Germany news: Chaos possible as demo blocks Alpine pass

Parents should be put under more pressure to limit the time their children spent looking at smartphones and tablets, German Family Minister Karin Prien has said.

“I believe it should be a social standard that children below three years of age have absolutely no contact with digital end devices,” Prien told the weekly Welt am Sonntag.

Prien, a member of ChancellorFriedrich Merz‘s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), said that legal pathways to achieve this goal should at least be considered.

“After all, we regulate other obligations of parents in the Civil Code,” she said, noting that corporal punishment is banned in Germany, for example.

“But we have to tell parents much more clearly what consequences their behavior has for the development of their children,” she said, saying that these were “dramatic” — also because parents themselves were spending too long at screens.

Prien also called for children to be tested for speech and general development around their fourth birthday, saying children with special needs should receive extra help before beginning school.

The minister said that it was essential for schools to focus on basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.

She said the fact that “around a quarter of children in Germany leaves primary school without being able to read properly” was something the country could not afford.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed once more that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder could act as the EU’s negotiator if there are peace talks to end the conflict in Ukraine triggered by Moscow’s invasion.

“When I mentioned Mr Schröder’s name, I had in mind someone who can be trusted,” Putin said in the Kazakh capital Astana on Friday. 

He said that Schröder’s status as his friend did not speak against such a nomination.

“What’s wrong with that?” Putin said, saying it was a matter of trust. 

EU leaders have given a cool reaction to Putin’s suggestion.

Schröder, who was chancellor from 1998 to 2005, has come under fire for his involvement with Russian energy companies since retiring from politics.

Operations at Munich Airport were temporarily suspended on Saturday after a suspected drone sighting.

Federal police said two pilots reported a suspicious object that may have been drones, prompting authorities to halt takeoffs and landings.

“In coordination with German air traffic control, the security authorities then decided to close the runways,” a police spokesman told the AFP news agency.

After assessing the situation, however, authorities determined that there was no threat.

And a spokesperson for the airport later reported that flights at the airport had resumed.

There was a similar suspension of services because of drone sightings at the airport in October last year.

A demonstration to protest the growing amount of traffic using the Brenner Pass, a major Alpine transport route between Austria and Italy, will possibly cause great disruption to traffic in the entire region on Saturday.

Demonstrators plan to rally near Matrei on the Austrian side of the Brenner highway at midday (1000 UTC), leading to the closure of the entire Brenner corridor, including subsidiary roads, for at least eight hours.

Any disruption is likely to extend into southern Germany, with the Bavarian Red Cross preparing for traffic jams between the city of Rosenheim and the Austrian border.

Motorbikes could be used to bring water to any people stuck in such a traffic jam, it said.

Police in southern Bavaria are also deploying in large numbers to manage any congestion, among other things to make sure that emergency vehicles retain access to the site of any accident.

They advised motorists to avoid the Tyrol region.

The demonstration has been called by the mayor of the district of Gries in Austria, Karl Mühlsteiger.

He said that the 15,000 residents in the Brenner region no longer wanted to accept the growing amount of traffic, and that they were suffering adverse health effects from fine particle smog and noise.

Mühlsteiger also called for the existing bans for trucks at night and on weekends and public holidays to be retained in full force and for the construction of modern noise barriers.
  

Guten Tag from DW’s newsroom on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn!

A demonstration that will block the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy is predicted to cause long delays for traffic between northern and southern Europe, with disruption reaching into Germany.

Residents of the Brenner region have long been angry about the dangers to their health and wellbeing posed by the growing flood of traffic through the pass, with holidaymakers from Germany making up a large proportion of it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has again suggested that ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a controversial figure because of his business ties to Russia and the Kremlin, be a EU negotiator in any talks aiming to end Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

And conservative German Family Minister Karin Prien wants parents to be made more aware of the possibly deleterious effects of excessive screen time on children and their education.

You can read more about these and other stories in our blog.