FRANCE: Online retail giant Amazon has been fined €32 million (£27m) for “excessive” surveillance of its workers, including measures that data watchdog CNIL found to be illegal.

The watchdog said that Amazon tracked activity so precisely that workers had to justify each break and had a system in place with alerts signalling breaks of 10 minutes or more.

GERMANY: The Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the far-right Homeland party will not receive any state funding for the next six years because its values and goals are unconstitutional and anti-democratic.

Leading German politicians have also discussed the possibility of trying to ban the Alliance for Germany (AfD) or excluding it from financial aid, but no-one has made a serious attempt to do so yet.

TURKEY: Legislators have begun to debate a long-delayed Bill to approve Sweden’s bid to join Nato after Turkey dragged its feet on ratifying the European nation’s accession for more than a year.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has accused Sweden of being too lenient towards groups it regards as security threats, including Kurdish rights groups, and has demanded concessions.

CHINA: A 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit a sparsely populated part of the Xinjiang region early today, killing at least three people in the latest in a series of disasters to hit the country’s west.

The death toll of a landslide a day earlier in the province of Yunnan reached 31 people, with at least 44 people still missing and rescue workers struggling with snow, icy roads and freezing temperatures.