#munich christmas market 2023

[japansapporowalk]

【4K】🇯🇵2023 ミュンヘン・クリスマス市 in Sapporo 初日の散歩／日本 北海道 札幌 中央区【Binaural ASMR】

[newstfionline]

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Trump Is Disqualified From 2024 Ballot, Colorado Court Says in Explosive Ruling (NYT) Colorado’s top court ruled on Tuesday that former President Donald J. Trump is disqualified from holding office again because he engaged in insurrection with his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, an explosive ruling that is likely to put the basic contours of the 2024 election in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Colorado Supreme Court was the first in the nation to find that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—which disqualifies people who engage in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it—applies to Mr. Trump, an argument that his opponents have been making around the country. The ruling directs the Colorado secretary of state to exclude Mr. Trump’s name from the state’s Republican primary ballot. It does not address the general election. Mr. Trump’s campaign said immediately that it would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

House Dysfunction by the Numbers: 724 Votes, Only 27 Laws Enacted (NYT) Representative Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, had a positive spin on the five days and record-breaking 15 voting rounds it took him to win the gavel in January. “Because it took this long,” he said after the ordeal, “now we learned how to govern.” But as the first year of the 118th Congress draws to a close, the numbers tell a different story—one that doesn’t involve much governing at all. In 2023, the Republican-led House has passed only 27 bills that became law, despite holding a total of 724 votes. That is more voting and less lawmaking than at any other time in the last decade, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The numbers reflect the challenges that have plagued Republicans all year and are likely to continue, and maybe even get worse, in 2024: a tiny majority that requires near unanimity to get anything done; deep party divisions that make unanimity all but impossible; and a right wing whose priority is reining in government, not passing new laws to broaden its reach.

Wars raise profit outlook for US defense industry in 2024 (Reuters) When the Pentagon pulled the world’s biggest defense contractors into a meeting to tell them to ramp up production shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, one CEO hesitated, saying they did not want to be stuck with a warehouse full of rockets when the fighting stopped, according to three people familiar with the discussion. Nearly two years later, big defense firms are singing a different tune, with several expecting strong demand in 2024 as the U.S. and its allies load up on expensive weaponry and munitions with an eye on what they perceive as more aggressive actions from Russia and China. The math is simple. For example, to meet demand for missile defenses, production of Patriot interceptors for the U.S. Army—a projectile fired at an incoming missile with the aim of knocking it down—will rise from 550 to 650 rockets per year. At around $4 million each, that’s a potential $400 million annual sales boost on one weapons system alone.

Holiday travel peaks in Europe (Reuters) Travel within Europe in the busy holiday season is exceeding 2022 levels, despite security warnings from authorities around Europe as consumers remain determined to enjoy holidays, prolonging the post-pandemic travel boom. Christmas markets and popular tourist sites in cities such as Munich and Paris have been bustling lately, albeit with strong security presences, as holiday travel within the European Union and including Britain was set to climb 22% above 2022 levels, according to travel data firm ForwardKeys. "I feel very safe and very conscious of the state of the world. And it's certainly something I think about every day, both conflicts in Europe, conflicts in the Middle East," said Gwen Fitzgerald, who visited a Christmas market in Munich this week from Boston. "But I also really am desperate for joy at the same time."

Migrant and asylum pact (Foreign Policy) In a bid to better share migrant responsibility, the European Union passed an agreement on Wednesday that outlines how members can divide cost and hosting obligations. Countries not along a continental border must choose to either accept 30,000 asylum applications a year or pay at least 20,000 euros (about $21,870) per person into an EU fund. Screening processes will be sped up, and immigrants will be distinguished by their need for international protections. Greece, Italy, and other countries most impacted by migration flows praised the deal, which they argued will force hesitant Eastern European nations to help bear the burden.

In Russian detention, five years on (BBC) Five years ago, former US Marine Paul Whelan travelled to Moscow on a two-week holiday that ended in a Russian labour camp. In a rare phone interview, the captive says he feels "abandoned" by Washington: In all the years we've spoken, I've never heard Mr Whelan so pessimistic or so frustrated. "I know the US have all sorts of proposals, but it's not what the Russians want. So they go back and forth, like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks," he said. "The problem is, it's my life that's draining away while they do this. It's been five years!" The US State Department won't confirm the details of sensitive negotiations. But the US government spokesperson described Secretary Blinken as "personally committed" to securing Mr Whelan's release.

