1. Abandoned
Germany has reached an agreement with Qatar on a gas supply contract.
The first German LNG terminals are about to start operations and the gas storage facilities for this winter are now full.
According to industry data, their filling level reached 100 percent by Tuesday.
In addition, inflation eased slightly to 10.0 percent in November.
So is the »evening situation« finally good for once?
Can we let the jingle bells ring and start the contemplative Advent season free of all worries?
Well, as always, the devil is in the details.
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Neuer Wall in downtown Hamburg
Photo: Nikito / IMAGO
Gas deliveries from Qatar, for example, are not scheduled to begin until 2026 and are so small that they will probably not cover more than three percent of Germany's annual gas requirements.
And unfortunately, inflation is still so high that it leads to major losses in purchasing power and wages are increasingly devalued.
The bottom line in the third quarter was a real wage loss, i.e. adjusted for price developments, of 5.7 percent – the highest decline since the statistics were introduced in 2008.
Florian Diekmann from SPIEGEL's business department reports that there is alarm among the 30 to 59-year-olds, i.e. the "middle generation", in view of inflation and the energy crisis.
According to a survey, many feel let down by politicians.
"Europe urgently needs a program for affordable energy," agrees SPIEGEL columnist Michael Sauga.
According to their own statements, a good half of consumers only buy products that they really need, as reported by the market research company Nielsen IQ based on a survey of more than 10,000 people.
This could be seen, for example, today at the Viktualienmarkt in Munich, where I spent a short lunch break.
Is the beautiful Christmas arrangement that two women admired next to me at the stand of a small nursery a really needed purchase worth 40 euros?
In any case, one said to the other, shaking his head: "Lidl has wreaths on sale right now." Because I don't want the Viktualienmarkt to look as homely as a German discounter car park soon, I immediately bought a few branches from the nursery for office decoration.
Read the whole story here: The middle generation is feeling unsure about the crisis winter - and is calling for the state
2. Clay, stones, shards
Why do men have to go to war so often?
Why does it always have to be the battlefield?
Why is it not enough for so many to vent their anger on the football field or another field?
Out of sheer frustration about personal or political defeats, one could, for example, join the CSU, as the former SPD member of the Bundestag Florian Post has just announced.
Not so Elon Musk.
He wants to "go to war" against Apple because Apple allegedly wants to throw its new acquisition, Twitter, out of the App Store.
The Tesla billionaire also accused Apple of "hating" free speech.
Presumably because the iPhone and Mac maker has stopped advertising on Twitter.
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Twitter employees in Ghana celebrate the opening of their Accra office in early November
Photo: mistameister / Twitter
One can only congratulate Apple on this decision.
Not only Musk's plan to defend freedom of expression with hate speech, declarations of war and the activation of homophobic and racist Twitter accounts is dubious.
In Ghana, he fired the entire Twitter team except for one person.
The new office had only been opened four days earlier, reports SPIEGEL correspondent Heiner Hoffmann from Nairobi.
One of the dismissed then showed on Twitter a clenched fist that he had made out of clay.
pottery!
This is also a good antidote to frustration.
Read the full story here: Second Class Twitter Employees
3. Time for experiments?
Fifa described her nomination as "historic".
But so far none of the three referees have been allowed to referee a match at the men's World Cup in Qatar.
28 of the 33 male colleagues have already been deployed, and by Wednesday a dozen of them will have refereed a game twice.
Stephanie Frappart (France), Salima Mukansanga (Rwanda) and Yoshimi Yamashita (Japan) still have to wait.
This begs the question of whether Fifa is actually serious about equality.
Or whether the naming of the women was an image measure?
“Qatar compact” columnist Christoph Scheuermann dared an experiment yesterday – public viewing in Advent:
»A Christmas market in downtown Hamburg, a self-experiment: Can two mediocre things – the football World Cup in Qatar and »vintner mulled wine« – be combined into something good?
I stand at the mulled wine stand and start the ARD app on my cell phone. Switzerland versus Brazil, at full volume. In Qatar it is 25 degrees, slightly cloudy. Hamburg: four degrees, rain. Cold water drips down my neck from above.
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Christmas market in Dresden
Photo: Matthias Rietschel / dpa
Shortly before the start of the World Cup, many German Christmas markets refused to broadcast football matches. No public viewing. Public drinking only. It was a gesture of defiance, a contemplative "Fuck you" in the direction of Qatar: We can be happy without football!
Scantily clad women with green and yellow make-up can be seen on my cell phone. Maybe a cold hallucination. My toes are freezing. The fans and players on the screen are as small as ants. Then Vini Junior shoots to Casemiro, who hits the ball into the net. 1-0 for Brazil. I yell, "Tor!" A mother yells, "Ben, get out of the rain right now."
If you are alone in the cold, a mug of mulled wine, 0.2 liters, warms you up for about nine minutes. I stopped that. Makes about ten mulled wine for 90 minutes plus a half-time break. The great thing is that if you order ten mulled wine here, you get the eleventh for free and can then vomit yourself in the sustainable wooden toilet next to the church.
Conclusion: Contemplative is not far from being unconscious, football has lost, and mulled wine remains an invention of Satan.«
Read more here: Public viewing during Advent is so depressing
And here you can read the World Cup news of the day
News and background to the war in Ukraine:
Was the Holodomor genocide?
Stalin's policies led to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians.
On Wednesday, the Bundestag wants to condemn this crime as genocide.
Historian Tanja Penter says: The sign is as important as it is problematic.
