Europe
Europe
Three female and four male police officers overpower a 36-year-old man in London 22 minutes after he on Tuesday morning used a sword to kill a 14-year-old boy and injure four others, including two police officers, an attack that the police do not believe is terror-related
Vojin Pavlovic, head of the NGO Eastern Alternative, is charged in Bosnia with inciting ethnic, racial and religious hatred for denying and seeking to justify the genocide of Bosniaks in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs by putting up posters in connection with the anniversary of the events in Srebrenica
Scotland's First Minister, the Muslim Humza Yousaf of the Scottish Nationalist SNP, resigns as First Minister and as party leader ahead of two planned no-confidence votes which he was expected to lose
22 percent of German residents between the ages of 14 and 29 would vote for Alternative for Germany if there were elections today, the highest for any single party, according to the study 2024 Jugend in Deutschland, support for the Greens falls from 27 percent in 2022 to 18 percent in 2024 and for the SPD from 19 to 8 percent
Russia's Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, one of his close collaborators and a construction boss, is arrested this week on suspicion of bribery, Ivanov maintains his innocence but no comment from the other two yet
The hate speech charges against Finnish MP and former minister Päivi Räsänen following her 2019 tweet and 2004 pamphlet on same-sex marriage will be heard in the Supreme Court of Finland after being acquitted in two instances, she says the investigation has been going on for almost five years and has consisted of more than 13 hours of interrogation
Residents of the district Bulwell in Nottingham in England with a 2.7 percent Muslim population oppose the planned construction of a mosque and a woman at a meeting says she thinks they are now considered the local racists but that it feels like they are being driven out and that the area will be completely overtaken
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico's close ally, 48-year-old Peter Pellegrini, wins the Slovak presidential election with almost 54 percent of the vote against liberal, pro-Western candidate Ivan Korčok who received just over 46 percent
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says Russian spies have been working at the defense alliance's headquarters in Brussels and have now been expelled, Ukrainian security adviser Oleksiy Danilov says Russian spy networks are very active in Germany and five people are awaiting trial in Britain accused of spying for Russia
Pagans in British army more than double in four years, considered fifth largest religion among soldiers and beard ban lifted in bid to attract more recruits
Britain's ruling party Tories, at the suggestion of former owner of Swedish newspaper Metro and Norwegian businessman Christen Ager-Hanssen, planned to create the app True Blue to sell party member data to advertisers, according to leaked documents to The Guardian, Hanssen met Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in June 2023 and donated GBP 70,000 through the blockchain company nChain, of which he was CEO for just under a year
Switzerland faces referendum on immigration after Swiss People's Party SVP submits more than 100,000 signatures needed to trigger referendum, proposes to change the constitution to include wording that population must not exceed 10 million before 2050
Iceland's Prime Minister since 2017, Katrín Jakobsdóttir for the party Left-Green Movement, is stepping down and will run for president in the upcoming election on June 1
71-year-old British amateur historian Des Cross believes King Edward III's charter from 1369 which says the village of Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey should be exempt from taxes and tolls should actually still apply, while Swale council claims the charter has been invalid since a reform in 1885, Cross says he needs rich financier to fight the legal battle
The Greek government is working on a bill that states that 45 percent of the music on local radio and in the public space must be Greek, and Culture Minister Lina Mendoni says that English-language music has almost been imposed on them and that the spread of Greek-language music is limited, amounting to 30 percent of what is heard
Possession of up to 25 grams of cannabis and three plants for adults becomes legal in Germany from 1st of April after a vote in the Bundesrat and the drug will no longer be classified as a narcotic
German 16-year-old Loretta B. taken by police from classroom after she posted video on Tiktok in support of Alternative for Germany and Elon Musk draws attention to the incident on X, her mother says there is nothing criminal in the video but yet her daughter is still treated as a criminal
Former Stasi officer Martin Naumann, 80, faces charges for murder of Pole Czesław Kukuczka who tried to escape to West Berlin in 1974, at least 140 people were killed between 1961 and 1989 trying to cross the Berlin Wall and officials have previously been charged for manslaughter for which the statute of limitations would have expired in this case
Alternative for Germany wins the election in Großschirma near Dresden with 59 percent of the vote in the first round and their candidate Rolf Weigand becomes the party's third mayor
Recording of top ranking German military officials discussing potential German operation to bomb Crimea Bridge leaked by Russia who intercepted the conversation and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says what is being reported is a very serious matter and that is why it is now being investigated very carefully, very intensively and very quickly
