Day: November 1, 2017

    Kazakhstan has announced plans to switch the from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, its third change in less than 100 years. Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev has announced that the government of the former Soviet Republic will appoint a commission to oversee the “gradual transition of the Kazakh alphabet to the Latin-based script until 2025,” Al Jazeera reports. Kazakh is a Turkic language that was written in Arabic script until the 1920s. In 1929 the Soviet Union replaced the Arabic script with Latin, but 11 years later Latin was replaced with the Cyrillic alphabet, to be “more in line with the rest of the USSR”, the BBC says. Kazakhstan was a Soviet Republic before it declared its independence in 1991, but Russian is still more widely spoken in the country than Ka...

    David Davis has suggested Britain's EU divorce deal will "favour" remaining member states as he signalled ministers are ready to accept demands to enshrine the Brexit agreement in law. Revealing the sixth round of formal negotiations will begin next week, the Brexit Secretary said the Government viewed Britain's withdrawal agreement and a deal on the future UK-EU relationship as inseparable. But, speaking to the House of Lords EU Committee, Mr Davis hinted Britain might have to pay a price in the divorce agreement as he looks to strike a long-term trade deal. In the infamous words or the famous words of the EU, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, he told peers. And we see these as being linked to each other. The withdrawal agreement, on balance, will probably fav...