Europe

    Calais France Europe Refugees Migrants Women and children at a camp on the outskirts of the French port city of Calais are to be given heated tents by the end of the week as winter approaches, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced on Wednesday. Announcing the doubling in capacity of a shelter for women and children from 200 to 400 on a visit to the camp on Wednesday, Cazeneuve added: "In the meantime, heated tents will be set up... by the end of the week." No woman, no child will remain without a shelter in this city, he told reporters, in quotes carried by the BBC. Cazeneuve added that an additional 460 police officers would also be sent to the camp from Thursday, bringing the total number of officers in the camp area to 1,125. He said that the work of expa...

    A Russian computer researcher has developed what he calls the 'USB Killer 2.0' - a modified USB stick capable of frying the innards of any computer it's plugged in to. The researcher, who goes by the name Dark Purple, wrote about the device on his blog - though fortunately, there's no instructions on how to build one. A demonstration video shows a perfectly functioning laptop having the USB Killer plugged in. In just a couple of seconds, the screen goes blank, the lights turn off, and the laptop is broken - the man in the video tries his best to get it working again, but to no avail. The device reportedly works by drawing power from the USB ports and using a converter until negative voltage is achieved. The power is then directed back into the computer, with the process lo...

    The Russian president has sent his generals to Baghdad to co-ordinate policy with Iran and Iraq President Vladimir Putin has sent out a fresh challenge to the West, saying he is determined to thwart its plans to remove the Assad regime and sending generals to Baghdad to co-ordinate policy with Iraq and Iran . Mr Putin agreed that his dispatch of weapons including 28 fighter aircraft, armoured personnel carriers and thousands of men to Syria were aimed at shoring up the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad . “Well, you're right," he said in an interview with CBS . “It's my deep belief that any actions to the contrary - in order to destroy the legitimate government - will create a situation which you can witness now in the other countries of the region or in other r...

    A migrant family wait for a bus that would take them to a temporary holding center for migrants, near the border line between Serbia and Hungary in Roszke, southern Hungary. Almost everyone agrees that the tens of thousands of people fleeing into Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, and other locations constitutes a crisis. But there's no agreement about the solution: whether they should be welcomed, or prevented from entering. That split goes so deep that the two sides can't even agree on what the people entering Europe should be called. To those who view them sympathetically, they're refugees; to those who want them kept out, they're migrants. So which side is right? The answer's complicated. For people in developed countries, there's a big difference between someone who choo...

    Two decades of frontier-free travel across Europe unraveled on Monday as countries re-established border controls in the face of an unprecedented influx of migrants, which broke the record for the most arrivals by land in a single day. Germany's surprise decision to restore border controls on Sunday had a swift domino effect, prompting neighbors to impose checks at their own frontiers as thousands of refugees pressed north and west across the continent while Hungary sealed the main informal border crossing point into the European Union. A majority of EU interior ministers, meeting in Brussels, agreed in principle to share out 120,000 asylum seekers on top of some 40,000 distributed on a voluntary basis so far, EU president Luxembourg said. But details of the deal, to be fo...

    More than 11,000 families in Iceland have offered to open their homes to Syrian refugees in a bid to raise the government’s cap of just 50 asylum seekers a year. They responded to a call by author Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir, who set up a Facebook group with an open letter to the country’s welfare minister, Eygló Harðardóttir, asking her to allow people to help. Ms Bjorgvinsdottir said she knew someone who could house five Syrians fleeing the country’s brutal civil war, requesting work permits, residents papers and “basic human rights” in exchange for paying for their flight and helping them integrate into national society. In the letter, she said she started the group to show the level of public support for welcoming more refugees, who Ms Bjorgvinsdottir called “human resourc...

    On Sunday, the Kremlin released a strange, awkward video of Russian President Vladimir Putin working out with Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. The camera follows the two men silently lifting weights in a sun-dappled pavilion at the Bocharov Ruchei government residence in Sochi, going from exercise to exercise on the kind of self-balancing weight machines that your CrossFit-obsessed friends are always making fun of. The decision to release footage of the most powerful man in Russia frowning through a set of calf raises in unflattering sweatpants might seem, to a casual observer, odd. But this is all part of the long-running and quite carefully scripted Putin Adventure public affairs strategy. It follows years of other photo ops and staged videos that are basically official P...

    An employee of France’s national rail operator SNCF has revealed being paid €5,000 (£3,550) per month to do absolutely "nothing" for 12 years, it emerged on Friday. However, rather than being delighted with the situation, he has filed a complaint for "compensation", saying the sinecure put the brakes on his promising career. Charles Simon told French media that his employer, which runs France’s trains including the fast TGVs, took him off his day job in 2003 after he blew the whistle on a case of suspected fraud to the tune of €20 million. Since then he has received €5,000 per month net while staying at home with the status "available" for work. “Each month I receive a new salary statement and a bank transfer. Last month, just like every year in June, I also received a bon...

    An aggressive squirrel was 'arrested' by the German police after a woman complained that the rodent was following her around, reports NDTV. According to the report, the police received an unusual emergency call from a young woman in Bottrop in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), complaining that while walking down the street in the West German city, she found herself being chased by the squirrel. Unable to shake the animal off, she eventually called the police for help and an officer was quick to come to her aid. After capturing the rodent, officers brought it back to the station, where it was discovered that the animal was showing symptoms of exhaustion, local reported. The squirrel had been 'arrested' and taken into custody, police said in a press release. Police in Nort...

    Premium 'Ghost airport' worth €1bn sold for just & euro;10K Spain's "ghost airport" - that cost hundreds of millions of euros to build and which became a notorious symbol of the excess of the country's bonanza years has been sold to a group of British and Asian investors for just €10,000 (£7,000). Ciudad Real airport airport, in the central Castilla-La Mancha region, has been closed since 2012, despite opening only four years prior to closure. The regional authorities raised an estimated €1billion in private investment to build it. They had hoped it would draw millions of visitors each year to Ciudad Real and the surrounding area, which is known as the home of Miguel de Cervantes’s fictional knight Don Quixote. But the airport itself soon became seen as...