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The situation in the morning: how can the chancellor remain silent?

2022-08-17T03:47:04.981Z


A guest in the Chancellery relativizes the Holocaust - and Olaf Scholz does not contradict. The traffic light struggles for the right crisis policy. And: What follows from the hot period? This is the situation on Wednesday.


Is Germany threatened with a »hot autumn«?

This morning,

Germany's largest gas importer Uniper

presented its half-year figures.

Then it will become clear how bad things are for the energy company, which supplies more than a hundred municipal utilities and industrial companies.

Most recently, the state had to save Uniper from going under, it put together a rescue package worth billions and acquired a 30 percent stake in the Düsseldorf-based company.

Above all, Uniper will also benefit from the gas levy planned from

October

.

For them, the EU has now declared: Without value added tax, as the federal government had imagined, it doesn't work.

Means:

It will be even more expensive for consumers.

This increases the pressure on the traffic light to tell people as soon as possible how they intend to cushion the renewed price surge in autumn.

The promise stands: there should be a

third relief

package.

What will be in it is far from clear, and the citizens are unlikely to have a clear view of where they will be charged or relieved anyway.

It remains to be hoped that the coalition will not lose its bearings in the daily three-party bickering.

In the end, what counts is what's left in the account.

If the

left

now takes advantage of the insecurity, stirs up fears and announces a

"hot autumn against the social coldness"

of the government, with "Monday demos in the East like back then against Hartz IV", then they are doing the cause of the whole misery a favor: Vladimir Putin.

Of course, criticism of government measures is always legitimate.

But populism is dangerous in this situation.

Because dividing Western societies is the goal of the Russian President.

It's a good thing that there are still voices of reason on the left, like that of Thuringia's Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, who warns his own people about the editorial network Germany:

"In the case of social protests, please observe the distance rule to right-wing extremist organizers."

  • Olaf Scholz as a helper, petitioner, coalition manager: the crisis traveller 

You can find more news and background information on the war in Ukraine here:

  • That happened during the night:

    In an interview, the Ukrainian presidential adviser Podolyak explains his country's military strategy.

    And: Russia apparently fires up to 60,000 rounds of ammunition – per day.

    The overview.

  • “The Ukrainians will probably be put on an ammunition diet by the Europeans”:

    Expert Michael Kofman believes that Kiev wants to show success quickly in order to secure further support from the West.

    But what could it mean if Ukraine failed in a counter-offensive in the south? 

  • Detonation in an ammunition depot in Crimea:

    The area around an exploded ammunition depot was cordoned off within a radius of five kilometers - more than 3,000 people had to leave their homes.

    You have questions and want to go back.

    The video.

  • What to do if the landlord increases the deductions?

    The gas surcharge is by no means everything: Even without it, heating costs are likely to rise sharply in winter.

    Jutta Hartmann from the Tenants' Association explains what rights tenants have when utility costs go through the roof. 

Handshake instead of contradiction

No,

Olaf Scholz

really did not cut a happy figure on Tuesday afternoon in the Chancellery.

Next to him is

Mahmoud Abbas

, the Palestinian President, answering a journalist's question about apologizing to Israel on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the assassination attempt by Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich.

To apologize?

Abbas doesn't think about it, doesn't even mention the attack in the Olympic Games, in which eleven Israelis were killed.

Instead, he speaks of the Palestinians who are being killed every day by Israel's army.

"Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian locations since 1947 to date," he says.

»50 massacres, 50 holocausts.«

The Palestinian President accuses Israel of a holocaust, thereby relativizing the systematic murder of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime.

And how does the Chancellor react?

Scholz is silent, the press conference ends, handshake, exit.

Later, Scholz' spokesman Steffen Hebestreit is blamed for the embarrassing omission.

According to the chancellor's office, he ended the press conference, as announced, immediately after Abbas' reply, "before the chancellor could contradict this outrageous sentence."

Scholz was "visibly annoyed" by this.

A dpa report on the appointment reads that the chancellor made preparations to reply to Abbas' statements, but then the press conference was over.

If you look at the video of the performance, you can interpret it that way, but you don't have to.

And with all due respect: It is difficult to imagine that the chancellor would let a Holocaust trivialization in the middle of the German government headquarters go unchallenged just because his government spokesman declared a press conference over.

