Brexit will turn Berlin into 'Europe’s startup capital'

The Local

London is currently thought of as the main hub for startups in Europe, but that will all turn around when the UK leaves the EU, tech industry experts say.

Thanks to its location in a finance centre and also fewer language barriers with Silicon Valley, London has long been dubbed the startup capital of Europe.

But not anymore, according to the some tech industry experts.

“The German startup capital of Berlin is the winner of Brexit, London is the loser,” said German Startups Association boss Florian Nöll on Friday.

At the same time though, Nöll said this isn’t the kind of victory one should celebrate.

“We haven’t seen ourselves as German or British entrepreneurs in a long time. We are European entrepreneurs. Our startups were founded for international markets.”

The German Association of the Internet Industry, eco, also say they expect that Brexit will bring a boost to Berlin as London loses its appeal as a pioneer for Europe.

Still, eco also sees Brexit as a setback for Europe in terms of global competition because plans to create a digital single market will now be on a smaller scale.

“A fragmented market will lose every form of competitiveness compared with countries like the USA,” warned eco’s politics and law director Oliver Süme.

Süme also predicted financial losses over the course of the UK’s exit negotiations.

“It will bring enormous insecurity in legal terms for companies in the Internet economy, and thus likely a drop in sales.”

The CEO of digital economy association Bitkom Bernhard Rohleder said he expected that the UK would distance itself from the principles of having a single market for the Internet.

“We must now make sure that the consequences for the German and the European digital economy remain as small as possible,” Rohleder said.

“Companies in Germany will have to deal with different rules in the UK. That is almost impossible for medium-sized companies and startups."

American tech writer Ben Thompson wrote for his website Stratechery that now is also a difficult time for American Internet giants in the EU: Germany and France have been trying to impose more restrictions especially on Google and Facebook, so without the more lenient voice of Britain, these two countries will have more power in regulating tech companies.

Five things to know about guns in Germany

The Local
1. Germany has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe

The US Library of Congress defines the German gun control system as “one of the most stringent in Europe”. And professor Christian Pfeiffer of Criminology Research Institute of Lower Saxony also told The Local that Germany’s laws were some of the toughest worldwide. Germans do not have fundamental rights to bear arms, unlike Americans do under the Second Amendment, and the country’s violent past including the Nazi era has certainly helped to shape the current strict regulations. To get a gun, Germans must first obtain a firearms ownership license (Waffenbesitzkarte) - and you may need a different one for each weapon you buy - or a license to carry (Waffenschein). Applicants for a license must be at least 18 years old and undergo what’s called a reliability check, which includes checking for criminal records, whether the person is an alcohol or drug addict, whether they have mental illness or any other attributes that might make them questionable to authorities.

The also have to pass a “specialized knowledge test” on guns and people younger than 25 applying for their first license must go through a psychiatric evaluation. One must also prove a specific and approved need for the weapon, which is mainly limited to use by hunters, competitive marksmen, collectors and security workers - not for self-defense. Once you have a license, you’re also limited in the number of and kinds of guns you may own, depending on what kind of license you have: Fully automatic weapons are banned for all, while semiautomatic firearms are banned for anything other than hunting or competitive shooting. Under the reforms passed in the wake of a 2009 mass shooting, gun owners are also subject to continued monitoring by the government with officials able to ask gun owners at any time to enter their private property and check that they are properly storing their weapons.

2. Fourth-highest gun ownership rate worldwide

But even given Germany’s strict gun policies, the country was still home to the fourth-highest number of legal guns per capita in 2013, falling behind just the United States, Switzerland and Finland. About 2 million people own more than 5.5 million legal guns in Germany for a population of more than 80 million. On top of that, police unions have estimated that there are up to 20 million more illegally-owned guns in Germany - this would mean roughly 30 guns for every group of 100 people.

3. One of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths worldwide

But even given the relatively high amount of guns in the country, Germany has one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths each year, according to international GunPolicy.org research by the University of Sydney. Over the past 20 years, “crimes against life” - which include murder as well as negligent manslaughter - that involve guns have dropped from 783 in 1995 to 130 in 2015, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).

Of those crimes last year, just 57 were intentional murders.

This of course pales in comparison to the rates in the US, where firearm homicides surpass 11,000 people killed each year or roughly 3.5 deaths per 100,000 people, according to GunPolicy.org. In Germany, that rate barely reaches 0.07 deaths per 100,000 people.

4. Mass shootings have led to stricter gun laws

 Several mass shootings within the past two decades have had a great impact on gun control policy. In 2002, a 19-year-old expelled from his high school in Erfurt brought a semiautomatic pistol to the school and killed 16 people before killing himself. The German parliament responded by passing major revisions to weapons laws, including increasing the minimum age for acquiring a gun and requiring a psychological exam for people under 25.In 2006, an 18-year-old went to his former school in Emsdetten and shot and wounded five people before killing himself. This led to restrictions on the sale of violent video games to juveniles. Then in 2009, a 17-year-old in Winnenden, Baden-Württemberg, went to his old school with a semiautomatic pistol, killing a total of 15 people at the school and while fleeing from police. Since those mass shootings, there has also been drop-off in gun violence. In 2009 when Winnenden happened, there were 179 crimes against life that involved guns being fired, compared to the 130 such crimes last year.

