1.
The supply of goods in Great Britain is stalling because Brexit drove Eastern European workers out of the country - including many truck drivers
Football hero Gary Lineker once said the beautiful sentence about a British Prime Minister's national solo effort: "I think she just won the election for the own goal of the year." think in the evening, but because of the supply crisis that the British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson
and his fans have caused by
Brexit
.
These days, many products on British supermarket and department store shelves are
becoming
scarce
due to
delivery bottlenecks
- and that is why the British government announced today that it intends to postpone the planned controls on imports from the EU for several months again.
Enlarge image
Supermarket shelves in Battersea, South London
Photo:
Kirsty O'connor / dpa
Brexit drove many thousands of Eastern European workers out of the country, which is why there is
now a shortage of truck drivers
in
Great Britain
- much more than in other European countries, including Germany.
The
»Lorry Crisis«,
As the supply shortage in Great Britain is called, 19 months after leaving the EU and eight months after leaving the EU internal market and customs union, the country has become a “kingdom of empty shelves”. That is the title of the story of my colleague Claus Hecking, who reports on the new British shortage economy. For example, McDonald's had to temporarily restrict the sale of milkshakes and soft drinks in almost 1,300 branches, deliveries to supermarkets with beverages such as Coke Zero and Diet Coke stalled due to a lack of supplies of aluminum cans - and the mineral oil multinational BP temporarily shut down several gas stations because they did not run out of fuel got more. The dispute between the London government and the EU over the so-called emergency clause in the Brexit agreement,which deals with the regulation of the movement of goods with Northern Ireland, acts like a diversionary maneuver. The British are calling for the agreement to be renegotiated, the EU rejecting what British Brexit Minister David Frost grimly described as a "serious mistake".
Will most of the British people who were once enthusiastic about leaving the EU now consider Brexit an own goal themselves?
"Curbing labor migration from Eastern Europe was a leitmotif of the Brexiteers and their supporters to vote in favor of leaving the EU in the referendum," says my colleague Claus.
"But now the British are seeing how important truck drivers from Poland, Romania and Lithuanians have been for their country."
Read the full story here: In the kingdom of empty shelves
2.
The Bundestag election campaign, long denigrated as bland, is getting more exciting - also because the Union is apparently catching up
For many weeks, SPIEGEL, too,
blasphemed
about the lack of tension in the
federal election campaign
.
Less than two weeks before the election, things are pretty turbulent.
The
posters by right-wing extremists
with the inscription
»Hang the Greens«
caused a rather unpleasant excitement today
.
which can be seen in some areas of Germany.
Last week the right-wing extremist party »III.
Weg «Posters hung up in several Saxon locations that could be understood as a call to murder.
The city of Zwickau wanted to remove the posters.
Today the administrative court in Chemnitz announced that the posters may continue to be shown if they are placed at a distance of 100 meters from the posters of the Greens.
The decision is not yet final - and the legal dispute over the poster campaign will certainly continue.
A spokesman for the General Prosecutor's Office in Dresden told SPIEGEL on request: "We see in the posters the initial suspicion of an invitation to criminal offenses and possibly also of sedition."
Enlarge image
Photo: PRESSEFOTOGRAFIE UDO GOTTSCHALK / imago images / Udo Gottschalk
In the final sprint of the major parties in the struggle for power and the office of Federal Chancellor,
the Union has caught up a bit again
, according to a
recent survey
. The opinion research institute Forsa has determined for the RTL / ntv trend barometer that the
CDU and CSU can
currently count on 21 percent of the votes, which is two percent more than in the previous week. The
SPD
remains stable and ahead at 25 percent.
The values remain unchanged for the other parties as well - with the exception of the FDP, which loses two points and is now on par with the AfD with 11 percent.
If the general election were now, the Greens would receive 17 percent, according to the poll, and the Left 6 percent.
According to the survey, one in four citizens has not yet decided who to vote - or does not want to vote at all.
Bundestag election: The developments in the news blog
3.
From now on, football fans can only watch the Champions League live on streaming services - because the television rights are given to those who pay the most
Of course I know people who don't care about football, but for people like me who are a little enthusiastic about this sport, the insight of the writer Ror Wolf applies: »The game of football is not the continuation of life, rather life is the continuation of it Football game. «I know that there are a lot of much more important things in the world, but I'm really looking forward to today's finals in the
Champions League,
which will include
Bayern Munich
playing at
FC Barcelona
.
Marcel Reif
Photo: Getty Images
For the first time in Germany this evening, a Champions League game will be broadcast exclusively by a streaming service, namely Amazon Prime. The television rights were given to the providers
Amazon
and
Dazn
because they were most willing to pay. On this occasion, my colleague Jan Göbel remembered in a personal text how varied the
history of football reporting
on television has been. Among other things, he pays homage to the TV commentator
Marcel Reif,
who was the voice of the Champions League for a long time.
