Wissing arbeitet dran. Wenigstens beim ersten Punkt sogar ziemlich erfolgreich, schließlich stammt das 9€-Ticket von ihm.

Spies need to be kicked out of the country and organizations set up by them have to be banned.

Germany has enacted border controls to catch illegal immigrants, causing massive traffic jams. There are huge pushbacks kicking out thousands of refugees. Social services have been cut for refugees. All of that leads to a doubling of the right wing party, because migration ends up a topic in the media and the right wing is calling for everybody who is not 100% ethnic German to be kicked out of Germany, which is obviously insane.

Looks more like Europeans are moving money from the US to Europe in fear of something bad happening, rather then Trump not starting with tariffs or the current plans for peace in Ukraine. Obviously the later would be great for Europe, but not in the way planned.

The gold stars on a blue background flag is orginally the flag of the Council of Europe of which every country in Europe besides Russia, Belarus and Kosovo are members. That organization is still around today.

The US wants to give Russia parts of Ukraine, end of sanctions, remoing its forces in Europe and no alliance with Ukraine for nothing in return, but the ability to negoiate. That in effect is the end of the alliance between the US and Europe. NATO is basically dead, as the EU is the more logical place to organize such things nowadays.

Yes that means the end of the Western lead world order for better or worse. For Europe and the US for worse, others might profit.

We are talking about 13 relativly small banks, a bunch of shadow tankers not in Russia ownership 3 years ago and aluminium, which makes up 1.8% of Russian exports. Basically it is just closing holes in the sanctions made a few years ago.

The first thing was unification, which meant a lot of railroad spending was used to rebuild the lines cut by the wall. Then around 2000 they tried to privatize it, but never did, but cut funding. Then decades of conservative car lobbiest as transport ministers, which ignored that freight and passenger rail demand was going up, which obviously means more infrastructure is needed. They also increased red tape to make new railways very hard to built. The current government actually started to look at the problem, which is already great, and then approved shutting down major lines for large scale maintanence work.

However what is really needed are additional high speed rail lines to take those trains of the other mainlines and increase capacity. There are still some gaps in the network in desperate need of hsr in general. Also many of the large train stations need increased capacity to deal with more passengers. It is going to cost billions and a lot of laws to get this fixed and even then it will take decades.

Probably more intressting is that the investment backlog grew so quickly, due to the current transport minister actually asking Deutsche Bahn to look into it. That really shows the main problem.

Zaragoza and Bilbao come to mind.

There are solutions for that too. EU wide procurement agency is the biggest one. With some standards permanent staff and so forth. It is already pretty common to have multi national weapons development, like Eurofighter, Eurocopter and FREMM. Also some good weapons are already bought by a lot of countries and then modified like Leopard2, OTO Melara 76mm naval gun and so forth. So many projects have already quite some scale. Regional groups would not help much with that.

For stuff like logistics there is for example the Binational Air Transport Squadron Rhin/Rhein.

Honestly small steps to start:

1. The EU needs a strong military command structure. The current EU military institutions should be expanded to something similar to serve as a top level command structure to coordinate the member countries armed forces in case of an attack or for other types of deployment. NATO already has similar structures, those should be replicated and improved giving the EU power in them.
2. A common foreign policy organization for basic coordination of foreign policy. Preferably with qualified majority votes in the council for some at least limited votes.
3. Common procurement agency similar to ESA in structure. The agency coordinates development of defense products by setting specifications and the like. It then acts as a common procurement structure for members. A certain amount of the money spend on the weapon system say 80% has to go back to the country buying them in the contracts. However the agency makes the call on what it buys from each member. It also acts as a place to permit weapon exports of weapons developed using the agency. Those have to be in line with EU foreign policy, as in certain weapons will not be sold to hostile or unreliable countries.

That would be a useful start, but probably more importantly qualified majorities for foreign policy and military matters within the EU.

EDIT: Also EU wide units for logistics, air defense, radars and the like which are expensive and easier to do politically. So an EU air lift for example.

The EU already has the Military Planning and Conduct Capability MPCC, which is set up to run EU battlegroups of 2500men. That would be a good place to strengthen cooperation. Currently a lot of it is within NATO, which might also be available, if the US leaves.

There also are a number of units with soldiers from multiple countries like the Franco-German Brigade.

The way to do that is to ban Twitter and honestly Facebooks social networks as well. Just rejecting it is not going to cut it. They have to be treated like Russia Today, because in many ways they are just oligarch run media corporations.

There is a difference between pro establishment and pro government though. In this case Die Linke would probably get away better, if DW would have been pro government, as the only way the current government can remain in power is realisticly to gain more votes and add Die Linke to the governing coalition. Otherwise one of the two governing parties SPD or Greens is likely to be kicked out, as they would govern with the Union.

German public broadcasting is modelled mostly after the BBC, but has quite a lot of impact from the state level, rather then just the federal level.

Also Linke has been in state level government before and have achieved very little. They are not as much out of the establishment as the UK Greens are, despite being of a similar party size.

Just to add to this. There is a bit of a buffer between DW and the government. That is supervisory board with appointees from the government, the chambers of the parliament and 10 German organizations representing the German public. So it is not like they just follow the orders of the German government. In fact two of the three highest position in DW have been appointed when Merkels conservative government was in power. That explains them being as willing as they are to attack the current German government, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

What makes DW different is that it is directly financed by the German government.

Just to say it, but Raiffeisen was a German founder of cooperatives for farmers. Part of that was banking. That concept moved to Austria as well. The local Raiffeisen cooperatives ended up coming together to form a larger bank to serve large corporate Austrian clients with international banking services. Part of that was sold on the Austrian stock exchange to raise more capital. After the Iron Curtain fell, they moved strongly into the former Communist countries and also offered retail banking services.

In other words German Raiffeisen banks have nothing to do with this at all and are perfectly decent places to do business. In Austria itself you will deal mainly with the cooperatives, which only own part of the Raiffeisen Bank International. If you are in eastern Europe then this is the bank you are dealing with.

TL;DR: There are more then one bank called Raiffeisen and most of them are perfectly fine places to do business.

That is working on a long term solution for another problem, namely Transnistria. They currently have no heating and daily blackouts with huge parts of the industry being shut down. As soon as Moldova does a lot better, that is a massive step towards Transnistria giving up its claimed independence.

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

That has to be one of the best headlines

Fair enough. Your country is better, as unlike in mine children are not lazy but work for a living and support their parents.

EDIT: Sorry for the dark joke, but most countries in the world have below replacement fertility rates. The strongest correlation seem to be between women’s rights and health care. So basically as soon as women, who tend to do the care work, can say no to babys many choose to do so. Health care allows for people to have access tot he pill or condoms. That is why HDI has a close correlation then GDP, as HDI includes education, which allows women to have an independent income, and life expectancy, which is a decent indicator for health care. The third factor is income, which according to ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works would mean that rich countries would have more children, as they can afford them. Also clearly wrong.

In other words improving peoples quality of life, lowers birth rates, which solves overpopulation. I honestly can not think of a less classist, ableist and racist thing to be proven with data.