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BERLIN - Berlin police, bolstered by forces from around the country, cordoned off a wide perimeter around the capital’s government center on Wednesday ahead of expected protests as parliament votes on a bill that would strengthen the government’s ability to impose coronavirus restrictions. A series of protests planned outside of Germany’s Bundestag parliament building were banned over security concerns, but many other protests have been registered for other areas in Berlin. Fencing was put up around a wide area, including the Bundestag and nearby parliamentary offices, the federal chancellery and the presidential residence and offices in case any protesters decided...

Writing in the Washington Post on Monday, the French and German foreign ministers... pledge for new cooperation. From an American interest perspective, however, this op-ed reads as little more than a petulant "we can only be friends if you put European concerns and interests first." ...On China...comes the veiled warning that Europe does not want to upset Xi Jinping. ...On Iran...Maas and Le Drian "want to reengage the United States on a joint approach.. On Russia...The words "ready to engage" reflect Europe's rising interest in reducing sanctions imposed on Russia... On trade...They want a one-sided tax.

EU member states Hungary and Poland have followed through on their threat to block the continental power bloc’s seven-year budget, after Brussels attempted to push it through with conditions the populist nations said were akin to “political enslavement”. European Union rules mean that many significant decisions — including whether to approve the bloc’s seven-yearly funding programs — must be taken unanimously, with any single member state able to veto decisions. This safeguard was triggered on Monday by conservative-led Hungary and Poland, who blocked the progress of the €1.8 trillion (£1.6 trillion, $2.1 trillion) ‘Multi annual Financial Framework’ (MFF) as an...

Police in Frankfurt, Germany fired water cannons at Antifa counterprotesters on Saturday as the far-left attempted to shut down an anti-lockdown rally against the government’s Chinese coronavirus restrictions. Approximately 600 Querdenker (lateral thinker) protesters took to the streets of Frankfurt, calling for an end to what they termed the coronavirus “dictatorship”. Around 300 far-left counterprotesters, carrying “bring down the right” Antifa banners, staged a counter-protest, blocking the march route while proclaiming that there is no room for “Nazi propaganda” on the streets, according to the Frankfurter Neue Presse. Despite their open hostility to the nation-state as well as the...

Would have given authorities power to have police restrain and inject refusniks. A law in Denmark that would have given authorities the power to forcibly inject people with a coronavirus vaccine has been abandoned after nine days of public protests. The ‘epidemic law’ would have handed the Danish government the power to enact mandatory quarantine measures against anyone infected with a dangerous disease, but it was the part about vaccinations that caused the biggest uproar. ... The Danish Health Authority would be able to define groups of people who must be vaccinated in order to contain and eliminate a dangerous...

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the service sector, made millions unemployed, and forced many of us who still do have jobs to work remotely. Fortunately, we now have a perfect solution to all this economic dislocation and disruption: a new tax on working from home! This week, the German financial giant Deutsche Bank released a new report full of proposals for how governments and corporations should respond to the pandemic. Included in the report is a call for a 5 percent tax on the incomes of people who work from home in places where the government is not advising or...

In September, a couple out for a stroll in the eastern French Alsace region, came across a tiny aluminium capsule in a field. Inside was the message, written in barely legible German on a kind of tracing paper. The message appears to carry the date 1910, or 1916. Dominique Jardy, curator of the Linge Museum, near where the discovery was made, thinks 1910 is more likely, Le Parisien reports (in French) . Describing the find as "super-rare", he told the paper the capsule was likely to have come to the surface of the soil over time as have many military...

European lawmakers said on Friday time was running out to put in place any new trade agreement between London and the European Union before the end of an 11-month transition period following Britain’s departure from the bloc. Britain formally left the EU last January but has been following the bloc’s rules since then as the two sides try to agree on their future trade relationship. The transition period ends on Dec. 31 but negotiators are still trying to reach an agreement to protect nearly a trillion dollars in annual trade from possible quotas and tariffs.

