Angela Merkel isolated as EU partners slam door on refugees

Merkel is battling for a deal that will see refugees more evenly spread around the European Union after Germany welcomed 1.1 million asylum seekers last year.

But instead, eastern European countries are planning new razor wire fences, and even Paris -- traditionally Berlin`s closest EU ally -- has shown little enthusiasm for Merkel`s welcome policy.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Saturday that the mood in France was "not favourable" to Merkel`s call for a permanent quota system.

"Europe cannot take in all the migrants from Syria, Iraq or Africa," Valls told German media. "It has to regain control over its borders, over its migration or asylum policies."

US Secretary of State John Kerry praised Merkel for showing "great courage in helping so many who need so much" amid "the gravest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II".

But he also told the Munich Security Conference that the mass influx spells a "near existential... threat to the politics and fabric of life in Europe".Another guest in Munich, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, took a far darker view, charging that "it`s quite simply stupid to open Europe`s doors wide and invite in everyone who wants to come to your country".

"European migration policy is a total failure, all that is absolutely frightening," he told the Handelsblatt daily.

A number of EU nations that were once in Russia`s Cold War orbit seem to agree.

Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia plan to meet Monday to discuss how to close down the main refugee route through the Balkans, reported Germany`s Spiegel news weekly.

"As long as there is no common European strategy, it is legitimate that the nations along the Balkans route protect their borders," Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak told the magazine.

He also opposed Merkel`s plan for an EU quota system, saying "quotas only increase the incentives for migration".

At the other end of the route, Austria`s foreign minister warned Macedonia on Friday that it should be ready to close its border to migrants coming up from Greece.

Vienna also plans to impose a cap on refugees and may start turning them away in the coming months.Merkel, long dubbed the "Queen of Europe", has seen poll numbers drop at home, coalition members rebel and EU allies duck away as the refugee crisis has sparked deep discord and threatened the bloc`s system of open borders.

She has pledged to reduce arrivals by more quickly turning away "economic refugees" and combating traffickers, including through a new NATO surveillance mission in the Aegean Sea.

Meanwhile, her government has urged fellow Europeans to remember their core humanitarian values.

"How can a continent of 500 million citizens see its foundations shaken... by 1.5 million or 2 million refugees?" said Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen in Munich.

Merkel said Friday there was "a group of countries" that may voluntarily accept more refugees in exchange for redoubled efforts from Turkey to tackle illegal immigration.

She did not name the members, but at a EU summit in December, Germany gathered officials from Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Merkel is planning to bring together what the media have dubbed a "coalition of the willing" on the margins of a two-day EU summit in Brussels starting Thursday.She suggested its members could help Turkey`s refugee effort beyond the three billion euros ($3.3 billion) already committed by the EU.

Turkey, which is hosting over 2.7 million mostly Syrian refugees, has voiced deep frustration with the EU as a fresh wave of Syrian refugees mass on its border.

Angry over calls that Turkey should do more, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week that his nation could throw out its existing refugees, threatening to fly and bus them to Europe.

"We do not have the word `idiot` written on our foreheads," he said.

"We will be patient, but we will do what we have to. Don`t think that the planes and the buses are there for nothing."

onald Trump in running for 2016 Nobel Peace Prize

Nominations for the award, won last year by four Tunisian groups that led the country's transition to democracy, must be posted to Norway by February 1 at the latest.

And as usual, the names of the nominees are a tightly-guarded secret -- or at least most of them are. Those who nominate candidates can reveal the name of the person they've proposed.

An online petition had on Monday picked up some 630,000 signatures calling for the Nobel to go the residents of Greek islands on the front line of Europe's migrant crisis, who have come to the aid of refugees turning up on their shores after perilous sea journeys from neighbouring Turkey.

The nomination, proposed by a group of university professors, faces a size problem: the prize can be shared by a maximum of three laureates.

Greek scientists have resolved the problem by putting three names forward: an octogenarian, a fisherman from Lesbos and the Hollywood actress-activist Susan Sarandon, who was the first high-profile celebrity to visit the island to raise awareness about the issue.

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the 1984 Peace Prize, has backed three nominations, including one involving Greece's Good Samaritans called the Aegean Solidarity Movement.

"Just imagine 900,000 visitors in desperate need arriving at the door of your reasonably modest establishment. Hungry, exhausted and in a state of acute emotional distress... They don't speak the same language as you or ascribe to the same cultural or religious beliefs. What do you do? You open the door. Incredible!" Tutu wrote on his foundation's website.

The two other nominations receiving his blessing were the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and a trio that includes Pope Francis, hailed by the Anglican archbishop for "consciousness about the ecological necessity to curb human consumptiveness and greed."

Prize to a 'traitor'?

In an entirely different field, US Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has also been nominated for the prize, according to Nobel watcher Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo.

According to a copy of the nomination letter Harpviken said he had received, brash tycoon Trump -- who has attracted international condemnation by calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States -- deserves the prize for "his vigorous peace through strength ideology, used as a threat weapon of deterrence against radical Islam, ISIS, nuclear Iran and Communist China".

Thousands of people around the world are allowed to make nominations for the Peace Prize, including members of parliament and government ministers, former laureates and some university professors.

The Nobel Institute accepts all valid nominations, so having one's name on the list is not to be taken as a sign of approval.

The five members of the panel that selects the laureate are also allowed to put forward their own nominations when they hold their first meeting on February 29.

Harpviken said he believed Edward Snowden, the American who exposed mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency, could be a winner this year.

"Snowden's leaks led to a good number of reforms in US practice and US legislation, which make it harder to still argue that he is a traitor to his country," Harpviken told AFP.

After a breakthrough on the Iran nuclear standoff, negotiators Ernest Moniz of the US and Ali Akbar Salehi of Iran are also among Harpviken's favourites, as well as Colombian peace negotiators President Juan Manuel Santos and rebel leader Timoleon Jimenez.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was one of the favourites last year when the prize went to Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet, is also in the running again this year.

The same goes for Congolese gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, who has spent a quarter of a century treating thousands of women brutalised by rape and sexual violence in war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nadia Murad, a Yazidi abducted by IS fighters in August 2014 from her village in Iraq and held for three months as a sex slave is also in the running.

Finally, 118 Italian MPs have nominated the Afghan Cycling Federation women's team, hailing the bicycle as environmental, economic and democratic.

The winner of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in early October.

Attackers planned multiple explosions in German stadium: reports

Special police forces cordoned off the stadium in Hannover after the soccer friendly match between Germany and the Netherlands was cancelled due to a bomb threat. 

A group of several attackers planned to set off multiple explosives in Hannover football stadium at Tuesday night's friendly match between Germany and the Netherlands, which was called off, daily Bild reported on Thursday.

Bild said it had obtained a copy of a document that Germany's domestic intelligence service provided to Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Tuesday, the contents of which were so shocking the authorities had no choice but to call off the match.

Based on intelligence from a foreign intelligence service, the document detailed how a group of several attackers planned to set off several explosives in the stadium in Hannover, as well as a bomb in the city centre.

The attackers planned to smuggle the explosives into the stadium in an ambulance, Bild cited the document as saying. The group's leader was to film the attack in the stadium. After midnight, another attack was planned at Hannover railway station.

In the event, the authorities said they found no explosives at the stadium.

The premier of the state of Lower Saxony said on Wednesday that German officials had concrete indications of a security threat that led them to call off the football game between Germany and the Netherlands.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had been due to attend the match.

There was no immediate comment from the Interior Ministry on the details of the Bild report.

But Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told a news conference: "The indications were so concentrated that calling off the match was unavoidable. Whether the indications were a real threat, or just an indication, we don't know."