Author: DW

Thousands of farmers from northern Punjab are protesting at two inter-state borders with Haryana demanding a legal guarantee on the Minimum Support Price (MSP) on all crops, as well as a complete loan waiver for all farmers to ensure better financial stability and control over their income. The scenes are reminiscent of India’s farmer protests in 2020 and 2021, when hundreds of thousands of farmers pushed the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to abandon three bills intended to overhaul India’s agricultural economy. Though the government promised a new start, agreeing to meet the farmers’ demands, farmers say those promises…

At least 43 people have died in a fire that broke out at a six-storey shopping mall fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Health minister Samanta Lal Sen said that the blaze broke out late on Thursday at a restaurant in the Green Cozy Cottage Shopping Mall, and quickly spread to other floors. By Friday morning, at least 43 had died and 22 others were left with severe burns and were in a critical condition. They are being treated at two major health facilities.Mr Sen said at 33 people, including women and children, were declared dead at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, while…

August 2023 was a time of failure, introspection and chaos for Germany’s women’s football team at the World Cup. While the chaos persisted for a time, their qualification for the Paris Olympics in 2024 offers them a chance of golden redemption this summer. Even if Horst Hrubesch’s side can arrest the decline experienced since their loss in the final of Euro 2022, the interim coach can only really paper over the cracks, according to former Germany international Julia Simic. “I think you have to look at what’s coming behind, and that’s where I think we are lacking – the next generation…

Breaking down in tears, musician Angel Maxine, who identifies as a queer Ghanaian, told DW that she fears for her life after Ghana’s parliament voted to pass a controversial anti-LGBTQ+ law. Maxine was one of the activists that had pushed for the bill’s rejection when it was sent to parliament in 2021, but she said that now all hope is lost. “I am sad because we have been working all these years for this bill not to be passed,” Maxine told DW from Ghana’s capital Accra. It has taken Ghana’s parliament three years to get this bill passed with the aim to clamp down…

On Tuesday, a court in Moscow sentenced Oleg Orlov, co-founder and co-chair of the human rights organization Memorial, to two and a half years in prison. The 70-year-old had been charged with “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian military after writing an article criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and labeling President Vladimir Putin’s regime as “fascist.” Orlov’s wife, Tatiana Kasatkina, was present at the verdict’s announcement. The two had jointly built up the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization in the 1980s. Russian authorities have been clamping down on the entity’s work for years, and in 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the outright liquidation of International…

In 2018, when Vladimir Putin announced a raft of new hypersonic nuclear missile systems, complete with video graphics of intercontinental ballistic missiles headed towards California, he left it to the end of his lengthy two-hour address to Russian lawmakers to deliver the killer blow.This year he wasted no time in pulling his punches, with fresh nuclear sabre-rattling and his by-now hackneyed critique of the “so-called West” coming pretty much straight off the top. Russian forces had the initiative in Donbas and would continue to press their advantage, he said.Latest updates: Putin threatens nuclear response as he claims NATO ‘preparing to…

Paul Pogba’s professional football career is in jeopardy after the French World Cup winner was banned from the sport for the maximum four years by Italy’s anti-doping court on Thursday.  Back in September, Pogba was flagged for elevated testosterone levels following a random doping test that was carried out after Juventus’ game against Udinese on August 20. The midfielder, who turns 31 next month, was provisionally suspended by Italy’s national anti-doping (NADO Italia), who then confirmed the failed drugs test in a second sample in October.  Talking to the AFP News Agency, a Juventus spokesperson said that the club had…

After Ukrainian troops withdrew from the ruined town of Avdiivka on February 17, Russian forces have been pushing to capture further settlements in Ukraine’s partly occupied eastern Donetsk region. As the war enters its third year, the Russian army has been deploying overwhelming amounts of artillery and manpower in an effort to seize Tonenke, Orlivka, Semenivka, Berdychi and Krasnohorivka — villages that form a new Ukrainian line just west of Avdiivka. Russian progress is slow and costly, but officials say the Ukrainian army is having trouble stabilizing its positions as military supplies from Western allies falter. The new Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Colonel General…

The streets of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, are packed with angry demonstrators calling to “end hardship now!” amid the West African country’s worst economic crisis in more than two decades. The protests kicked off on Tuesday after one of the country’s main unions, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), called for Nigerians to come out to the streets. ‘’There is suffering in the land, there is suffering for the workers, no worker can live on 30,000 naira ($18.40) minimum wage and over 150 million Nigerians are living below the poverty line,” NLC president Joe Ajaero told demonstrators.Tinubu has called for patience to allow his reforms to take effect,…

Seventy years after the Castle Bravo nuclear test took place on Bikini Atoll, Setsuko Shimomoto will travel to the Marshall Islands to take part in a memorial event for an atomic experiment that she believes killed her father. The test, on March 1, 1954, was significantly larger than what the scientists who developed the hydrogen bomb had anticipated. To this day, Castle Bravo remains the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the US military. The failure to anticipate the size of the blast, combined with strong winds in the central Pacific, meant that radioactive fallout fell across a vast swathe of…