Kabir Chibber

German soccer team Borussia Dortmand’s poor performance on the pitch—it spent half the season at the bottom of the table and sometimes played soccer so bad that its own coach branded it “pointless“—has been a drag on the club’s listed shares for months. The stock fell another 1.5% yesterday (April 15) on news that the coach, Jurgen Klopp, is cutting his contract short and leaving as manager of the Bundesliga club at the end of the season.

Front National, the French nationalist and anti-immigration far-right political party, was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. He ran the party until 2011, when his daughter, Marine, took over and took the party to new heights—recent polls have her on track to win the presidency of France.

London has a single university that can be considered among the 10 best in the world—Imperial College—and it wants to change that.

Beyoncé has released a new song as a seven-year anniversary present to her husband, Jay Z, on his new music streaming service Tidal. Beyoncé and a bunch of other artists have a stake in the service, and plan to use it to offer exclusive content—such as this new track, “Die With You,” which came with a music video.

Floyd Mayweather Jr.—due to meet Manny Pacquaio in Las Vegas in May in the biggest fight in boxing history—is putting his perfect record on the line. He is currently unbeaten, at 47-0, as a professional fighter. The last time he was beaten was as an amateur during the semi-finals of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

For many Koreans, a small pharmacy in the Latin Quarter of Paris has become as much a tourist attraction as the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre. According to M (link in French), Le Monde’s magazine, the Pharmacie de Monge gets around 1,000 customers a day—a third of its total—from Asia, mainly Korea.

During the Cold War, Norway built a secret naval base, Olavsvern, that was carved into the mountain just outside the city of Tromsø, in the Arctic Circle. The base—comprised of a submarine hangar made of rock, direct sea access, nearly 150,000 sq ft of buildings and almost double that in bombproof interior space—took 30 years and cost NATO around $500 million to build to fight the threat of the Soviet Union.

Chelsea Manning—currently serving a 35-year sentence for leaking government secrets at the maximum-security US Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—was banned from using the internet as part of her sentence. She’s found a way around that.

Among Napoleon Bonaparte’s earliest and most significant contributions after seizing power in France was to enact a uniform legal code, which had been mooted since the 1770s but successive revolutionary governments failed to accomplish. Napoleon began the process in 1800 and had preliminary drafts circulating the following year. ”Neither kings nor representative assemblies had been capable of achieving so much, so quickly,” the historian William Doyle wrote.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, his rightwing party, the UMP, and its allies emerged as the victors in France’s local elections over the weekend—taking 27 départements, or regional administrative councils, and bringing its total to 67 so far (link in French). President Francois Hollande and his Socialist Party could end up holding fewer than half of the councils that they held last week.

The coming superfight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquaio is building, with much back and forth between the two camps. The May bout is due to be the biggest in history, on course to generate more ticket revenue than the Super Bowl and to answer Mayweather’s claims to be the best ever.

Roger Moore, the fourth man to play James Bond on film, appeared to make some inopportune comments about Idris Elba, who has been tipped to be the first black Bond. Moore is said to have to have told the French magazine Paris Match (which published his comments in French):

The first teaser trailer for the next James Bond film, Spectre, has been released—and it looks pretty good.

France has never taken to the “doggie bag,” the practice born during World War II in the US of bringing leftover scraps home for pets, which evolved into taking uneaten food home for later human consumption.

A link has long been proven between negative moods and ill health. But how do positive moods affect us physiologically?

London is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, known for a dynamism and multitude of cultures that make the British capital quite distinct from the rest of the country. But is it agreeable? Apparently not.

Glastonbury began in 1970—a day after Jimi Hendrix died—at Michael Eavis’s farm, in Somerset, England—and 1,500 people attended to watch The Kinks headline. Last year, in the same place, more than 120,000 attended the festival, one one of the world’s biggest music events.

What to watch for today

When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, Steve Jobs helped create a home for ”legitimate music” on the internet in a time when piracy was rampant, helping to pave the way for the streaming services of today. But Jobs also insisted that the songs be sold individually and at a fixed price of 99 cents. This led to more than 10 billion iTunes songs downloaded, but also the death of the album.

There is a great deal of anxiety about wine—how to drink it (that link helpfully suggests “obtain wine”), how to choose it, and when to bring it to a party (paywall).

Finland already has one of the best school education systems. It always ranks near the top in mathematics, reading, and science in the prestigious PISA rankings (the 2012 list, pdf) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Teachers in other countries flock to its schools to learn from a country that is routinely praised as just a really, really wonderful place to live.

The UK has taken the unusual step of preventing two teenagers from East London from leaving the country—for fear they will travel to Syria to join ISIL. The girls, aged 15 and 16, had their passports seized and were made wards of the court—a rarely-used ancient feudal right that gives judges the ultimate responsibility for their decision-making—on the grounds that their own parents weren’t telling the whole truth about their daughters’ interest in jihad.

England invented many of the sports that the world knows and loves. Shame it’s not very good at most of them any more.

Thankfully, our televisions do not yet feature sports in which players try to avoid being chased to death by gladiators, a la The Running Man, or set out to murder each other at the behest of an evil global corporation, as in Rollerball.