The tidal wave of refugees that crashed through Germany’s doors last year has long turned to a trickle, but the costs of the inflow will remain a burden on the country for years, budget figures released on Friday showed. The German finance ministry expects to spend €77.6 billion ($86.2 billion) over the next four years feeding, housing and training refugees as well as helping their home countries to stem the flow, according to...

How Canadian hockey moms, poker buddies and neighbors are adopting Syrians, a family at a time. One frigid day in February, Kerry McLorg drove to an airport hotel here to pick up a family of Syrian refugees. She was cautious by nature, with a job poring over insurance data, but she had never even spoken to the people who were about to move into her basement.

Authorities in the Austrian town of Mistelbach issued a temporary pool ban for refugees following a sexual assault by a “dark-skinned’ man on a 13-year-old girl. "This news was a shock," said the town’s mayor, Alfred Pohl, as quoted by the Heute media outlet. According to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the attack happened on Wednesday afternoon.

Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal migrant policy. There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe's largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security. The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.

Speaking to German reporters in the de facto capital of Tibet's exiled government, the Dalai Lama apparently said that "too many" refugees are seeking asylum in Europe. "Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country," he said with a laugh, according to AFP, which quoted from an interview the spiritual leader gave to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper. "Germany is Germany. There are so many that in practice it becomes difficult."

A Swiss village, one of the wealthiest in Europe, has refused to take in its government imposed quota of asylum seekers, voting to pay a fine of £200,000 instead. The residents of Switzerland’s alpine resort Oberwil-Lieli, where there are 300 millionaires among a population of 2,200, voted “no” in a referendum over whether to accept just 10 refugees. Swiss government proposals had outlined a quota across its 26 counties in order deliver on promise to take 50,000 asylum seekers across the country, but Oberwil-Lieli voted by 52 per cent to 48 to reject the refugees.

A campaign to employ police officers of foreign origins regardless of whether they have a German passport or not has been launched in the state of Bavaria. The move is aimed at helping solve crimes involving migrants.

The German government is rushing to integrate hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, offering them language classes and the prospect of work. But in a country known for its matter-of-fact acceptance of public nudity and creative forms of lovemaking, it is also trying to teach the mostly-Muslim migrants about the joy of sex. Operating under the premise that many Syrians...

Slovakian border officials shot and wounded a Syrian refugee when they opened fired at a car carrying migrants from Hungary into Slovakia, authorities have said. The unidentified 26-year-old woman is thought to be in a stable condition after undergoing surgery to remove a bullet from her back, according to a hospital in Dunajska Streda, southern Slovakia. The hospital added it had also treated two other migrants suffering from dehydration. 

Eighty-four migrants are missing after their inflatable dinghy sank off the Libyan coast, the International Organization for Migration says. The dinghy was found taking on water in rough seas after the Italian coast guard received a satellite phone call. It diverted the merchant ship to rescue 26 survivors and bring them to Italy. A spokesperson for the coastguard said similar boats used by people smugglers could hold 100-120 people, and were usually full.

Police investigating the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve claim they were ordered to remove the word “rape” from their initial report. Local officers had produced an internal “important event” memo entitled “rape, sexual harassment, thefts, committed by a large group of foreign people” – the first indication of the scale of the incident which would go on to make headlines around the world.

Poland abandoned a pledge to shelter migrants under a European Union relocation agreement, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said, shifting her country’s stance a day after suicide bombers killed dozens of people in the bloc’s de-facto capital. Poland’s previous government agreed to host several thousand migrants under a deal forged by the EU’s 28 member states to address the hundreds of thousands of mostly...

Syria's war has killed more than a quarter of a million people, uprooted over half the population and left much of the country in ruins since it erupted five years ago. Here are some key facts and figures on the conflict: The fighting has left more than 270,000 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor which relies on a large network of doctors and activist sources across the country.

At least 18 people attempting to reach Greece drowned after their boat sank off the Turkish coast on Sunday, the state-run Anatolian Agency reported. The Turkish Coast Guard, using speedboats and a helicopter, rescued 15 people and recovered 18 bodies in the Aegean Sea near the town of Didim, it said. Efforts continued to find more victims whose nationalities were not given.

Demonstrators chanting "we are the people" surrounded a bus carrying asylum seekers as it arrived at a shelter in a German village and tried to prevent them from getting off. The state interior minister described the incident as "deeply shameful". Video footage from the scene late on Thursday in Clausnitz in Saxony has been widely shared. Clearly upset children can be seen on board the bus, which was prevented from reaching its destination for two hours.

The right-wing Polish weekly magazine wSieci (The Network) has caused outrage with its latest front cover. The publication features the image of a white woman, draped with the European Union flag, screaming as she is being groped and assaulted by dark skinned male arms. Twitter users have compared the images with fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, which used images of women being attacked by...

"This is a critical moment" for the European Union, Donald Tusk warns

Finland’s prime minister, Juha Sipila, has said he will not be able fulfil a promise to put up a family of asylum seekers. Sipila, a former telecoms executive, prompted controversy in September by saying he would open his second home in northern Finland to refugees. ‘Refugees are warm, emotional people. There’s a lot we can learn’ But on Sunday he told public YLE radio that he had had to put the plan on hold because of security concerns...

Allegation by 13-year-old sparked far-right protests and anger in the Kremlin

The head of the Swedish police has sparked outrage by expressing sympathy with the teenage asylum seeker accused of murdering social worker Alexander Mezher. National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson, who has already admitted police cannot cope with the wave of migrant crime, said he has concerns about the ‘horrors’ and trauma the accused murderer may have witnessed. He said he was ‘distraught’ on behalf of Miss Mezher’s family but also...