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Richard A. Carranza will resign as chancellor of New York City’s public school system, the nation’s largest, in March, city officials announced Friday.

The abrupt move comes after disagreements between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mr. Carranza over school desegregation policy reached a breaking point in recent weeks.

He will be replaced by Meisha Porter, a longtime city educator and current Bronx superintendent who will become the first Black woman to lead the sprawling system, which has over 1 million students and 1,800 schools.

A survey earlier this month suggested that only a fifth of voters are currently satisfied with the chancellor’s work – the worst result recorded since this type of polling began a quarter of a century ago

If they could pick a chancellor from any political party, only 5 per cent said they would choose Scholz.

This year has also been a difficult one for Germans.

“What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”

“There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”

Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.

The chief of the US spy agency NSA has not discussed the alleged bugging of German chancellor's phone with President Barack Obama, officials say.

A report in German tabloid Bild am Sonntag claimed that Gen Alexander had told the president about the bugging himself.

"[General] Alexander did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel," NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said.

"xenophobia, racism, and extremism have no place in this country."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Jochaim Gauck were among political and religious leaders who attended

"xenophobia, racism, and extremism have no place in this country."

The City of London has warned that businesses will start activating Brexit contingency plans unless there is a transitional deal by the end of 2017, as Philip Hammond tried to calm fears that a final agreement may not be reached for another year.

In a letter to Hammond before next month’s budget, McGuinness said the UK was facing a “historically defining moment” and warned that the timetable for business to prepare for transition was “tightening very rapidly”.

“We must have agreement with the EU on transition before the end of 2017,” she added.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, many German politicians have publicly admitted they got Vladimir Putin wrong. Even German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has apologised, saying it was a mistake to use trade and energy to build bridges with Moscow.

"It's a bitter acknowledgement that for 30 years we emphasised dialogue and co-operation with Russia," says Nils Schmid, foreign affairs spokesperson for Mr Steinmeier's party, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). "Now we have to recognise this has not worked. That's why we have entered a new era for European security."

That new era was dubbed "Zeitenwende" - literally meaning a turning point - by Germany's SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a now-famous speech in the German parliament a few days after the invasion.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said such efforts were a "top tenet" of US intelligence policy.

House of Representatives the US did not "indiscriminately" spy on nations.

"Leadership intentions is kind of a basic tenet of what we collect and analyse

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called US President Barack Obama after receiving information that the US may have spied on her mobile phone.

"views such practices... as completely unacceptable".

The White House said President Obama had told Chancellor Merkel the US was not snooping on her communications.

with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.

“the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.”

a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity

Five years ago today, Greece’s then Prime Minister, George Papandreou, disclosed to the world that his country was in severe fiscal difficulties. Recessions dipped and then double dipped, while debt soared. Unemployment rates, especially among young people, hit record highs in many parts of eurozone. Growth plummeted, and in many parts of the continent has yet to recover.

One constant throughout the eurozone crisis has been Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. Since Merkel took office in 2005, there have been 54 different leaders atop eurozone member countries - an average of more than three per country.

None of the eurozone’s current leaders has held office as long as Germany’s chancellor.

Those contradictions rest at the core of the Merkel legacy

As German chancellor, Ms. Merkel oversaw a golden decade for Europe’s largest economy, which expanded by more than a fifth, pushing unemployment to the lowest levels since the early 1980s.

As the United States was distracted by multiple wars, Britain gambled its future on a referendum to leave the European Union and France failed to reform itself, Ms. Merkel’s Germany was mostly a haven of stability.

Angela Merkel is traditionally known as Germany’s “safe pair of hands,” but when government-coalition talks unexpectedly collapsed late Sunday night after just four weeks, her future as the country’s chancellor was suddenly in question.

pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) party announced that it would no longer take part in coalition talks to form Germany’s next government. Though Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party won the largest share of votes during the country’s general election in September, they failed to win enough seats to govern on their own.

