Europe

    High-stakes talks to form a new German government collapsed Sunday as the pro-business FDP party walked out, plunging Europe's biggest economy into a political crisis and potentially precipitating the end of Chancellor Angela Merkel's career. After more than a month of gruelling negotiations, Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democratic Party said there was no basis of trust to forge a government with Merkel's conservative alliance CDU-CSU and ecologist Greens. It is better not to govern than to govern badly, said Lindner, adding that we cannot and will not answer for the spirit of the exploratory papers. The talks, which turned increasingly acrimonious, had stumbled on issues including the divisive matter of immigration. Merkel's liberal refugee policy that let in mor...

    The people expect it, his opponents are sure of it, his entourage is convinced of it. But Russia’s president is delaying. When Mr Putin chooses to run, he will win, and handsomely. The president remains popular with his base and possesses a well-oiled political machine that, as dependable as the rotation of the sun and the movements of the tide, will deliver a result between 60 per cent and 70 per cent in his favour. But behind the scenes things are less predictable. From interviews with academics, government and near-government players, some anonymous, The Independent can reveal a picture of intense uncertainty at the heart of power. It is a picture that shows the president’s grip on the Kremlin to be as strong as ever but only because it needs to be. Vladimir Putin is, s...

    The world's second youngest billionaire has been fined £23,000 for drink-driving, but it could have been even worse. Katharina Andresen, 22, was caught over the limit in Norway where fines are based on the income. Andresen, whose father Johan transferred 42 per cent of his hedge fund to her and her 20-year-old sister Alexandra, is worth an estimated $1.23 billion, according to Forbes. The Andresen family have been a household name in Norway for more than a century. Johan made his fortune in the tobacco industry but sold his share in the business for $480million (£363million) in 2005 and now runs the Ferd investment company. According to Norwegian business newspaper Finansavisen, Katharina was three times over the drink-drive limit when she was stopped near the family's lux...

    EU Council president Donald Tusk has told Theresa May she has two weeks to act on the issues of the Brexit divorce bill and Ireland for negotiations to progress. Mr Tusk told the Prime Minister he was ready to move onto the next phase of talks but that the UK needed to show more progress on key issues. He said good progress had been made on citizens' rights but that this had not been mirrored in other areas. We will be ready to move onto the second phase in December but, in order to do so, we need to see more progress from the UK side. If there is not sufficient progress by then, I will not be in a position to propose new guidelines on the future relationship at the December European council. I made it very clear to the Prime Minister that this progress needs to be made at...

    The latest round of negotiations between the EU and the UK ended with very little progress. But one thing ended up being set: the exact time of the exit. The historical moment the UK leaves the bloc had been set for midnight on March 29, 2019. But it was not clear if both sides agreed on what that meant. Was it midnight in Brussels or London? After all, the capital of the EU and the capital of the UK are one hour apart. Watch: Farage: I'd 'probably' take the money (Provided by Sky News) The UK said in March that it would leave the bloc when Big Ben rang midnight in London. But the EU said in May the exit would happen at the latest at midnight in Brussels. It seems over the past few days both sides may have reached an agreement. During the talks, first UK prime minister The...

    The German defence ministry set out its worst-case scenario for the year 2040 in a secret document that was leaked to Der Spiegel last week: “EU enlargement has been largely abandoned, and more states have left the community … the increasingly disorderly, sometimes chaotic and conflict-prone, world has dramatically changed the security environment.” The 120-page-long paper, entitled Strategic Perspective 2040, is a federal government policy document – and the scenarios it imagines are grimly realistic: an east-west conflict in which some EU states join the Russian side or a “multipolar” Europe, where some states adopt the Russian economic and political model in defiance of the Lisbon treaty. That the document exists at all is a sign of the increased tension in the global s...

    Earlier this year, it was reported that Peru has seen a whopping 26 per cent increase in complaints about gender violence between January and April 2017. The massive surge prompted the country's Minister for Women and Vulnerable Populations, Ana Maria Romero-Lozada, to call for a system reform so that gender crime reports could be properly dealt with. We don't want to send a lot of people to jail, but if someone must go, then he should go, she said. The growing issue has sparked a wave of feminist protests across the South American nation, and now, contestants of the Miss Peru beauty pageant have spoken out. During a segment in which the women are usually required to announced their measurements (bust, waist, hip) to the audience, competitors instead used their moment on s...

    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...

    Bella Devyatkina can speak English, Spanish, French, Arabic, German and Chinese apart from her native Russian. Learning new languages always comes handy although many average adults cannot speak a foreign language. But even as people are starting to learn more languages, some kids are giving grown ups a run for their money. On national television, a young girl, 4 years old to be exact, spoke 7 different languages and stunned the world! Want proof? Well, You tube has the proof with a clip that will blow your mind! If the encyclopedic knowledge of a two-year-old girl from Hyderabad stunned audiences, a four-year-old Russian left everyone stupefied by speaking seven languages. Not only did Bella Devyatkina speak six other languages apart from her native Russian, she did so wi...