Tag: germany

France Follows Germany with New (Voluntary) Military Conscription Plan

If you want peace, prepare for war. French President Emmanuel Macron appears to be the latest European leader embracing that ancient maxim, launching a new national military service plan Thursday as France seeks to address shortfalls in its armed forces amidst growing concerns over Russia’s geographical ambitions beyond the war in Ukraine.

Macron announced volunteers – not forced conscripts – aged 18 and 19 will start serving next year in a 10-month new military service programme alongside 6.5 billion euros ($7.6 billion) in extra military spending in the next two years, AP reports.

Germany has already announced it hopes to use the same method to boost its enlistments, as Breitbart News reported. Berlin’s plan remains to be approved by parliament.

“A new national service is set to be gradually established, starting from next summer,” Macron said in a speech at the Varces military base, in the French Alps.

Young volunteers will serve in France’s mainland and oversea territories only, not in France’s military operations abroad, Macron said.

The AP report notes France’s military currently comprises around 200,000 active personnel and over 40,000 reservists, making it the second largest in the European Union, just behind Poland. France wants to increase the number of reservists to 100,000 by 2030.

Macron’s announcement follows the French Chief of Defence Staff warning earlier this month that to present a credible deterrence against Russian aggression in Europe, France’s civilians must stand behind the military, be “prepared to accept losing its children” and “prepared to suffer economically.”

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‘Stunning’: Only 1 In 7 Germans With Positive PCR Test Had COVID Infection

Only about 1 in 7 positive PCR tests in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic indicated an actual coronavirus infection that triggered an antibody response, according to a new peer-reviewed study.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), called the study’s findings of an 86% false positive rate “stunning.”

The study also found that by late December 2020, when COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, about 25% of Germans had already acquired a natural infection. By the end of 2021, the figure rose to 92%, indicating near-universal immunity in the population.

PCR tests led to ‘significant overcounting’ of COVID infections

The study by three German researchers, published last month in Frontiers in Epidemiology, used two mathematical models to analyze how well PCR test results aligned with the results of blood tests for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.

The findings were based on data obtained from accredited labs in Germany that handled about 90% of PCR tests in the country from March 2020 to early 2023, and also performed antibody (IgG) blood tests until May 2021.

The researchers — Michael Günther, Ph.D., Robert Rockenfeller, Ph.D., and Harald Walach, Ph.D. — said their models aligned data from PCR tests that detect “small bits of viral genetic material in the nose or throat,” and antibody tests that show if a person’s immune system “responded to an actual infection weeks or months earlier.”

They told The Defender:

“When we compared the number of PCR positives with later antibody results, only about 1 out of 7 PCR-positive people showed the kind of immune response that indicates a true infection. Under conservative assumptions, it could be closer to 1 out of 10.”

Their analysis also showed that by the end of 2021, “nearly everyone” in Germany had been “infected, vaccinated, or both.”

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The Money Behind the Muzzle: Germany’s Fivefold Surge in Speech Control

Government spending on digital speech regulation in Germany has surged over the past decade, increasing more than five times since 2020 and totaling around €105.6 million by 2025.

The findings come from The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today, a detailed investigation by Liber-net, a digital civil liberties group that monitors speech restrictions and information control initiatives across Europe.

The report describes a sprawling alliance of ministries, publicly funded “fact-checkers,” academic consortia, and non-profit groups that now work together to regulate online communication.

It started as a handful of “anti-hate” programs and has evolved into a broad state-financed system of “content controls,” supported by both domestic and foreign grants.

Liber-net’s accompanying databases and map document more than 330 organizations and over 420 separate grants, rating each on a one-to-five scale according to its level of direct censorship involvement.

Between 2020 and 2021, public funding for these initiatives tripled, and by 2023 it had doubled again.

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“Nearly Every City in Germany Is Going Bankrupt”: How Globalist Mass Migration Policies Are Turning Germany Into a Third-World Welfare Colony

Germany’s cities are collapsing under a €30 billion deficit in 2025, and even mayors of the neoliberal, pro-mass migration, ‘center right’ party, the Christian Democratic Union, are finally admitting the globalist system they helped create has driven the Europe’s strongest economy straight into the wall.

The mayor of Essen, a large city in the western part of Germany, recently admitted that almost every single German city is on the brink of bankruptcy, with only a handful managing balanced budgets, BILD reported.

North Rhine-Westphalia, the country’s biggest state, has just 10 solvent municipalities out of 396, and the rest of Germany, tragically, looks exactly the same.

For the first time, even once-wealthy cities are imposing total spending freezes, and the era of endless Merkel-style handouts is officially dead..

