Annette Schavan could become second senior German politician to be stripped of doctorate

The “world’s most powerful woman” first staked her claim to greatness in 1999, with the publication of an open letter in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It called for the Christian Democrats to reject Helmut Kohl, the retired chancellor and her former mentor, and in doing so paved the way for Angela Merkel’s eventual election as party leader.

Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor and human-rights activist from the former East Germany, was elected President yesterday.

Wulff stands down after criminal investigation begins over charges of improper favours

It was Xabi Alonso who said it first on Saturday evening, although undoubtedly on the 15-hour flight to Costa Rica that the Spanish team were due to take it would be repeated a few more times too. "I wouldn't be surprised," Alonso said, "if England played the same way against us if we meet them at the Euros."

Talking Football: What is wrong with a strategy of containment? What is wrong with being a version of Greece in 2004?

German police yesterday arrested a suspected member of a neo-Nazi terrorist gang held responsible for a hitherto unexplained series of murders and bomb attacks in which a policewoman and nine immigrant kebab stall owners were killed.

Bernie Ecclestone defiant over UK civil action as $44m bribery trial continues in Germany

Borussia Dortmund's Mario Götze, Mats Hummels and Marcel Schmelzer, Bayern Munich's Thomas Müller, Toni Kroos and Holger Badstuber, plus Bayer Leverkusen duo André Schürrle and Lars Bender - there's no shortage of exciting German talent at the disposal of the Bundesliga's biggest names.

More now on the Cad and the Dandy's contest to find the City's best-dressed financial services professional, which we featured earlier this week.

Paul di Resta and Adrian Sutil head into this weekend's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix still sweating on their futures as a promised answer from Force India owner Vijay Mallya has yet to materialise.

Early in his new novel, Umberto Eco has his troubled and troubling Italian protagonist, Captain Simonini, habitué of the lower depths and grub streets of belle époque Paris, meet a certain Dr Froïde. The doctor belongs to a race Simonini is less than sympathetic to. Our anti-hero dreams about Jews nightly. They are at the very top of an obsessive hate-list on which Germans, Jesuits, Masons, French, Communists, Italians and, ever since he was rejected as a teenager, women appear in fulminating order.

The Formula One boss, Bernie Ecclestone, admitted yesterday to paying a Munich banker £27.5m to stop him from making allegations about a family trust to the Inland Revenue which he claimed could have made him liable for billions in back tax.

After 13 years of planning and two years of construction, the gas started flowing yesterday along the Nord Stream pipeline that will deliver Russian gas to an estimated 26 million EU homes.