The Alternative for Germany (AfD) continues to run away from its main rival, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) in a new poll, which shows the AfD nine points ahead.
The AfD achieved a new record in the current YouGov poll, reaching 29 percent, while the CDU/CSU and SPD have hit all-time lows. The results are expected to pile on the pressure on a governing coalition the German public increasingly despises.
In the YouGov poll, CDU/CSU achieves 20 percent of the vote and SPD earns 12 percent. The Union parties have never been worse in a YouGov poll.
BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov
AfD: 29% (+1)
Union: 20% (-2)
GRÜNE: 14% (+1)
SPD: 12% (-1)
LINKE: 12% (+1)
FDP: 5% (+1)
BSW: 4%
Sonstige: 5%
Änderungen zur letzten Umfrage vom 12. Mai 2026
Verlauf: https://t.co/f9MV7iZ8iJ#btw29 pic.twitter.com/yO2VS2jJn5
However, the Greens at 14 percent and the Left Party at 12 percent are making slight gains.
The FDP is also gaining ground, reaching 5 percent for the first time in a year and a half after a new chairman was elected, Wolfgang Kubicki.
The results for the CDU in particular are bound to spark further turmoil in the party, with some members perhaps even eyeing a future coalition with the AfD, a move that has been soundly rejected by CDU leadership. In particular, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to never work with the party.
The conundrum for the CDU remains that the party is forced to build coalitions with predominately left-wing parties like the Greens, the SPD, and even the Left Party, through its firewall against the AfD. The resulting politics have left CDU voters increasingly unhappy with the results, but remarkably, about half of CDU voters also reject a coalition with the AfD.
Majority of Germans reject politicizing the World CupYouGov also found that a majority of Germans do not want the World Cup politicized. The German national team has a history of taking a “woke” stance in the last two World Cups, but the German team was eventually humiliated in each tournament, failing to advance past the preliminary round in both World Cups.
However, Germans soundly reject politics in football, with 65 percent of respondents saying they want the World Cup and politics to be strictly separated. AfD voters (82 percent) and CDU/CSU voters (74 percent) are especially in favor of this position. More than half of SPD voters at 55 percent also share this view.
However, those on the more extreme left, back politics in football, like the Left Party (41 percent) and the Greens (34 percent).
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/18/2026 - 02:00Authored by Karlyn Bowman and Nicole Penn via RealClearPolitics,
As we approach the nation's semiquincentennial celebrations, the American Enterprise Institute released a new public opinion survey exploring Americans' views about the nation's past and present. The survey is part of AEI's America at 250 initiative, and it expands on a survey conducted 30 years ago by the Public Agenda Foundation in NYC.
Americans continue to endorse many of the ideals the founders championed, and they worry about their erosion. Nearly eight in 10 believe Americans take their freedoms for granted, while only 19% say Americans appreciate the freedom we have.
More than two-thirds of Americans believe that society has to teach kids what it means to be an American, while three in 10, 31%, believe this is something that happens naturally as they grow up. Three-quarters think high school students should be required to study the Declaration of Independence this year as part of the nation's 250th anniversary, including 61% of Gen Z-ers. Twenty-nine percent nationally say they have read the Declaration in full, while 45% have read it in part. Slightly more than a quarter, 26%, say they have not read the document. Still, 85% said they could give a good answer to what the 4th of July holiday actually celebrates, while 13% said they would be more comfortable looking it up.
Americans don't want to gloss over their history, and 65% said it was important to have public discussions of the nation's historical failures and flaws. In another question, 90% said it was very or somewhat important for high school students to learn how slavery and racial discrimination shaped the country. Forty-two percent said the public schools these days do not pay enough attention to the harm done to African Americans in U.S. history. Still, 75% in another question agreed with the statement "America is not perfect, but the country's leaders have worked hard to make it better." To this group of Americans, it was important to teach the country's failures and flaws but also its successes and strengths.
The survey revealed some significant gaps between members of the Gen Z cohort and baby boomers. Thirty percent of the Gen Z-ers strongly agreed that the Founding Fathers deserved respect for how they created the country compared to 60% of baby boomers. Two-thirds of Gen Z compared to 89% of boomers said they were very or somewhat proud to be an American. There were also big gaps between the parents surveyed in 1998 and parents today. Parents today are less likely to see the country and its history positively and also less likely to insist that schools teach positive claims about it.
Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies public opinion.
Nicole Penn is the assistant director of AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department.
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/17/2026 - 23:25Authored by Jijo Malayil via Interesting Engineering,
Chinese firm Alibaba has launched its first embodied AI model family, which links large language models with real-world robotic actions.
The Qwen-Robot suite includes three distinct models, each targeting a different layer of physical intelligence.Unitree/YouTubeThe Qwen-Robot suite was developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab and is undergoing pilot testing with selected Alibaba Cloud enterprise clients.
The suite comprises three models focused on navigation, manipulation, and world modeling for robots operating in physical environments.
Alibaba said the models enable machines to perceive, reason, and interact with the real world, joining a growing global push to advance embodied AI beyond traditional chatbot applications.
Robots meet reasoningAlibaba says its Qwen family of AI models has become very good at understanding the physical world. These models can recognize objects, understand spatial relationships, follow complex visual instructions, and reason about real-world environments. For example, a model can understand a command such as, "Go to the kitchen, find the red cup, pick it up, and place it on the shelf."
However, understanding a task is different from actually performing it. While a vision-language model (VLM) can describe the steps needed to complete a task, it cannot directly control a robot's movements.
The challenge is connecting human language and visual understanding with the motor actions required to interact with the physical world.
This problem is difficult because robot training data is very different from internet data. Information collected from navigation systems, robotic arms, vehicles, and cameras comes in different formats and is expensive to gather. Simply combining all this data often creates conflicts rather than improving performance.
To address this, Alibaba developed the Qwen-Robot Suite, which includes three specialized models. Qwen-RobotNav focuses on movement and navigation. It helps robots follow instructions, navigate to locations, track targets, and support autonomous driving.
According to its website, Qwen-RobotManip focuses on physical interaction. It enables robots to grasp, move, and manipulate objects using a large training dataset collected from different robotic systems. Qwen-RobotWorld acts as a world model, predicting how environments may change and helping robots understand the likely outcomes of their actions.
Together, these models aim to enable robots to understand instructions, interact with objects, navigate environments, and make decisions in the real world.
Physical AI acceleratesAlibaba showcased Qwen-RobotNav on a Unitree Go2 quadruped powered by NVIDIA Jetson Thor hardware and a single low-resolution camera. The robot successfully navigated an unfamiliar apartment, following spoken instructions across multiple rooms without preloaded maps, while maintaining an inference latency of 196 milliseconds.
The company claims that Qwen-RobotManip, its robotic manipulation model, was trained on more than 38,000 hours of open-source data covering object handling and interaction tasks. According to Alibaba, the model recently achieved the highest score in the generalist category of the RoboChallenge real-world robotics benchmark, earning a process score of 59.83 and a task success rate of 45 percent.
The company also unveiled Qwen-RobotClaw, a robotics agent framework that enables Qwen models to use the Qwen-Robot suite as physical-world tools. In one demonstration, an agent searched for a restroom, identified an out-of-order sign, and independently rerouted to another location. Alibaba further open-sourced Chat2Robot, a browser-based platform for testing embodied AI interactions.
As competition in embodied AI intensifies worldwide, Alibaba has expanded its ambitions beyond language and multimodal software with the launch of its Qwen-Robot models. The move reflects a broader industry shift toward creating AI systems capable of understanding and interacting with the physical world.
Alibaba's move comes as competition in physical AI accelerates globally. In the US, Google DeepMind is advancing Gemini Robotics, while Nvidia is expanding its robotics ecosystem through Cosmos, Isaac, and GR00T. Start-ups, including Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, and Figure AI, are also developing general-purpose robotic intelligence, according to the South China Morning Post.
China is strengthening its position by pairing its manufacturing advantages with growing investments in AI software for autonomous decision-making. The sector now spans AI developers, robotics firms, and EV makers. Companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Unitree, AgiBot, UBTech, Galbot, Spirit AI, GigaAI, Xpeng, and Xiaomi are actively pursuing embodied AI technologies.
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/17/2026 - 23:00