Millions of important emails from German corporations and medium-sized businesses remain unsent. “The formatting on page 12 of the template is not yet correct,” “With the pattern on the template, I would make the shade of blue a little darker,” “Lunch with the customer is only at 12.45 p.m. instead of 12.30 p.m..”
All of these substantial messages, often sent to the big mailing lists, remained unread today. It's hard to predict what this will do to the global economy.
Almost 130,000 Outlook problems were reported on Thursday evening around 7 p.m. This morning there were still around 4,500. Microsoft Teams, the AI assistant Copilot and online versions of Word and Excel were also affected. The countermeasures did not work as hoped during the night. “We currently have no evidence of malicious activity that could have caused this incident,” Microsoft said. Rather, the reason was “part of the infrastructure in several regions that was exposed to increased utilization.” The exact cause should be explained in a follow-up report.
Do you still remember? When Friedrich Merz won the election and had the prospect of becoming the new Chancellor, he wanted to do a real “Rambo zambo” at the CDU headquarters. Maybe some of his party friends in the EU Parliament misunderstood the saying? In any case, they were doing some “rammo zambo.”
The Berlin clan boss Issa Rammo caused a stir in Brussels today. He took part in the Conference of European Imams (CIE) in the EU Parliament. It was led by the French Imam Hassen Chalghoumi. One of the co-organizers was the EPP MP Céline Imart. The CDU and CSU also have their place in Brussels under the umbrella of the conservative EPP. The German Manfred Weber is its parliamentary group leader. Imart is assigned to the right wing of the parliamentary group. According to my colleague Timo Lehmann, she says that the list of participants was sent to the police in advance and that she or Chalghoumi were not aware of any suspicions against a participant.
The EPP emphasizes that Rammo was not invited by Imart or the group. Rammo himself distanced himself from the left in the “Jüdische Allgemeine”, which he attested to have an anti-Semitism problem. The left-wing faction leader in the EU Parliament, Martin Schirdewan, called the incident “deeply disturbing” and demanded clarification from Weber.
When Rammo appeared at a Left party party in Neukölln after the election, Berlin's CDU top candidate Stefan Evers said: "Clan bosses belong behind bars, not at election parties." Unlike in the EU Parliament, however, Rammo was not explicitly on a guest list at the time.
Read the whole story here: And suddenly clan boss Rammo shows up at the EPP
As of November 1st, German gas storage facilities were only around 61 percent full, the lowest they have ever been. The Ministry of Economics under Katherina Reiche (CDU) therefore wants to bring decommissioned coal and oil power plants back onto the electricity market in an emergency if gas becomes scarce. This is what it says in a draft bill from October 16th, which SPIEGEL has received. According to insiders, the law should come into effect this winter.
It is the second law of this kind. The first was in 2022 under Robert Habeck (Greens), after the Russian attack on Ukraine. At that time too, decommissioned power plants should have been reactivated. But the likelihood that the law would have to be applied was significantly lower because the storage facilities were much fuller at the time.
Of course, Reiche justifies the draft not with her own inability to ensure that the storage facilities are sufficiently full, but rather with the escalation in the Middle East. The minister only lately instructed that gas should be stored, and only to a small extent.
Critics complain that the plan takes effect at the second of three escalation levels and could thus distort pricing. The law is scheduled to expire at the end of March 2028.
Green politician Michael Kellner accuses Reiche of blocking renewable energies and messing up the refilling of gas storage facilities. Against their energy policy, “a rotary dial telephone is modern.” This also fits the report that UN Secretary General António Guterres described the billions in profits made by energy companies as a result of high crude oil and natural gas prices as “morally unacceptable”. “Governments must protect the interests of their populations – not the interests of a group of companies,” said Guterres.
Apparently difficult if you were the CEO of an energy company before becoming a minister.
Read the whole story here: Reiche is planning a comeback of old coal and oil power plants as an emergency reserve
