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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Deportation flights signal Germany's pivot to hardline stance on migration
The Qassim family were not in the Potsdam court last Tuesday to hear the ruling in their favour. Five hours previously, the parents and their four children aged five to 17 had been bundled on to a charter flight to Baghdad. They are now back in the country they fled in 2014 after the Islamic State terror organisation murdered 5,000 members of their Yazidis (Kurdish) minority. After landing, 12-year-old Maatz Quassim sent a voice note to a Berlin radio station about the dramatic end, in the middle of the night, of their happy life in Brandenburg. READ MORE 'They shouted 'police' loudly and shone their torches in our faces,' she said. 'Now we're afraid.' In a statement, the federal interior ministry said the deportation flight with the Qassims and 37 others 'demonstrates that we are continuing to push forward resolutely with a migration policy shift'. Last May, Germany's centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took office promising a tougher approach to migration and asylum, imposing checks on all German borders and promising 'more pressure on returns'. The shift is a response to two developments. The first: a series of fatal knife and car attacks in recent years where, in many cases, perpetrators were failed asylum application with overdue deportation orders. Last week's flight, the statement said, deported '14 single men, some of whom have a criminal record'. 'We will continue to carry out deportations,' the ministry concluded, 'provided they are legally and effectively possible.' There are no criminals in the Qassim family and, while doubtlessly effective, the legality of their deportation is in doubt. The court ruling granted them leave to challenge the refusal of their asylum application. The Brandenburg state refugee council denounced the dawn raid as a 'scandalous' example of Germany 's new 'deportation agenda, driven by the right wing'. 'The fact that they are Kurdish Yazidis from northern Iraq should have prevented the rejection of their asylum application,' it said. 'Germany recognised the Yazidi genocide and said we have a particular responsibility here as a result.' But German politicians, particularly in the CDU, say they feel a greater responsibility to their own voters. That leads to the second motivator for the migration pivot: an opinion poll which, this week saw the far-right Alternative for Germany ( AfD ) pull level with the CDU. [ Germany increases border checks: Alexander Dobrindt oversees radical policy shift Opens in new window ] A decade ago, as Germany faced a growing refugee crisis, chancellor Angela Merkel adopted a motivational 'we can do this' approach to the challenges of welcoming and integrating more than a million people annually. Last Friday, her CDU successor Friedrich Merz binned that legacy. 'Some 10 years on we know that, in the [integration] context she meant ... we clearly haven't managed it,' he told journalists in Berlin. German chancellor Friedrich Merz (right) and his interior minister Alexander Dobrindt. Photograph:As Merz spoke in the capital, his interior minister Alexander Dobrindt presided over a gathering of migration hardliners in his native Bavaria. To the top of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak, Dobrindt invited counterparts from France, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Denmark, as well as European Union home affairs commissioner Magnus Brunner. The informal gathering proposed greater use of drones at the EU's outer borders, ex-territorial 'return centres' for failed asylum seekers and the use of trade and development aid as leverage in negotiations over returns to third countries. 'We are all concerned that overburdening our countries through illegal migration is contributing massively to the polarisation of society and want to push back against this,' the ministers said in a concluding document. Despite its pivot, Germany has shied away from backing more radical migration proposals circulating in Europe. Last May, all of Dobrindt's Zugspitze guests backed a Danish-Italian demand for reform of the European Convention on Human Rights to 'match the challenge that we face today'. The paper warned that the convention, and the European court that oversees it, no longer reflect the realities of modern migration and, too often, results in 'the protection of the wrong people'. The European Court of Human Rights dismissed the paper, saying 'debate is healthy but politicising the court is not'. The Zugspitze document attempts a balance, vowing to 'preserve the judicial independence and guarantees of the European Human Rights Convention' while 'respecting the interests of the member states'. The Zugspitze gathering was an effort by Berlin to ease tensions with its immediate neighbours over its new border checks and refusal to accept asylum seekers from other EU states. Warsaw and other capitals are holding their tongues in public, anxious not to halt Dobrindt's momentum. His ministry organised a second deportation flight last week with 81 people aboard, this time to Kabul. To assist with this and future deportations, Berlin confirmed it had accredited two Afghan consular officials to work from Germany. It was a bold move given the previous refusal of Berlin, along with other western capitals, to recognise the Taliban-led regime. Opposition politicians have denounced the move as a 'de facto diplomatic recognition' of the Taliban regime that regained power in Afghanistan in 2021 but remains internationally isolated largely over its human rights record, particularly towards women and girls. While German migration analysts warn of a populist race to the bottom, Dobrindt's message to voters is clear: 'When ít comes to migration, Germany is no longer the brake but the locomotive.'
