Experts say there is a good chance this time that Estonia's next president will be elected in the Riigikogu. Among the few names mentioned publicly so far, analysts consider Chancellor of Justice Ülle Madise the strongest candidate.

The number of travelers passing through Estonia's southeastern border crossing points has increased significantly during the summer vacation season, leading to heavier bus traffic at the border.

Experts say there is a good chance this time that Estonia's next president will be elected in the Riigikogu. Among the few names mentioned publicly so far, analysts consider Chancellor of Justice Ülle Madise the strongest candidate.

Non-parliamentary party Parempoolsed missed the deadline for filing its 2025 financial report, marking the fourth year in a row it has failed to submit its annual filing on time.

The number of travelers passing through Estonia's southeastern border crossing points has increased significantly during the summer vacation season, leading to heavier bus traffic at the border.

Thousands of households across the island of Hiiumaa were left without electricity Friday evening after thunderstorms, with power restored later the same night.

Inglismaa jõudis Mehhikosse, kuid lisaks ilmastikuoludele on neile tekkinud ka teine mure — kohalike toetajate provokatsioonitaktikad.

Kertu Moppel pani sotsiaalmeedias üürile oma hubase Tallinna korteri. Vaata, milline näeb välja kodu, mida näitleja ise kirjeldab kui «vaikset rahulikku pesa vaiksel tänaval».

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the target is key infrastructure "that generates revenue for Russia's war".

Moscow's campaign for students to sign army contracts comes as the Kremlin seeks to sustain its war effort for a fifth year.

Employers are being urged to use their "common sense" to allow staff to work flexibly where they can.

Wedding lists are being replaced by cash requests, but guests are divided over how much to give.

France’s national football team has become an unlikely barometer for the country’s leading far-right party, whose leaders’ shifting rhetoric about the team reflects its broader attempts at moderation — from appeals around racial identity to working-class solidarity — and helps explain why the National Rally is now seen as having a genuine shot at the presidency after decades of falling short. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party known during his lifetime as the National Front, became perhaps the most vocal domestic antagonist of France’s football team as it emerged as an international force in the 1990s. After the country assembled a formidable squad led by nonwhite players with heritage from across its former colonial holdings, Le Pen disowned them as “fake Frenchmen who don’t sing the Marseillaise or visibly don’t know it.” “It’s a little bit artificial to bring in foreign players and baptize them ‘Equipe de France,’” Le Pen said in 1996, words he repeated even after the team won the World Cup two years later. “They put an Algerian in to please the Arabs, a Kanak who can’t even sing the national anthem, blacks to satisfy the Antillais. None of them has any place in a French team.” As Marine Le Pen prepared to succeed her father as leader of the party, she echoed his critique of the team as an example of France’s new migrants refusing to assimilate, calling the 2010 World Cup squad a collection of “ethnic, religious clans that are creating a sort of apartheid within the team itself.” “Most of these people consider themselves as representatives of France one minute, when they’re at the World Cup,” she said in a television interview at the time. “But the next, they feel like they belong to another country or have another nationality in their hearts.” As France’s governing parties weakened over the 2010s, Le Pen saw an opportunity to win support from traditional center-right constituencies. She insisted her party was “not racist,” ejected her father after he repeated statements denying the Holocaust, and rebranded the movement under a friendlier National Rally (RN) banner. Even if she was not ready to be a fan of the French national team — Le Pen conceded she “knows absolutely nothing about football” and expressed a preference for rugby — she was ready to abandon her father’s loud tradition of naysaying its successes. “It’s hard for the RN and far-right wing to be as blatantly critical of Les Bleus when the team has represented the nation well over the last decade in both their on- and off-pitch endeavors,” said Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a sports diplomacy expert who teaches at New York University’s Robert Preston Tisch Institute for Global Sport and is author of two books on sports in France. When France won a World Cup for the second time, in 2018, Le Pen made her target not the champions themselves but politicians who latched on to the team’s successes. Emmanuel Macron, the centrist who had defeated her for the presidency a year earlier, “should focus on the policies being implemented in France, about which there is much to say, and let Les Bleus go all the way to victory,” she told an interviewer. Sporting success, added Le Pen, “won’t make worries disappear, it won’t make the dangers of insecurity and terrorism disappear, it won’t make the financial struggles disappear.” It was part of a broader redirection of far-right resentments away from race and ethnicity to class and status, embodied by the yellow-vest protests that began months after that World Cup victory. Le Pen began to speak of France’s most famous athletes the way her father once dismissed Paris’ detached elites — “technocratic robots, graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, and bourgeois bohemians,” he said in a 2006 address to a party convention — rather than as ungrateful immigrants representing the country’s restive suburbs. The populist shift was evident in 2024, when several of the team’s top strikers all joined a swift counterattack against the National Rally following its gains in regional elections. French captain Kylian Mbappé called the outcome “catastrophic” and cautioned that “the extremes are knocking at the doors of power.” “When you have the luck to have a huge salary, be a multimillionaire, the chance to travel in a private jet, I am a little annoyed to see these sports figures giving lessons to people who struggle to make ends meet,” Jordan Bardella, a Le Pen protégé then leading the National Rally, responded to Mbappé. Now Bardella and Le Pen are waiting to see who will be the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections, a choice likely to be shaped by a looming court decision this week about Le Pen’s eligibility to run due to an embezzlement conviction. Polls show either candidate would be in a strong position to win the presidency. The two party leaders disagree on plenty of policy and political questions, but when it comes to France’s national team — now seen as favorites to again lift the World Cup trophy — Bardella and Le Pen are united in their messaging. “This tendency of actors, footballers and singers to tell the French how they should vote — particularly those earning 1,300 to 1,400 euros a month, while they themselves are millionaires or even billionaires — is starting to be very poorly received in our country,” Le Pen said after Mbappé stood by his anti-RN comments in a widely discussed Vanity Fair interview published just before the World Cup began. “Those people who are fortunate enough to live well, to be protected from insecurity, poverty and unemployment,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, should “maintain a certain reserve.”

