Bundestag passes controversial healthcare reform

Berlin’s CDU only needed a few hours to circulate word of their plan B after under-fire Mayor Kai Wegner said he would not run again in elections in September. 

The city-state’s finance minister, Stefan Evers, has been nominated to succeed Wegner by the party’s local supervisory board. He will have just 10 weeks to turn the tide in a difficult campaign. 

At first glance, Evers might not seem the ideal man to try to win swing votes in Berlin, famously one of Germany’s most left-leaning cities proud of both its Prussian and partly East German heritage. 

The 46-year-old hails from Westphalia, far in the west, and has been tasked with keeping a tighter grip on the purse strings in the capital in recent years.

He has however spent all of his adult life in the Berlin area, having moved east in 1999 to study law at the University of Potsdam.

He was seen as a close and loyal ally of Wegner since being brought into the city-state’s cabinet in April 2023, and as a fast-talker who does not pull his punches.

Evers is in a same sex marriage.

A now-separated couple confessed on the opening day of their trial in Paderborn to possessing and conspiring to traffic amphetamines. 

The couple said that they were planning to smuggle the drugs, with a street value of around €5 million (roughly $5.7 million), to Saudi Arabia. 

Their plan fell to pieces in February, when the 25-year-old woman took their 2-year-old daughter to hospital with symptoms indicating poisoning. 

Doctors soon diagnosed amphetamine poisoning, seemingly after the child had found and swallowed one or some of the pills unnoticed. The mother initially asserted that the child might have found and swallowed the pill at a playground, but a search there came up empty.

When police subseqently deployed canine units at the woman’s residence, they found around 320,000 pills. Around 150,000 were still in plastic packaging, but the larger part had been concealed within solar panels. These appeared to be prepared with a view to send them to Saudi Arabia.

The 28-year-old man confessed in court to having worked toward preparing the solar panels on the orders of the ringleader. 

The woman is accused of aiding and abetting him, having offered her apartment up as a storage location in return for payment.

Rail travel in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia is facing severe disruptions, with the main rail line between Cologne and Düsseldorf closed until at least Saturday. 

Two fires close to the tracks between the stops in Langenfeld and Leverkusen have caused delays and cancellations. Deutsche Bahn (DB) said that the fire was extinguished, but that it had damaged the tracks meaning normal service could not yet resume. 

DB said it was working on the assumption that “train traffic will not be able to roll on this line again before Saturday afternoon.” 

Deutsche Bahn said that vandalism was the suspected cause of the fires. A police spokesman said they were investigating.

Cologne is the most populous city in North Rhine-Westphalia and Düsseldorf is the state capital. 

Alexander Zverev has become the first German man since Boris Becker in 1995 to reach the Wimbledon final, beating Britain’s Arthur Fery 7-6, 6-2, 6-4.

The 29-year-old silenced a partisan Centre Court crowd after dominating the first-set tiebreak and pulling away to complete a straight-sets victory.

Zverev will now bid for a second consecutive Grand Slam title, just five weeks after winning his first major trophy at the French Open. He will face either world number one Jannik Sinner or record Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic in Sunday’s final.

It will be Zverev’s fifth Grand Slam final and his first at the All England Club. The result will also lift him above the injured Carlos Alcaraz to world number two when the rankings are updated on Monday.

Berlin’s Mayor Kai Wegner has announced that he will not run for re-election in the September 20 elections in the city-state, after facing major criticism from within his own party. 

He said he wanted to clear a path so that the Christian Democrats (CDU) could prevent a left-leaning coalition led by the Left Party from taking power in the capital. Wegner said Berlin needed continued government from the political center. 

Wegner said he would “of course” continue to lead the government for the remaining weeks of his term. 

The CDU is currently the largest party in Berlin’s state parliament or Senate, but current polls suggest it is at least likely to lose ground, if not to lose the top spot to either or both of the socialist Left Party and the Greens. 

Wegner conceded to communication errors in his handling of the major electricity outages after sabotage in Berlin a few months ago. He had come under fire for repeatedly misrepresenting his personal role in the crisis management process.

Reports of him playing tennis amid the blackout, in particular, grabbed the headlines. 

“Yes I made communcations errors. And that was a mess. Therefore I apologize,” Wegner said. 

He said that he did not believe he had anything to apologize for on a policy front or for his more general performance as mayor. But he said he thought the controversy would undermine his ability to campaign effectively. 

Wegner will also resign his post as the chairman of the CDU’s Berlin chapter. 

In Friday’s flurry of summer signings in parliament, an EU directive known as the “right to repair” has also passed a vote. 

The bill seeks to reduce electronic waste and strengthen consumer rights.

It aims to make repairing items easier and cheaper for longer and to discourage manufacturers from making products with what’s known in the industry as “planned obsolescence” — when devices are designed to have an unnecessarily short lifespan or to be more difficult to repair, bringing forward the future sale of a replacement item. 

Appliances purchased after July 31 this year will be subject to new warranty rules. If a consumer elects to repair and not replace a defective item that is still under warranty, manufacturers must reward them with a 12-month extension to their warranty, removing one incentive of taking a replacement item. 

The new law will also oblige manufacturers themselves to offer repair services for their products at a “reasonable price” throughout what’s deemed to be their “normal lifespan.” For business-to-business deals, it will be possible to contractually exclude this requirement, but it will apply to all consumers buying products.

The directive covers products subject to the EU’s so-called “Ecodesign repairability requirements,” including washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, mobile phones and tablets. 

Cologne city authorities say that an operation to disarm an unexploded World War II-era bomb in the Nippes district achieved its goal. 

