Germany, the sole European nation to have seized the World Cup crown on American soil, has embarked on its latest campaign with minimal excitement. In contrast to previous outings, Julian Nagelsmann’s squad is not favored by many, burdened by injuries and lacking the traditional star power and aura of invincibility that once characterized them.

Their glorious triumph in Brazil, marked by a staggering seven-goal decimation of the host nation in Belo Horizonte and Mario Gotze’s decisive goal in the Maracana, now seems a distant memory. These moments have been overshadowed by less flattering images, such as Manuel Neuer’s infamous dribbling mishap leading to a loss of possession against South Korea, culminating in their early exit in the 2018 World Cup.

This ignominious departure marked the first occasion in 80 years that Germany failed to progress past the group stage, a disappointment that persisted four years later despite Hansi Flick stepping in to replace Joachim Low.

Despite their storied history in the tournament, Germany’s recent World Cup performances have been lackluster. Since Gotze’s extra-time strike against Argentina in Rio de Janeiro in 2014, they have managed only two wins in six fixtures. A narrow victory over Sweden in Russia, secured by a brilliant last-minute free kick from Toni Kroos, and a comeback win against Costa Rica in Qatar, which ultimately proved futile, are their only wins since that crowning moment.

They beat Sweden in Russia thanks only to a brilliant 95th minute Toni Kroos free kick and fought back from behind to score three late goals and beat Costa Rica in vain in Qatar.

Losing games to Japan, Mexico and South Korea has rattled confidence. ‘I don’t think we’re a tournament team anymore,’ said Kai Havertz after elimination in 2022.

Germany’s recent tournament performances have been poor – pictured here after being dumped out of a home Euros by Spain in the quarter-finals two years ago

Gleeful Qataris waved goodbye with hands clasped over their mouths, mocking the German protests about FIFA censorship in a row about ‘One Love’ rainbow armbands which had dominated preparations.

FIFA’s Arsene Wenger stuck the boot in, too, with a sly aside during a technical analysis presentation in Doha that teams focused on competition rather than ‘political demonstrations’ had performed better.

This year, despite the wealth of material, Europe’s heavyweights have steered clear of politics.

Germany’s players have paid the inflated transport costs for 600 of their fans to travel from New York to the Met Life Stadium in New Jersey for the final group game, against Ecuador, but there has been a determined focus on football.

Changes to the format should at least prevent a hat trick of group stage exits.

One win should have any team in the reckoning for progress to the last 32 and albeit a tricky group also featuring Ivory Coast and Ecuador, Germany have an inviting start against Curacao in Houston on Sunday.

Tenth v 82nd in the FIFA rankings. Mighty four times champions and eight times finalists against World Cup rookies from a Caribbean island with a population the size of Heidelberg, bringing a fresh twist to a fierce old rivalry with the Dutch.

Dick Advocaat has returned as Curacao’s manager having quit last year to take care of family matters after holding Steve McClaren’s Jamaica to a draw in Kingston to qualify for a first World Cup.

McClaren is now head of football at Rotherham in League Two and Advocaat, in charge of his eighth different national team, is poised to become the oldest manager in World Cup history.

Julian Nagelsmann is attempting to bring back the aura of invincibility to the Germans

The 78-year-old was in the first of his three spells as Netherlands boss when they beat England in qualifying for USA 94 and despite ongoing tensions with star players led his team to the last eight before losing to eventual champions Brazil in Dallas.

Back in Texas, Advocaat will go up against Nagelsmann, less than half his age at 38 and charged with restoring Germany’s pride on the international stage.

Progress under Nagelsmann has been hit and miss. They underwhelmed while reaching the last eight of a home Euros and familiar problems have niggled away since, such as the lack of a natural centre forward and a vulnerable defence.

In this instance, a strong Bayern Munich does not automatically convert into a strong Germany. Bayern’s attack has relied heavily upon Harry Kane of England, Michael Olise of France and Luis Diaz of Colombia.

Even so, Germany recovered from defeat in Slovakia in the first of the qualifiers to whack six past the same opponents in the reverse fixture and finish on top of the group.

Arsenal’s Havertz is expected to lead the line and there is talent in supporting roles, although Jamal Musiala of Bayern is only just fit after missing almost the entire season through injury and Florian Wirtz has spent the same length of time in a struggle for form at Liverpool.

Perhaps this stage will help Wirtz restore his confidence and find his rhythm again. Injuries have ruled out Serge Gnabry and gifted teenager Lennart Karl, whose muscle strain in training last week led to an unexpected opportunity for 20-year-old Assan Ouedraogo of Leipzig.

In Florian Wirtz and Jamal Musiala, there’s plenty of talent, but Germany need both players to find their best form again 

Ouedraogo, a product of the Schalke academy who scored within two minutes of coming off the bench for his debut in November, was on holiday with his friends, lounging by a pool in Marbella when his phone lit up with a call from Nagelsmann.

