Author: DW

Sweden has cemented its place as a new member of NATO with a flag-raising ceremony.Two soldiers raised the blue banner emblazoned with a yellow cross among the official circle of national flags at the headquarters of the alliance in Brussels, Belgium. The ceremony came two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine persuaded Sweden’s reluctant public to seek safety under NATO’s security umbrella.The Nordic country becomes the 32nd member of the alliance.Under a steady rain, Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, and NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, attended the ceremony. Image: The ceremony was held at the NATO headquarters in Belgium. Pic:…

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…

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced plans for a bill to legalize medical assistance in dying for adults diagnosed with an incurable disease and facing imminent death. Macron told newspapers La Croix and Liberation that the new legislation to legalize “aid in dying” under certain conditions would only apply to those above 18 years of age. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal wrote on X on Monday that the bill would be put forward in parliament on May 27. “Death can no longer be a taboo issue and subject to silence,” he wrote in French. Proposed law to give people humane options in death The legislation is meant to offer “a…

Rescue workers have found the bodies of five cross-country skiers in southeastern Switzerland, on the border with Italy, local police said on Monday. Police in the Swiss canton of Valais launched a search on Sunday for six people who were reported missing after setting out on a ski tour from the Alpine town of Zermatt..  Bad weather conditions and the risk of avalanches made the search difficult, but a team of rescuers eventually found five bodies, police said. The sixth missing person is still being sought.The search for the skiers has been hampered by bad weatherImage: Angelika Warmuth/dpa/picture alliance Who were the skiers found in the…

Portugal’s political future rests on a knife edge after the country’s centre-left and centre-right parties ended up neck and neck in a parliamentary election.The centre-right Social Democrat-led Democratic Alliance won 79 seats in the 230-seat National Assembly, while the centre-left Socialist Party, which has been in power for the last eight years, got 77 seats. All votes in Portugal have been counted but the deciding votes will come from voters abroad, who will decide how the last four parliamentary seats are distributed. The count could take more than two weeks.The far-right Chega (Enough) party saw an unprecedented surge in votes…

A pregnant woman is carried away on a stretcher after a Russian missile strike on a maternity hospital: This shocking image from the Siege of Mariupol traveled around the world. The reason it exists in the first place is thanks to the Ukrainian war correspondents working for the Associated Press, who remained in the city when it was encircled and extensively bombed by Russian troops. They were the last team of international journalists on site, covering the first 20 days of the siege that left the city in ruins. The Ukrainian reporters Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori…

Catherine, Britain’s Princess of Wales, apologized on Monday after an official photo released by Kengsington Palace was retracted by several news organizations. The photo showing Kate and her family was removed from publication by the organizations due to alterations that failed to meet editorial standards. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Kate said on the platform X, formerly Twitter. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” Why was the photo retracted? The photo was the first official image of the princess since Kate’s abdominal surgery nearly two months ago.…

COVID, the pro-democracy crackdown and China’s trade war with the United States have dealt a severe blow to Hong Kong’s reputation as an international financial hub. Once seen as the main gateway between the West and China, many investors now believe it is increasingly hard to separate Hong Kong from the authoritarian mainland — a dilemma that has sparked an exodus of foreign firms from the city known as the Pearl of Asia. Since 2019, the number of global companies with regional headquarters in Hong Kong has fallen by 8.4%, according to data from the city’s census and statistics department. The…

An American man on Monday was sentenced to life in prison for committing rape, murder and attempted murder in an attack on two tourists near Neuschwanstein castle in Germany’s southeastern state of Bavaria. Presiding judge Christoph Schwiebacher said the offense was particularly serious and that the man would be unlikely to receive parole in 15 years, which is the earliest a life sentence can be suspended. The man admitted to the crimes during the start of the trial. Neuschwanstein Castle is one of Germany’s most visited sites, attracting around 1.5 million tourists a year. What do we know about the attack? The two female victims, who…

The decision to transfer Josef Fritzl – who kept his daughter captive for 24 years and raped her thousands of times – to a regular prison has been overturned by an Austrian court, local media reports.The Vienna Higher Regional Court (OLG) overturned the decision, made in January, to move the 88-year-old to a regular prison, news agency APA report.The initial ruling was made on the basis that Fritzl no longer posed a danger.Read more: Who is Josef Fritzl?It would have also likely paved the way for him to be released from prison into a nursing home.Ferdinand Schuster, spokesman for the…