Germany’s biggest carmakers are accelerating an overhaul of how and where they build vehicles, as collapsing profits in China and stubbornly high costs at home undermine their industrial model.

Germany’s economy will expand this year at more than twice the pace envisaged in the spring thanks to vast government spending and surprisingly robust exports, according to the country’s independent economic advisers.

Germany’s military banned Chinese-made drones and prohibited certain vehicles from bases after a counterintelligence assessment showed that data was potentially being collected and disseminated, people familiar with the matter said

GERMANY'S 🇩🇪 HELSING UNVEILS A EUROPEAN 🇪🇺 RIVAL TO PALANTIR'S MAVEN AI SYSTEM Called Clarity, the platform uses hundreds of AI agents to analyze data from satellites, drones, sensors and military reports in parallel. Helsing says it can process large volumes of data in seconds, identify military assets and prepare targeting information for human review. Human operators must approve targets and authorize each handoff to a weapon. The software runs on customer-owned infrastructure, keeping military data, models and operations under the customer's control. Helsing says it has been developing Clarity in secret since 2021, investing a nine-figure sum and hundreds of engineering years into the project. The system has already been tested in Ukraine. Development was led by Robert Fink, a former Palantir engineer who wrote the first line of code for Foundry, the software that later became the foundation for Maven. A senior German military official told the FT that Helsing is among three or four European companies expected to receive initial trial contracts from Germany's armed forces in the coming weeks. The launch comes as European governments, including France and Germany, seek homegrown alternatives to US military software. Palantir's Maven system is already used by the US military and NATO. Helsing, Europe's most valuable defense tech startup, was valued at $18B earlier this year.

Germany’s dogmatic and ideological green “Energiewende” has given us the dirtiest and most expensive energy. I’m saying this as a proponent of renewable energy – but the way this was done was utterly naive and destructive.