"This season a little adjustment is necessary again," writes Jan. And: "The Champions League has always been a traveling circus on German television." Sky, the perennial partner of the Champions League, has not included the premier class for the first time since 2000.
With this season, top football is leaving classic television and switching to Internet TV.
Despite all the flexibility, Jan announced, it was "a bit annoying" as a football fan to always have to keep up with the trading of television rights.
Read the full story here: A night-and-fog action at full volume
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What else is important today
300,000 households without electricity - the police assume an accident was the cause:
a commercial fairground balloon is said to have caused the major power outage in Dresden.
The police assume an accident - but cannot rule out a targeted act one hundred percent.
Marmara Sea is "now a dead sea":
The slime plague in the Marmara Sea has caused irreversible damage, marine researchers report.
The gray mass has made numerous animal species disappear - and new dangers threaten.
Alanis Morissette speaks about sexual abuse:
After years of therapy, she understood that she had been abused: In a new documentary, Alanis Morissette also talks about traumatic experiences from her past.
My favorite story today: Debate about Jewish identity
Enlarge image
Max Czollek
Photo: gezett / imago images
I find the dispute that has been going on among so-called German intellectuals in the past few weeks about the
Jewishness of
the
writer Max Czollek
is carried out, not just scary, but unworthy of an enlightened society. Do predominantly non-religious people committed to reason in Germany in 2021 want to seriously discuss whether the rules of the Jewish halacha, a religious legal system, decide who is allowed to take a Jewish speaker position in public discourse and who is not? I think such a discussion is absurd. That is why I am pleased about the open letter in which 278 intellectuals and cultural workers expressed their solidarity with the poet and scientist Czollek today. You criticize an "unbearable, against the background of German history, stunned debate" against Czollek. The clever, young and well-read writer Czollek was inspired by the clever,older and possibly well-read writer Maxim Biller referred to in a weekly newspaper column a few weeks ago as a "carnival and opinion Jew" and "excluded from the exclusive Jewish club". Since then, the dispute has raged, in which many non-Jewish people also participated. The signatories of the open letter recognize in the debate “the all-sudden interest and the unrestrained glee of the conservative media in an internal Jewish conflict in which more and more unpleasant voices are denied being Jewish than what it is: a pretext for one to discredit committed advocates of a pluralistic society «. The authors and intellectuals speak of an "unfounded insinuation", since Czollek has always made it transparentthat he came from a Jewish family, but never pretended to have a Jewish mother. "The claim that he wanted to steal a victim identity is not only false and defamatory because of the persecution of his family in the Shoah." Czollek's Jewish grandfather was imprisoned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
What we recommend today at SPIEGEL +
Black-and-yellow's debt error:
After the election, the Union and FDP want to maintain a balanced budget at all costs.
You should think again about that.
Do California's voters support Joe Biden?
In California, radical Republicans want to vote out the Democratic governor in a special vote.
US President Biden is hoping for a clear victory for his party - to overcome his own crisis.
Ziyad, the explosive dogs and whoever else is holding out in the German embassy:
Looted?
Shot?
Our reporter wanted to see what had become of the German embassy in Kabul.
Desperate Taliban bureaucrats watch outside the gates - and behind them a surprise awaits.
Why, as a feminist, I love old white men:
Old white men should be my enemy, they almost acquired their privileges at birth and they still explain the world to me today.
Why do I like to listen to them so much?
Which is less important today
Renamed ski paradise.
Palisades Tahoe is the new name of the
ski resort in the US state of California that has been marketed
under the name
Squaw Valley
since the late 1940s
.
For a long time, indigenous groups had been calling for the ski area, which became known as the venue for the 1960 Winter Olympics, to be renamed.
They found the old name to be a racist and misogynistic insult.
The operators of the ski area in the Californian part of the Sierra Nevada mountain range had already announced that they would be looking for a new name, and when they announced the new place name they called the old one "derogatory and insulting".
Typo of the day
, corrected in the meantime: "Both are impressed by your talks with the politicians."
Cartoon of the day:
To despair
And tonight?
Enlarge image
The members of the band Can
Photo:
Photoshot / picture alliance
You could
read
in Christoph Dallach's book
»Future Sounds«
and
listen
to the best songs from legendary (West) German bands like
Neu !, Can or Kraftwerk
.
The music journalist Dallach, who also worked for SPIEGEL for many years and has remained a friend to me, has dealt with many greats of the so-called
Krautrock
spoken.
His book arranges the original tones of musicians, journalists and celebrities into a cultural-historical panorama - and in a certain way also into a didactic piece about the connection between art and politics.
My colleague Felix Bayer wrote about Dallach's book, "The Federal Republic of Germany appears again and again as a country that reacted with irritation to the free lifestyle of musicians," and was amazed at the often repressive conditions under which records were made "by musicians around the world to this day influence".
A lovely evening.
Sincerely
yours, Wolfgang Höbel
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