US authorities have issued international arrest warrants for five former VW managers and developers for their role in the Dieselgate scandal.
Nobody in Germany can seem to find them so, you know, just put two and two together. No, that doesn’t make five. But it comes close.
Under the constitution, German citizens can only be extradited to other European Union countries or to an international court. But leaving Germany could pose the risk of being extradited to the United States from a third country.
So that at least explains why the Germans have been spying on us (as in U.S.) for years and years now.
Germany’s foreign intelligence service long spied on numerous official and business targets in the United States, including the White House, Spiegel weekly reported Thursday. The magazine said it had seen documents showing that the intelligence service, the BND, had a list of some 4,000 so-called selector keywords for surveillance between 1998 and 2006.
Zwischen 1998 und 2006 soll der BND demnach knapp 4.000 Suchbegriffe, sogenannte Selektoren, in seinen Datenbanken verwendet haben, die auf amerikanische Ziele gerichtet waren. Dazu sollen Telefon- oder Faxnummern sowie E-Mail-Adressen im Weißen Haus, im US-Finanzministerium und im US-Außenministerium gehört haben. Der BND wollte zu dem Vorgang o¨ffentlich keine Stellung nehmen.
You don’t have to. They’re minding you. Before you even noticed that you minded, too. But once you do start minding, remember to remind yourself that they are only minding you for your own good. So never mind.
Progress at last, I must say. Berlin’s Left party has taken another step forward into the past by banning what they have deemed to be sexist advertising with of half-naked women on city billboards. I couldn’t agree more. I want them all naked. Completely naked. Now.
That image above would also fall under that sexism category, by the way. Like I said, never mind.
A US Senate bill aimed at toughening sanctions on Russia has been slammed by leading members of the European Gazprom lobby as a dirty American trick to promote bad American liquefied petroleum gas and squeeze out good Russian gas from the European market.
The two outraged Gazprom spokespersons, German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) and German chancellor Angela Merkel, reminded the Americans that “Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Germany, that is, Europe to decide and not for the United States of America! We, as Germans, would never put our own economic interests before those of other countries or continents so like stop doing it immediately already. Did I just say we, as Germans? I meant we, as Europeans, of course.”
Ex-Kanzler Gerhard Schröder (SPD) leitet den Verwaltungsrat des Unternehmens Nord Stream II, das dem russischen Energiekonzern Gazprom gehört. Kürzlich erst hatten sich Gabriel, Schröder und der russische Präsident Wladimir Putin am Rande des russischen internationalen Wirtschaftsforums in St. Petersburg getroffen. Schröder hatte auf dem Forum für den Bau der Nordstream-Pipeline geworben.
Es sind besorgniserregende Zahlen: Laut Rüstungsbericht hat Deutschland 2016 fast doppelt so viele Kriegswaffen an Drittländer geliefert als noch ein Jahr zuvor. Zweitgrößter Abnehmer ist ausgerechnet Katar.
“Veiled searches” probably aren’t what you think they are. Women wearing veils aren’t randomly being searched here (although the idea isn’t half bad).
It means stop and search practices or dragnet controls – searches made without having a concrete suspicion.
Bavaria is pushing hard for more of these at the moment, all over the country. Federal minister of the interior Thomas de Maizière is all for it, too. And the usual cry of outrage hält sich in Grenzen (is being kept within bounds, within the border). Maybe because this is a country that thinks it doesn’t need to have a border?
Diese verdachtsunabhängigen Polizeikontrollen sind bislang auf einen 30-Kilometer-Gürtel hinter den Bundesgrenzen beschränkt, sollten laut Herrmann aber auch in der Nähe von Flughäfen, Bahnhöfen und Rastplätzen möglich sein.
PS: Not that stop and search would do any good here in Germany anyway. The courts here don’t cooperate. Check out the judgement reached be a court in Cottbus last week: A Muslim asylum seeker stabs his wife 19 times, cuts her throat and throws her out the window because he thinks she’s been sleeping around (the mother of his five children). He gets off with manslaughter. That means he’ll be out in half the time he would be out in if convicted of murder (there is no life sentence in Germany). The court’s reasoning? In the Muslim world it’s apparently OK to kill your wife if she commits adultery so the man had to be judged with a different set of standards. He gets a discount, in other words. For being a Muslim. This was a court in Germany. Today. Coming to your town soon.
Sorry, I mean Saleh S. And don’t even think of telling me that you don’t know who Safia S. is cause I know you do. But now her brother, Saleh S., has been given seven years of Jugendstrafe (youth custody) for carrying out an Islamist-motivated arson attack. In Germany, people. That means he could literally spend months in prison.
Mother S. and Father S. could not be reached for comment. Nor could Cousin S. (no relation to Cousin Itt). Nor could the Dog S. of the Great Aunt S. of the Neighbor Across The Street S. Okay, S. reicht (that’s enough) already!
Das Landgericht der Stadt hat Saleh S. nun wegen versuchten Mordes in sieben Fällen schuldig gesprochen. Dem Gericht zufolge hat der junge Mann gestanden, am 5. Februar 2016 aus islamistischen Motiven zwei Molotow-Cocktails in den Haupteingang eines Einkaufszentrums in Hannover geworfen zu haben.
PS: Talk about your Fahrenheit 351 (I know, it’s actually Fahrenheit 451). There are currently 351 Islamists with warrants out for their arrests being searched for by police in Germany. It is unclear, however, how many of them are members of the S. family.
What? Something happened in London, too? Imagine that.
I mean, after concrete terror threats forced German police to temporarily shut down the Rock am Ring music festival in Nuerburg and an Afghan man who killed a boy at a German refugee center near Regensburg was also shot and killed and German police arrested a 17-year-old asylum seeker suspected of planning a suicide attack in Berlin and… There were a few more there but I lose track of them these days. In the good old days, when these things only took place once a week or so, they were a whole lot easier to classify and arrange in order.
Something tells me that these terrible events must all be tied together somehow. I can feel it. There has to be a common thread connecting them but I just can’t figure out what it is. I bet you Sherlock Holmes could, though. If such a person existed, I mean.
PS: In an unrelated story, the rate of deportations is stagnating in Germany.
Germany can’t even reach the climate targets it has set for itself (see objective media coverage below).
A thirty-three page report has just confirmed what most German global climate saviors already knew: There is no way in hell that the more than ambitious climate target set by the federal government some ten years back will ever be reached. Emissions were to drop 40 percent the year 2020. They haven’t quite dropped 28 percent yet. The main problem – now get this – being German cars. Like, duh. Ever hear of Volkswagen & Co.?
Ein wesentliches Problem: Der Verkehrsbereich hat seine Emissionen kaum reduziert. So notwendig ein allgemeines Umsteuern beim Autoverkehr ist, so unpopulär sind die Maßnahmen im Einzelnen.
“We in Germany, in Europe and the world will band together to take more decisive action than ever to confront and successfully surmount major challenges to humanity such as climate change.”
None of this started with Donald Trump, you know. Just in case you were wondering.
Meet the new German problem. Same as the old German problem.
Why, then, do confident Germans increasingly dislike the United States?
It is complicated.
Since 1989, Germany has worked hard on its post-unification image as a largely pacifistic country. It is eager to teach other nations how to conduct themselves peacefully and to pursue shared global goals such as reducing global warming or opening national borders to the world’s refugees.
Implicit in Germany’s utopian message is that postmodern Germans know best what not to do — given their terrible 20th-century past, with the aggressions of imperial Germany and later the savagery and Holocaust perpetuated by Hitler’s Third Reich.
Yet being guilt-ridden does not equate to being humble (never a German strong suit)…
