Author: DW

Sixty years ago, Polish bishops approached their German counterparts with an unexpected message of reconciliation. To the majority of Poles, the gesture came as a shock. Twenty years after the end of World War Two, at the height of the Cold War, relations between Poland and then-West Germany were characterized by mistrust, hostility and lack of communication. The division of Germany had been finalized just four years earlier with the building of the Berlin Wall. Two irreconcilable ideological blocs — the capitalist West and the communist East — were now squaring up to each other on either side of the Iron…

Peter Wollny has known the Ciacona in D minor and the Ciacona in G minor for more than 30 years now — ever since he discovered the organ works at the Royal Library of Belgium. The handwritten manuscripts were from an unknown writer; undated and unsigned. Yet Peter Wollny — now director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig — had a sense his discovery could actually be a hidden treasure, composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. His meticulous hunt for clues began. “To confirm the pieces’ identity, I searched for a long time for the missing piece of the puzzle,” he…

The joint attendance of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at an event in Berlin on Tuesday (November 18) aimed at bolstering Europe’s technological independence suggests they mean business on the topic. Europe’s struggle to keep pace with the US and China on tech and digital innovation — from artificial intelligence, to semiconductor production, to cloud computing — has been blamed for the continent’s sluggish economic growth and apparently bleak prospects. The Berlin gathering, titled the “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty,” focused on the risks of dependence on China and the US for increasingly critical infrastructure. “Digital sovereignty…

In the US alone, 12% of the population have reported using injectable weight loss drugs, such as Wegovy/Ozempic, Zepbound and Saxenda, over the past year. That’s more than double the number recorded in early 2024. In European countries, demand is also on the rise: In the UK, for example, a survey found that 21% of the public had accessed an online or in-person pharmacy in the past year to obtain weight loss medication. Germans, for example, have also been keen to adopt the drugs, even if they have to pay for them themselves, according to a report by Reuters. Amid…

The British government will ban the resale of tickets for music concerts, shows and sports events at inflated prices, targeting ticket touts using modern technologies to turn a profit, a government minister said on Tuesday.  “We are committed to ending the scandal of ticket touts,” Housing Minister Steven Reed told BBC News, saying that ministers would set out the plans in more detail in the coming days.  He said the government was targeting modern ticket touting that often forced fans to pay “through the nose” to attend popular events. The government first voiced concern about so-called “dynamic pricing” practices last year.…

Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced three soldiers and a federal police officer to prison for planning to kill President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva before his inauguration. The plan was to assassinate Lula before he could assume office after his 2022 presidential election win, in which he beat far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. The plot was meant to keep Bolsonaro in power despite his election loss. The four were sentenced to terms of between 21 and 24 years in prison, which will not start serving until all possible options to appeal have been exhausted. 70-year-old Bolsonaro himself was sentenced to 27 years in prison…

The southern Japanesecity of Oita saw a fire that resulted in more than 170 buildings being evacuated, with one person in his 70s being missing. Some 175 residents moved to emergency accommodation after the fire started, local authorities said on Wednesday, with the cause for blaze still under investigation. One Oita resident told the Japanese broadcaster NHK that the flames turned the city’s skies red. “The wind was strong. I never thought it would spread so much,” he said.Residents of Oita reported seeing the sky turn red as the blaze swelledImage: JIJI Press/AFP What do we know about the fire?…

In the US alone, 12% of the population have reported using injectable weight loss drugs, such as Wegovy/Ozempic, Zepbound and Saxenda, over the past year. That’s more than double the number recorded in early 2024. In European countries, demand is also on the rise: In the UK, for example, a survey found that 21% of the public had accessed an online or in-person pharmacy in the past year to obtain weight loss medication. Germans, for example, have also been keen to adopt the drugs, even if they have to pay for them themselves, according to a report by Reuters. Amid…

The future’s so bright for Elon Musk, even industrial-grade shades won’t block the glare from his $1 trillion (€862 billion) pay deal. That is, of course, if he manages to hit some truly mind-boggling goals for Tesla, the electric-vehicle company he founded and transformed into a tech juggernaut. To unlock the full value of his compensation package, Musk must hit milestones that sound more like science fiction than corporate strategy. These include deploying one million robotaxis — autonomous vehicles that generate revenue without human drivers — and producing a million Optimus humanoid robots annually, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Musk will only become the world’s first trillionaire,…

“All roads lead to Rome!” Roads were the lifeline of the Roman Empire, stretching from Britannia to North Africa — people settled along those roads; armies, travelers, goods, knowledge and power passed along them — into the furthest corners of the empire. To this day, the Roman road network continues to shape large parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Now, an enormous new digital research project is fundamentally changing the way we look at that antique infrastructure. The international academic team behind the Itiner-e project has created the first high-resolution open-data set mapping the entirety of the Roman Empire’s…