Germany’s economic growth shrank for a second straight year in 2024, data released Wednesday showed. How to revive it this year has become a central issue as voters prepare to go to the polls next month to elect a new government. Manufacturing of automobiles and machinery fell sharply last year, as increased competition, especially from […]

Germany’s government on Wednesday approved a reform to help the heirs of Jewish collectors recover Nazi-looted art, introducing a binding arbitration tribunal to adjudicate claims. The new body replaces an advisory panel, whose decisions could not be legally enforced. The new system, the result of lengthy negotiations between Germany’s federal government and its 16 states, […]

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, spoke on Wednesday in Paris of the challenges already posed to U.S. alliances by the imminent return of Donald J. Trump to the White House, and said they believed that an American takeover of Greenland was an impossible idea. But they also asserted […]

When mysterious drones began appearing over oil rigs and wind farms off Norway’s coast about three years ago, officials were not certain where they came from. But “we knew what they were doing,” Stale Ulriksen, a researcher at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, said in a recent interview. “Some of it was espionage, where they […]

He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s seven-month-old Labour government, a […]

Syria’s new leaders are set to meet the French and German foreign ministers in the capital, Damascus, on Friday in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s top diplomat, and Jean-Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, arrived in Damascus for the first such […]