German Chancellor Angela Merkel has once again defended her stance on allowing asylum seekers into Germany despite her party’s loss at local elections apparently over the government’s refugee policy. “I consider the fundamental decisions as right, but there is much to be done to win back trust and the topic of integration will play a huge role, as well as the repatriation of those who don’t gain residency rights,” Merkel said during a speech in the lower house of the German parliament in the capital Berlin on Wednesday.

The remarks came just three days after a stunning defeat suffered by her party, the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), from an anti-refugee party in regional elections. On Sunday, Merkel’s CDU party fell to third place after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) gained the first place in the contest, according to exit polls.

Merkel said her government has expedited integration measures for those refugees who are granted asylum, including by raising school funding to help their education and by trying to find solutions for local problems through working with cities and states. “The situation today is many times better than a year ago, but there remains a lot to do,” she said. Merkel has been under fire at home since last year, when she opened the country’s borders to the massive influx of asylum seekers, mostly fleeing violence in Middle Eastern and African states.

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A new poll shows Jeremy Corbyn is set to win the Labour leadership election in a landslide victory by an even bigger margin than last year. A YouGov survey  for British paper The Times found that of all those entitled to vote in the Labour leader contest, 62 percent would vote for Corbyn and only 38 percent would vote for rival Owen Smith. In a major blow to Smith, this result would represent an increase in support for Corbyn compared to the results of the 2015 leadership election – where he won 59.5 percent of the vote.

This increase in supporters would be a significant achievement given the controversial move to charge a £25 fee for new pro-Corbyn voters. The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) ruled that only Labour members who signed up before January 12 are automatically eligible to vote. Those who joined afterwards or want a one-off vote will have to pay a fee of £25.

Corbyn has remained steadfast in staying as the party’s leader since being elected only a year ago. The 67-year-old socialist leader has been heavily criticized by the UK’s mainstream media throughout his tenure and overcame pressures to resign.

Labour has been engulfed in a bitter internal power struggle between Corbyn’s supporters in the grassroots membership and the party’s lawmakers, who overwhelmingly rejected his leadership after Britain’s vote to leave the EU. As a result, many of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet members resigned and publicly stated they had no confidence in his leadership.

Smith, a former shadow work and pension’s secretary, announced his decision to run in the Labour leadership election in June. He resigned earlier this year from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before challenging for the leadership. Corbyn has until September 21 to appeal to voters and defeat Smith. The results will be announced in a Liverpool conference three days later.

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Nicolas Sarkozy has announced he will seek his party’s nomination to stand in next year’s French presidential election. The rightwinger, who was nicknamed “the hyper-president” for his frenetic term in power from 2007 to 2012, had made no secret of his ambition to reconquer the Élysée palace and avenge his 2012 defeat by the Socialist François Hollande

After weeks of suspense in which he grabbed media headlines by presenting an increasingly hardline stance on national identity and the place of Islam in France, Sarkozy launched his campaign with an announcement on social media and a link to the first chapter of a book, Everything for France, which he will publish this week.

“The next five years will be filled with danger but also with hope,” he wrote. He listed what he said were the five major challenges facing France, including defending French identity, restoring lost competitiveness and enforcing state authority.

Sarkozy said France’s “top battle” was over how “to defend our lifestyle without being tempted to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world”.

In his fight to win his party’s nomination, the 61-year-old candidate is putting forward a platform of policies that veer even further to the far right than in 2012, when he set out to win over voters from Marine Le Pen’s Front National.

He wants to ban the Muslim headscarf from universities and public companies, limit the French nationality rights of children born to foreign parents, and Alain Juppé meaning Muslim and Jewish children would no longer be offered a substitute meal.

He has also scoffed at what he called “legal niceties” in the fight against terrorism, prompting the left to warn that his treatment of suspected jihadis could be akin to that of Guantánamo Bay.

For the first time, the French right and centre is holding an open contest to choose its presidential candidate. Anyone on the electoral register can vote if they pay €2 (£1.72) and sign a pledge saying they adhere to “the values of the right and centre”. Up to three or four million people could turn out to vote in the two-round ballot on 20 and 27 November.

