“Germany has updated its travel advisory for the United States to emphasize that a visa or waiver allowing entry does not guarantee Germans to enter the U.S. after several of its citizens were detained at the border.
According to an advisory on Germany’s Foreign Office website, the country warned that entry through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) system or a U.S. visa is not guaranteed every time and that the U.S. border control has final decision.
“It is recommended that you bring proof of your return journey upon entry,” the office said.”
German middle class people tended to support Hitler’s Nazi Party. They were afraid of Communist rebellion from below and dominating wealthy elites from above.
“The trade deficit is huge. It stands at $235.6 billion — a 12.9 percent increase since 2023. EU countries impose an average 5 percent tariff on U.S. goods, while the U.S. imposes an average 3.3 percent tariff on European goods. Even worse, the EU collects a 10 percent tariff on car imports — that’s four times America’s 2.5 percent.”
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“This has to change — and it can — but not through a tit-for-tat race to higher tariffs. Rather, we need to lower tariffs and observe symmetry. Ideally, EU-U.S. trade would be tariff-free. However, if that’s unachievable, tariffs should be, on average, 2 percent on both sides. That would create a huge stimulus for both economies, and it could be the basis and precondition for what is existentially necessary: a common trade strategy on China.”
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“If Trump is serious about “America First,” there’s one thing he should come to terms with — it shouldn’t mean “America Alone.” More leverage at the negotiating table with China, a healthy U.S. economy without inflation, and a prosperous Germany that could turn around a stumbling EU would be in the interest of the American people and Europe.”
“China is conducting the largest military build-up seen since that of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, one expert warns, after a new Department of Defense report detailed Beijing’s operations including bolstering weapons and psychological warfare.”
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“”Now the big difference there, is that he really focused on land power, which frankly is pretty easy to build up pretty quickly,” he added. “Navies are much more difficult to build up. And we are way behind. And not only do we need to catch up, but we also need to modernize our nuclear weapons, and we need to put a lot of effort into missile defense.”
“They’re massively building up their nuclear arsenal. We expect it to expand to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, only five years from now. Probably going to be bigger than that,” DeVore said Sunday. “The Chinese Navy, not by tonnage, but by numbers is now larger than the U.S. Navy. China has something like 250 times the ship building capacity that America does.”
The report cites how China has bolstered its People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) arsenal to include 50 new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can strike the continental U.S., raising its total to 400. As far as the report discloses, the DoD says China has added 300 medium-range ballistic missiles and 100 long-range cruise missiles. Their arsenal also now includes more than 600 operational nuclear warheads and is expected to have more than 1,000 by 2030.
The DoD says the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has the world’s leading arsenal of hypersonic missiles, including the DF-27, which as DeVore notes, “are capable of evading U.S. missile defenses and targeting Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska.””
“Germany’s three-party ruling coalition — consisting of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens on the left side of the political spectrum, and the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party (FDP) on the center right — was never a match made in heaven. Both the SPD and the Greens favor a strong social safety net and big investment to speed economic growth and the green energy transition. The FDP, on the other hand, believes in less government and less spending.
You may ask yourself why this triad came together in the first place. Good question! Simply put, there weren’t a lot of options given Germany’s increasingly splintered political landscape, as the rise of upstart parties has made it more difficult for the big-tent parties — the SPD and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — to form two-party coalition governments.
The fragmentation has worsened with the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now polling in second place nationally, and will continue with the arrival of populist-left newcomer Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW). Post-war Germany hasn’t had much experience of larger coalitions (Scholz’s fallen triad was the first three-way alliance in over six decades), but the ongoing division may make such coalitions — which tend to be more volatile — the new norm.
The key moment in the early demise of Scholz’s coalition came a year ago, when Germany’s top court handed down a bombshell ruling that ended a workaround the government had been using to spend money without violating the country’s constitutional “debt brake.” In order to circumvent those self-imposed fiscal strictures, Scholz’s coalition had relied on a network of “special funds” outside the main budget. The court deemed the practice unlawful, blowing a €60 billion hole in the federal budget in the process.
After that, Scholz’s coalition, which had relied on the free flow of money to paper over its major ideological differences, was not long for this world. A string of embarrassing election defeats and record-low approval ratings prompted the coalition parties to play to their bases to revive their political fortunes, worsening their incessant squabbling.”
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“Germany will hold its federal snap election on Sunday Feb. 23, 2025, lawmakers and officials in three of the major parties told POLITICO”
“Two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been suddenly disrupted, according to local telecommunications companies, amid fresh warnings of possible Russian interference with global undersea infrastructure.
A communications cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut on Sunday morning around 10:00 a.m. local time, a spokesperson from telecommunications company Telia Lithuania confirmed to CNN.
The company’s monitoring systems could tell there was a cut due to the traffic disruption, and that the cause was likely physical damage to the cable itself, Telia Lithuania spokesperson Audrius Stasiulaitis told CNN. “We can confirm that the internet traffic disruption was not caused by equipment failure but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.”
Another cable linking Finland and Germany was also disrupted, according to Cinia, the state-controlled Finnish company that runs the link. The C-Lion cable – the only direct connection of its kind between Finland and Central Europe – spans nearly 1,200 kilometers (730 miles), alongside other key pieces of infrastructure, including gas pipelines and power cables.
The incidents came as two of the affected countries, Sweden and Finland, updated their guidance to citizens on how to survive war. Millions of households in the Nordic nations will be given booklets with instructions on how to prepare for the effects of military conflicts, communications outages and power cuts.”
“NATO plans to coordinate the transport of a large number of wounded troops away from front lines in case of a war with Russia, potentially via hospital trains as air evacuations may not be feasible, according to a senior general.
The future scenario for medical evacuations will differ from allies’ experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank, the head of NATO’s logistics command, told Reuters in an interview.
In a conflict with Russia, Western militaries would likely be faced with a much larger war zone, a higher number of injured troops and at least a temporary lack of air superiority close to the front lines, the German general said.
“The challenge will be to swiftly ensure high-quality care for, in the worst case, a great number of wounded,” he said without specifying how many injured troops NATO would expect.
The planning for medical evacuations is part of a much broader drive by NATO, prompted by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, to overhaul and boost its ability to deter and defend against any Russian assault.”
“France and Germany said Tuesday that Ukraine should be allowed to use their weapons against targets inside Russia from which Moscow attacks Ukraine.”
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““Ukrainian soil is being attacked from bases in Russia,” Macron said during his visit to Schloss Meseberg in Brandenburg, Germany. “So how do we explain to the Ukrainians that we’re going to have to protect these towns and basically everything we’re seeing around Kharkiv at the moment, if we tell them you are not allowed to hit the point from which the missiles are fired?”
“We think that we should allow them to neutralize the military sites from which the missiles are fired and, basically, the military sites from which Ukraine is attacked,” Macron continued.”