The ruling Reform Party expects the speaker of the Riigikogu to take the lead in organizing discussions on the presidential election and believes the initiative in putting forward candidates should come primarily from the opposition.

A new survey on religion shows that traditional church‑based religiosity in Estonia is continuing to decline, and most Estonian residents do not consider themselves followers of any religion. The study also found that attitudes toward religion differ sharply between Estonians and Russian‑speaking residents.

The ruling Reform Party expects the speaker of the Riigikogu to take the lead in organizing discussions on the presidential election and believes the initiative in putting forward candidates should come primarily from the opposition.

Parliamentary parties will spend this week discussing ways to agree on a joint candidate in an effort to elect the president in the Riigikogu. Members of the European Parliament elected from Estonia believe reaching a consensus is possible.

A new survey on religion shows that traditional church‑based religiosity in Estonia is continuing to decline, and most Estonian residents do not consider themselves followers of any religion. The study also found that attitudes toward religion differ sharply between Estonians and Russian‑speaking residents.

Many women avoid traveling alone after dark and adjust their daily routines because of safety concerns. A recent master's thesis suggests that people's sense of safety is also shaped by whether others are present in public spaces and whether help is available if needed.

Paljud Eesti inimesed on viimastel aastatel avastanud oma aiamaa võlud ning kasvatavad hobikorras perele väikeses koguses köögivilju. Nüüd tahab regionaal- ja põllumajandusministeerium selle vaikselt tehtud seadusemuudatusega ametnike kontrollile allutada. Ametnikud toetuvad põhjendustes Euroopa Liidu määrusele – sealt aga neid ministeeriumi uusi reegleid ei leia.

Esmaspäeva õhtul kell 23.30 kohtuvad MMi sõelmängude esimeses ringis Saksamaa ja Paraguay koondised. Postimees vahendab mängu otseblogis.

The male suspect who has been arrested was in a custody dispute over his baby daughter, police say.

The Russian president acknowledged Ukraine's attacks were "obviously creating problems" but denied the shortages were "critical".

Andy Burnham's speech depicted a different way of seeing and running the UK, though there are many other questions about the detail.

BBC Verify has looked at what impact further devolution could be expected to have on the UK.

LONDON — Britain is announcing one of the biggest shake-ups of its armed forces in decades, and it’s using the experience of the war in Ukraine as a model. The Defence Investment Plan, set to be published on Tuesday by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in one of his last acts before stepping down, shows the U.K. is copying Ukraine’s successful playbook to focus on “cheap systems destroying high-value targets and innovation cycles measured in weeks, not years,” the Ministry of Defence said on Monday. The move indicates how the government intends to meet the goals of last year’s Strategic Defence Review, which warned that “state conflict has returned to Europe,” after a funding crunch that prompted former Defence Secretary John Healey unexpectedly quit earlier this month. For decades, much of the U.K.’s military strength has rested on sea power, with large, expensive warships like aircraft carriers and submarines able to launch nuclear missiles forming a central part of what Britain can bring to bear in peace and war. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended the old model for European defense. It exposed the vulnerability of expensive systems, underlined the need for large supplies of cheap drones and munitions, and accelerated the shift toward autonomous systems, AI-enabled targeting and quick battlefield innovation. ‘Leaner and meaner’ One of the most eye-catching policies in the DIP is an announcement that there will be no new money for up to eight Type 83 guided missile destroyers and Type 32 frigates — projects that had been a key part of rebuilding the size of the Royal Navy in the 2030s. Instead, the U.K. will invest in at least six new Common Combat Vessels which will act as control ships for uncrewed systems which include Type 93 underwater anti-submarine vessels, Type 91 uncrewed missile platforms and Type 92 and Type 94 unmanned sensor platforms for the sky and sea — notable because, despite having no navy, Ukraine defeated Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with a combination of sea and air drones and missiles. The unmanned shift extends to Britain’s Royal Air Force, with officials on Monday night teasing the investment of a “national Collaborative Combat Air program” which will produce autonomous jets to fly alongside their crewed counterparts — something that is part of the British-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Programme to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet. Tim Willasey-Wilsey, a senior associate fellow at the RUSI defense think tank, noted that although Britain needs to retain a large navy as a global trading power, the U.K. needs to shift its focus away from major projects to become “much leaner and meaner.” Doubling down on drones While the release of the much-delayed DIP meets a key demand from allies and the U.K.’s military-industrial complex, the implementation will rely on Andy Burnham, who is expected to take over as prime minister later this summer. Under the plan, the U.K. will get some of the way to meeting NATO’s new target of spending 3.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035, but Britain’s spending is off the pace of other allies like Germany, France and Poland and it has yet to set out a clear funding pathway to hitting that target. The new investment plan is set to add about £15 billion, the Financial Times reported, over the £270 billion defense budget over this parliament. That includes £5 billion the government announced it is spending on a drone transformation, with the Ministry of Defence pointing to the 200,000 drones which are used each month by Ukraine as an example of the approach that needs to be copied. “Technology on the battlefield is changing at lightning speed. The clear lesson from Ukraine tells us that drones have changed the character of warfare,” said Ross Exley, vice president of defense strategy at Hadean, a U.K.-based tech company which sits on the government’s Defence Industrial Joint Council. The DIP will now fund Europe’s biggest drone testing center, which will work alongside a new task force to “continuously scale production” to get drones into the hands of British forces. Willasey-Wilsey said it was “slightly ironic that Britain started training the Ukrainians back in 2022, and now they could be very much training us — they are showing us how war should be fought these days.” “It’s warfare we couldn’t do. We wouldn’t last more than a few weeks,” he said.

