Saturday, September 28, 2024

28 Sep 2024: Seven German News Stories

 1.  BSW Party sitting down for coalition talks in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony.  Party 'boss' Wagenknecht has named conditions for coalitions.  Oddly enough....no US missiles in Germany to be a state issue (at least she thinks the states can stake this out and force the German federal gov't to observe the condition.  

Scaring off the CDU/CSU folks?  Yeah.....it sounds that way.

2.  Draft agreement between Turkey and Germany?  Germany has a group of 12,000 Turks on a deportation list....Turkey says it'll take them back, but at a limit of 500 per week....with more on the table.  Now, if you asked me.....will the group stay in Turkey?  I'd laugh and suggest virtually all of them within a year, will have found a path back into Germany.

3.  Odd statement by Green Party youth 'wing'.....they want to hold talks with Linke Party youth wing....to bring the far-left folks into the Greens.

4.  German cities approaching the federal government....saying the public transportation system is out-dated....wanting in the range of 60-billion Euro (over a couple of years period).

They may have a legit request....but presently the government has maxed-out on money to hand out.

5.  WELT Saturday AM 'warning'....as winter approaches....pharmacies across Germany are advising drug shortages will be the norm.  

6.  A draft plan for 'change' has been created by the 16 states, and sent to ARD (the public TV/radio folks).  The states are saying....finally...change has to occur.

Whether ARD will accept this or not....unknown.

Reform 1: Channel SAT1 will dissolve into the ARTE channel.  SAT1 had been around for 40-plus years and I regard it as the ultimate artsy German intellectual network. ARTE had been around since 1992, and was the ultimate artsy European intellectual network. If you asked me on viewership?  For me?  Occasionally SAT1 would run a 1950s/1960s classic movie.  Nightly, I doubt if you could find more than one German out of thirty who watched either channel.

Reform 2: Each state would be limited to 4 radio networks. A system would be created where certain stations would be national (not state-orientated).

Reform 3: Four channels Phoenix, tagesschau24 , ARD-alpha and ZDF-Info would form into one-to-two networks.

Reform 4: ZDF-Neo and ONE?  Merged into a  single network.  Neo was supposed to be the savior of public TV....designed to get young people to watch, and that never took off.  ONE was designed for older viewers and never took off....revised for strictly young viewers....but that never took off either. So the idea would be to merge both failures into one failure.

Will ZDF and ARD take the ideas?  Well....neither have been able find any great magic in getting youth viewers to their TV style, and that segment is the strongest in wanting to dump the TV tax. 

7.  Coalition forming plans on migration....if you entered from a 'safe' country (France, Switzerland, Czech, etc).....you will be denied benefits/social help.  The belief is...whether true or not....this group would 'leave'.  I suspect the 'safe' countries would wake up and go ballistic....causing the EU to remedy the mess.

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