G lobal
13-19 June 2014
“
W
e have a lot of customers for whom money is no longer so important,” says Norbert Wolf, Managing Director of the Steyler Bank, and pauses a moment to let it sink in. Which bank boss can say that about his customers? Then he adds, to further emphasise the point, “Between 30 and 40 per cent of them donate a portion of their interest to a good cause.” In fact Steyler Bank is a genuinely unique financial institution. The Bank, located in the town of St Augustin near Bonn, is a small one. It has all of 55 employees and about 17,000 customers. But by its own account, it is ‘Germany’s oldest ethical bank’. It was founded in 1964, in the middle of then West Germany’s post-war economic miracle era, by missionaries of the Catholic Steyler order, who aimed for a financial institute that put ‘morality before filthy lucre’. But bank boss Wolf doesn’t see any contradiction. “Money is a good servant and enables us to help
US returning 21 sites to hosts in Europe
{ Washington/ DPA }
N
early 70 years after the end of World War II, the United State plans to continue its military divestment from Europe - but this time it will be mainly recreational sites. The Defence Department recently said that it would return 21 sites to the host nations - including 12 sites in Germany and the rest in Italy, Denmark, Greece, Britain and Belgium. The sites include a golf course and hotel in Garmisch, Germany; a recreational site at the US Army garrison in Vicenza, Italy; and a barracks at the US Army garrison Benelux in Belgium. The US has removed hundreds of thousands of troops from across Europe in the last 25 years. In 2012 there were still 80,000 US troops based in Europe, with plans to bring the number below 70,000. The Pentagon said the 21 sites were ‘minor, non-operational’ parts of US military infrastructure in Europe. Giving them up will save the US government about 60 million dollars a year. “None of these adjustments affects existing force structure or military capabilities, and the efficiencies will further enable US European Command to resource high-priority missions,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. u
Can this really be a Bank? people immediately - on the spot,” he says. The former Chairman of the German Bishops Conference, Karl Cardinal Lehmann, once described the Steyler Bank as being “exotic and at the same time a thorn in a world of banking, where often profits stand above all else.” The Bank doesn’t try to lure customers with opulent interest rates. Rather, it makes it easy for them to do without money - in order to do something good. For example, there’s an Africa savings account where half of the interest automatically goes towards aid projects. The Bank’s promise is that the customers’ money will go exclusively into ‘clean investments’, where the Creation is preserved and human rights are respected. Weapons companies are just as taboo as pornography distributors; nor does the Bank tolerate child labour or medical experiments with animals. What is truly unique about the bank of the Steyler missionary order is that the entire profit of the Bank goes
{ Andrew McCathie/France/ DPA }
T
he larger-than-life figure of US Director Quentin Tarantino strode into Cannes to declare “the death of cinema”, as traditional celluloid film-making falls victim to the digital revolution. “As far as I’m concerned, digital projection ... is the death of cinema as I know it,” he told a press conference marking the 20th anniversary of the year his film Pulp Fiction won the iconic Palme d’Or. “The fact that most films now are not presented in 35 mm means that the war is lost,” said Tarantino (51), whose films include Reservoir Dogs and more recently a Nazi wartime drama, Inglourious
Oliver Berg
{ Erich Reimann/St Augustin, Germany/ DPA }
Steyler Bank, founding in 1964 in Germany, by missionaries.
Caption Norbert Wolf, Managing Director of the missionaryfounded Steyler Bank. A missionary’s pictured in stainglass stands behind him.
to support the work of 10,000 male and female missionaries who are carrying out aid projects for the poorest of the poor in 70 countries. The money goes towards financing the construction of schools and medical stations, for the digging of wells, as well as for building churches - in Asia and Africa.
