Author: DW

In the main competition of the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, 21 international films will compete from August 27 for what is arguably the most prestigious film prizes in European cinema: the Golden Lion. A-list stalwarts from Julia Roberts to George Clooney and Cate Blanchett will feature on Venice screens, while politically charged features and documentaries will also mark this year’s film gala.   Roberts makes her first-ever stroll down the Lido for Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” a #MeToo-inspired thriller. The Hollywood icon plays a Yale philosophy professor who’s put in a difficult position when her Ph.D. candidate and protegee…

German industry’s steady decline in employment figures continues, with the country’s prized automobile industry leading the pack, according to a new study from accounting giants EY (formerly known as Ernst & Young) based on data from the government’s statistics office.  EY recorded roughly 51,500 lost car industry jobs in the space of a year, equating to 6.7% of the sector’s total workforce. This made up almost half of the 114,000 industrial jobs lost in the same time period. The phenomenon also appears to be accelerating: Since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly 112,000 carmaking jobs have been lost in Germany —…

It was only at college that Hiwot Daniel realized she had been lonely as a child. Her father died when she was two years old, leaving her mother busy meeting basic needs. Growing up as an only child, no one asked Daniel questions like, “How was your day? What are you planning after school? Is there anything troubling you?” “There was no emotional support. I’m so thankful to my relatives because it was with their support that I got an education,” said Daniel. “[But] they focused more on financial support than on emotional support. They would say, ‘What do you…

US President Donald Trump on Monday said he is firing US Federal Reserve Governor Lisa, marking an unprecedented attempt to extend presdiential influence over the independent monetary body. Trump announced his intentions in a letter posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. He announced that he was removing Cook from her position, effective immediately, due to allegations that she obtained mortgage funds improperly. “I have determined that there is sufficient cause to remove you from your position,” he said in the letter. Trump went on to describe that Cook had signed two different addresses as primary residences in two different contracts,…

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday filed a lawsuit against Apple and ChatGPT creator OpenAI. As part of the suit, he asserted that the two companies are engaged in a monopolistic collaboration which is putting his own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, at a competitive disadvantage. What else do we know about the xAI lawsuit? Musk’s AI startup, xAI, alleged in the Texas lawsuit that Apple is preventing other chatbots from ranking above ChatGPT in its App Store, thus starving rivals such as Grok of valuable user interactions upon which the software relies to improve. Apple and OpenAI have therefore “locked up…

The scene: A pine forest near Izium, a city on the Donets River in eastern Ukraine. There are empty graves all around. This is where Russian soldiers buried the hundreds of civilians they killed in the spring of 2022. The graves are empty because the bodies in them have been exhumed for examination. Some of the people buried here were horribly tortured. Along with Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv, this is the site of some of the most serious Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine. Petra, one of the visitors here on this day, simply notes that the sand…

Forced medical research and human experiments are among the darkest chapters of the Nazi era. Pathogens, toxins and drugs were tested primarily on Jews, prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma, disabled people and other persecuted groups. Their organs were removed, they were left to freeze to death in controlled conditions, they were forcibly sterilized, and they were killed. The extent of the atrocities is almost unimaginable, with tens of thousands of victims. Now, detailed profiles of 16,000 of these people are available in a new online database. For the first time, there is systematic access to the names and personal details…

What exactly happened on the weekend? In the German Cup match between second-division side Schalke and fourth-tier club Lokomotiv Leipzig, Black Schalke player Christopher Antwi-Adjei delayed a throw-in to tell first the assistant referee, then the head referee, that he had been called the N-word by someone in the stands. The referee temporarily halted the contest as a result. After it resumed, Antwi-Adjei was booed by Leipzig fans every time he touched the ball. The fans’ reaction to an incident during a cup match in Potsdam, near Berlin, was different. After a player from the visiting team, Kaiserslautern, was racially…

SpaceX said on Sunday that it had canceled a test flight of its Starship rocket, citing an issue with the launch site. “Standing down from today’s tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems,” the firm said on the platform X. What else do we know about the canceled Starship launch? The rocket was due to launch from the company’s Starbase in southern Texas and would have marked the tenth mission from the site. The launch was to be carried out at 6:30 p.m. local time (23:30 GMT), but was called off just 15…

The United States National Guard on Sunday began carrying weapons in Washington, DC. US President Donald Trump deployed the troops this month as part of a crackdown on what he calls rampant crime in the US capital city. “Starting the late evening of August 24, 2025, JTF-DC service members began carrying their service-issued weapon,” the Joint Task Force-DC said in a statement. Over 2,200 soldiers have been assigned to the task force in Washington DC. The statement said the troops were only allowed to use force “as a last resort and solely in response to an imminent threat of death or serious…