Free Republic

(Reuters) - Luxury car maker BMW (BMWG.DE) revealed a $1 billion Mexican plant investment on Thursday, becoming the latest in a line of major automakers to take advantage of the country's growing industrial base and tariff-free access to the U.S. market. BMW outlined plans to build a factory near San Luis Potosi, central Mexico, in a move that will reduce the German company's dependence on higher-cost plants at home. The plant will begin assembling unspecified models in 2019 with an initial workforce of 1,500 and annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles, the company said. "Mexico is an ideal location for...

Americans frustrated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reluctance to meet demands for stronger sanctions against Russia have now begun to ask if there is a good reason the German leader has been targeted by US spies. Questions are being raised about Merkel’s early life in totalitarian East Germany, the extent of her ties to its communist regime and her history as "an ardent Russophile" in Soviet-dominated East Germany. Last year, in information leaked to the German news magazine Der Spiegel by former US National Security Authority contractor Edward Snowden, Merkel learned that the US intelligence service had been tapping her...

...Supporters say creating the world's largest free-trade pact, and a marketplace of 815 million people, could boost the EU and U.S. economies by $100 billion a year each.

Students at German universities have shown themselves to be a risk-free lot in a survey by Ernst & Young. The civil service is their most popular choice of future profession, while job security is valued above all else. […] The number was higher for female students (36 percent), but government work also came in first among men with 23 percent choosing it as their preferred career path. […] Other future positions popular with students were in the fields of science (19 percent) and culture (17 percent). Consultants and auditors were the private sector jobs most interesting for students in Germany...

German lawmakers on Thursday voted to introduce a minimum wage of €8.50 per hour, despite criticism from both unions and employers of the new law. While employers said the law could cost jobs, unions criticized the final version for falling short. […] Labor Minister Andrea Nahles praised the government’s bill before the vote. “Cheap, unprotected—that is over,” Nahles told lawmakers. Her center-left Social Democrats (SPD) had made the minimum wage a condition for joining Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in a coalition government at the end of last year. …

The joke’s on you! A baby in a photo chosen by Nazis as the perfect Aryan baby has been revealed to in fact be Jewish, not German. Hessy Taft, who was 6 months old when the picture was taken, found out about the photograph after an aunt recognized her on a postcard, the Telegraph reports. But apparently the Nazis had no idea that the precious baby they deemed the “perfect Aryan” was actually a descendant of the House of David. Taft lived with her parents, Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, in Berlin during the height of the Nazis’ takeover in 1935....

The euro crisis may have eased recently, but companies and countries in the common currency zone still aren’t investing enough to fuel growth. The best solution, a Berlin economics institute argues, is to establish an EU-wide investment fund. […] But simply ratcheting up public expenditures, as some Southern European governments have advocated, is not a sound strategy for improving the situation, the [German Institute for Economic Research (DIW)] believes. “One of Europe’s biggest weaknesses is the lack of private investments,” (Marcel) Fratzscher says. “We have to close the gap by way of a European investment agenda.” …

Instead of a no-spy deal, the US has begun a Cyber Dialogue with Germany. In a Spiegel interview, John Podesta, a special advisor to President Barack Obama, speaks of the balance between alliances and security and says that changes are being made to NSA espionage practices. […] “(W)ith respect to what German citizens think, the United States has a pretty good track record of standing up for values of global democracy, of free expression, of protecting the rights of individuals, of trying to ensure that people are not discriminated against, of not suppressing free speech. Every country has a history...

Less than three weeks after the publicity surrounding Payhembury School in Devon, where the school staff have been pressured into bussing their pupils into a highly multiracial part of London on ‘exchange’ trips designed to promote multiculturalism and multiracialism, another school has been singled out for attack by Ofsted inspectors because of alleged ‘racist’ bullying, even though the pupils are all White. Payhembury School in Devon was criticised in its 2010 Ofsted report because all of the pupils attending the school are White and because the school is situated in an all White area. Payhembury School was graded merely, ‘good’,...

David Cameron has suffered "utter humiliation" over the nomination of Jean-Claude Juncker as European Commission president, Ed Miliband has claimed. The Labour leader told MPs the PM's renegotiation strategy for the UK in Europe was now "in tatters".

