Author: DW

Russia and Saudi Arabia each produce between 9-10 million barrels of oil a day. Together, they account for over 20% of total world oil production. This gives them significant control over supply, despite Western sanctions and price caps on Russian oil following the war in Ukraine , and disruptions caused by the Strait of Hormuz blockade. OPEC minus one important member As the biggest member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Saudi Arabia has long dominated the formal alliance and worked to keep oil prices stable by controlling supply. Before the war in Iran started, OPEC countries…

What’s the best way to combat disease-spreading mosquitoes? More mosquitoes! At least that’s the plan of scientists at Google’s Debug program. The researchers want to release 16 million mosquitoes each in the US states of Florida and California in a first step. And then they want to do it all again next year. Trying to reduce the mosquito population by adding millions more sounds counter-intuitive at first. But to understand the project, you have to look at what kind of mosquitoes the researchers are fighting — and what kind they’re looking to release. In a nutshell, it’s good mosquitoes vs. bad…

English football legend David Beckham is set to be honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, organizers announced on Tuesday, as the United States counts down to the FIFA World Cup, which it is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada. The 51-year-old former England captain’s plaque on the famous Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles will be unveiled at a ceremony on June 12 ahead of the first game of the tournament on US soil between the United States and Paraguay in nearby Inglewood later that evening. “David Beckham’s recognition with a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in the Sports…

Cologne’s Catholic Cathedral will begin charging tourists €12 (about $14) for entry from July 1. The renowned gothic church and UNESCO world heritage site first announced its plan to introduce entry fees in March, becoming one of comparatively few German places of worship charging for admission.  The figure announced on Wednesday is slightly higher than the €10 ceiling proposed in March by architect Barbara Schock-Werner, who heads the Central Cathedral Construction Association (ZDV).Guido Assmann (left) and Clemens van de Wen laid out the plans to reporters in Cologne on TuesdayImage: Benjamin Westhoff/dpa/picture alliance Why is the church charging for entry?  Church officials…

While Germany is trying to make major budget cuts, billions of euros are silently sitting in banks and other financial institutions, unused and unnoticed in so-called forgotten accounts. A 2021 report from the country’s Research Ministry estimated that up to €4.2 billion ($4.9 billion) was in such accounts. Other estimates are much higher, some as high as €9 billion. The banks themselves haven’t released any figures. As people get older, have multiple accounts or die, relatives and heirs have a hard time identifying accounts. Online banking, with no paperwork or printed statements, makes it more difficult because the information is locked up…

US tennis giant Serena Williams confirmed on Monday that she will return to the sport, after it became known that she would compete in doubles at the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club next week. “Guess everybody heard the news,” she wrote in an Instagram video post, which showed her walking on the court, racket in hand. Williams won her last Grand Slam singles title in 2017. She has not competed in tennis since the 2022 US Open. Since then, she gave birth to two daughters. The tennis legend never actually used the word ‘retirement’ when she stepped away from tennis, saying instead…

When the world seems to be falling apart, people look for something to hold on to. “Now, more than ever, with the world plagued by crises and at risk of being engulfed by war, there is a growing desire for unity,” says Evelyn Meining, artistic director of the Mozartfest Würzburg. Throughout history, the genius and beauty of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music has frequently provided comfort during times of crisis — and it continues to do so today. “As a composer, he is a figurehead, especially when there is a sense of hyper-stimulation and polarization,” Meining tells DW. That is why the…

North Korea runs one of the most bizarre economies on the planet. Despite being one of only a handful of nations with nuclear weapons, its 2024 gross domestic product (GDP) was a paltry $26.6 billion (€22.9 billion). This is about 70 times smaller than South Korea’s $1.86 trillion economy and about a fifth of the annual revenue of the world’s top-traded company, Nvidia. Thanks to a centrally planned economy that prioritizes domestic production, North Korea is nowhere near as reliant on trade as your average free-market economy, partly due to international sanctions, introduced by the United Nations in 2017 over its nuclear weapons and ballistic…

Your DNA has never been created from scratch. Think of it like a recipe — passed down from parent to child over countless generations, all the way back 4 billion years to the earliest life on Earth. With tweaks and changes accumulating along the way, but always copied from something that already existed.  That’s the one rule that has held the entire time: to make DNA, you need existing genetic material to copy from.  Scientists just found a protein that breaks this rule. A mechanism nobody has seen before “It was quite a surprise!” Alex Gao, a biochemist at Stanford…

The interwar Weimar Republic period is often referred to as a “Golden Age” of culture and creativity in Germany. It was a time when groundbreaking movements, from Bauhaus architecture and experimental cinema to avant-garde art and theater, flourished against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and extreme political polarization. In cities such as Berlin, where speakeasies, cabarets and hedonistic nightlife were the norm, a radical new genre of music became immensely popular. Jazz, which emerged from African American communities in the Deep South, was first brought to Germany by pioneering artists from the US, UK and France after World War I. Josephine Baker,…