Israelis Abandon Political Left Over Security Concerns After Oct. 7 (NYT) Maya Mizrachi grimaced at the group of eight Israelis calling for peace with Palestinians in front of Israel’s military headquarters this month in Tel Aviv. A year ago, Ms. Mizrachi, 25, had protested alongside them, carrying a sign that called for Israel to end its military occupation of the West Bank. Now, she had bumped into them by accident, on her way home from a nearby rally calling for the return of Israeli citizens held hostage in the Gaza Strip. “I don’t think there are more than eight people in all of Israel who would protest against the army right now,” said Ms. Mizrachi. She is one of a growing number of Israeli citizens eschewing the politics of the left—ideas that include promoting peace talks with the Palestinians, ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and supporting a two-state solution—since Oct. 7, when Hamas gunmen crossed into Israel in a surprise attack and killed roughly 1,200 people. In the wellspring of sadness, anger and fear that has gripped Israel since that day, a consensus has emerged that Israel needs to take a harder line with the Palestinians and embrace an even more militarized state.

Israel is struggling to destroy Hamas, but it’s destroying Gaza (Washington Post) Amid mounting pressure on Israel from Western allies to rein back its campaign against Hamas, Israeli President Isaac Herzog held the line. “We intend to take over the entire Gaza Strip and change the course of history,” he said during a Tuesday interview facilitated by the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Herzog said that the current conflict is a clash of “a set of civilizational values” and cast the Palestinian militant group, which carried out the brutal Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, as a “force of evil.” “The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do,” recently declared David Azoulai, mayor of Metula, Israel’s northernmost town. “Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.” The official museum at the Holocaust’s most infamous concentration camp responded on social media, saying the Israeli mayor’s remarks “may sound as a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz.”

Hamas’s Cheap, Makeshift Drones Are Outsmarting Israel’s High-Tech Military (Bloomberg) It wasn’t the eruption of rocket fire from Gaza that rattled soldiers at Israel’s southern frontier on Oct. 7. It was the unusual hum overhead that they hadn’t heard before. A fleet of drones that are available online for as little as $6,500 filled the skies above Israel’s $1 billion border fence. They were rigged to carry explosives and knock out cameras, communications systems and remote-controlled guns, setting the stage for the unprecedented massacre. Militaries have been using drones in conflicts for more than two decades. Israel itself boasts one of the largest armies of unmanned aerial vehicles in the Middle East. Today, a new generation of cheap, commercially available systems—like the ones Hamas used in the Oct. 7 attack—is emerging, challenging some of the world’s most technologically advanced forces. The war with Hamas is a wakeup call for top-tier militaries about their deadly potential. Hamas’s use of modified commercial drones to stage attacks—a strategy also used by Ukraine in the early days of Russia���s invasion—exposed a significant vulnerability in Israel’s vaunted air and ground defenses. The tactics overwhelmed a far more advanced opponent, all on a shoestring budget.

Paramilitary force takes city in heart of Sudan’s breadbasket; 300,000 flee (Washington Post) The paramilitary force fighting the Sudanese government has stormed into a major city in the heart of the nation’s grain-producing region, residents said, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee. Wad Madani, south of the war-torn capital of Khartoum, had been an area of relative security for the past eight months of fighting and was one of the few havens for humanitarian operations in the war-ravaged nation. Sofie Karlsson, the spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the situation was a “nightmare.” More than 300,000 people had fled the city in the past four days. “Horror in Sudan continues. Where are people going to go?” she tweeted.

A Chaotic Election in a Pivotal African Nation (NYT) Running the Democratic Republic of Congo is a tough and dangerous job. For decades, this African country the size of Western Europe has lurched between dictatorships, wars and vast humanitarian crises. Despite extraordinary natural resources, it remains desperately poor. Two leaders have been killed. Even so, about 20 candidates are still in the race to become Congo’s next president in national elections, the fourth in Congo’s history, on Wednesday. Another 100,000 people are running for seats in national, regional and local assemblies. Organizing an election in such a vast country would tax any bureaucracy—never mind in the world’s fifth-poorest country, with a population of about 100 million people, and some of Africa’s worst infrastructure. To reach all of Congo’s 75,000 polling stations, the authorities have sent Korean-made voting machines by boat on the Congo River, by plane across vast distances and by foot into some of the world’s most impenetrable forests—a journey that can take three weeks, election observers say.

