Germany's national soccer club, favored by many to win this year's World Cup, is not messing around with their accommodations for next June's tournament. Dissatisfied with Brazil's hotel inventory, the team has decided to instead build a new beach resort as their home base. Financed by a Munich entrepreneur, "Campo Bahia" will have 14 two-story homes for players and team officials, a soccer field, and a media center by the time it finishes construction this spring. It'll be the first time the squad will have its own World Cup facility built from scratch, according to Der Spiegel.

Friends, relatives and business associates of Tajikistan's president are driving around in cars stolen off Germany's streets, according to the German government. German authorities have been attempting to raise the issue with Tajik officials since at least May, they confirmed Thursday after a German tabloid broke the story.

Patterns of global migration and remittances have shifted in recent decades, even as both the number of immigrants and the amount of money they send home have grown, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the United Nations and the World Bank. A rising share of international migrants now lives in today’s high-income countries such as the United States and Germany, while a growing share was born in today’s middle-income nations such as India and Mexico, the analysis finds.

After the recent deal on Iran's nuclear program was concluded, Catherine Ashton, who is in charge of EU's foreign policy, was commended for her constructive role as coordinator and moderator of the tough negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. According to many observers, Ashton's performance had kept Brussels in the game and that is quite an achievement for someone who has to conduct policy on behalf of 28 EU member states with often fundamentally different objectives.

Unsurprisingly, the news that the NSA has been monitoring the calls of dozens of world leaders hasn't gone down particularly well with any of those world leaders. In fact, after suspecting that the US might have been snooping on her communications, last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel rang up Obama herself to demand some answers. A couple of days later, it emerged that her phone has potentially been monitored for more than a decade by the supposedly friendly American government.

Germany is paraphrasing Ricky Ricardo today: America's "got some 'splainin' to do." The German Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador in Berlin Thursday and told him Germany wants an honest and full explanation of US surveillance operations in Europe.And Chancellor Angela Merkel repeated her concerns that her own mobile phone is being monitored. She told a European summit that "spying among friends" is simply not done, and accused the United States of an unacceptable breach of trust.

Madrid is the first city we lived in (seven weeks there, seven months Berlin, three months Paris) and is the cleanest of them. Every day, I believe, Plaza de la Paja, the oldest square in Madrid, on which we lived, was hosed down, and garbage collected. Contrary perhaps to stereotype, Berlin was dirtier than Madrid (and Paris dirtier than both).

Lech Walesa has called for Poland to unite with Germany to form one European state, despite the bloody history between the two countries. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Polish president, whose Solidarity trade union played a key role in bringing an end to the Cold War, said the world had changed and needed new ways of organising itself.