BERLIN — German political leaders are responding to Volkswagen’s bombshell plan to slash 100,000 jobs — potentially one of the largest corporate layoffs in history — with predictable pledges to prevent the cuts, even as Germany’s economic reality grows darker. That sets up a clash between VW’s increasingly aggressive corporate management and the politicians and unions that sit on the automaker’s supervisory board — and who have the power to block the plans. It’s a fight that ties the survival of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s ever-more-unpopular coalition government to Germany’s increasingly bleak and potentially inescapable economic reality. VW’s push to cut nearly one in six workers and shut down four German plants is the most poignant sign yet of the growing desperation of Germany’s manufacturing sector and its once-vaunted car industry, which have been hit particularly hard by competition from China and U.S President Donald Trump’s tariff wars. The plan also shows that the problems inside Germany’s largest and most iconic automaker are even deeper than previously acknowledged — and that Chief Executive Oliver Blume is growing more forceful in his push to restructure the company and cut costs. Leaders of the parties in Merz’s coalition vow to resist the plan, and because Lower Saxony — home to VW’s headquarters in the city of Wolfsburg — is the company’s second-largest voting shareholder, they have considerable power to try to stop it. “The primary goal is to preserve the production sites of German manufacturers and to safeguard jobs,” Stefan Kornelius, Merz’s spokesperson, said Monday. The news of VW’s plan to cut 100,000 jobs, first reported Friday by Germany’s Manager Magazin and expected to be presented to VW’s supervisory board in July, could hardly have come at a worse time for Merz’s weak coalition government — consisting of the chancellor’s conservatives bloc and the center-left Social Democrats. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party — which has been hitting Merz’s coalition hard over the shedding of industrial jobs — holds a considerable lead over the chancellor’s conservatives in national polls — and is even further ahead in two state elections set for September in AfD strongholds in the former East Germany. “Germany’s industrial base is crumbling at a dramatic pace right before our eyes,” said Alice Weidel, one of the leaders of the AfD, in a statement on Monday. “Even long-established companies are fleeing the economic mismanagement of this federal government.” How far will VW go? Because of VW’s unique corporate structure — and its partial ownership by the state of Lower Saxony — politicians and workers’ representatives have an outsize role in how the company is run. The state, with its large number of factory laborers, is also one of the few remaining strongholds for the SPD, a party that has traditionally had close ties to labor unions. Olaf Lies, the SPD premier of Lower Saxony, sits on the supervisory board, along with the deputy state premier, Julia Willie Hamburg, a politician of the center-left Greens. Both have vowed to resist VW’s cost-cutting plans, and argue that its management instead needs a better plan to recapture lost market share. “Our task must be to ensure that we don’t seek solutions through simplistic measures like ‘We’ll lay off employees or close locations,’” Lies told public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday. “We have to be competitive; we have to be technological leaders. And we also have to be able to secure and capture markets again. And personally, that’s what I expect from the executive board of a company like this.” VW’s supervisory board would need to approve the reported layoffs and factory closures with a vote scheduled for July 9, according to the Manager Magazin report.  