Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

An organisation pushing the Green party to equate Zionism with racism has encouraged people to join the party specifically to support that agenda, and has links to activists who say that pro-Israel “infiltrators” must be rooted out of the UK, the Guardian has learned.Some Green members are increasingly concerned that the party risks being manipulated by extremist outsiders over a motion to be voted on at the party’s annual conference this weekend, which states that “Zionism is racism”.Some Jewish members have said privately they fear it will be difficult for them to remain in the party if the policy passes.Zack…

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a “State of the Force” address on Wednesday to launch a new effort to study how war may be fought as tech advances rapidly. It’s being called Project Meridian. Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will co-lead the project. They’ll be joined by others from fields such as academia and policy, all working under the direction of Defense Department CTO Emil Michael. Their job is to “study the battlefields of the future” and the “weapons and technologies warfighters” may use on them, said Hegseth in a letter announcing the…

Ravie LakshmananOct 01, 2026Artificial Intelligence / AI Safety Google on Wednesday announced its latest frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model, Gemini 4 Argon, that it said is being rolled out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through its Fairwind Program. “It delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense,” Koray Kavukcuoglu, senior vice president of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google, said. The development comes nearly a month after the tech giant unveiled Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, which it described as the most capable cybersecurity model.…

Japanese payment provider PayPay added Binance Pay on Sept. 30, letting eligible overseas visitors pay from their crypto balances at participating offline stores in Japan. Merchants receive the proceeds in Japanese yen.PayPay’s launch announcement says the integration runs through HIVEX, a cross-border payment network. For visiting Binance users, funds held in their crypto accounts can cover a yen-denominated purchase, with conversion handled during payment.Binance says the feature is exclusively for visitors who have completed its identity verification and is unavailable to Japan residents. Its launch blog sets out that restriction, while PayPay specifically excludes Binance Japan users residing in Japan.This…

The 2024 inauguration of the Chinese-built Chancay Port in Peru has reinforced calls to build road infrastructure through the Amazon, connecting Brazil to the Pacific coast, with authorities in Acre, on Brazil’s border with Peru, wanting their state to be part of a strategic corridor to the Pacific.Acre already has a road connection to Peru through the BR-317 highway, but local politicians running for election this year defend the extension of the BR-364 from Cruzeiro do Sul in Acre to Pucallpa in Peru’s Ucayali department, saying it will ease connectivity for local communities and encourage economic development.A new report…

Last year, after it emerged that a private White House chat group about U.S. strikes on Yemen mistakenly included a journalist, the inevitable headlines and media coverage meant someone had to take the fall. Then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz departed after just 101 days in the job. Waltz, a decorated war hero who had previously represented Florida’s 6th district in Congress, was later named U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If the role seemed like a relegation to a place U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t hold in high regard, Waltz himself disagrees: “President Trump is a New Yorker,” he told…

A pilot on a plane travelling from Dubai to Tel Aviv stabbed the other pilot and then apparently tried to crash the aircraft Wednesday before being subdued by passengers and crew. The Boeing 737 made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, where the unnamed pilot was detained, but not before an abrupt descent prompted Israel to scramble warplanes over concerns of a possible hijacking. Here are some past examples of plane hijackings and attempted hijackings potentially involving pilots or crew members: An off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot tried to cut the engines of a Horizon Air jet travelling from Everett, Washington,…

That, indeed, has been the official Russian stance for some time: that what is happening in Ukraine amounts to a European war on Russia. It is a narrative that skips over the fact that in 2022 it was the Kremlin that launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that Russia continues to wage war there.How far would Russia go to sever European support for Kyiv?Is Moscow, for example, actively preparing to initiate military conflict in Europe with a Nato member state? That seems unlikely. After more than four-and-a-half years of war Russia’s army has not yet managed to occupy the…

Reddit is further limiting who can use the “Old Reddit” experience as part of its efforts to combat scraping and automated traffic. Reddit recently started forcing users to log in to be able to use Old Reddit, but in the “next few months,” the company says that you’ll have to be logged in and have used Old Reddit within the last six months from when the change rolls out to be able to continue browsing the platform with the classic experience.Reddit says the six-month window covers “the vast majority of all Old Reddit users.” The announcement didn’t go into detail,…

NVIDIA has released Kumo Tabular, a new family of tabular foundation models (TFMs) for classification and regression. If you have followed TabPFN or TabICL, the setup will look familiar. The model takes labeled rows as context and predicts new rows in one forward pass. There is no training, no hyperparameter tuning, and no feature engineering. Kumo Tabular comes in Small, Medium, and Large versions, spanning about 28M to 215M parameters. It runs through NVIDIA’s open-source structured-data-models (SDM) library. Is it deployable? Yes. Weights ship under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, which permits commercial use. The SDM code is Apache-2.0, and it needs…