Author: DW

A Hungarian firm, BAC Consulting, has been linked to the thousands of pagers that exploded in Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people and leaving nearly 3,000 wounded. The name of the Budapest-based firm first cropped up in a statement by a Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo, whose label appeared on the devices. Gold Apollo said it did not manufacture the devices and that they were made by its Hungarian partner, BAC Consulting. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Gold Apollo founder and president Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters at the company’s offices…

When the 11 dancers of the Cottbus Piccolo Theater youth dance company whirl across the stage, the energy is electric. The theater piece “Move On Move Over”  revolves around the topics of time, war and migration. For the theater’s director Reinhard Drogla, the production is the highlight of the upcoming season. “Young people are our hope,” he says. There are many reasons to stay optimistic, despite the political situation in the country as voters’ turn towards the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in much of former East Germany. Located about 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Berlin, Cottbus is a medium-sized…

The first half of September 2024 saw devastating floods in Nigeria, Myanmar, the Czech Republic, Budapest and other parts Central Europe after heavy rainfall. In August, floods hit Bangladesh and left more than 500,000 people without clean water, sanitation, dry clothes and other basics like medication. With experts tending to attribute these extreme weather events to climate change, governments and communities are looking towards mitigation and adaptation strategies. For instance, investment in grey infrastructure projects, using concrete and steel, and natural green initiatives could help to prevent the very worst impacts of more frequent and severe flood events. Storm Boris: Torrential rains hit EuropeTo…

What is the hearing all about? The Premier League, the top football division in England and the richest football league in the world, has charged its reigning champions, Manchester City, with 115 breaches of its financial regulations. The charges were initially bought in February 2023 and cover the years between 2009 and 2018.  Starting on September 16, 2024, a three-person commission will review mountains of evidence for about 10 weeks at an undisclosed location. A verdict is expected sometime before the end of the current season. The English champions, owned in practice by the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family, deny all charges and…

Voting began on Wednesday in Indian-administered Kashmir in its first local elections in a decade and also for the first time since the disputed region was stripped of its semi-autonomous status five years ago. Polling is staggered geographically in the three-phased ballot to elect the local government because of security arrangements and logistical issues in the restive Himalayan region. Additional troops deployed Amid a heavy police and paramilitary presence, over 2.3 million residents are eligible to cast their votes in the first phase on Wednesday, which will see 24 Assembly constituencies contested in the region’s seven southern districts. Kashmir remains one…

Sean “Diddy” Combs on Tuesday was headed to jail in the US to await trial, after a judge ordered him to be held without bail in a case that sees the rapper accused of racketeering and sex trafficking charges. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky ordered Combs to remain jailed after the music mogul pleaded not guilty to charges that were unsealed. Combs was arrested by federal agents in New York on Monday. He was charged in a three-count indictment with engaging in a decades-long pattern of sexual abuse of women. What is the rapper accused of? According to prosecution, the rapper and producer used…

The suspect in an apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump over the weekend has been charged with two federal gun crimes.Plenty of information has come to light about suspect Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who was arrested following the incident on Sunday at Mr Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing at the time. But the FBI says an investigation is “still at the early stages”, and there are still a lot of unknowns following the incident.Here are five key unanswered questions after the alleged shooting attempt.Did Routh know Trump would be playing golf?…

When China’s youth unemployment rate reached a record high of 21.3% last year, Beijing did what authoritarian governments do whenever ugly truths emerge — it stopped publishing the data. After fiddling with its methodology for six months, China’s National Bureau of Statistics excluded students from the data and Bingo! — by December, youth joblessness had dropped by nearly a third. Massaging the data, as many China watchers suspect happened, doesn’t make the problem go away. In July, after several months of small declines, the youth jobless figure rose sharply again — by a third to 17.1%. Singapore-based Jiayu Li, senior associate at the public-policy advisory firm Global…

Just like a boxer needs his entry music, US presidential candidates have long used songs as campaign anthems. For bands and musicians, this can be an honor, though that’s not always the case. The White Stripes are now taking legal action against the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump because he used their super hit “Seven Nation Army” without permission. In a video posted on X that has since been deleted, Trump was seen boarding a plane with the iconic opening riff of the song playing in the background. Jack White, the band’s singer and guitarist, published a picture of the…

There are hundreds of huge stone statues on Rapa Nui — the so-called Moai. No one has ever conclusively found out why they exist. But researchers have long assumed that many thousands of people must have lived on the Pacific island, also known as Easter Island, to erect the colossal figures. Ancestors of contemporary Polynesians first settled on the then-uninhabited volcanic island around the year 1210. No other inhabited place is so isolated in the world. Rapa Nui is 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) from the nearest inhabited island and almost 3,800 kilometers from the Chilean mainland. Early theories assumed that…