CBC
16-07-2025
- Sport
- CBC
London athletes part of dominant Canadian team at World Dragon Boat Racing Championships
This is the first year that breast cancer survivors are competing in their own division at the World Dragon Boat Racing Championships in Brandenburg, Germany and the Canadian team won two gold medals on the first day of racing. Ten members of the Canadian Breast Cancer Paddler (BCP) team, along with their coach, Cheryl McLachlin, are members of Rowbust—-the London Dragon Boat Club's BCP team that trains on Fanshawe Lake. On Monday, they competed in the 2000 metre races for standard and small boat, winning first in both. "To watch the athletes leave the dock for the first time in a world division, run a clean race and excel to gold was amazing," she said. "Then to watch them mount up onto the podium in that gold position and enjoy our anthem as our flag went up the pole…amazing" The tradition of BCP teams began here in Canada. The first team was formed in Vancouver in 1995 by Dr. Don MacKenzie, a sports medicine doctor researching the physical and social benefits of paddling for breast cancer survivors. Since then, it has become popular worldwide with over 300 teams across nearly 40 countries. Despite the growing number of BCP teams, they have never been able to enter a national team at the world championships. The push for inclusion had been ongoing since around 2009, McLachlan said. "This is the stage we wanted to be on," she said. The Forest City is well represented on the team. Besides McLachlan as coach, there are eight paddlers, along with one steersperson and one drummer from London's Rowbust. Linda Kuska, one of the paddlers, has been a member of Rowbust for 26 years. When the opportunity arose to try out for the national team, there was no hesitation, she said. "You've got to do it while you can, and I really, really wanted to be part of this inaugural team." "And it was an amazing experience. Being a 62-year-old breast cancer survivor athlete, I never thought that I would see this kind of competition in my competitive career." Overall, the Canadian teams won 13 gold, nine silver and five bronze medals on the first day, with athletes from The London Dragon Boat Club also paddling on the Senior A, Senior B, U18 and Para teams. The championships continue through Sunday, and the BCP team is feeling energized, McLachlan said. "We really have to keep our foot on the gas tomorrow," she said. "But I feel good right now." "We can't lose sight of what our goal is," added Kuska. "We'll take it one day at a time, one hour at a time, and get out on that water and do our best."