With Jamaica no longer an option, Germany is faced with three choices: The first is a minority government, formed by Merkel’s CDU/CSU party in coalition with either the FDP (which would leave the government 29 seats short of a majority) or the Greens (short 42 seats). Though that’s not impossible, Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me this option would be alien to both Merkel’s leadership style and the country as a whole. “For historical reasons, Germans are very skeptical of minority governments because it reminds people of the Weimar period,” he said, referring to the post-World War I period between 1918 and 1933 known for its political instability. “For somebody like Angela Merkel, it’s not in her style of governing to run a minority government because she’s not exactly a big gambler.” And a minority government would certainly be a gamble for Merkel—effectively denying her the authority she needs to push through reforms both at home and within the eurozone. “She’s somebody who doesn’t just embody stability, but I think she also likes stability herself.”

During a meeting with Angela Merkel, Vice President Mike Pence praised Richard Grenell, the blunt-spoken U.S. ambassador to Germany, eliciting a characteristically dry comment from the chancellor.

Turning to Mr. Grenell, Ms. Merkel said his style “took getting used to,”

Mr. Grenell, a confidant of the president and former adviser to his campaign, embodies both the diplomatic doctrine of the Trump administration and its new posture toward U.S. allies in Europe: engagement, public criticism that rankles host nations, some achievements and some unbridgeable divides.

He was the man who famously unified Germany and ended France's domination of Europe. But new documents found in a dusty town hall reveal that the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck nearly drowned while swimming at the French seaside resort of Biarritz, an event that could have profoundly changed the course of European history.

The rescue of Bismarck - then Prussia's ambitious ambassador in Paris, in his mid-40s - would prove costly for France. Eight years later, in 1870, he masterminded Prussia's swift, crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war, ending French primacy in Europe. The Iron Chancellor went on to unify Germany, something that had eluded its kings and rulers since Charlemagne.

Bismarck recalled his time in Biarritz, where he met the French emperor Napoleon III, as the happiest of his life. "I have lost the illusion, that we can be happy again in Biarritz," he wrote later to his ailing mistress, who died in 1875 at 35.

The country’s decentralised political system has allowed some of the 16 federal states to surge ahead with special exemptions for local businesses, such as North Rhine-Westphalia allowing the opening of larger furniture stores.

“No one likes to hear it, but we are not in the end phase of this pandemic, but at the beginning,” the German chancellor said. “We will continue to have to live with it for a long time.”

The chancellor’s handling of the crisis, while drawing praise across the world, has also been the subject of criticism in Germany, where liberal politicians accused the conservative politician of acting in a more executive role than anticipated in the country’s constitution.

Angela Merkel's faith in America was deeply shaken when Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016.

The German Chancellor who grew up behind the Iron Curtain was quicker than most to perceive his threat to the kind of US global leadership that has traditionally underwritten European security. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Merkel may well have opted not to run for a fourth term. But she would not retire with Trump in the White House, seeing him as a peril to the West, its common values and security architecture like NATO.

A sense of relief four years later pulsed through her congratulatory message

Long a linchpin of Chinese trade in Europe, Germany is increasingly caught in the diplomatic tussle between the world’s two largest economies — wooed by China but urged by Washington to move further away from Beijing

These companies provide the majority of Germany’s economic output, according to some studies. They employ 60 percent of its workers, and make up 99 percent of its private sector — a higher percentage than in any industrialized nation in the world.

These companies, known in German as the “Mittelstand,” are struggling to create a model for the future, as the country’s socioeconomic order begins to falter under the weight of stalled modernization and ruptures in global politics.

what happens in an “economy in search of a political raison d’être,” as the historian Werner Abelshauser once described the postwar Federal Republic, if its GDP suddenly stops growing? We are about to find out.

Germany’s economy is running out of steam, and not only because of COVID or because Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned off the gas tap.

A recent poll shows that, notwithstanding this radical program, only 57 percent of Germans now say that they could never imagine voting for the AfD

Since the spring, the AfD has only gathered momentum. The party has gained at least four points in polls since May, rising to 20 percent support and overtaking the country’s governing center-left Social Democrats to become Germany’s second-strongest party. A more recent poll, released on Sunday, put the AfD at a record high of 22 percent support.

The AfD is now nipping at the heels of Mr. Voigt’s own Christian Democratic Union, or C.D.U., the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, which remains the country’s most popular but now sits in opposition.

“Now is the critical juncture,” Mr. Voigt said in an interview. “We have to understand, if we are not showing or portraying ourselves as the real opposition in Germany, people will defect to the Alternative for Germany.”