Essen itself went from expecting a tiny surplus to a €123 million black hole in a single year—proof that globalist open-border policies, combined with Germany’s exceedingly generous social welfare programs, have destroyed the nation’s finances overnight.

The main culprit? The unrelenting stream migrants, the majority of whom are welfare-dependent military-aged men. So-called ‘refugee’ housing, welfare, and integration efforts alone devour at least €50 billion a year nationwide, and that’s the official low-ball figure.

Add in exploding costs for schools, hospitals, prisons, and psychiatric wards filled with foreign nationals, and the real bill is heading toward €20 trillion if the catastrophic status-quo is maintained and borders stay open.

In Essen, over a third of primary-school kids now have a migration background and require expensive extra classes that native German children pay for.

Nationwide, 63% of welfare recipients have foreign roots despite being a minority—German workers are forced to fund their own replacement.

Berlin’s “rescue package” for cities is a sick joke: Essen gets €28 million a year, barely enough for two schools while costs skyrocket.

The globalist elite in Berlin drown cities in bureaucracy and then toss crumbs, pretending they’ve solved the disaster they created.

Hardworking Germans are now drowning in personal debt too—5.7 million are over-indebted for the first time in years as rents and energy prices explode.

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US Peace Plan Bears Striking Resemblance to German AfD Proposal — and Nobody in the Media Wants to Talk About It

US President Donald Trump has once again blown up the scripted narratives of Western foreign-policy elites by unveiling a sweeping 28-point peace plan for Ukraine.

His proposal doesn’t call for endless spending, escalation or for NATO brinkmanship—but for neutrality, security guarantees, territorial arrangements and economic rebuilding.

And here’s the part the media really doesn’t want discussed: Trump’s plan looks strikingly similar to a peace initiative introduced back in 2023 by the AfD in the German Bundestag under foreign policy spokesman Petr Bystron. In other words, the populists had the diplomatic roadmap long before the “serious” people running Europe.

Shared Strategic Premise: Endless War Is a Choice

Trump and the AfD start from the same inconvenient truth—Ukraine will not be “won” on the battlefield. Both proposals reject NATO expansion, call for permanent neutrality, and ban foreign troop deployments inside Ukraine. Both demand international security guarantees, a negotiated ceasefire and a phased military disengagement.

And both reject Washington and Brussels’ childish fantasy that shoveling weapons and cash into a corrupt war zone will magically produce peace.

Converging Approaches to Contested Territories

Even on the most explosive issue—territorial control—both plans take a sober, realistic approach. Trump outlines concrete territorial arrangements.

The AfD plan suggests internationally supervised transitional mandates followed by bilateral negotiations. Different mechanics, same logic: de-escalation, monitoring, and rebuilding instead of mass graves and propaganda slogans. The foreign-policy blob hates it because it acknowledges reality.

Key Differences Highlight Europe’s Failure

The AfD document, written in Europe rather than Washington, is actually the more diplomatic of the two. It doesn’t demand instant recognition of Russian-held territories.

It doesn’t dictate the size of Ukraine’s military or attempt to micromanage internal politics—features in Trump’s draft. Instead, it focuses on negotiations, UN or OSCE mandates and long-term stabilization. But the outcome is the same: stop the dying, stop the spending, stop the geopolitical LARPing.

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“Increasingly Becoming No-Go Areas” – Violent Crime Explodes At German Train Stations

Exploding violence in Germany has long been tied to mass immigration, as the statistics clearly show, and German train stations are becoming another perfect illustration of this worrying trend.

The number of violent crimes at Berlin central station in 2024 has tripled compared to 2019, which was the last year before the coronavirus crisis. In Cologne, violent crime has grown 70 percent in the same timeframe, according to Welt newspaper.

Those are just two cities, but the same trend is seen everywhere.

“Look at a main train station, in Duisburg, in Hamburg, in Frankfurt. Neglect, drug dealers, young men, mostly with a migrant background, mostly from Eastern Europe or Arab-Muslim cultural areas. This also has to do with irregular migration, as it looks in our inner cities, in the marketplaces“, said Jens Spahn, the CDU parliamentary group leader, in a BILD interview. Remarkably, his own party is massively responsible for Germany’s incredible demographic transformation and crime crisis.

As the left promotes public transport as a big part of the solution to climate change, the reality is that taking public transport is becoming more and more dangerous.

According to police data, the total number of violent crimes at train stations rose from 25,640 in 2023 to 27,160 last year. Meanwhile, women are more and more at risk. Sexual crimes increased from 1,898 to 2,262 within a year, while property damage jumped from 30,961 to 32,671.

This follows data from earlier in the year that showed foreigners commit 59 percent of all sexual crimes on German trains and at train stations, with serious sexual crimes doubling since 2019.

