Beautiful German weapon sale of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
Einen Auftrag zur Aufrüstung von Panzern für die Türkei hatte die Bundesregierung vor einigen Wochen noch gestoppt. Jetzt aber erhält das Land sechs neue Jagd-U-Boote – geliefert von ThyssenKrupp.
PS: Funny how these expensive exports always meet the client’s expectations but the weapons systems used in Germany never seem to work. Hard to believe, actually. It’s almost as if it were intentional. Nah.
Yes, it certainly does. It ought to consider trying the so-called “deportation” approach I’ve heard tell about. You know, like actually deporting the hundreds of thousands that have already been turned down?
Germany has a problem with migrants who have been denied asylum. Many of them don’t want to leave, and getting them to go is far from easy.
Last week, police in Ellwangen in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg attempted to pick up a 23-year-old Togolese man at a refugee hostel to deport him to Italy, the country where he first crossed the border into the European Union. About 150 other Africans at the hostel wouldn’t allow it. They heavily outnumbered the 24 officers, and forced them to hand over the keys to the man’s handcuffs. The police had to retreat. They returned in force three days later and took the Togolese man away. Twenty-seven of the hostel residents are being held for rioting.
For 2016 and 2017, 406,153 people were denied asylum in Germany. In the same two years, only 49,300 people were deported or left “voluntarily” under pressure from authorities.
Flushed with the success of not having been built yet but nobody really seeming to give a shit, Berlin’s hyper-delayed Berlin Brandenburg Airport will soon also not be getting an additional terminal for none of the additional millions of passengers that are almost certainly never going to land here.
Being that the airport was originally planned to open in 2011, Airport operators are playing it safe this time and have scheduled the new terminal to open in October 2074, provided, of course, no unforeseen delays get in the way of all the other unforeseen delays that are invariably going to pop up during non-construction so unforeseenly.
The new airport has defied all clichés of German efficiency: it was meant to open in 2011, but construction problems and technical delays saw the date pushed back repeatedly, leaving the German capital reliant on two small and aging Cold War-era airports.
When not actually running away, that is.
Around 200 African migrants in refugee accommodation in the small southern German town of Ellwangen have forced police to release a man who was due to be deported to the Congo.
The 23-year-old man was un-handcuffed by police who considered themselves outnumbered after the large crowd of refugees, reportedly mostly African, threatened violence against officers who had arrived in three police cars.
“They were so aggressive and threatened us more and more, so we had to leave the man behind and retreat to the gate [of the refugee facility],” one officer said, adding that there was some damage to the cars.
The migrants then sent a messenger to the police, bearing an ultimatum: that they had to remove the handcuffs from the Congolese national within two minutes, or that they would storm the gate.
The police decided to give the security guard at the refugee facility a key to release the man.
“I can only pay my colleagues great respect for having kept cool heads in such an aggressive and exceptional situation.”
It’s past bad. It’s hilarious.
Only 4 of the Bundeswehr’s 128 Tornadoes are operational.
Maybe that’s why Germany’s defense minister Ursula von der Leyen wants 12 billion euros “more for the German army than current budget plans foresee.” That won’t do it even if she gets it, of course. And to get anywhere near the 2 percent of GDP spending Germany has committed itself to spend you’d need more along the lines of 30 to 40 billion euros. But who’s counting?
Nur 4 von 128 Eurofightern kampfbereit: „Im Ernstfall kann man nur beten.”
It’s May Day in Berlin! And Berliners are big on tradition.
Tuesday I watched the riot . . .
Seen the cops out on the street
Watched ’em throwin’ rocks and stuff
And chokin’ in the heat
Listened to reports
About the whisky passin’ ’round
Seen the smoke and fire
And the market burnin’ down
Watched while everybody
On his street would take a turn
To stomp and smash and bash and crash
And slash and bust and burn
Berliner Polizei rechnet mit heftigen Krawallen – 5300 Beamte im Einsatz
When it comes to German-American relations, I mean. Like holy Scheiße! Who would have ever expected that?
