Word: germanics
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Thousands of Opel workers in Germany are breathing a huge sigh of relief after the last-minute deal to rescue GM's European operations. German unions had always supported Austrian-Canadian company Magna International's takeover of GM Europe, wary that the rival bid from Fiat was just an attempt, as one union official put it, to "pinch German engineering." The unions regard Magna as an innovative company that put forward the best plan to secure the long-term future of Opel. At the carmaker's headquarters in the town of Rüsselsheim near Frankfurt, workers were hugging friends...
...Klaus Franz, the head of Opel's works council tells TIME. "Of course I'm also worried about my U.S. friends, but I'm happy the bridge financing plan for Opel has worked out and all GM's European assets have been guaranteed," he says. But despite the German relief, major sacrifices among GM Europe's 55,000 workforce are unavoidable in the coming months. (See pictures of General Motors Factory-scapes...
...After marathon talks on Friday night, the German government approved plans by the Austrian-Canadian car-parts manufacturer Magna to take over GM's European business. Under the deal, Opel will be placed in a trust and the German government will provide a bridging loan of $2.1 billion (€1.5 billion) to provide Opel with emergency funding and keep GM's European operations running. On top of that, the German government will give $4.3 billion (€3 billion) in loan guarantees. The Canadian firm would own 20% of the new group, Russia's biggest lender Sberbank would have...
...deal, which prevents German taxpayers' money from disappearing into the GM's all but empty coffers in the U.S., was a lifeline few Germans had expected. In the past, Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative CDU party has steered clear of state intervention in the economy. But as the global downturn took its toll on German firms and the financial crisis brought a few major banks to its knees, Merkel has embarked on a big U-turn. First, there was the bail-out of the property lender Hypo Real Estate, then the part-nationalization of Germany's second biggest bank, Commerzbank...
...files to suggest that Kurras was acting on direct Stasi orders to kill Ohnesorg. But the discovery that it was a Stasi spy who shot him has raised new questions about the history of the student movement. Prime among them: how might the student protest movement have developed if Germans had known at the time that Kurras was in the pay of the East German secret police? The question is all the more sensitive since that movement spawned the Red Army Faction, postwar Europe's most deadly terrorist organization, which killed at least 34 people in a series of flamboyant...