Author: DW

In the Baltic country of Lithuania, the startup sector has great ambitions — but achieving them might not be that straightforward. A construction site in the south of the country’s capital, Vilnius, will be key to the plan. Dozens of workers were bustling about there, on a recent Thursday morning. A truck was mixing cement with a humming sound, while a dredger was flattening a small patch of earth. The area is expected to become Europe’s largest startup hub by the end of 2028. The so-called Tech Zity will host 5,000 workers on roughly 55,000 square meters (65,7779 square yards). It…

In many ways, it was fitting that right when Germany needed to get back on track, they went back to where it all started for head coach Julian Nagelsmann. In Sinsheim, Nagelsmann made history when he became the youngest ever Bundesliga coach aged 28 back in 2016. Nearly a decade later, after stops at RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich, Nagelsmann’s Germany delivered the performance both expected of and required from them. Aided hugely by the fact Luxembourg played an hour with 10 men after an early red card, Germany dominated the 96th best team in the world. The contest was over before it began, not…

Hardly a night goes by that Ukraine doesn’t come under aerial attack from Russia. Last Sunday night alone, almost 500 drones and rockets were fired at targets in Ukraine. As it turned out, in many of those missiles, there were Western-made components. At the beginning of the week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed this out in a filmed message, noting that somehow high-tech componentry — circuit boards, microchips, sensors, converters, semiconductors and control units — had all made it to Russia, despite Western sanctions on the country.  After the attack on Sunday as many as 100,000 internationally-sourced components had been found in the…

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday reappointed Sebastien Lecornu as prime minister just days after a submitted his resignation. “The president of the republic has nominated Mr Sebastien Lecornu as prime minister and has tasked him with forming a government,” the Elysee Palace said in a statement. Lecornu accepts reappointment “It is my duty to accept the mission entrusted to me by the President to do everything in my power to give France a budget for the end of the year and to respond to the everyday problems of our compatriots,” Lecornu said. “We need to put an end to…

“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” said President Donald Trump on “Newsmax’s Greg Kelly Reports” on Monday, reacting to the news that Puerto Rican star, Bad Bunny, would headline the 2026 Super Bowl’s iconic halftime show. “I’ve never heard of him,” Trump added.  Renowned for his obsession with ratings, the US president has presumably since been informed that the global superstar holds significant streaming records. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” (2022) is Spotify’s most-streamed album of all time. He was the most-played artist on Spotify for three consecutive years, from 2020 to 2022. And this September, his residency finale, “Una Más,” became the most-watched single-artist performance…

France’s political crisis shows no sign of abating. The resignation of Sebastien Lecornu as prime minister this week, after just 27 days in office, means the country is set to have an eighth prime minister in the space of five years. Although President Emmanuel Macron now looks set to name another prime minister before the week is over — potentially fending off the need for new elections — the political turmoil comes with major consequences for the EU’s second-largest economy. As happened in 2024, it means the 2026 budget may not be agreed in time to be debated and passed…

Before India’s courts and federations took over the headlines, the heart of Indian football lived on its local grounds. “Earlier, a player in Mumbai could play 100, 120 matches in the entire season,” Henry Menezes, former India goalkeeper and longtime football administrator tells DW. “Competitive matches, local grounds, different tournaments — he had the option to play.” That system once formed the backbone of Indian football. District and state leagues fed into national tournaments, and professional players could climb step by step — from district clubs to state teams and eventually the national setup. The Indian Super League (ISL) changed all that, breaking away…

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz spoke out against the EU’s current goal of phasing out new cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, only allowing the registration of new all-electric vehicles by that date.  Merz was speaking at a summit with other German political leaders and leading representatives of the country’s struggling car industry.  “Such a hard cutoff in 2035 will not take place, if I have anything to do with it, and I will do all I can to achieve this,” Merz said in Berlin.  Activists from Greenpeace and Fridays for Future were waiting outside the chancellery in Berlin on…

A United States federal judge on Thursday ordered a temporary halt to President Donald Trump’s deployment of hundreds of National Guard soldiers in the state of Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago. The Trump administration had ordered the troops to protect federal officials, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and facilities in Chicago — which it depicts as a “war zone” — from what it described as violent protesters. Local Democratic officials in Illinois have accused the Republican president of purposefully spurring protests with heavy handed operations, adding that state’s law enforcement agencies were perfectly sufficient. What did…

It was a radio broadcast that marked media history, rocketing a 23-year-old Orson Welles to notoriety: his 1938 adaptation of H. G. Well’s novel “The War of the Worlds.”  That year, on the evening of Sunday, October 30, listeners who had tuned in to dance music on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network heard a news flash interrupt the “regular” program. A series of unusual explosions had been observed on the planet Mars, and a mass of hydrogen gas was moving towards Earth. The broadcast went back to dance music. Another news flash interrupted the orchestra, to inform listeners…