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A truck has ploughed into a Christmas market in western Berlin injuring several people, local media reported, citing police. “Police confirm that a truck ploughed into a Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin-Charlottenburg,” local newspaper Berlin Zeitung stated.

A truck ploughed into a crowded Christmas market in the German capital Berlin on Monday evening, killing nine people and injuring up to 50 others. According to local police, the first indications pointed to a terrorist attack on the market, situated at the foot of the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church.

On Wednesday a Syrian teenager reported she had been kicked off Berlin public transport for wearing a headscarf. It now appears that was a misunderstanding. The 14-year-old had told authorities that the bus driver had refused to leave the tram stop, instead announcing over the loudspeaker that he would not drive anyone wearing a headscarf. […] But the Berlin Transport Company (BVG) say that after reviewing video footage, they believe that the driver asked her to leave the tram because she was eating a Döner kebab, something which is against their regulations, the Berliner Morgenpost reports. …

A 14-year-old from Syria has reported a Berlin tram driver to police, claiming he told her to get off the vehicle because she was wearing a headscarf. The incident took place in the southeastern neighborhood of Friedrichshagen on Tuesday, according to the police report. The teen got onto the tram shortly after 2 pm, intending to ride to the nearest S-Bahn stop. But the driver announced over the loudspeaker that she should get out of the vehicle, saying he would not drive anyone who wears a headscarf, the girl told police. According to her account, she did not receive support...

German mail service DHL said that it had not made certain personal deliveries through its express service to the Berlin district of Wedding due to fraud and attacks on their carriers, but tamped down reports of “no-go” areas. A DHL spokesman told news agency DPA on Wednesday that the company has asked certain people who live in the Wedding neighborhood to pick up their packages at a DHL Express station in Wilmersdorf instead, noting that this policy has only been applied in a few isolated cases. The spokesman further explained that DHL will ask recipients in the future to also...

President Obama said Thursday in Berlin that he would not encourage Americans marching in protest of President-elect Trump's victory to stop their demonstrations. "I wouldn't advise them to be silent," Obama said of "people who feel strongly or are concerned" about Trump's campaign rhetoric.

German police launched an investigation Thursday after the addresses of Jewish institutions were published on Facebook by neo-Nazis on the anniversary of the 1938 pogroms against Jews. […] The Facebook post had the caption “Jews among us!” and showed a map with addresses of nearly 70 synagogues, day care centers, schools, monuments, businesses, restaurants and graveyards, Tagesspiegel reported on Wednesday. […] One of the addresses listed was Berlin’s Holocaust memorial — formally known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. …

German federal prosecutors said Thursday they had brought charges against a 19-year-old Syrian man accused of having scouted targets in Berlin for a potential attack by the ISIS terror group. The man identified only as Shaas Al-M. allegedly joined the jihadist group in 2013 and took part in various military operations in Syria, they said in a statement. Prosecutors declined to tell AFP when and how the suspect entered Germany last year, which in 2015 took in nearly 900,000 asylum seekers, around 40 percent of them from war-ravaged Syria. …

The White House announced on Tuesday that US President Barack Obama will be paying one last unexpected visit to the German capital — his last before he leaves office. Obama is now set to stop by Berlin on November 16th, after the divisive US national election takes place on November 8th and following a trip to Athens. But the trip will be short, as two days later he will head to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, Peru. …

Russian President Vladimir Putin is to arrive in Berlin on Wednesday as part of a summit hosted by Chancellor Angela Merkel on the Ukraine conflict. Merkel’s spokesperson Steffen Seibert announced on Tuesday that Putin would arrive for the summit alongside President François Hollande of France and Petro Poroshenko, the leader of Ukraine. It will be Putin’s first visit to Berlin since Russia annexed the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, leading to EU sanctions against Moscow. Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine will hold the summit in Berlin on Wednesday to “evaluate the implementation” of the Minsk peace accords for Ukraine, the...

