Morning Brief, Tuesday 22 September

Germany's political centre took another punch. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Alternative for Germany won 38.2% and the Social Democrats took 35.5%, while Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union fell to 4.9%, below the threshold for state-parliament seats for the first time in postwar history. Berlin added a different kind of warning: Die Linke led with 25.7%, while the CDU placed second with 18.8%, leaving the chancellor squeezed from the nationalist right and the urban left at once.

Friedrich Merz rejected resignation talk and cleared his week, cancelling his planned trip to New York for the UN General Assembly. He argued that the results reflected a deeper remaking of the party system, not merely a verdict on one leader, although his coalition with the SPD now governs with a Bundestag margin of only 13 seats before a rebellion could threaten a leadership vote. Friedrich Merz defended his position in Berlin.

Markets shrugged, for now. The DAX rose 1.2%, helped by globally exposed companies, while conservative rivals waited rather than moved openly against the chancellor. The danger for Friedrich Merz is less an immediate coup than a slow loss of authority, in which every pension bill, tax package and defence vote becomes a fresh test of whether Germany's once-dominant centre can still command obedience.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico sued the Trump administration in federal court in Washington after the White House revoked their journalists' access to the complex. The outlets say officials pulled credentials without notice or appeal because President Donald Trump disliked their reporting, and they asked for an emergency injunction to restore access. The dispute started when correspondents were turned away at the gates and one Politico credential was confiscated without a formal process.

The fight quickly spread from three newsrooms to the television pool. ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC refused to replace CNN when the White House blocked CNN from serving its scheduled rotation for Donald Trump's UN trip, halting shared television coverage of presidential movements while print, radio, wires and still photographers continued. The administration called the access a privilege, not a right; the plaintiffs call the move viewpoint discrimination dressed up as housekeeping.

Vice President JD Vance defended the decision before reporters and framed the cutoff as a response to hostile coverage.

The case now moves fast because access itself is the prize. A court does not have to like every press-room custom to see the larger issue: once the state can remove reporters for critical coverage without process, the briefing room becomes less a workplace than a loyalty queue.

European intelligence chiefs warned that Russia could test NATO territory within months through sabotage, border incidents, false-flag provocations or influence campaigns. Czech, Latvian and Swedish officials described different levels of risk, but they agreed that Moscow seeks to fray public support for Ukraine and strain allied decision-making. Their warnings landed as European agencies tracked sabotage against infrastructure tied to Ukraine and watched drone activity rise near sensitive sites.

Poland then scrambled military aircraft on Monday night as Russian forces struck targets in central and western Ukraine. Warsaw placed ground-based air-defence and radar systems on heightened readiness, sent emergency phone alerts to 24 districts in Lublin Voivodeship and ended the operation after confirming no incursion into Polish airspace. Latvia also alerted residents near Krāslava and scrambled allied aircraft under NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission after a potential aerial threat near the Belarusian border (9bf08d7e-33cd-428a-ab76-003c55cd9eb2e808).

Michal Koudelka, the head of the Czech Security Information Service, described what a Russian test could look like.

The caution is not panic. Latvian intelligence said it saw no sign of an imminent full-scale attack, and Russia still spends enormous resources in Ukraine. But the incidents force NATO to live in the grey zone, where an aircraft scramble, a cut cable or a drone over a base may demand a response before anyone agrees what happened.

A construction crew in New Jersey accidentally severed a Verizon fibre-optic cable running near an Amtrak line, disabling primary radar and radio communications circuits used by the Philadelphia air-traffic control centre. When controllers tried to shift to the backup line, they discovered that it also was not working. The FAA issued ground stops across the New York region, Philadelphia and Boston, catching airlines just as delegations began arriving for the UN General Assembly high-level week.

FlightAware recorded nearly 4,000 delayed flights and 500 cancellations across the United States. Newark suffered the worst disruption, with more than 1,000 delayed or cancelled flights, while ground stops also hit JFK, LaGuardia, Teterboro, Westchester County, Philadelphia and Boston. United Airlines waived change fees, but regulators kept some restrictions in place until technicians could install replacement circuits and verify safe operations.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford explained why the redundancy failed when it was most needed.

Congress allocated $12.5 billion last year to modernise American air-traffic control, but Monday's mess showed how fragile the system still is at the physical edge. The glamour of global diplomacy arrived in New York by jet; the bottleneck sat beside a rail line in New Jersey.

British Columbia and a local school board sued OpenAI and Sam Altman in federal court in San Francisco over the Tumbler Ridge school shooting. The filing accuses the company of negligence and aiding and abetting a mass attack, arguing that OpenAI's monitoring system flagged Jesse Van Rootselaar's account eight months before the killings for references to gun violence and weapons. An internal safety team reportedly recommended referral to law enforcement, but company leadership deactivated the account instead, after which the attacker used a second account.

The February attack killed Van Rootselaar's mother and sibling at home before she travelled to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and fatally shot five students aged 12 and 13 and a 39-year-old educational assistant. More than 30 lawsuits have already been filed by survivors and families. British Columbia says any damages it wins will help rebuild the school, and officials brought the case in California because OpenAI is headquartered there and allegedly made the non-reporting decision there.

Attorney General Niki Sharma set out the province's argument against treating AI companies as legally exceptional.

OpenAI has said it did not alert police in June 2025 because it saw no indication of an imminent attack, while Sam Altman has since apologised and said updated safety rules would have led to police notification. The case will define how old duties to warn and prevent harm attach to systems that can notice danger long before a human officer knocks on a door.