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Automotive
- The Guardian
Musk's giant Tesla factory casts shadow on lives in a quiet corner of Germany
When Elon Musk advised Germans to vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in elections last year, Manu Hoyer – who lives in the small town where the billionaire had built Tesla's European production hub – wrote to the state premier to complain. 'How can you do business with someone who supports rightwing extremism?' she asked Dietmar Woidke, the Social Democrat leader of the eastern state of Brandenburg, who had backed the setting up of the Tesla Giga factory in Grünheide. Hoyer said that in Woidke's 'disappointing, but predictable' answer, he denied the charge. 'He said he didn't know him personally. As if that excused him.' She had co-founded a Citizens' Initiative to oppose Musk's plans, announced in 2019, to build in the sparsely populated municipality in the sandy plains south-west of Berlin. The initiative's fears at the time were largely over the potential environmental impact of the plant on the region's pine forests and groundwater. However, more recently it is Musk's politics that have caused particular alarm. Not only has he offered his high-profile support to far-right European parties, but at a rally after Donald Trump's inauguration he appeared to twice make the Nazi salute. In the meantime Tesla sales have slumped, especially in Europe – where new vehicle sales fell for five consecutive months despite an overall growth in the electric car market. Heiko Baschin, another member of the citizen's initiative, said he had been watching with a certain amount of schadenfreude. 'We put our hopes in this,' the carpenter said, discussing the change in the company's fortunes on a recent forest walk in the shadows of the sprawling Grünheide factory. As sales have declined, the factory has suffered. Shifts manufacturing the Y-Model have been reduced from three to two a day. The trade union IG Metall – which recruited several hundred workers despite opposition from Tesla – has urged the company to consider putting workers on 'kurzzeit', the short-time work allowance much of the embattled car industry has introduced to enable it to retain workers during a downturn. The regional press has reported how unsold Teslas have been moved on transporters en masse to a former East German airport 60km (37 miles) away, where, hidden behind trees and parked alongside solar panels, they bake in the sun. Musk's apparent Nazi salute was in general met with shock and horror in Germany but did not play large in Grünheide, until campaign groups projected an image of it on to the facade of the Tesla factory, provocatively placing the Nazi-associated word 'heil' in front of the Tesla logo. The shock caused by the incident was palpable on the factory floor, workers told the tabloid Berliner Kurier. 'At Tesla Germany they had pretended they had nothing to do with (Musk) and were keeping quiet,' it wrote. Now they could no longer ignore their association. Workers are hard to reach, most having been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). But on Kununu, a job portal where employees can anonymously vent their feelings about their workplace, one Tesla worker has written: 'The brand once stood for cosmopolitanism, progress, and tolerance, but now it stands for the exact opposite. That bothers almost everyone here, and you can feel it'. Almut, a resident of Grünheide, said local politicians were keen to cite the benefits Tesla had brought to the region, but 'neglect to mention at the same time the problematic reality that we are subsidising the richest man in the world, who in no way takes any social responsibility for what happens here'. She said local people joke among themselves about what might take the place of the factory, should Tesla fail. 'A munitions factory? A prison? In some ways these would seem like favourable alternatives,' she said. The only positive contribution as she saw it that Tesla had contributed to Grünheide was a robotic lawn mower it had donated to the local football club. Two weeks before the salute, Musk had followed his endorsement of the AfD in the German federal elections with an hour-long conversation with the anti-immigrant party's co-leader, Alice Weidel. The two discussed topics including Hitler, solar power and German bureaucracy, which Musk said had required Tesla to submit forms running to 25,000 pages in order to build the Grünheide factory. Unmentioned was the fact that the AfD had vehemently opposed the Tesla factory, citing its fears over US-driven turbo capitalism and a watering down of workers' rights. 