Author: DW

Renault’s new electric Twingo fits easily into the French carmaker’s portfolio. It is a modern mini passenger car meant for urban European drivers, but it also tells a story about changes in the broader auto industry.   Renault developed the new Twingo over a breakneck 21 months in Shanghai, following an initial design phase in France.  The car is now in production in Slovenia, arriving this month at dealers with a price tag just under €20,000 ($23,000). The continent-hopping Twingo is a snapshot of a hypercompetitive auto industry and its new center of gravity in China. There, many legacy carmakers are developing new models by focusing on speed, cost and technology.  Germany’s Merz seeks China reset as trade imbalance widens To view this video please enable JavaScript, and…

A humanoid robot has been declared champion at a half-marathon running race held in Beijing, China, on Sunday, far outpacing human participants and beating the world record. The autonomously navigated robot Shandian was presented with the laurels after a remote-controlled robot, Lightning, who technically finished first, was denied the prize under the event’s weighted scoring rules. Big robotic improvement Shandian completed the 21-kilometer (around 13-mile) course in Beijing’s Yizhuang district with a time of 50:26, while Lightning achieved a time of 48:19. Both times were faster than the human record for the distance set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who ran a time of 57:20 at the…

Amid talk of a possible return of compulsory military service, more young Germans are applying for conscientious objector status. Meanwhile, Germany has become the world’s fourth-largest military spender. DW has more.

Four decades ago, the Strait of Hormuz revealed its deadly vulnerability to the global oil market. During the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war, both sides repeatedly targeted oil tankers in the strait, turning one of the world’s most vital crude arteries into a floating battlefield. Saudi Arabia reacted by building the East-West Pipeline across its vast desert peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Years later, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) followed suit with the Habshan–Fujairah pipeline from the Abu Dhabi emirate to the Gulf of Oman. Hormuz’s vulnerability came roaring back in late February when the US-Israel war with Iran broke out.…

Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe has become the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. The 30-year-old set the milestone by winning the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds on Sunday, breaking the previous record. The time for the 26.2 miles (42.2km) distance was 65 seconds faster than the mark set by fellow Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum in Chicago in 2023. It was also 10 seconds quicker than Eliud Kipchoge’s time from 2019 in Vienna. That finish was not recognized as an official record because it was not in open competition and the Kenyan was assisted by pacemakers. Another record set in…

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…