Germany

BERLIN, Nov 24 (NNN-XINHUA) – It was an unpleasant trip in complete silence for the German team, back to the team’s hotel in the north of Qatar.

Everyone of the 110 kilometres seemed endlessly long, as the 2014 world champions found themselves in a state of shock, after the 2-1 defeat against Japan in their World Cup opener.

It might be a curious side-effect that, two Japanese players employed by German first-tier clubs scored the winning goals: Ritsu Doan of Freiburg and Takuma Asano of Bochum.

BERLIN, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had aimed to convene European talks with Vladimir Putin the year before his invasion of Ukraine but in the end did not see any possibility of influencing the Russian president at the end of her term.

Merkel told the Spiegel news magazine in an interview published on Thursday that she and French President Emmanuel Macron had planned to hold an independent talk format with Putin within the European Council in 2021, her last summer in office.

BERLIN (AP) — A senior official in southern Germany said Wednesday that organized crime groups were likely behind the theft of a huge horde of ancient gold coins stolen from a museum this week.

The 483 coins were discovered in 1999 during excavations of an ancient settlement near the present-day town of Manchning and were on display at the local Celtic and Roman Museum.

BERLIN (AP) — Consumers and businesses in Germany will receive subsidies to soften the blow of higher natural gas and electricity prices starting in January, two months earlier than originally planned, officials said Tuesday.

The move is part of a larger pot of almost 300 billion euros (dollars) in subsidies that the German government is cooking up to address the energy crisis resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine.

BERLIN, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Germany has offered Warsaw the Patriot missile defence system to help it to secure its airspace after a stray missile crashed in Poland last week, Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht told a newspaper on Sunday.

The German government had already said it would offer its neighbour further help in air policing with German Eurofighters after the incident, which initially raised fears that the war in Ukraine could spill across the border.

BERLIN/PARIS, Nov 18 (Reuters) - France, Germany and Spain have reached agreement on starting the next phase of development of a new fighter jet dubbed FCAS, Europe's largest defence project at an estimated cost of more than 100 billion euros ($103.4 billion), Berlin said on Friday.

Germany's Defence Ministry said in a statement that an industrial agreement was achieved after intense negotiations, confirming an earlier Reuters story saying the three countries and their respective industries had struck a deal.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s biggest industrial union agreed with employers Friday on a pay deal that will see millions of workers get raises totaling 8.5% over two years as well as one-time payments meant to cushion the effect of sky-high inflation.

The IG Metall union and employers reached a compromise in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, a key industrial region. In Germany, wage deals are typically hammered out in negotiations between employers’ organizations and unions that cover a whole sector, and an agreement reached in one region is generally applied nationwide.

BERLIN, Nov 16 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden told G7 and NATO partners that a missile blast in eastern Poland was caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile, a NATO source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The blast, which killed two people, raised global alarm that the Ukraine conflict could spill into neighbouring countries.

Ukraine blamed Russia. Russia denied its missiles struck Poland.

Biden told reporters in Indonesia on Wednesday that the missile was unlikely to have been fired from Russia.

SHENYANG, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- BMW Group's joint venture in China, BMW Brilliance Automotive Ltd. (BBA), will invest 10 billion yuan (about 1.4 billion U.S. dollars) into a new battery production project in northeast China's Liaoning Province.

The signing ceremony of the project was held Friday in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning. The signed agreement will see BBA expand battery production capacity at its Shenyang production base.

BERLIN, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Germany has made it clear to Hungary that there is no grey area when it comes to the ratification of Sweden and Finland's accession to NATO, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in Berlin on Thursday.

"With regard to the question about Hungary: I would like to underline this clearly ... there is no grey area," Baerbock told a joint news conference with her Swedish counterpart, Tobias Billstrom.