Germany - Deutschland, but in English

This is nice, but sorry, what colour did you say it was 😂

On November 1, Germany introduces a law making it easier to alter the gender marker and name on official documents. Transgender, intersex, non-binary people have welcomed the move but conservatives are opposed.

The discovery of a World War II-era bomb forced the partial evacuation of the Sternschanze nightlife district in the German city of Hamburg late Saturday.

More than 5,000 people were evacuated to safety from the 300-meter (984-foot) exclusion zone, fire officials said. Police also cleared restaurants and bars in the area.

Residents within a 500-meter warning radius were told not to stay outside, to keep windows and doors closed, and to move to rooms away from the danger zone.

Shortly after midnight local time (2200 GMT Saturday), the fire department, which had been called in for a major operation, said on social media that the bomb had been defused.

The discovery of the bomb also disrupted rail traffic, as the Sternschanze S-Bahn station, which is particularly busy on weekends, was also in the evacuated area.

Early Sunday, Hamburg police said the fire department's measures were gradually being lifted.

The bomb was found during construction work on the grounds of a primary school.

According to a final statement from the fire department, the defusing itself took only about 30 minutes and went without complications.

Germany is accustomed to finding unexploded World War II munitions from Allied and Soviet bombing campaigns. Most are defused without incident by bomb disposal experts.

On Saturday, a World War II-era bomb in Cologne prompted a massive evacuation. After the evacuation of numerous residential buildings and several clinics in the city, the US bomb discovered on Wednesday was detonated in a controlled manner.

Another National Holiday is right around the corner and of course most shops will be closed. Don't forget to do your grocery shopping or you will have to go the more expensive alternatives: gas stations, shops at railway stations and so on...

This year the special festivities will be held in Schwerin. If you're intested you'll find more info on their official website.

The first German woman is set to fly into space on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with four other astronauts, the private space exploration company said on Wednesday.

Rabea Rogge was introduced by SpaceX as a "robotics researcher" who studied electrical engineering and information technology at ETH Zurich. For her doctoral thesis, she transferred to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The mission, called Fram2, is going to be the first human spaceflight over the Earth's poles. The company said the flight will take place "no earlier than late 2024."

No German woman has ever been to space, according to the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Rogge said she felt incredibly honored for being selected to take part in the mission.

"I'm really looking forward to being responsible for the research and getting some cool projects off the ground," she said on X.

During the multi-day flight, the team of astronauts will look at the Earth's polar regions and examine purple lights, known as "Steve" and similar to northern lights, at the altitude of 425 to 450 kilometers (264-280 miles).

SpaceX said the mission will also produce the first X-ray images of humans in space.

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Cologne-Wahn military base has been sealed off after a suspected act of sabotage against its water supply, news outlets reported Wednesday.

The base near Cologne-Bonn airport employs 4,300 soldiers and 1,200 civilians and is also home to a fleet of military aircraft used by Chancellor Olaf Scholz for international travel.

According to news magazine Der Spiegel, authorities told employees at the base not to drink the tap water, as they believed it had been contiminated. They also found damage to a fence at the edge of the property.

Police, military police, and the military intelligence agency MAD are all looking into the alleged crime, Spiegel said.

Police cordoned off a large area and it was no longer permitted to enter or leave the barracks.

"We have our reasons for taking this action, and we take the case seriously," a spokesperson for the Territorial Command in Berlin was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying.

Germany justified Israel's recent strike on the Al-Tabiin school in Gaza, which killed almost 100 Palestinians during morning prayers, saying that Israel has the "right to defend itself."

Palestinian survivors of the attack described how men, women, and children sheltering at the school were torn to pieces after Israel targeted it with three separate strikes on Saturday.

"Israel has the right to defend itself. The reality is that Hamas uses schools, hospitals, kindergartens as command centers and that the people in the Gaza Strip are also abused against their will as protective (human) shields," government deputy spokesman Wolfgang Buechner claimed while speaking the press in Berlin.

Buechner provided no proof of his assertions.

An 80-year-old man from Leipzig stands accused in Berlin of killing a Polish man in cold blood at a border crossing in 1974 on the orders of the former East German secret police, the Stasi.

The already-delayed case reopens on Friday at the Moabit criminal court in Berlin and is thought to be entering its final stages.

In May, when the verdict was originally scheduled, the court announced additional trial dates through August.

It said complications like new information from Stasi archives about the Berlin Friedrichstraße train station border crossing between East and West Berlin, where the killing took place, and the possible need to arrange another historical expert witness were among the reasons for the extension.

"One problem with the proceedings is that we have gaps in our levels of knowledge," presiding judge Bernd Miczajka lamented at the time, appealing to the Stasi archives in Berlin to provide more information about operations at the border crossing.

What happened at the time? On March 29, 1974, 38-year-old Polish man Czeslaw Kukuczka was shot in the back from close range at the busy Berlin Friedrichstrasse train station border crossing between communist East and democratic West Germany in broad daylight.

It was one of the more high-profile of the many killings around the area of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.