Berliners have reacted with disbelief after the mayor’s head spokeswoman was placed on a temporary retirement plan of €6,385 per month — and at the ripe old age of 37. […] City officials said on Tuesday that Berlin mayor Michael Müller’s former head spokeswoman Daniela Augenstein had been placed on temporary retirement, just two days after the Berlin election. Because she held a position as state secretary, Augenstein is entitled to be paid her full salary for the next three months, which the Berlin interior department told Spiegel Online would be “around €8,906” per month. …

Chancellor Angela Merkel faces new gains by the anti-migrant AfD party in Berlin state elections on Sunday, as a wave of protest voting against her welcome to refugees is expected to hit the hip, multicultural capital. […] Fresh gains in long-divided Berlin — where the AfD has polled 14 percent, a year ahead of national elections — would spell another setback for Merkel, whose open-door policy brought one million asylum-seekers to Germany last year. […] A strong showing for the AfD — which was founded, originally as a euroskeptic fringe party, just over three years ago — would hurt all...

Islamophobia has been on the rise in Germany ever since a million refugees descended on the country last year. Now, with state elections looming in Berlin, a mosque in the city is trying to mobilize the Muslim vote. On a recent Friday evening, Mohamed Tahi Sabri ascended the tall wooden minbar in the Dar-as-Salam mosque in Berlin’s immigrant-heavy Neukölln district and implored 1,500 of his fellow believers to do something that may seem counterintuitive to many Muslims living here: vote in upcoming elections. […] “You’ve got these movements like Pegida and the AfD, a party that vilifies Islam in its...

Traditional parties are starting to get nervous about the upcoming Berlin state parliament election as the upstart far-right AfD party has been gaining support. A poll by broadcaster ARD and research group Infratest dimap released on Thursday evening showed that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could gain 15 percent of the vote in the upcoming Berlin state parliament elections set for September 18th. The AfD’s support in Berlin has been hovering around 15 percent in the Infratest dimap polls since April. The current reigning Social Democrats (SPD) got just 21 percent in the poll, followed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s...

The trend of underage migrant girls entering Germany married to older men is on the rise, with the city of Berlin recording 100 child marriages this year alone. While the majority of underage migrants flowing into Germany are young boys, underage girls tend to come as ‘child brides’ to older migrant men who are more often adults. In the German capital of Berlin a new report claims that the local government has registered around 100 child marriages and the trend shows little signs of slowing down, reports broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party member and Berlin Senator for...

Much like the Swedish government, a German youth group has had enough of the mass migration of mostly Muslim refugees flooding into their country. But while the Swedes began to change their mind for financial reasons, the German youth group is standing up to keep Germany, well, German. According to Reuters:

Since its reunification in 1990, Berlin has developed into a thriving, cosmopolitan centre. Dubbed "poor but sexy" by its former mayor, it has attracted creative types like moths to a flame with its low rents and exploding startup scene. Tourists flock to this grungy vibe too, with nearly six million visiting in the first six months of this year alone. But the reality is that the city is struggling with poverty, unemployment, poor infrastructure, a floundering education system, debt, the refugee crisis and crime. Its chronic problems led national newspaper Die Welt to label it a “failed state” in 2014....

A gay couple will make history as they become the first homosexual couple to be “married” in a Protestant church in Berlin on Friday, reports the Berliner Zeitung. Having been together for fourteen years, civil partners Sven Kretschmer and Tim Kretschmer-Schmidt are finally going to get “married”, at least in the eyes of the Protestant church. […] In 2002, the Protestant church made it possible for gay couples to receive a blessing. However, the “classical” church marriage service remained a privilege reserved for heterosexual couples only. Recently though, the Synods in the Rhineland, Hesse-Nassau, and Baden pioneered further change when...

French filmaker Claude Lanzmann has claimed that a luxury hotel in Berlin deliberately leaves the Israeli dialing code out of its directory for the sake of its Arab clients. On Tuesday, filmmaker Lanzmann was staying in a hotel belonging to the Kempinski group near Kurfürstendamm in the west of the capital. The Jewish director who shot the 1985 documentary “Shoah” leafed through the services offered by the hotel. Whilst looking up the international dialing codes, he noticed that the Israeli code did not appear in the hotel list. …

After 15-plus years in business, predominantly with industry leaders in the UK and Sweden, I recently ventured into the world of Berlin startups — the land of flat hierarchies, table football, internships and copycat business models. I expected a vibrant, exciting startup scene that mirrored the incredible city I chose to move to from Stockholm. Were the rumors true? Is Berlin Europe’s startup capital? A veteran German businessman told me in my first week that “some companies here aren’t even real companies” — I wasn’t even sure what that meant! But I quickly learned that the thriving “Silicon Allee” scene...