It comes as more than a month's worth of rain fell in 24 hours in parts of north-west England.

The suspected gunman killed nine people "of migrant background" in shisha bars on Wednesday night.

A man in his 70s is injured in the attack, which police are not treating as terror related.

Twelve British nationals suspected of running the underground factory in Spain were arrested.

The UK Foreign Office said October's attack was designed to undermine Georgia's sovereignty.

Academic and electronic musician Bertolt Meyer has hacked into his prosthetic arm and connected it to his synth.

The Hanau crime fuels fears that Germany has underestimated the far-right terror threat.

FOR A GLIMPSE of how immigration is changing Poland, head to Hala Koszyki, an Instagram-friendly food hall in the middle of Warsaw. Take an Uber and there is a good chance the driver will be from Belarus. Inside, Ukrainian waiters and chefs toil over sushi and tapas. Outside, straddling their scooters, a group of UberEats riders from India and elsewhere in South Asia wait to take orders from any Varsovians who fancy a night in.

Poland, one of the EU’s most homogenous countries, is becoming a country of immigration. It took in more workers from outside the EU in 2018 than any other country—nearly five times more than Germany—and is likely to have repeated the trick again in 2019. Nearly 2m Ukrainians have arrived since 2014, pushed by a ropy national economy and a war in the country’s east, and pulled by higher wages in Poland. They are not alone. In the past three years 36,000 Nepalese, 20,000 Indians and 18,000 Bangladeshis have moved to Poland. It is a big shift: Poland, a country of 38m inhabitants, had only 100,000 foreigners of any stripe in 2011. Migration is seen as a political faultline in the EU, with an open west set against a closed east. Yet Poland is, quietly, starting to look more like its peers in western Europe.

Unfortunately, Poland is being a bit too European about it. Western Europe turned to...

A BROAD GRIN spreads across Aboubacar Koumbassa’s face as he displays the result of his morning’s class: a tray of oven-hot pains-aux-raisins (currant pastries), which he and his classmates have baked for the first time. The 18-year-old, in a white chef’s cap and apron, had originally hoped for an apprenticeship as an electrician. But it was easier to secure one at a bakery. He now spends one week in three in the classroom, travelling over an hour by train. The other two weeks he is learning on the job. “I made the right choice,” he says, carefully inspecting his pastry, “because this is teamwork. Here we learn the theory, and at my firm we are really working.”

Apprenticeships offer a much-needed path out of France’s highly academic school system and into the world of work. The Campus des Métiers, where Mr Koumbassa studies, lies in the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, a neighbourhood of brutalist tower blocks with a poverty rate twice the national average. The centre trains some 1,400 apprentices, in subjects ranging from car mechanics and plumbing to hairdressing and patisserie.

On the building’s first floor, hairdressing students are practising basic trimming and advanced colouring techniques on plastic model heads. “Whatever your level, what matters is your motivation,” the teacher they...

IN MATTERS OF sex and politics, French insouciance rules that the public interest stops at the bedroom door. Presidents have often kept mistresses. Public opinion shrugs off such dalliances. While in office, François Hollande was photographed astride a scooter visiting his lover. In 1899 Félix Faure died in his mistress’s arms at the Elysée Palace.

Yet on February 14th Benjamin Griveaux, Emmanuel Macron’s struggling candidate for mayor of Paris, made history by standing down after a private sex video he made was posted online. Mr Griveaux, a close ally of the president, did not dispute its authenticity. In 2018 he sent the clip via an app to a woman with whom he was having a consensual liaison. On February 12th the video was posted by Pyotr Pavlensky, a Russian political artist, on a pornographic website along with an article denouncing Mr Griveaux. Within 48 hours he resigned.

To some this marks a cultural shift: the end of French tolerance of sexual indiscretion in public life. It represents the “Americanisation” of French politics, wrote one commentator; the embrace of “puritanism”, said another. That it was an effort to bring down Mr Griveaux is not in doubt. Mr Pavlensky, who once nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Moscow’s Red Square and was granted political asylum in France, said he was out to expose Mr...

ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS across the globe are bracing themselves for the Lenten fast, a seven-week period of vegan fare and prayer that starts on March 2nd. But few expect this annual ritual to close the rift that runs through eastern Christendom. A dispute that flared a year ago over the proclamation of an independent church in Ukraine has ricocheted across all the other countries where Orthodox Christianity is practised. Diplomats in Moscow, Washington and elsewhere are watching, because behind the arcane arguments over history and canon law lies a geopolitical standoff.

From the beginning, President Vladimir Putin and his supporters have denounced the new Ukrainian body as an encroachment on Russia’s spiritual sphere of influence and a machination of American diplomacy. The United States backs Ukraine’s right to ecclesiastical independence. Mike Pompeo, the American secretary of state, made a point of meeting the new Ukrainian primate, Metropolitan Epifaniy, when visiting Kiev on January 31st. Both deplored religious persecution in Russian-controlled bits of Ukraine and laid flowers in memory of slain Ukrainian soldiers.

The global row formally pits Bartholomew I, the Istanbul-based Patriarch of Constantinople who inaugurated the new Ukrainian body, against Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. The former has a historic role as “...

TRADITIONALLY, CHINESE ambassadors are restrained, colourless figures who emerge from the wallpaper only to object ritually that any criticism of their government is an insult to Chinese people. Gui Congyou, China’s ambassador to Sweden, has taken a different tack. He and his embassy denounce journalists and public figures for perceived slights on an almost weekly basis, a pace so unusual it has been studied by Swedish political scientists. He has been summoned to Sweden’s foreign ministry more than 40 times in two years.

But Mr Gui has only grown more outspoken. Interviewed on Swedish public radio in November, he sounded like a gangster: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.” Mr Gui offers a glimpse of a newly forceful brand of Chinese diplomacy (see article). The regime is quicker to take offence, and retaliates more harshly.

Sweden has friendly business ties with Chinese companies: Volvo is now owned by a Chinese carmaker, and Swedes are happy with that relationship. But the two countries are at odds over human rights. In 2015 Gui Minhai (no relation to the ambassador), a Swedish national who was a bookseller in Hong Kong, disappeared in Thailand and reappeared months later in Chinese custody. His crime seemed...

RARELY ARE the ramifications of a four-letter word so great as in the case of Yukos, a defunct Russian oil firm. On February 18th a Dutch appeals court ruled that the Russian state owes Yukos’s shareholders $50bn, one of the largest awards ever, for bankrupting the company using bogus tax-fraud charges. That reinstated a decision in 2014 by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), an international dispute-resolution court in The Hague. In 2016 a lower Dutch court had overturned the ruling, finding that the PCA lacked jurisdiction. The issue largely hinged on a single clause in an international energy treaty—specifically on how to interpret its use of the word “such”.

The seizure of Yukos was a turning-point in President Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power. In 2003 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Yukos’s CEO and largest shareholder (and Russia’s wealthiest man), had begun financing opposition parties and hinted at running for president. Mr Putin confronted him, and the government charged the company with $27bn in tax violations. Mr Khodorkovsky went to prison for a decade. Yukos was broken up and sold to state-controlled firms at fire-sale prices.

As the company was being devoured, its owners and managers began filing lawsuits. They no longer included Mr Khodorkovsky, who during his trial had transferred his shares to a...

Only those who are well can travel, and they will be quarantined on their return, it is understood.

Nine people are shot dead in two shisha bars in Hanau in a case being investigated as terrorism.

Roma are set to have talks with other European clubs about raising awareness of missing children after a groundbreaking social media campaign.

It had been argued that the Jägermeister logo could offend Swiss Christians.

Once a year the citizens of the old medieval town of Ivrea gather in the main square to hurl oranges.

Leaders are meeting this week to discuss budget plans in challenging discussions.

As the Irish parliament convenes to try to choose its new leader, concerns about inequality linger.