“The World War bomb in Cologne-Nippes has been successfully defused,” the city administration said in an update on social media. “The road closures will now gradually be lifted.” 

The 500-kilogram bomb was found in the Johannes-Giesberts-Park in Nippes earlier on Friday, based on an earlier post from authorities. 

“The unexploded bomb must be defused today,” they wrote, posting a map of the 500-meter radius exclusion zone being set up in the immediate vicinity.

Some 4,300 people, including a children’s hospital in the area, were affected. 

Cologne, the most populous city in North Rhine-Westphalia straddling the stategically crucial Rhine River, came under frequent and heavy Allied bombardment during World War II.

Unexploded ordnance is found on a fairly regular basis to this day, with authorities accustomed to such operations. Typically the bombs can be defused or disarmed, but occasionally controlled explosions are necessary. 

Germany’s upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, has passed the government’s healthcare savings package.

The legislation seeks to cut health care spending from 2027. The measures include higher co-payments for prescription medicines and tighter rules governing the free co-insurance of spouses under Germany’s statutory health insurance system.

The bill secured 318 votes in favor, 284 against and four abstentions in the lower house, or Bundestag, earlier on Friday. 

“Everyone involved in the health care system has a part to play, because everyone stands to benefit in the long term from sustainable funding,” Health Minister Nina Warken, who introduced the bill, told lawmakers.

Opposition parties were highly critical of the legislation. 

Green parliamentary leader Britta Hasselmann said there would be “hospital insolvencies, overburdened GPs and psychotherapists who have been let down.”

Heidi Reichinnek from the Left party said: “With this law, you are putting people’s lives at risk.”

The Bundestag lower house of parliament has passed a heavily altered set of reforms to heating laws and standards. 

It’s part of the flurry of activity this Friday in the house, as politicians try to sign off on as much as possible before vacating the Bundestag for the summer break. 

The motion passed reasonably narrowly, with 322 votes in favor and 272 against. 

All three opposition parties —  the Greens, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Left Party — had signalled their intent to oppose the legislation, if not for the same reasons. 

The building modernization law, as it is formally known, is also scheduled for a vote in the Bundesrat later on Friday, and is expected to pass. 

The watering-down of the rules involved scrapping an obligation for all new heating systems to be powered at least 65% by renewable energies. 

Critics like the Greens said this was falling short of climate change targets, but the government argued it was trying to give homeowners greater freedom of choice. 

While it will continue to be possible to install new oil and gas heating systems, from 2029 requirements for the fuels powering them will start to become more exacting. By 2045, as currently planned, the fuel sources for all heating systems will be required to be deemed CO2-neutral. 

The German army will withdraw troops from the Iraqi city of Erbil and close a field camp there, German outlet Spiegel reported.

The troops are expected to leave the city by the end of September, according to a parliamentary defense committee briefing cited by the report.

Around 30 soldiers are currently stationed at the camp, which is located near the Erbil airport.

Germany has already reduced its forces in the Middle East due to security risks posed by the Iran war.

The heads of Germany’s football association (DFB) are making their way to the US for talks with Jürgen Klopp.

The former Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund boss is the leading candidate for the job as the German national team’s coach, with Klopp already voicing interest in taking over Germany.

According to media reports, Klopp will be offered a contract through the 2030 World Cup. The technicalities of his move from his current employer, Red Bull, where he is head of global soccer, to the German national team still need to be agreed upon.

Former national team coach Julian Nagelsmann resigned a week ago after the team’s round of 32 World Cup exit against Paraguay.

Germany’s states would make the denial of the State of Israel’s existence illegal on a federal level, the state of Hesse suggested.

According to the proposal submitted to the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house, questioning Israel’s right to exist in public in a way that would suggest readiness for antisemitic violence would become a punishable offense.

The Bundesrat also added the rising number of antisemitic incidents as a reason behind the proposal.

The German government will now be able to express its views on the matter, before turning to the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house, for votes.

German car maker Volkswagen is considering cutting up to 100,000 jobs worldwide as its sales continue to drop worldwide. 

According to VW, vehicle deliveries across all its brands fell nearly 9% between April and June compared to last year, due to collapsed sales in China.

The company, Europe’s biggest car maker, has been under financial strains due to both competition from the electric car market in China and the US tariffs.

While VW say they’re expected to lay off at least 50,000 jobs in Germany until 2030, reports say the number of jobs the company will cut is about 100,00 worldwide. 

Company CEO Oliver Blume said in April that the company cannot compete its Chinese competition with its “underutilised plants, especially given that Chinese makers are entering Europe at an ever-growing pace.”

A man was nearly sucked out of the window mid-air in a Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany, witnesses and officials said.

Other passengers held him inside the plane, with the man suffering from friction burns but being otherwise in good condition, according to the authorities.

One witness told local radio in Greece that the man’s body had been, in part, outside the aircraft, with both other people and his seatbelt preventing him from being sucked out of the plane altogether.

According to Greek media, the window was hit by a piece of debris that originated from one of the plane’s engines.

Ryanair confirmed the incident, saying the flight had returned to Thessaloniki and that the passengers had been flown to their destination with an alternative aircraft.

Here are some of the meausres the German parliament approved to cut the costs of healthcare in the country:

• Patients will have to pay more for medications: between €7.50 ($8.60) and €15 instead of between €5 and €10 
• Partners of insured individuals will have to be insured themselves rather than receiving free coverage through their partner
• Reductions in covering several areas, such as homeopathic treatments, as well as teeth replacements
• A second opinion will be required ahead of carrying out certain operations to confirm their medical necessity