Voters in Sierra Leone flocked to the polls on Saturday to elect new president in a hotly contested run-off vote between opposition leader Julius Maada Bio and ruling party candidate Samura Kamara. Bio, of the opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) won a razor-thin victory in the first round of voting on March 7 with 43.3 per cent, while his …

Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, is in New York to pitch for a seat at the UN Security Council for 2019 and 2020. A UN vote is to be held on June 8. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas will try to convince UN member states of Germany’s credentials for a seat at the UN Security Council in New York. Maas made …

Germany recorded a bounce in the birth rate in 2016, official statistics show. The country hit a 43-year high helped along by large numbers of recently-arrived migrants. The latest figures are part of an upward trend for Germany, Europe’s biggest country by population, which has suffered from low birth rates since the 1970s. Some 792,131 children were born in Europe’s …