Morning edition··Coverage: overnight since last night’s brief (~19:30 → 08:15)
What matters
Saxony-Anhalt is set to seat Germany’s first AfD parliament president; the Mecca pact sends Turkish and Pakistani troops to Saudi Arabia; Reflection unveils Beam.
The new Magdeburg Landtag meets for its constituent session at 11:00; AfD nominee Tobias Rausch (35, in the Landtag since 2016 and the party’s state general secretary) is all but certain to win.
Arithmetic: AfD 39 seats plus BSW 5 makes 44, enough for a majority; CDU, SPD, Linke and Greens together hold 39. CDU leader and caretaker premier Sven Schulze tells his MPs to abstain.
Wagenknecht to dpa: “Das BSW beendet die Brandmauer-Idiotie!” — the strongest group should get the post “at 44 percent of the vote”; she calls Göring comparisons from SPD, Greens and Linke a trivialisation of Nazism.
Why it matters —First time the AfD would hold a Land’s top parliamentary office, and the first real test of whether AfD and BSW can deliver votes together.
Emergency meeting of defence and foreign ministers in Riyadh on Monday: the three states “activate collective deterrence measures” and will rapidly deploy “agreed military forces and capabilities” to the kingdom (joint statement via Pakistan’s foreign ministry).
The pact, signed 7 August, treats an attack on one as an attack on all; this is its first invocation. Trigger: last week’s Houthi strike on a Medina substation that powers the Prophet’s Mosque.
Why it matters —Turns a Saudi–Houthi war into a three-country military commitment — and pulls Ankara and Islamabad out of their mediator roles in the wider Iran war.
FBI cyber chief Brett Leatherman: the breach came from “a security failure of a platform managed by a third-party organisation” after a contractor failed to apply a patch “explicitly issued” for it; the contractor was removed on 5 October.
Two sources told Reuters the platform was Oracle’s PeopleSoft HR system and the third party was Accenture; the FBI named neither.
Hearing called by Council Speaker Julie Menin as the city weighs its own AI guardrails; Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta sent policy staff, appearing virtually.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon: “the majority of the code is now written by AI, and people do not check it that carefully anymore.”
New BfV situation report on counter-espionage (reported by WELT): “persistently high” Iranian procurement for its launcher and missile programmes, “with a rising tendency”.
Rationale: after the war since February 2026, Iran is expected to refill and expand its arsenals and rebuild destroyed plants — and still depends on Western tech where Germany is a leading maker.
Executive order signed Monday at a Nebraska rally: waives the off-road requirement so anyone can buy dyed, excise-tax-exempt diesel “for any reason”.
Transportation, Agriculture, Defense and Treasury are told to widen access, and states are encouraged to suspend their diesel taxes (White House fact sheet).
Trump approved Hegseth’s recommendation of death by Army firing squad for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan (13 killed in 2009); he’d be the first US soldier executed by the military in 60+ years.The Guardian
Vite shipped five patch lines overnight (8.3.3, 8.2.4, 8.1.6, 7.3.7, 6.4.4) with dev-server hardening: `fs.serve` now checked for `?vite-wasm-instance`, and safe-module tracking stores ids instead of URLs. No advisory published yet — worth updating.vitejs/vite v8.3.3
