Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Far-right nationalist populist parties are making the running everywhere from Washington to Warsaw. So why be so alarmed about a little regional electoral victory for one such party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in one federal state, Saxony-Anhalt? “Because it’s Germany!” is the almost instinctive answer in many heads around the world.But that “because it’s Germany” needs to be taken apart, like the segments of an orange. Yes, because of Adolf Hitler, two dictatorships (Nazi Germany until 1945, communist-ruled East Germany until 1989) and two world wars. And yes, some of the language used by the AfD will give anyone…

Residents in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh have been given the all-clear after air raid alerts were issued and explosions were reported in the capital.It was the first time alerts have been issued in Riyadh since the Houthis increased their attacks and declared a “maritime embargo” on the Saudis in July. The Saudi Civil Defence sent alerts for the capital and several other regions late on Friday night and Saturday morning (local time) as the Kingdom’s conflict with the Iran-backed Houthis continued to escalate.Journalists from Reuters and AFP reported hearing explosions in the capital, but authorities have since said the danger has…

Ein historisches Novum rückt in greifbare Nähe: Fliegt die CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern womöglich aus dem Landtag oder schrammt haarscharf daran vorbei? Während Manuela Schwesig auf einen Wahlsieg mit für die SPD triumphalen Werten zusteuern könnte, kämpfen die Christdemokraten an der Fünf-Prozent-Hürde und ums politische Überleben im Land. Gordon Repinski und Rasmus Buchsteiner analysieren, warum die Polarisierung die Parteien erdrückt und welche bundespolitischen Ambitionen die amtierende SPD-Ministerpräsidentin Schwesig hegt. Hinter den Kulissen in der Union brodelt derweil weiter die Kanzlertausch-Frage. Also geht es bei den beiden im Gespräch auch darum, wie zum Beispiel ein CSU-Kanzlernachfolger ein beispielloses Stühlerücken im Kabinett auslösen…

The Liberal Democrats have begun work on a new manifesto in case of a possible snap election, as Ed Davey said he understood the frustrations of some of his MPs who fear that the party’s message is currently at risk of being lost.But Davey also urged his party not to panic at static polling numbers, arguing that with tactical voting and fragmented political loyalties, he fully expects the party to do even better at the next election than in 2024, when it won 72 seats, the highest total for a century.Speaking ahead of the party’s annual conference in Brighton, Davey…

A team of three independent security researchers at Hacktron says it took less than 72 hours for them to hack into OpenAI employee accounts using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and 5, The Wall Street Journal reports. They were able to access OpenAI’s GitHub repository, called “Monorepo,” which reportedly contains “OpenAI’s algorithmic secrets,” according to The Wall Street Journal’s sources.They stopped short of accessing internal code in Monorepo themselves, but sent a pull request from an employee’s Codex account to prove they gained access. They were able to get in through Discourse, the third-party service that hosts OpenAI’s community forums, by…

Linkup research team releases SPARSEUP, an open-source learned sparse embedding model. The model runs on a 149M-parameter ModernBERT backbone and ships under Apache 2.0. Linkup team reports 56.4 average nDCG@10 on BEIR-13. It calls this the strongest public vocabulary-based sparse encoder it knows of under 150M parameters. Is it deployable? Yes. The weights are on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. The model loads through Transformers or Sentence Transformers with trust_remote_code=True. Why a Sparse Model, and Why Now Most open retrieval models are dense: 1 vector per text. Sparse models output weights over a vocabulary instead.…

An attacker copied about 170 of CrowdSec’s private GitHub repositories on May 22 using the account of an employee who had just left, CrowdSec said on September 18. The French security company had kept his GitHub access open. CrowdSec says his laptop was compromised in May’s supply chain attack on TanStack, in which malicious versions of TanStack’s npm packages stole credentials from developers’ machines. The code appeared on an online forum on September 16. Along with the source code, it contained the email addresses of 83 CrowdSec users and the names, email addresses, and investment context of 51 potential investors…

Bitcoin (BTC) jumped past $80,000 around Friday’s Wall Street open as fuel-crisis woes spread through global markets.Key points:Bitcoin gained 6% on Friday as concerns about oil supply saw US bond yields reverse higher.Crypto markets liquidated $250 million in short positions over four hours.BTC price momentum now faces the familiar resistance levels first encountered in May.BTC surges 6% as US bond yields turn upwardData from TradingView showed BTC/USD filling pockets of upside liquidity to reach local highs of $81,034 on Bitstamp.BTC/USD four-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingViewA cluster of short positions above the spot price came under fire as a result. Per data…

Memory problems, thinning skin, and declining bone mass may seem like separate consequences of growing older. Yet experiments in mice suggest that changes in a protein deep inside the brain can influence all three. Restoring that protein, called Menin, improved several signs of aging, while a separate treatment with the amino acid D-serine improved cognition. The findings came from a study published on March 16, 2023, in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Lige Leng of Xiamen University in Xiamen, China, and colleagues. The work identified a possible connection between brain inflammation, metabolism, and aging throughout the body.…

More than 20 years ago, when I started the campaign and TV series School Dinners, I couldn’t believe that we had standards for dog food but no standards for the food we fed our children at school. I have never, and will never, stop banging that drum – even after this week’s momentous announcement on school food standards in England. Because it is so important we remember where we started from.Children in the state sector are at school for 190 days a year. And if they’re eating breakfast and lunch there, the majority of what they consume each day is…