Heidelberg university shooting: Gunman dead after injuring several
A lone gunman is dead after injuring several people inside a lecture hall at Heidelberg University, German police have said.
They said the gunman was in possession of a “long gun”, and that a large operation including emergency services was under way at the university’s campus in Neuenheimer Feld.
It is not yet clear how many people have been injured, or how badly.
Heidelberg is a university town in the southwest of Germany.
Germany is said to be blocking Estonia from providing German-origin military support to Ukraine, US newspaper The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Friday.
The report comes after the US State Department gave Estonia the green light to send US-made weapons to Ukraine.
According to the WSJ report, Berlin has refused to issue permits so that the weapons can be exported to Kyiv.
It refuses to provide arms to Ukraine while other NATO members step up to do so.
Fears are rising that Germany is failing to do enough to prevent a Russian invasion and failing to aid Ukraine in the case of an attack amid warnings from the White House that Russian troops could invade at any time.
U.S. officials say there is evidence Russia is planning to overthrow Ukraine’s government and take Kyiv, CNN reported Tuesday. Russia is also deploying troops into Belarus — a development that U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Tuesday shows Russia “is making moves that would suggest that they have plans to invade.”
Pipeline politics have undermined Europe’s strategic advantage over Russia
A pipeline of natural gas from Russia to the West is also, in effect, a pipeline of money from the West to Russia. Neither side can cut off supplies to the other side without cutting itself off.
It’s a co-dependent relationship that has helped to keep to peace for decades. Pipeline politics has been especially helpful to the countries between Russia and Germany — and, in particular, Poland and Ukraine.
Pop stars don’t come more quintessentially British than David Bowie. But during his Berlin years, the English icon left a deep impact on Germany too. When Bowie died exactly six years ago, the German Foreign Office tweeted out its farewells and thanked him ‘for helping to bring down the wall.’ Bowie would have been 75 this weekend, giving Germans cause to reflect on the legacy of a much-loved Cold War hero.
Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has had his first telephone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Scholz, who succeeded Angela Merkel as chancellor on December 8, pledged to strengthen economic ties with China, but he failed to mention human rights or the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong.
The telephone call will disappoint those who had hoped that Germany’s new government — a three-way coalition consisting of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) — would break with the past and take distance from Merkel’s policy of appeasing dictators and sacrificing human rights on the altar of financial gain.
Two Afghan brothers have been charged in Germany with murdering their sister, whom they allegedly wanted to punish because of her Western way of life.
The men, identified only as Sayed H., 26, and Seyed H., 22, due to Germany’s privacy laws, are accused of luring their 34-year-old sister Maryam H. to a meeting in Berlin on July 13, before choking and strangling her and cutting her throat.
German prosecutors say that the brothers dismembered the mother-of-two’s body and then took a taxi to a train station later that day with her body in a suitcase.
… The Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance against Christians in Europe (OIDAC), which has compiled a report on anti-Christian hate crime in the continent, says the two main threats come from ‘secular intolerance’ and ‘Islamic oppression’.
… They said: ‘Islamic Oppression can mostly be seen in what we call “hotspot areas” of European cities and suburbs, where they impose unique legal and moral codes, which are often in contradiction to democratic principles and human rights.’
German police revealed on Friday that they prevented a planned Islamist attack in the northern city of Hamburg over the summer.
Andy Grote, top security official for the city, which like the cities of Berlin and Bremen is a state in its own right, said that the plot had been “very, very serious.”
On August 26, police arrested a 20-year-old German-Moroccan man after he tried to buy a firearm and hand grenade on the dark web — unwittingly from an undercover investigator.
“Western hegemony is over,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently. “It lasted centuries, but it is over”.
At the same time, the mosques of Cologne, the fourth-largest city in Germany, have obtained permission to broadcast the call to prayer every Friday over minaret loudspeakers.
“Many residents of Cologne are Muslims,” said Mayor Henriette Reker, “and in my opinion it is a sign of respect to allow the call of the muezzin.”
“The Führer was surprised — he clearly had no foreknowledge of the date and time of the attack — and ecstatic.”
Over a dozen people have been forcibly taken to government isolation centers in Germany, while hundreds are being held in similar centers in Australia as Western countries continue to use mandatory COVID quarantine centers all in the name putting an end to COVID-19.
The three parties planning to form a new federal government in Germany have presented a coalition agreement that is to serve as a pre-agreed policy roadmap for the next four years.
The platform for the new government indicates there will be little substantive change from the policies pursued by outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The lack of bold fresh ideas is the direct consequence of an inconclusive election in September and that the parties seeking to form a new government are ideological rivals that do not agree on almost anything.
Frankfurt’s Higher Regional Court on Tuesday found 29-year-old Taha A.-J.guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity resulting in death, sentencing him to life in prison.
The Frankfurt case is the first in the world to decide whether a former member of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) group played a role in the attempted genocide of the Yazidi religious group.
The proceedings had to be briefly suspended as the defendant passed out when the verdict was read aloud in court.
The approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia is outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “biggest mistake”, the former president of the EU Council said in comments backing up warnings from former President Donald Trump.
In a press conference on Sunday, former President of the European Council Donald Tusk said that Angela Merkel was “helpless” in the face of lobbying efforts from German industry to approve the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is set to deliver gas to Germany from Russia in a pipeline along the bottom of the Baltic sea.
