Germany

BERLIN (AP) — Lufthansa said Friday that it has repaid all the aid it received from the German government last year to help the airline through the coronavirus pandemic.

Germany’s biggest airline, which also owns carriers including Austrian Airlines and Swiss, received a 9 billion euro ($10.3 billion) government rescue package in mid-2020. The German government took a 20% stake in the company, which has long made clear that it wanted to pay back the aid quickly.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s disease control center is calling for people to cancel or avoid large events and to reduce their contacts as the country’s coronavirus infection rate hits the latest in a string of new highs.

The center, the Robert Koch Institute, said Friday that Germany’s infection rate climbed to 263.7 new cases per 100,000 residents over seven days, up from 249.1 the previous day. Another 48,640 new cases were reported after the daily total topped 50,000 for the first time on Thursday. A further 191 deaths brought Germany’s total so far to 97,389.

09 Nov 2021; MEMO: Germany today urged the European Union to help Poland protect its borders as thousands of irregular migrants seek to enter the country from Belarus.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer accused Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of engaging in a form of "hybrid" warfare and using migrants as a weapon to destabilise European countries.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s coronavirus infection rate climbed to its highest recorded level yet on Monday as what officials have called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” gathers pace.

The national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the country has seen 201.1 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past seven days. That was above the previous record of 197.6 from Dec. 22 last year. While it’s still a lower rate than in several other European countries, it has set alarm bells ringing.

BERLIN, November 7. /TASS/: The Minister-President of the German state of Bavaria Markus Soder has urged to launch the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as soon as possible to ensure stable gas supplies ahead of the cold season.

"A wise strategy to ensure power supplies is necessary. In this regard, there are good reasons to launch the Nord Stream 2 pipeline soon to bring gas prices to a normal level," Soder said in an interview with Funke Mediengruppe, published on Sunday. "We cannot just stand aside and watch prices growing ahead of the cold winter," he added.

BERLIN, Nov 6 (Reuters) - If a multi-ethnic Bosnia is pushed towards disintegration, that will inevitably have an impact on other unresolved conflicts in the Western Balkans such as that between Serbia and Kosovo, Bosnia's peace envoy told Reuters on Saturday.

German politician Christian Schmidt, who is international High Representative in Bosnia, said this week that the peace deal that ended the country's war in the 1990s was at risk of unravelling unless the international community took measures to stop Serb separatists.

BERLIN (AP) — A knife attack on a high-speed train in Germany left three people severely wounded, the Bavarian Red Cross said Saturday. Police said a man has been arrested in connection with the morning attack.

The train, one of Germany’s high-speed ICE trains, was traveling between the Bavarian cities of Regensburg and Nuremberg at the time of the attack. A spokesperson for the Bavarian Red Cross, which had 110 responders at the scene, said the organization processed three “severely injured” people.

06 Nov 2021; MEMO: Greece has adopted brutality against asylum seekers as a policy, German weekly Der Spiegel said.

The EU has clear rules regarding the treatment of asylum-seekers, giving them the right to apply for asylum once they are within EU territory, but Greece violates these rights, Der Spiegel noted on Thursday.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — OPEC and allied oil-producing countries will decide Thursday how much oil they think the global economy needs, with President Joe Biden urging Saudi Arabia and Russia to increase production and lower U.S. gasoline prices — so far to no avail.

The OPEC+ alliance, made up of OPEC members led by the Saudis and non-members led by Russia, has moved cautiously to restore production cuts made during the coronavirus pandemic, aiming to support prices that collapsed during the COVID-19 downturn and have since surged to seven-year highs.

BERLIN, Oct 29 (NNN-AGENCIES) — German police said Friday they had found a dead Iraqi man among around 30 people apparently smuggled across the Polish border in a van.

  The 32-year-old had been dead for “several hours” when police found the group near the van outside the town of Schoepstal in Saxony on Friday morning, they said.

   The driver, a 48-year-old man of Turkish origin, reportedly fled the scene but was later detained.

   Germany has seen a surge in illegal migrants entering the country from Poland in recent months, most coming via Belarus.