Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted for the first time Thursday he made a mistake in trusting a party colleague at the centre of a major corruption scandal but denied any wrongdoing and vowed to stay in power.

The driver was on the phone with a colleague and apparently looking at a document as his train barrelled ahead at 95 mph, almost twice the speed limit.

France’s foreign minister demanded Tuesday that Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Morsi be freed, describing the political crisis as “very critical” after bloody unrest in Cairo.

British police said Tuesday they were investigating violent and sexually explicit Twitter postings directed at a lawmaker in a growing row over threats to women on the social network.

Two trains collided head-on Monday in western Switzerland, killing one of the drivers and injuring 35 passengers, at least five of them seriously, police said.

An Italian tour crushed through a sidewall of a highway bridge in southern Italy, and plunged some 30 meters (100 feet) into a wooded ravine, killing at least 38 people, authorities said Monday.

The driver of a train that hurtled off the rails killing 78 people in Spain faced possible charges as doctors worked on Saturday to identify the last three victims of the country’s worst rail disaster in decades.

Italian police said they launched two major anti-mafia operations Friday in Rome and the southern region of Calabria, targeting around 100 people.

The French government Tuesday condemned as “unacceptable” weekend violence in a Paris suburb triggered by the country’s ban on full-face veils and strongly defended the controversial law.

The Pakistani Taliban have set up a base in Syria to assess “the needs of the jihad” and at least 12 of its “experts” in warfare and information technology have visited the strife-torn country, a media report said.