I'm working on a two-part post keyed to the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. I was originally going to publish Part 1 on Tuesday, but I also thought I should weigh in on the regional German election in Saxony-Anhalt. So I've written the short post below on that topic. The two-part post on September 11 will be coming on Wednesday and Friday. Enjoy a rare three-post week at Notes from the Middleground! All the polls foretold it: The right-populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won a plurality of the vote in the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt by a very wide margin: 43.8 percent, with the second place center-right party (CDU) coming in at 17.2 percent. Yet the AfD also fell just short of winning an outright majority of the vote'an outcome that would have empowered the right populists to form a government without requiring the support of any other party. (The AfD appears on track to hold 39 out of the 83 seats in the state parliament, three short of a majority.)...

Scientists are raising the alarm about proposals from the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) that they say could severely limit academic freedoms at German universities and research institutes. The AfD is predicted to become comfortably the largest party in elections in two German states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in September. Although most German parties currently have a policy not to enter into any coalition with the AfD at the state or national level, the AfD could form a government with a sufficient lead. The party is also currently leading in polls of voters at the national level. Education policy in Germany is almost entirely devolved to its 16 constituent states. In Saxony-Anhalt ' where recent polls have seen the party's support exceed 40% ' the AfD laid out sweeping proposed reforms to the state's university system in its election manifesto, in a response to what it sees as a 'deep crisis' in German science. Published in April, the manifesto includes calls for 'critical climate research', the setting up of a state institute for 'critical Islamic studies', the creation of a chair in population studies to investigate the 'dying out of our people', and the abolition of gender studies. It also says that moves over the past two decades towards the 'Anglo-Saxon' system of bachelor's and master's degrees have 'completely destroyed the German university', and proposes to reinstate German Diplom and Magister degrees (although both degrees are generally considered equivalent to a master's in Germany, they are not widely recognized internationally)....

While the high-security corridors of Washington and Berlin are occupied with a frantic, transactional debate over NATO burden sharing and the fallout of the Iran blockade, a far more profound rupture is occurring in the quiet streets of the Rhineland-Palatinate. President Trump announced last week that the United States will remove 5,000 troops from Germany, possibly as the beginning of a larger drawdown. Pentagon planners anticipate a phased reduction over the next 12 months that could see the total U.S. presence in Germany drop significantly. Some analysts believe that the administration ultimately favors rotating troops in and out of Europe rather than permanently basing them there. Americans have been stationed in Germany by the tens of thousands since the end of World War II. Some 50,000 Americans'including military personnel, civilian employees, and their families'populate the Kaiserslautern Military Community, which includes Ramstein Air Base. The remainder of the U.S. presence is concentrated in strategic hubs such as Wiesbaden, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Europe and Africa, and the training grounds of Grafenwoehr and Vilseck in Bavaria, where thousands of soldiers maintain a rotational readiness. The initial 5,000-troop reduction will likely be drawn primarily from forces stationed around Vilseck and Grafenwoehr....

By OpenAI COO's own admission last February, 'we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes.' But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose stock has dropped significantly in 2026 in part from the 'SaaSpocalypse,' the issue is still front and center. On Monday, the European heavyweight announced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an undisclosed amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to invest '1 billion (approximately $1.16 billion) into the business over the next four years to grow it into an AI lab focused on structured data ' the tables and databases where enterprise information typically sits. SAP declined to disclose how much it spent on the acquisition itself, but sources told Pathfounders that this was a healthy exit: an 'almost all cash' deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup's founders ' Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir. The trio co-founded Prior Labs just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular foundation models (TFMs) ' AI models that can make predictions from data that sits in tables and databases. This is potentially a better fit for enterprises than language models. It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, HR, procurement and expense management rely on its database....