Scholz governing coalition fell apart a week ago and that means new elections in Feburary. The problem for Scholz is that the defense minister Pistorius is much more popular then him. However Pistorius is also more hawkish on Russia, which their party the SPD is generally not. So Scholz needs support from his party to actually be the candidate. Putin rather has Scholz then any of the other realistic option apart from a government including the far right AFD. Hence making Scholz look like a peace candidate is in both Scholz and Putins interest.

Honestly I doubt anything real comes from this. Both Russia and Ukraine are talking since the war started. There are embassies in Russia allowing for easy communication with lower level diplomats all the time. This is just show.

As a bit of context. Abkhazia is internationally recognized as part of Georgia, but since 1993 declared indpendent with strong Russian ties and not under control of the Tiblisi government. There have been multpile wars with Georgia involving Abkhazian troops with Russian support.

European countries sending weapons to Ukraine do not need treaties. Russia invading a European country means that Russia might invade another European country. It is just a lot cheaper to just send weapons and other support to Ukraine and have Ukraine be bombed and their soldiers dead, then to end up in a direct war with Russia.

For the US Ukraine is a problem, as being soft on Russia, means other countries who want more land could attack countries, which the US has intressts in. For example China might see the US Ukraine support and figure invading Taiwan, just means they need to pay a lot of money to US lobbiest to avoid a US response. That might be wrong, but certainly not a good look.

Deshalb werden doch die neuen Gaskraftwerke so gebaut, dass sie einfach auf Wasserstoff umrüstbar sind. Einige Erdgasspeicher lassen sich auch relativ einfacher umrüsten, was schon passiert. Für zwei Wochen im Jahr ist das alles ganz okay, auch wenn Wasserstoff teuer ist. Momentan werden 42TWh Wasserstoff in Deutschland für die chemische Industrie produziert, meist leider aus Erdgas. In diesem Monat haben wir 2,8TWh Strom aus Erdgas und Kohle produziert. Bei 50% effizienz ist das also trotzdem nur 5,6TWh Wasserstoff. Dazu geht auch noch Biomasse in Kohlekraftwerken.

Das ist genau der Plan den Habeck mit der Kraftwerksstrategie umsetzen will und teilweise schon hat. Deshalb wurde auch die EU Taxonomie in der Richtung angepasst und die Wasserstoffstrategie entworfen und angefangen umzusetzen.

China and Russia are not natural allies. Russia is very much afraid of China taking land in the Far East.

In other words you are saying that I am a racist.

I argued against Europe having benefited from having colonies in the Europe community, which by its nature is eurocentric.

As I said Europe should pay for its crimes and I fail to see, that crimes need to benefit the criminal to be considered crimes. However that obviously makes reparations a lot more complex.

If colonialism has made those countries poor, then they should have gotten rich once they were no longer part of a colonial empire. At the same time countries which had large colonial empires should have gotten poor, when loosing their empire.

What we mostly see is that this is not the case. Portugal got rich after its empire collapsed. Spain was about as rich as its former colonies for a long time. France and the UK did not collapse after loosing their colonies. There are rich countries, which never did have many colonies or only small ones for a limited time, like Germany, Scandinavia or Switzerland. You also have Oman, which did not get rich despite having had colonies. We also have Africa, which only has Botswana as a country genuinly benefiting from no longer being a colony. However that was after diamonds were found inside Botswana shortly after independence. Funnily enough Botswana also asked to be a colony. Everybody else more or less failed to get rich.

That is not to say that colonial empires should not pay for crimes they comitted or return stolen artifacts. The benefits of colonialism were mostly going to a small elite in the colonial countries and cost the states a lot of resources, which in many cases would have been better spend on other projects.

Russia has very few regional bases of power. Most of Russia is controlled by the Kremlin pretty directly and the parts of Russia lacking direct control also lack nukes. So the most likely option is a bit of maybe even violent infighting in the Kremlin and then the victor rules Russia. The Kremlin would also control nukes, so China is unlikely to invade.

Speaking of nukes, there are 8 launch sites for ICBMs, 3 nuclear submarine naval bases with nukes and two air bases with long range bombers aremed with nukes. So 13 locations need to be controlled. That seems rather possible to me. So honestly I doubt it will be too bad.

Ukraine has seen what the Russians are willing to do to Ukraine, so they themself will try to become part of NATO or the EU as much and as soon as possible. So it is pretty much NATO/EU or Ukraine building nukes, probably even both.

Russia would be weakend and needs some time to rebuilt. A defeat would mean that reconstruction period would take a long time. Looking at demographics and Russias economy maybe never.

Arte gets a bit of funding from the EU as well, to ad subtitles for some programming to Spanish, Italian, English and Polish. However outside the EU you sometimes need VPN to access to content.

euractiv.com is pretty good, but also privatly owned.

arte.tv news format journal is great, but only video and German and French public broadcasting. However they are very willing to have shows not talking about either country. However it is French and German and not English

theguardian.com is independent, but mixed in its reporting standards. Sometimes amazing sometimes just okay.

Maccabi Tel Aviv ist von der Fanscene auch sehr rechts.

Davon gehe ich nicht aus. Es gibt einen CO2 Preis für fossile Heizungen auf EU Ebene, der bereits beschlossen ist. Durch lokale Verbote, wird die Nachfrage absinken und lokale Handwerker werden weniger Gasthermen anbieten. Weniger Nachfrage wird sich auch auf die Preise und Ersatzteile auswirken. Außerdem werden die Netzkosten steigen, da weniger verbraucht wird. Gleichzeitig werden die Preise für Wärmepumpen sinken. Kommunla Wärmeplanung ist in BW und Hessen schon Pflicht. In der Gegend um Mannheim wird das also recht schnell fallen und nur Rheinland-Pfalz wird noch Gas benutzen.

Mannheim hat einen kommunalen Wärmeplan, damit ist ein Einbau einer reinen Gasheizung schon heute verboten. Außerdem gibt es bereits ein großes Fernwärmenetz.

Qualified majority on foreign policy matters by the Council and a simple majority from the parliament. Also the option to defend the EU called out by the Commission to be able to act quickly.

Germany and France combined have about a third of the EUs population. Also the EU parliament is made up of different parties from the individual countries. Those parties disagree on a lot of things.

Sounds like a good idea, but it would probably be better to have a military and multiple civilian agencies specialized in different fields. Like medical, physics, chemistry and so forth research agencies. Also in edge cases both agencies should be allowed to do research or cooperate on it.

Die brauchen allerdings auch weit mehr Personal.

Was zum Geier? Wissing wird jetzt auch noch befördert?

No, it is not. 5% hurdle means Linke, FDP and the other small parties will not get seats. In some polls they have combined 16% of the vote. So the coalition does not need 50% of the vote, but a bit less then 45%.