Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Six German News Stories: 11 July 2023

 1.  Tickets for the first NFL game in Frankfurt for this fall....sold out in roughly an hour.  Tickets were priced at 75 to 225 Euro each, and on-sell platforms....some of the better seats are already selling at 1,500 Euro.

Based on comments, I'd say that they could have sold half-a-million tickets, but were limited to around 50k.  

Second game tickets?  Scheduled to sell today at some point....probably will gone in an hour as well.

2.  I noticed out of Drenthe, Netherlands....some sheep-ranch guy had to shoot a wolf, who'd bitten the guy while he was trying to protect his sheep.  Naturally, the pro-wolf folks have complained to the police about this provocative act.

3.  There was a regional train on a run in the Brandenburg region.....when 'heat' overcame operations.  What passengers say....at some point....the train just stopped. Electricity cut off.....the AC unit (with temperatures above 30 C) stopped working.

They eventually had to manually open the doors and allow people to 'escape'.

4.  'Funk', the streaming video service by public TV in Germany.....went out and did a documentary-news piece called 'what is left' (trying to describe leftist politics).

This came after the 1st piece which was entitled 'what is right', and got a lot of criticism over depicting both the CDU and AfD in the same landscape.

Focus had a long piece on the topic....worth reading.  

I'll just say that the term 'left-of-center' and 'right-of-center' gets used a lot, and you could measure up the bulk of the Merkel era as 'center-center' politically....so this Funk description of the political landscape is marginal.

(footnote: 'Funk', the network, is designed for 14-to-29 year old Germans)

5.  Erdogan of Turkey gave some 'green' light for Sweden's entry into NATO late yesterday.  

6.  For 2022, Germany had 8,173 heat-related deaths.  I should note in the descriptive material....what they are now saying that heat over several weeks....puts strain on the body.  

So you could (using this medical condition) have a three-week long period of say 32 C (or more temperatures), and die in the 4th week when it rebounds to 27 C temperatures.  The doctor would then write into the death certificate that the heat contributed to their eventual death. 

I won't question how this is done but if you used the same logic in the 1920s or 1930s....the death count would be significant and just as high as today (if not more so).  

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