World

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 Curtain. It would be another four years before West Germany introduced a policy of detente, after the arrival of the Social Democrat Willy Brandt as chancellor. The traumatic memory of ...

President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, first elected in 2019, is running for a second term despite initially pledging to serve only one. Sissoco Embalo sought to remind voters how much he had done for the country: "I have given my all to give Guinea-Bissau a second chance at the future. Do you really want to hand the country over to someone who has no vision for the future?" he asked. In 2023, he dissolved the opposition-controlled parliament after armed clashes which he described as an attempted coup. But critics saw this move as an effort to extend his mandate. "Although Embalo's official term ended in February 2025, he remained in office and spent the following months systematically sidelining the opposition," the journalist Bacar Camara told DW.  Of the 14 parties competing for 102 parlia...

Leading United Nations diplomat Tom Fletcher was in Port Sudan on Tuesday for talks with the country's transitional military government, looking to secure aid better supply to the war-torn country that's partly controlled by the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia.  Sudan's Transitional Sovereign Council shared a brief video on social media of Fletcher sitting in a room with President Abdel-Fattah Burhan and other officials. Fletcher, a veteran British diplomat and government advisor, meanwhile shared an image of the meeting online, and lauded the "positive" discussions early in his one-week visit to Sudan.  "Practical and positive exchange with General Burhan on continued dialogue and cooperation to improve humanitarian access across Sudan. The UN appreciates the clear commitmen...

The president of the United States could take Britain's national broadcaster to court amid a debate over editorial decisions at the BBC that has led to the resignation of two of its most senior executives. Contents of a memo sent to a BBC internal editorial standards committee by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser, was published by the Daily Telegraph newspaperbetween November 3-6. It raised concerns about the BBC's coverage of immigration, racism, historical content, transgender issues and BBC Arabic's coverage of the Gaza war. It also highlighted issues with an episode of the BBC's flagship current affairs program, "Panorama." Prescott cited problems with the show's depiction of Donald Trump's speech to supporters in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, as the US Congress p...

About 200 protesters demonstrated in front of the parliament building in Austria's capital Vienna on Tuesday evening. They were rallying against an event called the Dinghofer Symposium that they say is antisemitic. Parliamentary speaker Walter Rosenkranz, who hosted the event, had attracted massive criticism in the past weeks for going ahead with the symposium despite calls to cancel it. Some protesters held up placards that read "No place for antisemitism" or "Shame." "Dinghofer was an antisemite and a Nazi party member during World War II," said Lia Guttmann, co-president of the Austrian Union of Jewish Students group. Guttmann said the protesters were holding a "counter-symposium" outside parliament against what she called "historical amnesia."Protesters held a 'counter-symposium' ...

Power was restored in parts of the Dominican Republic on Tuesday after a countrywide outage hit earlier in the day and brought the country to a standstill, officials said. Generation units in San Pedro de Macorís and the Quisqueya Power Plant shut down, triggering a domino effect at other transmission and generation plants, according to the Dominican Electricity Transmission Company, a decentralized state agency. The nationwide blackout disrupted mass transit systems, including aerial cable cars and the metro in the capital, Santo Domingo, where some people were forced to leave the train and begin walking through tunnels alongside the railway. Electricity sector authorities said some public transportation services had resumed in parts of the capitalImage: Eddy Vittini/AFP Many hospital...

Bogdan Leonov, a Russian national, is building a chain of power-bank rental stations in Cyprus and Greece, and setting up a franchise in Portugal.   His WE53 startup, launched in 2023, has already seen annual revenues rise to about €600,000 ($693,000) and it now employs dozens of people. The network currently boasts almost 3,000 stations. His previous brainchild provided the same service in Russia.Between Russia and Germany — Arts.UnveiledTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video But setting up a business abroad was particularly challenging as he had to learn all operational activities by himself, from scratch. Even "repeating" one's own success in a new environment was far from easy. "You can't copy-paste barely anyt...

French authorities threatened to block Chinese online store Shein on Monday over the presence of a sex doll with "childlike" features on its website.  The French consumer watchdog said descriptions for such products on the Shein website "make it difficult to doubt the child pornographic nature of the content." The French daily newspaper Le Parisien said the product in question — an 80 centimeter (30 inch) tall doll holding a teddy bear — was accompanied by an explicitly sexual description on the Shein website. How has Shein reacted to the French threat? In a statement late on Monday, Shein announced "a total ban on sex-doll type products" and the removal of previous listings of such items. The Paris prosecutors' office said it had opened an investigation into Shein, along with rival r...

Peru announced on Monday that it had cut off diplomatic ties with Mexico over the asylum claim of former Peruvian Prime Minister Betssy Chávez, who is facing charges in her homeland over the alleged 2022 coup attempt by then President Pedro Castillo. "Today we learned with surprise and deep regret that former Prime Minister Betssy Chavez, the alleged co-author of the coup d'etat attempted by former President Pedro Castillo (2021-2022), is being granted asylum at the residence of the Mexican Embassy in Peru," Peruvian Foreign Minister Hugo de Zela said at a news conference. 'Unfriendly act' De Zela described Mexico's decision as an "unfriendly act," before adding, "considering the repeated instances in which the current and former presidents of that country have interfered in Peru's inte...

A worker who was pulled from the rubble of a medieval tower that partly collapsed in Rome has died, Italian media and officials reported. The man, a Romanian national, had remained conscious during the lengthy rescue operation before being hospitalized, according to authorities. "Resuscitation attempts were made for about an hour to save Octay Stroici," Italian news agency ANSA said, citing the Umberto I hospital. "Despite this, spontaneous cardiac activity could not be restored" and his "death was pronounced at 12:20 am (2320 GMT)." Romania's Foreign Ministry mourned its national's death on Tuesday. "Despite the sustained efforts of the medical teams in Rome, Octav Stroici, who had been trapped under the rubble of a historic building undergoing restoration works, has sadly passed awa...