Germany news: Workers protest Mercedes-Benz cost-cutting

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A social media user captured footage of a particularly low-speed police chase outside the Schloss Nordkirchen castle, and posted it with great success this week.

Police noticed that the scooter's license plate was out of date and switched on the sirens to pursue it. But, presumably for safety reasons, they made no move to forcibly stop or impede the vehicle.

Instead, a somewhat comical scene ensued as a police van followed the small vehicle at around 25 kilometers per hour (15 miles per hour). As if sensing the absurdity of the pursuit, an officer pleaded with the runaway citizens via his megaphone.

"Just stop. It's embarrassing, what you're doing," he implored, as rider and pillion passenger held their course.

The video gathered almost a million views within a day and some domestic media coverage, as well as various amused responses, including, "Funny trailer, when is the movie hitting theaters?"

The scooter ultimately gave the police the slip in the park's narrow roads and paths. Police located the vehicle but not its prior occupants.

Police in Coesfeld, a district between Dortmund and Münster in western Germany, however, told regional broadcaster WDR that they were confident of locating the suspects via its outdated registration details.

More than 30 German cities sent representatives to a memorial ceremony in Latvia on Friday to commemorate the deportation and murder of European Jews during the Holocaust .

Delegates from the German Riga Committee gathered at the Bikernieki Cemetery and Memorial in the capital, Riga. They also attended the remains of the Nazi occupiers' Jungfernhof concentration camp.

The event also marked the 25th anniversary of the memorial site's inauguration.

From November 1941 to the end of 1942, more than 25,000 Jews from Germany and Austria were deported to Riga to be killed.

"The Bikernieki Forest was essentially the first place in Riga where mass murders of Jews took place. The first murders took place here exactly 85 years ago, on July 2 and 3, 1941," said Ilya Lensky, director of the Museum of the Jews in Latvia, in his speech at the ceremony.

The dead were buried anonymously in the forest. Political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war were also executed and buried in mass graves there. An estimated 35,000 people died in the area between 1941 and 1944.

Protests have started in the central German city of Erfurt a day ahead of the opening of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's summer conference on Saturday morning.

A regional charter of the "Grandmas against the Right" ( Omas gegen Rechts ) invited people to a "coffee klatsch" in front of the city hall, to discuss the state of democracy in Germany.

A group of scientists also held a discussion on the "shift to the right in politics and society" at a cultural center near the rail tracks in the state capital of Thuringia.

Thousands of demonstrators are expected over the next two days as the AfD party conference convenes.

One action group calling itself "Resistance" ( Widersetzen ) has said it plans to set up a blockade of the access roads to the Erfurt Messe trade fair.

A large police presence was already assembling and preparing for potential disruptions on Friday.

The party is currently polling better than other individual political parties in the country, albeit several years away from the next election and with less than one-third public support.

But it is also under investigation by authorities for potentially anti-constitutional elements in its ranks, and faces calls for a move to ban it from some quarters .

Germany requested urgent talks with China 's ambassador over reports that China was training Russian soldiers, a German Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Berlin said on Friday, confirming information first reported by Der Spiegel magazine.

The invitation for "urgent" talks, which falls short of a diplomatic summons, came two days after Reuters reported that China covertly trained Russian forces last year with the personal approval of Russia's defense minister.

"Anything that enables Russia to continue its war of aggression against Ukraine also threatens our security," Reuters cited a Foreign Ministry source as saying. "Consequently, China's decisive and growing support for Russia's brutal war of aggression directly impacts our security."

Russia has sustained considerable losses almost four-and-a-half years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, leading to various measures seeking to recruit new soldiers without combat experience and prepare them for frontline service.

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Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has published updated data on asylum applications through the end of June.

The Interior Ministry subdepartment revealed that it had received 39,646 first-time asylum applications in the first six months of the year.

That compares to 61,336 in the same period in 2025 and roughly 121,000 in the first half of 2024.

The reductions come amid efforts in both Berlin and Brussels to reduce overall migration.

German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt ordered an intensification of border controls after taking office in April 2025. He also instructed Federal Police to turn back would-be asylum-seekers, except those who are ill, pregnant or otherwise in need of special assistance, at Germany's land borders.

He argued this was possible on the basis that they were entering via another safe European country where they should apply for asylum first, a position that has been undermined by court rulings in some individual cases .

According to the ministry, 14,270 people were turned back or deported at Germany's borders in the first half of this year. The figures indicated that 494 suspected people-smugglers were arrested during the same period.

A package of reforms to EU asylum rules also came into force on June 12 this year , among other things making it easier for EU member states to send people to third countries with which they have no connection. However, systemic changes resulting from these new laws could take months or even years to realize. Knowledge of the plans might already play some role in individuals' decisions on where to seek asylum, though.

The CEO of German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall , Armin Papperger, fired broadsides at former-Chancellor Angela Merkel at a security conference on Friday.

"Chancellor Angela Merkel said to us: We don't really need you, if there's a problem, we'll call the Americans," Papperger told newspaper Die Welt 's security conference, the outlet reported. Papperger said dependence on the US was by design.

The CEO of the arms giant, whose share price exploded in the years after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine but which has now halved from its peaks of late 2025, said there had been no "great demand for weapons systems in Germany itself" prior to 2022.

He alleged that Rheinmetall and other companies had been put in the Schumddelecke, a figurative German term for the dirty corner of a room or building where unwanted or taboo things are discarded.