Share Why we disrupted Annalena Baerbock's award speech on social media When, in late August, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation announced that former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was its 2026 medallist, we were stunned. The cognitive dissonance was striking, even if we had become used to this after years of unabashed hypocrisy within the world's most powerful institutions. According to the foundation's homepage, the medal is given to a person who "contributes to a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world through valuable achievements in politics or research". As this year's medallist, Baerbock was invited to visit Uppsala University and deliver a lecture. Here was an event claiming to celebrate " compassion, humanism and commitment to international solidarity " while honouring the foreign minister of a government that approved 94 million euros ($102m) in arms exports to Israel in the span of three months in 2024.

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Image caption, The Gruffalo has been a staple of children's bookshelves since 1999 Axel Scheffler, whose illustrations have captivated children since 1999, said he wanted AI companies to stop using artists' work without permission. The Gruffalo, written by London-born children's author Julia Donaldson, tells the story of a mouse who outsmarts a beast. I've been in touch with a lawyer in Germany, Scheffler said. There have been illustrators taking legal action against AI companies and I'm seriously considering it. I just want them to stop.

A plan to funnel the heat given off by data centers into nearby homes has run aground in Germany. Across Europe, policymakers are weighing AI ambitions against climate objectives. Earlier this year, the German government laid out an ambitious plan: By 2030, it would double the scale of the country's data center fleet, and quadruple the amount of compute available for running artificial intelligence models. The idea was to minimize Germany's dependence on the United States for access to AI--a point of concern across Europe--and boost its faltering economy. However, Germany has found that its AI ambitions are butting up against its climate commitments.

Tesla has changed the name of its Full Self-Driving feature in some of its European websites, including Germany, Spain and France, to "Assisted Driving." While the Full Self-Driving feature is already available in some parts of Europe, Tesla is working to get it approved in more countries. As Reuters reports, the rebranding came after Germany revealed that its Transport Minister Steffen Bilger is advocating for its swift approval. In the country's announcement, it explained that the term Full Self-Driving, particularly because it is still of the Supervised variety, is "somewhat misleading." The system doesn't actually drive the car, Germany's Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport said, and it only provides assistance for certain tasks, like accelerating and braking.

Technology Cold War espionage added $4.6 billion to East Germany's economy Stolen trade secrets boosted the country's output--to a point. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A Wartburg 353 and Trabant cars parked beside the Berlin Wall while a queue of East German people wait to cross to the West after the Wall fell and travel restrictions were lifted, Berlin, December 1989. No matter what side you were on, espionage was a cornerstone of Cold War political life . But it was also big business.

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The AfD won its second first-place result in state elections this year, bringing the party closer to regional power than any far-right party since WWII.

Germany's federal prosecutor indicted seven people for allegedly securing weapons and ammunition for Hamas to launch terrorism attacks targeting Jewish communities.

The leaders of eight German states have backed the nation's chancellor amid growing speculation about his political future. The premiers - all of whom are part of Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - wrote that restoring trust in their party lay in listening and taking political action, not in debates over personnel. Merz, who has only held the post for 16 months, is facing poor approval ratings while the anti-immigration, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is surging, prompting questions about whether he is an electoral liability. He has vowed to carry on but two more state elections on Sunday have been seen as a key test of his leadership. Rumours of a Kanzlertausch - or Chancellor swap - have been around for months, but they have increased since the conservative CDU tumbled to a distant second behind the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt at the start of September. The AfD shot up to 43.8% of the vote while the CDU plummeted to 17.2%, marking the first time since World War Two that a far-right party has come close to controlling a German state.