Tennis player Alexander Zverev shed his unfortunate spell as the best player never to win a major as, at 29, he claimed his maiden Grand Slam title by winning the Roland-Garros, or French Open, Paris

Alevis make up around 13% of Muslims living in Germany today; this religious community, now the fourth largest in the country, once predominantly lived in rural Turkey, passing on their spiritual beliefs and rites orally

Marie-Louise Eta became the first woman to coach a match in the top five European men's leagues: her Union Berlin's defeat 2-1 gave way to misogynistic reaction online, condemned by German Football Association as contrary to values of fairness, equality

Gerd Faltings, a number theorist at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, has won the 2026 Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, for his work on proving that Diophantine equations can have a finite set of solutions