Today it's about the impending famine, the party congress of the left, abortion, two kinds of attacks on parliaments and Franz Grillparzer.
zero humanity
345 million people do not have enough to eat.
This dramatic figure will rise sharply because
the war is preventing Ukraine from exporting enough wheat.
The country's coasts are mined to prevent Russian warships from approaching.
If the Ukraine were to clear the mines to let the transport ships go out, the Russian warships could go in in the opposite direction.
That's part of the problem, another is crop failures because of fighting in the fields.
Today the International Conference on Food Security begins in Berlin, which will not be able to solve these problems.
Only the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, could do that by guaranteeing that his ships would not abuse open sea routes in a warlike manner.
However, he does not seem to want to muster this minimum of humanity.
The Berlin conference will therefore have to focus primarily on justice.
It must not be the case that food only flows to countries where the high prices can still be paid.
Africa must also get its fair share in order to prevent catastrophic famine.
Consequences of Russia's war of aggression: "We must prevent further hoarding"
You can find more news and background information on the war in Ukraine here:
That happened during the night:
According to Kiev, the approximately five million war refugees should remain abroad for the time being.
Selenskyj applauds "historic" EU decision.
And: Johnson offers help at sea.
The overview.
In the steam boiler of Luhansk:
Russian troops have almost completely surrounded Sievjerodonetsk and Lysychansk, they are probably firing 15,000 shells every day.
The Kremlin even sends ancient tanks.
Why this conquest is so important to Putin.
EU makes Ukraine and Moldova candidate countries:
Ukraine is one step closer to EU membership: At the summit in Brussels, the member states voted to give the country candidate country status – Moldova can also be happy.
"We need as many troops here as possible":
Russia threatens retaliation for the blockade of Kaliningrad.
Lithuanian security expert Margarita Šešelgytė says NATO should react now and not wait until after an attack to defend the Baltic States.
Greta Garbo of politics
The figure of the political diva, male or female, is rarely prominent in Germany.
Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder made a clumsy attempt in this direction in the 2020/21 primary election campaign, but remained completely free of grandezza, which means that he did not fulfill an important qualification.
In the role of the political diva, Sahra Wagenknecht has remained unrivaled for years.
Some she wraps around her little finger, others she snobbs unperturbed.
A diva must be able to do that, as well as the offended retreat and the bold attack.
In addition, of course, crass egocentricity.
In its cool opacity, Wagenknecht is not inferior to the »Swedish Sphinx« Greta Garbo.
And she was one of the greatest divas of all time.
Planting Wagenknecht in the party Die Linke, whose habitus a diva least suits, is a nice historical idea.
That's why it keeps popping.
In addition, the political positions between the great Wagenknecht self and the party leadership often diverge widely.
That could be confirmed today at the party conference of the left in Erfurt.
However, Wagenknecht himself will be absent – according to his own statements due to illness.
Lorenz Gösta Beutin, who is running for deputy chairman, said in advance: Wagenknecht was “always ready to push comrades or the entire left in front of the car”.
Bodo Ramelow on the crisis of the left: "I want to change the Federal Republic"
end of the excavation
The Bundestag is expected to overturn the advertising ban for abortive doctors today.
A reform that is overdue.
If abortions are legal under certain conditions, and fortunately that's the case in Germany, doctors must also be able to draw attention to themselves.
The previous regulation in paragraph 219a has undermined the right to an abortion.
A constitutional state must also ensure that citizens can claim their rights.
Abortion advertising ban: battle in no man's land
Five sizes smaller
Sometimes it is an advantage that the events in Germany are usually much smaller than in the USA.
For example, when storming the respective parliaments.
At the hearings on the
storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021
, it becomes clear that Donald Trump wanted to turn his election defeat into a victory by encouraging manipulation, by stirring up the masses.
What he had in mind was nothing more than a coup.
American democracy was in serious jeopardy.
The same cannot be said of the attempt to storm the Reichstag in Berlin.
Starting today, the Moabit Criminal Court is hearing about a man who was involved in August 2020.
He is said to have hit a police officer and insulted another.
That's bad enough, but there can be no talk of an attempted coup.
Fear of Assassination in the US: The Violence He Called
Winner of the day...
...for me it is
Clemens J. Setz,
anyway one of the best German-language writers, but this time it's not about one of his wonderfully disturbing novels, but about the booklet
"Mind Games about Truth"
, which only has 44 pages and is still generously typed .
Setz reports that Roger Willemsen liked to tell at readings what Franz Grillparzer thought when he saw the sea for the first time: "I hadn't imagined it like that." This sentence is in Grillparzer's diary.
And it really is a great sentence.
A man sees the sea for the first time and all he can think of is this bad-tempered remark.
A world class set.
Setz then looked in the diary and found that Grillparzer had by no means written it that way.
He found the sea "indescribably beautiful" and praised it in many sentences.
The sentence "I never thought it would be like that" is also said, but in the sense of: I hadn't imagined it to be so beautiful.
Make a point about the truth: "I don't think Willemsen's version is a good rendering of the passage from the diary, but at the same time it is perhaps the best short biography of Grillparzer there is."
The truth in the non-truth.
I like that because Willemsen acted as narrator here.
This way of dealing with the truth is forbidden for a journalist.
Tomorrow I'm going to a lake in the Uckermark with my daughter and I know exactly what I'm going to think as soon as I see it.
Here's the current quiz of the day
The starting question today: when was unemployment in Germany the highest since German reunification?
The latest news from the night
Nancy Pelosi's husband accused after an accident under the influence of alcohol:
He had collided with another car in his Porsche: Paul Pelosi, husband of top Democrat Nancy, has to answer in court.
The 82-year-old is said to have been drunk at the incident.
Coalition seeks car compromise:
The EU is planning a ban on internal combustion engines.
In the federal government, the FDP is opposed, negotiations are ongoing.
Does the traffic light find a compromise?
Deutsche Bank passes the US stress test without any problems:
Every year, the large financial institutions in the USA have to prove themselves in a decisive stress test: the Deutsche Bank subsidiary showed itself to be well prepared.
The SPIEGEL + recommendations for today
Is it only the brakes in the brain that make us brilliant?:
In the human brain, 30 percent of the nerve cells slow down the signal storm, much more than in mice, for example.
A research team has a guess as to what that might be good for.
»Heating behavior cannot be enforced with laws«:
Can landlords lower the heating temperature to save energy?
Kai Warnecke from the Haus und Grund owners' association considers the worries of some tenants to be unfounded.
Nevertheless, he predicts limitations.
"I see shadows rising wherever I turn":
Right-wing extremists killed Walther Rathenau on June 24, 1922.
The foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, a torn visionary of Jewish descent, was always the target of hatred - and had foreseen his death.
Nothing but trouble with sex education:
educating children and young people has long been an almost hysterical culture war.
Many parents shied away from embarrassing questions about sex, desire and contraception - but they hardly trusted the schools.
I wish you a good start into the day.
Yours, Dirk Kurbjuweit
