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MUNICH

Five German unis crack global top 100

German universities made headway in respected league table the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings which, published Monday evening, provide the only global index based on an academic institution's brand.

Published: 5 March 2013 07:10 CET
Five German unis crack global top 100
Photo: DPA

While the top 100 is headed by a mix of US and British universities led by Harvard and followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, German universities also feature in the 2013 list.

This year Germany had a new entrant which cracked the top 100 – Berlin’s Free University – meaning that there are now five German universities which are considered to have the best reputations.

They are, in order of rank success, Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, The University of Applied Science in Munich, both Berlin’s Humboldt and Free Universities and Heidelberg University.

Unfortunately for the country’s academics though, the top ranked German university Ludwig-Maximilian has this year slipped down two spots to 44th place. New player Berlin’s Free University landed at the end of the list between the 91st and 100th place.

According to the Times Higher Education, a university’s reputation not only reflects and drives university success, but attracts staff, students, business investment, research partners in a highly competitive global market.

Who ends up in the coveted list is based on what is apparently the largest worldwide invitation-only survey of senior academic opinion. Twenty countries feature in the table, the most commonly represented of which are the US, UK, Japan, Canada and Switzerland.

The Local/jcw

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MUNICH

Four injured as WWII bomb explodes near Munich train station

Four people were injured, one of them seriously, when a World War II bomb exploded at a building site near Munich's main train station on Wednesday, emergency services said.

Published: 1 December 2021 16:41 CET
Smoke rises after the WWII bomb exploded on a building site in Munich.
Smoke rises after the WWII bomb exploded on a building site in Munich. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Privat

Construction workers had been drilling into the ground when the bomb exploded, a spokesman for the fire department said in a statement.

The blast was heard several kilometres away and scattered debris hundreds of metres, according to local media reports.

Images showed a plume of smoke rising directly next to the train tracks.

Bavaria interior minister Joachim Herrmann told Bild that the whole area was being searched.

Deutsche Bahn suspended its services on the affected lines in the afternoon.

Although trains started up again from 3pm, the rail operator said there would still be delays and cancellations to long-distance and local travel in the Munich area until evening. 

According to the fire service, the explosion happened near a bridge that must be passed by all trains travelling to or from the station.

The exact cause of the explosion is unclear, police said. So far, there are no indications of a criminal act.

WWII bombs are common in Germany

Some 75 years after the war, Germany remains littered with unexploded ordnance, often uncovered during construction work.

READ ALSO: What you need to know about WWII bomb disposals in Germany

However, most bombs are defused by experts before they explode.

Last year, seven World War II bombs were found on the future location of Tesla’s first European factory, just outside Berlin.

Sizeable bombs were also defused in Cologne and Dortmund last year.

In 2017, the discovery of a 1.4-tonne bomb in Frankfurt prompted the evacuation of 65,000 people — the largest such operation since the end of the war in Europe in 1945.

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