And here I thought Germans were such positive, can-do people who have always been so, you know, upbeat and cheerful about German-American relations. In the past, I mean. Right? This just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just not their nature. Somebody should double-check these numbers.
6 charts on how Germans and Americans view one another
1. Americans think U.S.-German relations are in good shape, but Germans disagree.
2. German attitudes toward the U.S. have turned sharply negative in the Trump era.
3. Merkel gets positive reviews from Americans, especially Democrats.
4. Many Germans see the U.S. as a top foreign policy partner; fewer Americans feel the same way about Germany.
5. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see Germany as an important partner for foreign policy.
6. There are transatlantic differences about defense spending.
Only 11% of Germans expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs in 2017, down from 86% for Obama in 2016.
And sexy, of course.
It all used to be so easy. But now property prices are rising like mad. This is not sexy, I am told. Unless, of course, you own property here, which practically nobody does. And that brings us back to poor…
About 85% of Berlin’s 3.4 million residents live in rentals and homeownership remains remarkably low — a condition fostered by the city’s turbulent history, Cold War division and five decades of communist rule in East Berlin. Almost by nature, Berliners tend to have a low regard for property owners…
Though still modest compared with other cities in Europe, rents in Berlin have risen 75% in the last five years. A recent survey by the property consultant group Knight Frank showed that property prices in Berlin rose 21% in 2017, the steepest rate in its survey of 150 cities around the world and far above the average increase of 4.5%. The biggest increases that year in the United States were Seattle, where rent rose 12.7%, and San Francisco, where they were up 9.3%.
“Once you move into an apartment in Germany, you are basically in the lease for life unless you cancel it yourself.”
That means caring. You know, like the German state? It is caring and social (“social” here, of course, just being a different word for “free of charge”).
And it turns out that one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, Tunesian Salafi Sami A. (he lost the other letters of his last name in a tragic car crash or something, I guess) has been receiving over 1,100 euros a month from the social German state since 2008 to chill around the house somewhere in the Ruhr Valley and do nothing except watch his beard grow. Or maybe reminisce now and then about the good old days with the Big O. himself. And the Germans do this even though the Tunisians would like to have a word with Sami A. Germany won’t extradite him, however, being sozial and all and fearing that Tunisia might subject him to “inhuman” or “demeaning” treatment. You know, like not getting him a flat-screen TV or a sufficiently fast WiFi connection for his cell?
You laugh but just think about it. How would Germany look returning the bodyguard of a mass murderer to a country like that?
Die deutsche Justiz geht davon aus, dass A. “mit beachtlicher Wahrscheinlichkeit Folter, unmenschliche oder erniedrigende Behandlung drohen.”
As head of a “worker’s” party like Germany’s SPD, I mean: Somebody who has never worked a day in her life.
Folks like that know best how to distribute/redistribute other people’s money. I guess this election means that the SPD commrades want to stretch out their party’s long and excruciating terminal illness for as long as they possibly can. Good choice, workers. She is clearly the best man for the job.
Andrea Nahles has become the first woman to lead Germany’s Social Democrats — though by a disappointing margin of votes…
After garnering a meager 66.35 percent of delegate support at a special conference in the western German city of Wiesbaden on Sunday, Andrea Nahles takes over a Social Democratic Party (SPD) in an unprecedented crisis.
Scarcely a year ago, SPD delegates had unanimously elected Martin Schulz, the longtime president of the European Parliament, as party leader and chancellor candidate. The result was a historic national electoral debacle against Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), leaving the SPD deeply divided over policy and personnel.
After initial refusals, party leaders decided to extend the grand coalition with Merkel’s CDU and Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, which allies with the chancellor’s conservatives. Nahles’ job is to remake and re-energize the SPD while ensuring that its cabinet ministers can do their jobs with minimum of interference by fellow Social Democrats.
“Solidarity is one of the main things missing in this globalized, neoliberal turbocharged world.”
Observing Hermann 