Kami Rita Sherpa, 54, Nepalese mountain guide, climbed Mount Everest for the 29th time, extending his own record. Sherpa, accompanying a group, reached the summit of the highest mountain in the world at 8,848 meters on Sunday morning at 7:25 a.m. local time, a Nepalese official told the German Press Agency. Sherpa first conquered Mount Everest in 1994 and, according to the Guinness Book of Records, has repeated this almost every year since then – as part of his work. He also climbed several other eight-thousanders in the Himalayas. Sherpas are a local ethnic group whose members often work as guides and porters for mountaineers from abroad.
Taylor Swift, 34, US pop phenomenon, is supposed to improve the image of the Protestant church in Germany. In Heidelberg’s Holy Spirit Church, their songs were now the focus of two services – more than 1,000 Christian “Swifties” had registered for the masses, according to the Catholic News Agency. At the church services, an idea of the Protestant pastor Vincenzo Petracca, the singer Tine Wiechmann interpreted various Swift songs with a band. The Baden regional bishop Heike Springhart praised the masses as an opportunity to make the church “experienceable”.
Olaf Scholz, 65, Federal Chancellor, can imagine growing old in Potsdam. “We live here now – and that was a conscious decision,” said Scholz at a panel discussion organized by the Editorial Network Germany (RND) in Potsdam. “I didn’t finally move to Potsdam as my first residence because I became Chancellor, but before that, because we feel very comfortable here, we settled here.” He added: “There’s also water, which is pretty important to me as someone who grew up in Hamburg.” Scholz lives in his adopted home with his wife Britta Ernst.
Sebastian Herzog, 61, puzzle author from Hanover and president of the Scrabble Germany association, would like Scrabble to be a school subject. In this way, “Germany could improve in the PISA study,” he said, who was also the organizer of the German Scrabble Championships in Minden. “Scrabble enables a playful approach to the German language and grammar, expanding the vocabulary with every game,” said the player, according to the German Press Agency. “And when you calculate the points, you also deepen basic arithmetic.” The association, which Herzog heads, was founded in 2005 as the only Germany-wide association of Scrabble enthusiasts. The game has been played for more than 70 years with largely the same rules: players have to score as many points as possible from randomly assigned letter tiles by placing words in a kind of crossword puzzle.
Lina Pfeiffer, 22, climate activist from Berlin, has developed an app where you can share climate stories from Berlin and Brandenburg. “I wanted to create something where you could see at a glance how many hot spots there are in the region,” explained the student, who created the “Climate Stories Map” as part of her bachelor’s thesis at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Anyone can create an entry on the map and report what changes they have observed and where, she told the German Press Agency. The first reports about pollen allergies and dried-out swamps can already be read. According to Pfeiffer, this would make the consequences of climate change more tangible for people. The long-term goal is to expand the map to cover all of Germany. They don’t want to make money with the project.