BERLIN — The German government on Thursday declassified a top-secret security assessment on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from 2021, only four months before the outbreak of war, which claimed energy supplies “won’t be jeopardized” by increased dependency on Russian gas.
The document, dated October 26, 2021, was adopted in the final days of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s outgoing government, in which Germany’s current leader Olaf Scholz played a key role as vice chancellor.
Germany’s largest mosque will broadcast the call to prayer for the first time on Friday.
It comes as part of an agreement between the Central Mosque of Cologne and the city authorities.
“We’re very happy,” Abdurrahman Atasoy, general secretary of the the Turkish government’s religious affairs authority in Germany, DITIB, which runs the mosque, said.
“The public call to prayer is a sign that Muslims are at home here,” he added.
Now they can be called to the next mass sex assault directly from the Mosque!
A leftist German state Prime Minister has described those protesting the country’s car-crash energy policy as the beginning of a new “fascist movement” in the country.
Bodo Ramelow, the Prime Minister of Thuringia who is a member of the far-left Die Linke party, described what he saw as an ever more unified populist right in the country as being the embryonic stages of a new “fascist movement” in the country.
The same Germany that took in over a million Muslim migrants in 2015, and ten thousand non-vetted Afghans in 2021—all people who, by definition, could not be experiencing religious persecution back home as they themselves were Muslim—has refused asylum to a Muslim convert to Christianity, even though one of his relatives was tortured and murdered for the same “crime” of apostasy in his native Iran.
Although Germany is one of the richest countries in the world, signs of increasing poverty are becoming increasingly visible across the country. Homeless people sleeping rough, mothers forgoing meals in order to feed their children, pensioners looking for discarded bottles to trade for the deposit.
According to the Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband, Germany’s umbrella organization for welfare organizations, 13.8 million Germans either live in poverty or are at risk of slipping below the poverty line. The German government also voices its concerns about the growing gap between rich and poor.
The term poverty in this context does not mean that millions of people in Germany are at risk of starving or freezing to death. Instead, it refers to relative poverty, which is measured by the average living conditions of the society in question.
Germany to pay December gas bills for households and businesses in new energy crisis plan
Europe’s largest economy must cut consumption by 20 per cent to avoid potential shortages, expert warns
Germany is to pay most of the nation’s December gas bills as part of an effort to shield citizens and the economy from the energy crisis fuelled by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Berlin has riled EU neighbours by allocating up to €200bn (£175.5bn) for a “defensive shield” to ease the strain, amid warnings in Berlin that Europe’s largest economy must reduce its gas consumption by 20 per cent to prevent a potential shortage this winter.
Pretty sweet social programs!
Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is looking to fire the chief of the federal agency responsible for cybersecurity, Arne Schönbohm, over his alleged contacts with agents of Russia’s security services, Germany’s newspapers reported on Sunday, citing anonymous government sources.
Schönbohm is the president of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
But a recent investigation found that he was also the member of a technology association which counts as a member a German company that is a subsidiary of a Russian cybersecurity firm founded by a former KGB employee.
BERLIN (Reuters) -Cables vital for the rail network were intentionally cut in two places causing a near three-hour halt to all rail traffic in northern Germany on Saturday morning, in what authorities called an act of sabotage without identifying who might be responsible.
The federal police are investigating the incident, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said, adding the motive for it was unclear.
The disruption raised alarm bells after NATO and the European Union last month stressed the need to protect critical infrastructure after what they called acts of sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Putin?
Soaring energy prices and rising unemployment is driving voters to the Right
“Bring an extra jumper, we can’t afford to heat the house properly this year,” was my aunt’s cheerful advice when I told her I’d drop by on my annual Christmas visit to Germany. She lives in Thuringia, in the former East of the country. Like her, many people there are deeply concerned about the coming winter — the mood has reached a tipping point, which is spilling into politics.
German Environment Minister Steffi Lembke said on Wednesday that the energy crisis meant it was “reasonable” to keep two nuclear plants running for three months beyond their planned closure, but that she rejected any further extension.
The Green politician’s remarks contrast with the stance of coalition partners the Free Democrats (FDP), who favor an indefinite extension to the usage of nuclear power in Germany amid the predicted energy supply shortage in winter.
The New York Times has been running an extended crusade for some years now to dispense with freedom of speech. It’s run op-eds arguing that speech is violence, that the First Amendment has been misunderstood… and that we should be more like Germany.
This lunatic is all for it…
We need to be way tougher in Canada. Too many refuse to acknowledge that we are a hotbed of right wing extremism. You need to protect democracy if you’re going to keep it.
— Catherine McKenna (@cathmckenna) September 25, 2022
NEW YORK — Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany gets right to the point when asked why his country will not send battle tanks to Ukraine: It is “a very dangerous war,” he said.
Ukraine has made gains recently against Russia, which invaded the country in February, and has been asking the West for reinforcements. But Germany has declined to lead the way in sending that aid.
“We are supporting Ukraine,” Mr. Scholz said last week in an hourlong interview with The New York Times. “We are doing it in a way that is not escalating to where it is becoming a war between Russia and NATO because this would be a catastrophe.”
The German federal state is operating hundreds of fake far-right social media accounts online, a mainstream newspaper in the country has revealed.
Hundreds of fake social media accounts espousing far-right ideology on platforms such as Twitter, Telegram, Instagram and Gettr are being operated by the German Federal State, a report by a major mainstream newspaper in the country has revealed.
Office for the Protection of the Constitution operates hundreds of right-wing extremist fake accounts itself
BERLIN. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution has revealed that it operates hundreds of fake social media accounts that are classified as right-wing extremists. “This is the future of information gathering,” said an unnamed head of a relevant state office of the Süddeutsche Zeitung .
You can take the boy out of the STASI but you can’t take the STASI out of the boy.
Officials in Germany have announced plans to rebuild a bridge over the Rhine that collapsed days after its capture by US soldiers in the final weeks of the second world war.
The bridge at Remagen, which featured in a 1969 film of the same name starring George Segal, Ben Gazzara and Robert Vaughn, focusing on the heroism of the allies’ final advance into Germany, could be standing again within a decade, town planners have said.
Anybody who wants to know how the Germany economy is running need only count the number of customers Nikolaus Bode has.
The formula for working this out is fairly simple. If the pawnbroker in the small western city of Siegburg is not very busy, the whole country is doing well. But if people are breaking down his doors, that indicates some kind of crisis.
In September this year, Bode is so busy he can hardly think. That means Germany’s in a mess. “A pawnbroker is an indicator,” Bode told DW. “People come here when there is a lot of unemployment or severe economic problems.”
I first visited West Germany as a student, during the height of the Cold War, but I didn’t make it to Berlin until shortly after the Wall came down. In fact, when I arrived there by night train from Munich in the spring of 1990, it was still coming down, both figuratively and literally. Chugging through what until very recently had been East Germany, we stopped at a station where the train remained closed—like Lenin’s on his 1917 journey to Saint Petersburg—while an elderly woman in a shabby, ill-fitting uniform made her way slowly along the platform, meticulously copying down the numbers of our passenger cars, obviously performing a decades-long but now pointless ritual. In the morning, we pulled into the Berlin Zoo station, where everyone got out except for yours truly, because I was too naïve to know that Berlin Zoo was, in fact, the main station for West Berlin and that the final stop, the Hauptbahnhof, where I ended up disembarking, was a cavernous, empty old pile of rubble—or close to it—in the former East Berlin.
