The Social Democrats' recent rise in the polls may reflect voters growing disillusioned with their preferred parties, while Isamaa's declining support could be linked to a lack of fresh ideas, a political analyst says.

Six energy firms warn that higher network fees for battery storage from 2027 could deter investment in Estonia. Elering says discounts would shift costs to other customers.

The Social Democrats' recent rise in the polls may reflect voters growing disillusioned with their preferred parties, while Isamaa's declining support could be linked to a lack of fresh ideas, a political analyst says.

The Center Party and Social Democrats topped Emor's October poll as long-time leader Isamaa slipped, with voters' party loyalties still far from firm, said expert Aivar Voog.

The Office of the Chancellor of Justice has asked the Ministry of Finance to explain why heirs may face income tax on the sale of inherited property even when the proceeds are used to repay the deceased's debts.

Estonia will spend €13.5 million to host the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Tallinn next January, bringing together thousands of international delegates to support Ukraine's reconstruction.

Edela-Rootsis Boråsi lähedal sai reedel õhtul seitse varateismelist tõsiselt vigastada garaažis lahvatanud põlengus ning veel kaks inimest pöördus suitsu sisse hingamise tõttu öö jooksul haiglasse.

Tai on Kagu-Aasia üks populaarsemaid sihtkohti, meelitades igal aastal miljoneid välismaalasi oma valgete liivarandade, saarte ja rikkaliku kultuuriga. Väljaande The Independent vahendusel tuletavad reisieksperdid aga meelde, et kohalikud seadused võivad Euroopa turistile valmistada ebameeldivaid üllatusi — süütuna tunduv eksimus võib tuua kaasa hiigeltrahvi, riigist väljasaatmise või äärmuslikul juhul isegi eluaegse vangistuse ja surmanuhtluse.

One person is killed and five wounded in a series of attacks. The suspected gunman has been apprehended.

Ukrainians held alongside the American say they witnessed beatings and sexual humiliation by Russian guards during his detention.

Do British pensioners have it better or worse than those in other countries?

The chancellor will unveil AI spending aimed at shoring up the UK's defences in Wednesday's Budget.

Listen on Spotify Apple Music Amazon Music Ist Deutschland wirklich der kranke Mann Europas oder steht ein wirtschaftliches Comeback bevor? Nach einem milliardenschweren Investitionsgipfel „Invest in Germany“ mit Tech-Größen wie Nvidia-Chef Jensen Huang zieht Martin Blessing, der persönliche Beauftragte des Bundeskanzlers für Investitionen, eine optimistische Bilanz. Es bleibt die entscheidende Frage, wie viel von den zugesagten Milliarden tatsächlich frisches Geld ist und ob die deutsche Bürokratie das Tempo der KI-Revolution überhaupt mitgehen kann. Als ehemaliger Vorstandsvorsitzender der Commerzbank weiß Blessing, wie man durch existenzielle Krisen navigiert. Auf einem Spaziergang mit Gordon Repinski durch das herbstliche Berlin erklärt der Ex-Banker, warum das deutsche Rentensystem dringend eine Kapitaldeckung nach skandinavischem oder auch US-Vorbild braucht und wie ausländische Geldgeber auf den Aufstieg der AfD blicken. Dabei wird deutlich, warum der drohende Fachkräftemangel und überbordende europäische Regulierungen derzeit die größten Bremsklötze für den Standort sind. Im Gespräch liefert Blessing einen Einblick in die wirtschaftspolitische Strategie der Regierung und fordert ein Ende der deutschen Larmoyanz. Am Beispiel der LNG-Terminals oder auch der Finanzkrise 2008 zeigt er auf, dass politischer Wille durchaus zu rasanten Genehmigungs- und Gesetzgebungsverfahren führen kann. Ein Tempo, das nun auch für den Ausbau der digitalen Infrastruktur und die Sicherung der globalen Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zwingend notwendig ist. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig. Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren. POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbHAxel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 BerlinTel: +49 (30) 2591 0information@axelspringer.deSitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 BUSt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna POLITISCHE WERBUNG **(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht der PKV: Wir sind die Besser-für-alle-Versicherung. Warum? Weil wir als private Krankenversicherung die medizinische Versorgung stärken, nachfolgende Generationen entlasten und den medizinischen Fortschritt beschleunigen. Das kommt allen Menschen in Deutschland zugute, auch den gesetzlich Versicherten. Mehr auf PKV.de** Sponsor: Verband der Privaten Krankenversicherung Diese Werbung steht im Zusammenhang mit der Debatte über Belastungen der privat Pflegeversicherten zugunsten der sozialen Pflegepflichtversicherung (SPV). Weitere Informationen zu politischer Werbung hier.