'People really need to get behind the AfD,' Musk said. For Grünheide's residents who oppose Musk, their preoccupation remains the impact of the factory on their rural community, which is characterised by its woodlands, lakes and rivers. New cycle lanes and roads have required the felling of large swathes of pine forest, threatening the already perilous supplies of drinking water in a region declared a drought zone, the driest anywhere in Germany. The 300-hectare (740 acre) large factory complex itself is due to be expanded in the near future by a further 100 hectares, under plans signed off by Grünheide's mayor despite a local referendum in which 62% expressed their opposition. Supporters point to the 11,000 jobs the factory has created, and the boost it has given to the local economy in a region of the former communist east and which was one of the lowest-performing in the country. Some young people enthuse that the trains to Berlin now run more regularly, the supermarkets are better stocked, and that their home town is now on the map as a beacon of 'green capitalism' alongside Shanghai, Nevada and Austin, locations of the other Tesla factories. They hanker for an invitation to the 'rave cave' techno dance space Musk has allegedly constructed within the factory complex. The recruitment page of the factory's website – which emphasises that diversity is at the core of its business model – shows a lengthy list of positions needing to be filled, from shift managers to maintenance technicians. Nevertheless, the mood has cooled even among those who used to enthusiastically speak out in favour of Tesla, such as a group of local teenage schoolboys who habitually flew drones over the site when the factory was under construction and proudly posted them on YouTube – until Musk asked them to stop. 'Nobody is willing to speak publicly about Tesla/Elon any more … even anonymously,' one told the Guardian via text message, without elaborating. There was no response to a request for an interview with the company or for access to the factory. Arne Christiani, the mayor of Grünheide and an unwavering Musk enthusiast, said he was confident Tesla would stay in Grünheide and would thrive. He was unmoved, he said, by what Musk said or did. 'You have to distinguish between what happens in the US and here in Grünheide,' he said. Hoyer, who lives 9km from the factory, said she had not relinquished her dream of one day being able to see a starry sky from her garden again. 'Since the factory was built the light pollution from the round-the-clock operation has put paid to that,' she said, showing before and after pictures on her mobile phone.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Automotive
- The Guardian
Musk's giant Tesla factory casts shadow on lives in a quiet corner of Germany
When Elon Musk advised Germans to vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in elections last year, Manu Hoyer – who lives in the small town where the billionaire had built Tesla's European production hub – wrote to the state premier to complain. 'How can you do business with someone who supports rightwing extremism?' she asked Dietmar Woidke, the Social Democrat leader of the eastern state of Brandenburg, who had backed the setting up of the Tesla Giga factory in Grünheide. Hoyer said that in Woidke's 'disappointing, but predictable' answer, he denied the charge. 'He said he didn't know him personally. As if that excused him.' She had co-founded a Citizens' Initiative to oppose Musk's plans, announced in 2019, to build in the sparsely populated municipality in the sandy plains south-west of Berlin. The initiative's fears at the time were largely over the potential environmental impact of the plant on the region's pine forests and groundwater. However, more recently it is Musk's politics that have caused particular alarm. Not only has he offered his high-profile support to far-right European parties, but at a rally after Donald Trump's inauguration he appeared to twice make the Nazi salute. In the meantime Tesla sales have slumped, especially in Europe – where new vehicle sales fell for five consecutive months despite an overall growth in the electric car market. Heiko Baschin, another member of the citizen's initiative, said he had been watching with a certain amount of schadenfreude. 'We put our hopes in this,' the carpenter said, discussing the change in the company's fortunes on a recent forest walk in the shadows of the sprawling Grünheide factory. As sales have declined, the factory has suffered. Shifts manufacturing the Y-Model have been reduced from three to two a day. The trade union IG Metall – which recruited several hundred workers despite opposition from Tesla – has urged the company to consider putting workers on 'kurzzeit', the short-time work allowance much of the embattled car industry has introduced to enable it to retain workers during a downturn. The regional press has reported how unsold Teslas have been moved on transporters en masse to a former East German airport 60km (37 miles) away, where, hidden behind trees and parked alongside solar panels, they bake in the sun. Musk's apparent Nazi salute was in general met with shock and horror in Germany but did not play large in Grünheide, until campaign groups projected an image of it on to the facade of the Tesla factory, provocatively placing the Nazi-associated word 'heil' in front of the Tesla logo. The shock caused by the incident was palpable on the factory floor, workers told the tabloid Berliner Kurier. 'At Tesla Germany they had pretended they had nothing to do with (Musk) and were keeping quiet,' it wrote. Now they could no longer ignore their association. Workers are hard to reach, most having been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). But on Kununu, a job portal where employees can anonymously vent their feelings about their workplace, one Tesla worker has written: 'The brand once stood for cosmopolitanism, progress, and tolerance, but now it stands for the exact opposite. That bothers almost everyone here, and you can feel it'. Almut, a resident of Grünheide, said local politicians were keen to cite the benefits Tesla had brought to the region, but 'neglect to mention at the same time the problematic reality that we are subsidising the richest man in the world, who in no way takes any social responsibility for what happens here'. She said local people joke among themselves about what might take the place of the factory, should Tesla fail. 