Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Van Oord has named its two new subsea rock installation vessels (SRIVs) Vindnes and Vestnes, in line with the names of other vessels in the company’s SRIV fleet.Source: Van Oord The SRIV duo, being constructed in China at the Yantai CIMC Raffles Offshore shipyard, was designed by Norway’s Ulstein, will be equipped with a loading capacity of 35,000 tons, will be capable of handling large rock sizes, and will feature a DP2 dynamic positioning system. They will include multi-fuel engines, for biofuel and methanol, a DC-grid with large battery storage capacity, and an energy-efficient hull design and rock handling system.…

When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington today, there will be many issues on their agenda, from tariffs and trade to artificial intelligence and Taiwan. But Trump must ensure that China’s human rights crisis is high up on the list, too. Even if the U.S. president is not focused on these issues, others around him—his supporters, advisors, and those in Congress—do care. Trump himself has made promises in the past, such as getting Jimmy Lai out of jail, and has had successes that he can build on, such as securing the release of Ezra…

Claim: Former President Barack Obama thanked reporters in his final news conference as president, telling them, “You’re not supposed to be sycophants. You’re supposed to be skeptics,” and, “You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power.” Rating: In September 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his efforts to control how the news media covers him by banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. The outlets sued the Trump administration in response, calling it a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Critics of Trump have compared…

A priest has been killed and four other people injured in a knife attack in south-east Poland, officials have said.A 31-year-old Ukrainian man was arrested after the stabbings on the grounds of a Catholic abbey in the town of Jarosław.Polish President Karol Nawrocki said Thursday’s attack “has shaken us all and demands a firm response from the state”, while his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky said “we are shocked by this evil”. Reports in Polish media said the attacker first injured a priest in a nearby cafe, and then another four people inside the abbey itself. A police investigation into the…

Coroner Jason Pegg ruled on Thursday that Mawer was unlawfully killed by an unknown person, but accepted an argument by lawyers from TotalEnergies’ Mozambican subsidiary that the company had no legal duty of care to him because he was a subcontractor. The testimony could carry consequences in France, where TotalEnergies faces two criminal complaints over its Mozambique operations, including an involuntary manslaughter case tied to the deaths of contractors during the Palma attack. A French investigating magistrate was appointed last year to examine that complaint.  “These hearings were crucial, crucial, crucial,” said Henri Thulliez, a French human rights lawyer who…

The Greek prime minister has called on Andy Burnham to find the “political will” to send the Parthenon sculptures back to Greece. Kyriakos Mitsotakis wrote in the Guardian that returning the classical treasures, also known as the Elgin Marbles in the UK, would “send a powerful signal” but would require “courage”.The sculptures have been on display in the British Museum since the 19th Century, though Greece has long disputed the legality of their removal.Mitsotakis and his government have previously held talks with the British Museum about the sculptures, but the two have so far failed to reach an agreement, with…

When you think of SeaWorld, you most likely think of orcas, school trips to the aquarium, or eating chicken fingers while contemplating the ethics of marine mammal captivity. But this Halloween, the theme park franchise wants to make SeaWorld synonymous with something else entirely: BookTok smut.On September 11, SeaWorld Orlando officially opened its annual Howl-O-Scream event, an after-hours Halloween-themed immersive experience featuring various “scare zones” in the park. Scattered between the more expected spooky fare, such as a haunted “Woodrot Hollow” forest and an I Know What You Did Last Summer–themed haunted house is Just One More Chapter, a BookTok-inspired…

Google has launched two Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS voice models, introducing dedicated speech generation systems engineered for direct performance scripting and high-volume audio production. The dual release splits vocal synthesis tasks between creative direction and cost-managed infrastructure.Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS targets interactive entertainment, game development, and long-form narrations where studio teams demand prompt-based vocal design. Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS focuses on automated media dubbing, customer-facing conversational agents, and high-throughput translation pipelines.Both systems expand Google’s established audio roster, which previously introduced 3.5 Live Translate, 3.5 Transcribe, 3.8 Live, and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. Technical teams structured the new models to replace…

A threat actor is using autonomous AI agents in an ongoing campaign targeting hundreds of online retailers, cybersecurity outfit Gambit reports. Active since July, the campaign relies on three AI harnesses to automate the attack chain, including vulnerability research, exploitation, and orchestration. “Between 10 and 15 September alone, 105 attack projects were launched, and at least 27 companies were compromised to varying degrees,” Gambit says. The hackers stole information from over 600,000 unexpired credit cards from two of the compromised companies and injected skimmer scripts into five online stores. Additionally, they gained some access to a Fortune 500 hospitality company…

In brief Researchers from ETH Zurich, MATS, and Anthropic built an AI pipeline that matched anonymized Hacker News accounts to real LinkedIn profiles at 90% precision. The attack runs on nothing but web search, embeddings, and reasoning models like GPT-5.2, at a cost of roughly $1 to $4 per target—no hacking or data breach involved. The paper’s authors withheld their code, prompts, and every real identity they uncovered, and say the study passed through ETH Zurich’s ethics review board before publication. It’s the end of internet anonymity as we know it, according to loads of freaked out social media users…