thank you for this crown i am thus it's all that. i'm rachel join me to meet the gentleman from deep happy. post. this is d. w. news live from berlin tonight the u.s. announcing a partial military withdrawal from germany a 3rd of its troops are being ordered to leave 12000 soldiers will either be posted elsewhere in europe or head back to the u.s. the plan looks and sounds like richard as president trump continues to accuse germany of being a freeloader at nato and not paying its bills also coming up tonight turkey

tightening its control over social media activists say a new law will help the government experience since your ship and erode the opposition's access to the public. good to have you with us the united states has unveiled plans to withdraw nearly 12000 troops from right here in germany president trump justifying the move today saying that germany has not been paying enough for its defense and that the u.s. quote did not want to be the suckers anymore a u.s. defense secretary marc esper 1st announced the plan as part of a redeployment of forces here in europe which he says will strength in nato. the current eucom plan worry position approximately 11900 military personnel from

germany from roughly 36000 down 224000 in a manner that will strengthen nato and hance the deterrence of russia and meet the other principles i set forth of the 11900 nearly 5600 service members we will be repositioned within nato countries and approximately 6400 will return to the united states though many of these or similar units will begin conducting rotational deployments back to europe it was mark as for their speaking at the pentagon earlier today we have team coverage now of this story with me are our correspondents teri schultz in brussels and simon young here in berlin to both of you good evening simon let me start with you the troop withdrawal it's even bigger than expected so what has been the reaction here in germany. yeah brant the so far the german government i think biting their lives the foreign and defense minister has released

a joint statement the seedlings saying just that they had taken notes of this decision and that they would be consulting with the affected regions in germany but also with the u.s. government and with nato partners but there has been some sort of disappointed reaction from some politicians for instance the varian state premier marcus. he said that this is the wrong decision that it weakens the u.s. and nato in their military interests of bavaria of course it is an interested party here because the u.s. base at graf and in bavaria is the law against overseas u.s. army base in the world and others within the political scene here in berlin really quite disappointed pointing out that you know the u.s. presence in germany is not about defending germany primarily it's about the u.s. or operational capability and the logistics base. in the region and around the

world which is proven and established here in germany. to go to you we know political germany does not like this plan what about nato it's a big part of this equation. that's right brant and nato did say to the united states while it was making this plan that it would prefer to see no u.s. troops taken out of europe and secondarily that i mean its preference was that they stay in germany. because that's what that's what everyone's used to that's a very a very strong base i think that it could have been worse all 12000 could be headed back to the u.s. which as simon pointed out is not in the u.s. is best interest at all and anyone who knows about how the resources are allocated there in germany much of what station there is is for u.s. interests and not to protect europe at all the african headquarters in stuttgart

for example so i think that because it was secretary esper he was quite calm he was flanked by the supreme allied commander europe. the announcement of it today is sort of anti-climactic and and nato is getting used to just sort of saying well we could have been worse it's a very good point there are so many variables in this decision so i mean we've gone into what you coming up in november in the united states and i'm wondering how will this decision impact u.s. german relations moving forward. well i think this decision strikes at the heart of the relationship between germany and the u.s. you've got to remember there have been tens of thousands of u.s. servicemen and women as stationed here since the 2nd world war and for many people they felt safe because of it taking western germany of course in the confrontation with the soviet union previously and even now with an unpredictable russia so i

think this does sort of change the game is an economic aspect of course tens of thousands of jobs direct and indirectly dependent on the u.s. presence here and i would point out the president trump says he's doing this because germany doesn't pay its way and with only 1.33 percent of its g.d.p. going on military spending a lot of these personnel are going to be moved to belgium and italy will accept the figures of saving belgium nor point 93 percent italy 1.2 percent both of those spending less of their g.d.p. on military spending the germany is that's a very good point simon terry is there anyone or any party here that stands to benefit or maybe another president. i haven't heard anyone i spoke spoke with speaking out in favor of this plan or agreeing of course

off the record with the u.s. position that this makes nato stronger against russia so i mean maybe belgium will get some extra buildings maybe italy will get a bit more money also having to house the couple of battalions that are being sent there but no allies are not in favor of this they don't buy the argument that nato will be more effective this way but this is a u.s. decision and they don't really have a choice so like i said i think that everyone is looking forward now to seeing exactly how it's implemented and if if there's a change come november in the white house now this won't happen at all if you could point to results in brussels and so i mean young in berlin to both of you thank you let's take this story now across the atlantic to our correspondent all over sell it he is covering it for us in washington all over donald trump said today they are not paying their bills so we're reducing the troops it sounds like the motivation of donald trump is to punish germany is that what we're talking about richard boucher. well that is the official reasoning and it really looks like it

