Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday called on Germany’s ambassador to Moscow to attend talks regarding allegations Alexei Navalny was poisoned.

Officials in Berlin say that they have evidence to support their claim. Russian authorities say that Berlin is “bluffing.”

Opposition figure Navalny was airlifted to Berlin last month after he fell ill on a domestic flight in Russia. Medics in Berlin say evidence indicates he was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok, a statement supported by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.

‘Dirty political agenda’

“This is too serious to allow German officials to keep everythin...

UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet called on Moscow Tuesday to conduct or cooperate with an investigation into the alleged nerve agent attack on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“The number of cases of poisoning, or other forms of targeted assassination, of current or former Russian citizens, either within Russia itself or on foreign soil, over the past two decades is profoundly disturbing,” Bachelet said in a statement.

Such an investigation would have to be “thorough, transparent, independent and impartial,” she said.

Navalny is currently coalescing in a Berlin hospital...

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has suggested that Germany should hold an official memorial for those who have lost their lives to the pandemic, because many of them had to die without their loved ones by their side.

“A corona death is a lonely death,” Steinmeier told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland media group on Saturday. “We need to help people with their grief, and think about how we express our sympathy.”

Those infected by the disease are required to be treated by health care workers in isolation to ensure that the virus doesn’t spread...

About one-third of people in Germany believe that “secret powers” control the world, according to a new poll published on Sunday.

Some 11% of respondents said it was “definitely true” that secret powers control the world, while 19% said it was probably true.

Of those who thought the world is controlled by a secret elite, 13% said the shadowy groups included commercial enterprises, banks or “the financial capital.”

Read more: Conspiracies are ‘always theories of power’

A total of 12% named secret services such as the CIA, Mossad or Russia’s now-dissolved KGB...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a tendency to hesitate. Whatever decision she makes regarding ties between Germany and Russia, the governments will find a way to get on with one another again. Their gas-based relationship has survived all political turbulence so far.  
 
Back in the 1970s, the US opposed plans to build a pipeline between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, with officials calling their West German counterparts shortsighted for providing the “enemy” with hard currency...

In March, the students of the 18,000-odd academic programs in Germany could suddenly no longer physically attend lectures or go to their university libraries. Everything went online. Though there was little enthusiasm for the abrupt digital switch, “nobody refused outright,” said Bernhard Kempen, the president of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers. He said academics who had struggled with the technology had been offered support. 

Read more: Germany could benefit as foreign students ditch US, UK during pandemic

Kempen said the priority became ensurin...

In March, the students of the 18,000-odd academic programs in Germany could suddenly no longer physically attend lectures or go to their university libraries. Everything went online. Though there was little enthusiasm for the abrupt digital switch, “nobody refused outright,” said Bernhard Kempen, the president of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers. He said academics who had struggled with the technology had been offered support. 

Read more: Germany could benefit as foreign students ditch US, UK during pandemic

Kempen said the priority became ensurin...

Refugee relief organizations are setting up thousands of chairs outside the German parliament in Berlin on Monday, to call attention to the overcrowding in a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.

The 13,000 chairs were set up at the “Platz der Republik” in front of the Reichstag building as part of the nationwide anti-racist action days of “We’ll come united.”

Read more:Lampedusa mayor calls for ‘strike’ over migrant arrivals 

The chairs should symbolize the inhabitants of the Moria camp on Lesbos and Germany’s willingness to take refugees in.

They are meant to represent...

Angela Merkel’s spokesman has said the German chancellor believes “it’s wrong to rule anything out” over Moscow’s refusal to acknowledge the findings that Alexei Navalny was poisoned. 

Navalny, a key Russian opposition figure, was airlifted from the Siberian city of Omsk late last month to a Berlin clinic in a medically induced coma. Citing toxicological testing that showed “proof without doubt,” German authorities said last week that he had been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent. 

On Sunday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the Kremlin reaction of denying res...

A third-straight night of violent protests in the eastern city of Leipzig left at least two police officers injured and several people were detained, police said on Sunday.

Demonstrators clashed with police on Saturday evening, after a group had rallied to protest gentrification in the city’s Connewitz district two days prior.

The gentrification protest was sparked by a police operation to evacuate a house occupied by a group of squatters since August 21.

The property was otherwise empty when squatters chose to occupy it, but the owner filed a criminal complaint for alleged tres...