Tag Archives: Berlin

Germany, taking tougher stance on migration, to pay Afghan criminals to return to their home country

Euros-Money

Important Takeaways:

  • Berlin said it intends to give convicted criminals from the South Asian country “travel money” in an effort to clear the legal hurdles preventing deportations.
  • Since a police officer was killed by an Afghan migrant in June, Germany has been pursuing a more hardline policy on deportations.
  • Germany’s interior ministry said that it was “examining how to create the operational and legal conditions for deportations to Afghanistan”, adding that “the payment of financial travel assistance can serve to create such legal conditions”.
  • How much cash will be offered will be determined by state authorities, under whose jurisdiction deportations usually fall.
  • Berlin has said it would only deport criminals convicted of violence or those considered a terror threat.

Read the original article by clicking here.

In Berlin man arrested after mowing down people shopping. 1 dead, 30 injured

2 Timothy 3:1-5 “But understand this that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Moment German-Armenian man, 29, is arrested by police after repeatedly mounting pavement and ploughing his car into shoppers in Berlin leaving teacher dead and students among 30 injured
  • This is the moment 29-year-old German-Armenian man Gor H. was arrested after driving into crowds in Berlin
  • At least one person died and 30 more were hurt when he rammed shoppers around 10.30am local time
  • Dead person is a teacher, local media says, and students are among the wounded – five of whom are in critical
  • Police have confirmed the man’s arrest but have so-far refused to say whether the crash was deliberate

Read the original article by clicking here.

Syrians in exile lose hope for disappeared loved ones as Assad re-election looms

By Riham Alkousaa

BERLIN (Reuters) – Holding a laminated photo of her father, Wafa Mustafa and dozens of Syrians stood next to the Syrian embassy in Berlin on Wednesday to protest against the almost certain re-election of President Bashar al-Assad for a fourth term in a national vote.

Mustafa’s father has been missing for almost eight years. She believes he is being held as a political prisoner at a Syrian government prison. A re-election of Assad on Wednesday would dampen her hopes of seeing her father anytime soon.

“As long as Assad is in power … my Dad and another 130,000 people will still be detained forcibly,” she said.

Wednesday’s election, set to extend Assad rule over the country, “is a clear message to the international community that al-Assad regime has impunity and that it has got away with all war crimes,” Mustafa said, adding that Germany’s decision to prevent voting at the Syrian embassy in Berlin was right.

Germany, which hosts around 700,000 Syrians, mostly war refugees, views the election as fraudulent. It denied a formal request from the Syrian embassy to allow Syrians living in Germany to vote, saying the election will not be free or fair.

“Most of the diaspora Syrians would not be allowed to vote under the current stipulations or would not vote out of fear of repercussions against them and their families following from a registration,” said Christopher Burger, a spokesman for the foreign ministry.

But not all Syrians in Germany agree.

Carrying photos of Assad, dozens of Syrians demonstrated against Germany’s decision on Thursday, saying banning the election was unacceptable.

“No matter how you feel about these elections … elections cannot be forbidden,” said Aktham Suliman, a Syrian journalist living in Berlin.

Suliman, who expects Assad to win, said the election was an internal matter for Syrians to decide.

“This picture that they have been trying to draw for years, of one person ruling and the whole nation being against him does not apply,” he added.

(Reporting by Riham Alkousaa, Editing by William Maclean)

Merkel appeals to Germans to stay home for Easter to stem pandemic third wave

By Emma Thomasson

BERLIN (Reuters) -Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to Germans on Thursday to stay at home over Easter and meet fewer people to help curb a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, as the capital Berlin announced a nighttime ban on gatherings from Friday.

“It should be a quiet Easter, with those closest to you, with very reduced contact. I urge you to refrain from all non-essential travel,” Merkel said in a video message, adding this was the only way to help doctors and nurses fight the virus.

Merkel was accused of losing her grip on the COVID-19 crisis last week after she ditched plans for an extended Easter holiday agreed two days earlier with governors of Germany’s 16 states.

She has since tried to shift the blame for the third wave of the pandemic onto state premiers, accusing them of failing to stick to earlier agreements to reimpose restrictions if infections rose.

On Thursday, the city government of Berlin said it will impose a nighttime ban on gatherings from Friday and only allow children of essential workers to attend nursery from next week.

