Germany

BERLIN (AP) — Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans to come together like they did in the spring to slow the spread of the coronavirus as the country posted another daily record of new cases Saturday.

“Difficult months are ahead of us,” she said in her weekly video podcast. “How winter will be, how our Christmas will be, that will all be decided in these coming days and weeks, and it will be decided by our behavior.”

Meanwhile, new restrictions went into effect in several other European nations in an effort to staunch the resurgence of the pandemic.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European Central Bank board member Yves Mersch said on Wednesday he had yet to be convinced that the ECB, currently in the middle of rewriting its inflation target and how to achieve it, needed a new strategy at all.

“I’m still one to be fully convinced of a new strategy which would be yielding superior results to what our existing strategy has yielded up to now,” Mersch told an online event.

BERLIN (AP) — Scientists say a comparison of 21 developed countries during the start of the coronavirus pandemic shows that those with early lockdowns and well-prepared national health systems avoided large numbers of additional deaths due to the outbreak.

In a study published Wednesday by the journal Nature Medicine, researchers used the number of weekly deaths in 19 European countries, New Zealand and Australia over the past decade to estimate how many people would have died from mid-February to May 2020 had the pandemic not happened.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany has agreed to provide more than a half billion euros to aid Holocaust survivors struggling under the burdens of the coronavirus pandemic, the organization that negotiates compensation with the German government said Wednesday.

The payments will be going to approximately 240,000 survivors around the world, primarily in Israel, North America, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe, over the next two years, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.

14 Oct 2020; MEMO: German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas yesterday called on Turkey to refrain from more provocations in the Eastern Mediterranean.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s population has contracted slightly for the first time in nearly a decade because immigration shrank as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, official data showed Tuesday.

Some 83.1 million people lived in Germany at the end of June, with the population declining by 40,000, or 0.05%, in the year’s first half, according to the Federal Statistical Office.

BERLIN (AP) — An icebreaker carrying scientists on a year-long international effort to study the high Arctic has returned to its home port in Germany carrying a wealth of data that will help researchers better predict climate change in the decades to come.

The RV Polarstern arrived Monday in the North Sea port of Bremerhaven, from where she set off more than a year ago prepared for bitter cold and polar bear encounters — but not for the pandemic lockdowns that almost scuttled the mission half-way through.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The euro zone economy is entering a “tougher” phase as the continuation of the recent rebound will depend on how quickly a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic can be controlled, the European Central Bank’s chief economist said in an interview published on Sunday.

“The next phase is going to be tougher,” Philip Lane told the Wall Street Journal.

“The big question, and this is why there is so much uncertainty, is: how quickly can the current dynamic, with rising cases, be stabilised.”

BERLIN (Reuters) - The poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny requires an international reaction and must not be treated as a German-Russian conflict, Germany’s foreign minister said when asked why sanctions proposals against Russia did not mention the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Paris and Berlin said on Wednesday they would propose European Union sanctions against Russian individuals after receiving no credible answers from Moscow over the Navalny poisoning with a nerve agent.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The European Union could quickly sanction people in Russia who are involved in developing nerve agents like that used to poison Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Wednesday.

“It would be possible to sanction very quickly individuals who, for example, are known to be involved in the development of chemical warfare agents - and that is a discussion we will have in the European Union in the coming days,” Maas told German lawmakers.