Author: DW

Stability has recently been in short supply in Germany’s women’s national team. Through coaching confusion, post-mortems of their World Cup group stage exit in 2023 and the international retirements of stalwarts Svenja Huth and Melanie Leupolz, Alexandra Popp has been one of very few constants. Although the Germany captain, 33, will miss Friday’s Euro 2025 qualifier against Iceland due to a minor foot ailment, she is poised to lead a new-look Germany squad hoping to recapture Olympic gold in Paris. The Wolfsburg striker is the lone player left from Germany’s gold medal triumph at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. But with so much instability, Popp can’t stand alone. With…

Just three days after a crowd crush disaster at a religious event in northern Uttar Pradesh state killed over 120 people, Rahul Gandhi, the newly appointed leader of the opposition in the lower house of India’s parliament, visited the site to meet with family members of those killed. “It is a matter of grief that so many families have suffered, so many have lost their lives,” Gandhi told reporters after meeting with the families. “I don’t want to speak through a political prism, but there have been some lapses on the part of the administration. There have been mistakes, which should…

The idea of China outstripping the United States to become the world’s largest economy has been a fixation for policymakers and economists for decades. What will happen, they argue, when the US — one of the most dynamic, productive economies — is usurped by an authoritarian regime with a three-quarter-of-a-billion-strong workforce? Predictions of when exactly China would steal the US crown have come thick and fast ever since the 2008/9 financial crisis, which hampered growth in the US and Europe for many years. Before what became known as the Great Recession, China saw double-digit annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth for at least five years. In…

A Moscow court on Thursday upheld the jail sentence of Oleg Orlov, head of the Nobel-prize-winning human rights organization Memorial. Orlov has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian army. Orlov said he stood by his denunciation of “mass repression” in Russia. The 71-year-old was found guilty in February after penning an article saying the country had descended into fascism under President Vladimir Putin.Russian court sentences activist to prisonTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video ‘No remorse’ “I have no remorse or regrets. I…

The spire of France’s famous Rouen cathedral in Normandy is on fire.Images posted on social media showed flames spewing from a scaffolding canopy near the top of the building – which is renowned due to its three towers spanning hundreds of years of architecture. The gothic cathedral is widely known as it was painted multiple times by French impressionist painter Claude Monet in the 19th century.”A fire has started on the spire of Rouen Cathedral. Origin unknown at this stage. All public resources are mobilised,” wrote the city’s mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol on X.The blaze started in a section where building…

England have not made many friends at Euro 2024. They have disappointed, underwhelmed and, quite simply, bored spectators for much of the tournament. But one thing nobody can deny the Three Lions is that they roar the loudest when they are under attack. For the third time in three knockout ties, England conceded the first goal. For the third time, they were the team that went through. And on this occasion it wasn’t a case of one player producing heroics as everyone else desperately flailed around. Instead there were moments, especially in the first half, where England looked like a team,…

07/11/2024July 11, 2024NATO and Ukraine: ‘The stronger the signal these days, the better,” foreign relations expert tells DWGustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told DW that Russia’s summer offensive in Ukraine was still in full swing and that Ukraine’s military ranks were stretched thin. “Ukraine has battled the Russian offensive quite well so far,” Gressel said. “By autumn, of course, the tide could stall, but Western assistance is good for the end of the year, or into the spring.” There was a question of where things could stand in terms of future international assistance…

“The influence of China on Guinea-Bissau is undeniable, especially in economic terms,” Bissau-Guinean sociologist and China expert, Diamantino Lopes, said in an interview with DW. Since the country’s independence from Portugal five decades ago, almost all infrastructure measures have been carried out and financed by the Chinese, the analyst added. “The government palace, the justice building, the parliament, the renovation of the Palace of the Republic, the 13-kilometer (8-mile) highway between the airport and Safim, the national stadium in Bissau, or the new fishing port in Bandim — the Chinese control almost everything here,” Lopes explained. This week, Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro…

Are you a “night owl” or a “morning lark” — do you get up early to seize the day or stay up working late into the night? Whether you think it’s a preference, a habit, or just the way you are, it’s your “chronotype”. And a study suggests your chronotype can impact your general cognitive skills. The found night owls generally had higher cognitive scores than morning larks. The UK-based study, published July 11, 2024 in the journal BMJ Public Health, looked at data from more than 26,000 people, who had completed a number of cognitive tests. The aim was to find out how different aspects of sleep, including duration, patterns,…

Three days after the election, Emmanuel Macron had still not commented on the new balance of power in the country. There was silence at the Elysee. The French president was playing for time before appointing a new government. Though his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, resigned on Monday, he had decided to keep him in power until further notice. Observers doubted that France would have a new government before the Olympic Games came to an end in August. The new National Assembly, whose first session will be on July 18, is now dominated by three comparably large political camps. The broad…