and of course also president trump is having the electorate on his mind and you just mentioned it we're getting closer to the election here germany has been a very popular scapegoat for president trump getting closer to the election he wants to present some results on the threats that he's made throughout his whole presidency to withdraw all troops if germany continues to come short of the promise 2 percent off the german g.d.p. in a defense budget experts however told us today that the withdrawing these troops would not punish germany would rather punish the united states and of course nato as a whole and also lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle also call this a gift for kremlin 6 that the troops were not there to defend germany but rather for deterrence reasons especially looking at russia and that this is not a given anymore especially because the trumpet ministration decided to take a big part of the troops even home back home to the united states you can imagine

that the russian president tonight is probably reading this story and smiling what about the the execution of this plan i mean it's going to be very expensive and it's going to take a lot of time will it out west survive the trump administration. that's one of the least the critics are hoping and there are many of them even within the republican party there was a bipartisan group led by a republican lawmaker amid wrong the old saw lindsey graham that's one of the closest allies is among them and they're planning actually to go to block that withdrawal which is a complicated process in the end a bill has to be confirmed by both chambers of congress the house and senate so complicated yes but nevertheless experts say small it's possible for the administration all to withdraw a small portion in germany station troops as of now the total withdrawal we're

talking as we've heard before about $12000.00 american troops that will take longer there are many questions to be answered and then we are getting closer to the election once again so it might be possible that in the end it will be joe biden's call should teach when the election and then of course it's unclear if that's really the end of the story you know it's a very good point is well over seldom the story for us tonight in washington over thank you huge. well here are some of the other stories now that are making headlines around the world 4 of the biggest names in global tech are appearing via video link before an anti-trust panel the u.s. congress facebook's mark zuckerberg google's sundar pichai apple's tim cook and amazon's jeff bezos all face lawmakers today they're being questioned about whether their platforms and their companies have stifled competition iran's revolutionary guard has tested launching ballistic missiles from underground sites for the very

1st time it's part of a series of military exercises which also included targeting a dummy american aircraft carrier in the strategic strait of hormuz. german police haven't finished searching a community garden near the city of handover as part of their investigation into the missing british toddler madeleine mccann it's not yet known if any new evidence has been found the piece of land is thought to be connected to a suspect in the kate smith khan was 3 years old when she vanished on vacation in portugal 13 years ago. now to turkey lawmakers there have passed a controversial bill that will impose strict new regulations on social media regulations that many companies could well find impossible to comply with critics say the bill will increase censorship and help authorities silence dissent turkish president. has often criticized social media platforms for.

lauri's. attacks on personal rights character assassination these platforms a full of these kinds of things and they must be brought under control. my colleague reporter rebecca rivers has been following the story she joins me now . so let's talk about this rebecca tell me about the new regulations versus the impact that they're going to have well brant this law which will come into effect in october requires social media companies the big ones the ones that have more than a 1000000 turkish daily uses such as facebook twitter you tube and the like it will it may. it will mean that they have to set up local offices to comply with requests to take content down basically content requests from the government use it out of also have to be stored on servers in turkey making it much easier to access that use of data in the companies refused to face hefty fines and also dot

a spade cuts which obviously makes their platforms unusable and the impact is going to be huge on ordinary turkish citizens and journalists a lie. the internet has become the primary the primary platform for critics of the government for dissenting voices and one of wanting to be critical alternative news organizations now human rights of obviously come out saying that the law will greatly increase censorship we have something i can bring up for you they came out this week saying that the new law will enable the government to control social media to get content removed at will and arbitrarily target individual uses social media is a lifeline for many people who use it to access news so this law signals a new era of online censorship some pretty strong language there now many other rights groups and local journalists are occurring echoing that sentiment. now that laura assad thousands of people are detained in turkey every year for they social

