Word: merkel
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...grabbed control of efforts to save GM's Opel and Vauxhall operations, which GM's board in Detroit this week centralized under Opel's control. But Belgium and the U.K. are no longer willing to just follow Berlin's lead. Politicians and union leaders there fear that Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing re-election in September, is preparing a deal that would save GM jobs in Germany at the expense of plants in their countries. (See 10 milestones on the road to GM's bankruptcy...
...Participants said talks were tense and frustrating. While Germany was represented by Merkel and two key ministers, Washington sent a midlevel Treasury official who was unable to make any definitive decisions. Several times during the meeting, the U.S. negotiator broke off talks to consult with his superiors by telephone back in Washington. "The meeting ended in a disaster because of the obstructive behavior of GM and the U.S. [Department of the Treasury]," said one German attendee...
...Chancellor Angela Merkel's home state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, is the poorest region in Germany with a 24% poverty rate; one of the richest is the picture-postcard pretty Black Forest region, with a poverty rate of only 7.4%. According to the report, the massive gulf between rich and poor doesn't only exist between regions, but within them, too. The northern areas of the state of Bavaria have a poverty rate of 15%, more than double the 7% rate in Munich, in southern Bavaria. (Read about Merkel in the TIME...
...legal minimum wage and only six sectors of the economy have a statutory rate - in the construction industry, for example, the minimum pay rate is between $12.50 and $18 an hour. Union leaders and politicians have been calling for a national minimum wage of $10.50 an hour, but Chancellor Merkel and her conservative party colleagues have refused to back down, saying a minimum wage could be counterproductive as jobs that pay less than the required minimum would be cut and that could lead to higher unemployment. "More and more people are on low wages earning less than $7 an hour...
There are several good reasons. For one, as Merkel made clear, Germans have a special obligation. "We don't want [history] to repeat itself," as papal adviser Kasper says. The Holocaust also remains an affront to the self-understanding of Christians, and Western civilization as a whole. We learned the word genocide through the Jews. Since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has set the post-Shoah standard in acknowledging the absolute unacceptability of the Jewish loss. Without the Catholic Church's leadership on the issue, other Christian groups might not have followed...