Afternoon edition··Coverage: since this morning’s brief (~08:00 → 13:20)
What matters
The AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt’s parliament presidency with votes to spare; ex-BND chief Hanning is arrested for treason; the physics Nobel goes to IceCube’s Halzen.
The Federal Prosecutor accuses Hanning (80; BND president 1998–2005, then interior state secretary until 2009) of attempted treason, treasonous espionage and acting as a foreign agent.
BKA officers arrested him at home in Nordwalde near Münster; his former office chief Manfred D., at the BND until this spring, was arrested in Bavaria.
Prosecutors say Manfred D. passed him about 2,000 documents, many classified, “in exchange for remuneration”.
Why it matters —An ex-president of the BND held on suspicion of treason is an extraordinary blow to the service, and it lands a day after Germany’s intelligence chiefs warned the Bundestag about Russia.
Citation: “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Sole laureate; prize 12M Swedish kronor.
Halzen (born 1944 in Tienen, Belgium; PhD KU Leuven) is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Why it matters —It rewards an entirely new kind of astronomy, with neutrinos as messengers from cosmic accelerators that light can’t reveal.
Destatis: new orders −10.6% month on month, the steepest drop since the start of the year; economists polled by Reuters expected −1.0%.
Without large orders: just −0.1%. “Other vehicles” (aircraft, ships, trains, military vehicles) fell 61.5% after more than doubling in July.
Why it matters —The headline is noise from lumpy defence orders, but the underlying trend is still flat, so the recovery hinges on regular orders and investment.
At Canberra’s AI inquiry, OpenAI strategy chief Jason Kwon apologised again for its agents accessing government sites during training and evaluation: “That should not have happened.”
Kwon says OpenAI is reviewing agent-training logs back to November 2025 and admits notifying an “arbitrary department email” three months later was “not good enough”.
UK app users got a push notification: “Dear ASOS DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it.” It linked to Telegram.
Asos says it is aware of the reports but hasn’t confirmed a breach; the website and app kept working.
Why it matters —Using a company’s own push channel as a ransom note is a new escalation. If the claim holds, the attackers also control the app’s messaging stack.
Development and environment ministries: €4.7bn from the federal budget went to climate action in developing countries in 2025, down from €6.1bn in 2024.
The Merkel and Scholz governments had pledged at least €6bn a year in budget funds by 2025.
SPD parliamentary group paper “Deutschland modernisieren” calls for bringing back the wealth tax, an inheritance-tax reform and changes to Ehegattensplitting — none of it in the coalition deal.Handelsblatt / Reuters
GitHub ReviewBench (research preview) scores AI code reviewers on 219 PRs from 187 repos in 19 languages; an ensemble “lite” Copilot review raised recall 13.6% and cut cost per review 8% in production tests.Help Net Security
Basketball Löwen win 93:87 at RASTA Vechta on Monday night: 3–0 in the BBL, their best start in 24 years. Edwards 16, Green 15, Zylka’s late deep three ended the comeback; Ludwigsburg visits Sunday (15:00).Basketball Löwen BraunschweigBasketball-World