media use already so now critics are saying it's. going directly to the companies as another way of censoring we're we know we've been seeing for the past several years a crackdown on dissent media social social media why is the government doing this now well that's right i mean as you say the government often complains about stuff on platforms now according to a guardian report that they did they said that twitter received more than 6000 requests from the turkish government for content to be removed. complied only with 5 percent of the requests and it's that ability to make that independent those independent decisions about what they will and won't take down but that critics say is what we're doing government is trying to remove by introducing this law now the why is an interesting question why now. is possibly something quite personal. earlier this month the foreign minister and who is married to his daughter funnily

enough they had a child they posted about the child on twitter and got some negative remarks back people asking about the paternity of the child. vowed to crack down cold and well we know that the president would not like those kinds of questions actually in the form of that's for sure rebecca as always thank you. r.j. watching the w. news i'm brant goff i'll be back at the top of the hour with more world news followed by the day to see the. combating the corona pandemic. where does research stand. what are scientists learning. background information and. our corona up to.

19 special next on d w. d yes it is on its way to bring you more conservation of. how do we make cities screeners how can we protect habitats we can make a difference oh boy genius mental series of global. some 660000 people have died so far from covert 19 according to official statistics poor rich young old famous the virus doesn't discriminate. even care as doctors and nurses who were there to help succumb to the illness. france and spain are among

the few countries that held public memorials to honor the dead and whose departure has been especially difficult for loved ones many have not had an opportunity to say goodbye and thousands have been buried in mass graves. unexpected and fast changing our lives and the world. how do you grief when bedside visits and funerals banned. welcome to your not in special here and you knew someone to jones in berlin good to have you with us well normally we're here to talk about the latest vaccine studies or various other approaches to treat with 19 but we shouldn't forget that the coronavirus also kills and so today we want to talk about deaths in times of a pandemic 1st a report from the u.s. for amanda and gina their grandfather who see it was like a father to them he taught them everything heard them become who they are and died

of the corona virus one of the many in arizona it was horrible to leave him alone and him knowing we had a leader malone like what was he going through at that time knowing that he could have his loved ones there to support him his basing everything pretty much alone and there's nothing we could do about it. i don't know it's hard but it's very heartbreaking. situational aster has become all too familiar with even after 38 years in the funeral business the corona pandemic nothing is as it used to be. with these families so many of them haven't been able to be with their loved one at the time of death put into a hospital where they can't visit or into a nursing home where they can no longer seem so many people are dying alone and that emotionally it's challenging for families just to know that they can't be there and they can't you know be supportive and so are our challenge our job is to

help them kind of deal with that and start to help them heal and grieve and that's that's what we do. more than 2500 people have already died in arizona leaving many hospitals overwhelmed with the sick and the dead. when we get a death call the hospital will say can you come quickly because our capacity capacity we don't have anywhere to put these people they're trying not to get to these mobile units but they actually are so when we go now to a hospital transfer or someone in our care they have to actually have to look and see where the body is is it in the hospital facility or is it out in the mobile facility. it's been a little over a week since they've buried their grandfather amanda and gina still need time to come to terms with their loss but they already have strong feelings about who is to blame they could have handled it a lot better i feel they knew about this from john and they did nothing i understand pricilla the world going on panic mode but at the same time look what's

going on like what occurred due to them knowing and not doing anything about it and i really do think they could have did a lot more to help a lot of people and people are still getting sick people are still going to the hospital people are still dying and i don't understand why. i just don't and i don't think it's fair to any of us. their feelings are shared by many mourners in america that the lack of leadership from the white house is just as dangerous as the virus itself. so let's talk a bit more about deaths lydia humaneness yorks is associate professor of the department of psychiatry and forensic medicine at the autonomous university of barcelona and she's also been part of a research team looking into the deaths and mourning process in the times of the coronavirus pandemic could you have you with us let me start with the assumption western society tends to ignore the fact that we're mortal has the pandemic changed

but yes. yes definitely this is the whole of that on some means that we are responding to you know that until it arrives but these scripts are asked to make things are going to be life easier now and then he's forcing sourcing and changing our consciousness or our rank do you know say your minds are marxist and those that have been closer to someone in effect. he already has meetings he's change and those that are your bones home stupor ceased in this heart and only we have a new challenge and some exactly and of course i mean those who've experienced it and we've just seen that also in the report many couldn't say goodbye to the dying relatives they couldn't even give them a proper burial how big a trauma is that and how do you recover from that. well she is her 1st we should

