Legions of PR auxiliaries, colleagues and politicians have tried to retrieve a sentence about Vladimir Putin. US President Joe Biden said on Saturday in Warsaw about the Russian President: “This man cannot remain in power.”
The Kremlin then protested sharply against the idea of regime change. A day later, however, Biden no longer wants to correct anything: “I’m not taking my sentence back.”
He expressed “moral outrage” and no new US policy: “I make no apologies for my personal feelings.” At the same time, he is asking Congress for the highest military spending in history, with $773 billion to flow into the Defense Department alone.
Olaf Scholz came out of cover on Sunday in his individual interrogation at “Anne Will”. Rarely was the chancellor so temperamental, nor so aggressive. For example, against economists who, according to their own calculations, claim that an energy embargo against Russia is very tenable.
It was “irresponsible to add up any mathematical models that then don’t work,” railed the head of government, who, as finance minister, still adorned himself with economists. Scholz also argued that Putin could not use the proceeds from gas, oil and coal sales because of the many sanctions.
“There is no basis for that,” counters economics expert Veronika Grimm in Handelsblatt: “I don’t know how the chancellor came up with that.” The available data and analyzes would speak a different language. The dispute is likely to be overtaken by reality soon.
The G7 economy ministers reject Putin’s pressure to pay for Russian gas in rubles. Moscow’s response came from Ivan Abramov, a member of the parliament’s economics committee: Such a refusal by the G7 would lead to a halt to supplies.
It was the last newspaper critical of the Kremlin, run by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, an internationally respected Russian truth-telling organ – but now the “Novaya Gazeta” will temporarily stop appearing until the end of the Ukraine war.
The editors had received the second warning from the media regulator Roskomnadzor, a license is threatened. As requested, the paper does not write about the war, but about the “special operation”. However, it is said to have neglected to include the addition “foreign agent” in an article. The EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell sees a “result of censorship and years of systematic intimidation by the Russian authorities”.
We comment with Jean Paul: “Books, newspapers and magazines don’t make you good or bad, but they do make you better or worse.”
Timotheus Höttges likes to present himself as the guardian of data protection. At the same time, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom likes to bash the tech giants from the USA.
But there, of all places, T-Mobile US operates an advertising program that hardly differs from surveillance capitalism in the manner of Google & Co. Intimate user data is evaluated in a targeted manner and sold to advertisers.
It’s about websites accessed, information about the customer’s end device and their location, but also personal data, my colleagues describe – everything is anonymous, but the identity of the user could still be fathomed, data protection officials fear.
T-Mobile US is considered to be a successful model in the Telekom realm, in which the federal government is the largest shareholder. Almost two-thirds of the group’s sales are generated here – So CEO Höttges is considering bringing parts of the US advertising happiness program to Germany. Of course, this would happen “in accordance with German data protection rules,” Telekom assures. Sometimes half the truth seems like a full lie.
(Photo: imago images/sepp spiegl)
Those who want to cover up mishaps, bad luck and embarrassment tend to attribute them to “technical failure” or, even better, to “office errors”. It wasn’t you yourself. This explains the dubious behavior of Pope Benedict XVI. in an abuse case that was raised in Munich. And so the North Rhine-Westphalian Environment Minister Ursula Heinen-Esser (CDU) is helping herself out of the jam.
She once stated that she had stayed in her holiday apartment in Mallorca for five days immediately after the flood of the century in July 2021. But now she officially calls nine days – all the “result of an office error”.
Many people died in NRW during the flood disaster last summer, which is said to have got around in the Balearic Islands. The opposition SPD demands Mrs.Mallorca’s resignation. “Travel makes you humble. You realize what a small place you occupy in the world,” Gustave Flaubert recognized.
And then there’s the slap in the face. It was once – in pedagogically dark times – a means of education, otherwise always a moral blow in terms of honor.
The resounding measure of the unnerved seems to be experiencing a certain boom: In Los Angeles at the Oscar gala, actor Will Smith stormed onto the stage and slapped the presenter Chris Rock because he had made fun of his wife in a tasteless way. In Dortmund at a boxing event just at the weekend, the rapper “Fat Comedy” got physical against TV revenant Oliver Pocher.
Of course, all of this is silly compared to Beate Klarsfeld, who in 1968 slapped the Chancellor and former NSDAP follower Kurt Georg Kiesinger with the cry “Nazi, Nazi!”.
Out of sheer excitement about the recent slap in the face in Hollywood, it was a little lost that the iPhone group Apple was the big winner of the evening. His own film “Coda”, prepared for the Apple TV streaming service, received three Oscars. Maybe you can see that as a kind of slap in the face for the old Hollywood studio system.
I wish you a stimulating day.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
hp Houses and apartments are becoming more expensive, in the last quarter of 2021 prices rose by 12.2 percent compared to the same period last year. What do you think – is there a bubble, is it about to burst? Would you still buy a property now, or are the risks and prices too high for you? What should politicians do now? Write us your opinion in five sentences [email protected]. We will publish selected articles with attribution on Thursday in print and online.