Germany tries to stop brawls in public swimming pools

Summer in BerlinDU) is not dull this year. More than 100 police spent July 20th chasing reports of a stray lion. None turned up; it was probably a wild boar. So Berliners returned to the other big local debate: whether police should patrol municipal pools to prevent brawls.Both Friedrich Merz, the head of Germany’s opposition Christian Democrats (c, and Nancy Faeser, the Social Democratic interior minister, are in favour. The police union is not. Cops, it says, are not trained to be (lifeguards); in Germany, world champion of occupational licensing, the job requires a three-year apprenticeship. One idea is to restrict pools to families with children during peak hours.