Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Meta’s Muse mascot is named Jolly. It’s an adorable, cuddly representation of Meta’s AI agent that you can dress however you want—like a doll. At the company’s recent Meta Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s furry Muse donned a toga and laurel wreath. In Instagram ads I saw for Muse, the mascot wore exercise gear and boasted about helping with my fitness goals. Later this year, Meta plans to sell a Tamagotchi-style device for your Muse character. It’s all very kawaii-coded.Although Muse’s ability to complete digital tasks rocketed it to the top of the app charts, its Labubu-adjacent mascot latched this…

Ravie LakshmananSep 26, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security Google is warning of renewed mass exploitation of a known security vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft as part of a campaign targeting multiple sectors globally. The ShinyHunters-linked activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2026-35273 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The vulnerability was first exploited as a zero-day in attacks against academic institutions to conduct reconnaissance, deploy remote access software like MeshCentral agent for persistence, move laterally over SSH, run a shell script to connect via SSH to other internal PeopleSoft machines using known username/password combinations, and…

MAXYZ, a group of former Balancer contributors, is asking for up to 6 million currently non-circulating BAL to seed a successor protocol. If the granted tokens reach other eligible holders before Balancer’s proposed wind-down redemption snapshot, the same treasury would be divided among more BAL. In exchange, MAXYZ proposes a contingent allocation from a future fork to the Balancer treasury, an asset with no realized value today.The fork proposal, posted Sept. 20 and expanded in a Sept. 23 FAQ, sits beside a separate wind-down plan to let BAL holders burn their tokens for a pro rata share of the DAO’s…

Breast cancer screening can sometimes identify cancers that would never have caused symptoms or threatened a woman’s health during her lifetime. This phenomenon is known as overdiagnosis, and it has long been considered one of the potential drawbacks of screening. For decades, researchers have debated how often overdiagnosis actually occurs. Estimates from randomized trials have differed sharply, with some studies suggesting that 30-50% of breast cancers detected through screening could fall into this category. Those figures have influenced international discussions about both the benefits and possible harms of population-based breast cancer screening. “The aim of our study was to bring…

Claim: Videos authentically show Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wearing a Palestinian flag at a United Nations event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rating: In September 2026, as the United Nations held its annual meeting in New York, a video (archived) circulated online that social media users claimed showed Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wearing a Palestinian flag at a United Nations event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One X user shared the video, writing:   BREAKING:📷  Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni:”I am a woman and also a mother. I cannot stand with someone who kills innocent children.”  The…

The Pennsylvania department of health (DOH) announced on Friday that 55 new measles cases had been reported in the state since Wednesday, with officials continuing efforts to contain an outbreak of the disease that has spread across dozens of counties.In a news release, the DOH said that 890 measles cases had been confirmed across 39 counties in the state so far for the year. The outbreak had resulted in 173 hospitalizations in the state and four measles-associated deaths, the statement added.State health officials said fewer than 1% of reported cases have occurred among individuals vaccinated against measles. And according to…

Honorable MentionsNowadays Cannabis Infused Beverage, Starting at $40: Bringing a bottle of booze is a white elephant classic; my husband’s work team almost exclusively exchanges bottles of liquor as a safe bet for enthusiasm. I think you can do better, though, and bring a THC spirit instead. This spirit is light and a little fruity, sitting somewhere in between the flavor profile of a floral gin and a sweet sake. My friends and I tried it mixed into a pomegranate cocktail instead of tequila, which was fantastic, and we also loved it with seltzer as a THC twist on a…

Payward has divided that vision into four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, its business-to-business infrastructure division.Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion of assets, according to Sethi, across more than 190 countries and territories.To grow its vision of a unified financial platform, Payward is now adding services around those accounts, including cards, lending, derivatives and tokenized equities, as well as products that allow customers to borrow against assets or deploy them in decentralized-finance applications. Kraken Financial, its Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, also forms part of the stack.Build, buy…

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Tanuja Pandey, a climate justice activist in Nepal. In the weeks following the deadly glacier collapse and floods in Nepal this August, researchers from the World Weather Attribution group rapidly assessed the event and concluded that climate change played a “very strong” role in the catastrophe.  Warmer weather melted ice, thawed permafrost and increased rainfall, destabilizing a glacier before its collapse. Nepal estimates that damages from the floods—which killed at least 1,300 people—could exceed $4 billion, over a tenth of the country’s…

Reading Time: 3 minutes The Milwaukee Police Department told NNS it is looking to the future with its policy on generative artificial intelligence, or AI. The department is not currently using the technology, but that could change. One potential law enforcement use of generative AI is helping officers write police reports. For example, Axon, the company that provides MPD’s body cameras, offers a product called Draft One, which uses body-camera audio to generate draft police reports. Some civil rights advocates and defense attorneys say using this type of emerging technology could create problems for Milwaukeeans accused of crimes. “You have…