Author: DW

December 1914. World War I had been raging for five months. Between minefields and barbed-wire fences, millions of soldiers faced each other in trenches along the Western Front, sometimes only some 30 meters apart. The combat zone stretched from the English Channel through Belgium and France to the Swiss border. As the war dragged on, soldiers huddled in their dugouts, where rats, lice, the cold and poor food wore them down, and death hung over them. Beyond the trenches, between the enemy lines, lay the muddy hell of no man’s land, where the bodies of fallen comrades lay out of reach. Disillusionment…

The long-running legal fight over Bayer’s weedkiller Roundup has seen nearly 200,000 cancer claims filed in US courts over the past seven years and is now being turned into a political tug of war. In prior Roundup lawsuits, the US Justice Department under former President Joe Biden, had argued that consumers should be allowed to pursue damages against Germany’s chemical giant, with most claims involving non‑Hodgkin lymphoma after long-term exposure to the pesticide. Earlier this month, however, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed course. After the US Supreme Court sought the Solicitor General’s view, the Justice Department sided with Bayer and urged limits on the tens…

For a number of countries that missed out on the 2026 World Cup, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) which kicks off on December 21 in Morocco, not only offers a swift chance at a measure of redemption but also a chance to start rebuilding and preparing for the global tournament when it next comes around in 2030.  Teams such as Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Benin, Sudan and others will stay home next summer, even though Africa saw its allocation at next summer’s World Cup expand to nine automatic places, up from five in 2022. They will, however, all be in…

When do the festivities begin? For Catholics, the Advent season started on November 30 this year — and with it, the excitement for Christmas. At the Vatican, the festivities begin with the official lighting of the Christmas tree and the inauguration of the Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square, which both took place on December 15 this year.  What kind of Christmas tree has been erected at the Vatican? Every year, a different Roman Catholic diocese has the honor of donating a Christmas tree to the Vatican. This year’s tree is a Norway spruce from the diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone in…

In mid-December, Evelyn Palla, the newly appointed chief executive of Deutsche Bahn (DB), unveiled a sweeping restructuring plan for Germany’s state-owned rail operator, set to take effect in 2026. After receiving approval from DB’s supervisory board on December 10, Palla said the company would eliminate around 30% of its executive positions as part of an effort to streamline management, decentralize decision-making, and improve punctuality and efficiency by making the organization more agile. The overhaul comes at a low point for Deutsche Bahn’s performance. This autumn, punctuality fell to a new record low, with just 55% of long-distance trains arriving less than six…

Even in Paris’s hard-drinking intellectual circles, French philosopher and feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir found that a glass of wine hit harder than expected. De Beauvoir once joked that two glasses left her feeling quite dizzy, long before any existential debates began. Decades later, science can explain why: Women’s bodies process alcohol differently from men’s — often faster and more intensely — and women’s brains also respond more strongly to its rewarding effects, even when drinking the same amount as men. How alcohol moves through the body Alcohol affects the body almost immediately. Before it hits the stomach, taste buds signal…

Ismail Skira looked relieved, a little exhausted, but very happy as he parked his bicycle in the coastal city of Agadir in southern Morocco. He had just finished a more than 3,000-kilometer (1,864-mile) journey from France that took four weeks. The Morocco-born football fan, who has lived in Paris since he was 21, was determined to support the Atlas Lions in person at the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). But traveling by car or plane would have been too easy for the 59-year-old. “When I was at the Africa Cup of Nations in Ivory Coast (in 2024), the fans were singing a song…

“It’s been quite a remarkable event in my life,” says linguist Paul Frommer, recalling his first encounter with James Cameron. Searching for someone to develop a constructed language for a science-fiction film, the renowned director had sent an email to the linguistics department of the University of Southern California. In his application for the job, Frommer convincingly expressed his enthusiasm for the challenge. “Welcome aboard,” Cameron told the doctor in linguistics at the end of their first 90-minute talk in 2005. “My life really hasn’t been the same ever since,” Frommer tells DW ahead of the release of “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the…

The long-running legal fight over Bayer’s weedkiller Roundup has seen nearly 200,000 cancer claims filed in US courts over the past seven years and is now being turned into a political tug of war. In prior Roundup lawsuits, the US Justice Department under former President Joe Biden, had argued that consumers should be allowed to pursue damages against Germany’s chemical giant, with most claims involving non‑Hodgkin lymphoma after long-term exposure to the pesticide. Earlier this month, however, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed course. After the US Supreme Court sought the Solicitor General’s view, the Justice Department sided with Bayer and urged limits on the tens…

In the early morning hours of Friday, December 19, you could spot the visitor from another solar system in the sky ― with a serious telescope, that is. Comet 3I/ATLAS flew by Earth at a distance of 270 million kilometers (168 million miles). That was its closest approach to our planet.  From here, the comet will continue its journey and pass by Jupiter in early 2026 before crossing the orbits of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by 2028 and then leaving our solar system. The facts about 3I/ATLAS Beyond the fact that this is the third known interstellar object to have entered our solar system, “we don’t know…