Two children were killed and several others injured as a school bus rushed down a slope in the central German state of Thuringia on Thursday, local media FOCUS Online reported.

The accident took place in the Wartburg district where there was heavy fog and slippery road, according to the report.

Around 20 children were on the bus.

Germany is banning the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 Deutschland in what the country's top security official said Thursday was a "clear message" against far-right extremism and anti-Semitism.

More than 200 police officers carried out raids in six German states early Thursday, seizing cellphones, computers, unspecified weaponry, Nazi memorabilia and propaganda material, the Interior Ministry said.

The group had spread "far-right extremism and anti-Semitic hatred" in German society by producing neo-Nazi music and staging concerts for extremist bands, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said.

The group is an offshoot of Combat 18, which was founded in Britain in the early 1990s as a militant wing of the British National Party. The number 18 stands for the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, AH, which are the initials of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The German chapter of Combat 18 "enjoys great respect within the far-right extremist scene" and is regarded as a symbol of violent extremism, Seehofer said.

Some of the group's members were convicted of illegally importing ammunition to Germany as they returned from firearms training in the Czech Republic in September 2017.

The police raids were carried out in Brandenburg, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia states.

Russia's parliament has approved a package of constitutional amendments in a first reading Thursday, in a move widely seen as an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to stay in on power past the end of his term in 2024.

Putin submitted the amendments to the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, on Monday, just several days after presenting them in the annual state-of-the-nation address last week.

He suggested that lawmakers could name prime ministers and Cabinet members, proposed a greater role for the State Council, an obscure consultative body of regional governors and federal officials, and sought to prioritize the primacy of Russian laws over international law.

The proposed changes, he argued, would bolster democracy.

The Kremlin-controlled Duma unanimously voted for the amendments on Thursday, after discussing them for two hours.

Putin, a 67-year-old former KGB office, has led Russia for more than 20 years — the longest since the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. According to the Russian Constitution, he will have to step down in 2024, having served two consecutive terms.

The bill submitted to parliament empowers the State Council to "determine the main directions of home and foreign policy," its specific authority yet to be spelled in a separate law.

It gives the parliament more say over Cabinet ministers' appointment, but emphasizes that the president should retain the power to dismiss the prime minister and Cabinet ministers and remain in charge of the Russian military and law enforcement agencies.

Commentators see these proposals as a strategy for Putin to stay in charge by becoming the head of the State Council.

The draft also modifies the constitution to limit a president to two terms altogether, unlike the current version containing a limit of two consecutive terms.

The second reading of the bill is scheduled for Feb. 11. Lawmakers and the working group created by Putin have already come up with a variety of proposals in addition to what the draft law outlines.

Putin said that the constitutional changes need to be approved by the entire nation, but it remains unclear how such a vote would be organized.

Russian opposition members condemned the reform as a "constitutional coup" and called for a rally against it on Feb. 29.

Three more people have died as a result of a fierce storm that has battered Spain for the past three days, authorities said Wednesday, raising the death toll to seven.

Fears increased that heavy rains expected later Wednesday could lead to several swollen rivers breaking their banks, among them the Onyar river that flows through the northeastern city of Gerona .

The body of a missing man was found Wednesday in a flooded area near the town of Callosa, in southeastern Spain, the local Valencia regional government said.

It added that a woman was killed when her apartment building partially collapsed in the town of Alcoy, following heavy rains.

In the southeastern town of Nijar, a farmer was found dead in a plastic greenhouse that had been hit by a hail storm, according to the private Spanish news agency Europa Press.

Four other people died between Sunday and Tuesday.

Searches continued for several missing people.

Since Sunday, the storm has hit mostly eastern areas of Spain with hail, heavy snow and high winds, while huge waves smashed into towns on the Mediterranean coast and the nearby islands of Mallorca and Menorca.

Weather forecasts said the worst of the storm had passed by Wednesday.

Transport authorities said the bad weather forced the closure of more than 200 roads. Schools canceled classes for more than 5,700 pupils.

Officials in Barcelona said the city's beaches lost much of their sand due to the high, powerful surf.

Rubén del Campo, spokesman for national weather service AEMET, said he expected that once all data was collected the storm will have been one of the strongest on record. Some areas saw their heaviest rainfall in more than 70 years.

The head of Italy's 5-Star Movement stepped down as party leader Wednesday, following a string of parliamentary defections, falling poll numbers and questions about the movement's future.

Luigi Di Maio said he had finished his work, that an era had ended, and that he would trust his successor to lead the party going forward.

"It's time for the 5-Star Movement to be refounded," he told a gathering of party faithful in Rome, ending days of speculation that he would step down as party leader while remaining Italy's foreign minister.

The 5-Stars have been in crisis for months, most acutely since the movement flipped coalition partners in September. But even earlier, it was beset by infighting and has seen the defections or expulsions of 31 lawmakers since the party won 33% of the vote in the 2018 election.

It was the 5-Stars' biggest victory nationally since its birth as a grassroots, anti-establishment protest movement led by comic Beppe Grillo.

Analysts have long said the party has struggled to pivot into an effective governing force, hobbled by its uneasy governing alliances first with the right-wing League party and, since September, with the center-left Democratic Party. In the process, it has alienated voters by defying some of its core values.

The conflict came to a head a few days before a regional election this weekend that is likely to see Matteo Salvini's League party score well in the traditional leftist stronghold of Emilia Romagna.

Latest polls showed the League and the Democratic candidate running close.

Analyst Massimiliano Panarari, writing Wednesday in the La Stampa newspaper, said a decision by Di Maio to step aside now as party leader would spare him blame should the candidate closest to the ruling coalition, Democrat Stefano Bonaccini, lose.

Panarari said Di Maio is the "natural scapegoat," because he has collected so many jobs — deputy premier, labor minister and minister of economic development in the first 5-Star government, and now foreign minister.

The 5-Stars' support has now shrunk to polling nationally only around 15-16%.

Premier Giuseppe Conte said he respected Di Maio's decision, while dismissing suggestions that his resignation as party leader could destabilize the government.

"Certainly, I would be sorry on a personal level," he told RTL102 radio.

Emiliana De Blasio, a communications sociologist at Rome's Luiss University, said Di Maio's downfall is linked to the fact that he rose in party ranks representing the movement's right-wing, and as such could work with Salvini when the League was in the government.

"The rapid fall is probably best represented by the fact that the government in this moment is made up of an alliance with the Democratic Party, so the whole 5-Star Movement seems to have moved towards the center-left," she said.

De Blasio noted that Di Maio never finished university and had no relevant work experience before being selected to head the party, a prime example of the fluid, non-traditional leadership ethos that guides the 5-Stars.

While he is capable and clever, "the 5-Star Movement is made up of many personalities, and Di Maio is only one of the personalities," she said.