Free Republic

The Interior Ministry is planning to beef up its terror response capacity by setting up an new elite unit to be deployed in emergency situations, on top of Germany’s existing GSG 9. The government is taking the step as a response to the recent terror attacks in France and Denmark, believing that Germany’s current reaction capacity is too limited, reports Der Spiegel. Germany needs “a robust unit that can confront such situations,” said the Christian Democrat (CDU) specialist for the interior, Armin Schuster. …

Real German incomes, or gross wages adjusted for inflation, had not developed evenly in recent years across different wage sectors, a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Munich-based IFO economic research institute showed Wednesday. […] The authors of the study said one of the reasons for the increasing wage disparity had been a creeping decline of collective bargaining deals with binding wages. […] “We need to redouble our efforts to scale back wage disparities again without losing too many jobs,” Bertelsmann Foundation chief Aart De Geus said in a statement, pointing out that the recent introduction of a minimum...

About a thousand people still contract tuberculosis daily in Europe and Central Asia, despite an overall decline of the disease, a report by the Europe Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) revealed Tuesday (17 March). The report, co-authored with the World Health Organization (WHO), said the continent would not be free of the disease until the next century at the current low rate of eradication, particularly due to prevalence in countries to the east of the region. “Multi-resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is still ravaging the European region, making it the most affected area of the entire world,” Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO...

Speaking to BuzzFeed, Cameron admitted any future negotiations would be “tough”, but maintained his stance that a continuation of the status quo was “not an option”. The EU “isn’t working properly” and too many people are happy to “go on as they are”, Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday (16 March). “Europe isn’t working properly. You can see that by the fact that Britain, outside the euro, has created more jobs in the last five years than the other 27 put together,” said Cameron. “Rather than burying this under the carpet, let’s work out what needs to change.” […] Yesterday,...

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble confirmed on Tuesday that Germany has agreed to join the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), despite pressure from the US.Germany, France and Italy “want to bring our long experience … to help the bank build a solid reputation,” Schäuble said at a joint press conference in Berlin with Chinese vice-premier Ma Kai. “We want to make a contribution to the positive development of the Asian economy, in which German companies are actively taking part,” he said. France and Italy have also agreed to become members of the $50-billion institution, seen as a rival to the...

Around 70 police officers searched the Sahabe Islamic Education and Cultural Center in Stuttgart on Tuesday, looking for connections to terrorist organization ISIS. “There is concrete suspicion that the association fulfills the criteria for being forbidden under the law,” Baden-Württemberg interior minister Reinhold Gall said in a statement. “We’ve been watching the association for a long time, but the suspicions of breaching the law have grown more serious recently.” […] Gall said the Sahabe association “supports the use of violence to assert religious values and supports a foreign organization, the so-called Islamic State, which provokes attacks against people or property.”...

The E.U. Experiment Has Failedby Bruce ThorntonThursday, March 5, 2015 The slow-motion crisis of the European Union is the big story that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Even an event like the recent terrorist attack in France that left 17 dead is often isolated from the larger political, economic, and social problems that have long plagued the project of unifying the countries of Europe in order to harness its collective economic power, and to avoid the bloody internecine strife that stains its history. On the economic front, the E.U.’s dismal economic performance over the last six years was summed...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he considered activating nuclear forces to annex the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine after the fall of a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv early last year. “We were ready to do it,” Putin said of putting nuclear forces at the ready, in a nearly three-hour documentary that aired on state television Sunday. The president added that he had fielded many calls from foreign leaders and told them “that this is our historical territory and Russian people live there, they were in danger, and we cannot abandon them.” He said: “It was a frank and open position....

A key European diplomat said Thursday that the letter to Iran from Senate Republicans “was not helpful” to ongoing international nuclear talks with Iran, as other officials lowered expectations for reaching a framework deal this month. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was reacting to a letter signed by 47 Senate Republicans warning Tehran that any nuclear deal it strikes with President Barack Obama will be non-binding and easily undone. Steinmeier added that to call the missive unhelpful was “an understatement.” Germany is among the six nations conducting talks with Iran in an effort to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear...

Christians are frightened to reveal their religious beliefs to colleagues at work, equality chiefs admit. When they do declare their Christianity, whether in the office or on the shop floor, they are often mocked or treated like bigots—and their children are even ridiculed at school. Christians also think their faith is being pushed out of its role as a cornerstone of life in Britain, according to a major study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. And ironically, many feel they are being persecuted by the same anti-discrimination and equality laws supported by the equality watchdog. …

Early Tuesday morning, Israeli police demolished an illegally built structure a few hundred meters away from the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus which bore a European Union (EU) flag, according to rights group Regavim. The structure was situated on state land which is zoned as a national park, it is one of five hundred built by the European Union on state land in and around Jerusalem,without any coordination with the Israeli authorities. A recent report by Regavim highlighted this new EU policy of unilaterally building on behalf of the Palestinians in Jerusalem and Area C of Judea and Samaria...