say that. lady carson accident nor the x. . will be changed and will die and see me too or the sas that you didn't get to say what i ought to do or retool this route start war in recess and intensifies for awareness that. nest and makes me a force to be. cory the best of many shot to us and those who have floated no solutions to her only will need professional. searching meaning in life and to. make a difference. in dates and especially as this pandemic isn't over yet and it has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives professor please stick around because we would just like to take a look at some numbers here this curve that we see now shows just how many lives

were lost within a relatively short period of time it started slowly but then by mid february it became clear that we do have a problem and by april we counted tens of thousands who died of covert 19 some 6 months into the pandemic some 660000 people lost their lives the highest death toll in the united states followed by brazil britain mexico and italy and as i mentioned and as we all know the pandemic is still on going back to professor human as your in barcelona please tell me we're talking about statistics here but these are people these were lives lost why don't we see more public ceremony warnings the death. well how only because this story should expressions of sympathy and relief as a collective august come at the end of the tragedy the tragedy of the all there are

so here we are conscious that we are all one who are together in them you know of these biotope still in the battle is not yet aware and also because. they are all the countries that this theory in them wants to be our have of confrontation with the buyer so i think that this country our one of the arms that refrains institutions are who are immense in a state has gone that because we have and the waves but are many other countries we wait in a certain way that this is the art or distress wave is over and to descend the respect of the. right professor menace york from the autonomous university of barcelona thank you so much time and thank you for sharing your seat research on deaths and morning in times of a pandemic with us and you know. what now time for more of your questions over to our science correspondent eric williams.

what's happening with the present flu season. this is a really interesting question that made some headlines after a big wall street journal article on the topic last week don't forget that when it's summer time here in the northern hemisphere it's winter in the southern hemisphere so for the last 5 months there should have been a spike in that in the number of cases of influenza as as flu season ramped up into full swing there but according to the w.h.o. global flu levels have remained astonishingly low for this time of year in many countries south of the equator in some places they drop by by 90 percent compared to average years and actually when you think about it and it probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise

a long with with heavily restricted travel all of the social distancing measures people have been observing to stop the spread of covert 19 are ones that would also be effective at curbing the spread of flu we've just never used them against the flu before on this kind of a scale. could sophs cove to combine with influenza viruses to create a new strain. usually viruses evolve through a gradual process tauld antigenic drift which sees them slowly mutate as changes occur and their genetic material over time and many replications them what you're talking about is a phenomenon known as antigenic shift which describes abrupt major changes that can occur for example and some flu viruses when when 2 different strains recombine inside the host to produce

a much more deadly pathogen appear. lee out of the blue that's what we think for example occurred with the h one n one flu virus that caused a pandemic back in 2009 and now fortunately antigenic shift that leads to highly infectious new pathogens seems to occur rarely and we're pretty sure it only happens between very closely related pathogens so so some flu viruses recombine amongst themselves in this way and there's some evidence that that some coronaviruses might do it too but but the 2 different species we combine with each other to create some kind of superbug. before we start worrying about to the next threat let's deal with the one at hand for people in hong kong this means no more dining in restaurants after a new upsurge in case numbers restaurants have been ordered to hold to dine in

service and offer takeaway meals instead and while the threat is real with the use of such says of hong kong harbor well eating outdoors may not be the worst way to spend your lunch break as you see here 70 times of a pandemic. that's your 900 special forces day for me and the team then berlin as always thanks for watching distaste. enter the conflict zone in these extraordinary times we decided to take the opportunity to focus on the impact that the coronavirus pandemic is having on human rights around the world there are reports of invasive surveillance of authoritarian power grabs my guest is the head of human rights watch a kind of problem of how many limitations are people willing to accept in order to

fight a threat play. coronavirus conflict zone is. next to the police. one continent. 700000000 people. all with their own personal stories. we explore every day life. what europeans fear and what they hope for. some goose under a. long g.w. . we're all set. to go beyond the obvious. we're live. as we take on the

world. we're all about is the stories that matter to you but about something to hide the people what ever it takes people running up. to you and how much. money can change but i know that w. last made for mines. censorship kills it literally is apathetic of the public and you have called coronavirus the new terrorism nobody wants to see a dictatorship delta over over their head conflict zone it is on summer break and we look back at this season's most controversial interviews in april we decided to take the opportunity to focus on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is having on human rights.