Germany

BERLIN, March 11 (Reuters) - Germany's Verdi trade union has called for strikes on March 13 at the country's northern airports, including Berlin, which it said would likely cause longer queues for passengers and flight cancellations.

The strikes will affect Berlin's international airport, as well as the smaller airports of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen, the relevant regional branches of the services sector trade union said on Saturday in separate statements.

FRANKFURT, March 11 (Xinhua) -- Five people died and two others were seriously injured after a road accident near the southwestern German city Karlsruhe on Friday night, local police said on Saturday morning.

According to initial police findings, a car with four people on board got into the oncoming lane on Friday night and collided sideways with a large taxi. The emergency call had been received by the police around midnight.

HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — A shooting at a Jehovah’s Witnesses hall in the German city of Hamburg killed eight people, apparently including the perpetrator, police said Friday. An unspecified number of other people were wounded, some of them seriously.

There was still no word on a possible motive for the shooting on Thursday evening that stunned Germany’s second-biggest city. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a former Hamburg mayor, described the shooting as “a brutal act of violence.”

BERLIN (AP) — A German appeals court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing hearing for a German convert to Islam who was given 10 years in prison on charges that, as a member of the Islamic State group in Iraq, she allowed a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband kept as a slave to die of thirst in the sun.

The 31-year-old defendant now risks a higher sentence.

BERLIN, March 6 (Xinhua) -- Despite their own heavy losses, European countries -- especially Germany -- have unanimously kept silent over the blasts that destroyed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines last September and subsequent investigations.

Since veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the U.S. Navy's involvement in the explosions on the U.S. portal Substack last month, more and more experts have questioned Europe's atypical, collective silence.

BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says there would be “consequences” if China sent weapons to Russia for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, but he’s fairly optimistic that Beijing will refrain from doing so.

Scholz’s comments came in an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, two days after he met U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany wants to buy mothballed Leopard 2 battle tanks from Switzerland to replace tanks that Berlin and its Western allies are sending to Ukraine, the Swiss government said Friday.

The Swiss Defense Ministry said that Germany’s defense and economy ministers wrote on Feb. 23 to Swiss Defense Minister Viola Amherd, setting out German manufacturer Rheinmetall’s interest in buying Leopard 2 tanks that the Swiss army doesn’t plan to put back into service.

BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday called on China to refrain from sending weapons to Russia and instead use its influence to press Moscow for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

“My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to press for the withdrawal of Russian troops, and do not supply weapons to the aggressor Russia,” Scholz said in a speech to German parliament.

BERLIN, March 1. /TASS/: The German government thinks that Russia should be the first to take a step towards achieving peace in Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a joint press conference with Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins in Berlin on Wednesday.

Scholz argued it was "clear" to him that Russia had attacked Ukraine, and that Russia was the country that "must do something" to make peace possible. He would like to see the withdrawal of Russian troops in the first place.

BERLIN, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- Two people have been seriously injured following gunshots near a school in Bramsche in northwest Germany, according to the local police.

Police have arrested the suspected shooter, and there is no danger to the public. The school itself was also not affected, the police said.