Angela Merkel backs fellow conservative for chancellor ahead of tight German vote
CBC
Germans vote in a national election on Sunday that looks too close to call, with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) mounting a strong challenge to retiring Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.
Merkel has been in power since 2005 but plans to step down after the election, making the vote an era-changing event to set the future course of Europe's largest economy.
A fractured electorate means that after the election, leading parties will sound each other out before embarking on more formal coalition negotiations that could take months, leaving Merkel, 67, in charge in a caretaker role.
Campaigning in his home constituency of Aachen alongside Merkel, conservative candidate Armin Laschet said on Saturday that a leftist alliance led by the SPD with the Greens and the hard-left Die Linke (The Left) party would destabilize Europe.
"They want to pull us out of NATO, they don't want this alliance, they want another republic," said Laschet, who is 60. "I don't want the Linke to be in the next government."
Running against Laschet is Olaf Scholz of the SPD, the finance minister in Merkel's right-left coalition who won all three televised debates between the leading candidates.
Scholz, 63, has not ruled out a leftist alliance with The Left but said NATO membership was a red line for the SPD.
The death toll from unrest in Iran climbed to almost 2,600, a rights group said on Wednesday, as Tehran stepped up diplomatic contacts with U.S.-allies in the region over a crisis that has drawn threats of intervention from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Erfan Soltani, a 26-year-old Iranian man, has been sentenced to death in Iran, according to human rights groups. It comes amid widespread protests in the country and a deadly government crackdown.
The United States is telling its citizens to leave Iran, as Washington maintains its pressure on Tehran to cease its crackdown on protesters and U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to strike the Iranian government over the issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may meet Iranian officials and was in contact with the opposition as he weighed a range of strong responses, including military options, to a violent crackdown on Iranian protests, which pose one of the biggest challenges to clerical rule since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
A crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran has killed at least 538 people and even more are feared dead, activists said Sunday, while Tehran warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be "legitimate targets" if America uses force to protect demonstrators.
For years, many of Venezuela’s exiles in Spain — leading opposition figures and citizens — have hoped for a day when ousted president Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela has shifted the ground for guerrilla groups operating across the country's borderlands with Colombia, raising fears of possible betrayal by Venezuelan regime officials, while opening the door to a wider conflict should U.S. boots ever hit the ground, local security experts say.
Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark on Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
Russia didn’t just use a hypersonic missile to target a site in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, in the European Union, but high ranking officials then went on to boast about the power of the nuclear-capable weapon, in what some saw as a clear warning to the West.
The official White House narrative of how a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen in her vehicle in Minneapolis is bumping hard up against what can be seen in videos of the incident.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.
When Marco Rubio took the lectern at Mar-a-Lago shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the country had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it was the culmination of a decade of effort from the secretary of state and a clear sign that he had emerged as a leading voice within the Trump administration.
The catchphrase going into Tuesday's coalition of the willing meeting on Ukraine in Paris appears to be: expect the unexpected.