Author: DW

SpaceX has achieved a new milestone in space exploration, having caught its own rocket booster as it landed back on Earth this week.  SpaceX’s launch tower caught the rocket in ‘chopsticks’ as it performed a carefully calculated ‘landing burn’ while slowly returning to Earth.  This latest achievement is a key step in SpaceX’s goal to develop a reusable space launch system for its Starship space transport. Elon Musk— who co-owns the private space company — posted on his social media platform X that “Hopefully early next year, we [SpaceX] will catch the ship too.” SpaceX’s reusable rocket tech could reduce ‘space junk’ SpaceX’s rocket-catching achievement is…

“Footballers are often playing at or above their performance limit,” Professor Wilhelm Bloch of the Sports University Cologne told DW in an interview. The sports scientist is among those who question whether players can sustain such exertion at a high level of performance in the long term without suffering damage. This comes as the footballing calendar is constantly being extended  – and the games become more and more intense. Julian Alvarez, who moved to Atletico Madrid from Manchester City in August, is among the male footballers who played the most games last season. According to the players’ union FIFPRO, the attacker played 75 games…

Voters in Moldova are heading to the polls on Sunday. Not only are voters in the small Balkan nation, sandwiched between EU member Romania and war-torn Ukraine, choosing their next president, but they will also be asked about the future they want. In a historic referendum involving 228 polling stations across 37 counties, voters will decide whether to rewrite the constitution to enshrine joining the European Union as a strategic objective. Moldova, which has a resident population of around 2.6 million plus a sizeable expatriate community, already entered into official negotiations to join the 27-member bloc in June. However, the…

Cuba’s national electrical grid shut down on Friday after a failure of one of the country’s major power plants, its Energy Ministry said. The Antonio Guiteras power plant went offline shortly before midday on Friday, causing a total grid failure and leaving around 10 million people without power. What did Cuban officials say about the blackout? “There will be no rest until (power) is restored,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on X. Officials said by mid-afternoon they had begun taking steps to restore power but that the process would take time. Before the total failure, authorities had already canceled non-vital…

Anne Applebaum’s latest book “Autocracy, Inc.” comes just in time to illustrate why her work is being honored in Frankfurt, where she is being honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on October 20. The Pulitzer-prize winning author explains in “Autocracy, Inc.” how autocratic alliances undermine our democracy — not simply due to tyrants ruling from above, but also through networks cooperating behind the scenes in areas such as technology, economy, military and diplomacy.  Anne Applebaum is renowned as a key analyst of the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Her books about the Soviet gulags and the Holodomor,…

Do icons need agents? Well, when it comes to Charlie Chaplin, the answer is Yes! The film legend was born in England, made his most important films in Hollywood and spent his last decades in Switzerland. Yet, it’s on a quiet street in Paris not far from the Louvre where the Chaplin Office is found. It is a tiny place with a big job. It’s from here that a dedicated team is hard at work looking after Charlie Chaplin’s legacy and they are busier than ever, nearly 47 years after he died in 1977. Charlie Chaplin in control of it all…

A Spanish TV documentary has claimed that the explorer Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe. The claim could overturn long-accepted beliefs about the explorer’s identity as a Genovese from the Italian peninsula. The new claims of Columbus’ ancestry were presented in a documentary on Spain’s broadcaster TVE called “Columbus DNA: The True Origin,” and are the result of work led by forensic researchers Jose Antonio and Miguel Lorente from the University of Granada in Spain.  But experts have cast doubt on these claims — the results have not been published in a scientific journal and therefore cannot be verified.   …

Did British mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1924 – 29 years before the first documented ascent of the highest mountain on Earth? It’s a question that mountaineering enthusiasts worldwide have been asking for decades – so much so that many books have been written about the subject.  New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal are in the record books for their 1953 feat. But now US mountaineer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin has found a very old mountaineering boot on the Central Rongbuk Glacier below the north face of Everest – with the…

10/18/2024October 18, 2024US diplomat: ‘This is such a critical moment in terms of the war in Ukraine’US diplomat Michael Carpenter, senior director for Europe at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, told DW that the trip to Germany had been important for the US president to make — even if shorter than had been anticipated. “This is an important moment for President Biden to meet with President Steinmeier and Chancellor Scholz and thank Germany for all the contributions it has made alongside the United States — for Ukraine, and for European security.” “This is such a critical moment in terms…

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was killed during an Israeli military operation, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz confirmed late on Thursday. “The mass murderer Yahya Sinwar, responsible for the massacre and atrocities of October 7th, was eliminated today by IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers,” Katz said in a statement sent to media.  The Israeli military also confirmed Sinwar’s death, saying in a social media post that he had been “eliminated.” The first reports of Sinwar’s death came earlier in the day, but Israeli authorities took several hours to confirm it after carrying out DNA tests. Israeli president praises soldiers for eliminating ‘arch-terrorist’ Sinwar Israeli…