Good morning dear readers,
It’s been almost exactly three years since a virus changed the world. Around seven million people have died worldwide in connection with a coronavirus infection, and public life has stood still for billions for months. But the big question remains unanswered: Where did Covid-19 come from?
The final answer has not yet been found, but the debate about the origin of Sars-CoV-2 is currently heating up the conflict between the great powers USA and China.
FBI chief Christopher Wray recently stated that his agency assumes that the pandemic was “most likely caused by a potential laboratory accident”. And on Capitol Hill in Washington, a special committee took up its work, unequivocally titled “The Chinese Communist Party Threat to America.”
Beijing feels unflattered by the American accusations and promptly presented its own seemingly absurd laboratory theory. Sars-CoV-2 came from a military base in the USA and was brought into Wuhan, China, by American soldiers. According to this line of argument, the United States would also be to blame for the mess.
The escalating struggle for the sovereignty of interpreting Covid does not bode well for the relationship between the superpowers. It is to be feared that a military conflict between China and the USA would have just as far-reaching consequences for the world population as the corona virus once had.
(Photo: AP)
Who hasn’t it already happened to: Saturday evenings comfortably on the sofa, outside three degrees and rain, the sports show is on TV. Suddenly the chip bag is empty. But the shock is only short-lived, because there are now bike courier services that deliver groceries directly to your home within minutes.
But when the person who is cycling through the rain on a Saturday evening and providing “couch potatoes” with bags of chips suddenly wants to have a say in the company, there are often problems. Many of the once cool, nice start-ups suddenly don’t seem so cool and nice anymore. Raul, for example, who rode a bicycle for the delivery service Flink and wanted to set up a works council with other comrades-in-arms, was fired. Such disputes between start-ups and employees who demand codetermination are increasing.
The problem is becoming more and more explosive with the current economic weakness. Because when start-ups fire their employees in droves, only their stakeholders can negotiate a social plan – which can also entail a right to severance pay. If there are no stakeholders, there is no severance pay.
There is good news for Munich this morning: Apple has announced that it will invest an additional one billion euros in the expansion of its European Center for Chip Design in the Bavarian state capital over the next six years. Munich is thus developing further into the Apple stronghold of Europe. The city is already the largest European development site for the American technology giant.
The additional investment should also help Apple catch up. Because when it comes to cell phone chips for the new 5G generation of mobile phones, the US group has so far been dependent on Qualcomm, the world’s leading provider. A dangerous dependency that Apple no longer wants to afford. The hope for improvement is growing in the heart of the Bavarian metropolis.
Apple’s announcement should make people who are looking for living space in Munich break out in a cold sweat. Even more people with good salaries on the housing market can hardly use the rents in Germany’s most expensive city. But elsewhere, too, rents continue to rise.
The CEO of the real estate platform Hypoport, Ronald Slabke, sees political “explosive” in the development of rental prices and in the Handelsblatt interview calls for “more flexibility and speed” for the housing market.
Slabke believes that this should be achieved through less regulation of housing construction and the rental market. This also includes gradually reducing tenant protection. His hope: “If we create more freedom there, rents in new buildings would become cheaper and existing rents would adjust more to market prices”.
Slabke himself no longer has to worry about rents, he lives in a condominium, as he reveals in the interview. He sold his first apartment when he moved out instead of renting it out. According to Slabke, renting out is no longer lucrative for private individuals.
The topic of rental prices should also concern Berlin’s Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey. In September 2021, your city decided by a majority to want to expropriate large housing groups. But that this referendum will still be implemented seems more and more questionable.
Late on Wednesday evening it became known what had already been indicated: the Social Democrats are turning their backs on the Greens and the Left and want to co-govern in the capital under the leadership of the Conservatives in the future. Expropriations of large housing groups will hardly be possible with the CDU.
Harsh criticism of the decision came from the ranks of the Young Socialists. On the other hand, the SPD would probably have had to take a lot of criticism for a continuation of the coalition with the Greens and the Left. Giffey, who will probably get a job as a senator in Berlin, will remember Johann Ferdinand Rüthling, who wrote: “How true it is, I don’t know and it’s me too pomade.”
I wish you a day full of right decisions.
It greets you cordially
Her
Teresa Stiens
Editor of the Handelsblatt
