Police detained more than 3,000 people and broke up rallies in Moscow and across Russia yesterday as supporters of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny braved the bitter cold and a massive show of police force to demand he be set free.

The brother and aides of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny were placed under house arrest on Friday ahead of new rallies, as Russian authorities warned that protesters could face charges of taking part in “mass unrest”.

The World Health Organization’s European branch yesterday said it is too early to ease virus restrictions in Europe despite a drop in new cases in most countries.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was set to hand in his resignation to the head of state on Tuesday, hoping to be given the opportunity to try and put together a new coalition and rebuild his parliamentary majority.

Britain’s unemployment rate hit its highest in nearly five years in the three months to November, when coronavirus cases began to rise for a second time and most of the country returned to a partial lockdown.

As the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 death toll approaches 100,000, grief-stricken relatives of the dead expressed anger at Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the worst public health crisis in a century.

A 22-year-old Italian linked to white supremacist groups was arrested yesterday on terrorism charges, Italian police said.

Google and a French publishers' lobby said on Thursday they had agreed to a copyright framework for the US tech giant to pay news publishers for content online, in a first for Europe.

The toll from a powerful explosion caused by a gas leak that gutted a building in a residential part of Madrid rose to four yesterday after a priest died from his injuries.

Central Europeans of the Bronze Age used bronze rings, ribs and axe blades that were roughly standardised in their shape and weight as an early form of “euros,” according to a new study.

At least two people died and eight were injured on Wednesday when a building in central Madrid belonging to the Catholic Church was blown apart by an explosion, local authorities said.

Several thousand people held an unauthorised protest in Amsterdam on Sunday against a national lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, before being dispersed by riot police.

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.