✈️ 🌐 📉 Global airlines are cancelling flights at an unprecedented pace:

Airlines have cut 2 million seats and 12,000 flights worldwide from their May schedules over the last 2 weeks, reducing the total available seats to 130 million.

This comes as jet fuel costs have doubled since the Iran war began, forcing carriers to cancel unprofitable routes, switch to smaller aircraft, and raise ticket prices.

Turkish Airlines and Air China account for the largest seat reductions, cutting ~520,000 and ~490,000 seats, respectively.

Lufthansa leads in flight cancellations, at ~4,000 flights in May alone, with the airline having removed 20,000 flights from its schedule between May and October.

Meanwhile, Gulf carriers, including Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, are still operating well below pre-conflict capacity, as the closure of Gulf airports has disrupted ~33% of all European journeys to Asia.

Singapore and Tokyo airports asked carriers not to add extra services to limit jet fuel use, and Vietnam introduced jet fuel rationing.

The global aviation shock is spreading.

📎 KobeissiLetter

🇩🇪 German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has opened 300 criminal investigation against individuals who insulted him online

The Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg has ordered the Bundeskanzleramt to identify every prosecutor’s office running a Merz-insult investigation, along with the file number for each one.

The ruling, which rejected the Chancellery’s appeal against an earlier decision of the Berlin Administrative Court, came after a legal challenge by Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. Until the judgment, roughly 300 criminal proceedings over alleged slights against the sitting head of government had been shielded from any journalistic scrutiny.

The legal hook for all of it is Section 188 of Germany’s criminal code, a special provision that gives people in political life reinforced protection against insult. The official English translation of the statute states that anyone who “insults a person who exercises a political office in relation to their office or in connection with their office shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years.”

A politician gets to sit at the center of a prosecution aimed at a citizen who said something unpleasant about them, and the punishment on the table is years in prison.

How cases enter the pipeline is itself revealing. Citizens are encouraged by NGOs and state-run reporting portals to flag supposed insults, sometimes anonymously.

Those reports travel to the Federal Criminal Police Office, which routes them to the relevant regional prosecutor’s office. The targeted politician is then notified and decides whether to file a formal criminal complaint or whether to leave the prosecution to run without objection. The Chancellery alone receives between 20 and 30 such files every month.

The scale alone deserves attention. A head of government who has triggered roughly 300 criminal investigations over things people said about him is using the machinery of the state against ordinary speech at a volume that does not look like an occasional recourse to legal remedy. It looks like a policy.

🔗 https://reclaimthenet.org/merz-insult-law-controversy