The world's fourth largest economy must not pass up the opportunity to catch a ride on the boom in information technology, but the country has some catching up to do. The problem, according to critics, is that 30,000 also happens to be the number of unemployed information technology specialists in Germany, nevermind the national total of four million unemployed overall.
Union leaders are naturally up in arms.
But she's confident that 40,000 internship positions will be created by the end of the year. Computer experts of a different sort have been called upon to retrieve data erased immediately after the national election in 1998 that put an end to Kohl's reign as chancellor after 16 years. The files were kept on computers in the Chancellor's Office. But recovering the data may take a while. The recently discovered backup copies are evidently protected by a security program which is barely used anymore.