Europe

Issued on: 14/11/2020 – 22:25 A silk shoe that belonged to Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France who was executed during the French Revolution, will go up for auction on Sunday with a starting price of €10,000 ($11,800). Advertising Read more The sale takes place in the Palace of Versailles, where the queen – who has gone down in history as a symbol of the excesses of the French monarchy – and King Louis XVI held court before they were guillotined in 1793. The shoe bears her name on its heel and Jean-Pierre Osenat, of the auction house that is conducting the sale, said she is thought to have worn it regularly during daily life at the palace. During the French Revolution, the shoe ended up in the possession of Marie-Emilie Leschevin, a close friend of the queen's head chambermaid, and whose husband was later killed by the guillotine. Her family held on to it for generations before it came to auction 227 years after her death. "This auction is coming at a time when F..

Issued on: 15/11/2020 – 22:27 The World Health Organization's coronavirus dashboard on Sunday showed a record daily number of new Covid-19 cases over the weekend as France registered 27,228 new cases and a further 302 deaths over the past 24 hours, according to health ministry data. Advertising Read more The WHO's figures for Saturday showed that 660,905 coronavirus cases were reported to the UN health agency, setting a new high watermark. That number, and the 645,410 registered on Friday, surpassed the previous daily record high of 614,013 recorded on November 7. Within Saturday's new case numbers, the WHO's Americas region registered a one-day record high of 269,225 new confirmed cases. Within each week, the pattern of cases being reported to the WHO tends to peak towards Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and dip around Tuesday and Wednesday. According to the WHO's figures, there have been more than 53.7 million confirmed cases of the disease in total s..

A French teenager has attended the first day of a trial against 13 people accused of sending abusive messages after she posted videos criticising Islam. Mila was 16 when her first Instagram clip went viral. She has since received 100,000...

Russian police have detained more than 2,000 people in a crackdown on protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, monitors say. Tens of thousands of people defied a heavy police presence to join some of the largest rallies...

Thousands of refugees and migrants urgently need proper shelter in Bosnia-Herzegovina after weeks outdoors in freezing cold, the UN has warned. Some 2,500 people are in unheated tents or sleeping rough near the northern town of Bihac. A UN official...

A top Swedish official involved in the coronavirus response has defended a Christmas holiday in the Canary Islands in the face of heavy criticism. Dan Eliasson is head of the civil contingencies agency, which earlier in December had texted all...

France is to mobilise 100,000 police and gendarmes on New Year's Eve to crack down on parties and enforce a curfew imposed to combat coronavirus. The plan also aims to prevent urban unrest, which has seen large numbers of vehicles...

Four people have been seriously injured after a shooting in Berlin in the early hours of Saturday, police say. Heavily armed police officers were deployed to the scene in the Kreuzberg district, German media report. The four injured were aged...

A former associate of deceased US financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has been placed under formal investigation and remanded in custody in France on suspicion of sex crimes. French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel is accused of sexual harassment and...

A Paris court has found 14 people guilty of involvement in a series of deadly militant Islamist attacks. The January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine, a policewoman and a Jewish supermarket left 17 people dead. Eleven defendants appeared in...