Category: Finance

British Prime Minister David Cameron wants to educate the British to be more health-conscious. Fat people, junkies and drinkers are feeling the pinch.

David Cameron is campaigning at the expense of the sick. Picture: reuters

Anyone who eats and drinks too much or uses drugs and is therefore unable to work should no longer receive aid money. That is the election promise of British Prime Minister David Cameron. Around 100,000 people are affected, 56,000 of them alcoholics and almost 34,000 drug addicts. The rest are obese people. Each of them gets about 100 pounds a week without having to undergo therapy.

Maria Schrader tells the love story between the exiled writer Stefan Zweig and Europe in a few exemplary excerpts.

Europe, where are you? Photo: X Verleih

You can almost smell the lush flowers on the dining table, around which servants scurry, busily polishing cutlery and straightening plates. Finally, the buzz of voices from the next room grows louder. The doors open and the gala dinner can begin.

The fee dispute is not about 86 cents. The AfD and the right wing of the CDU want to weaken a supposedly left-green broadcasting.

Cover letter of the dispute Photo: Hendrik Schmidt/dpa

It’s not about the 86 cents. CDU Secretary General Paul Ziemiak is setting a false trail when he describes the coalition crisis in Saxony-Anhalt as a dispute over a "sober factual issue." What is really at stake was clearly stated in an interview by the ousted Interior Minister Holger Stahlknecht. The right wing of the state CDU is fighting back against the alleged moral apostasy of an intellectual, naturally left-green minority, against gender language and political correctness.

Bremen Senate is not irritated by critical questions: The offshore terminal is to come. BUND wants to take legal action against port construction.

Components for the Alpha Ventus offshore wind farm being shipped. Photo: Ingo Wagner (dpa)

"Only an offshore terminal can justify the major intervention in nature," Green environmentalist Anne Schierenbeck stressed in the parliamentary debate on the planned offshore terminal in Bremerhaven (OTB). This must become a "port for renewable energies," she said. Of course there are risks, she said: "We all don’t know what the future holds," but it’s also clear: "The energy turnaround is coming, and the expansion is only just getting underway."

"Dicker als Wasser" tells a harebrained story about a dead nightclub owner and a gangster father. The only bright spot is Armin Rohde.

Dinner with commissioner: Ralf Trimborn (Armin Rohde, left) and Freddy Schenk (Dietmar Bar). Image: WDR/Uwe Stratmann

Even when Freddy Schenk, at that point the film is only three minutes old, is handcuffed to a streetlight at night by two milksops with his own handcuffs, it’s clear: things aren’t going so well for him. In general, the Cologne "Tatort" episode "Dicker als Wasser" is full of worms, and not just between the commissioners Schenk and Ballauf.

What controls the sleep-wake rhythm? Three American scientists receive the prestigious prize for their findings on the internal clock.

To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question Photo: dpa

Three U.S. geneticists Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research on the internal clock of humans and other living creatures. The three scientists have discovered molecular mechanisms that control the sleep-wake rhythm, the Nobel committee said Monday in Stockholm. Hall, Rosbash and Young share prize money of nine million Swedish kronor (about 940,000 euros).

The Cologne store "The Good Food" sells what is discarded elsewhere or left behind during the harvest. On the road with the food rescuers.

Successful post-harvest: Nicole Klaski, Alica Humm and Leonie Grob in the field Photo: Thekla Ehling

In the drizzle, three women trudge across a harvested leek field. It doesn’t take long before one of them gets stuck in the muddy ground with her thick hiking boots. Nicole Klaski records this with her smartphone, laughing. The 37-year-old is the founder of The Good Food, a store with two branches in Cologne that sells only rescued food: expired spreads, baked goods from the day before, crooked vegetables and fruit with bruises. All food that would find no place in a normal supermarket.

DGB chairwoman Doro Zinke likes it practical: when companies like delivery services fail to pay the minimum wage, she draws consequences.

It’s often a lot of stairs they have to climb: Food delivery driver at work in Berlin Photo: dpa

site: Ms. Zinke, do I create valuable jobs when I order from delivery services like Deliveroo and Foodora?

The Nativity scene is about the struggle between good and evil. In Naples, each crib maker tells his or her own Christmas story.

In a workshop on the San Gregorio Armeno Photo: Victor Sokolowicz

The devil is in the details. But sometimes he squats in the Christmas idyll. In the art cribs of the Scuotto siblings, he waits, snarling, to thwart the birth of the light child. Once upon a time, the devil is said to have been part of the permanent staff of the Neapolitan nativity scene. Today, he has disappeared. "We take the artistic liberty of bringing him back to life," explains Salvatore Scuotto. Because the Nativity scene is always about the struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between dark and light, he says. In the Scuottos’ store, misshapen freaks and other unseen figures stand in the display case alongside wing-beating angels.

U.S. special envoy prevents Afghanistan from splitting in two politically. Peace negotiations with the Taliban begin in March.

Abdullah Abdullah, here at a press conference, does not recognize the election results Photo: Rahmat Gul/ap

This Thursday, incumbent Mohammed Ashraf Ghani was actually scheduled to be sworn in for a second term as Afghanistan’s president in Kabul. Kabul’s streets were already flagged. On Tuesday of last week, the election commission had declared the 70-year-old Pashtun from Logar province, an anthropologist, ex-World Bank employee and finance minister, the winner with 50.64 percent of the vote.