Germany’s cybersecurity chief has been fired after allegations of being excessively close to Russia through an association he helped set up. Arne Schonbohm had led the Federal Cyber Security Authority (BSI) — charged with protecting government communications — since 2016. German media have accused him of having had links with Read more…
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has asked the economy, environment and finance ministries to lay the legal framework to keep the country’s three nuclear power plants operational until as late as April 15, 2023, a letter seen by Reuters showed on Monday. Germany had planned to complete a phase-out of nuclear Read more…
Twenty countries most vulnerable to climate change are considering halting their repayment of $685 billion in collective debt, loans that they say are an “injustice,” Mohamad Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, said on Friday. When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund conclude their annual meetings in Read more…
A crackdown by authorities in Zimbabwe to support the local currency and fight inflation has increased the use of US dollars in the economy, according to the country’s oldest brokerage. “Ironically the authorities’ clampdown on Zimbabwe dollar payments created such a squeeze that it has had the unintended consequence of Read more…
NPR reports that astronomers have spotted a black hole finally “burping” out energy from a star that it swallowed back in 2018: How unusual is this? “Super unusual,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. “We’ve never Read more…
Remember the MICROSCOPE satellite ? In 2017, based on its first results, scientists were able to confirm Einstein’s equivalence principle (a key assumption in General Relativity) to unprecedented precision. Recently, they were able to improve precision by almost another order of magnitude by using all the data. Fortunately (or not) Read more…
“For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself,”: On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, Read more…