💭 Climate activists decapitate prominent Berlin Christmas tree
Last Generation climate activists calling for tougher government action to combat the global climate crisis sawed the top off a Christmas tree at the Brandenburg Gate. Police said they attended the scene and took action.
Climate activists in Germany chopped the top off a famous Christmas tree outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on Wednesday in the latest in a series of public stunts.
Members of the group Last Generation used a cherry picker to reach the top of the 15-meter-high (50-foot) Nordmann fir.
They then cut off the top of the tree and unfurled a banner that read: “This is just the tip of the Christmas tree.”
“So far we’re seeing only the tip of the underlying disaster in Germany,” said one of the activists, Lilli Gomez, in a statement.
“While all of Germany spends the week getting the best gifts from the biggest stores, others are wondering where they will get their water to drink after droughts and floods have destroyed their crops.”
💭 ‘A perverted religion, outright Satanism’: Putin attacks the West while praising Russian values | Russian President Vladimir Putin attacks the West, saying it’s ‘satanic’ and rejected ‘moral norms’ while praising ‘traditional’ Russian values.
In his speech at the Kremlin, Putin cast the conflict with the West in even more severe terms than he had previously, reeling off centuries of Western military actions to denounce the U.S.-led world order as fundamentally evil, corrupt and set on Russia’s destruction.
“The repression of freedom is taking on the outlines of a reverse religion, of real satanism,” Putin said, asserting that liberal Western values on matters like gender identity amounted to a “denial of man.”
Putin attacked the West’s liberalism, saying that, unlike Russia, it had turned away from “traditional” and “religious” values.
At one point in the speech, in which Putin announced Russia was annexing four regions of Ukraine, he asked the assembled dignitaries if they wanted “children to be offered sex-change operations,” a practice he implied was widespread in the West.
In his two decades in power, Putin has routinely promoted what he says are “traditional values” and suppressed LGBTQ rights through a number of laws and by backing ultra-conservative movements and initiatives.