As the weather has turned warm in recent days, Berliners have been flocking to public spaces. About a hundred youngsters threw bottles and stones at police in one park on Wednesday when they tried to break up the party, the Berliner Zeitung reported.

Merkel said it was no longer the elderly who were fighting for their lives in the pandemic, but the middle-aged and even younger patients who were ending up on ventilators in hospital.

She held out hope, however, that the sluggish distribution of vaccinations would speed up after Easter, when family doctors will start giving shots.

Christian Karagiannidis, the scientific head of the DIVI association for intensive and emergency medicine, said Germany needs a two-week lockdown, faster vaccinations and compulsory tests at schools if hospitals are not to be overwhelmed.

“If this rate continues, we will reach the regular capacity limit in less than four weeks,” he told the Rheinische Post daily. “We are not over-exaggerating. Our warnings are driven by the figures.”

The Berlin city government said people would only be allowed to be outside on their own or with one other person from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m., though children under 14 are exempted.

This will be the first limited curfew imposed in Berlin since the pandemic began a year ago. The city of Hamburg already announced on Wednesday it will restrict nighttime outings from Friday, with supermarkets and takeaways shut from 9 p.m.

Unlike Britain and France, Germany’s 16 states, which run their own healthcare and security affairs, have been reluctant to impose drastic limits on movement out of fear of further damaging the economy, as well as an aversion to far-reaching restrictions on freedoms in a country wary of its Nazi past.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany, Europe’s most populous country and largest economy, rose 24,300 to 2.833 million on Thursday, the biggest daily increase since Jan. 14. The reported death toll rose by 201 to 76,543.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson, editing by William Maclean and Mark Heinrich)

U.S.’s Blinken warned Germany’s Maas about Nord Stream 2 sanctions

By Robin Emmott

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday he had told his German counterpart that sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline were a real possibility and there was “no ambiguity” in American opposition to its construction.

Berlin has so far been betting the new U.S. administration of President Joe Biden will take a pragmatic approach to the project to ship Russian gas to Europe because it is almost completed, officials and diplomats have told Reuters.

Reiterating Biden’s concerns about the pipeline from Russia to Germany, Blinken said he told German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Tuesday in a private meeting that companies involved in the project risked sanctions, particularly at a point when construction might finish.

“I made clear that firms engaged in pipeline construction risk U.S. sanctions. The pipeline divides Europe, it exposes Ukraine and central Europe to Russian manipulation and coercion, it goes against Europe’s own stated energy goals,” Blinken told a news conference.

The Kremlin says Nord Stream 2, a $11 billion venture led by Russian state energy company Gazprom, is a commercial project, but several U.S. administrations have opposed the project and Europe has vowed to reduce its reliance on Russian energy.

The United States and eastern European Union countries such as Poland say Nord Stream 2 is part of Russian economic and political measures to manipulate European countries and undermine transatlantic ties.

“What I said (to Maas) was that we will continue to monitor activity to complete or certify the pipeline and if that activity takes place, we will make a determination on the applicability of sanctions,” Blinken said.

He said it was important to carry the message directly to Maas, “just to make clear our position and to make sure there is no ambiguity.”

Reuters reported on Feb. 24 that 18 companies recently quit work on the pipeline to avoid sanctions.

Asked about a possible compromise in which Germany’s energy grid regulator could be empowered to stop gas flowing if Russia crossed a line, Blinken declined to comment.

Last month, a former German ambassador to the United States floated the idea of a compromise between Washington and Berlin that would have given the completed pipeline a use as political leverage.

Triggers for what the former envoy, Wolfgang Ischinger, called an “emergency brake” might include a flare-up in violence between Ukraine and Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014, or if Moscow sought to undermine Kyiv’s existing gas transit infrastructure.

(Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Edmund Blair)

Germany urges WHO to hasten review of its handling of pandemic

BRUSSELS/BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s health minister urged the World Health Organisation (WHO) to speed up its review of how it handled the pandemic, apparently signalling Europe’s tougher line on the United Nations body.

Berlin, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has so far largely shielded the organization from the most intense criticism by Washington, which wants to leave the WHO because of its alleged excessive closeness to China.

But now Germany seems to be taking a more assertive position.

Spahn told reporters he had discussed the review of the WHO’s management of the crisis with its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus twice over the last 20 days.

“In both conversations I encouraged him very clearly to launch this independent commission of experts and to expedite its launch,” Spahn said.

