German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is resisting a possible Western expansion in military backing for Ukraine, saying on Sunday he does not favour allowing Kiev to use German weapons to hit targets in Russia as German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said on Saturday in Italy the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized democracies still have “a lot of work to do” on using interest generated from frozen Russian assets to aid Ukraine.
Norway, Spain and Ireland will recognize an independent Palestinian state, their leaders said in near simultaneous announcements on Wednesday, defying staunch opposition from Israel. Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said in Oslo he hoped other countries would join in the initiative, believing it will advance the prospects for peace after more than seven months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Scholz: “At best, it’s the start of a process that could lead to direct talks between Ukraine and Russia. In Switzerland, it will be about the safety of nuclear power plants, grain exports, the issue of prisoner exchanges and the necessary taboo on the use of nuclear weapons. Once again, this is all still in its infancy.”
Pistorius said that military spending should be excluded from the so-called debt brake rules that are written into Germany’s constitution, which were added to the German constitution in 2009, and only allow the government to rely on borrowing for deficit spending under certain conditions.
Nicaragua argued that by providing political, financial and military support to Israel and by defunding the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), “Germany is facilitating the commission of genocide and, in any case has failed in its obligation to do everything possible to prevent the commission of genocide.”
Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski described the delivery of U.S. ATACMS missiles to Ukraine as a “reaction to the Russian escalation” in Ukraine, to which Germany must also respond.
The Main Ground Combat System project is conceived around not just a new main battle tank design, but also a series of systems and vehicles built off that platform that will connect battle tanks in a data network with support weapons such as drones and other unmanned systems.
The €100 billion ($107 billion) special fund created to update
Germany’s military after Russia invaded its neighbour in 2022 will be used up in a few years, Lindner said.
The armed forces will then have to be upgraded from regular funds. But this won’t be possible with a limited budget and
ever-growing debt, the finance minister went on.
Israeli soldiers in the West Bank threatened and detained a team of journalists from the German public broadcaster ARD, the network reported on Sunday evening. The soldiers behaved extremely aggressively towards the journalists and weapons were aimed into the team’s vehicle on several occasions, ARD said. Bavarian Rundfunk, the ARD member station that operates the network’s Tel Aviv studio, described the incident as an attack on press freedom.
Flights at Hamburg’s airport returned to normal schedule on Monday morning, hours after police managed to end a lengthy hostage stand-off with an armed man without bloodshed. The airport said security measures will be overhauled and physical barriers strengthened after the armed man managed to drive his car onto the runway apron on Sunday, forcing a halt to air traffic.
US President Barack Obama cited the Libyan government’s ‘continued violation of human rights, brutalization of its people and outrageous threats’.
Pakistan Thursday successfully tested a nuclear-capable cruise missile with a range of up to 600 km, a military official said.
A spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Germany has been indicted on terrorism charges, federal justice authorities said Monday in Karlsruhe. Agilan W., who now holds German citizenship, was arrested in November and indicted January 24.
Myanmar’s parliament Friday elected former army general Thein Sein as the country’s president, giving him the power to select a cabinet and head a powerful new security council.
Iran is at least two years away from producing a single nuclear weapon, according to an in-depth report published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Thursday.
