Author: DW

Earlier this month, gaming giant Electronic Arts was sold to an investment consortium including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for $55 billion (€47 billion). The deal stood out in a few ways. It is believed to be one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history, meaning a significant chunk of the $55 billion was borrowed money that the company itself will have to pay back. It was also the second-biggest deal in gaming history, after Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, the company behind the “Call of Duty” franchise, for $69 billion in 2023. The Electronic Arts sale additionally…

“A year ago, I told my team that we need to step things up by two gears, and we did that,” Schalke’s second-year coach, Miron Muslic, told the club’s website ahead of this season’s return to the Bundesliga. “Now we need to step things up by two gears all over again. At first glance it may sound like a threat, too dramatic, but this is what we will need to meet this challenge. The lads know this and we are confident that we have a higher gear in us.” The challenge for Muslic is not simply to avoid relegation in year one…

US country music singer Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80.  Her nephew Brian Seaver announced the news in a video posted to Parton’s Instagram page.  The 80-year-old singer spent almost all of her life making music and is known all over the world for a series of major hits like “Jolene,” “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You.” Her decades-long career earned her 10 Grammys and 13 Academy of Country Music (ACM) awards. Earlier in the year, Parton canceled a series of shows in Las Vegas citing ongoing treatment for health problems. Late last year,…

1. Why is Volkswagen holding crunch talks with workers? Volkswagen’s management is holding extraordinary meetings with workers this week amid an unprecedented cost-cutting drive, including reports of up to 100,000 job losses and the possible closure of several German car factories. Germany’s auto industry faces a deep structural crisis due to intense pressure from Chinese rivals, the transition to electric vehicles (EVs), higher production costs and other challenges. As Europe’s biggest carmaker by volume, VW has the heaviest exposure to overcapacity in its German plants, high fixed costs and its reliance on China. Workers have been particularly concerned by how the restructuring was communicated so far, which representatives have described…

The 64th season of the Bundesliga is here. The tiny team from Elversberg will become the 59th club to play in the league, Ismael Saibari is Harry Kane’s new back-up at Bayern Munich, Schalke return after three years away, and Kathleen Krüger is Head of Sport at Hamburg.  Coming off an XXL World Cup and a new broadcasting deal in the US, the Bundesliga is looking to step forward into a new era. But beyond the loyal support of club fans both domestic and abroad, has the international appeal of the league, particulary in the key US market, worn off? “It would…

The list of international composers who have written for star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is a long one. It features names like Krzysztof Penderecki and Sofia Gubaidulina, along with Andre Previn and Jörg Widmann. In recent years, women like Iranian-Dutch composer Aftab Darvishi and South Korean composer Unsuk Chin have also written works for Mutter. On the occasion of the violinist’s 50th stage anniversary, she’s now recorded over 30 works either dedicated to her or commissioned by her — all part of her “ASM Forte Forward” project on the Alpha Classics label.Anne-Sophie Mutter is deeply committed to social causesImage: Bernd Weißbrod/dpa/picture alliance The…

A 70-year-old woman with advanced breast cancer was supposed to undergo chemotherapy every two weeks. Doctors had scheduled six treatment sessions, each costing around 100 million Iranian tomans (about $530 or €450). Iran’s minimum monthly wage for workers covered by the country’s labor law is 16.6 million tomans, meaning that just one of her chemotherapy sessions costs roughly six times the monthly minimum wage. The woman’s children asked her doctor to postpone the next round of treatment while they searched for a loan or any other source of financial support, according to colleagues of Hamid Hemmatpour, an Iranian physician based…

The skull has traditionally been regarded largely as armor for the brain. New research from the United States suggests it may have another role: proactively helping to defend what lies beneath it. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis identified previously unknown immune “security stations” in the bone marrow of mouse skulls. What the mouse experiments revealed The lymph node-like structures responded to brain tumors before more distant lymph nodes in the neck did. When researchers disrupted the structures in mice with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, the tumors grew faster and the animals died sooner. “The skull should…

Bayern Munich striker Harry Kane has been named men’s Player of the Year in Germany after a record-breaking season for the Bundesliga champions. Bayern coach Vincent Kompany was voted trainer of the year, while Germany defender Giulia Gwinn completed a clean sweep for the Munich club by winning the women’s Player of the Year award. “A Bayern double — never before have the men and women’s Player of the Year awards gone to the same club. Congratulations to Harry and Giulia, as well as our coach Vincent,” Bayern president Herbert Hainer said in a club statement. “When men’s and women’s football…

As Europe’s rivers recede during periods of drought, long-hidden traces of the past have resurfaced. Alongside Nazi-era shipwrecks, unexploded World War II bombs and prehistoric mammoth remains, some rivers reveal history literally written in stone. One such inscription, in German, reads: “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” — “If you see me, weep.” These words are etched on a hunger stone in the Elbe River near Decin in Czechia, close to the German border. The 2026 drought has revealed historical artifacts lying under Europe’s rivers, like this century-old shipwreck in CroatiaImage: David Jerkovic/Pixsell/IMAGO Why ‘hunger’? Hunger stones, or “Hungersteine” in…