Britain should not engage in free trade with countries that abuse human rights, but proposals that the country’s courts should decide whether genocide has been committed by trade partners is flawed, foreign minister Dominic Raab said.

Russia yesterday said it was withdrawing from the Open Skies treaty, undermining a post-Cold War defence accord that allows its signatories to carry out unarmed surveillance flights over each other’s territories.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte's government resigned on Friday, accepting responsibility for wrongful accusations of fraud by the tax authorities that drove thousands of families to financial ruin, often on the basis of ethnicity.

A French court yesterday gave suspended jail terms to three soldiers convicted over the death by drowning of a trainee officer during an initiation ritual at the country’s most prestigious military academy.

A French court has launched an investigation into Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti for alleged conflict of interest relating to his time as a lawyer, prosecutors told AFP yesterday.

The Moscow metro said Sunday it had hired female drivers for the first time in its recent history, following recent changes in controversial Russian legislation prohibiting women from many professions.

The opposition Greens and the far-left Die Linke are fiercely opposed.

The number of deaths in the Netherlands increased at the highest rate since World War Two this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Dutch national statistics office (CBS) said on Tuesday.

The European Union began a vaccine rollout Saturday, even as countries in the bloc were forced back into lockdown by a new strain of the virus, believed to be more infectious, that continues to spread from Britain.

France recorded its first case of the new variant of coronavirus, as the number of cases and deaths from Covid-19 mounted in the country, increasing concerns of a new wave of the virus hitting the euro zone’s second-biggest economy.

Britain clinched a Brexit trade deal with the European Union on Thursday, just seven days before it exits one of the world’s biggest trading blocs in its most significant global shift since the loss of empire.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson held the fate of a post-Brexit trade deal in their hands yesterday as talks hung in the balance.

Three French police officers were shot dead when a man opened fire on them when they arrived at a house in a remote village in response to a call about domestic violence against a woman, police said today.

Europe's medicines regulator on Monday approved the use of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by US company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, putting the EU on course to start inoculations within a week.

The EU’s chief negotiator yesterday said there had been good progress in trade talks with Britain that aim to prevent a turbulent finale to the Brexit crisis in two weeks’ time.

European Union states will start vaccinations against Covid-19 in 10 days as Europe tries to catch up with Britain and United States after what some have criticised as a slow EU approval process for the shots.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday said that Britain and the European Union remain far apart, as he prepares to head to Brussels to try to salvage a post-Brexit trade deal.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the UN Security Council no longer provides good solutions to global problems, in remarks published yesterday, and called for an overhaul of international cooperation mechanisms.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in self-isolation yesterday after a contact tested positive for the coronavirus while spiralling infections in the United States saw stay-at-home measures imposed on Chicago, its third-biggest city.

French President Emmanuel Macron has said his country is fighting “Islamist separatism, never Islam”, responding to a Financial Times article that he claimed misquoted him and has since been removed from the newspaper’s website.