Its last mine is about to close.

In Germany, strict recycling laws are widely praised. But success masks a dark truth.

The German state of Hesse has ruled it's illegal for its schools to use Microsoft's Windows 10 and Office 365 citing "privacy concerns."

For almost 30 years they passed as quirky eccentrics, diligently setting up their insect traps in the Rhine countryside to collect tens of millions of bugs and creepy crawlers.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. By Cory Doctorow.

Germany becomes the first country in the world to criminalise the boycott, disinvest and sanction movement. Shir Hever, TRNN correspondent in Germany and expert on Palestine-Israel, responds in this conversation.

A wild raccoon has moved into Heidelberg Zoo in Germany and keepers can’t kick him out. German daily Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung reported Friday that zoo staff recently discovered the uninvited guest inside the raccoon enclosure, where he seemed to be getting along fine with the seven original residents.

Germany is joining the ranks of those countries betting on "electric highways" to foster eco-friendly trucking. The country has started real-world tests of an eHighway system on a 3.1-mile stretch of the Autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, with an electric-diesel hybrid truck merging into everyday traffic while it received power from overhead cables to keep it from using its combustion engine. Earlier tests in the country relied on either slow nighttime tests or the safety of an unused military airfield.

Trucks are guzzling ever more diesel, polluting towns and cities and fueling climate change. Germany thinks it may have found the answer by using overhead lines to power big rigs. A system that allows trucks to draw electric power from overhead cables went into operation on 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of the autobahn on Tuesday, according to the German government.

Frumpy

German parents who fail to vaccinate their children against measles could face fines of up to €2,500 ($2,800), as part of draft legislation from the country's health minister.

Parents who do not get measles vaccinations for their children could be fine thousands of Euros, under new plans being drawn up in Germany. Health minister Jens Spahn has drawn up draft legislation which would also see children excluded from nursery and daycare facilities. His initiative comes amid a highly charged debate in the country about whether the measles vaccine should be obligatory.

The mysterious cube arrived in the summer of 2013. Physicist Timothy Koeth had agreed to go to a parking lot for an unspecified delivery. Inside a blue cloth sack, swathed in paper towels, he found a small chunk of uranium. It was about 5 centimeters across, with “a white piece of paper wrapped around it, like a ransom note on a stone,” Koeth says. On the paper was a message: “Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.”

The wolf is “dangerous” and “breeds explosively.” The way some politicians talk about wolves sounds a lot like the way they talk about immigrants.

Virtually all the Nigerian women forced into prostitution in Germany were bound to their madams through a bizarre voodoo curse. One year ago, the spiritual leader Oba Ewuare II issued a countercurse in the hope of putting a stop to human-trafficking in the region. Has it helped? A visual story by Alexander Epp and Olaf Heuser.

Parents get to decide whether their children take part in religion classes, part of the school curriculum in Germany. But if they don't participate, their kids may suffer consequences, even with the law on their side.

According to PETA, the farmer shut down ahead of the 2022 deadline as he was struggling under government pressure and frequent, unannounced inspections. He said he also felt the weight of activist pressures — PETA has been campaigning strongly in the country for more than two decades. Germany banned fur farming in 2017 — the country gave farmers a five-year transition period to fully phase out of the industry. PETA credits its heavy campaigning efforts, petitions, protests, and anti-fur ads for helping push the legislation through into law.

Thousands of German youths went on strike from school on Friday, joining Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg who has taken her protest against climate change to Berlin. Armed with homemade posters bearing slogans like "It's getting hot in here" or "Our house is on fire" or "You're never too small to make a difference", the teenagers packed into a park in central Berlin to sound the alarm about global warming.

After reaching 65% renewables earlier this month, Germany soared past that to 72.4 per cent last week, with wind power accounting for most of it.

A Polish-Italian alliance may counteract the Franco-German driving force for European integration.