'A munitions factory? A prison? In some ways these would seem like favourable alternatives,' she said. The only positive contribution as she saw it that Tesla had contributed to Grünheide was a robotic lawn mower it had donated to the local football club. Two weeks before the salute, Musk had followed his endorsement of the AfD in the German federal elections with an hour-long conversation with the anti-immigrant party's co-leader, Alice Weidel. The two discussed topics including Hitler, solar power and German bureaucracy, which Musk said had required Tesla to submit forms running to 25,000 pages in order to build the Grünheide factory. Unmentioned was the fact that the AfD had vehemently opposed the Tesla factory, citing its fears over US-driven turbo capitalism and a watering down of workers' rights. 'People really need to get behind the AfD,' Musk said. For Grünheide's residents who oppose Musk, their preoccupation remains the impact of the factory on their rural community, which is characterised by its woodlands, lakes and rivers. New cycle lanes and roads have required the felling of large swathes of pine forest, threatening the already perilous supplies of drinking water in a region declared a drought zone, the driest anywhere in Germany. The 300-hectare (740 acre) large factory complex itself is due to be expanded in the near future by a further 100 hectares, under plans signed off by Grünheide's mayor despite a local referendum in which 62% expressed their opposition. Supporters point to the 11,000 jobs the factory has created, and the boost it has given to the local economy in a region of the former communist east and which was one of the lowest-performing in the country. Some young people enthuse that the trains to Berlin now run more regularly, the supermarkets are better stocked, and that their home town is now on the map as a beacon of 'green capitalism' alongside Shanghai, Nevada and Austin, locations of the other Tesla factories. They hanker for an invitation to the 'rave cave' techno dance space Musk has allegedly constructed within the factory complex. The recruitment page of the factory's website – which emphasises that diversity is at the core of its business model – shows a lengthy list of positions needing to be filled, from shift managers to maintenance technicians. Nevertheless, the mood has cooled even among those who used to enthusiastically speak out in favour of Tesla, such as a group of local teenage schoolboys who habitually flew drones over the site when the factory was under construction and proudly posted them on YouTube – until Musk asked them to stop. 'Nobody is willing to speak publicly about Tesla/Elon any more … even anonymously,' one told the Guardian via text message, without elaborating. There was no response to a request for an interview with the company or for access to the factory. Arne Christiani, the mayor of Grünheide and an unwavering Musk enthusiast, said he was confident Tesla would stay in Grünheide and would thrive. He was unmoved, he said, by what Musk said or did. 'You have to distinguish between what happens in the US and here in Grünheide,' he said. Hoyer, who lives 9km from the factory, said she had not relinquished her dream of one day being able to see a starry sky from her garden again. 'Since the factory was built the light pollution from the round-the-clock operation has put paid to that,' she said, showing before and after pictures on her mobile phone.
The Star
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
30 years of the MP3: The story of a breakthrough that changed music
ERLANGEN: It turns out the invention of the MP3 format was a combination of vision, overtime and stubbornness – as well as a good dose of luck. Thirty years ago, on July 14, 1995, a new file format called MP3 emerged, aiming no less than to revolutionise the world of music listening and the music business with it. On that day, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in the southern German city of Erlangen decided to give their audio compression invention the file extension ".mp3". Now, audio streaming from similar audio files is everywhere. But 30 years ago, it was the compression technology invented in Erlangen that first made it possible to listen to music on the Internet. The origins of the MP3 project date back to 1982. At the time, the goal was to make music files small enough to transmit in decent quality over a digital telephone line (ISDN). Karlheinz Brandenburg had made this seemingly unsolvable task the subject of his doctoral thesis when he was an electronics student in Erlangen. Used by billions of people Brandenburg was initially unsure about the significance of his research, as one statement from him in 1988 reflects: "Either my dissertation will gather dust in the library, or the technology will become a standard used by millions of people." In fact, the "MPEG Layer-3" (MP3) standard, which he played a key role in developing, has influenced the listening experience of billions of music fans. The development work by Brandenburg and other researchers was intended not only to fundamentally renew broadcasting technology but also to mark the beginning of the end for CDs in the music industry. The success continues to