Tag Archives: German

Germany’s first hobby horsing championship will gallop through Frankfurt this weekend, with hundreds of young riders competing in time jumping, style jumping and dressage on their wooden stick horses.

Roughly 300 riders — mostly youngsters, but there are about 20 adults enrolled — are expected to canter around a gymnasium on Saturday and Sunday, watched by 1,500 spectators.

The competition is part of a growing wave of hobby horsing events internationally: the US and Australia also held their first championships this year.

The events stemmed from a grassroots movement in Finland, where riders trotted their hobby horses through Nordic forests more than 20 years ago.

The pastime has since exploded…

By Emma-Victoria Farr

LONDON (Reuters) – Private equity firm Oakley is looking to sell its majority stake in German cloud hosting platform Contabo as it seeks to capitalise on demand for cloud computing fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, two people familiar with the situation said.

The Munich-based company could be valued at between 700 million euros and 800 million euros ($762.6 million and $871.5 million ) as part of an auction process expected after the Easter break, those people said.

London-based advisory firm Arma Partners is handling the sale, which is mainly focusing on private equity bidders, one of the people said.

The company has already drawn interest from several tech-focused buyout funds including Hg, Montagu, Vitruvian, Cinven and IK Partners, another source said.

Oakley, Arma…

A photo showing flames and smoke coming from a ship has been shared on social media with the caption “German warship retreats from Yemen after unsuccessful mission.”

But this is an old photo and does not show a ship anywhere near Yemen.

The picture is actually a screenshot from a video of an explosion on a German warship caused by a misfired missile during a training exercise off the coast of Norway in 2018. Two German sailors reportedly suffered minor injuries and an image of the aftermath shared by the German navy showed part of the damage done to the ship.

A German warship did reportedly leave the Red Sea (which is off the coast of Yemen) in April 2024, after it was deployed there in February as part of an EU mission to protect ships from attacks by Houthi…

German police claim to have disrupted the country’s most popular underground market for drugs and cybercrime.

Düsseldorf police said it had been collecting evidence “for years” about Crimemarket: an online marketplace where users traded drugs, weapons and illicit services such as money laundering and cybercrime.

The police said late last week that Crimemarket had over 180,000 registered users and could be accessed via both the dark web and freely via the publicly accessible surface web (“clearnet”).

“On Thursday, February 29, 2024, a total of 102 search warrants were executed nationwide at the same time in the evening,” a police notice read.

“The local focus of the measures was primarily in North Rhine-Westphalia with 36 search objects. A total of three people were…

An old myth that a German court ruled the measles virus does not exist has been spreading again on Facebook.

In particular, many posts have shared a screenshot of an article saying “the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) confirmed in a recent ruling that measles virus do not exist” [sic].

This is not true, as other fact checkers have said before.

The article, which appears to originate on an activist website, concerns the case of Dr Stefan Lanka, who in 2011 offered a reward for proof that the measles virus existed.

Dr Lanka said (when translated by Google): “The prize money will be paid if a scientific publication is submitted in which the existence of the measles virus is not only claimed, but also proven and, among other things, its diameter is…