Germany’s conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) said yesterday that its 37-year-old general secretary would become the country’s new economy minister.
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg will replace Michael Glos, whose shock resignation with a general election only seven months away stunned many.
The CSU is the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and has two Cabinet seats in her “grand coalition,” the economy and agriculture ministers.
Guttenberg is a rising star in the CSU. He became its general secretary last November when the party shook up its leadership after a poor performance in a Bavarian state election.
Elected to parliament at the age of 30, the media-savvy zu Guttenberg — full name Baron Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg — is poised to be the youngest economy minister in modern German history.
The 64-year-old Glos said he was stepping down due to his age and the need for an injection of fresh blood within the conservative CSU. He has been widely criticized for his inactivity during the financial crisis and has often been a thorn in Merkel’s side. The front-page of the Financial Times Deutschland describes Glos’s resignation as “his first achievement.”
However, it is not clear how well-qualified zu Guttenberg is to tackle the economic woes facing Germany as he is considered a foreign policy expert.
The resignation is a major political headache for Merkel, who has seen her popularity dip in recent months as Germans give the thumbs-down to her handling of the economic crisis. Although campaigning is not meant to start officially for several months, Merkel’s Social Democrat challenger for power in September, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, wasted no time in scoring political points from the crisis.
Steinmeier said on Sunday he was “more than unhappy that the future of the economy minister is being debated in the middle of an economic crisis.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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