Germany

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany plans to offer all citizens rapid coronavirus tests free of charge from March 1, its health minister said on Tuesday.

Jens Spahn said rapid antigen tests were now sufficiently available on the market to enable local test centres and pharmacies to offer the tests for free.

Earlier, German media group RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) reported that Spahn planned to expand the national testing strategy to enable free tests. The federal government plans to bear the costs, RND said.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Union will fast track approvals of coronavirus vaccines adapted to combat mutations, the bloc’s Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.

“We have now decided that a vaccine that has been improved by the manufacturer on the basis of the previous vaccine to combat new mutations no longer has to go through the entire approval process,” she told Bavaria’s Augsburger Allgemeine.

“So it will be faster to have suitable vaccines available without compromising on safety.”

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany plans to extend restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus until March 14, a draft agreement for talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of the 16 federal states on Wednesday showed.

The number of new daily infections in Germany has been falling, leading some regional leaders to push for a timetable to ease the lockdown, but concerns are growing about the impact of more infectious strains of the virus on case numbers.

BERLIN, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) -- German Federal Foreign Office on Monday declared a staff member of the Russian embassy in Berlin as persona non grata, in response to Russia's expulsion of a German diplomat on Friday.

"Russia expelled several EU diplomats, including one at the German embassy. This decision was not justified in any way," said a statement of the office, adding that the German diplomat was merely carrying out his task of reporting developments on the spot in a legal fashion.

BERLIN, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday that Germany's attitude towards the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is, for the present, "unaffected" by Russia's treatment of its opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

At a press conference after an online meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel reiterated that the stance of the German government on the gas line project has not been changed.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany should not drop support for the planned Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia over the crackdown on Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, as “feel-good moralising” is not foreign policy, the man best placed to be the next German chancellor told Reuters.

Pointing to U.S. purchases of crude oil from Russia, Armin Laschet described himself as a political realist - or “Realpolitiker” - and said: “We have to take the world as it is in order to make it better.”

BERLIN (AP) — Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has agreed to supply 9 million additional doses of its coronavirus vaccine to the European Union during the first quarter, the bloc’s executive arm said Sunday.

The new target of 40 million doses by the end of March is still only half what the British-Swedish company had originally aimed for before it announced a shortfall due to production problems, triggering a spat between AstraZeneca and the EU last week.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A German court sentenced a far-right sympathiser to life imprisonment on Thursday for shooting dead a pro-immigration politician two years ago in a case that raised questions about whether Germany is doing enough to tackle right-wing radicalism.

Walter Luebcke, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, was found dead in a pool of blood outside his house in the western state of Hesse in June 2019. He had been shot in the head at close range.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff opened the door for continued deficit spending on Tuesday with a proposal to change Germany’s debt issuance law, because the government won’t be able to stick to the strict limits on borrowing for several more years.

Parliament suspended the law, enshrined in the constitution and normally restricting new federal borrowing to 0.35% of economic output, for 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FRANKFURT, Jan. 25 (Xinhua) -- Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), said on Monday that 2021 could be a year of recovery, but that would most likely be accompanied by a "very high level of uncertainty" before achieving the transition to a "new economy".