New Chancellor Olaf Scholz had announced his new Corona expert council with trumpets. The best in their field would ensure greater rationality. But recently nothing was heard from this Areopagus of the pandemic. In an act of self-empowerment, the qualified veterinarian for microbiology Lothar Wieler, currently head of the Robert Koch Institute, set an important standard. After that, a person is only considered to have recovered three months after surviving the infection – and no longer six months. Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD) gave his Plazet and looked as if he had been shown.
Now the expert council with members like Christian Drosten and Hendrik Streeck calls for better health communication in a statement: “Even if authorities and ministries are currently implementing parts of it, there is no institution in Germany that implements risk and health communication coordinated according to the principles listed below.” Seldom has the reckoning with chaotic politics been formulated more diplomatically.
If you want to have a say in current energy issues, you can’t do without the abbreviation “LNG”. It stands for liquefied natural gas, and we’re learning that there’s bad LNG and good LNG. The bad variant goes back to shale gas, which the Americans would love to sell us as a dollar-decorated sign of Western solidarity in the face of a possible Gazprom-Ukraine default. The good variant brings “green gas” into play – i.e. bio-LNG on the basis of residues such as straw, or synthetic LNG from green hydrogen.
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Our report provides information on two projects for the construction of modern LNG terminals in Stade and Brunsbüttel. Economics Minister Robert Habeck approves of LNG imports. However, the two planned terminals have so far not been privately financeable: “We will now address this question energetically.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
There are reports in the press about “dirty games” – about a Winter Olympics in Beijing whose image is suffering from the current problems of the host country China. These include the suppression of the Uyghurs, the premature total incorporation of Hong Kong, the diplomatic boycott by the USA, Germany, Australia and Japan, and the complete corona isolation. If there are dirty games in a one-party state, then there is dirty money. That will become clear before the Five Rings Show, which begins on Friday. This money comes from 13 top sponsors of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose boss Thomas Bach has trained the kowtow so intensively that another posture hardly seems to be an option for him in China.
- American Olympic financiers such as Intel and Coca-Cola had to justify their spending in Beijing in the US Congress.
- “We don’t choose the Olympic hosts, we just follow the athletes to where they compete,” said the human rights manager at Coca-Cola.
- Athletes like US biathlete Clare Egan, on the other hand, are anything but naïve: “If you see something that’s going wrong, you shouldn’t just sit there and do nothing.”
The Munich insurance giant Allianz has also got caught up in the whirlwind of debates, as my colleagues report. They wanted more perception, a hip image and younger target groups – and found themselves in Xi Jinping bashing. For the blogger and China expert Mark Dreyer, the case is clear: “The Olympic Games have become so polarized worldwide that the big sponsors are basically just ducking their heads.”
A social policy orientation combined with a restrained spending policy has led to a surprising victory for the Socialist Party (PS) of Prime Minister António Costa in the parliamentary elections in Portugal. She received almost 42 percent of the votes. The PS has thus achieved an absolute majority in Parliament. This is the end of a time when Costa’s minority government had to rely on the help of smaller left-wing parties. The conservative PSD, the country’s largest opposition party, came to just under 28 percent.
He has quarreled so often with his party that they want to throw him out. But now Boris Palmer wants to make it clear to every Green in his own way that the individual counts more than the collective. In the Tübingen mayoral election in autumn, the incumbent will stand again – as an independent. Palmer confirmed this to SWR and raved about the most beautiful office he could imagine. 30 years ago he fell in love as a student in Tübingen.
If he leaves it at this honeyed self-portrayal, he will probably end up increasing the current popularity rating of 68 percent to the 90 percent heights of vanished socialist systems. It will now be interesting to see who the Greens could line up against the Greens. Palmer probably feels very close to the writer Albert Camus: “What is a rebel? A man who says no.”
The streaming platform Spotify will in future place corona warnings for problematic content in order to appease critics and cool down a heated debate. Canadian singer Joni Mitchell (“Woodstock”) followed her compatriot Neil Young in the decision to remove her own music from Spotify earlier this weekend. Mitchell said she wanted to show solidarity with the rock star who identified the Swedish company as a place of “deadly disinformation about Covid”.
The occasion was a controversial podcast by US comedian Joe Rogan, a notorious vaccine skeptic who likes to invite guests who spread false information about the corona virus. “When I left Spotify, I felt better,” said Neil Young now – and ranted about a “crappy, degraded and castrated sound”. At this point, we do not want to elaborate on the fact that this statement also rattles a bit.
And then there is economist Max Otte, 57, who wants to turn a political disaster into a political triumph. One could easily forget that the CDU is throwing him out because he was baited by the right-wing club AfD as a rival for Frank-Walter Steinmeier for the upcoming federal presidential election.
“The office of Federal President or the candidacy is above the parties and at the end of a political career. What should come after that?” Otte actually shared – guaranteed no fake news – with the German Press Agency. “So this candidacy also means my departure from the party-political stage.” Some wonder whether, following the ad hoc AfD exodus of former party leader Jörg Meuthen, a second fig leaf will soon disappear from the public eye.
I wish you a good start into the week, with real highlights of course.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
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