The European Union is poised to move next week to impose tariffs on $4 billion of U.S. imports in retaliation for U.S. subsidies for planemaker Boeing, EU diplomats said, teeing up an eleventh-hour showdown with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Germany's largest party has delayed choosing a new leader and the likely successor to Chancellor Angela Markel for a second time. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had planned a convention in Stuttgart for December but confirmed on Twitter that the "pandemic situation" means the event could not take place. Current party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had announced in February that she would not run for chancellor in the expected 2021 election and would relinquish the party leadership. A first convention to choose the CDU leader in April was also postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Berlin: Germany called on Donald Trump to play by the rules and accept the result of the U.S. presidential election in what amounted to a rare diplomatic foray by a key Western ally. Trump’s appeal to end the counting of ballots “doesn’t comply with the democratic culture” of the U.S., German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told public broadcaster ARD on Thursday. “It’s easy to be a winner, but sometimes it’s quite hard to be a loser,” he said. “It’s important that in the end the result will be accepted by everybody.” Until now, European leaders have chosen to keep quiet...

French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Turkey having a "bellicose" attitude towards its allies, as the row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad contiues unabated. In an interview broadcast on Saturday, Macron said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had displayed "belligerent behavior with Nato allies", adding that he hoped "things would calm down" and that the Turkish president "would not tell lies". France-Turkey showdown: A battle to shape the regional order Read More » His comments came as Erdogan, as well as a number of other leaders of Muslim-majority countries, continued to criticise Macron for comments he made describing...

Both Germany and France announced new nationwide lockdowns on Wednesday as Europe enters a deadly new phase of the coronavirus pandemic. Chancellor Angela Merkel says German officials have agreed to a four-week shutdown of restaurants, bars, cinemas, theaters and other leisure facilities in a bid to curb a sharp rise in coronavirus infections. Merkel and the country's 16 state governors, who are responsible for imposing and easing restrictions, agreed on the partial lockdown in a videoconference Wednesday. It is set to take effect Monday and last until the end of November. Merkel said, "We must act, and now, to avoid...

Germany will be plunged back into lockdown with restaurants, bars and theaters closed for a month to stop the rapid spread of COVID-19, officials announced Wednesday. Chancellor Angela Merkel and the country’s 16 state governors said the partial shutdown will go into force Monday, saying it’s needed after a recent surge in new infections. “We must act, and now, to avoid an acute national health emergency,” Merkel said in a videoconference.

The European Union and its member states are the largest single donor bloc financing the PA. A Palestinian child can walk to school along a street named after Abu Jihad, who planned a bus hijacking that killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, spend the day learning in a school named after Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin, and end the day in a youth center named after terrorist Abu Iyad, responsible for killing the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich. “Do you think it is beautiful?” a male host asks an 11-year old girl on a popular Palestinian TV program. “Shahada is very,...

Instead of rebuking Sweden and states such as South Dakota who exposed the failure of lockdowns, we should be thanking them. ... Sweden’s decision to take a “lighter touch” to the coronavirus pandemic—foregoing strict lockdowns and relying primarily on social responsibility to encourage social distancing—has made it a lighting rod for criticism. Many commentators claimed Sweden was behaving recklessly and selfishly by refusing to enforce an economic lockdown ... Though its per capita death rate remained well below European neighbors such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain—each of which enforced strict lockdowns—Sweden became, as one CBS report claimed, “an...

As forces mass in Europe, the biggest stumbling block to EuropeÂ’s future strategic independence as well as American grand strategy is once again Germany. North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies Turkey and Greece are embroiled in a dispute over Turkish oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, and Greece is backed by the French navy. After the French military conducted training exercises with Greek forces in the region on Thursday, Turkey warned France to retreat. Within a day, three things happened in rapid succession.First, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a treaty to relocate troops out of Germany to...

Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programs have invaded a Belgian cemetery. Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a meter and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonizing a historic Antwerp graveyard. “It’s impossible to round up all of them. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble,” said Kevin Scheers of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research. Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the...

The media are still feeling the impact of an executive order signed in 1917 that created ‘the nation’s first ministry of information’.. When the United States declared war on Germany 100 years ago, the impact on the news business was swift and dramatic. In its crusade to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy – press freedom – by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history. Following the lead of the Germans and...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany rose by more than 10,000 in a single day for the first time, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Tuesday. The institute recorded 11,287 new cases in its daily update for a total of 392,049. The previous day’s increase was 7,830. The reported death toll rose by 30 to 9,905, the tally showed.