Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

They waited for them for hours in the rain and cold of this seemingly endless winter in Joinville, Santa Catarina state. In this exhibition centre that once hosted the country’s largest arms fair before falling victim to its own success and being moved to São Paulo, the campaigners can hardly believe their eyes. On this particular day, it must be said that the Bolsonaro family’s supporters are spoiled with choice: there are not one, but two Bolsonaros onstage. The eldest son, Flavio – nominated by his father Jair as the Liberal Party’s candidate for the presidential election – is accompanied…

“We have to be very careful and understand that Russia is trying to destabilize and scare Europe. And any time we overreact to a hybrid attack, they have actually won the battle in that particular way,” Stubb told POLITICO during an interview on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. “We also have to understand that it is not in the interest of Russia nor in the capacity of Russia to go full-scale” with military escalation, Stubb added. “So they will continue to intimidate and we just have to be, as I say, cool, calm and collected…

The Liberal Democrats have rejected official guidance by the equalities watchdog on how organisations should implement the supreme court ruling on transgender people, calling it “discriminatory and unworkable”.The motion, passed overwhelmingly at the party’s annual conference in Brighton, makes the Lib Dems the first of the big three parties in parliament to call for a new approach to implementing last year’s ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only. The Greens have previously done so.Formal guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), put out in May, is intended to tell service providers…

Last week, GM announced a new software experience for its upcoming Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra trucks, including a new look for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the popular phone mirroring systems that the automaker made a big deal about removing from its electric vehicles in 2023.Naturally, this led to some confusion about whether GM was “bringing back” CarPlay and Android Auto to its vehicles. Yahoo Finance reported it that way, calling it an “about-face” by the automaker, while Apple Insider’s headline boasted that GM “cave[d]” on its decision to remove the interface from its gas-powered vehicles. Even The Verge’s…

Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen-Image-2.1, a unified text-to-image generation and image editing model. Its visual generation component has 7B parameters across 32 single-stream DiT layers. One checkpoint covers text-to-image, multi-reference editing, local edits, and transparent RGBA output. Is it deployable? Yes, for research and evaluation. Day 0 support covers Diffusers, ComfyUI, vLLM-Omni, SGLang, and LightX2V. Commercial deployment needs a separate license from Qwen. From 20B to 7B The original Qwen-Image shipped in August 2025 as a 20B model under Apache 2.0. Editing lived in a separate Qwen-Image-Edit checkpoint. Qwen-Image-2.1 folds both jobs into one model at about a third…

A fake LastPass Authenticator installer offered on GitHub installs a Windows kernel driver that shuts off antivirus and other security software before a password stealer runs if a victim downloads and runs it, researchers at LastPass and Delphos Labs said on September 17. Microsoft’s own hardware-compatibility program signs the driver, scored zero detections on VirusTotal when researchers checked it in August, and was not on Microsoft’s list of blocked drivers. LastPass says none of its own systems, services, or customer vaults were touched, and that the attackers only borrowed its name. The lure is a fake GitHub page (github.com/LastPass-Authenticator) that…

Long-awaited crypto legislation failed last week — but Bitcoin buyers don’t seem to care.  The price of the leading cryptocurrency shot up Monday by nearly 7% over a 24-hour period, six days after lawmakers blocked the Clarity Act.  Digital asset industry bigwigs have been calling for clear rules to be put in place to regulate the fast-moving space. But the key legislation aiming to do so in the form of the crypto market structure bill didn’t progress last week after Democrats mostly disagreed with the ethics side of the bill.  Bitcoin’s price has shrugged off the bill’s collapse, and recently…

A new type of brain implant could give scientists a more precise way to study the brain and may eventually contribute to treatments for neurological conditions such as epilepsy. Researchers from DTU, the University of Copenhagen, University College London, and other institutions have developed a long, needle-thin brain electrode equipped with microscopic channels. Known as the microfluidic Axialtrode (mAxialtrode), the device is designed to provide multiple functional points along the length of the implant. This allows researchers to record neural activity and deliver medication to specific locations across different parts of the brain. The findings were published in the journal…

The Bajau people of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines have traditionally harvested the sea through freediving.A recent ban on compressor-assisted diving in Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara province has made traditional freediving skills more valuable than ever.On Sumbawa, one of the province’s largest islands, traditional fishers and a local NGO are working together to preserve Bajau diving techniques and to manage local marine and fisheries resources in harmony with traditional management practices.See All Key Ideas POTO TANO, Indonesia — Mahari sits at the front of the boat, cigarette in hand, surveying the conditions of the waters off Poto Tano,…

Winnebago County prosecutors called former UIC lab manager Jennifer Bash to testify in a pair of fatal driving-while-high cases earlier this year despite being informed in 2024 that her now-shuttered forensic toxicology lab had produced unreliable test results. In response to recent Injustice Watch inquiries about Bash’s testimony, Winnebago County State’s Attorney J. Hanley said his office had dropped some charges in one of the cases and would launch a review of all convictions based on the University of Illinois Chicago Analytical Forensic Testing Laboratory’s controversial and discredited urine testing. But Hanley said his office is continuing to pursue charges…