In an interview with Spiegel, celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty speaks about Alexis Tsipras’ election victory in Greece, Europe’s inability to fix its financial woes and what EU leaders can learn from the United States. […] “We may have a common currency for 19 countries, but each of these countries has a different tax system, and fiscal policy was never harmonized in Europe. It can’t work. In creating the eurozone, we have created a monster.” […] “We need a fiscal union and a harmonization of budgets. We need a common debt repayment fund for the eurozone, like the one proposed...

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has described his country as the most bankrupt in the world and said European leaders knew all along that Athens would never repay its debts, in blunt comments that sparked a backlash in the German media on Tuesday. A documentary about the Greek debt crisis on German public broadcaster ARD was aired on the same day euro zone finance ministers met in Brussels to discuss whether to provide Athens with further funding in exchange for delivering reforms. "Clever people in Brussels, in Frankfurt and in Berlin knew back in May 2010 that Greece would never...

Swiss voters Sunday overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have scrapped the Alpine country’s value-added-tax system and replaced it with a carbon tax. Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative while 8% supported the measure. The initiative would have encouraged Swiss households to use renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, which would have been exempt from taxes. The initiative, which was introduced by the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland, was designed to help lower carbon emissions and reduce global warming. A proposal replacing the main consumer tax with a new levy on non-renewable energy has suffered a blistering defeat...

The honorary mayor of a village in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt has resigned after neo-Nazis were given permission to demonstrate outside his home over his support of asylum seekers. Markus Nierth, from Tröglitz, said he did not want to expose his family to the slogans of National Democratic party (NPD) protesters as well as the presence of the armed police that would have to be in place to protect him. “My children are too precious,” said Nierth in a message posted on the Tröglitz community Facebook page. “What really took the the biscuit was the realization that the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Having topped the polls in last year’s European Election, Marine Le Pen’s National Front is set to become the biggest party in France with the French Prime Minister accusing the party of wanting to “kidnap France” at this month’s regional elections. The latest polling data, which comes after it was revealed French Jews are increasingly turning to the right wing party, puts the National Front on 29 per cent, four points clear of the opposition UMP and creating a significant gap between them and the socialists on 21 per cent, The Local reports. The country votes on March 22nd...

Hungarian Jewish leaders are criticizing a new Holocaust museum under construction in Budapest for omitting the culpability of Hungarians in the attempted genocide of the Jews. The museum in Budapest, called House of Fates, is nearly complete, but the planned exhibition focuses only on the last period of the Holocaust in Hungary, starting in 1944, when the ghettoization and deportation of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews was already complete. It fails to deal with the earlier persecution against Hungarian Jews, starting with the passage of anti-Jewish laws in the 1920s, local Jewish community leaders and historians complained. Community leaders said they...

Germany has rejected a definition of anti-Semitism that labels the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) as anti-Semitic. Responding to a legislative questionnaire released Thursday by leading Green Party MP Volker Beck, the Merkel administration wrote that “there does not exist a general academic definition” of anti-Semitism. Beck, who heads the German- Israel parliamentary group in the Bundestag, sharply criticized the Merkel administration: “Here the federal government has cowered,” he said. “There is no doubt of the anti-Semitic motivation within the spectrum of the BDS campaign. BDS aims essentially against Jewish Israelis and is therefore anti-Semitic. Whoever aggressively boycotts Israeli...

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned Sunday that the far-right Front National (FN) party could win the next presidential election in 2017, saying their policies were a “disaster” for the country. “Do you not think that a FN which wins 25 percent in European elections and maybe 30 percent in local elections… cannot win the presidential election?” Valls said on French television channel iTele. “Not in 2022, not in 2029, but in 2017,” he added. Polls showed that the FN could win an “unprecedented” score in forthcoming local elections on March 22nd and 29th, Valls said. …

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has advocated a combined EU military force, suggesting two major benefits: to improve the bloc’s standing on the world stage, and to send a message to Moscow. Juncker told the Welt am Sonntag Sunday paper that forming an EU army would be one of the best ways for the bloc to defend its values, as well as its borders. “An army like this would help us to better coordinate our foreign and defense policies, and to collectively take on Europe’s responsibilities in the world,” Juncker told the weekly. “Europe’s image has suffered dramatically and also...