Kukuczka had been trying to flee to the West as he had relatives in the United States. He had threatened to set off explosives in the embassy of the communist Polish government in East Berlin unless he was granted safe passage, although it later transpired his briefcase did not contain a bomb.

He was given the necessary documents and escorted to the border but was not aware his apparent permission to leave was a trick.

Prosecutors in the case cited witness testimony from a group of West German schoolgirls who said they saw a man in a raincoat and sunglasses shoot him as among the new evidence enabling prosecution. The girls were part of a group on a school trip from Hesse in western Germany.

Kukuczka's children and his sister are co-plaintiffs at the trial. Poland had also put out a European arrest warrant for the defendant in 2021, but Germany had said its legal system would deal with the case. Charges followed in 2023.

Why did it take so long to go to trial? Although the killing itself was well documented on both sides of the Berlin Wall at the time, information about the shooter was not.

While the East German Stasi is well known for its vast archiving of information, it was also very prone to leaving incriminating information out of its records, at least directly.

Research by historians in the Stasi archives decades after the killing had shed more light on the likely shooter and how the orders for the killing came about.

They found high-level East German citations being given both to the defendant and another now-deceased man, who prosecutors say gave the order to kill Kukuczka, with the stated reason of them preventing a border crossing on the exact date of the murder.

Investigators at first unconvinced if statute of limitations applied in Germany The case has been plagued by doubt about whether the defendant can still be tried 50 years after the fact.

Only the German legal equivalent of first-degree murder in the US has no statute of limitations and can always carry a life sentence, typically no less than 15 years in prison.

In order to demonstrate this, the prosecution will be required to show not only that the defendant killed Kukuczka but that the killing was "heimtückisch" in German. This word could be translated as "insidious," "treacherous" or "malicious," or roughly as "killing in cold blood." The wording of this law, which dates back to the Nazi era, is itself contentious in Germany.

The prosecution has argued factors including the nature of the killing, with the man allegedly deceived and then shot in the back, met this definition.

Were the case ultimately deemed a lower-level homicide from the defendant's perspective, as prosecutors in Germany once suspected it to be, it would no longer be prosecutable.

msh/sms (dpa, epd)

What is that game show where two people answer questions in a spiral? Wilhelm and Rainer were competing yesterday.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.world/post/17934447

German producers have sparked a dispute by filing an opposition to a Turkish application to grant the döner kebab's special status at the EU level, initiating a six-month period to resolve disagreements.

A Turkish application to the European Commission for the döner kebab to be given similar EU recognition as the Neapolitan pizza and Spain's jamon serrano has been opposed by Germany, sources close to the issue have told Euronews.

As reported, in April Türkiye filed an application to register the name döner in Europe so that it can be used only by those producers conforming to the registered production method and product specifications.

Germany gets top marks for integration of migrants

Jens Thurau

07/07/2024July 7, 2024

A new OECD study has found Germany is successfully integrating migrants despite obstacles such as migrants often having little education.

If you were to listen to many in Germany, you would think the country's integration of migrants and asylum seekers was going rather poorly. But a new study by the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that isn't the case.

Despite a number of challenges — such as further education and training — Germany is doing a better job than many of its European neighbors when it comes to integrating new arrivals, the study finds.

Most migrants coming from within the EU

For the study, OECD migration expert Thomas Liebig compared data from countries such as Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, as well as from Scandinavian nations. For the first time, comprehensive data from the EU was also used.

His finding: Although much attention is focused on asylum seekers and refugees, most migration in Germany comes from citizens moving within the European Union.

At a press conference, Liebig said that refugees made up only about one out of five migrants who arrived in Germany in the past 10 years.

"The overwhelming number of new arrivals to Germany come from within the European Union," he said.

A glance at Germany's migration map makes that clear: Almost 60% of people come because EU citizens can find easier access to work here.

The study also makes clear that migrants have long become part of German society.

'We're a country of immigrants'

German integration commissioner Reem Alabali-Radovan, who commissioned the study, shares this view.

"We were always a country of immigrants and that has made us strong," she said. "Germany's immigration history is very diverse. It consists of refugees from the Second World War, guest and temporary workers, resettled ethnic Germans, and refugees from the former Yugoslavia and later from Syria and Afghanistan."

Workforce participation is a major characteristic of successful integration. The OECD study found that 70% of those coming to Germany have found employment. That figure, which temporarily dipped during the coronavirus pandemic, is higher than in nearly all other EU countries and is a record for Germany.

Problems with lack of migrants' education

Still, there are plenty of problems: Although nearly two-thirds of immigrants can speak good German within five years of arriving in the country, that number drops dramatically among those with little or no formal education — with only a quarter of poorly educated arrivals being able to speak the language after five years.

Employment is also lower among such arrivals, hovering around 50%. On the other hand, only Italy hosts more migrants without a formal education.

Alabali-Radovan sees this as an area for improvement: "The education system still isn't geared toward serving the immigrant society we've long since become. That's why we all need to pull together."

