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Wed, 10 March 09:53
WHILE tearing out old bathroom fittings from a Munich apartment, a 23-year-old workman, Kai Struve, found 100,000 euros hidden inside the bathtub panelling. He took it to the police whose investigators found that it belonged to the former tenant, an 88-year-old suffering from dementia now living in a retirement home. Under German law, Kai stands to receive a 3,000-euro reward - three per cent of the cash.
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Wed, 10 March 09:51
THE Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled last week that anti-terror legislation allowing the authorities to retain information from telephone calls and emails violated constitutional privacy rights. It also failed to balance the need for security against entitlement to privacy, said the court, which did not entirely close the door to data retention but described the new laws as a “grave intrusion.”
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Wed, 10 March 09:47
MANFRED WALTER BACHMAN, a 55-year-old German tourist was jailed for 15 weeks in Christchurch (New Zealand) after he was caught trying to smuggle 13 adult and three young lizards out of the country. The reptiles would have fetched 85,000 euros on the European black market but 11 of the females were pregnant, significantly increasing their potential value.
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Mon, 08 March 12:29
German police detained a nightclub reveller they caught trying to snort amphetamines off the top of their unmarked patrol car in a disco car park. The man had no idea the vehicle belonged to the police, and it was coincidence that the officers discovered him as he was about to take the drugs.
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Wed, 03 March 12:58
A DRAFT law by the central government could drastically reduce subsidies for solar energy production and in some instances eliminate them entirely. The proposed bill, designed to prevent market saturation and save money, would reduce by 15 per cent the guaranteed price for solar-produced energy on open ground and eliminate present subsidies for panels erected on arable land.
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Wed, 03 March 12:31
THIRTY men and women stripped down to their underpants and knickers in front of a crowd of 14,000 spectators to compete in a topless toboggan race in Braunlage in the Harz mountains. A similar event in Oberwiesenthal near the Czech Republic finally went ahead some days earlier, despite a threatened ban by the local mayor who claimed that the “good name of Oberwiesenthal” was at stake.
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Wed, 03 March 12:29
GERMAN oceanographers from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven used underwater microphones to listen in as a 400-milion ton iceberg crashed into the Antarctic ice-shelf, producing a 2,000-metre fissure. As well as the tremendous noise of the collision, equipment picked up alarmed calls from seals and whales as the 54-kilometre iceberg rammed the coast with a force equivalent to 10 tons of explosives.
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Mon, 01 March 11:18
WHEN the head of the Lutheran Church, Bishop Margot Kaessmann, was stopped by police after driving through a red light, a blood test revealed an alcohol content of 0.15, more than three times the legally allowed 05. The bishop, said she was “shocked at herself” and prepared to face the legal consequences, but has since received a vote of confidence from the 14 members of the church’s leadership council.
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Mon, 01 March 11:16
BELARUS, sometimes called “Europe’s last dictatorship”, has banned the Berlin-based group Rammstein, declaring it an enemy of the state. The Morality Council denounced the industrial rock band – which incorporates blasts of “white noise” and the sound of machinery – as propaganda for “violence, masochism, homosexuality and other perversions.” Insiders said the ruling now jeopardises Rammstein’s March 7 concert in the Belarus capital, Minsk.
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Mon, 22 February 11:44
There are now 11.5 million of Germany’s 82 million inhabitants living below the poverty line in Germany, an increase of one-third over the past decade, said the Berlin-based Institute for Economic Research (DIW). The DIW said the surge in poverty was directly linked to increased numbers of young people at university or in vocational training, a stagnant employment market and a tendency for young people to leave home earlier.
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Mon, 22 February 11:43
DEUTSCHE BAHN is to cut down on English-language signs at railway stations after Bavarian MP Ernst Hinsken wrote to DB chief executive Rudiger Grube voicing concerns that he and many members of public found them irritating and incomprehensible. So Kiss & Ride (for short-term parking) and Service Point will be scrapped although others, like BahnCard and Intercity would remain, said Grube, since travellers were now accustomed to them.
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Fri, 12 February 19:11
THE number of German households with children is falling, and 2009 was the first time childless families exceeded those with offspring, found a recent demographic study. Calculated at 39.5 per cent in 2009, the number of single-person households is also rising and is the fastest-growing sector of the population, particularly in Berlin where they comprise more than half the capital’s population.
