Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Trump has also been meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung and leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman.This latter meeting, which also involved leaders from other Arab and Islamic countries, “discussed current regional developments and the situation in the Middle East, as well as ways to consolidate security and stability,” the UAE’s foreign minister said in a statement.Earlier, Guterres gave his farewell speech as UN secretary general, urging unnamed superpowers to recognise “that their power isn’t so super”.”The fault lines in our world…

A thinktank linked to Reform UK has called for the abolition of the state pension and £75bn worth of sweeping tax cuts in a “radical” report likely to influence the party’s platform for the next election.The Centre for a Better Britain’s (CFABB) report – which also calls for weaker rules for UK banks and Trump-style investment accounts offering £1,000 to newborns – will be formally launched at a private event with City executives on Wednesday.The 183-page report, entitled “Boosting Britain”, proposes abolishing taxes typically levied on wealthy Britons, including capital gains tax and inheritance tax, which it says disrupts family…

After turning a string of spectacular mathematical results into a reputational crisis, OpenAI is consulting human mathematicians to help it figure out a less disastrous path forward.On Monday, the company announced a new independent panel of mathematicians tasked with advising it and other AI companies on their interactions with mathematical research and the wider mathematics community, including how new results are presented and released. Its abrupt arrival caught many mathematicians by surprise. Researchers told The Verge the group is a good first step, but many said they were left with basic questions about what it will actually do, how much…

Voice input on phones has been solved for years. What has not been solved is the output. Speak into most dictation tools and you get back exactly what you said, fillers and false starts included, in a note you then have to clean up and move somewhere else. SpeakON attacks that gap with hardware: a 25 g magnetic button that snaps to the back of an iPhone, carries its own microphone, and writes finished text straight into whatever app is already open. The Positioning: a Communicator, not a Dictation App SpeakON calls the category an AI Communicator, and takes its…

Ravie LakshmananSep 22, 2026Supply Chain Attack / Malware Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malicious npm package named “tw-pkgprobe-7731” that masquerades as a security tool targeting developers integrating Twilio into their applications, while stealthily attempting to harvest sensitive data. The package, named “tw-pkgprobe-7731,” was first uploaded to the npm registry in mid-August 2026 by an npm account named “twdepprobe7731.” In total, 11 versions of the package were published in quick succession on the same day over an approximately 45-minute time period. The npm user account no longer exists as of writing. “The first version of tw-pkgprobe-7731 posed as an…

In brief CME Group plans to launch Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures on October 19, pending regulatory review, in both standard and Micro contract sizes. Bitcoin Cash futures will represent 250 BCH (Micro: 25 BCH), and Uniswap futures will cover 10,000 UNI (Micro: 1,000 UNI). CME’s crypto futures and options averaged 279,800 contracts daily in H1 2026, worth $8.3 billion in notional volume, the exchange said. CME Group is adding Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap to its regulated futures lineup. The exchange said Tuesday it plans to launch BCH and UNI contracts on October 19, pending regulatory review.Traders get a choice…

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have pushed the search for microscopic black holes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) into new territory. These hypothetical black holes would be extraordinarily small and short-lived. If they could be produced at the LHC, their existence might help physicists address some of the deepest unanswered questions about spacetime and gravity. The search also gave researchers a chance to test a new technique for finding rare and previously unknown particles. “Had we found evidence, we could have begun to directly study quantum gravity,” said Tamas Vami, a…

Some 175,000 people in Indonesia have suffered from respiratory illness since August, its health ministry said, as it continues to battle wildfires that have raged for weeks.More than 40,000 cases – which range from coughs to bronchitis and more serious conditions like pneumonia – involve toddlers.Forest fires have blanketed parts of the country as well as neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore in toxic smog, pushing air quality indices into “unhealthy” territory.Indonesia has deployed more than 54,000 officials and dozens of jets to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra for water bombing, but the vast territory and challenging peatland conditions make it…

When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump this week for a high-stakes summit, he’ll be armed with a powerful card: rare earths. Rare earths have loomed over the U.S.-China relationship since at least April 2025, after Trump unveiled punishing tariffs against much of the world. China retaliated in part by unleashing its own rare-earth trade restrictions, laying the groundwork for several rounds of negotiations and other trade escalations before both sides agreed to a one-year trade truce that expires in November. When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump this week for a…

A lawyer for fugitive property developer Jean Nassif offered a Liberal operative $1,000 if he could get media to write about an unsubstantiated extramarital affair and breach of Covid-19 restrictions by a New South Wales minister, the anti-corruption watchdog has heard.Sharangan Maheswaran told the Independent Commission Against Corruption a message to lobbyist Jeremy Greenwood about placing a story about former Liberal minister David Elliott, was “not a serious offer”. He was shown a message to Greenwood in which he wrote he was “not joking”.In a statement and evidence to the commission, Elliott has strongly rejected the allegation of an extramarital…