The AfD wins a German state for the first time
Today is Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Player controls
Story 1 of 24: Weather
weatherWeather
Stories
- Good morning, and welcome to Hark News. Here's what the world got up to while you slept. First, the weather in New York. A high of 83 and a low of 60, with clear skies.
- The far-right Alternative for Germany won a state election in Saxony-Anhalt, finishing just short of an outright majority. The New York Times says the result shocked the country, and NPR notes that if the AfD forms a government there it would be Germany's first far-right regional administration since the Nazi era.
- At least five people died and five were injured when an Amazon Prime Air cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International, struck vehicles on the ground and stopped in a parking lot.
- Iran says it will unveil an exclusion zone in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to sanction ships that transit the waterway, while the UAE builds alternative export routes so it isn't held hostage.
- US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Kyiv and Moscow back to back and called the talks substantive, but nothing broke loose. Zelensky told Axios he'd consider steps to de-escalate over the winter while negotiations continue, while NPR notes Russia still demands Ukrainian land, which most Ukrainians poll strongly against.
- Heather Cox Richardson is tracking the president's run of AI-generated maps. In one batch, he posted images renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America," turning New Mexico into "New America," and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as new United States territory.
- Axios ran the November math: the Republicans' redrawn maps can absorb a Democratic swing of about 5 points, but this year's special elections are landing roughly 10 points better for Democrats than 2024 did, enough, on that analysis, to hand them around 230 seats.
- OpenAI published data showing its researchers now log 3.1 agent workdays for every human workday, with the median researcher burning over $600 a day in inference, and a goal of an automated AI researcher by 2028.
- The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court for a third time asking it to allow rules limiting mail-in voting before the midterms, with ballots already going out in two swing states and a Wednesday deadline set for responses.
- Nvidia's Jensen Huang declared on Sunday that AGI has arrived, resting the claim on the scale of compute behind OpenAI's latest model, about 100,000 of Nvidia's chips, by his count.
- European bond yields rose on fears the Middle East conflict will feed inflation, with French, Italian and UK bonds the worst performers in the G7 over the past month and German yields up on anxiety about AfD economics.
- Beijing is putting roughly $45 billion of fresh capital into its biggest banks and insurers, the most substantial state-led recapitalization in decades, aimed at getting credit moving in a stalling economy.
- HUMAIN's chief executive says the kingdom wants to be the Switzerland of open-source models, using cheap power and sovereign money to join the US and China as an AI hub, and is staffing a team to take the two-year-old company public.
- Canadian tariffs on $27.6 billion of US goods take effect after midnight, with no negotiations scheduled and Trump threatening to block sales from a Montreal aircraft maker.
- US employment figures keep failing to show an AI-driven surge in layoffs, and the economists picking through them say it's extremely hard to identify any occupation AI has actually made obsolete yet.
- Investors hedging against AI are buying teams. Jeff Bezos took a stake in Liverpool, other money has gone into the Lakers and Timberwolves, and venture firms are backing mixed martial arts, winter sports and padel, on the theory people want to watch actual humans play.
- Ahead of Saturday's live telecast, the Television Academy handed out most of its Emmys over two nights, with Widow's Bay taking eight and The Pitt four.
- Authorities arrested an armed man who allegedly lunged at Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, at the Canfield Fair. Her campaign says Acton was unharmed but several bystanders were injured, and he's facing assault charges.
- Nigeria's securities regulator approved the Dangote Refinery's Lagos offering, a roughly $1.6 billion raise from Africa's largest oil plant, part of a $5 billion push that's half funded already.
- A volunteer crew calling itself the Bitcoin Red Team pointed language models at 390 open-source Bitcoin codebases. The sweep turned up 85 severe vulnerabilities in under 28 hours, enough that one exchange, Boltz, paused trading to patch its own.
- Claude produced the first complete computer-verified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, working for 11 days in the Lean proof assistant. It ran to 13 million lines of code and 29,500 intermediate theorems, automating what Andrew Wiles did by hand back in 1995.
- New American small businesses are having a record year, at least on paper. Axios reports more than 3 million were formed in the first half of this year, the highest January-to-June total in Census Bureau records going back to 2005.
- And before you go, a little extra from The New York Times. That's approximately how many meat pies Australians eat each year . Last week, 16 judges tested 1,800 single-portion pies and sausage rolls seeking the country's best. The answer: 270 million
- And that's your world for today. The full stories and the links are waiting in the app. Tap through, bookmark what matters, and share what's worth sharing. And if you want to see what stuck, take today's quiz in the app: five quick questions. And if Hark is making your mornings a little better, share it with a friend. It's the best way to help us grow. I'll see you again tomorrow morning. Until then, have a great day.