Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In the spring of 1942, Mao Zedong—already a dominant figure in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), though not yet its formally elected chairman—addressed a hall packed with some of China’s leading intellectuals, military brass, and artists. Mao, himself a diligent writer of classical-style poems, shared a vision of creative work that was centered on workers’ experiences and made in service to the masses rather than elites. “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics,” he reportedly said. After the CCP took power…

Headlining a conference for Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit he previously led that regularly spreads vaccine misinformation, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a litany of familiar false and misleading claims, particularly about vaccines. For a few months earlier this year, Kennedy had largely stopped talking about vaccines, reportedly at the request of the White House. Facing a surge of measles cases not seen in a generation, Kennedy had also at times offered a lukewarm recommendation to vaccinate, frustrating his hardline anti-vaccine supporters. But in August, Kennedy appeared with President Donald Trump during the signing of…

President Donald Trump said Friday he has a deal with Denmark to bolster the US military presence in Greenland after months of threatening to take island by force from the NATO ally. Trump in a social media post announcing the deal said the agreement “gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many US concerns.” He added that with the agreement his administration would “immediately” begin the process of developing a larger military presence on the mineral-rich Danish territory. The office of Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said the…

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has said he is “truly sorry” for describing rival airlines as “high-fare rapists”.He had previously refused to apologise to a rape crisis centre which criticised him for the comments.O’Leary had made the remark earlier this month while talking to journalists ahead of Ryanair’s yearly meeting with shareholders.Following the comments, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) wrote to him asking for an apology, in a letter seen by the BBC.O’Leary had originally said that some people were “desperate to get to Ryanair’s low fares because they can’t afford to fly with the high-fare rapists around Europe”.He…

Four years ago, a startup lab launched that wasn’t quite an incubator, accelerator program, or venture firm. UP.Labs, as it was called then, built startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers such as Alaska Airlines and Porsche, as well as for the outside world. The firm still has the same mission — albeit with a critical addition to its approach, a new name, and a $100 million investment from Silversmith Capital Partners. Vantora, as the firm is now called, continues to work with its corporate customers, including some new ones in industrial manufacturing that it declined to name, and…

Jina AI, part of Elastic, has released jina-ocr-v1, an end-to-end visual document parser. It takes PDFs, scans, tables, charts or invoices and returns clean Markdown in 1 pass. The model has 3.4B total parameters, with about 570M decoder parameters active per token. A speculative decoding head ships inside the checkpoint. Jina AI built it to serve on low-budget GPUs such as the NVIDIA L4. The technical report lists 91.14 on OmniDocBench v1.6 and 83.4 on olmOCR-Bench.Is it deployable? Yes, for research and non-commercial use. The open weights are about 6.8 GB in BF16 and run on Transformers or vLLM. The…

Microsoft has resolved a known issue that causes incorrect alerts warning that Defender Antivirus was turned off after installing recent updates. In a Windows release health dashboard update on Thursday, Microsoft said the issue was fixed in the Microsoft Defender Antivirus update (version 4.18.26080.4) released on September 17. The company acknowledged the bug in late August, even though the issue had affected users in the Release Preview Channel of the Windows Insider program since at least June. As Microsoft explained, this affects all supported Windows client and server versions, including the latest Windows 11 26H1 and Windows Server 2025 releases,…

The Bank of England has committed to remove £368 billion of gilts held for monetary-policy purposes by September 2034, even as the first market response pointed toward easier conditions in long-dated UK debt.The figure covers the portfolio left after the Bank separated £120 billion of longer-dated gilts to back banknotes. The Monetary Policy Committee said the remaining stock will fall by an average £46 billion a year through bond maturities and £20 billion of annual active sales.Quantitative tightening shifts bonds from a central bank’s balance sheet toward private investors. That can lift the extra yield investors demand to hold longer-dated…

Light can transmit huge amounts of information at extraordinary speed, which is why photonic technologies are being explored for faster communications, more powerful computing, and highly sensitive sensors. To make those systems work, however, researchers need precise ways to control the direction of light and change it extremely quickly. Caltech researchers have now developed a device that uses one beam of light to redirect another in just 74 femtoseconds (74 quadrillionths of a second). That is roughly the amount of time light needs to travel across the width of a human hair. “Steering light with light is very challenging because…

The idea that the United States would launch an ill-advised war with undefined aims in the Middle East in order primarily to benefit its former adversary, Russia, would under almost any previous administration have been the preserve solely of the wildest conspiracy theorists. And yet in both economic and military terms, the benefits of U.S. President Donald Trump’s war on Iran for Russia have been a mirror image of its harmful effects on the United States and its allies. This article has been adapted from American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in its Long War with Washington by Keir Giles (Hurst, 224…