It’s Christmastime in the Cosmos (NYT) For astronomers peering into the depths of the universe, Christmas came a little early this year. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA released an image last month of a Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, a winking collection of galaxies 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. These images and others follow a long tradition of astronomers and other stargazers connecting the season of light with cosmic phenomena occurring light-years from Earth. But there is genuine scientific wonder involved in some of these festive observations. Underlying the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster was a detection by astronomers of 14 stars that flicker over days or months—like the lights on a Christmas tree. Astronomers have often found seasonal spirit in space. In 2010, NASA released an image of a red bubble that looked like an ornament floating amid the stars. One year later, the Hubble dropped a breathtaking image of a cosmic snow angel: a star in our galaxy flanked by wispy blue “wings” of hot gas.

[bopinion]

2023 / 48 - Brief compromise edition due to work overload (and belated - sorry...)

Aperçu of the Week:

"He, who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, German philologist and founder of a new philosophical school, the "philosophy of life").

Bad News of the Week:

Abuse of power in relationships is a sensitive issue. Many endure and remain silent, their number can only be guessed. And it is practically always the supposedly weaker sex that suffers. Violence against women costs Germany 148 million euros - per day. Loss of work, being forced to move away from the abusive man, the upkeep of women's shelters. Last year alone, 240,000 people in Germany suffered domestic violence, 8.5 percent more than in the previous year. And these are only the cases documented by the police. On average, a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every three days.

In other supposedly "civilized" countries, the situation is hardly any better, not to mention the rest - keyword Taliban. "The scale is unbearable," says Lisa Paus from the Green Party, Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. And then there is the dark number of unreported cases. The White Ring (an aid organization for victims of crime and their families) estimates that there could be four times more abuse than is recorded. I dare not even think about children, for whom there are hardly any reliable figures. I like to say that the most dangerous drug in the world is testosterone. And I'm afraid I'm right once again.

Good News of the Week:

Real estate prices really only know one way, at least in sought-after locations like Munich: up. Where residents are increasingly suffering from rising rents, most of the same thing is happening with office and retail space. One person who has made a killing on the real estate market in recent years is the Austrian self-made billionaire René Benko and his Signa holding. He also owns valuable buildings in city centers, such as centrally located department stores.

Now Signa-Holding has filed for insolvency, not even wunderkind Benko (he is only 46) is spared from rising construction prices and increasingly expensive loans. At the same time, the "department store" model, in which Signa is the clear market leader, appears to be becoming increasingly obsolete thanks to online retailing and increasing specialization in the sector. In many German cities, there will soon be large buildings in the middle of the city center that will lose their purpose and its financing.

Martin Schirdewan, chairman of the Left Party, is now putting forward an idea that I find very appealing. He proposes that local authorities use their often existing pre-emptive rights to secure these central properties. He calls them "urgently needed care centers". With local amenities, doctors, childcare, libraries, theaters, social counseling, etc. Town centers that offer the people what they need. In other words, real city centers that serve their residents instead of making investors richer. A great idea.

Personal happy moment of the week:

In December, there are Advent markets everywhere in Germany. Wooden hut villages decorated for Christmas in public squares, mainly offering arts and crafts, but above all food and drink - hot caipirinha, for example. I opened this year's season with friends in Munich's old town. Right at the start of winter with snow flurries, a wonderful atmosphere. Two more trips to Advent markets are already planned: one on an island in Bavaria's largest lake and one on the edge of the Alps. Nice.

I couldn't care less...

...about the political future of George Santos. The fact that the Republican impostor from Long Island has lost his seat in the US House of Representatives only goes to show that a minimum of "political hygiene" (still) works in the United States of America.

As I write this...

...I'm sitting on the train. Which is now running again. There was a total standstill for four days, as the onset of winter brought the most snow in a single day since 2006 - on that day alone I shoveled snow for four and a quarter hours. Nothing worked: roads were closed, the airport was shut, train routes were impassable. Now at least the train is running again. And I'm sitting inside in the warmth, listening to soft chill-out music and looking out of the window at a beautiful winter landscape.

Post Scriptum

Germany has won the World Cup. In Indonesia. In soccer. Against France. The U17s, young players with a maximum age of 16. We are already European champions, and now world champions. At the moment, our men's team is anything but competitive. We wouldn't even qualify for next year's European Championships in Germany if we weren't the hosts. But in a few years' time, when the youngsters have turned professional, things will obviously look different: dress warmly!