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The AfD has won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with more than 44% of the vote, taking twice the share of Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats but falling three seats short of a majority.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he expects the war to run into the winter after talks in Kyiv with Donald Trump's envoys ended without a breakthrough, and Israeli strikes have killed seven people in southern Lebanon.

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Major Story

🇩🇪 AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt but falls short of a majority

The Alternative for Germany won 44.2 percent of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to exit polls for the ARD broadcaster, more than twice the 17.4 percent taken by Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats.

Projections gave the party 39 of the state parliament's 83 seats, three short of the 42 needed for an absolute majority.

Lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund said the party had "made history in this state", while national co-leader Tino Chrupalla said voters had rejected the "firewall" that has kept the AfD out of every governing coalition in Germany.

Incumbent state premier Sven Schulze congratulated the AfD and said he did not intend to cooperate with it, though the projected arithmetic makes forming any government exceptionally difficult.

Saxony-Anhalt's AfD branch has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the state's domestic intelligence agency, a designation the party rejects as politically motivated.

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3️⃣ 🇮🇱🇱🇧 Seven killed in Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon: Lebanon's health ministry said seven people, including two women, were killed in Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon, with two men killed on the edge of an Israeli-declared security zone and three others in a drone strike on Nabatieh al-Tahta. The Israeli military said the strikes were retaliation for Hezbollah firing two drones at its soldiers.

4️⃣ 🇪🇺🇨🇳 EU faces 300,000 factory job cuts as China 'colonises' supply chains, industry warns: The trade body Eurometal predicts 300,000 manufacturing job losses across the EU in the rest of 2026 because of Chinese competition, and will stage a protest in Brussels using ten symbolic coffins marked "EU competitiveness" and "European factories". Its president Alexander Julius said once China controls a supply chain it owns the complete value chain.

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