Author: DW

More luxury cars have been seized from Andrew Tate’s home in Romania after he was placed under house arrest earlier this week.The 37-year-old influencer was arrested alongside his brother Tristan, 36, and four others on Wednesday as part of an investigation into human trafficking, trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor, and money laundering, among other alleged offences. On Saturday, Romania’s anti-organised crime agency DIICOT took further vehicles from Tate’s largest property in Bucharest. Image: A vintage car is towed away from Tate’s home Image: A white Ferrari is seized from Tate’s Bucharest home During initial raids on Wednesday,…

Female founders who are perceived as attractive are more likely to raise funding from investors than those who are less attractive, a study by the Global Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland has found. The researchers conducted an experiment involving 111 male early-stage investors from Switzerland and Germany. The participants were randomly shown a video pitch of the same startup idea, with some presented by a more attractive actress and others by a less attractive one. It was a real startup case with significant potential for investors.The study wanted to know how male investors react…

A nine-member jury selected Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film to represent Germany at the 2025 Academy Awards in the category of Best International Feature Film. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was inspired by the mass protests in Iran in 2022 that were sparked by the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, by the so-called morality police. Rasoulof heard the demonstrations from his prison cell when he got the idea for a thriller exploring state violence, paranoia and censorship. After shooting the feature in secret — the Iranian regime had banned the director from filmmaking in 2017 — Rasoulof had to…

If it succeeds, Polaris Dawn will be the first non-government mission to perform a spacewalk. But not only that — it’ll do that about 700 kilometers (435 miles) above Earth. The highest ever. To compare: the International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth at about 400 kilometers, where the radiation is less intense. It will also orbit Earth through regions of a highly-charged belt of radiation. There are two of these “Van Allen Belts”, an inner and an outer one. Astronauts tend to avoid the hazardous Van Allen Belts, but they will have to travel through them if humans want to fly…

German extreme athlete Jonas Deichmann set a world record after completing his 106th long-distance triathlon. The Ironman distance includes 3.8 kilometers (2.4 miles) of swimming, 180 kilometers of cycling and 42 kilometers of running. It comes two weeks after Germany’s Laura Lindemann won first place in the 2024 Paris Olympics’ mixed triathlon relay. What else do we know about Deichmann’s record? “New world record, 106th. Awesome,” Deichmann said. The previous record holder was the UK’s Sean Conway, who reached 105 consecutive days last year. “This has been my life for eight or nine months now, there hasn’t been time for anything else.…

Vox pops are very popular in Turkey. However, it is a society in which opinions cannot always be expressed freely and many people are reluctant to speak out publicly. Dilruba K., however, didn’t mince her words. Interviewed on the street by a YouTube channel in Izmir last week, she not only criticized the blocking of Instagram by the Turkish government, but also the official day of mourning for the former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which was decreed around the same time. “In the 21st century, handing the Republic of Turkey to one man means he’ll treat it like his father’s farm,”…

Three people were killed and five seriously injured in a knife attack in the western German city of Solingen on Friday. Police said they had launched a “major operation to find the suspect, who escaped in the turmoil and panic that initially spread after the crime.” According to media reports, a man stabbed passers-by at random with a knife at a festival celebrating the city’s 650th anniversary. The local newspaper Solinger Tageblatt reported that three people had been killed and others were in a life-threatening situation.  In the wake of the attack, the city of Solingen has completely canceled its 650th anniversary celebrations.  The events…

At least one person has been killed in Russia after prisoners at a jail claiming to be Islamic State militants knifed guards and took hostages.Russian website Mash showed a video of at least two attackers, with one declaring they were “mujahideen” and saying they had taken over the prison.Four uniformed officials could be seen in pools of blood – three of them motionless. Another was sitting upright in a doorway with a knife held to his neck.The attackers have reportedly killed at least one prison official.Security forces then stormed the prison to free the hostages, Russian TV news channels say.The…

Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region has brought the gas transit hub in Sudzha into sharp focus. A few kilometers inside Russia from the Ukrainian border, Sudzha is an important processing point for Russian gas being exported to Europe. Gas from Siberia arrives there before it is piped via Ukraine toward EU countries such as Hungary, Austria and Slovakia. Last week, a Ukrainian military brigade published a video of its soldiers at the offices of Russian gas giant Gazprom’s offices at the Sudzha station and claimed it was under their full control. Russia claims Ukraine does not have full control of the facility. Earlier…

When US musician Dave Doughman was touring Germany with his band in the early 2000s, the show in Hamburg was empty until local football club St. Pauli finished its game. Suddenly, the venue was “full of people wearing Jolly Roger t-shirts” — the skull and crossbones symbol of the St. Pauli team — recalled Doughman. “What is this, a pirate convention?” he wondered. Coming from Dayton, Ohio, Doughman had “zero interest in football.” But the singer and guitarist soon realized that these “buccaneers” were both soccer and alternative music fans who were avowedly anti-homophobic, anti-sexist and anti-racist — values the indie musician shared.  The football club…