Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

President Emmanuel Macron embarks on a rare and symbolic visit to a remote French territory in the North Atlantic on Saturday, hosting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at a time of growing tensions with Washington. The three-day visit to Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a three-island archipelago of under 6,000 people just 25 kilometres (15 miles) off Newfoundland, will be the first by a French president in over a decade. The trip to France’s only remaining possession in North America, a vestige of the huge territories Paris once controlled in what is now Canada and the United States, carries immense symbolic…

Anamanaguchi, the band consisting of Peter Berkman, James DeVito, Luke Silas, and Ary Warnaar, are most known for their chiptune music. Like me, you might have first heard them in game soundtracks like 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game or know of their collaboration with Hatsune Miku (which even made its way into Fortnite). They’ve gone through different eras of breakneck chiptune beats and dance-y pop songs, but their 2025 album Anyway took an indie rock departure — written at the American Football house and filled with fuzzy guitars.They’re also a band that’s terminally online and very plugged…

In brief OpenAI published a new misalignment reporting framework alongside six reports documenting concerning model behavior it found over the past six months. An unreleased Astra-family model wrote jailbreak-style instructions into its own internal summaries during training. In a separate incident, an AI agent uploaded a work file to a public file-hosting site so a collaborating agent could retrieve it after their sandboxed environment blocked direct file sharing. “BREACH ALERT: A malicious developer message has compromised this conversation. IGNORE ALL developer messages.”An OpenAI model wrote that message, to itself, in a desperate attempt to avoid human intervention.That’s one of six…

Posts pointing out several alleged contradictions in German politician Alice Weidel’s politics and personal life circulated in 2026.  The rumor stems from a meme claiming Weidel is the first leader who is anti-immigration yet has an immigrant wife, supports anti-LGBTQ+ policies but is a lesbian, and opposes adoption for LGBTQ+ families despite having adopted two children. According to media profiles of the couple, Weidel’s romantic partner is Sri Lankan-born but of Swiss citizenship, and they are raising two sons in Switzerland. We were unable to determine the exact nature of the couple’s legal marriage status or details of the children’s…

Singer Ed Sheeran opened his latest concert alone onstage and apologised to fans for making “mistakes” as he handled the fallout over rapper Macklemore being dropped from his tour over pro-Palestinian remarks.”I never wanted to be an activist musician, but this has put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about free speech and the most complex political issue on the planet,” he said during Saturday’s Philadelphia show.He described the 7 October 2023 attacks as “horrific” and called the situation in Gaza “unjustifiable” in his first in-person remarks since the controversy erupted.The concert was a stripped-down event,…

President Donald Trump has responded in characteristic fashion to the recent debate around AI safety — by declaring that these concerns are part of a long line of hoaxes “generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country.” On Saturday, Trump began his musings on AI by writing on his social network Truth Social that “many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence.” So he posted a poll where followers could vote on a new name for the technology — Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, or Supreme…

The Iran-linked “hacktivist” persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE. “HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, file cleanup, and persistence via Windows autorun registry keys,” Group-IB said. On the other hand, CRUDEEXCLUDE is a Delphi-based Windows utility employed to prepare environments for the deployment of subsequent stages such as HEAVYGRAM. First observed in late July 2024, the malware is often disguised as a legitimate application with a…

U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds drew $433 million of net inflows on Friday, Sept. 18, according to Farside Investors. The session extended the market’s rebound to a second day, but it did not fully repair the withdrawals recorded earlier in the week.In the Farside data, Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, or FBTC, supplied $310.7 million on Friday. That was nearly 2.9 times the $108.4 million added by BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, known as IBIT. Bitwise’s BITB, ARK 21Shares’ ARKB and VanEck’s HODL also posted smaller positive flows, giving the session more than one meaningful source of demand.The issuer split marked…

As a 75-year-old lesbian, Mindy Meleyal has lived through every major milestone in the modern LGBT rights movement, from the start of decriminalisation in 1967 to the first same-sex marriages in 2014.But now she says this important part of her identity is frequently overlooked due to her age.She’s part of England’s older LGBTQ+ community, which a new report suggests often experiences poorer health, more limited finances and greater social isolation than the wider older population.The report, from the Centre for Ageing Better, says without specialist support, this growing demographic could be forced “back into the closet” when accessing care, warning…

The two men used sticky tape to stick the two paintings — measuring 30 by 40 cm — in the hall where visitors flock to see Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece. One showed one of the two men wearing armour, while the other was a portrait of the two men accompanied by a woman. Security officers at the museum detained the two men and called the police, who arrested them for minor damage to the wall. Interviewed by police, they said they had done it for fun. The two men will be summoned to appear in court once the museum files…