Author: DW

The long-anticipated announcement came on November 11, when Google revealed details at a press conference in Berlin. Philipp Justus, the California-based tech giant’s managing director for Germany, said the company would invest €5.5 billion ($6.37 billion) over the next four years. That includes the construction of a new data center in near Frankfurt and expansions at existing sites in Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin.Google and other Big Tech companies need data centers across the world to handle the computing power needed for AI applicationsImage: Google Handout/dpa/picture-alliance German officials hailed the announcement as a boost for the country’s digital ambitions. “We want to make…

The plot thickens regarding the corruption scandal in Ukraine: Justice Minister German Galushchenko and Energy Minister Svitlana Grynchuk announced they will step down at the request of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Their resignations are among the fallout of revelations by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) about a large-scale money laundering scheme in the energy and defense sectors. Both politicians have rejected the allegations against them. NABU launched its investigation in the summer of 2024. In particular, it probed the business of the state-owned company Energoatom, which operates four nuclear power plants in Ukraine. The operation was given the code name “Midas,” after…

The lower house of US Congress, the House of Representatives, on Wednesday voted to pass a spending bill, ending a federal government shutdown after 43 days of impasse. The bill was brought to the desk of US President Donald Trump just hours later. “So with my signature, the Federal government will now resume normal operations and my administration and our partners in Congress will continue our work to lower the cost of living, restore public safety, grow our economy and make America affordable again,” the president said as he signed the bill into law. The bill was passed in the upper house, the Senate,…

Germany’s infamous symbol of division, the Berlin Wall, split West Berlin — an isolated enclave of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) — from East Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for 28 years. Construction began in 1961 under the orders of the GDR’s communist leadership, following the flight of approximately 3 million people to the West. They were escaping a struggling economy, limited freedoms and government surveillance. To prevent further defection to the West, the East German government built a complex system of barriers, obstacles and guard towers along the 155-kilometer-long border. It was meant to be impenetrable — although…

Olkiluoto island on the western coast of Finland used to be just an energy hub for the country bordering Russia. But with the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it became strategically important as Helsinki decided it could no longer rely on Russian energy. Up until then, the country had been receiving half of its energy imports from the neighboring country, with which it shares a 1,300-kilometer (807-mile) border. They included electricity, oil and natural gas deliveries.Olkiluoto island has become crucial for ensuring Finland’s energy supplyImage: Tapani Karjanlahti, Posiva “Before 2022, there had been the optimistic hope we…

An Istanbul court issued arrest warrants for the eight suspects, including a club president and several referees, the state-owned Anadolu news agency reported on Tuesday. Murat Ozkaya is the president of Eyupsport, who play in Turkey’s topflight Super Lig. Eleven other suspects who had also been taken into custody on Friday have been released on bail. The suspects stand accused of abuse of office and match-fixing, among other things. The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) says that it has summoned 1,024 players before its disciplinary committee on charges of betting on matches. For the past two weeks, all matches in Turkey’s…

About 200 protesters demonstrated in front of the parliament building in Austria’s capital Vienna on Tuesday evening. They were rallying against an event called the Dinghofer Symposium that they say is antisemitic. Parliamentary speaker Walter Rosenkranz, who hosted the event, had attracted massive criticism in the past weeks for going ahead with the symposium despite calls to cancel it. Some protesters held up placards that read “No place for antisemitism” or “Shame.” “Dinghofer was an antisemite and a Nazi party member during World War II,” said Lia Guttmann, co-president of the Austrian Union of Jewish Students group. Guttmann said the…

Power was restored in parts of the Dominican Republic on Tuesday after a countrywide outage hit earlier in the day and brought the country to a standstill, officials said. Generation units in San Pedro de Macorís and the Quisqueya Power Plant shut down, triggering a domino effect at other transmission and generation plants, according to the Dominican Electricity Transmission Company, a decentralized state agency. The nationwide blackout disrupted mass transit systems, including aerial cable cars and the metro in the capital, Santo Domingo, where some people were forced to leave the train and begin walking through tunnels alongside the railway.…

It’s Sunday afternoon, and 10 people are gathered for a theater rehearsal in a community hall in Lille, a city in northern France. Most of the amateur actors did not get to know each other through the arts scene. They met during France’s  “yellow vests” protests.  The grassroots protest movement was at its height in 2018 and 2019 when protesters wearing yellow, high-visibility vests, blocked streets across France in response to fuel tax hikes designed to partially finance climate measures. Since then the movement, named “gilets jaunes” in French, has dissipated somewhat. Smaller, local actions still take place but the larger protests…

The future’s so bright for Elon Musk, even industrial-grade shades won’t block the glare from his $1 trillion (€862 billion) pay deal. That is, of course, if he manages to hit some truly mind-boggling goals for Tesla, the electric-vehicle company he founded and transformed into a tech juggernaut. To unlock the full value of his compensation package, Musk must hit milestones that sound more like science fiction than corporate strategy. These include deploying one million robotaxis — autonomous vehicles that generate revenue without human drivers — and producing a million Optimus humanoid robots, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Musk will only become the world’s first trillionaire, albeit…