Deutsche Welle reports that, thanks in part to the weak dollar, German companies are flocking to the American South. Steel giant ThyssenKrupp, for instance, just began building a plant in Alabama while Daimler celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its production facility there.

Germany is trying to outlaw scientology.

A new study on global opinions has been published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States about trade, agriculture and immigration, Perspectives on Trade and Poverty Reduction, conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Among its many conclusions, it found a decline in U.S. global engagement, anxiety about globalisation but that a majority favour pro-globalisation policies, Europeans generally feel more threatened by China's rise than Americans and that most "favour deepening trans-Atlantic ties and regulatory cooperation."

Towering influential avant-garde composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, passed away at 79. Pens the NYT obit, "Right from his early 20s he never doubted that he was a great composer, and this conviction guided all his actions. It made him authoritarian in his dealings with others, whether fellow musicians or administrators. It pulled him through the creative challenges he set for himself as a young man. But it left him an isolated figure at the end."

Stockhausen caught some heat in 2001 when he called the 9/11 attacks, "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos" after which he apologized, saying his allegory had been misquoted.

Ivan Hewett writes, in a Stockhausen tribute for the Telegraph, "Some say he was just a high-class charlatan, his grandiose visions indulged by the generous German subsidy system and protected from the world by a bevy of ministering women and starry-eyed followers. Others say that he was the really the best of that great generation of composers who were born in the 20s and moulded by the traumatic experiences of war. The truth lies somewhere in between."