Sarkozy is the challenger and not the favourite in the right’s primary race. The leader in the polls and currently France’s favourite politician is Alain Juppé the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister, who served as Sarkozy’s foreign minister.

Juppé, 71, has undergone a staggering image transformation. Twenty years ago he was the most loathed prime minister in modern times after his pension changes brought 2 million people on to the streets in protest. Now he is seen as a calm, elder statesman and a moderate, pushing pro-business structural reform and less divisive on identity issues.

Sarkozy believes that the climate of fear and anxiety in France after the deaths of more than 230 people in terrorist attack claimed by Islamists in the past 19 months means the nation needs a man of authority such as himself.

One hurdle for Sarkozy beyond winning over right and centre-right sympathisers is his lasting unpopularity among the wider French population who still dislike his abrasive personality and his hard-to-shake-off label of “president of the rich”.

He must also get around his lacklustre economic record in office – he promised to restore the values of work and reward, yet left France with many more unemployed – as well as judicial investigations into party financing relating to his 2012 presidential campaign, in which he denies any wrongdoing.

The Guardian

UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn says the challenge to his leadership has created a “massive opportunity” to unite people across the country. Addressing up to 10,000 of his supporters at a campaign event in Liverpool on Monday, Corbyn said the ongoing battle for leadership in the party provides an opportunity to unite Britons against the “Tory philosophy.”

“I don’t see this leadership contest as a distraction,” said Corbyn. “I see it as a massive opportunity to reach out to people all across this country and have the strength and confidence [to stand up to] those who tell us that nothing we’re trying to do is possible, that what we have to do is compromise with the Tory philosophy and free market ideas and all will be well.”

Corbyn, who needs to beat former BBC producer Owen Smith in order to keep his throne as the opposition leader, described the audience as the largest crowd he had at a leadership campaign rally.

“This is a campaign about, on one level, the leadership of the Labour Party, but it’s also a campaign about how we do politics in our society,” he noted, before getting more specific about issues such as mental health services, workers’ rights and homelessness.

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UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will only need to challenge former shadow work and pensions secretary Owen Smith to preserve his position as the opposition leader, following Angela Eagle’s decision to drop out of the race. Registrations for the leadership vote closed on Wednesday, and Smith was the only challenger left in the race. He now faces an uphill battle as the latest YouGov poll has put him 20 points behind Corbyn.

Eagle ended her bid on Tuesday because of a failure to attract enough endorsements from Labour lawmakers to continue. This means Corbyn and Smith have until December 21 to appeal to voters and party members. The results will be announced in a Liverpool conference three days later.

As a Welsh MP and a former BBC producer, Smith is barely known outside Westminster and Wales, but his supporters hope he can dethrone Corbyn. Smith, who pitches himself as the candidate who can “save” the party, also faces criticism for his past as a lobbyist for the pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer and his support for the Iraq war.

Corbyn’s opponents challenged his leadership for what they call inadequate efforts to keep the UK in the European Union (EU). Nearly 52 percent of British voters made it clear in a referendum on June 23 that they wanted their country out of the bloc. Corbyn was a fierce opponent of the decision and vouched for a stronger UK role in the EU instead. Smith himself is an admirer of Corbyn and has praised him for “helping Labour discover its radical roots.”

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband urged his supporters on Facebook to back Smith, saying, he “can build a Labour Party and a country of which we can be proud.” Eagle also announced that she will support Smith against Corbyn. Smith has offered her a senior job in his shadow cabinet if he wins.

By Tuesday, more than 55,000 people had paid £25 to vote in the race and the number was expected to rise before the Wednesday deadline. However, many people were left out as they could not pay the registration fee. A fund that had raised more than £14,000 in three days to help those voters was shut down after the party’s National Executive Committe said it was in violation of its rules.

“The figure of £25 is a discriminatory price that will clearly exclude a great many from being able to take part in this vote,” said Lauren Ashby, a party member who had set up the fundraiser.