In any case, Scholz had previously rebuked his guest on the open stage because he had described Israeli politics as an "apartheid system".

Now that Abbas kept talking for a long time after his Holocaust rant, the SPD politician could easily have signaled to his spokesman that he still had something to say.

But now the second contradiction followed with a delay via the "Bild" newspaper: "Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable," emphasized Scholz.

One would have liked this clarification to be more immediate.

  • Press conference with Palestinian President: Abbas accuses Israel of "Holocaust" - Scholz is silent

The world is drying up

I've been living with my family in southern California, near Los Angeles, for a few weeks.

Before moving, we thought about how it would be like to live with the

drought as a permanent condition

: lakes, water reservoirs, rivers are drying up, the authorities are warning us to save water wherever possible, people are tearing up the last already withered lawns from their gardens, spread gravel or mulch instead.

"Now you can still live there," a colleague said shortly before we left, only half jokingly.

»In ten years there will only be desert.«

Now I read every day

how heat and drought are increasingly affecting Germany and all of Europe.

Such periods of drought are of course not entirely new, but the extent is frightening.

Forests are burning, rivers are becoming rivulets, fish are dying, ships can no longer sail, nuclear power plants can no longer be cooled, farmers are complaining about crop failures, and in some places water is being rationed.

Experts agree: The probability of such droughts or other extreme weather (last year it was the flash floods) is increasing.

But does this judgment change anything?

Will the new hot season mean that politicians are finally waking up and fighting climate change even more?

There is no lack of dismay, of warning words.

In fact, in Germany, for example, the energy turnaround

is being slowed down , the fossil-fuel era is being extended, and the turnaround in transport is sluggish – while the fight against global warming is all about speed.

Of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war in Eastern Europe have changed a lot and shifted priorities.

But the war must not be used as an excuse for the half-hearted fight against climate change.

Maybe it will have to get even hotter, even drier, for a few weeks before this insight catches on.

  • Major fires, floods, avalanches: in the midst of a catastrophe 

Here is the current quiz of the day

The starting question today: How many murder cases were recorded by the police in Germany in 2021?

Winner of the day...

… is Gina Lückenkemper.

Late on Tuesday evening, the 25-year-old sprinted over 100 meters to the gold medal at the European Athletics Championships in the Olympic Stadium in Munich.

The victory in 10.99 seconds can confidently be described as a sensation.

For the first time in twelve years, a German has won the title over this route.

The fact that the defending champion and Europe's fastest this year, Briton Dina Asher-Smith (Great Britain), had to retire due to injury naturally made things easier for Lückenkemper.

But who cares: gold is gold.

The latest news from the night

  • US President signs historic package of environmental and social legislation:

    Joe Biden speaks of "one of the most important laws in our history".

  • Trump critic Liz Cheney loses primary in Wyoming:

    Donald Trump's plan worked: The candidate he supported won the Republican primary in Wyoming - and thus defeated Liz Cheney.

    She is considered the ex-president's sharpest internal party critic.

  • RKI reports 67,390 new infections, incidence falls slightly:

    The Robert Koch Institute registered 192 new deaths in connection with the corona virus within 24 hours.

    There is a slight decrease in the seven-day incidence: it is now 311.8.

The SPIEGEL + recommendations for today

  • The advocate of the damned:

    With Simon Stiell, a representative of small island states is organizing the UN climate conference for the first time.

    The ex-environment minister knows the consequences of hurricanes and rising sea levels from his home country.

    But how much power does he have? 

  • "Six feet of German brutality":

    Kathrin Zeiske was in Bonn in the Antifa.

    Today she lives in Ciudad Juárez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world - and makes a career as a show wrestler.

    For her, this is living feminism.

  • What employees with long covid should know:

    People who initially had a mild course of the corona virus can also be affected by long covid.

    What rights do sick people have when they can hardly work? 

  • Mother's dangerous love:

    Julian is a healthy child.

    But his mother talked him into serious illnesses.

    From this she drew self-affirmation as a caretaker.

    Doctors speak of "careful abuse" that sometimes ends fatally.

Have a good day.

Heartfelt,

Yours Philip Wittrock

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-08-17

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