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Several Muslim suspects have been arrested in France, Germany and Austria for allegedly planning Christmas terror attacks, according to reports, which say there’s a “very high level of terrorist threat” from Islamic terrorists in France. Spain is also on alert.In France, five men, aged 20 to 23, were apprehended in Meurthe-et-Moselle, Le Parisien reported, saying French intelligence services had been surveilling the men for links to criminal terrorist associations and they were found scouting Strasbourg Christmas market.A video filmed at the market featuring one suspect saying, “And there, we shoot,” was found during a raid. These men are believed to...

Germany’s most in-the-red towns could soon get help from the government, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Saturday. In an interview with the Funke media group, Scholz said Berlin “has signaled its willingness” to help remove a €40 billion ($44 billion) debt from local authorities on a “one-off basis.” Out of Germany’s 11,000 local authorities, Scholz said the plan concerns “around 2,500 cities and municipalities that are squeezed by so much debt that they can barely breathe.” Removing the debt would likely set local authorities up to spend more on much-needed infrastructure repairs and renovations on schools, kindergartens and swimming...

Angela Merkel on Monday tapped the popular female premier of Germany's tiny Saarland state to take over as secretary general of her conservative party, fuelling speculation the veteran chancellor is lining up her successor. At a joint Berlin press conference, Merkel said she was "moved" that close confidante Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, 55, would take the reins from her right-hand man Peter Tauber at "a difficult time" for their Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. The surprise reshuffle comes after Tauber said at the weekend he was stepping down for health reasons, and with Merkel struggling to form a new government after a...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has nominated Saarland State Premier Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to be the CDU's next secretary general. She will take over from Peter Tauber, who is stepping down due to health reasons.

The widespread occurrence of peculiar samples in the Nalbach area covering many square kilometers and exhibiting convincing indications of high temperatures and high pressures, in particular the mineralogical evidence of strong shock, establishes a meteorite impact event in the Holocene as a matter of fact according to the generally accepted opinion that shock metamorphism in rocks proves a meteorite impact. The young Holocene age is concluded from the concentration of the peculiar finds in the upper soil layers, the very fresh status of the impact glasses and the young appearance of the now discovered probable impact crater. Using impact scaling...

Saarland’s minister-president stirred anger on Wednesday by comparing the prospect of gay marriage to incest and polygamy. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), told the Saarbrücker Zeitung that she was worried about the consequences of changing the definition of marriage—currently narrowly defined as being between a man and a woman in the German Constitution. “If we open up this definition to become a long-term responsible partnership between two adults, then other demands can’t be ruled out, such as a marriage between close relatives or between more than two people,” she opined. …

German public sector workers fighting plans to extend their working hours have widened their strike action to cover most of the country. An estimated 20,000 local and regional authority staff including nurses, cooks and cleaners have joined the largest public sector strike in 14 years. They are protesting against plans to extend weekly working hours by 90 minutes, from 38.5 to 40 hours a week. The industrial action...has now spread to 10 of Germany's 16 states... Leaders at Verdi - Germany's biggest union with 2.4 million members - have warned that the strikes could last for up to six weeks.

BERLIN (AFP) - German voters in the state of Saarland vented their anger at Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's harsh labour market reforms, dealing his Social Democrats their worst defeat there in four decades. Despite low turnout, voters still left the Social Democrats (SPD) smarting by slashing the party's score by one third from 44.4 percent in the last state election in 1999 to a dismal 30.8 percent, according to provisional results. It was the worst result for the SPD in Saarland since 1960. The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took advantage of weeks of protests that had seen tens of thousands...