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte visits Volodymyr Zelenskyj in Kharkiv and agrees to speed up the process of delivering fighter jets of the F-16 model to Ukraine and according to Rutte, they will be in place later in 2024
EU Parliament approves law which means that at least 20 percent of all European land and sea areas must be restored by 2030, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and lakes are explicitly covered, needs approval from all member states before it comes into force
52-year-old Tunisian imam Mahjoub Mahjoubi, who has lived in France since the 80s, is being sent home after being arrested for calling the Tricolor satanic in a viral video, the deportation order cites that his sermons create an intolerant and violent image of Islam that can encourage action against French values, discrimination against women, tensions with the Jewish community and jihadist radicalization
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny died in the Russian penal colony IK-3 in Siberia after, according to the Federal Penitentiary Service, he felt ill after a walk and lost consciousness, was sentenced in 2021 to 19 years in prison for extremism and survived poisoning with the nerve agent novichok in 2020
Germany is introducing pre-loaded payment cards for asylum seekers to be used for basic necessities and local newspaper Reutlinger General Anzeiger reports that the introduction of the card appears to be inspiring some to look for work and others to return to their countries of origin
Poland's former interior minister and vice president of the Law and Justice party, Mariusz Kamiński, and former deputy interior minister Maciej Wąsik are on hunger strike for two weeks after being arrested on January 9 and released after being pardoned for the second time in the same case by President Andrzej Duda
Farmers have been protesting against higher taxes and lower subsidies since December in Germany, for almost two weeks in Romania and in France in recent days, in Berlin, for example, thousands of tractors and an estimated 30,000 protesters gathered
Denmark gets a new regent as 55-year-old King Frederik X takes the throne after Queen Margrethe II abdicates on Sunday, his wife, Mary Donaldson of Australia, becomes Queen Mary and their son, 18-year-old Christian, becomes crown prince
René Springer, representative of Alternative for Germany, says they plan to send foreigners to their home countries, counted in the millions, and the party, which has just received 24 percent in a national opinion poll, writes in a statement that 2024 must be the year of return migration
69 percent of Germans support the farmers protests in the country despite the fact that a fifth of the respondents themselves were affected by the protests, according to a survey by the German research company INSA
The EU home affairs commissioner as well as a Swedish social democrat, Ylva Johansson, says the EU needs one million additional migrants annually to compensate for the demographic deficit as the working population in the EU is decreasing by one million annually
About 150 farmers from North Frisia meet arriving ferry with Germany's finance minister and vice chancellor Robert Habeck, who is advised by security personnel to not discuss the differences on land and instead invites them on board, which the farmers refuse, farmers have resented scrapped subsidies on agricultural diesel as well as new taxes on vehicles
More than 155,750 foreigners arrived in Italy by sea in 2023, which is an increase of almost 50 percent compared to the previous year, in April 2023 the Italian government declared a six-month state of emergency over migration and Giorgia Meloni took office as Prime Minister in October 2022
Russia carries out the single largest air attack on Ukraine since the outbreak of war on Friday, killing 18 people, according to the Ukrainian army which claims 158 robots and drones were fired
28-year-old Jordan Bardella, party leader of the National Assembly in France, challenges Marine Le Pen in popularity, which has been shown in recent surveys, has received media attention in connection with recent terrorist attacks and debate on an immigration reform bill
McDonald's opens a new restaurant 20 kilometers outside Kiev, has an area of 430 square meters and 234 seats, becomes the 100th restaurant in Ukraine but before the war the chain had 109 restaurants
EU is expecting well over one million asylum applications in 2023 and according to the European Union Agency for Asylum, 937,000 applications have been received up to and including October, which is an increase of 22 percent compared to the previous year, after Syria the most common nationalities are Venezuela, Turkey, Colombia, Bangladesh and Pakistan
Russia announces full control of the city of Maryinka, 30 kilometers southwest of Donetsk, while Ukrainian spokesman says it is incorrect to talk about a complete capture and says the city is completely destroyed
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been located at the penal colony IK-3 in Kharp in Siberia after being in an unknown location since December 6, is since 2021 serving a 19-year prison sentence for extremism
Norway's Equinor will supply Germany with a third of its industrial gas needs following a EUR 50 billion deal with German energy company Sefe, formerly Gazprom Germania which was nationalized in 2022, deliveries starting on January 1, 2024
Alternative for Germany gets its second mayor when 53-year-old Tim Lochner, who is not a party member but ran on the party's ballot, takes over the post of Pirna in Saxony with 37,000 inhabitants, Clara Bünger of the left-wing party Die Linke writes on X that "advent , advent, democracy burns"