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The Bundestag calls on the country to negotiate with Russia 'with an open mind', as anti-Russian sanctions begin to take their toll on the deteriorating economy and energy scarcity. In a tweet on Thursday, German left-wing politician and chairman of the Bundestag committee on energy, Klaus Ernst, referenced statements by Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the sanctions should not hit Europe harder than Russia itself: “We have now imposed seven packages of sanctions and Gazprom is making record profits. At the same time, we are threatened with a wave of bankruptcies. Therefore: negotiate with Russia with an open mind". ...

The images of the storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6 sent shock waves around the world. The theme of Thursday’s debate in the Bundestag — “In the Wake of the Storming of the Capitol: Strategies to Strengthen Democracy and the Rule of Law in Germany and the World” — shows that those extended to Berlin. Many of the speakers warned that democracy and the rule of law are under threat. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, of the Social Democrats (SPD), referred to the Capitol, the seat of the US House of Representatives and the Senate, as...

Keep in mind that, according to most of our media (and even more so the European media), we are supposed to regard with fear the German “ultra-right-wing” political party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Also, keep in mind that we are supposed to believe that the Brexit battle pits Brits against a united Europe that is horrified at their effort to shatter the European Union. But, in fact, the arrogant, unaccountable transnational organizations, of which the EU is a leading example, have served global elites better than ordinary citizens of their constuent countries. Watch this speech in Germany’s parliament, the...

Alice Weidel, the parliamentary group leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is being formally investigated for violating campaign finance laws, the public prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Konstanz announced Tuesday. The AfD branch in Lake Constance is accused of receiving large sums of money from a Swiss company in the leadup to Germany’s 2017 general election. The vote saw the AfD become the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. The donations from abroad, paid in 18 tranches, reportedly amounted to more than €132,000 ($150,000). The prosecutor said the probe would target Weidel and three other...

....On April 29, 2016, when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated, an emergency meeting was held between the Chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, DNC’s Chief Executive, Amy Dacey, the DNC’s Technology Director, Andrew Brown, and Michael Sussman, a lawyer for Perkins Coie, a Washington, DC law firm that represented the DNC. Sussman took control of the meeting, setting out the DNC’s agenda when it came to dealing with the cyber attack on its server. The three most important questions, Sussman declared, were what data was accessed, how was it done, and how can it be stopped?...

A decision on Wednesday that the Bundestag’s 709 members get a pay raise next June when average wage trends are calculated drew criticism from a tax austerity lobby group as well as the outer edges of the political spectrum. The Federation of Taxpayers (BdSt), which leans toward supporting businesses, said the planned rise gave the “wrong signal” while Germany remained without a new federal government in the wake of its September 24 election. The system of automatized adjustments designed to answer criticism of self-service and first practiced in July 2016 gives a newly constituted Bundestag only three months into its...

The German government has warned that in some circumstances a vegan diet can be harmful to a person’s health, as the non-meat, non-dairy lifestyle experiences a boom in Berlin. “A purely plant-based diet makes it more difficult to give the body some of the important nutrients it needs,” the government statement from last week reads. Vitamin B12 is a particularly important nutrient that is almost exclusively present in meat, the statement adds, explaining that the only way vegans can consume it is by taking supplementary pills. …

German politicians and media organizations from across the political spectrum have been scathing about Nigel Farage after he announced his resignation as leader of UKIP, Britain’s anti-EU political party. Farage announced on Monday that he was stepping down as leader of UKIP, saying he wanted his life back. But critics have accused him of irresponsibility, as the decision means he will disappear from the political limelight with the UK’s exit from the EU, which he has long sought, looking set to become reality. “First they lied and stirred up anger, then they created chaos and now they’ve run away. Nigel...

For two decades after the Second World War, over half of all employees of the West German interior ministry were ex-Nazis, a new study shows. The research, carried out by the Center for Contemporary Historical Studies with the blessing of the Interior Ministry, shows that the number of ex-Nazi party members in both the West and East German postwar administrations was much higher than previously thought. In exact figures, an average of 54 percent of civil servants in the West German interior ministry were former Nazis, although at its high point between 1966 and 1961, two-thirds of all employees at...

A hacker attack on the Bundestag (German parliament) earlier in 2015 means that an entirely new network will have to be built after experts failed to fix the breach. The Federal Office of Information Technology Security (BSI) decided that it could no longer defend against the attack and had to give up, broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Thursday. Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday evening that data was still flowing out of the parliament to unknown recipients, and that rebuilding the network using completely new hardware would take months and cost millions. …

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...

Iraqi Kurds have welcomed the German government’s expressed willingness to supply weapons in the fight against violent Islamists. Speaking on Deutschlandfunk radio on Thursday (21 August), Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq Rodsch Schawais said arms assistance should come as quickly as possible. The Kurdish leader addressed fears that German weapons could end up in the wrong hands or later be used in a possible conflict for an independent Kurdistan. This question is not relevant right now, he said. At the moment it is important to stop the advance of the extremist Islamic State (IS), Schawais explained. […] But the government’s...

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. …

Mr President of the Federal Republic, Mr President of the Bundestag, Madam Chancellor, Mr President of the Bundesrat, Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the House, It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of the Bundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which...

German MPs examining their army and intelligence service in Kosovo before the ethnic violence in March want to know why they did not follow up a tapped telephone call in which an Albanian extremist urged his allies to prepare a "hot party". Senior German army officers used several internal reports after the violence flared to make assurances that they would have acted differently and been able to provide the necessary protection for Kosovo's Serb minority if they had had the slightest forewarning. But it has emerged that an imminent security threat may have been on their desks. A parliamentary commission...

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Thursday that he believed U.N. Security Council resolution 1441 passed in November does not include any automatic authority for a military strike against Iraq. Speaking in parliament, Schroeder said the resolution obligating Iraq to disarm "or face serious consequences" which was passed unanimously by the U.N. Security Council did not automatically justify military action. "Germany supports this resolution and we have worked actively on implementing it," Schroeder said. "But we support resolution 1441 as a Security Council member. But equally as clear is that this resolution contains nothing automatic as far...