The '20 July plot', as it came to be known, saw German army officers from Hitler's inner circle team up with members of the resistance to try to blow up the Nazi leader at his headquarters in Rastenburg, Eastern Prussia, now part of PolandGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute on Saturday, June 28, to the army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler towards the end of the Second World War. Speaking ahead of the 70th anniversary of the failed plot, Merkel said those responsible had acted "in accordance with their conscience."

Germany wants to promote structural economic, financial market and tax reform when it takes over the presidency of the G7 club of rich nations next week, German media reported on Sunday. Member states must “join forces to support an even stronger economic recovery”, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and central bank chief Jens Weidmann said in a written message to other G7 members, the Handelsblatt business daily said. […] Germany—the Eurozone’s largest economy—also called for progress to address “the remaining gaps in financial market regulation”, including shadow banks, and on the automatic exchange of tax information. Schäuble also wants to promote...

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) publishes a weekly webzine, The Islamic State Report. The latest issue is headlined “Smashing the Borders of the Tawaghit.” (“Tawaghit” are non-Muslim creations.) ISIS, citing the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 between the British and French, boasts that it is destroying the “partitioning of Muslim lands by crusader powers.” That may seem like a quixotic task for a relatively small band of irregulars, but in trying to redraw the map of Iraq and Syria, ISIS has hit upon a weak link in the chain holding the nations of the Middle East together. It...

Dealing a defiant blow to the Kremlin, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine signed a long-delayed trade pact with Europe on Friday that Moscow had bitterly opposed. He then declared he would like his country to one day become a full member of the European Union. In so doing, Ukraine’s new leader, a billionaire confectionary magnate, has in effect raised a risky bet on the West that has cost his country hundreds of lives and the loss of the Crimean peninsula to Russia and has set off a low-level civil war in its eastern border region. By signing the trade...

Archaeologists have formed a trade union grouping amid concerns that some highly qualified people are working for pay rates not much above the minimum wage — or in some cases, for free. Contract archaeologists, who mostly work in the private sector, have joined trade union Unite in an attempt to convince archaeological consultancies to sign up to a standardised pay agreement that would protect wage levels. The move comes after what the chairman of the new branch, Matt Seaver, described as “an apocalypse” in the sector. The union grouping comprises approximately 60 contract archaeologists — around half the total number...

BERLIN -- After being injured fighting the Syrian government, 31-year-old Mohannad reached his home in Frankfurt, Germany, with a simple plan: rest, recuperate, then rejoin the fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. As related in German newspaper accounts, which by law couldn’t identify him by his full name, Mohannad even transferred the equivalent of $6,800 to a Syrian bank for use by the terror organization. With that as evidence that he was supporting a terrorist organization, German authorities seized his passport and prevented him from returning to Turkey _ the jumping-off point for radicals seeking to join...

Germany’s domestic intelligence service wants to increase surveillance on users of social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but stressed it would only target terrorists and extremists. […] But the Süddeutsche Zeitung had reported that the BfV’s chief, Hans-Georg Maaßen, wanted to develop a system which collected “large amounts of online data”. …

The German government is ending a contract with Verizon over fears the company could be letting U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on sensitive communications, officials said Thursday. The New York-based company has for years provided Internet services to a number of government departments, although not to German security agencies, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate. […] German authorities were particularly irked by reports that the NSA had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlin has also proposed building more secure networks in Europe to avoid having to rely on American Internet companies that manage much of the electronic traffic circulating the globe. …

Eurofighter will by year-end make is final proof-of-concept test flight on an aerodynamic modification kit that promises to improve the combat aircraft’s subsonic turn rate by 15%. Adding leading edge root extensions and extended trailing edge flaps, and reshaping the side-of-cockpit ILS antennae covers as 70° delta strakes should improve the aircraft’s agility for close-quarters combat. Laurie Hilditch, head of future capabilities at Eurofighter, says the modification kit should give the aircraft the sort of “knife-fight in a phone box” turning capability enjoyed by rivals such as Boeing’s F/A-18E/F or the Lockheed Martin F-16, without sacrificing the transonic and supersonic...

This is a fascinating development and one that I had no idea was happening until today. It seems that rallies are spreading throughout Germany protesting the corrupt and dying global status quo. One of the key targets of these groups is the U.S. Federal Reserve system, which as I and many others have maintained, is the core cancer infecting the entire planet. According to the organizer of these rallies, they have now spread to up to 100 cities and have a combined attendee base of around 20,000. What is also interesting, is that the mainstream media in Germany is calling...