Author: DW

Embellished with a gilded iguana and a bouquet of fruits topped with a pineapple, an ostentatious piece of queer history  was sold on April 24 for €300,000 ($350,000) at the Berlin branch of Germany’s Lempertz auction house. The just over 116-centimeter-tall porcelain vase is thought to have been made as a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last emperor of Germany, to his friend Prince Philipp of Eulenburg-Hertefeld. Little known about today, the relationship between the Kaiser and the prince was at the center of a scandal, the so-called Eulenburg Affair, that German historian Norman Domeier, says shook all of Europe…

Weeks after Apple’s 50th anniversary, the US technology titan announced on Monday that its CEO Tim Cook would step down in September, to be succeeded by hardware engineer John Ternus. Ternus will step into some of the biggest shoes in corporate America. Cook is credited with turning Apple from a $350 billion (€298 billion) company when he started to a valuation of over $4 trillion today. Ternus takes over a tech giant that must keep its premium edge — the iPhone recently retook the crown as the world’s most popular smartphone by sales — while pushing harder into artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, Apple faces…

When it became clear to renowned German actress Tilla Durieux and her husband Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, a businessman of Jewish origin, in mid‑1934 that their residence permit in Switzerland would not be renewed, the two decided to leave for Zagreb — the capital of Croatia, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Few Europeans really had a sense of where Zagreb was located, Durieux later noted in her diary. “People thought Zagreb was a suburb of Vienna or of Prague. Yugoslavia was somewhere ‘down there,’ in a part of the world no one could quite make sense of.” Friends of the couple admired…

The Iran war is having a profound effect on the global aviation sector, with jet fuel shortages and surging prices wreaking havoc on flight routes. On Tuesday, April 21, Germany’s largest carrier Lufthansa announced it had canceled 20,000 flights between May and October to try and save fuel. The airline said the short-haul flights being cut would remove “equivalent to approximately 40,000 metric tons of jet fuel, the price of which has doubled since the outbreak of the Iran conflict.” Dutch airline KLM last week canceled 160 flights for the coming month, while other airlines in Europe and across the Asia-Pacific region…

At the beginning of this year, a “nihilistic penguin” went viral. The short clip shows a penguin on the ice leaving its colony and waddling off alone into a seemingly endless frozen expanse — behavior that is highly atypical from a biological standpoint. The scene presents a tragicomic allegory open to multiple interpretations. The footage comes from a 2007 documentary by filmmaker Werner Herzog. Memes are now a permanent fixture of online culture that’s here to stay. They also play a growing role in political discourse — shaping people’s perceptions and even opinions. This trend is particularly visible in the…

Social media giant Meta on Thursday announced plans to lay off about 8,000 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, as it seeks to scale up development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The owner of social media platforms Facebookand Instagram, along with the messaging app Whatsapp, said in an internal memo that the first round of cuts is due on May 20. Along with the cuts, Meta said 6,000 further posts would be left unfilled. Also on Thursday, US media reported that tech giant Microsoft was planning to offer voluntary early retirement buyouts for around 8.700 workers, or about 7%…

On Friday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said his country was prepared to supply mine clearance and maritime reconnaissance to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. “We could provide mine-clearance vessels — we are good at that,” Merz said, adding that a “sound legal basis” would be needed for such an intervention. His announcement followed consultations with fellow European leaders on a potential multinational mission to secure the strait after the war. The same day, Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghchi declared the critical waterway “completely open” for the duration of the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, and US President Donald Trump likewise said it was…

Even by Bayern Munich’s standards, wrapping up men’s and women’s Bundesliga titles with a week remaining in April is impressive. The women’s football team sealed their fifth title in the last six seasons with a 3-2 win at Union Berlin on Wednesday, having won 21 and drawn one of their 22 league games so far. Later that evening, the men reached the German Cup final with a 2-0 win over Bayer Leverkusen having made it 12 out of 13 Bundesliga titles a few days before that. “It was a really great evening that leaves us wanting more,” said women’s captain Giulia Gwinn after scoring…

Running a cozy little bookshop where readers can meet and connect over their favorite authors is a dream shared by many book nerds. But beyond the romanticized idea, the independent bookstore business is renowned for being risky, which is why most people never get to follow that dream. There is a creative and popular alternative, however: The Open Book, in the coastal town of Wigtown, Scotland, offers a “bookshop holiday” experience in which guests volunteer to run the bookstore during their one- to two-week stay at the apartment above the shop.  “I think what draws people here is the dream. The kind of ‘what if’ —…

Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has drawn comparisons with the supply disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and US President Donald Trump’s new tariff regime. The pandemic exposed the world’s heavy dependence on China for manufacturing everything from electronics to medical gear, while Trump’s tariffs, introduced last year, also accelerated efforts to cut that reliance. The war in Iran has highlighted yet another weakness: how fast a disruption to critical raw materials such as oil, gas and fertilizers can ripple across global trade. The International Energy Agency described the loss of roughly 10% of the world’s oil supply and a fifth of global liquefied…