Germany yesterday reintroduced temporary controls on its western and northern borders as part of efforts to combat irregular migration and cross-border crime, the German Ministry of the Interior said.
The restrictions are part of a series of measures Germany has taken to toughen its stance on irregular migration following a surge in arrivals, in particular people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, and a rise in support for the opposition far-right and conservatives.
The checks now apply at Germany’s land borders with France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark for an initial six months, marking a further setback to free movement within the EU.
Photo: Reuters
They were already in place at crossings with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.
Federal police will conduct these controls flexibly, basing their actions on the current security situation and focusing on minimizing disruption to commuters, travelers and trade, the ministry said.
Traffic was flowing freely at borders yesterday.
Travelers are advised to carry valid identification, and non-EU citizens should have their entry documents, including visas, ready for checks, the ministry said.
The changes come against a backdrop of declining asylum applications in Germany, which fell 21.7 percent in the first eight months of the year.
German Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser said the numbers had fallen, thanks in part to controls introduced last year, which blocked more than 30,000 unauthorized entries.
“That is why we will expand our temporary border control to include all of Germany’s land borders, as I ordered today,” she said in a statement.
“My order is also intended to protect against the acute threat of Islamist extremist terrorism and serious cross-border crime,” she added.
The measures have prompted criticism from Germany’s neighbors. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has called for urgent consultations with other affected countries, which fear having to absorb more asylum seekers and the impact on trade.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer warned that if Germany introduced measures to send more immigrants back across their shared border, Vienna would reciprocate by sending more people eastward toward the Balkans.
Border checks with Austria are scheduled to run until Nov. 11. Similarly, inspections at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland are to continue until Dec. 15.
The German Ministry of the Interior has implied that there would likely be further extensions.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS