Early last year, Ivy*, a Chinese student living in Germany, got a phone call from the police. At first, she thought it was a scam. An officer said they needed her help with an investigation involving someone she once knew. What followed turned her world upside down. The police told her that her former boyfriend, identified in court documents as Tong Z, had been investigated for sexual assault and covert photography. Then came the tougher blow: police showed her a number of nude photos Tong Z had secretly taken of…
Tag: Germany
Weather tracker: Heatwave breaks June temperature records across Europe
Last week’s heatwave across western Europe shattered national June records and set new all-time highs. The UK recorded a provisional high of 37.7C at Lingwood in Norfolk on Friday 27 June, smashing the previous June record of 35.6C, set in 1976. Such a margin is exceptionally rare: temperature records are typically broken by 0.1C or 0.2C, not a remarkable 2.1C. A boy cools off in a Berlin fountain. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Germany reached 41.7C in Coschen on 28 of June, breaking its all-time record for a third consecutive day. The…
Weather tracker: Heatwave on course to tip temperatures over 40C in Germany and Poland
Temperatures are forecast to rise dramatically in parts of central and northern Europe this weekend as the intense heatwave continues. In Germany and Poland, highs up to or exceeding 40C (104F) are expected on both Saturday and Sunday, days after swathes of France experienced similar extreme temperatures. The Austrian Grand Prix, taking place this weekend in Spielberg, has declared a heat hazard, the first race to do so this season. Temperatures are expected to rise into the low 30s celsius during the race, almost 10C warmer than usual for the…
Germany urged to stop admiring Beijing and wake up to ‘China Shock 2.0’
Germany must stop admiring China’s success in the EU or it will sleepwalk into the kind of deindustrialisation the US experienced 25 years ago, a leading Brussels thinktank has said. With China’s surplus with Germany having doubled between 2024 and 2025 from $12bn (£9bn) to $25bn, creating a $94bn trade imbalance, the Centre for European Reform (CER) said Europe’s largest economy risked a repeat of what happened in the US in 2001 when a sudden surge in imports permanently hollowed out towns in the American midwest. “China Shock 1.0” not…
EU carmakers pave way for Chinese rivals as balance in market shifts
Chinese carmaker Xpeng is on the hunt for a factory in Europe. Volkswagen is aiming to reduce the number of its factories. It seems like it should have been the perfect set-up for a deal. Yet there was one problem with the plant on offer, according to Elvis Cheng, Xpeng’s managing director of north-eastern Europe: “It’s a little bit, I would say, old.” The withering verdict on the facilities of Germany’s carmaking champion, delivered this week at a Financial Times conference, may cause some awkwardness between Xpeng and Volkswagen, which…
Jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai wins free speech award in Germany
The jailed media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai has been awarded Deutsche Welle’s freedom of speech award for his contribution to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The German public broadcaster said on Thursday that Lai would be presented in absentia with the 12th iteration of the award on 23 June at the DW Global Media Forum in Bonn. Deutsche Welle’s director general, Barbara Massing, praised the 78-year-old founder of the now-shuttered news outlet Apple Daily for standing “unwaveringly for press freedom in Hong Kong at great personal risk”. “With Apple Daily, he gave…
A Europe of clean, green cities and resurgent industry is a fantasy – unless we get really creative | Hans Larsson
“Bitterfeld, Bitterfeld, where dirt falls from the sky,” went a popular saying. Located in the intensely industrialised Chemical Triangle of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in the 1980s Bitterfeld became known as the dirtiest town in Europe. Its chemical industry and lignite mines dumped toxic waste in waterways, and the air carried a concentrate of sulphur dioxide some 40 times today’s levels. Europe would soon be rattled out of its postwar reliance on heavy industry, in favour of cheap imports from abroad. In the last days of the GDR, environmental…
China overtakes US as Germany’s top trading partner
China has overtaken the US as Germany’s top trading partner, figures have shown, as the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, prepares for his first visit to Beijing since taking office. Merz will head to China on Tuesday and will be welcomed with military honours on Wednesday in Beijing by the prime minister, Li Qiang, before later meeting the president, Xi Jinping, for talks over dinner, his spokesperson, Sebastian Hille, said. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office released figures on Friday showing that China is back on top as the country’s most important market with…
EU leaders to clash over ‘Buy European’ push at Belgium summit
EU leaders are expected to diverge on whether “Buy European” is an answer to Europe’s waning economic fortunes, at a summit on how to secure the continent’s future in a more volatile global economy. At a moated castle in the east Belgian countryside, the EU’s 27 leaders will gather on Thursday for a brainstorming session on how Europe can regain its economic competitiveness vis-a-vis the US and China, at a time of economic threats and political turbulence. The question of Europe’s declining competitiveness has long troubled the EU, but gained…
The Guardian view on combating Europe’s national populists: protect the less well-off from the winds of change | Editorial
More than a year after the election that handed Donald Trump a decisive comeback victory, the Democratic party has still not released its postmortem analysis. But last week, an influential progressive lobby group published its own. Kamala Harris’s campaign, its authors argued, failed to connect with core constituencies because it did not focus enough on addressing basic economic anxieties. By prioritising the menace to democracy that Maga authoritarianism represented, progressives neglected the bread-and-butter issues that were uppermost in many people’s minds. As the EU braces for a tumultuous period of politics…