5. No major mass shootings since 2009

According to criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, the 2009 Winnenden massacre was Germany’s last mass shooting, defined as four or more people killed in a public place. However, a year later, a woman in a nearby small town shot and killed her five-year-old son, the boy’s father and then went to a hospital where she shot at more than a dozen others, killing one. Subsequent rampage shootings have resulted in fewer than four deaths, such as last year when a man shot dead two people in what appeared to be random killings. Meanwhile, so far this year the US has had about a dozen mass shootings where four or more people were killed, according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

Dutch woman arrested in Qatar after making rape claim

--By BBC NEWS

A Dutch woman is being detained in Qatar on suspicion of adultery after she told police she had been raped.

The 22-year-old, who was on holiday, was drugged in a Doha hotel and woke up in an unfamiliar flat, where she realised she had been raped, her lawyer says.
She was arrested in March on suspicion of having sex outside of marriage. She is due to appear in court on Monday.

The alleged rapist is also being held, but says the sex had been consensual.
A Dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman said the woman, who she named as Laura, had been arrested but not yet been charged.

"We have provided assistance to her since the first day of detention. For the sake of the defendant's case we will not make further comments at this point," the Dutch embassy said in a statement.

'Great horror'

The woman had gone dancing at a hotel in Doha where alcohol was allowed, "but when she returned to the table after the first sip of her drink... she felt very unwell" and realised she had been drugged, her lawyer Brian Lokollo told Dutch broadcaster NOS-Radio1.

Her next memory was waking up in an unfamiliar apartment where she "realised to her great horror that she had been raped," Mr Lokollo added.

The woman may also be charged with an alcohol-related offence, news website Doha News reported.

It is an offence to drink alcohol or be drunk in public in Qatar, although alcohol is allowed at certain hotels and expatriates can obtain a permit for purchasing alcohol.

In 2013, a Norwegian woman in neighbouring United Arab Emirates was given a 16-month prison sentence for perjury, extramarital sex and drinking alcohol after she told police she had been raped.

She was later pardoned and allowed to return to Norway.

In Qatar, Nearly Three in Five People Live in ‘Labor Camps’

 In Qatar, Nearly Three in Five People Live in ‘Labor Camps’
Over the past several years, Qatar’s widespread use of migrant labor to build its ever growing queue of building and infrastructure projects has gained the attention and criticism of human rights activists across the globe.

These activists allege Qatar’s migrant laborers, most of whom come from South Asia, live in dirty, dangerous camps and have severely limited civil rights. Some might even argue that the term “indentured workers” or “slave laborers” would be a more accurate description.

While it has been known that a huge population of these migrants reside in Qatar, it wasn’t until a recent census that the truly stunning nature of migrant labor in the Middle Eastern country was known.

According to figures produced by the Qatari government, of its population of 2.4 million, nearly 60 percent, or three in five people, live in migrant labor camps. Other estimates, however, have put the figure much higher.

How did this tiny nation that was home to a mere 370,000 people in the mid-1980s end up with such a population boom in just three decades?
Moreover, how did this boom end up including more migrant laborers than Qatari citizens?
Qatar’s story is not wholly unique for the Middle Eastern region: As in Saudi Arabia, for example, Qatar found itself sitting atop fossil fuel resources worth billions upon billions. After oil prices fully rebounded in the 1990s, Qatar’s energy elites found their bank accounts overflowing.

That’s where the similarities start to fade. As Qatar began to tap the world’s third largest known reserve of natural gas and oil, it gradually surpassed Luxembourg to become home to the world’s highest GDP per capita by 2014.
With all that cash, what can a wealthy Qatar elite class to do? Fund opulent building projects, among other things. This led to the importation of migrant laborers; These people thought they were getting an unique opportunity to work but instead found themselves gravely exploited, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives.

Getting to Qatar as a migrant worker isn’t easy. With the promise of a steady income, these individuals are pushed to pay “recruitment fees” to a Qatari company for the privilege to work for them. Often, migrants cannot afford this and instead take out high-interest loans to pay for it.

After taking these steps, a laborer in Qatar might find himself earning meager wages (though workers are often underpaid, if they are paid at all) and living in an overcrowded, unsanitary camp. These “worker cities” are usually owned and “maintained” (cockroaches and open sewers are typical) by employers.

Many workers say it is not uncommon to end up working 12, even 24-hour days, often with little water or food, if any.

“We feel like we were cheated, we didn’t get the jobs we were expecting,” one Nepali worker says.

What happens if a worker wants to change employers? He must first gain permission from his current employer. And what happens when a migrant wishes to leave Qatar? He must obtain an exit visa — also provided by his employer.
If the employer doesn’t wish to grant those requests for whatever reason (such as unpaid debt from a loan taken out for the recruitment fees), then that worker is essentially trapped in Qatar with that employer.

Those who complain or try to hold an employer accountable could face worse repercussions, ending up not only stuck in Qatar but also unemployed and homeless.

Qatar has faced a great deal of heat over these practices. As the country plans to host the 2022 World Cup, this scrutiny has only increased — at the same time Qatar’s building projects ramp up to accommodate the anticipated tourism influx.

Hundreds of migrant workers have died since construction for the World Cup began. In 2013 alone, 185 Nepali workers perished; Between 2012 and 2014, 450 Indians died. Most deaths were related to heart failure. Exact numbers for other nationalities aren’t known, however activist groups believe around 4,000 laborers will die before the World Cup begins.

Qatar insists it is taking significant steps to make life better for its migrant workers. This claim is lacking substance, though, if the recent tragic labor camp fire in southwest Qatar, which claimed 13 lives, is any indication.

Every nation that intends to vie for the chance to play in the 2022 World Cup has a responsibility to threaten Qatar with boycott if genuine steps to protect the human and civil rights of its many migrant laborers are not taken immediately.