this day: Whether in streaming, digital radio, digital television or video calls like Apple's FaceTime – a form of MP3's successor, AAC, is used everywhere. How does MP3 work? But how was it even possible to significantly reduce the size of music files without making them sound noticeably worse to the human ear? The researchers in Erlangen exploited the fact that the human ear does not perceive many details in music or other complex sounds. Some tones are too quiet or are masked by louder tones. For example, an alarm clock continues to tick even when it rings, but the ticking is no longer heard. When converting to an MP3 file, precisely those parts of the music that humans probably would not hear anyway are removed or simplified. Only what is important for human hearing is retained. A music file can thus shrink to about one-tenth of its original size without the sound becoming noticeably worse for most people. However, music purists, such as Canadian singer Neil Young, dispute this. Newer versions hardly distinguishable from analogue sound MP3 co-inventor Brandenburg can still somewhat understand the criticism of the original MP3. However, he said that the new MP3 codecs, such as AAC, are now so good at higher data rates that the human ear can't distinguish them from analogue sound, such as those from vinyl records. This has also been proven by blind tests with trained listeners. However, it took countless hours of experimentation before the sound of an MP3 file could even remotely compete with that of a CD or vinyl record in the 1990s. Ironically, a record shop in Erlangen was the first to benefit from MP3 research. Brandenburg would bought dozens of records from here. "Simple pieces, complex pieces, music from all genres across the board," Brandenburg recalled in a 2020 newspaper interview. "We didn't know what would work and, more importantly, what wouldn't." As Brandenburg was nearing the completion of his doctoral thesis, he read in an audio trade magazine that the song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was often used for sound tests in the hi-fi trade. A colleague quickly got the CD. Experiments with an a cappella version of the song from 1982 were initially sobering: the first attempt with "Tom's Diner" reportedly sounded "as if someone was scratching at your left and right ear," Brandenburg said when the New York singer visited the institute in Erlangen in 2007. The inventor was not deterred by the setback. He listened to the song thousands of times to continuously improve the MP3 algorithm. One solution was to transmit the lower frequencies very precisely – much more so than the higher tones, where storage space could be saved. A cybercriminal aids the breakthrough After the official naming, the format initially took off slowly. The Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen had actually planned to license the software for converting to MP3 to interested entertainment companies. However, a young cybercriminal thwarted this plan: in 1997, an Australian student used a stolen credit card number to purchase the encoder software and made the programme freely available online. Word spread quickly. "Ripping" CDs – converting them into MP3 files – became a popular pastime. The online file-sharing platform Napster caused significant damage to the music industry and artists from 1999 onwards. The software allowed millions of users to easily and freely share their MP3 files with one another. The idea was simple: Napster searched users' hard drives for MP3 files and then facilitated direct exchanges between computers via the Internet. Entire record collections could suddenly be swapped with just a few clicks. Napster effectively made the MP3 format the standard for digital music overnight and ensured its worldwide adoption. Napster not only changed how people consumed music but also forced the music industry to engage with digital distribution channels. The platform demonstrated how simple and appealing the exchange of music in MP3 format could be, paving the way for later legal music services and the digitisation of the entire industry. With the success of the iPod (2001), the iTunes Music Store from 2003 and legal streaming services like Spotify from 2008, the music industry slowly recovered. Who profited financially from MP3? With the emergence of legal MP3 usage scenarios, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) also began to generate revenue. Brandenburg estimates that his then-employer earned €50 to €100 million annually in fees from manufacturers of MP3 players, music platforms and other licensees until the last MP3 patent in the United States expired in 2017. Overall, all technologies surrounding MP3 are said to have generated at least half a billion to €1bil (RM4.9bil) in revenue. Fraunhofer IIS stated that marketing over the entire patent period generated "revenues in the high hundreds of millions." However, the real big business was not made by Fraunhofer but by the commercial users of MP3 technology, including manufacturers of MP3 players such as Apple, Sony, SanDisk, Creative, iRiver and Archos. Apple alone is estimated to have generated US$60 to US$70bil (RM255bil to RM298bil) in revenue and at least US$15bil (RM63.9bil) in profit from the iPod between 2001 and the discontinuation of the product line in 2022. To this day, the iPhone still includes a note that the audio coding technology MPEG Layer-3 was licensed from the Fraunhofer IIS. – dpa