"I don't know how I'm going to survive this":
The city of Cherson has been under Russian fire since it was liberated by the Ukrainian army.
The remaining residents are close to despair.
At least with the power supply there is hope.
Find all the latest developments on the war in Ukraine here: The News Update
What else is important today
Iranian general admits high number of victims in protests for
the first time: Iran's Islamist regime is taking massive action against popular protests.
The Revolutionary Guards have now admitted the deaths of more than 300 people.
The actual numbers are likely to be significantly higher.
Paul Ripke ends cooperation with Weight Watchers:
With influencer Paul Ripke as a decoy, Weight Watchers wanted to win new customers on Tinder.
Instead of flattering messages, the women saw weight loss advertising.
That didn't go over well.
Three men discovered on the rudder of an oil tanker:
According to their own statements, the Spanish coast guard rescued three stowaways from a rudder blade and brought them to port.
The ship they arrived on had come a long way.
Archaeologists find wellness area in Roman barn conversion:
The villa complex became known through an Iliad mosaic, now a research team has made another discovery: the ancient owners had once converted a barn into a house - including a wellness room and underfloor heating.
The Schlecker insolvency administrator's lawsuit worth millions is being re-examined:
the Schlecker drugstore chain went bankrupt years ago, but the consequences are still being dealt with by the courts today.
The lawsuits are mainly for the former Schlecker employees, says the insolvency administrator.
My favorite story today: The sweet steam business
The good news first: Tobacco seems to be out among young people.
According to figures from the Federal Center for Health Education, the smoking rate among 12 to 17 year olds fell to an all-time low of 6.1 percent in 2021.
Hard to imagine for someone like me, who could easily meet a third of my classmates in the long break at the Raucherhof in the 1990s.
The bad news: the smell of cola, lemon cake or cotton candy wafts out of the smoking corners of German schoolyards.
"What smells like sweet bags from the kiosk are partly nicotine-containing vapors from disposable e-cigarettes, which with their fruity aromas apparently also whet the appetite of young people," say my colleagues Pascal Mühle and Roger Schneider, who talk about the trend towards disposable e-cigarettes. wrote about e-cigarettes.
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Young woman with e-cigarette (symbol image)
Photo:
Liudmila Chernetska / iStockphoto / Getty Images
The industry likes to point out that the so-called vapes offer smokers an opportunity for an easier exit.
At the Berlin Specialist Center for Addiction Prevention, however, it looks as if many people are more likely to find their way into it.
There are currently many inquiries, especially from schools.
"Apart from cannabis, e-cigarettes are currently the main topic of our prevention work," says the speaker Anna Freiesleben.
Some teachers sometimes notice it as early as the seventh and eighth grades.
A large proportion of the disposable e-cigarettes sold also contain the addictive substance nicotine.
“No one really likes the first cigarette, but disposable vapes do,” says prevention worker Freiesleben.
"As a result, e-cigarettes lead a target group to smoke that would never have used normal cigarettes before."
Read the full story here: Disposable e-cigarette trend
What we recommend at SPIEGEL+ today
Air conditioning instead of heat pump - can that work?
Heat pumps are popular, but expensive and currently hard to come by.
In order to still heat in a way that saves CO2 and gas, more and more homeowners are turning to air conditioning.
Whether this pays off depends on several factors.
When "How are you?" becomes the killer question:
Anyone living with Asperger's Syndrome needs clear work structures and an environment in which thinking and feeling outside the norm are welcome.
What those affected experience in companies - and what can help them.
How the traffic light buried the chlorinated chicken:
Hundreds of thousands used to protest against free trade agreements, but now the Bundestag is likely to approve the EU-Canada agreement Ceta without much resistance.
Is there another turning point in German politics?
Which is less important today
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Photo: Andrew Harnik / dpa
How do you think Robert Habeck's "Short-Term Energy Supply Security Measures Ordinance" is translated into English?
It doesn't matter, American authorities and government buildings obviously don't have to save energy anyway.
In any case, 77 Christmas trees were set up in and around the
White House
and more than 83,000 Christmas lights were installed.
This year's decoration is themed "We the People" (in German: "Wir, das Volk") - the words with which the American Constitution begins.
This concept of unity describes the "soul of the nation," said First Lady Jill Biden at the presentation of the holiday decorations.
Typo of the day
, now corrected: »However, local residents report that they are under considerable pressure.
Some of the new plots of land have already been allocated to them.«
Cartoon of the Day:
One Love
And tonight?
Can your partner fall in love again if you're underground yourself?
Reading this “self-pitying look at the future” (so the mid-life columnist and SPIEGEL news boss Stefan Weigel describes his work) warmed my heart today.
How about a cheesy song with a serious background?
With »Another Love«, the British songwriter Tom Odell reached number eleven in the German charts in 2013.
Now the old hit about love and frustration is making a big comeback: it has already climbed to number 9 in Germany and much higher in many countries.
The reason are the words from Odell's lyrics, which people in many countries have raised to the protest anthem out of solidarity with the demonstrators in Iran.
The lines read like this: »And if somebody hurts you, I wanna fight/ But my hands been broken one too many times/ So I'll use my voice, I'll be so fucking rude/ Words they always win, but I know I'll lose.” Translated roughly: If someone hurts you, I want to fight, but my hands have been broken too many times.
That's why I use my voice, I'll be so damn rude, Words will always win, even though I know I'll lose.
Your Anna Clauss
wishes you a nice evening