Country may be waiting on outcome of talks setting out plans to kickstart trade with EU
Iran has held back on its threat to make its first breach of the nuclear deal and may be waiting for the outcome of talks with EU powers, China and Russia in Vienna.
At the talks on Friday the EU countries will set out plans to kickstart trade between Tehran and the bloc, one of the Iranian preconditions for sticking with the deal.
Continue reading...German chancellor will travel to G20 despite visibly shaking at public event in Berlin
Angela Merkel has travelled to the G20 summit in Japan, despite experiencing a second bout of shaking in just over a week at a public event, her spokesperson has said.
“Everything is going ahead as planned,” Steffen Seibert told German media. “The chancellor is doing fine.”
Continue reading...Although Germany is internationally touted as bike-friendly, Berlin lags metropolises like Amsterdam or Copenhagen by decades. But in the city’s senate, a rethink is under way
Electric bikes, swanky racers and clanky old flea market two-wheelers roll along a cycle path near Berlin’s Hasenheide park that was recently reclaimed from a lane used by cars. The path has been coated with bright green paint and has a line of stripy metal bollards to separate it from the busy road.
“It’s now protected from cars and that is good,” says Jerome Jossin, who lives nearby and whose baby sits swinging her legs from a seat on the back of his bike. “This is safer, but it’s not typical.”
Continue reading...Court rules against Georg Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia’s claim on Rheinfels Castle
A German court has ruled against a claim by the great-great-grandson of the country’s last kaiser to the picturesque ruins of a 13th-century castle overlooking the Rhine valley.
Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, argued the ruins of Rheinfels Castle should be returned to the Hohenzollern family because the current owners had breached a century-old agreement, a claim rejected on Tuesday by a court in Koblenz.
Continue reading...Temperatures could hit 40C from Spain to Switzerland, with authorities urging children and older people to stay indoors
Authorities have urged children and older people to stay indoors and issued severe warnings against dehydration and heatstroke as an unprecedented week-long heatwave begins its advance across continental Europe.
Meteorologists said temperatures would reach or even exceed 40C from Spain to Switzerland as hot air was sucked up from the Sahara by the combination of a storm stalling over the Atlantic and high pressure over central Europe.
Continue reading...The party has to address the concerns of groups beyond its urban base if it is to ultimately succeed
The Greens in Germany could hardly believe it. Leading party members were bouncing up and down when the public broadcasters sent the first, still uncertain results on the evening of the European Union elections. The green column rose to 20% and above, close to the black column of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, which ended up with 22.6%. Party manager Michael Kellner was beaming as the numbers came in.
Over the course of the evening it became clear that the Green party had nearly doubled its seats in the European parliament and had overtaken the Social Democrats, the former “people’s party”. A historic victory for us, a historic disaster for them.
Continue reading...Chancellor warns against losing credibility after arrest over murder of Walter Lübcke
Angela Merkel has said Germany must rigorously fight rightwing extremism after the murder of a prominent politician.
The arrest of a man with suspected far-right sympathies over the shooting this month of Walter Lübcke, a regional ally of Merkel known for his pro-migrant views, shocked Germany and prompted calls for a more proactive government response to anti-immigrant extremists.
Continue reading...Jürgen Rudloff’s chain of ‘wellness spas’ sold sex as a health service for men. But his business model was fatally flawed – as his trial for aiding and abetting trafficking revealed
Until his dramatic fall from grace, Jürgen Rudloff was the self-proclaimed “brothel king” of Germany. Owner of a chain of clubs he boasted was the “the largest marketplace for sex in Europe”, he was every inch the well-dressed entrepreneur, a regular face on reality TV and chat shows.
Rudloff is now serving a five-year sentence for aiding and abetting trafficking. His trial laid bare the misery and abuse of women working as prostitutes at his club who, according to court documents, were treated like animals and beaten if they didn’t make enough money. His imprisonment has dismantled the idea of Germany’s “clean prostitution” industry and raised troubling questions about what lies behind the legalised, booming sex trade.
Continue reading...Email warns recent murder of Walter Lübcke was first in a line of ‘upcoming purges’
Several German politicians who have publicly stood up for refugees have received death threats since what police are treating as the alleged politically motivated murder of one of Angela Merkel’s party allies.
An email sent to politicians and media organisations across the country on Tuesday night warned that the alleged murder of the Christian Democratic Union politician Walter Lübcke, allegedly by a man linked to the far right, was the first in a line of “upcoming purges” and called for terror attacks on left-leaning politicians, refugees and Jews in Germany.
Continue reading...The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has blamed dehydration after she was seen shaking during a rendition of her national anthem. Merkel was welcoming the newly-appointed Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to the Germany capital. However, she grinned widely when later asked by reporters about her condition during the red-carpet reception for Zelenskiy. 'Since then I’ve drunk at least three glasses of water, which I apparently needed, and now I’m doing very well,' she said at a press conference
Continue reading...Actors and directors called on Görlitz voters to not succumb to far-right party’s ‘hate and enmity’
A 51-year-old immigrant has been elected mayor of a town in eastern Germany after beating a candidate from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a campaign that drew international attention.
