Free Republic

Greenpeace charged on Monday that a massive US-EU trade deal would place corporate interests above the environment and consumer safety, as it released classified documents from the negotiations. […] Greenpeace said the papers show, for example, that the US wants to be able to scrap existing EU rules in areas such as food labeling or approval of dangerous chemicals if it they spell barriers to free trade. “TTIP is about a huge transfer of power from people to big business,” the group argued, having also projected an image of a classified text passage onto the façade of Berlin’s parliament building....

Germany’s president says his compatriots shouldn’t always reject deploying the military to help resolve conflicts as he underlines calls for the country to take more international responsibility. […] President Joachim Gauck told Deutschlandfunk radio in an interview broadcast Saturday that he understands Germans’ longstanding reluctance to take a leading international role, but the country is now a “solid and reliable democracy.” He said that in defending human rights and innocent lives “it is sometimes necessary to take up arms.” …

Germany has no desire to dominate other countries, but it needs to leverage its post-war experiences of democracy and prosperity to play a bigger role on the global stage, President Joachim Gauck said. Germany, still haunted by its Nazi past seven decades after the end of World War Two, remains reluctant to send troops abroad even on peacekeeping missions. It faced criticism from allies in 2011 for abstaining in a U.N. vote backing military intervention in Libya and declined to join the operation. Gauck, 74, a former pastor and human rights campaigner in communist East Germany, caused a stir with...

German President Joachim Gauck has said his country should put aside World War II anxieties and play a bigger military role abroad. “While there are genuine pacifists in Germany, there are also people who use Germany’s guilt for its past as a shield for laziness,” he said on Friday (31 January) at the Munich Security Conference, a yearly meeting of European and US security chiefs. “This [guilt] gives Germany a questionable right to look the other way … Restraint can be taken too far.” […] “By acting with other countries within the EU, Germany gains influence … Perhaps this could...

Germans resoundingly elected Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor and human rights activist from communist East Germany, as president of the European Union's largest country on Sunday, posing a potential political headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel.