Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Jarvis Cocker, one of the judges for this year’s Booker prize, has expressed surprise that the shortlist, announced this week, contains four male authors and only two female writers, because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”.The Pulp frontman might be on to something. Over the past 10 years, however, seven Booker winners have been men; the number of women boosted to four by the controversial joint win between Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood in 2019. The 2024 Booker shortlist was the first to have five female authors in the prize’s history. Last year’s…

Dale Caldwell, the lieutenant governor of New Jersey, resigned from his position on Friday, after the release of a report accusing him of sexually harassing a female staffer, among other ethics violations.New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, announced on Friday afternoon that Caldwell had submitted his resignation to her earlier in the day.The decision by Caldwell, 66, came one day after Sherrill called on him to step down after an investigation determined he violated state ethics rules and engaged in behavior that constituted sexual harassment.The 61-page report said it found credible evidence that Caldwell made romantic advances toward a female staffer’s…

ZDNET’s key takeaways Microsoft now has a single Copilot client for consumers and business. Today’s new Copilot client release adds Code and Autopilot tabs. The cost model is “evolving,” with usage-based billing for key features. For the past few years, Microsoft’s Copilot client lineup has been a fragmented mess, with its consumer chatbot and its enterprise-focused AI tools sharing a brand name while sporting wildly different interfaces and feature sets. Also: Nearly 70% of workers use AI regularly now – but many get no time to upskill Last month, the company began rolling out a single app designed to serve…

Ravie LakshmananSep 25, 2026Malware / Social Engineering Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new version of PamStealer that ensures that the main payload can only be recovered using a server-side decryption chain. The latest artifacts, per Jamf Threat Labs, continue to rely on the same JavaScript for Automation (JXA) dropper mechanism, but modify the lure and the delivery method. “Where earlier variants embedded their payload key material directly in the JXA source, it now fetches a purpose-built decryption utility and completes a key exchange with the server before the payload can be unwrapped,” security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in an analysis.…

Update (Sept. 25, 18:30 UTC). This article was updated with additional details on Hsin-Ju Chuang’s cause of death.Hsin-Ju Chuang, a former partner at crypto venture firm Hack VC, died at age 37, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner. The county’s Coroner Death Registry later listed her death as a suicide.California Highway Patrol officers responded to southbound Interstate 15 south of Field Road in Harvard, California, on Aug. 24, where Chuang was pronounced dead at the scene. A search of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Coroner Death Register shows Hsin-Ju Chuang’s death on Aug. 24, 2026. Source: San Bernardino…

The 2026-2027 challenge theme is, “Fueling Flight Design Challenge: New Energy Systems.”  As more and more aircraft are a part of the US’ National Airspace System (NAS), NASA and partners at the FAA, at universities, and in the aviation industry are searching for ways to increase safety, make flight more affordable, find new fuels for aircraft, and reduce the amount of time passengers and cargo spend in the air. This year’s Dream with Us Challenge focuses on new aircraft fuels and how even the addition of one new fuel will change both the aircraft they are used in and the…

The world has spent a decade trying to put a price on nature, yet the criminal economy has been putting a price on it for much longer.Land grabbing, illegal logging, illicit gold mining and wildlife trafficking are extremely lucrative and have become a serious drag on both sustainable development and climate action, a new op-ed argues, and its drivers must be addressed from where extraction begins all the way to corporate offices.“The world is still working out how much a standing forest is worth. Criminal markets settled on a price for a felled one long ago,” the authors write.This…

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing for a state constitutional amendment to lower property taxes. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Florida voters appear poised to reject a constitutional amendment backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) that would reduce property taxes and limit how local governments can spend property tax revenue, despite massive spending by the proposal’s backers. The measure has drawn nearly $18.5 million in combined contributions from supporters and opponents, making it one of the most expensive ballot measure campaigns among the 164 measures on state ballots nationwide this year. But it’s also among the most financially lopsided. The…

Have we reached the “end of history”? A little-known former RAND analyst, Francis Fukuyama, asked that provocative question in a lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago in February 1989. Invited by his mentor, Allan Bloom, Fukuyama presented his analysis in a series on the perennial topic of the “Decline of the West.” But he offered a more optimistic verdict. He pointed to the worldwide spread of liberal democracy, and the obvious failure of communist alternatives, especially in the Soviet Union, and suggested that the West had won. Drawing on the dialectical historical system of Hegel, the 19th century…

A Republican super PAC has been running an ad that makes the misleading claim that North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper “let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf” when he was the state’s attorney general. The evidence kits were in the custody of hundreds of local law enforcement agencies and were never submitted for testing by the state crime laboratory that Cooper oversaw as attorney general.  The kits, which include swabs and other materials to collect blood, urine and DNA samples, are used in forensic medical examinations and become evidence in sexual assault cases. It was not known…