The WHO said last week it was setting up an independent panel to review its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response by governments.

U.S. President Donald Trump has accused the WHO of being too close to China and not doing enough to question Beijing’s actions at the start of the crisis. Tedros has dismissed the suggestions and said his agency kept the world informed.

Tedros has said the panel will provide an interim report to an annual meeting of health ministers in November and present a “substantive report” next May.

Spahn said the review was important now, even if the pandemic is still raging across the world, because “we can already draw conclusions.”

This could lead to quick actions over the body’s governance and to improve “cooperation between the political and the scientific level” of the organisation, Spahn added.

EU governments have said the review should be followed by a reform of the organisation, a possibility already being discussed with the United States and other members of the G7 group of rich countries, officials told Reuters.

One official had said the aim was to ensure WHO’s independence.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio @fraguarascio in Brussles, Joseph Nasr and Andeas Rinke in Berlin, Editing by William Maclean)

Three decades on, Germans remember surprise fall of Berlin Wall

Three decades on, Germans remember surprise fall of Berlin Wall
By Elena Gyldenkerne

BERLIN (Reuters) – Sascha Moellering witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 9, 1989. But it took about another 10 years for the border between the communist East and capitalist West to come down in his mind.

His mother was watching television at home and saw images of people shaking fences at the border after Guenter Schabowski, a senior East German communist official, accidentally announced the opening of the wall at a news conference.

“At some point my mother looked at me and asked: ‘What are you doing here? Go! This is history! And you have to go’,” Moellering recalled ahead of the 30th anniversary of the event which ultimately led to German reunification.

“There were a few thousand people standing on the wall singing and dancing to Beatles songs, ‘Give peace a chance’, of course, and the mood was really great,” he said.

Pressure had been building on the East German government for months to let its citizens travel freely when Riccardo Ehrman, a journalist at ANSA news agency, asked a clearly underprepared Schabowski about current travel rules.

Stumbling over his words, Schabowski said the East German government had decided to let citizens leave through any of the border crossings – and he believed the new rule would take effect immediately. Dumbfounded and euphoric East Germans rushed to the border to get a glimpse of the West.

“I am not sure that I really contributed but maybe, if I did help it a very, very little bit, I am incredibly proud,” Ehrman told Reuters.

It later turned out that the announcement was not supposed to be made until 4 a.m. the following day. Schabowski had also meant to say East Germans could apply for visas in an orderly manner.

“A DIFFERENT WORLD”

Hans Modrow, the last Communist premier of East Germany, was taken by surprise.

“I was walking when a young man came to me and said ‘Have you heard? The border is open!’ (And I asked) ‘Where does that come from?’ (And he said) ‘Yes, the border is open, should I go?’ And I said: ‘Why would you go?’,” he told Reuters.

Susanne Roebisch, who was from East Berlin but was one of the few who managed to get permission to move to West Berlin with her family in 1985, remembers saying goodbye to everyone she knew as a 14-year-old, never expecting to see them again.

They got a shock when they heard the wall had been breached.

“We all sat there, thinking: ‘What? The wall is open now? Was that a clear statement? Did he say everyone can go from East to West and West to East? What?’,” she said.

Her father, who kept a detailed diary, made a note in the page for Nov. 9, 1989 reading: “The border is open”. The entries for the following days show they received a steady stream of visits from family and friends who lived in the East.

But while the physical wall came down quickly, it has taken much longer for Germans to feel like East and West have really become one country.

A majority of Germans in the former communist East still feel like second-class citizens, even though they are catching up economically with western regions, a government report showed in September.

Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who united Germany, pushed through political union. But factors including outdated economic structures and a way of life imposed on citizens by communist rule, have hampered integration.

Moellering said it took him a long time to see East Berlin as part of Berlin. “The feeling – as a young boy who grew up sheltered in Lichterfelde, on the other side of the town – was that it (the East) was a completely different world.”

“It took me about ten years to erase the border in my head.”

(Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Hundreds evacuated as forest fire sends smoke over Berlin

Firefighters help to put out a forest fire near Treuenbrietzen, Germany August 24, 2018. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

TREUENBRIETZEN, Germany (Reuters) – Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes as around 600 firefighters battled a blaze in a forest strewn with unexploded ammunition south of Berlin on Friday and a pall of acrid smoke hung over the city.

