ALMATY (Reuters) - Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev fired his defense minister on Wednesday, accusing him of failing to show leadership and initiative when the Central Asian country was rocked by its worst unrest in 30 years of independence. The removal of Murat Bektanov marked the latest stage in Tokayev’s purge of the security establishment as he consolidates power after violent protests shook the former Soviet republic in the first week of January.

 

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 (Reuters) - Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has turned down the offer of a job at the United Nations, her office said on Wednesday, a month after she stepped down as Europe’s most powerful politician after 16 years at the helm. Merkel, 67, called U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres last week to thank him for the job he had offered her in a letter and to tell him she would not accept it, the office said, without elaborating. German media reported that Guterres had offered Merkel the chair of a high-level U.N. advisory body on global public goods, one of his flagship reform projects. It will focus on issues including the ozone layer, vaccines and outer space debris.

 

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OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik remains just as likely to commit acts of violence today as he was a decade ago, a psychiatrist testifying at his parole hearing said on Wednesday. Breivik, a far-right extremist, killed 77 people in Norway’s worst peacetime atrocity in July 2011. He killed eight with a car bomb in Oslo and then gunned down 69, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party youth camp. The 42-year-old neo-Nazi is serving Norway’s maximum sentence of 21 years, which can be extended indefinitely if he is deemed a continued threat to society. But after a decade in prison he is entitled to apply for parole.

 

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MADRID (Reuters) - Six residents died in a fire at a Spanish retirement home in a suburb of Valencia early on Wednesday.

Five people died in the home and a sixth died in hospital, the regional health department said. Around 70 residents were evacuated from the home in the suburb of Moncada, and 15 people were taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation, emergency services said. Town councillor and firefighter Martin Perez Aranda told the television channel 24H that an unextinguished cigarette or an electrical fault linked to an oxygen bottle w

 

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BERLIN (AP) — Police in Germany are investigating thousands of cases of suspected forgery of coronavirus vaccine certificates, the DPA news agency reported Wednesday. It cited figures obtained from the country’s 16 states showing more than 12,000 police investigations have been opened nationwide. DPA reported that the number of probes surged in December, after authorities announced new restrictions that largely locked unvaccinated people out of public life.