The absence of Gnabry and Karl is expected to propel Leroy Sane back into the team. Former Manchester City winger Sane is now 30 and at the end of his first season at Galatasaray.

Neuer is also back. Less than two years after retiring from international football the Bayern goalkeeper has reclaimed the status of number one keeper at the age of 40 from Oliver Baumann of Hoffenheim.

‘It wasn’t exactly cool,’ said Baumann, when asked about his sudden demotion after a 2-1 win against the USA in a warm-up friendly in Chicago.

Perhaps though, there is no better symbol of Germany’s ongoing identity crisis and the failure to kick on from the era of Kroos, Mesut Ozil and Thomas Muller than 124-cap Neuer, back in goal and preparing for a fifth World Cup.

In Dearborn, Michigan, an iconic site of the Civil Rights movement has found a new home. The historic residence where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent leaders once strategized has been meticulously reconstructed at The Henry Ford Museum. Originally located in Alabama, the house was carefully dismantled and transported to Michigan, where it now stands proudly among more than 80 historic structures in the museum’s Greenfield Village.

On a momentous Friday, the daughter of the home’s original owners, Jawana Jackson, joined Patricia Mooradian, President and CEO of The Henry Ford Museum, to officially open the Jackson House. The event, attended by several hundred supporters, included a ribbon-cutting ceremony that was met with enthusiastic applause as Jackson and Mooradian entered the 3,000-square-foot bungalow.

Jawana Jackson eloquently highlighted the significance of the relocation, noting that the founder of the museum, industrialist Henry Ford, envisioned Greenfield Village as a collection that narrates the story of America. “This, the Jackson family home, is part of that story,” she emphasized.

Originally owned by dentist Sullivan Jackson and his wife, Richie Jean, the Selma, Alabama residence played a pivotal role in history. It was here that King and other civil rights leaders convened in 1965 to plan the pivotal Selma-to-Montgomery marches, which were crucial in challenging Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black voters.

Owned by dentist Sullivan Jackson and his wife, Richie Jean, the home in Selma, Alabama, was where King and others in 1965 discussed three Selma-to-Montgomery marches against Jim Crow laws that prevented Black people from voting.

King was inside the home when President Lyndon Johnson announced a bill that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The role the Jackson House played was integral to the Civil Rights Movement. Jawana Jackson contacted the museum in 2022 to have it take over the home’s preservation and legacy. The museum bought the home in 2023 for an undisclosed price.

Mooradian called the home a symbol for the support of all and the “pursuit of justice and dignity and equality during one of the most defining chapters in our nation’s history.”

“We’re opening a doorway to history,” Mooradian said. “A place where an ordinary family chose to risk their lives to do something extraordinary. A place where conviction was tested. A movement was sheltered and nourished in this home, and where parents led with courage for the sake of their little girl.”

In 2023, crews began taking apart the house piece by piece. It was trucked more than 800 miles (1,280 kilometers) north to Dearborn, where the house was carefully reconstructed. Original artifacts, including the chair King sat in while he watched Johnson’s televised announcement, also were brought north.

Other items found in homes during the 1960s have been added to complete the exhibit.

The house was built in 1912 and served as a guesthouse for Black authors W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who held “fireside chats” regarding education, religion, the arts, community building and economic sustainability, according to the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium.

Jawana Jackson, who was 4 years old in 1965 and refers to King as “Uncle Martin,” connected the home’s history in the fight for voting rights during the 1960s with current attacks on those rights.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court knocked out a major pillar of the law that had protected against racial discrimination in voting and representation. Three years ago, justices voted 5-4 to strip the government of its most potent tool to stop voting bias — the requirement in the Voting Rights Act that all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, get Washington’s approval before changing the way they hold elections.

“We are still trying to protect democracy,” Jackson said Friday. “What Uncle Martin did in this house all those many years ago continues today.”

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Williams is a member of AP’s Race & Ethnicity team.

Recent confrontations outside Newark’s Delaney Hall migrant detention center have led to the arrest of several out-of-state activists, some with privileged backgrounds, The Post has discovered.

Among the 12 individuals detained over the weekend for alleged assaults on federal officers and vandalizing vehicles, four traveled from distant states such as Washington, Colorado, Arizona, and Illinois to participate in the disturbances, according to details from Newark Police Department records and arrest reports reviewed by The Post.

Additionally, one individual arrested came from Connecticut and five from New York, most of whom had recently relocated to the city.

Only three of those apprehended were residents of New Jersey, where tensions have been escalating for over three weeks following a hunger strike by 300 detainees protesting what they described as inhumane conditions.

Social media insights suggest that at least two of the arrested individuals are linked to advocacy groups funded by dark money, which have been vocal about their goals to “shut down Delaney Hall” and “abolish ICE” since the protests erupted.