Quentin Tarantino declares the Death of Cinema Basterds. “Digital projection is just television in public. And apparently the whole world is OK with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead,” he said. While he added that he’s given up on current moviegoers, he insisted that “the next generation will want the real thing.” Irrepressible as ever, Tarantino said that he was considering a Cable TV mini-series of four one-hour segments of his American slave drama, Django Unchained, which incorporated 90 minutes of unused footage from the film. The movie won him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay last year. Tarantino acknowledged
that the digital revolution has its advantages; most importantly, of giving young filmmakers a better opportunity to enter the the movie business. But added, “Why would established filmmakers shoot on digital? I don’t get it.” A former head of the Cannes jury, Tarantino once famously described the Festival as the Olympics of Cinema. This time he again heaped praise on the world’s leading film festival. “Winning the Palme d’Or to this day is still ‘the thing’; as far as laurels are concerned, it is my single absolutely positively greatest achievement,” he said. “Of all the trophies that I have won, it’s the one that has the
New Zealand Kiwi not from Australia { Washington/ DPA }
N
ew Zealand’s diminutive national bird, the Kiwi, is most closely related to the extinct Madagascan elephant bird - a three-metre-tall, 275-kilogram flightless giant - and did not originate from Australia as previously thought, according to research recently published. An analysis of ancient DNA also suggests that the birds shared a common flying ancestor. The finding was “bizarre,” said Alan Cooper, the Director of the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, in Wellington. The Professor has been trying to track down the origins of the Kiwi for over two decades. The DNA was extracted from the bones of two elephant birds, estimated to be between 1,000 and 3,000 years old, housed in New Zea-
land’s national museum, Te Papa. The latest research corrects a controversial finding, also by Cooper, in the 1990s that the Kiwi came from Australia. “It’s great to finally set the record straight, as New Zealanders were shocked and dismayed to find that their national bird appeared to be an Australian immigrant,” Cooper said. “We found that the Kiwi is still closely related to the emu and cassowary, but by far its closest relative was the Madagascan elephant bird. It is bizarre because it looks nothing like it and it is on the other side of the world, which has never been connected directly by land.” Cooper said that recent advances in genomics finally enabled him to ‘fish out’ tiny fragments of elephant bird DNA from the bones. The research apparently solves a 150-year-old evolutionary mystery about the origins of a group of
21
Since its foundation the Bank has generated more than 91 million euros (120 million dollars) in donations and banking profits for the Order’s good works, Wolf says. The average customer of Steyler Bank is a practicing Catholic, over 50 years of age, and affluent. But any customer is welcome at the Bank, Wolf stresses.The financial crisis six years ago created an upswing for Steyler Bank. “Ever since then we have noticed that more young people have come to see us as an alternative,” the Bank boss says. Customer assets have grown steadily now to about 410 million euros. Such confidence does not even require a great deal of faith in God. According to a study by the corporate consulting company, ZEB, which specialises in the financial sector, millions of customers are interested in offers that promise more than just profits. “Socioecological Banks, which take into account sustainability aspects in their investment decisions, are acting according to the growing need of consumers for ‘responsible money deposits’,” ZEB expert Christof Jauernig says. u biggest place of honour inside of my house. It’s the one I want another one of - maybe someday before they turn out the lights. My joke about the Palme d’Or is that the only thing more prestigious than the list of directors who have won the Palme d’Or is the directors who haven’t!” he said. Tarantino also expressed his admiration for Italian cinema. “I have always responded to Italian cinema; it has the flair of the operatic. I like that kind if boldness,” he said. “It might be my Italianesque speaking to me,” he added. He also felt sorry for directors who can’t watch their movies again, because they see the flaws in them. “I watch my movies all the time,” he said. u
flightless southern hemisphere ‘ratite’ birds - including the Australian emu and African ostrich - which share a distinctive palate and are known as palaeognaths (or ‘old-jawed’). Scientists previously thought that the birds shared a common flightless ancestor and were separated when the southern super-continent Gondwanaland broke apart 130 million years ago. But after using the elephant bird DNA to estimate when the species separated from each other, Cooper said that there was no relationship between their dispersal around the world and the separation of the continents. “Clearly they were flying, which changes our traditional view.” Cooper believes that the Kiwi and the elephant bird shared a common ancestor about the size of a partridge, which existed between 50 and 70 million years ago and made its home in Antarctica - at that time free of ice and the centre of Gondwanaland. u