Octavian Ursu, a classical musician who came to Germany from Romania in 1990s, stood for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union party, receiving 55.1% of the vote in Sunday’s election in Goerlitz. Preliminary returns showed his AfD opponent, Sebastian Wippel, an ex-policeman received 44.9%.
Continue reading...Lakeside house where a Jewish family lived before fleeing the Nazis spans a century of German history
Elsie Alexander called it her “soul place”, the lakeside house on the outskirts of Berlin where her family had spent long happy summers before they were forced to flee the Nazis.
Eighty-three years on, her grandson, Thomas Harding, along with members of the local community, reopened it to the public on Sunday after a painstaking restoration process in which the house by the lake – the subject of his bestselling 2015 book of the same name – was saved from demolition and turned into a educational meeting place for young Europeans.
Continue reading...Pia Klemp, one of the Iuventa 10, says it is ‘ridiculous’ that she could face jail
A captain of a search-and-rescue ship potentially facing up to 20 years in jail in connection with her role in saving 6,000 people from drowning in the Mediterranean has accused the EU of letting people die and the Italian authorities of “criminalising solidarity”.
Pia Klemp, 35, who skippered the Iuventa, a vessel run by an NGO, stands accused with nine others of aiding and abetting illegal migration in relation to their role in seeking to rescue people in danger after fleeing the Libyan coast for Europe.
Continue reading...Rise in bars stocking 0% beers to meet demand of drinkers who wish to ditch the hangover
During last year’s sweltering summer in Europe, workers of the Störtebeker beer brewery stood at the doors of the bottle depot eagerly awaiting the empty returns so they could be washed and refilled as quickly as possible. A bottle shortage swept the country due to the rate at which beer was being consumed to quench the overheated nation’s thirst.
But it wasn’t the demand for their classic range of beers that surprised the brewery bosses most, rather the rate at which its alcohol-free varieties were being drunk.
Continue reading...Dollar slides after America only created 75,000 new jobs last month, weaker than the 175,000 expected
Earlier:
Let’s get some details on the weakest US jobs report in three months.
The government cut 15,000 jobs in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while private companies hired 90,000 people.
The unemployment rates for adult men (3.3 percent), adult women (3.2 percent), teenagers (12.7 percent), Whites (3.3 percent), Blacks (6.2 percent), Asians (2.5 percent), and Hispanics (4.2 percent) showed little or no change in May.
Continue reading...Niels Högel, who used drugs to cause cardiac arrests, confirmed as country’s worst postwar serial killer
When Niels Högel, a nurse, worked shifts at two clinics in the northern German towns of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst in the early 2000s, the hospital rota showed a mysterious spike in patients who experienced sudden cardiac arrests and had to be reanimated.
Yet the bullish man in his late 20s was allowed to go about his business undisturbed until a colleague caught him in the act in 2005: for at least half a decade, Högel had systematically injected patients with cardiovascular medication in order to orchestrate a medical emergency and show off his resuscitation skills.
Continue reading...Senior figure in Angela Merkel’s party was shot in the head at close range, say police
A local politician from Angela Merkel’s party was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head, German police said on Monday.
With no weapon found at the scene and no discharge residues on the dead man’s body, investigators appear to have ruled out suicide and are investigating intentional homicide.
Continue reading...Party is developing a taste for their opponents’ blood and shaking up fiscal policy
Emboldened by unprecedented highs in the European elections in Germany, a surging Green party is discovering that it can set the political agenda in Europe’s largest economy without having to be in power.
The party that was once derided for its plans for a meat-free “veggie day” at nationwide canteens is developing a taste for their opponents’ blood: pushing other parties to adopt their policies, laying down red lines for coalition talks and even hatching plans to slay the country’s holy cows on fiscal policy.
Continue reading...Andrea Nahles’s resignation fuels fears Germany’s embattled government may fall
Andrea Nahles, the leader of Germany’s junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), has announced her resignation, raising concerns that Angela Merkel’s government might collapse.
Nahles, who will step down from all her political roles including that as leader of the SPD parliamentary group, said her resignation was a consequence of the poorest ever performance from the SPD in its 156-year history last weekend, when it received just 15.8% of the vote at the European parliamentary elections, 11 points down on 2014.
Continue reading...Call for solidarity follows warning that Jews wearing cap face abuse and attacks
Germans of all faiths and none are being urged to wear kippah skullcaps on Saturday as a symbol of solidarity with the Jewish community, after a steep rise in antisemitic attacks.
Protests across the country have been called by the government’s antisemitism ombudsman after he triggered a heated debate when he warned Jews last week not to wear the kippah because of the increasing likelihood of being attacked.
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