” Wunderbar Together”?

The New Yorker: How Trump Made War on Angela Merkel and Europe. “The German Chancellor and other European leaders have run out of patience with the President.”

Link via MetaFilter.

“Europe has had many fights with American Presidents over the years, but never in the seven decades since the end of the Second World War has it confronted one so openly hostile to its core institutions. Since Trump’s election, Europe’s leaders have feared that it would come to this, but they have disagreed about how to respond to him. Many hoped to wait Trump out. A few urged confrontation. Others, especially in nations more vulnerable to Russia, urged accommodation. (Poland offered to name a new military base Fort Trump.) Macron tried flattery, and then, when that failed, he reverted to public criticism of Trump-style nationalism.

The challenge from Trump has been especially personal for Germans, whose close relationship with the United States has defined their nation’s postwar renaissance. Merkel grew up in Communist East Germany and credits the United States as essential to the liberation of the East and to German reunification. As the head of Europe’s largest and wealthiest nation, she has sought to guide the Continent through the standoff with Trump, but has struggled, because the President’s harsh words reflect a painful truth: Europeans are dependent on the United States for their security and increasingly divided as Putin’s Russia threatens the nations in the east.

“The color is almost intact even though the tomb is almost 4,400 years old“

The Washington Post: Look inside a ‘one of a kind,’ 4,400-year-old tomb discovered in Egypt. “A newly discovered, well-preserved tomb in Egypt has been determined to be the final resting place of a royal priest[…] Photos and videos of the tomb, which is more than 4,000 years old, show its exceptional condition. Waziri said the find was “one of a kind in the last decades,“ according to Reuters.”

Keine Frage: Schützen!

WDR Doku: Wölfe – Schützen oder schießen? (YouTube, 43:50min) “Die Wölfe sind zurückgekehrt und breiten sich in Deutschland aus. Aber sind Wölfe automatisch gefährlich für den Menschen? Tendenziell sollen Menschen für den Wolf uninteressant sein, aber was sagen Experten? Ob in Niedersachsen, Sachsen oder jüngst in Nordrhein-Westfalen, allerorten werden die Raubtiere gesichtet – Der Wolf ist zurück in der deutschen Wildnis.”

“In Straßburg dürfte damit wieder etwas Normalität einkehren.”

Deutsche Welle:
Strasbourg terror suspect shot dead by police. “The Strasbourg Christmas market shooting suspect Cherif Chekatt has been shot dead by French police. The jihadi “Islamic State” group says he was one of its militants.”

Mutmaßlicher Attentäter von Straßburg ist tot. “Zwei Tage nach dem Anschlag auf den Straßburger Weihnachtsmarkt ist der mutmaßliche Attentäter getötet worden. Nach Angaben der Polizei starb der Mann am Donnerstagabend bei einem Feuergefecht im Stadtteil Neudorf.”

Polizei in Straßburg sucht mögliche Komplizen. “Der mutmaßliche Attentäter ist tot, doch für die Ermittler ist der Fall längst nicht abgeschlossen. Die Polizei sucht nun Personen aus dem Umfeld Chérif Chekatts. Sieben Menschen sind in Gewahrsam genommen worden.”

On the Outskirts of our Solar System

NPR Science: Voyager 2 Bids Adieu To The Heliosphere, Entering Interstellar Space.

“Just a few months after celebrating its 41st birthday, the Voyager 2 probe has left its familiar environs and entered interstellar space — only the second human-made object in history to do so, after Voyager 1 did it in 2012.
[…]
The moment they were waiting for arrived early last month, when Voyager 2 left what’s known as the heliosphere — the vast bubble of plasma and particles generated by the sun and stirred in solar winds. This bubble ends at a boundary called the heliopause, where the sun’s magnetic field peters out and solar winds give way to interstellar space.
[…]
By one definition, that also means Voyager 2 — now more than 11 billion miles from the sun — has achieved another, much simpler-to-say feat: leaving the solar system.

It’s not the only definition, though. And the JPL itself marks the end of the solar system at the edge of the sun’s gravitational influence, on the outer boundaries of the Oort Cloud. By that measure, the lab explained, both Voyager probes “have not yet left the solar system, and won’t be leaving anytime soon.”

“It will take about 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud,” it said, “and possibly 30,000 years to fly beyond it.”