According to a statement, Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP Martin Hess warned: “Train stations, once places of mobility and peaceful encounters, are increasingly becoming no-go areas.“

“In many areas of crime, foreigners are disproportionately represented among the suspects,” he added.

Saxony, which has far fewer foreigners, sees huge crime increase

Even in German states with far fewer migrants, foreigners are contributing to a massive rise in crime and sexual assaults. In Saxony, for instance, crime has jumped massively in just one year at German train stations.

Citing the new data, just released a few days ago, AfD MP Matthias Rentzsch states:

“The sharp rise in crime (total offenses: 11,065 in the first half of 2025) at Saxon train stations is alarming. Whether property crimes, vandalism, or violent offenses: virtually all forms of crime show massive increases. Violent offenses at Saxon train stations rose by a good 42 percent, sexual offenses by over 15 percent, and weapons offenses by almost 87 percent. At some individual Saxon train stations, there were enormous increases in crime. For example, the number of offenses at Dresden Central Station rose by 24.6 percent, at Leipzig Central Station by 57.2 percent, and at Bischofswerda Station by 100 percent,” he said.

Rentzsch points out an especially shocking statistic in one German city: “The Chemnitz Central Station is the unfortunate leader, with an increase of 212.5 percent.”

As with every single German state, migration is the biggest driver of this crime surge.

“The uncontrolled mass immigration, largely driven by the CDU/CSU and SPD, is clearly having an effect: almost Foreign nationals account for 50 percent of all crimes committed at Saxon train stations, and there is a significantly above-average proportion of foreign suspects in violent, property, sexual, and drug-related offenses,” he said.

Notably, in Saxony, only 8 percent of the population is made up of foreigners, yet they are responsible for 50 percent of all crimes in train stations. Another 5 percent or so of the population are German citizens with a migration background.

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German Police Raid a Libertarian’s Home for the Crime of Calling Civil Servants “Parasites”

A new insane German speech crime investigation just dropped.

On September 29th of this year, a German man of libertarian persuasion known only by the pseudonym Damian N. tweeted the following:

No, anyone who is financed by the state pays no net taxes; they live off taxes: every civil servant, every politician, every employee in a state-owned enterprise, everyone who is subsidised and financed by the state. Not a single parasite pays any net taxes.

You can find the tweet here; as I write this, it has a grand total of 402 views and 10 likes.

No matter: yesterday morning, police acting on behalf of the Ulm public prosecutor’s office raided Damian’s home. He is suspected of the crime of inciting hatred (in violation of Section 130 of the German Criminal Code) for his rough remark about government “parasites”.

Apollo News reports:

“At almost exactly 6am, my doorbell rang. I went to the intercom and heard: ‘Police, please open the door, we have a search warrant,’” N. recounts.

“They then gave me a choice: ‘Either you unlock your cell phone and give us the PIN, and we’ll take the cell phone with us, or we’ll take everything.

“Under pressure, I naturally cooperated, unlocked my cell phone, and gave them the PIN,” he said. The officers then took Damian N. to the police station for identification procedures. “The whole programme,” said N.: “Weight, height, photos from many angles, and all the biometric data from my hands. I felt like a serious criminal.” The police also asked for a blood sample – “for your DNA,” as one officer is reported to have said. N. refused. “I thought I hadn’t heard right.”

The identification procedures – roughly comparable to a police booking in the United States – were likely illegal in this case. Damian N. further claims that the police produced no search warrant and provided no receipt for his confiscated phone, which would represent a further violation of the law. Before leaving, an officer instructed our suspected speech criminal to “think carefully about what you post in future”, because “you must realise that you are now under observation”.

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ChatGPT’s Use Of Song Lyrics Violates Copyright, Munich Court Finds

  • Judges found GEMA’s claims valid, ordering OpenAI to cease reproduction and provide damages and disclosure.
  • The court said GPT-4 and GPT-4o “memorized” lyrics, amounting to reproduction under EU copyright rules.
  • The decision, not yet final, could set a major European precedent on AI training data.

Germany’s national music rights organization secured a partial but decisive win against OpenAI after a Munich court ruled that ChatGPT’s underlying models unlawfully reproduced copyrighted German song lyrics.

The ruling orders OpenAI to cease reproduction, disclose relevant training details, and compensate rights holders.

It is not yet final, and OpenAI may appeal.

If upheld, the decision could reshape how AI companies source and license creative material in Europe, as regulators weigh broader obligations for model transparency and training-data provenance.

The case marks the first time a European court has found that a large language model violated copyright by memorizing protected works.