The exposure was immense, with AI multiplying the risks — and yet time-tested global cybersecurity procedures appeared to be functioning. Then suddenly, it all broke down.         The decision by a cybersecurity company on Wednesday to prematurely release information about a flaw in the popular PHP computer programming language left much of the web exposed to hackers, triggering a panic that brought to life months of warnings of how the AI-powered era could cause widespread damage. The flaws in PHP, discovered using AI tools through a months-long process coordinated by OpenAI, caused cyber agencies across Europe, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada to post urgent warnings Wednesday. Numerous governments took websites offline as a precaution. While no major hacking damage was immediately apparent, the way the incident unfolded over 72 hours showed how easily cybersecurity processes can break down and the outsized consequences of cyber risks in the AI era. The man who set off the chain reaction with the early release — Chainguard’s CEO Dan Lorenc — quickly apologized in a LinkedIn post. But on Thursday, in an interview with POLITICO, Lorenc said he’d shared the information ahead of time because the flaw was already being exploited. Though others disputed that, Lorenc said he believed he’d seen enough evidence to invalidate an embargo set up to allow time to find a fix for the flaws.  While he disputed that his actions would have caused problems for other defenders, Lorenc conceded that the evidential threshold in these coordinated cyber defense systems is a “grey area.”  The revelation of the PHP flaw brings out into the open what cyber officials have been bracing for since the arrival of the most powerful tools of artificial intelligence, which not only can be used to discover vulnerabilities but also to exploit them at scale.  The cybersecurity world’s long-established protocols helped prevent disaster scenarios, in which hackers would have successfully exploited the vulnerabilities to take control of numerous websites and access their data. But the scale and end-of-days potential of AI-driven cyber risks are now visible for the world to see.  This “is what happens when AI turns up a flaw that’s been hiding for years,” said Eylam Milner, co-founder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity start-up Echo. The vulnerabilities, he added, are “about as serious as it gets for the web.” Origin story Understanding how this week’s emergency unfolded offers a glimpse at how companies and authorities are working to stave off attacks — and how much risk they face going forward.  The origins of the incident can be traced back as far as April when leading frontier AI firm Anthropic unveiled Mythos, leading some in the cybersecurity world to worry that systems would quickly be overrun by advanced artificial intelligence, with potential for catastrophic events to ensue. But while researchers did find more flaws in computer systems in the months after Anthropic and other AI firms like OpenAI released those models, they had little impact in the real world. Even the Hugging Face incident, a widely discussed hack that saw OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents go rogue during an internal security evaluation, related more to the level of control AI companies exert over their models than their power to break into systems worldwide.  This photograph shows a figurine in front of the logo of the company Anthropic during a photo session in Paris on February 13, 2026. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images That changed this week after researchers unveiled the vulnerability in PHP, a coding language estimated to be integrated into some 70% of the web. The process by which information about flaws is released among cybersecurity officials and affiliated companies is crucial. Through a longstanding practice known as coordinated disclosure, researchers and companies that identify flaws can find a fix and share it confidentially with agencies and others before releasing to the public, meaning they don’t hand malicious hackers the gift of a hole without a fix. In the case of the PHP flaw, that process worked well, but not perfectly. Information about the bugs started to circulate ahead of the planned release time. Then, according to the PHP Foundation, Chainguard “unilaterally broke the embargo,” which “disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.” PHP Foundation executive director Elizabeth Barron told POLITICO by email that while it was “disappointed” with Chainguard, it hopes to “rebuild trust with them in the future to ensure we can continue to collaborate effectively.” After the leak— which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves. Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen “millions” of attempts to exploit the flaw. Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said. Amazon’s cloud division also said the flaw is “now being broadly exploited in the wild.” One senior U.S. government cyber official said that federal authorities have been overwhelmed — and not just by PHP. The same day the world was racing to address PHP, they were also dealing with bugs in node.js, a widely used JavaScript framework, Fortinet, GitHub and Oracle. “The fire department is fighting multiple fires at once,” the official said, adding: “The good news is they’re all one-story structures on fire, which the fire department deals with all day, every day.” Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare speaks during the 2026 Semafor World Economy conference in Washington, DC, on April 17, 2026. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images More to come Dauntingly, OpenAI said there’s more on the way. “These bugs are among several significant vulnerabilities we’ve already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months,” the company said Wednesday in a statement. Matthijs van Amelsfort, head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, said in an interview that the job of keeping computer systems safe has been transformed by the advancement of AI. “As soon as the frontier models came out, that’s exactly what we said, this will be the trend,” he said. “And actually that’s happening now.” Thomas Caspers, vice president of Germany’s cyber agency BSI, concurred: “We expect that [to be] happening more and more during the coming months.”  AI also ramps up the risks once the flaws are out in the open. Cyber agencies’ recommendation that organizations take their websites offline was “really a drastic measure,” Caspers said. “We wouldn’t have done that a few years ago or so.” But because AI has made it quicker and easier to exploit flaws, “we had to do that,” he said.  At the same time, the use of advanced AI to detect the flaws may create a new level of protection against malicious hackers looking to take advantage of them. Caspers said that though his German agency has also seen attacks, it has not seen any successful use of the flaw by hackers. “It seems a little bit more complicated than expected to exploit,” he said.  Despite the fact that AI offers a new way to discover flaws, the work involved in keeping systems protected is more quotidian, with cyber agencies urging organizations to install the fix shared by the PHP Foundation, in a process known as patching. “There are three things that you have to do right now,” said van Amelsfort from the Dutch agency. “And that’s patch, patch, and patch.”  John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.

Already struggling after losing homes to Israeli military operations, Palestinians face hardship as WFP halves aid.

The visit comes about a week after a major new bridge linking the two countries was officially opened.

Video shows AI likenesses of people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party appearing to admit to wrongdoingA political ad from Spain’s main opposition party that used a deepfake video of the prime minister’s wife has sparked outrage and set off a wider debate on AI, as the deeply polarised country gears up for general elections next month.Launched this week across the social media channels of the conservative People’s party (PP), the video used artificial intelligence to manipulate the likenesses of various people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party and appeared to show them admitting to acts such as soliciting prostitutes and taking kickbacks. Continue reading...

About 200 firefighters deployed to tackle the blaze at former Nazi retreat in a remote part of southern GermanyGerman police said Saturday they had detained a suspect after a fire at Adolf Hitler’s former mountain retreat, known as the Eagle’s Nest, in the state of Bavaria.About 200 firefighters were deployed to tackle the blaze at the Nazi dictator’s remote and difficult-to-access Kehlsteinhaus residence, on the peak of Obersalzberg in southern Germany. Continue reading...

Government puts 20% more officers on the streets for Saturday to boost security following last weekend’s riots

As disorder engulfs Paris and Marine Le Pen waits in the wings, the country is running out of money, patience and answers