On the surface, the German electoral system is similar to that of most other Western countries, although it does have its own quirks and peculiarities. DW-WORLD explains. 

When Germans go to their polling stations - often in schools or other public buildings - they select candidates for parliament with marks on a multiple-choice ballot. But when it comes to tallying the ballots, it's a whole different ballpark.

Under Germany's parliamentary system, considerations other than the check mark come into play in determining the final makeup of the Bundestag - including things like 5 percent clauses, overhang seats and first and second votes.

But the most important difference is that Germans don't elect their chancellor directly. Instead, they elect parties, and the parties gaining the majority of seats in the Bundestag then elect the chancellor.

Turkey has marked a sad anniversary of 50 years knocking on Europe's door, with some enthusiasts hoping that the EU's recent deal on the Nabucco gas pipeline could speed up Ankara's membership bid.

The Eurasian country of 74 million on Friday (31 July) marked a half century from the first official announcement of its application to join the EU, which was then called the European Economic Community.

In 1959 Turkey sent the first application to join the EU, which numbered just six member states

On the same day in 1959, Turkey's prime minister Adnan Menderes made the first partnership application to join the economic bloc of what was then six countries, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, created only two years before in 1957.

Ankara's bid came before several other EU countries now seen as the bloc's heavyweights, such as Britain or Spain, joined the currently 27-member club. But it has proceeded in a death-slow tempo and along with re-emerging doubts about the ultimate goal of the mutual relationship and contacts between Turkey and Europe.

Canadian officials have deported former German industry lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, who sought to evade prosecutors in Germany for a decade. He was at the center of one of Germany's biggest postwar political scandals and will likely face trial on multiple charges.

The plane from Toronto arrived in Munich at 9:22 a.m. on Monday. Two police vans and three unmarked vehicles awaited the arrival. Their quarry: Karlheinz Schreiber, the infamous 75-year-old former arms lobbyist with dual Canadian-German citizenship, who had been at the center of Germany's biggest postwar political scandal.

Leading representatives of the German governing parties will meet on Monday (3 August) in Berlin to formulate legislation on how to implement the EU's Lisbon treaty, as requested by the country's constitutional court.

A new deal is needed after Germany's highest court on 30 June ruled that the Lisbon treaty can only be ratified if the national parliament's role is first strengthened.

The Bundestag: Germany's ratification of the Lisbon treaty was suspended by its top court

The 147 page-long ruling suspended the ratification process of the treaty until the new provisions requested by the court come into force.

Time is short for Berlin as the German parliament will soon be dissolved due to general elections on 27 September.

France will demand that fruit and vegetable farmers pay back their EU subsidies, according to French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire. Subsidies dealt to French farmers between 1992-2002 totalled some 500 million euros.

AFP - French farmers will have to pay back hundreds of millions of euros in subsidies after the European Union ruled the state aid amounted to unfair competition, the agriculture minister said on Monday.

 

Fruit and vegetable farmers received more than 330 million euros (468 million dollars) in illegal subsidies from the French state between 1992 and 2002, according to the European Commission.

 

"We will have to launch proceedings to be reimbursed by the farmers," said Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper.

The Netherlands Muslim Party has announced it will be fielding candidates in local elections next year in five towns and cities, including Amsterdam and The Hague.
 
Party chairman Henny Kreeft says he is also in discussion with party branches in at least a further five municipalities on whether they will field candidates. In June Mr Kreeft said he hoped party representatives would be standing in twenty districts. The NMP will launch its election manifesto after Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, which this year ends on 19 September.

If it is successful, the NMP will not be the first Islamic party to be represented in Dutch local politics. The Islam Democrats have held a seat on the local council in The Hague since 2006.

More than 15,000 Italian women, including academics and scientists, have endorsed a petition attacking the "sexist policies, behaviours and discourse" of Silvio Berlusconi, a Milan academic has said.

Professor Chiara Volpato, from the University of Milan-Bicocca, said that thousands of women responded to an internet appeal made in June after Italian academics urged the wives of world leaders to boycott the G8 summit to protest against the alleged antics of the Italian Prime Minister, who is embroiled in scandal over his private life.

The wives of the leaders, including Sarah Brown, ignored the appeal and joined their husbands at the summit in L'Aquila. Mr Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, was noticeably absent, having announced that she planned to divorce her husband after he was pictured with Noemi Letizia, a lingerie model from Naples, at her 18th birthday party in April.

News of the women's petition came as several opposition MPs renewed their demand for Mr Berlusconi to appear before the Italian parliament to respond to allegations about his "encounters with young women".

Germany's center-left Social Democrats, struggling to revive their flagging election campaign, will present a "Germany Plan" on Monday to eradicate unemployment by 2020 by promoting green technology. Rival parties say it's a completely unrealistic pledge that smacks of desperation.

German Deputy Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier presenting his election team last week. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate to become chancellor in the Sept. 27 election, will make a fresh attempt to revive his campaign on Monday by pledging to create 4 million jobs and create full employment by 2020.

Steinmeier, whose center-left party is trailing Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives by more than 10 points less than eight weeks before the election, will present his "Germany Plan" on Monday evening.