“There’s an organized effort to create anarchy. It is insane to me,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) told The Post. “This is America. We have the rule of law and that has to be stopped.”

Some of the arrested include:

• Zion Napier, a 28-year-old, long-haired radical activist seen in police video jumping on cars and smashing windows. The Seattle resident, who worked at the Emerald City’s oldest marine construction firm, Seaborn Companies, was charged with three counts of criminal mischief.
• Mariano Anthony Perez, 31, trekked from Phoenix and was nabbed for punching a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in the face, after he tried to remove Perez from blocking the entrance to the detention facility.
• Thomas Clemens, 30, from Chicago, completed a doctorate degree at the University of Colorado in 2019 and until December, and worked as a traveling physical therapist in rural Washington, New Mexico and Hawaii, records show. While he worked alongside patients, he was touting causes online that included Black Lives Matter in COVID-era Facebook posts, where he identified himself as a vaccinated “frontline worker” and urged others to get the jab. Clemens, who was charged with aggravated assault of a law enforcement officer and hindering apprehension, declined to comment.
• Connecticut-native Rayaan Baywa, 22, is an actor with the Stonehill Theatre Company and once played the leader of a kidnapping gang in “Murder on the Orient Express.” His experiences with “bigotry have helped me be extra attentive to my peers of color,” he claimed in his online resume. Baywa declined to comment.
• Self-described trans photographer Persephone Ambriz-Squires, 27, who lists Bergdorf-Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue as interests on social media, is from Albuquerque, growing up in a $1.6 million pad, according to public records. The now Brooklyn resident was arrested for rioting and failure to disperse.
• Sarah Sullivan, 25, from upstate High Falls, whose literary agency owner mother and research executive father had their wedding announcement in the New York Times in 1996. Sullivan is the great grand-daughter of Lawrence Upjohn, chairman and part of family behind pharma giant The Upjohn Company, which brought to market blockbuster drugs like Xanax and Motrin. She was charged with rioting and failure to disperse.
• Julianna Wurst from Old Bridge, New Jersey, features the grim reaper on her Facebook page. The 19-year-old includes an anti-west, Marxist rally cry on her bio: “The empire must fall.”

Far-left organizations have supplied protestors with military goggles, helmets, knee and shin pads to face off with federal officials — as they broadcast the chaos to millions of followers on social media.

At least two have connections to the radical nonprofit Sunrise Movement, among the organizers of the Delaney Hall mayhem.

Drew Larsen, 29, lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, but hails from the small historic town of Frederick, Maryland, an hour outside DC, where he was a photographer for the local branch of the Sunrise Movement, according to an Instagram post from 2020.

Solomon Dunston, 28, who was arrested for rioting and failure to disperse and is one of the few who actually grew up in New Jersey, touted the Sunrise Movement on his Facebook page, urging others to join the group.

The nonprofit is funded by megadonors that include far-left billionaire George Soros and boasts $2.6 million in revenue and $4.9 million in assets, according to its 2024 tax filings.

“For 19 days…Sunrise organizers have been on the ground at Delaney Hall in New Jersey” it bragged on its Instagram, along with daily pictures and videos of the standoff.

The organization, founded in 2017 as a climate activist group, has since pivoted to anti-ICE mayhem, including chaotic protests in Minnesota.

Critics said the Delaney protests are far from grassroots. 

“They come in with overwhelming resources, any objective person who just looks at it from a 30,000 feet point of view would say that’s not organic,” said former prosecutor Chuck Flint.

“It’s a web of organizations, transactions and then you’ve got these people who recruit these individuals that I would call mules — and they throw them out in front and use them like a mule, the way that a cartel would.”

None of the other arrested protestors answered calls or returned The Post’s messages. The Sunrise Movement also didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Turkiye’s captain, Hakan Calhanoglu, stood firm on his belief that his team had control over the game, echoing his assertive pre-match remarks.

When questioned about the team’s display, the Inter Milan star responded, “Are you saying we didn’t have control?”

The journalist countered, “No, I wouldn’t agree. You certainly had possession, but…”

Calhanoglu elaborated, “I don’t think their view aligns with yours. Today, we were the dominant side. Australia was mostly on the back foot, defending well.”

He added, “Their two goals came from distance, a result of our own errors.”

‘If you go through the whole 90 minutes, and you don’t score… it means you have to always be focused.

‘Somehow we could not score a goal – they have been very good in their game.

‘We had 78% of the time where we had the ball but we had not been precise and we think it is also important to score a goal. We have been very close to scoring a goal but it was very difficult, we know the defence was very good, they are very tall, so it is very difficult sometimes to have a competition with other players who are much taller than us.

‘I would like to congratulate them, they have been playing very well, we will continue with our balance and judgement, we are still in the round.’