In its decision, the 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court said that GPT-4 and GPT-4o contained “reproducible” lyrics from nine well-known songs, including Kristina Bach’s “Atemlos” and Rolf Zuckowski’s “Wie schön, dass du geboren bist.”

The court held that such memorization constitutes a “fixation” of the original works in the model’s parameters, satisfying the legal definition of reproduction under Article 2 of the EU InfoSoc Directive and Germany’s Copyright Act.

“At least in individual cases, when prompted accordingly, the model produces an output whose content is at least partially identical to content from the earlier training dataset,” a translated copy of the written judgement provided by the Munich court to Decrypt reads.

The model “generates a sequence of tokens that appears statistically plausible because, for example, it was contained in the training process in a particularly stable or frequently recurring form,” the court wrote, adding that because this “token sequence appeared on a large number of publicly accessible websites“ it meant that it was “included in the training dataset more than once.”

In the pleadings, GEMA argued that the model’s output lyrics were almost verbatim when prompted, proving that OpenAI’s systems had retained and reproduced the works.

OpenAI countered that its models do not store training data directly and that any output results from user prompts, not from deliberate copying.

The company also invoked text-and-data-mining exceptions, which allow temporary reproductions for analytical use.

“We disagree with the ruling and are considering next steps,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Decrypt. “The decision is for a limited set of lyrics and does not impact the millions of people, businesses, and developers in Germany that use our technology every day.” 

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German States Expand Police Powers to Train AI Surveillance Systems with Personal Data

Several German states are preparing to widen police powers by allowing personal data to be used in the training of surveillance technologies.

North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg are introducing legislative changes that would let police feed identifiable information such as names and facial images into commercial AI systems.

Both drafts permit this even when anonymization or pseudonymization is bypassed because the police consider it “impossible” or achievable only with “disproportionate effort.”

Hamburg adopted similar rules earlier this year, and its example appears to have encouraged other regions to follow. These developments together mark a clear move toward normalizing the use of personal information as fuel for surveillance algorithms.

The chain reaction began in Bavaria, where police in early 2024 tested Palantir’s surveillance software with real personal data.

The experiment drew objections from the state’s data protection authority, but still served as a model for others.

Hamburg used the same idea in January 2025 to amend its laws, granting permission to train “learning IT systems” on data from bystanders. Now Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia plan to adopt nearly identical language.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, police would be allowed to upload clear identifiers such as names or faces into commercial systems like Palantir’s and to refine behavioral or facial recognition programs with real, unaltered data.

Bettina Gayk, the state’s data protection officer, warned that “the proposed regulation addresses significant constitutional concerns.”

She argued that using data from people listed as victims or complainants was excessive and added that “products from commercial providers are improved with the help of state-collected and stored data,” which she found unacceptable.

The state government has embedded this expansion of surveillance powers into a broader revision of the Police Act, a change initially required by the Federal Constitutional Court.

The court had previously ruled that long-term video monitoring under the existing law violated the Basic Law.

Instead of narrowing these powers, the new draft introduces a clause allowing police to “develop, review, change or train IT products” with personal data.

This wording effectively enables continued use of Palantir’s data analysis platform while avoiding the constitutional limits the court demanded.

Across North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, and Hamburg, the outcome will be similar: personal data can be used for training as soon as anonymization is judged to be disproportionately difficult, with the assessment left to police discretion.

Gayk has urged that the use of non-anonymized data be prohibited entirely, warning that the exceptions are written so broadly that “they will ultimately not lead to any restrictions in practice.”

Baden-Württemberg’s green-black coalition plans to pass its bill this week.

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Germany to funnel more cash into Ukraine’s corruption-plagued energy sector

Germany has pledged to provide Ukraine with an additional €40 million in an effort to prop up its power generation during the winter, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has said. The announcement comes as Ukraine’s energy industry finds itself mired in a corruption scandal allegedly linked to an ally of leader Vladimir Zelensky.

Speaking on Tuesday, Wadephul said Berlin was “helping Ukrainians survive another winter of war with an additional €40 million ($46 million).” The diplomat noted that this year alone Germany has already spent €9 billion on military aid for Kiev.

A day earlier, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced that it was investigating a “high-level criminal organization” which allegedly profited from contracts involving state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom.

According to the authorities, the ring forced Energoatom officials and contractors to pay kickbacks for state contracts. Formal charges have so far been brought against seven unnamed individuals. The Ukrainian media has claimed that one of the suspects is Timur Mindich, a close associate and former business partner of Zelensky. The businessman allegedly fled Ukraine just hours before his home was raided by NABU agents.

Mindich’s personal and business ties to the Ukrainian leader are understood to date back to when Zelensky was actively involved in the entertainment industry.

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