SPIEGEL has seen the 67-page document which outlines plans to create 2 million jobs in industry through improved efficiency in the consumption of energy and raw materials and by promoting green technologies such as electrically-powered cars.

Enel and Electricité de France have created a joint venture to assess the feasibility of building at least four nuclear power plants in Italy, marking the latest stage in the relaunch of the country's nuclear industry more than 20 years after it was rejected by the public.

The new venture, known as Sviluppo Nucleare Italia, will be based in Rome and follows the signing of an agreement between the heads of government of the two countries in February to restart nuclear power production in Italy.

Police have closed down many illegal cannabis plantations, but they hardly ever investigate who is making money from them. That is the conclusion of an investigation by the Brabant detective force into organised crime in the cannabis trade in six police regions in the south of the Netherlands.

The result are confirmed by public prosecutor Gerrit van de Burg in Den Bosch, who heads the national task force for the fight against cannabis plantations.

In 2004, the Dutch government announced a crackdown on organised crime in the cannabis cultivation sector. It was to be a concerted effort by police, local authorities, housing associations and energy companies.

But according to detective Stephan van Nimwegen, who headed the investigation, police departments still give cannabis plantations low priority compared with murder, robbery or hard drugs investigations.

Van Nimwegen said closing down cannabis plantations was "fighting the symptoms".

Georgia's foreign ministry has accused Russia of attempting to move the South Ossetian border deeper into Georgian territory, increasing tensions between Tbilisi and Moscow.

The ministry said Russian troops entered the village of Kveshi, near South Ossetia on Sunday, with the aim of creating a new border.

But EU monitors said Russian border guards had assured them they had no plans to move their checkpoint to the new area.

Georgia's accusation comes days before the first anniversary of the Russia-Georgia war, which was fought over the breakaway province.

India's fast-growing information technology outsourcing sector has hit out at the red tape of the consular regimes of many European Union countries, saying that they form formidable protectionist barriers against services exports to the trading bloc.

A survey by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, published on Monday, lambasted the difficulties of gaining work permits for IT professionals, their spouses, and the often unreasonably short duration of visas. It said visas often restricted workers to one country, or even one city, thereby hindering Indian companies from reaping economies of scale by doing bulk work for multiple countries.

British manufacturing grew for the first time in 16 months during July, boosted by the fastest flow of new orders since November 2007.

According to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS), the Purchasing Managers Index, which measures activity in the manufacturing sector, rose from a reading of 47.4 to 50.8 between June and July. It is the first time the measure has risen above 50, the dividing line between contraction and growth, since March 2008.

David Noble, chief executive of CIPS said: "The manufacturing sector has clearly pulled out of the nosedive it was in earlier this year and is no longer plummeting." He said customers had cut inventories so severely in the downturn that they were now in need of new stock in order to meet improved sales. However, Mr Noble warned it was still early days and said smaller businesses continued to bear the brunt of the recession.

However, in a stunning development, China entered the fray this month and signed an agreement to loan $1 billion to Moldova at a highly favorable 3% interest rate over 15 years with a five-year grace period on interest payments. The money will be channeled through Covec, China's construction leviathan, as project exports in fields such as energy modernization, water systems, treatment plants, agriculture and high-tech industries.

Curiously, China has offered that it is prepared to "guarantee financing for all projects considered necessary and justified by the Moldovan side" over and above the $1 billion loan. In effect, Beijing has signaled its willingness to underwrite the entire Moldovan economy which has an estimated gross domestic product of $8 billion and a paltry budget of $1.5 billion.

New migrants who demonstrate an "active disregard for UK values", possibly including protesting at homecoming parades of troops from Afghanistan, could find their applications for a British passport blocked under new citizenship proposals published today.

But migrants who contribute to the "democratic life of the country" by canvassing for political parties could find the application process speeded up so that it takes one year instead of three.

The new Nato secretary general today called for a "strategic partnership" with Russia a year after the Kremlin's war in Georgia triggered the worst tension between Moscow and the west for nearly 20 years.

In his first public appearance since he took up the post, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister, said good relations with Russia were a priority during his five-year tenure. His statement will worry Nato members of central Europe and the Baltic who are protesting to the White House over Barack Obama's recent overtures to the Kremlin.

RAI, the state-owned TV channel, recently launched a new satellite platform, owned jointly with Mediaset, the Prime Minister's company. RAI and Mediaset own 48.25% each of the project, with Telecom Italia owning 3.5%. An unnamed Milan stock analyst, quoted by DowJones Newswires, said that "Sky may have to worry about the possibility of losing 40% of its audience, which is attached to RAI and traditional free-to-air channels", which hitherto have been available on the Sky satellite. Some of RAI's channels have already been pulled from Sky viewers, and others may be in future. The analyst went on to say that "in the medium term, this is a move that may benefit Mediaset". President Napolitano has expressed some concern about this issue - which is certainly a blatant case of using the machinery of the Italian state in order to benefit the private business interests of the prime minister - but it seems highly unlikely that he will intervene in any way.

is that why you can get Current TV on sky, which does devastating documentaries about Genoa and Berlu?

expect more Times articles slagging His Phallus?

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~