AfD's record win, Ukraine talks stall, Germany at The Hague

Germany's far-right AfD scored a record 43.8 percent in Sunday's Saxony-Anhalt election but fell short of an outright majority, taking 39 of 83 seats. Analysts say the surge owed less to immigration than to economic insecurity, a longing for peace, and anger at Chancellor Merz's CDU: two-thirds of the state's workers backed the AfD. Against that backdrop, hopes for peace next door took another hit. US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and then Kyiv this week but left without any breakthrough on a Ukraine deal. Germany faced pressure on a second front too. Nicaragua hauled Berlin before the International Court of Justice, accusing it of aiding genocide in Gaza through arms sales to Israel; German officials rejected both the charge and the court's jurisdiction. Separately, the World Meteorological Organization warned that wildfire smoke and heat-driven ozone are erasing years of progress on clean air, with wildfire smoke deaths possibly undercounted by up to 93 percent. Elsewhere, Trump floated renaming New Mexico to "New America" on Truth Social, echoing his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario; the governor rejected it at once. And in Bochum, Aral's century-old fuel lab kept at quieter work, with 80 scientists refining the gasoline and diesel powering Germany's 47 million combustion cars.