Europe

    At least 39 people were killed and another 69 wounded when a gunman opened fire at the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey on Jan. 1, 2017, according to Turkey's Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu. Istanbul governor Vasip Sahin called it a terrorist attack and told reporters the gunman first shot a police officer and a civilian as he entered the club in Ortakoy district. Police have cordoned off the area and ambulances are on the scene but the whereabouts of the attacker is still unknown. An armored police vehicle blocks a road leading to the club. A gunman reportedly dressed in a Santa costume killed at least 39 people, including 16 foreigners, at a famous nightclub in Istanbul during New Year's Eve celebrations. Armed with a long-barrelled weapon, the attacker shot a polic...

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel poses for photographs after the television recording of her annual New Year's speech at the Chancellery in Berlin Islamist terrorism is the biggest test facing Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday in a New Year's address to the nation, and she vowed to introduce laws that improve security after a deadly attack before Christmas in Berlin. Describing 2016 as a year that gave many the impression that the world had "turned upside down," Merkel urged Germans to forsake populism and said Germany had an interest in taking a leading role in addressing the many challenges facing the European Union. Many attach to 2016 the feeling that the world had turned upside down or that what for long had been held as an achievement is now being que...

    Romania’s president has rejected the nomination of the country’s first ever Muslim candidate for prime minister. President Klaus Iohannis said he had “carefully weighed the arguments for and against” appointing Sevil Shhaideh and had decided not to accept the nomination. Ms Shhaideh, who is a member of the country’s Muslim Tartar minority, had been put forward by the Social Democratic Party, which comprehensively won Romania's election earlier this month with 45 per cent of the vote. She was nominated by party leader Liviu Dragnea, who would normally have assumed the post himself but is unable to do so because of a conviction for electoral fraud. Some had suggested he was instead planning to run the government through Ms Shhaideh, who has only a few months' experience in g...

    Hundreds of refugees have returned to live in secret camps in the Calais region in the hope of travelling to the UK, The Independent can reveal, just weeks after the demolition of the Jungle shantytown. There are at least six informal settlements in rural parts of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, each housing scores of refugees and migrants, with numbers growing steadily in recent weeks. It comes two months after the closure of the Jungle, which was intended to bring an end to the refugee situation in Calais by destroying the camp and dispersing its residents to reception centres (CAOs) across France an operation the authorities hailed as a success. However, scores of refugees and migrants who were taken on buses to CAO centres have now started making the journey back to the...

    A long-haul flight was forced to land at an airport in Ireland to allow passengers to use the toilets. The plane travelling from New York to Paris on the Open Skies airline, a subsidiary of British Airways, was diverted into Shannon Airport in the west of the country after complaints from passengers. The onboard crew confirmed the Boeing 767’s toilets could not be serviced properly, with 90 minutes of the journey remaining.The flight’s 172 passengers were given the chance to take a toilet break before the flight continued its journey, over two hours behind schedule. A team of engineers successfully fixed the broken facilities during the intervening period. British Airways has yet to offer comment on the incident. Over 70,000 passengers are expected to pass through Shannon ...

    Frustrated army commanders are growing increasingly furious with selfie-obsessed newbies constantly posting pictures of their military duty on social media. The Swiss army has said it has found that new recruits, and most specifically women, are obsessively taking snaps of themselves and posting them to their personal social media accounts. Swiss armed forces spokesman Daniel Reist said: There is a very clear policy: no photos in uniform. Whoever wants to take a picture must first ask the commander. If gross nonsense is posted, or sexist or racist content, we will get the military police in. But if they post positive experiences, that does not hurt the army. Valentine Morina, 24, is one of the female recruits who regularly posts selfies to social media. The woman from the ...

    Explosives experts on Sunday defused a large World War II aerial bomb in the southern German city of Augsburg — clearing the way for thousands of evacuated residents to return to their Christmas celebrations at home. City police tweeted that they had "good news at Christmas" just before 7 p.m. local time Sunday. They had earlier been unable to say how long residents would have to stay away. Some 32,000 households with 54,000 residents in the city's historic central district were forced to leave by 10 a.m. Christmas morning so experts could handle the bomb. They had to clean seven decades of muck off the bomb so they could find and disable its three detonators. The munition's large size — 1.8 tons — suggested it was a so-called blockbuster of the type dropped by British for...

    Debris from a Russian military plane carrying 91 people that had disappeared from radars has been found in the Black Sea, local news agencies quoted the defence ministry as saying on Sunday. Fragments of the Tu-154 plane of the Russian defence ministry were found 1.5 kilometres from the Black Sea coast of the city of Sochi at a depth of 50 to 70 metres, the ministry said. A Russian military plane headed to Syria has disappeared from radar after taking off from the southern city of Adler, local news agencies reported the defence ministry as saying Sunday. The ministry said that there are 91 people onboard and that search and rescue groups had been dispatched to locate the missing Tu-154. The plane had departed at 5:40am local time (0240 GMT) from Adler, south of the Black S...

    The Tunisian had been on the run for days following the attack on a Christmas market. • The Berlin Christmas market truck attack suspect Anis Amri was shot dead in Milan on the morning of 23 December. • Italian media reports that he was caught in a routine traffic stop at Piazza I Maggio in Sesto San Giovanni. • Tunisian-born Amri, 24, was the main suspect for a terror attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people and injured 48 on 19 December. • Amri's fingerprints were discovered on the door of the lorry that ploughed through crowds on the evening of 19 December.

    Four people have reportedly been arrested in Germany as a Europe-wide search continues for the suspected Berlin attacker. Armed police stormed a house in Dortmund early on Thursday morning, detaining four people inside, Bild reported. The newspaper published photos of officers at the scene and taking a suspect covered in a towel into custody. They were believed to have links to Anis Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian man being hunted across Europe following the massacre at a Christmas market in Berlin.  A spokesperson for Germany's Federal Public Prosecutor, which is leading the terror investigation, said the report was totally false. But officials at North Rhine-Westphalia police did not deny the operation took place and The Independent understands more details may be released ...