But representatives of the workers’ side and state politicians currently hold a majority of 11 out of 19 votes on the supervisory board. It therefore appears unlikely that the proposed plans will be approved without significant amendments or the inclusion of additional safeguards for workers. The question will be how far VW’s management is willing to go in confronting politicians and trade unionists over its cost-cutting drive. One of the most potentially explosive elements of VW’s reported plan is the possible spin-off of at least parts of the company into a separate entity. Experts say management may be seeking to create a corporate structure that would give it greater freedom to decide the future of factories and jobs, without the constraints of state ownership or trade union representation. Under the current law regulating VW’s governance model, management would need a two-thirds supervisory board majority to close one of its western German factories.  “It would be very radical,” Helena Wisbert, professor of automotive economics at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, said of a possible spinoff attempt. Wisbert said such a step would be extremely difficult to pull off — in great part because the current supervisory board would have to approve a spinoff. Still, she added, if such a step were truly under consideration, “it would really show just how intense the pressure to cut costs is right now.” In an emailed statement to POLITICO sent on Friday, VW said it would “not comment on internal, confidential documents,” but added that “the entire Group — including its brands and subsidiaries — must undergo a profound transformation. To this end, the Group Executive Board has been working intensively over the past few months on a strategic plan for the company’s restructuring.” VW’s woes became clear in 2024, when management announced a plan to close three factories in Germany for the first time in the automaker’s then 87-year history. But after marathon negotiations at the end of that year — which labor unions hailed as a “Christmas miracle” — factory closures were averted. Both parties agreed that 35,000 jobs would be cut by 2030. But as the company’s outlook soured, VW announced this March it would increase job cuts to 50,000 by 2030 — an announcement met with relatively muted reaction. Now, plans to cut double that amount are facing far stiffer resistance. “As a state, we have a clear expectation that VW management will put forward a viable plan for the future,” Grant Hendrik Tonne, the SPD economy minster of the state of Lower Saxony, told POLITICO. “Plant closures are not a plan for the future and are therefore unacceptable.” Romanus Otte contributed reporting.

Naomi Osaka impresses with her outfit and performance, while British hopes are dashed on first day of championship.

Follow the updates, with live build-up, team news coverage, and our text commentary stream of the last-32 match.

Two sides agree to try to make bilateral relationship ‘more balanced’ after weeks of threatsThe EU and China have agreed to enter three months of talks to try to avoid a trade war over the bloc’s €360bn (£310bn) annual import/export imbalance.In their first joint statement in seven years, the two sides agreed in Brussels to open a formal trade consultation after weeks of threats and recriminations from China if the EU imposed any measures to stop the flood of goods and components into the bloc. Continue reading...

Four women among the dead and two people arrested after incident in city west of HamburgFour women and two men have been killed in a shooting at a youth welfare facility ⁠in northern Germany, police said. Two people including the suspected ⁠shooter were arrested.The incident took place in Stade, a city close to the port city of Hamburg, on Monday afternoon. Police said the victims, employees of the shelter, were all shot inside the building. Five died at the scene and the sixth died in hospital. Police said the death toll could rise. Continue reading...

European commissioner Maroš Šefčovič demands action after meeting Chinese commerce minister Wang Wentao

President of central bank signals that there could be a modest increase in interest rates