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Fri, 12 February 11:17
FOUR resentful pensioners found themselves in a Traunstein court in southern Germany last week, accused of abducting and holding prisoner their 56-year-old financial adviser, American-born James Amburn. A fifth member of the group, a 67-year-old doctor, was absent owing to ill-health and will stand trial at a later date.
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Fri, 12 February 11:14
THE constitutional court in Karlsruhe met to debate using troops in anti-terrorist operations after the Interior minister of Hesse argued that police – currently responsible for aircraft hijackings – were not equipped to deal with them. The present law rules that shooting down hijacked aircraft is unconstitutional but also contains a clause empowering the military to fire warning shots to force hijackers to land.
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Thu, 11 February 18:31
AFTER the tax authorities paid more than 2.5 million euros to computer hackers for a CD containing data stolen from a Swiss bank, there has been a surge in the number of depositors contacting them. The government hopes to raise 420 million euros in unpaid taxes from some of the German citizens who hold an estimated 200 billion euros in undeclared funds in Swiss banks.
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Thu, 11 February 18:29
 TWO cows which broke out of their barn in Unna (North Rhine-Westphalia) on February 7 were later found roaming 100 metres away from the A1 motorway. After after vets and hunters failed to coax the cows to safety police marksmen equipped with night vision equipment shot them down. “They were out of control,” explained a spokesman, “and the safety of humans comes first.”
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Fri, 05 February 11:11
THE future of the world’s first topless sledging race is now uncertain, due to be held in Oberwiesenthal, after local councillors tried to ban the event. Mayor Mirko Ernst maintained that the majority of residents opposed the topless idea but organiser Jochen Noeske replied that if the competition was banned it would take place over the border in the Czech Republic “where they are less stuffy.”
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Fri, 05 February 11:08
COLOGNE-BORN Maziar Golchehr was arrested last month in Oklahoma City on charges including possession of a sawn-off shotgun and wearing body armour. Not a burglar or bank robber, however, the 27-year-old German was instead a bogus law officer who deceived local police officers into believing he was one of them.
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Fri, 05 February 11:03
A TOURIST stranded on the frozen North Sea off St Peter-Ording was saved after he was seen by a woman viewing the sunset via a webcam 500 kilometres away in Southern Germany. Noticing flashes from his camera, she rang the police who sent local officers to lead the 40-year-old professional photographer to safety before he either froze to death or fell through the ice.
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Fri, 05 February 11:00
ONCE new Channel Tunnel safety rules come into force, Deutsche Bahn hopes to run a 300 kilometre per hour train service between Cologne and London. High Speed 1, which owns the rail link between the St Pancras terminal and the Tunnel, said a direct service could begin in December 2012 but did not dismiss the possibility of bringing this forward to coincide with the Olympic Games.
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Thu, 28 January 19:53
GIUEPPE PROIETTI, an Italian ministry of Culture official, claimed that Germany’s intelligence service has evidence proving that the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta attempted to sell works of art looted from Afghanistan. Proietti said that Atta, who studied at Hamburg University, contacted an archaeologist at Gottingen University, claiming that he needed to raise money for flying lessons in the U.S.
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Thu, 28 January 19:04
Karl-Ulrich Mueller, Germany’s ambassador to Iceland since 2007, was found dead in his car on January 25 after apparently running off the road and driving into a river. He had left Reykjavik two days earlier, bound for Akureyri, announced the Iceland police, who said an investigation was underway to verify whether Mueller died of injuries sustained in the crash or other causes.
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Thu, 28 January 19:03
AN American judge in Memphis (Tennessee) granted asylum to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike who left Germany in 2008 after they were prevented from teaching their five children at home. Home-schooling has been banned in Germany for around a century but the Tennessee judge claimed that the German government were violating the Romeikes’ “basic human rights” and were accordingly eligible for asylum.
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Thu, 28 January 18:59
ACCORDING to a study from the Hamburg World Economy Institute (HWWI), Germany missed out on a minimum of 4 billion euros in tax on cigarettes during 2008, as smokers bought tobacco abroad or on the black market.
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Thu, 28 January 18:56
A “GIROUX DAGUERREOTYPE” camera recently discovered in a private house in Germany is expected to fetch between 500,000 and 700,000 euros when it is auctioned next May. Still in oustanding condition, the camera was made in Paris in 1839 by Alphonse Giroux - brother-in-law of Louis Daguerre, who invented the first simple photographic process – and comes complete with its original manual.
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Bonus 
Stars 
