Author: staff

Published on 08/09/2026 – 5:19 GMT+2 A robot that vacuums, scrubs toilets and wipes down kitchen counters for €26 an hour is already making its way into homes in San Francisco, in the United States. US start-up Tau Robotics is offering its humanoid robots as household cleaners, taking on the kind of complex, varied domestic work that robotics companies have spent years trying to automate. The service has been operating for about a month and has already cleaned more than 50 apartments and condominiums across the city. The company says demand is growing, with prospective customers now joining a waiting…

Some countries are places you simply visit; others urge you to travel through them. On foot, by bicycle, paddling across a lake, following a river downstream or heading beneath the surface of the earth. Slovenia clearly belongs to the second group. This small country of just over 20,000 square kilometres and barely two million inhabitants concentrates an extraordinary variety of landscapes. Around 60% of its area is covered by forest and more than a third of its territory is protected or forms part of the Natura 2000 network. It is the green lung of the Balkans and also a vast…

The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, wanted a group of heavyweight former leaders to come up with fresh ideas to address Europe’s defense gaps. Instead, the initiative was killed before it even launched. Zoya Sheftalovich and Ian Wishart look at why some capitals pushed back — and what the episode says about Kallas’ authority and the battle over who drives European defense policy. Then, European Council President Antonio Costa continues his tour of European capitals as negotiations over the EU’s next long-term budget get more concrete. And finally: could Ukraine and Poland make a joint bid to host the football…

Eurostat estimates that consumer goods thrown away prematurely generate close to 35 million tonnes of waste annually across the EU. Although most discard their devices when broken, a Eurobarometer survey showed that 77 percent of Europeans would prefer repairing their appliances to replacing them. But professional repair services are often expensive, and parts are made inaccessible by the companies that provide them. The EU wants to stop this cycle of premature replacements through the Right to Repair Directive and an accompanying set of Ecodesign regulations. Amongst other things, the new laws ask manufacturers to design appliances with standard screws instead…

Published on 08/09/2026 – 5:29 GMT+2 The supercomputer, called the Threadripper Halo Station, was unveiled at the German tech event Internationale Funkausstellung by AMD Senior Vice President Jack Huynh. The Threadripper Halo is an ultra-high-performance workstation equipped with up to two terabytes of system memory, up to 576 gigabytes of high bandwidth memory (HBM3E), along with 96 cores of Threadripper Pro, two MI350P data centre accelerators, all supported by liquid cooling. Huyn said the new supercomputer is the “most powerful workstation in the world”, capable of running AI models with more than a trillion parameters. The AMD executive gave a…

Nach dem Wahlschock in Sachsen-Anhalt steht der Reformkurs der Bundesregierung auf der Kippe. Während Lars Klingbeil im Bundestag seinen Haushalt erklärt, muss Kanzler Friedrich Merz gucken, dass seinem Koalitionspartner ob schwieriger Umfragen und Wahlergebnisse nicht der Reformwille abhanden kommt. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert, wie sich der Kanzler in Selbstkritik übt und trotzdem noch nicht so wirkt, als hätte er definitive Antworten. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview fordert die SPD-Abgeordnete Rasha Nasr einen teilweisen Kurswechsel bei der Rentenreform. Sie erklärt, warum ein Festhalten an den aktuellen Plänen ein fatales Signal an Wähler sendet und warnt die Parteispitze vor einem respektlosen Umgang mit der arbeitenden Bevölkerung.…

Published on 08/09/2026 – 4:47 GMT+2 Russia resumed strikes on Kyiv after the expiration of a three-day halt in attacks for a visit to the Ukrainian capital by US envoys, as “Russian forces attacked Boryspil and Fastiv districts with drones,” the State Emergency Service of Ukraine posted on Telegram late Monday. Russia’s state news agency TASS also confirmed earlier that the strike pause had expired. Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the three-day halt in Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv as US President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were visiting the Russian and Ukrainian capitals at the weekend.…

But what those consequences will be remains uncertain. Merz’s dismal approval ratings and the AfD’s convincing win have fueled speculation that his conservatives could seek a Kanzlertausch, or “chancellor swap,” to revive their political fortunes. But Merz said Monday that he would remain in office and stay the course on economic reforms he argues are long overdue and will, with time, solve the country’s economic problems. The AfD has made little secret of its intent to turn the election loss into a still greater debacle for Merz. The far-right party is openly courting conservative lawmakers in Saxony-Anhalt to defect and…

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will huddle with his CDU party on Monday to discuss and digest their thumping defeat at the hands of the far-right AfD party in a state election in the ex-communist east. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored its biggest win yet on Sunday with 44% of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt, against around 18% for the centre-right CDU, according to broadcasters’ projections. The visibly dejected CDU state premier Sven Schulze said his campaign was not always helped by national government policies, saying that “we often faced headwinds, and that wasn’t always easy.” The ballot box…

Published on 07/09/2026 – 11:29 GMT+2 The UK government branded hundreds of demonstrators as “thuggish” after they blocked roads in an attempt to prevent asylum seekers leaving Portsmouth on Sunday. The protest came after around 140 migrants arrived by small boat, as tensions over Channel crossings continue to mount. “We condemn the intimidating and thuggish behaviour we saw in Portsmouth last night,” a spokesperson for the UK’s Home Office, said in a statement. “The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy but it must never cross a line into disorder.” Footage showed demonstrators, many dressed in black with…