Author: staff
Decorated cows made their way from the Alpine pastures into Gstaad on Saturday for the annual Züglete festival in Switzerland. Families dressed their animals with floral crowns before leading them down the mountain and through the busy town centre. The event marks the traditional move from the summer pastures to their winter farms. Crowds gathered along Gstaad’s promenade to watch several herds pass, while cowbells and alphorns added to the day’s celebrations. The festival also drew visitors from abroad. Two tourists from Melbourne said they had built their European holiday around seeing the Züglete after discovering the event online. The…
Published on 09/09/2026 – 14:04 GMT+2 Qatar’s budget deficit more than doubled to 21.2bn riyals (€5bn) in the second quarter of 2026, the Ministry of Finance announced on Tuesday. The deficit stood at 10.3bn riyals (€2.44bn) in the first quarter. Total revenue reached about 25.6bn riyals (€6.06bn), while expenditure amounted to approximately 46.9bn riyals (€11.1bn). On 25 August, Qatari foreign ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari disputed reports about government spending cuts, saying figures had been taken out of context. He said reported reductions of up to 30% applied only to operating expenses and excluded salaries and capital projects. He described the…
Astronauts, heads of state, as well as major economic players in the space industry are set to unite on Wednesday and Thursday at the international space summit, co-hosted by France and Germany, at Paris’ Grand Palais. Several US companies reportedly withdrew from the event, due to pressure from Washington over support for “EU policy positions.” The summit comes at a strategic crossroads for the European space industry, described by President Emmanuel Macron as an opportunity to “bring Europeans together around a common ambition” and develop a “shared vision of Europe’s place on the map of global space powers by 2035″…
A former tram depot and diesel station dating back to 1912 has been transformed into Uzbekistan’s first permanent centre dedicated to contemporary art. The Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent (CCA), redesigned by Paris-based Studio KO, brings exhibitions, performance, film, research and education under one roof in the Uzbek capital. But its significance extends beyond the creation of another cultural venue in Tashkent. The centre brings artists from Uzbekistan into closer contact with the international contemporary art world, while developing partnerships with major cultural institutions in Europe, the United States and Asia. The centre adds a contemporary dimension to a country…
The EU Court said the bloc’s sanctions criteria were objective, sufficiently precise and proportionate. They target prominent businesspeople operating in Russia, particularly those active in sectors that provide significant revenue to the Russian government. It dismissed Abramovich’s claim that the EU was targeting him because of his public profile, noting that sanctions were imposed on him because of his capital holding “and not, as he maintains, a desire to exploit him on account of his public notoriety,” the statement said. Judges also rejected Abramovich’s argument that the measures were effectively decided by Council working groups rather than by EU governments…
There has been dismay and pledges for action across Europe after it was revealed on Tuesday that maths and reading skills among pupils have declined across the world, largely due to digitalisation and a drop in recreational reading. The OECD’s latest PISA report, based on a standardised test taken by 15-year-olds, found that student performance across OECD countries reached a record low in maths and reading. Within the EU, pupils in Spain, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, Greece, Romania, Cyprus, and Bulgaria score below the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science skills. Only Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Poland and Czechia managed…
Acute respiratory distress, unusual odours, coloured explosive blasts, long term health problems, and environmental degradation are among the indicators that a group of experts has identified as credible evidence to support witness accounts of exposure to toxic chemicals linked to military activity in Sudan between 2024 and 2025. The findings are described in a 32-page investigation, seen by Euronews, into the use of chemical weapons in civil areas in Sudan amid the ongoing war that started in 2023. The investigation was led by former senior officials of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), two of whom served…
Europe’s benchmark wholesale gas price, the front-month Dutch TTF contract, traded above €79 per megawatt-hour on Wednesday morning, its highest level since early 2023. Prices have risen as fighting between the US and Iran has intensified concerns about LNG shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Before the conflict, the waterway carried about 20% of global LNG trade. Its effective closure has blocked those shipments for several months. The continuous front-month TTF contract has traded between about €26.50 and €79/MWh since the beginning of the year, as the conflict added a growing risk premium to European gas prices. It has also…
A researcher who spent three years building the systems behind some of the world’s most powerful AI models has quit the industry entirely, warning that the companies racing to build ever-more capable AI “are gambling with our lives”. Jacob Coxon, 27, resigned from Anthropic on 8 September after also working at OpenAI and set out his reasons in a lengthy thread on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.” In his thread, Coxon argued that AI systems are approaching a point where they could “hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire…
After a fallow year in 2026, the UK’s Glastonbury Festival has confirmed that tickets for next year’s edition will go on sale next month. Having previously argued that Worthy Farm’s finest is overrated, a nightmare to get tickets for and ultimately has everything to envy some of mainland Europe’s finest music festivals, here’s another push factor that confirms our stance: ticket pricing. Tickets for the 2027 edition, which will take place from 23 to 27 June, will cost £408 including a £5 booking fee per ticket. That’s approx. €480 in total – an increase of nearly £30 (€34) from 2025…