Greece has signed its first major privatization deal granting control of over a dozen regional airports to a German company. The agreement is part of international creditors’ demands to privatize state assets to secure €86 billion in bailout funds for Athens. The €1.23 billion contract gives a 40-year lease to the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport. [...]

Germany has publicly warned Saudi Arabia against further financing religious radicals globally. German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s demand to cut money flowing to the Wahhabis comes as some lawmakers are growing weary of Saudi-funded radical mosques. Gabriel stressed that the Saudi regime has been funding mosques known for radicalizing the Muslim population, including in various communiti [...]

The tragedy of Paris seems to have accelerated long-awaited political changes: "the United States can no longer play its self-declared hegemonic, or only super-power, role in the world, and Russia has returned to the center stage of world affairs", according to NYU political science professor Stephen Cohen. [...]

After announcing that Germany would not place limits on the number of asylum-seekers it accepts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now considering a quota system. The turnaround wasn't her choice. In early September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an order to bring thousands of refugees who were stranded in Hungary to Germany. Germany's basic right to asylum has no upper limits, she said [...]

Microsoft is building two new data centers to hold the data of its German and EU customers, the company has announced. EU courts recently ruled a previous data-transfer treaty with the US invalid, following the Snowden revelations of NSA data collection. Starting in late 2016, Microsoft’s cloud offerings will be hosted from the new data centers in Magdeburg and Frankfurt, CEO Satya Nadella an [...]

The death of Helmut Schmidt genuinely marks the end of an era. The 96-year-old former German Chancellor and celebrated media pundit was a voice of reason in an increasingly self-destructive Europe. In a country renowned for both conjuring and vigorously applying rules, Germany’s smoking laws have been a modern day aberration. [...]

Until recently, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was considered to be the most powerful politician in Europe. But now, her approach to the refugee crisis has her under fire at home and in Brussels. Can she survive? For almost three quarters of an hour, it was as though there was no refugee crisis in Germany. [...]

Germany now is somewhere at the edge of anarchy and sliding towards civil war, or to become a banana republic without any government, says Hansjoerg Mueller of the Alternative for Germany party. Bavarian official Peter Dreier called German Chancellor Angela Merkel to tell her personally that if Germany welcomes a million refugees, his town of Landshut will only take in around 1,800. [...]

A small German village containing just 102 residents and with almost no infrastructure will have to accommodate as many as 750 asylum seekers after a decision by the regional authorities. Villagers fear the area will be unable to cope with the burden. [...]

Thousands rallied in Cologne on Sunday as supporters of the ‘Hooligans against Salafists' far-right group and their left-wing opponents took to the streets. Police had to deploy a water cannon in an attempt to control the counter-protest. Law enforcers had earlier sought to ban Sunday’s demonstration by the far-rights. [...]

Turkey is pressuring Germany to create “safe zones” inside Syria as a “price” for alleviating the EU’s refugee crisis. It’s a Faustian bargain that could escalate the Syrian conflict, where NATO forces could end up pitted against Russia’s military. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hot-footing to Istanbul last weekend was capped with a U-turn regarding Turkey’s much sought-aft [...]

Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has called for Russians and Germans to unite and called good relations between the two nations “priceless capital” in a newspaper interview. “History teaches us that when Germans and Russians walk hand in hand both nations and all Europeans benefit. [...]

Following an inquiry, the media authority of Thuringia (TLM) has found no breach of legislation pertaining to the broadcast of RT’s show The Missing Part (Der Fehlende Part) by regional German TV channel Salve.TV. TLM, broadcast regulator of the federal state of Thuringia, stated that it had no objections to Salve.TV airing RT’s The Missing Part. [...]

MPs from the German parliamentary party "The Left" have positively assessed the recent visit to Crimea by French lawmakers and said that they'd also consider the possibility of personal trip to the republic and assessment of the situation there. “I think that the French parliamentarian’s trip was a right thing to do. Being elected by the people it was their duty to tell and show the officia [...]

To varying degrees, Angela Merkel has now managed to alienate the USA, Russia and the rest of Europe. Germany urgently needs to tackle negative perceptions of the country. Oscar Wilde was fond of citing the philosopher George Berkeley. Whether it was because he enjoyed his fellow Irishman’s writings or because Berkeley was a Trinity College Dublin grandee is moot. When I lived in Berlin, almo [...]

America,s National Security Agency has spied on German chancellors and their offices for more than 10 years, a new WikiLeaks report says. The three leaked NSA intercepts indicate that the US targeted 125 phone numbers of top German officials. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) intercepts published on Wednesday show that Washington has been tapping the phones of the political offices of the [...]

Chancellor Angela Merkel was not the only NSA target in the German government, as WikiLeaks has released a new tranche of documents containing a list of the phone numbers of German ministers and officials whose privacy was breached by the US spy agency. Sixty-nine high-ranking members of the German government, including the economy and finance ministers, as well as Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabrie [...]

Left-wing German politician and former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine has some harsh language message for US on its politics concerning Russia and Ukraine. He has also called on the EU to oppose Washington. In a Facebook post which cannot be quoted fully quote due to strong language, Lafontaine, whose latest political post was co-chairman of the democratic socialist party The Left, called US [...]

Never has a leader so catastrophically misjudged the character of an enemy as Hitler misjudged the Soviet Union and its people prior to launching his invasion of the country on June 22, 1941. Hitler and other top Nazis were convinced that the Soviet Union would crumble under the weight of the largest military operation ever mounted, codenamed Operation Barbarossa. [...]