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France’s far-right leader has called on Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to resign, saying the steeply increasing death toll from terrorist attacks in France is clear evidence of the need for changes in the French government.   

During a speech on Saturday, two days after the deadly terrorist attack in Nice, French National Front Party Leader Marine Le Pen said, “In any other country in the world, a minister with a toll as horrendous as Bernard Cazeneuve — 250 dead in 18 months — would have quit.”

The French government is facing severe criticism from opposition politicians and newspapers following the Nice attack, the third major terrorist attack on the French soil in 18 months.

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Austria’s former presidential candidate Norbert Hofer has warned that his country could hold a British-like referendum on leaving the European Union within a year. The far-right leader of the Freedom Party (FPOe), who narrowly failed to become the head of state in last month’s presidential run-off in Austria, warned the EU to avoid any moves towards political “centralization.” “If a course is set within a year further towards centralization instead of taking (the EU’s) core values into account, then we must ask Austrians whether they want to be members,” he said.

Hofer made the threat after the British people voted on Thursday to leave the European Union.   Hofer and his allies believe that the union should be based on economic rather than political cooperation. “The founding fathers (of the EU) wanted to ensure closer economic cooperation because states that cooperate economically do not wage war against each other,” Hofer said. “That worked very well until the political union was founded.” Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, however, ruled out the possibility of holding a referendum on EU membership, which is dubbed “Auxit” vote.

Campaigning for Britain’s EU referendum scheduled for next week has been suspended for a second day as the nation remains in shock from the murder of Jo Cox, a Member of Parliament (MP) who was pro-Europe. Cox, a 41-year-old former aid worker and pro-EU campaigner known for her advocacy on behalf of Syrian refugees, was killed on Thursday outside a library where she regularly met constituents in Birstall in northern England.

Cox, a Labour Party MP, had been repeatedly shot and stabbed, witnesses told local media. Following the attack, both sides in Britain’s June 23 EU referendum on staying or leaving the bloc said they were suspending their campaigns. British Prime Minister David Cameron also pulled out of a planned rally in Gibraltar, a British overseas territory located on the southern end of Spain in Mediterranean Sea.

The Stronger in Europe camp, which campaigns in favor of the UK’s continued membership of the EU, said it was “suspending all campaigning” for Thursday and Friday, while a spokesperson for the rival Vote Leave group, an organization that campaigns for Britain to leave the EU, said their “battle bus” was returning to headquarters.

Her attacker is reported to have shouted “put Britain first” at least twice. A 52-year-old man, named locally as Tommy Mair, has been arrested. According to British media, Mair, may have had extreme right-wing leanings. “Britain First” is the name of a far-right anti-immigration group. Police said an investigation was under way to determine the motive of the murder, the first killing of an MP since Ian Gow was killed by a car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army in 1990.

Earlier on Thursday, dozens gathered outside the Parliament in a vigil to remember Cox, including Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was flanked by tearful party colleagues. “What’s happened is beyond appalling. We are here in silent memory of her loss,” said Corbyn. “She was a fearless campaigner, and a voice for the voiceless. We feel shaken,” said Fatima Ibrahim, 23, an activist with the Avaaz civic organisation.

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The French Senate has voted for a resolution aimed at lifting EU sanctions that were imposed on Russia over the crisis in eastern Ukraine and reunification with Crimea back in 2014. An influential senator says the future of the French Republic is “inconceivable without dialogue with Russia.”

The non-binding motion was approved in the Luxembourg Palace on Wednesday with 302 senators voting in favor of the proposal and only 16 against the move, which stipulates a gradual scaling down of anti-Moscow restrictive measures.

According to French media reports, the motion cannot pressure the government because the renewal of the embargo is made in Brussels and requires unanimity of the 28 Member States. During the Senate debates on the draft resolution, Jean-Pierre Raffarin (seen below), the French premier from 2002 through 2005 and currently a senator, said “France’s future is inconceivable without dialogue with Russia… The text of the resolution is well-balanced and that’s why I’ll vote for it.”

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