Author: DW

The clearest thing about India’s political funding system is that it is opaque to the public, with both politicians and electoral officers repeatedly and openly acknowledging their failure to achieve transparency.  In mid-February, the Supreme Court of India struck down the electoral bonds scheme , which allowed donors to send unlimited funds to their parties of choice, and to do so anonymously. The tool was set up six years ago. Many have since called it unconstitutional, with the Supreme Court eventually agreeing and proclaiming it eroded people’s right to information. The landmark ruling defies the stance taken by the government of…

In central Tehran, a woman and her friends are harassed by a group of armed men on motorcycles. Their first thought: “Put on your hijab.” “Since that day, every time I hear the sound of a motorcycle behind me, my body freezes,” one of the women recalls. The incident from last year has been burned into her memory. “That’s why I don’t go for walks anymore. When I do, I have my headphones on the whole time.” Scenes like this are everyday life in Tehran. This story was shared with Ghoncheh Ghavami, an Iranian feminist activistand editor in chief of…

A woman whose partner was on the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in 2014 has claimed there was an “intentional effort to cover up what happened”.Ten years ago, Sarah Bajc woke up to the news that MH370 had disappeared on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777 had 239 people on board when it disappeared, including her partner Philip Wood.While satellite data analysis suggested that the plane had likely crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, off the coast of western Australia, two major searches failed to make any breakthroughs.Speaking to Sky News on Friday, Ms…

If only politicians could learn to empathize with other people and their lives, they would get to fixing the world’s problems. Ever heard that idea before? We have. The question is: Can people learn empathy? A new study suggests we can indeed learn empathy, but that we can learn to be both more and less empathetic.   Published in the journal PNAS, the study found that watching people respond empathetically to other people in pain boosts your own sense of empathy, but it also found that we learn from non-empathetic people to feel less empathy. It was already known that children learn empathy, but…

A distant, dull roar accompanies a family as they go to sleep. It booms, hisses, fizzles and bangs: the sounds of a factory running day and night. Only this factory doesn’t produce goods — it produces corpses. The family whose life these noises accompany is that of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex. The family’s house is directly next to the walls of the camp. The idyllic garden is flanked by chimneys spewing thick smoke. Flames rise into the sky at night. As the children play in the garden, the sounds of barking dogs, shouting…

The delayed 2023 African Games kicked off this week, with the official opening ceremony in Ghana’s capital, Accra, on Friday. The games, formerly called the All-African Games, are held every four years, the year before the Olympics. This year, 52 countries are competing, making it an actual pan-African sporting event. Some 5,000 athletes will battle it out to win medals and break records in 30 disciplines, an increase from the 2019 African Games, which offered 26 sports. The 2015 Games had 22 disciplines. Events are being held in Accra, Cape Coast and Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. Table tennis was the first event…

Emmanuel Macron has set the cat among the pigeons once again. Known for proclivity to provoke debate among EU and NATO allies, the centrist French president raised eyebrows by taking aim at a long-standing taboo in the war in Ukraine: the prospect of deploying Western troops. “There is no consensus today to send ground troops… [but] nothing should be ruled out,” Macron said at a gathering of Ukraine’s allies in Paris last week, convened amid worrying signs and reported ammunition shortages from the front line of fighting with Russia. Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK, Poland, NATO and the European Commission all underlined…

Kidnapping in Nigeria has evolved into a lingering security threat that feeds a vast network of criminal and Islamist groups. From July 2022 to July 2023, at least 3,620 people were abducted in Nigeria. That’s according to an analysis of Nigeria’s kidnapping industry published by SBM Intelligence, an Africa-focused consulting company. Mass abductions are also common, with an average of six people taken for every kidnapping incident. Kidnappers demanded ransom totaling at least 5 billion naira ($6.4 million or €5.8 million in June 2023) from July 2022 to June 2023, the report found. However, as a sign of Nigeria’s struggling economy and…

Politicians have condemned a “moronic act of vandalism” after pro-Palestine activists damaged a portrait of Lord Balfour. Palestine Action shared a video on social media of a demonstrator defacing and slashing the historic painting, which hangs at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College.In the clip, a woman can be seen spraying red paint before using a sharp object to slice open the canvas.Lord Arthur James Balfour was a Conservative prime minister between 1902 and 1905. He later became the foreign secretary, when he signed the Balfour Declaration in 1917.The declaration was a public statement issued by the British government which…

It was an ordinary afternoon, March 7, 2024, until residents in Germany received a warning from the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance — abbreviated in German as BBK. It warned that fragments of space debris were expected to fly over Germany the following days, March 8-9. Details were sparse from both the BKK and the European Space Agency. Authorities expected a palette of nine batteries to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere on an uncontrolled trajectory. The total mass was to be in the region of 2.6 metric tons — the equivalent of 2,600 kilograms (about 5,730 pounds), or, as…