Author: DW

The Venice Film Festival this year offered up films wrestling with the most pressing political and social issues of our times — from war in the Middle East to the rising threat of AI — while finding a way to make existential despair feel entertaining. Dystopia has never looked so good. Laughing at the apocalypse Two of the films with the bleakest messages for humanity were also the funniest. “Bugonia,” from “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos, casts Emma Stone as a high-powered CEO who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists convinced she’s an alien out to destroy planet Earth. Adapted…

At the 2022 World Cup, South Korea was one of just four nations, along with Brazil, Argentina and Saudi Arabia, not to have a naturalized player in its squad. That is unlikely to be the case in the 2026 World Cup as the East Asian nation selected a foreign-born male player who has switched sporting nationalities in August for the first time in its history. It is a move that could be more significant off the pitch than on it. Jens Castrop has lived all his life in Germany but is now preparing to make his senior international debut against the…

Emergency services in the Portuguese capital Lisbon said that at least 15 people were killed and 18 injured one Wednesday when one of the city’s iconic yellow Gloria railway cars derailed. In a statement, the National Institute for Medical Emergencies said that five of the injured were in serious condition, including a child, and that some were foreigners. According to emergency services, all of the victims have been recovered from the wreckage.Emergency services said that all of the victims have been recovered from the wreckageImage: Pedro Rocha/REUTERS What do we know about the accident? The famous funicular, which travels up and…

A boat carrying over 100 passengers sank in Nigeria’s north-central Niger State, leaving a dozen people dead, rescuers said on Wednesday. The State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) said in a statement that 29 bodies were recovered and 50 people were rescued, while two were still unaccounted for. News agency Reuters cited a local government official as saying that the death toll was rising and had reached as high as 60. How did the boat sink? The accident took place around 11 a.m. local time (10 a.m. UTC) on Tuesday. The boat had left Tungan Sule in the Malale district and was heading…

The movie is brash, loud, funny, and full of catchy songs. It tells the story of HUNTR/X, a K-pop girl band whose members — Rumi, Zoey and Mira — are more than just manufactured products of the South Korean pop industry: They also hunt demons!   In between filling stadiums, the band lounge on the sofa in bunny pajamas, stuff themselves with fast food, and enjoy their pop star life without hard training and constant rehearsals. But at the same time. they’re hunting demons that suck the souls out of music fans in an effort to take over the world. The head…

Landslides are the most common geological event. That’s a fact. They affect millions of people and cause many thousands of deaths. They often occur in countries with poor or inadequate infrastructure — such as in Sudan’s Marra Mountains region in late August 2025. Just the year before, in 2024, there were two major landslides in the same region.  In Papua New Guinea, a reported 2,000 people were buried alive following a landslide in May 2024. Two months later, torrential rains in Indonesia caused a landslide to crash onto a reportedly illegal gold mining operation on Sulawesi island, killing some of the people working there. But landslides…

Bayer Leverkusen’s dismissal of Erik ten Hag after just two Bundesliga games has shown the weight of the transformation the club are grappling with. Just over a year after celebrating a historic first league title under Xabi Alonso, Leverkusen find themselves stripped of key leaders, searching for cohesion, and unwilling to risk early-season drift. Ten Hag’s abrupt exit, announced on Monday, underlines the tension between expectations and the harsh realities of Leverkusen rebuilding its squad and identity. Leverkusen’s season so far underwhelming While Ten Hag’s reign began with promise as he oversaw a convincing German Cup win against fourth division side Sonnenhof Grossaspach, it quickly…

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Washington had carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug- carrying vessel that departed from Venezuela. Trump said that the US military killed 11 people in the strike. “The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. Initially on Tuesday Trump gave few details on the operation. “When you leave the room, you’ll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally, shot a boat — a drug-carrying boat,”…

A Republican-led United States House of Representatives committee on Tuesday released tens of thousands of pages from the probe into disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein amid the case becoming a political headache for the Trump administration.  The 33,295 pages, which are a part of a first batch of documents related to Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, were released by the House Oversight Committee on its website after being handed over by the Justice Department following a subpeona.  “We’re in the process of uploading those documents for full transparency so everyone in America can see those documents,” Republican…

William Kentridge is one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, his charcoal drawings provide the foundation for multimedia creations combining animation, prints, collages, sculptures, tapestries and even puppets. He came to global prominence in the late 1980s and 1990s for his animated short films based on drawings that dissected South Africa’s apartheid regime, but also tell personal stories. To mark the 70th birthday of the Johannesburg-based artist, Germany’s Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Dresden State Art Collections are hosting a major exhibition celebrating Kentridge’s expansive artistic oeuvre.A still from Kentridge’s animation ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance,’ in which the procession of…