How to make a headline from boring stuff...: "oblige" and "required" are pretty strong words for what can't be more than a recommendation. ("Die Bevölkerung wird angehalten , einen individuellen Vorrat [...]" is the German quote, which I'd maybe translate as "the public is asked to ") Also, as far as I can tell from the news reports, the report and it's recommendations are about general disaster preparedness, not ter…
Those are indeed strong words. Governments in Europe have considerably more power than in the new world. They can do these things - they view statehood as literally the community. Sometimes that has advantages, sometimes not. Even scarier, is the fact that this is even being done. Since there are no external threats and 0 chance of environmental disaster (Germany doesn't get floods and hurricanes etc.) - it speaks to…
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Germany has floods, snow storms, etc. The government has to think about disaster protection and what it means in a modern society, which depends on concepts like 'always on'. Plans are twenty years old and need to be updated.
A few years ago there were some parts of Germany without electricity for a few days and some were not reachable, because of a winter storm, which damaged large power lines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrill_(storm)
Example for a flood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_European_floods