Europe

    A young asylum seeker has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a female employee at a refugee centre in Sweden. The 22-year-old victim was stabbed to death at a centre for youngsters aged between 14 and 17 in Molndal, near Gothenburg, on Monday. She was taken to Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, but died of her wounds. Swedish newspaper Expressen named her as Alexandra Mezher, whose family was originally from Lebanon. She had reportedly only been working at the centre for a few months. "It is so terrible. She was a person who wanted to do good," a cousin told the paper. "We have cried a lot. She was such a nice person, warm and happy." Her parents described her as "an angel". Police spokesman Thomas Fuxborg said there were signs of a violent fight at the ho...

    Hundreds of homes have been damaged by the quake A strong 6.6-magnitude earthquake has struck the Mediterranean between Morocco and Spain. The 20-mile deep quake hit at 4:22am, 39 miles north of the Moroccan city of Al Hoceima and 102 miles east-southeast of Gibraltar, the US Geological Survey said. It was followed by six aftershocks including a 5.3-magnitude tremor. There were no immediate reports of any casualties. Emergency services received 250 calls from alarmed residents in the Andalucia region, in southern Spain. Tremors and aftershocks were felt throughout the area including in the cities of Malaga, Cordoba, Seville and Granada. Up to 200 households in the Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast suffered damage to their properties. Officials said schools would be clo...

    The Tory truce over Europe began to crumble on Saturday as David Cameron faced an angry backlash from MPs over his attitude to his party in the referendum campaign. The Tory truce over Europe began to crumble on Saturday as David Cameron faced an angry backlash from MPs over his attitude to his party in the referendum campaign. An alliance of 40 Conservatives wrote to the Prime Minister requesting a meeting to discuss concerns that he will fail to restore Britain's "sovereignty" over setting tax rates and laws. They fear he is not asking for sufficiently radical changes to EU membership and want him to be more ambitious in his negotiations to wrest back powers. Mr Cameron rejected the request to meet his MPs, who were said to be backed by 10 Government ministers and aides,...

    Angela Merkel has survived several crises in the past. But her open-door policy toward the refugees fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be the biggest challenge to her leadership since she became German chancellor in 2005. The challenge is so big that Merkel is losing support from her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), while its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has repeatedly asked Merkel to impose a cap on the number of refugees entering Germany. Some 40 conservative parliamentarians recently wrote to Merkel demanding a change of policy. And during an acrimonious meeting of the CDUs parliamentary group, a senior party figure told Merkels critics to shut up. Rarely has Merkel had to face such internal opposition, having been...

    Four out of five people believe that it would be a risk for Britain to leave the EU, according to a poll for The Independent. ORB found that 82 per cent of the public think that “Brexit would pose a risk to the UK including 58 per cent who see “some risk” and 23 per cent who see a great deal of risk. Only 18 per cent believe there would be no risk at all. The findings suggest that the campaign to keep Britain in the EU could profit by highlighting the dangers of a vote to leave in the referendum David Cameron plans to hold this summer. He intends to spell out the possible threat to Britain’s economic and national security if it left the EU, including its ability to fight terrorism and crime. Supporters of “Brexit” have already dubbed the In campaign “Project Fear” –the lab...

    Turkish coast guard officers The Greek coast guard says at least 21 people have died after boats smuggling migrants capsized in two separate incidents. A search and rescue operation is under way after two wooden boats sank. The first, carrying 48 people, sank in the early hours of Friday off the island of Farmakonissi. 40 made it to shore, one girl was rescued, and seven bodies were recovered from the sea. In a separate incident a boat carrying an unknown number of people sank off the island of Kalolimnos. Some 26 people were rescued, and 14 bodies were recovered.

    The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has said Europe cannot take in all the refugees fleeing wars in Iraq and Syria and that the crisis was putting the concept of Europe itself in grave danger. Speaking to the BBC at the economic forum in Davos, Valls said Europe needed to take urgent action to control its external borders. “Otherwise,” he said, “our societies will be totally destabilised.” Asked about border controls inside Europe, which many fear put the passport-free Schengen zone at risk, Valls said the concept of Europe was in jeopardy. “If Europe is not capable of protecting its own borders, it’s the very idea of Europe that will be questioned,” he said. He said a message to refugees that says “Come, you will be welcome”, provoked major shifts in population. “Tod...

  One person was left brain-dead and five others hospitalised after participating in a drug trial in France, the country’s Health Minister Marisol Touraine said in a statement on Friday. Touraine said that the six had been taking part in a trial for an oral medication being developed by a European laboratory in the northwestern city of Rennes when a “serious accident” took place. The minister did not say what the medicine was intended to be used for, but French media reported that the trial was for a painkiller containing cannabis. The six volunteers took the medication at a private laboratory, which was “specialised in carrying out clinical trials”, Touraine said. All tests on the drug have now been suspended and trial participants called back. The study was a Phase I clinical tria...

    A German town has sent a bus carrying 31 Syrian refugees to Chancellor Angela Merkel's office in Berlin in protest at her open-door migrant policy. Landshut in Bavaria said it was buckling under the strain of an influx that brought 1.1 million migrants to Germany last year. The town's mayor Peter Dreier said he organised the seven-hour journey after residents told him "it's time we set a limit". He called it "an act of desperation" and said he had warned Ms Merkel about his plans in a phone call in October last year. "We are trying to help these people integrate. But that won't work if this year we face another wave of one million, or even more," Mr Dreier added. Pro-refugee campaigners condemned the trip as a publicity stunt that exploited the refugees, who are all Syrian...

    Russian servicemen equip an Iskander tactical missile system at the Army-2015 international military-technical forum in Kubinka, outside Moscow, Russia, in June 2015. Magomed Tolboev, a former Soviet bomber pilot, says he feels that relations between Russia and the US are worse today than they were even in the depths of the cold war. In those days his job, for which he trained rigorously, was to take out a US air base in Turkey with a nuclear strike. "There was some kind of predictable order in cold war times. Two camps, two leaders, and everything depended on them. Now there are so many different players, many of them not under control by either side," such as North Korea or the many factions vying for dominance in Syria. "So we have not only growing tension between Mosco...