Another issue is employment among young women who have come to Germany with at least one child but without a partner. In 2021, around 40% of those women were actively working, compared to 70% of similarly situated women born in Germany. That gap is much larger than it is in other countries and has most recently affected women with children arriving from Ukraine.

Migration Representative Reem Alabali-Radovan says the debate around migration needs to be more objectiveImage: Malte Ossowski/Sven Simon/picture allianceCalls for more objectivity in an emotional debate

But, despite the issues of migration, Germany simply cannot afford long, drawn-out debates about whether it is a country of immigrants or not, the study finds.

"There are now more than 14 million immigrants in Germany. And when we add those who were born here to immigrant parents, that means one-in-five people here were either born abroad or born in Germany to immigrant parents," migration expert Liebig said.

Ingegration commissioner Alabali-Radovan added that she commissioned the study to bring greater objectivity to what she called "an emotional debate."

"Integration is going far better than is generally thought, when we look at it internationally," she said.

US the only OECD country with more immigrants

Beyond the 14 million migrants already living in Germany, 2022 saw the arrival of 1 million Ukrainians as well as another 600,000 asylum seekers.

Among OECD countries, only the United States takes in more immigrants than Germany.

The most important lasting impact of Euro 2024 is likely to come far away from the football pitch.

This year's tournament has already seen plenty of young stars make a name for themselves and a glut of "David vs. Goliath" moments — most notably Georgia pulling off an impressive victory over 2016 winners Portugal.

But UEFA's decision to adopt a human rights declaration just ahead of the start of the competition could prove to be far more significant for players, fans and workers alike.

An online form has been created to report any human rights issues and, importantly, provide an immediate response and resolution from a law firm hired by UEFA to deal with the complaints.

Previously, fans, journalists and workers faced an uphill battle to be heard, as there was no clear information on which the correct institution was to deal with a specific concern. As a result, fans impacted by issues during UEFA events like the 2021 Euros final at Wembley and the 2022 Champions League final in Paris struggled with knowing how and where to file complaints over treatment or abuse they suffered. 

Andrea Florence, director of Sport & Rights Alliance, highlighted the importance of UEFA's including stakeholders — clubs, leagues, national associations, players unions and European institutions — to create an effective grievance mechanism.

"It allowed us to provide our expertize to try and help users of the system know how to access it and get remedy," Florence told DW.

Fan voices at heart of mechanism

Crucially for Ronan Evian, the executive director of Football Supporters of Europe, the inclusion of fans in the consultation period meant more peace of mind coming into the tournament than ever before.

Across the 10 stadiums hosting matches during Euro 2024 and the Fan Zones in the host cities, posters directing people on how to report grievances, along with QR codes, have been advertised. 

Additionally, a specific "safe room" in every stadium has been set up for stewards to direct people to who feel under immediate threat or discriminated against.

"Human rights are universal, and as fans we need to fight for universal human rights," Evian told DW. "For us fans it's about fair treatment, and what UEFA has newly implemented is that there is a rapid response mechanism and there is a grievance mechanism."

"It's very important because everybody should feel safe in the stadium, regardless of their background, gender, sexual orientation, capacity," Evian said. "This is a way to ensure that everybody can feel as safe as possible in any crowd." 

Independent law firm receiving complaints

To ensure the independence of the reporting and resolution process, UEFA hired German law firm Rettenmaier to process any grievances that come in through the online tool.

The inclusion of the law firm has helped ensure the ability to file complaints anonymously as well as the possibility of immediate resolutions.

"What's equally important is, as the complaints are being managed by a law firm and not by UEFA, you know you will receive a response," Evian said.

"That is an assessment of whether your rights have been abused," he said, "and crucially it will mean accountability of the tournament organizers, which is something we've welcomed."

"We know a number of people, whether they are fans, workers, journalists, have filed complaints through the grievance mechanism," he added.

Late implementation an issue

The implantation process has not been without its issues or flaws, namely how late the grievance mechanism was put into force. This has meant workers, for example, had no instrument to report issues in the lead up to the tournament. 

Equally, though posters at grounds have instructed people on how they can report problems, UEFA opted against putting up a link on its homepage.

Though she praised the work UEFA has done to ensure that human rights are respected during Euro 2024, Florence lamented a lack of publicity.

"There were undoubtedly impacts that happened before the tournament started," she said. "For instance, workers' rights or people that might have been forcibly removed from cities because of the event."

"People need to know that all of that can be reported, even things that happened before the mechanism was set up," she added.

And Evian said the "biggest weakness of the tournament" was how late a lot of things were set up.

"Honestly, I don't know why things happened so late," Evian said. "I don't know if it's down to governance or the way the preparation was done."

"The human rights declaration could have been adopted significantly earlier, and that would have had a broader impact on the preparation," Evian said.

"Nevertheless, when the engagement started, it was genuine, and it was a meaningful consultation," he added. "UEFA sought an ambitious human rights policy, which was not at all the case for previous tournaments. All in all, it's progress and it's also a lesson learned for future tournaments."

Edited by: Matt Pearson

Kalika Mehta Sports reporter