Berlin

A league of potentially 16 teams is also being looked at, combining the regular 10 to 12 franchises with open spots that teams will be able to qualify for.

With the rise in popularity of basketball and the NBA in Europe, the American league is holding six games in four different European cities across the next three seasons, with London, Manchester, Berlin and Paris hosting games between 2026 and 2028.

Silver said talks with Real Madrid, who play in the EuroLeague and are regarded as one of the greatest basketball clubs in Europe, were “more in the category of fact-finding”, but he confirmed discussions had taken place with another EuroLeague side, Alba Berlin, whose Uber Arena hosted the NBA game.

“We’re trying to find the best combination of the old and the new; the tradition and the innovation,” said Silver.

Alba Berlin, he said, was “the model of the type of club that we would like to see in a potential European league”.

Reports say the existing EuroLeague has concerns about the new venture, threatening legal action against the NBA should clubs break existing agreements to take part in the new competition.

But Silver said he does not think the two leagues would clash, adding: “There’s plenty of room for competition”.

Jan. 4 (UPI) — A far-left activist group sent police a letter taking credit for setting fire to part of a power plant near Berlin, leaving nearly 50,000 customers in the dark, as a protest against the fossil fuel industry.

The German activist group Vulkangruppe, or Volcano Group, acknowledged in a 2,500-word letter that it set a fire on Saturday near the Lichterfelde heat and power station, damaging high-voltage cables to “cut the juice to the ruling class,” The Guardian reported.

On Sunday morning, Stromnetz Berlin, the power company that owns the station, reported that roughly 45,000 homes and 2,200 businesses had lost power in the outage, Deutche Welle reported.

The power company said that while some connections have been turned back on in small waves, some customers may not have their electricity until as late as Thursday afternoon.

Some schools may also be closed for the part of the week because they do not have power, The BBC reported.

“We are expecting damage costing millions to plants and machines and owing to high losses in revenue,” Alexander Schirp, director of the regional business associations in Berlin and Brandenburg, said of the arson.

“This is a serious problem and stokes a feeling of insecurity in the business world,” he added.

Early Saturday, cables near the power plant were spotted burning and incendiary devices were later found to have caused the inferno.

In the aftermath, several hospitals and health care facilities received emergency generators, but many people had to be moved from either facilities or their own homes because there was no power.

Vulkangruppe said in the letter, which police have said is credible, that they set the fire in an “act of self-defense and international solidarity with all those who protect the Earth and life.”

The group condemned “greed for energy” by burning fossil fuels for the ever-growing electricity needs of humanity, and specifically called out the massive, and exponentially growing, use of electric for artificial intelligence computing.

“We are contributing to our own surveillance and it is comprehensive. The tech corporations are in the hands of me with power, which we give them,” the group wrote, calling the fire an “action in the public interest.”

Vulkangruppe previously took credit for a fire that was set at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Berlin in March 2024.

That arson included deliberately setting fire to a high-voltage electric pole, which damaged the electric line and cut power to the surrounding area, including the plant, officials said at the time.

We might rarely get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, but logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a different kind of flurry. The one where our friends, both close and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening data dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped only represents the culmination of our listening habits on a single music platform, but every shared Wrapped post seems to come with some self-evident clarity about our personal identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and provides us the opportunity to see ourselves deconstructed via our musical inclinations. By most accounts, it’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you’ve got us pegged.

For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a year to get the Wrapped treatment. We’re still processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the federal administration’s ceaseless attacks on California. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to take that temperature check.

But listening to music can be a passive experience — one enjoyed in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a car. To really learn about ourselves and how our year has been, we might want to turn elsewhere, to a habit with more intention. I’m talking, of course, about reading.

While there’s apps for tracking our reading habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I’m devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that’s helped me churn through books faster and with more intent than ever before: the book stack.

Starting every January, whenever I finish a book, I place it sidelong atop a shelf in the corner of my living room. With each new book I conquer, the stack gets taller, eventually becoming a full tower by December. A book stack, low on analytics, can’t tell me the total number of pages I’ve read, or how many minutes I spent reading, but it’s a tangible monument to my year’s reading progress. Its mere presence prods me into reading more. It calls me a chump when the stack is low and cheers for me when it reaches toward the ceiling.

My first book stack started in 2020, a wry joke to demonstrate the extra time we could all devote to reading books during a pandemic. The joke barely worked. I ended up reading just 19 books that year, only a few more than I had the previous year (though it could’ve been more if one of those books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).

Still, the book stack model gamified my reading habits and now I give books time I didn’t feel I had before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters and the DMV. If ever I have to wait around somewhere, you better believe I’ll come armed with a book.

The pandemic may have waned, but my book stack count continued to climb, peaking in 2023 after reading 52 books, averaging one per week.

But, hey, it’s about quality, not quantity, right? If there’s a quality to be gleaned from my 2025 book stack, you’d see that I’ve been looking for hot tips on how to survive times of extreme authoritarian rule. Some were more insightful than others.

In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men,” a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who brought down the president of the United States by repeatedly bothering people at their homes for information. Fascinating as it is, it also feels like a relic from a time when doing something like that could still work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” tells the story of a Jewish New Jersey family in an alternate timeline where an “America First” Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the threat of Hitler in Europe and giving way to a rise in antisemitism at home. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that scenario could have played out, but the horrors are resolved by something of a deus ex machina rather than by any one character’s bold, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” about the converging stories of a German boy enlisted in Hitler’s army and a blind French girl during World War II. Sadly, this novel reads less like a book about living under fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to become source material for Steven Spielberg’s next movie.

Each of these titles have merit, but this year’s book stack had two gems for anyone who wants to know how best to resist tyranny. Pointedly, there was Timothy Snyder’s tidy pocket-sized handbook “On Tyranny” filled with 20 short but fortifying chapters of practical wisdom like “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions” and “Believe in truth.” Each is applicable to our current moment, informed by historical precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the past century. This book — well over a million copies sold — came out at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, so I came a little late to this party. The fact that Snyder himself moved to Canada this year should give us all pause.

Practical advice can also be found in great fiction, and on that front I found comfort and instruction in Hans Fallada’s “Alone in Berlin” (a.k.a. “Every Man Dies Alone”), based on the true story of a married couple living in Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards urging resistance against the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public places for random people to discover. Under their extreme political conditions, this small act of civil disobedience means risking death. Not only is the story riveting, there’s also great pleasure in seeing the mayhem each postcard causes and how effective they are at exposing the subordinate class of fascists for what they truly are: nitwits.

Also notable in “Alone in Berlin” is the point of view of both the author and his fictional heroes. Neither a target of persecution, nor a military adversary, Fallada nevertheless endured the amplified hardships of living under Nazi rule during World War II. His trauma was still fresh while writing this book and it’s evident in his prose. He survived just long enough to write and publish “Alone in Berlin” before dying in 1947 at the age of 53.

If I’ve learned anything from these books, it’s that it’s in our best interest to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on fear and expect it. A citizenry without fear is much harder to control. That’s why we need to raise our voices against provocations of our rights, always push back, declare wrong things to be wrong, get in the way, annoy the opposition, and allow yourself to devote time to do things for your own enjoyment.

And in that spirit, my book stack also includes a fair amount of palate cleansers in the mix: Jena Friedman’s “Not Funny,” short stories by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose main character is named after Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Though it’s hard to read Vonnegut without stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of wisdom, like this one from his novel “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior.”

Zachary Bernstein is a writer, editor and songwriter. He’s working on his debut novel about a poorly managed remote island society.