. Social skills – defined as a single latent factor that combines social intelligence scores with the team player effect – improve group performance about as much as IQ. We find suggestive evidence that team players increase effort among teammates.

Just as Volkswagen was undergoing a radical restructuring to focus on e-mobility and driverless cars, the company has announced it is shutting down factories across Europe due to the coronavirus. There is hope in China, however.

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.

The corona crisis has hit the German economy at full force. Already, 470,000 applications have been filed for a German government subsidy that prevents employees from getting laid off, 20 times more than the previous record during the 2009 financial crisis.

The coronavirus crisis has forced another 3.2 million Americans to file for jobless aid, bringing the total number to 33.5 million in the seven weeks since the pandemic forced millions of companies to close and layoff huge amounts of staff.

Weather extreme enough to shatter records across large swaths of the U.S. is heading our way this weekend, just in time for Mother’s Day. A storm system heading into the Northeast on Friday will smash into the polar vortex as it makes swing down from the Arctic, reported NBC News. This might sock the region in with heavy, wet snow all the way into New England.

Things were not OK.

Brya Bishop was arrested days before her 25th birthday and charged with three felonies.

You can always get your mom flowers for Mother’s Day, or chocolate, or your standard Mother’s Day gift. Or, if your mom is anything like mine, you can go in a completely different direction.

The semen of men infected with coronavirus revealed that the disease lingered in only a few patients, suggesting there is a small chance COVID-19 can be transmitted sexually, researchers said.

Conservative firebrand Dennis Prager has taken a break from pushing hydroxychloroquine and calling lockdowns “the greatest mistake” in history to rail against the loss of racist language.

President Trump on Friday called the viral video of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing “very, very disturbing,” but he said he’s confident that Georgia’s law enforcement authorities will handle the case properly despite a slow-moving investigation and conflict-of-interest questions surrounding the incident. “So I saw the tape, and it’s very, very disturbing," he said in a Fox New phone interview. “I looked at a picture of that young man. He was in a tuxedo... And I will say that that looks like a really good, young guy.”

Veterans are being hit hard by unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Some Costco customers are not happy about having to wear masks in stores.

Chris Cornell’s widow is firing back at her husband’s Soundgarden bandmates, calling the lawsuit they filed against her Wednesday an attempt to “browbeat” her into giving up “copyrighted works.”

The wildly influential singer and pianist established rock ’n’ roll as a genre with just one rule — there are no rules.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) has simplified the system for certain mergers to be notified to it.

New research from the Central Bank shows that demand for bank loans has fallen sharply.

The unemployment rate for April, as measured by the Covid-19 adjusted measure, was 28.2% according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office.

The patient, laid up in the ICU, gets sicker. Thursday, 3.2 million more people joined the ranks of the unemployed, bringing to 33.5 million the number of Americans who’ve lost jobs since mid-March. Believe it: One in five of those employed before this living, dying hell began is now seeking jobless benefits.