Attempts to fight the fire were complicated by the presence of the ammunition thought to date from the Soviet Army’s activities in former East Germany.

The blaze, about 50 km (30 miles) southeast of Berlin, spread rapidly overnight to cover an area the size of 500 football fields, aided by the parched conditions after one of Europe’s hottest summers in living memory.

“I have huge respect for the firefighters who are out there right now, risking their lives. We know there is ammunition lying around in the forest,” said local politician Guenther Baaske, adding that some explosions had been heard.

The summer has seen forest fires across much of eastern Germany, but this blaze, so close to its largest city, led authorities to activate emergency alert systems in the early hours of Friday telling Berliners to shut their windows.

Firefighters help to put out a forest fire near Treuenbrietzen, Germany August 24, 2018. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Firefighters help to put out a forest fire near Treuenbrietzen, Germany August 24, 2018. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Helicopters dropped water on flames near the village of Treuenbrietzen and a Reuters photographer saw firefighters spraying water in a blackened landscape thick with smoke.

Flames came within 100 meters of houses in some places. Authorities said 540 people had to leave their homes, with many forced into emergency accommodation.

In many places flames reached as high as the forest canopy in the ordinarily swampy, heavily-wooded region that surrounds Berlin.

(Reporting by Hannibal Hanschke and Reuters TV; Writing by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

German police defuse WW2 bomb after evacuating central Berlin

Police officers look at a dismantled World War Two bomb at a construction site next to the central train station in Berlin, Germany, April 20, 2018. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

BERLIN (Reuters) – Bomb disposal experts defused a World War Two bomb in Berlin on Friday after evacuating an area in the heart of Berlin including the central train station, a hospital and the Economy Ministry.

The 500-kg British bomb was discovered during building work this week, more than seven decades after the end of World War Two.

Some 10,000 people – including residents, hospital patients and office workers – were evacuated from 9 a.m. from buildings within an 800 metre radius of the bomb while experts performed the delicate operation.

Police posted a video on Twitter showing officers walking up the stairs in an apartment building with the caption: “We’re not bringing room service or breakfast in bed but a personal wake-up call.”

The gave the all the clear in the early afternoon and the city began getting back to normal.

Long-distance and local train transport at the central station was disrupted for several hours but police said on Twitter that the station had now re-opened. Bus and tram services also restarted.

The evacuation area included the Natural History Museum, the BND intelligence agency, a clinic of the Charite hospital and an army hospital.

Some roads were closed but were due to gradually reopen.

Germany still discovers more than 2,000 tonnes of live bombs and munitions every year.

Last year some 60,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Frankfurt after a massive bomb dropped by Britain’s Royal Air Force was unearthed.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin; additional reporting by Laura Dubois; Editing by Toby Chopra and Alison Williams)

Germany urges Erdogan not to address Turks during G20 Hamburg visit

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan reviews a guard of honour during the launch of a new Turkish Navy ship in Tuzla, near Istanbul, Turkey, July 3, 2017.

BERLIN (Reuters) – The German government urged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday to respect its request that he not address Turks living in Germany when he attends this week’s Hamburg summit of the world’s 20 largest economies.

Ties between Berlin and Ankara have soured over the past year due to disagreements on a range of political and security issues, including Turkey’s jailing of a German-Turkish journalist and its refusal to let German lawmakers visit German troops at a Turkish air base.

Erdogan was also infuriated by what he called “Nazi era tactics” when some local German authorities, citing security concerns, barred Turkish politicians from campaigning in Germany ahead of a referendum on expanding the president’s powers.

Last week Germany rejected a request from Ankara that Erdogan be allowed to address members of the 3 million-strong ethnic Turkish community living in Germany during the G20 summit.

In unusually strong language that underlined the poor state of relations, a German foreign ministry spokesman said even appearances by Erdogan at a Turkish consulate or via a video feed would “would be an affront to the clearly expressed will of the government and a violation of German sovereignty”.

“Appearances of this nature have to be requested well in advance,” Martin Schaefer told a news conference when asked about “rumors” that Erdogan might still address Germany’s Turks despite Berlin’s request.

He said Germany could not ban Erdogan from speaking at a Turkish consulate, but had options for influencing such actions.

Last week German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said he did not want to see Turkish domestic conflicts played out among the Turkish community in Germany – a reference to deep political divisions within Turkey.

 

(Reporting By Thomas Escritt; Editing by Gareth Jones)