Listen on Spotify Apple Music Amazon Music Today, we’re bringing you a special bonus episode from our colleagues at WELT. Originally released in German, Ernstfall is now available in English. What if Russia attacked NATO? How would Germany respond? And where are our weaknesses? We wanted answers. In a wargame, we simulate an attack on NATO’s eastern flank. Politicians, former military officials, and experts take on the roles of the German government for a day. A second team plays the Kremlin.The wargame triggered an international debate. It’s the reason we decided to publish our results in English as well. In this five-part podcast, you’ll hear a simulation of a crisis that many European leaders hope will never happen. Script and Storytelling: Antonia Beckermann, Carolina DrütenProduction: Marvin Schwarz Listen to the full five-part series on WELT’s website.

President Trump has praised Americans as ‘a historic and heroic people’, in a speech on the nation's 250th anniversary.

Efforts to expand birth registration in Cameroon are gaining ground, but millions of children remain undocumented.

St Petersburg governor reports no victims after ‘large-scale’ overnight attack that also hit Baltic port of VysotskUkraine launched a big overnight drone attack on St Petersburg and the surrounding area, hitting the city’s oil terminal and port infrastructure in the wider region.The St Petersburg governor, Alexander Beglov, said the city had been subjected to a “large-scale” drone attack that had hit its oil terminal. He said there were no casualties and the aftermath of the attack had been dealt with. Continue reading...

Aerial footage released by Catalan firefighters shows a huge plume of smoke rising from a wildfire burning in La Bisbal d’Empordà area of northeastern Spain. The wildfire has burned about 750 hectares (1,853 acres), according to provisional estimates from the Catalan rural agents serviceWeather tracker: Heatwave breaks June temperature records across Europe Continue reading...

Paris loses out on cheap loans due to strict eligibility criteria it had championed

Sweden, Denmark and Finland resist plan to label flavoured versions ‘cider-based beverages’