Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The wife of a US scholar imprisoned in China on charges of spying and endangering national security has asked President Donald Trump to secure his release when he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House next week. U Min Zin, the director at a think tank focused on Myanmar, was arrested on 3 June after travelling to the Chinese city of Kunming for an academic conference. “I’m deeply hopeful that President Trump will raise my husband’s case with President Xi Jinping at the summit next week,” his wife, Sylvia Zin, testified to Congress on Wednesday.Xi is due to…

For the first time since worries about AI eradicating humanity sparked a wave of calls for immediate regulation, the companies were all under one roof. Charles addressed the dire warnings in his remarks to his guests.  “There seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of such technologies falling into the wrong hands and being used in potentially catastrophic ways,” he said. “Surely, then, we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late.”  But after weeks of fervent debate about the need to increase oversight and slow the pace of development, tech leaders at the event were…

Prime Minister Andy Burnham is facing calls to set a national waiting-time target for dementia care in England.An Alzheimer’s Society proposal to set an 18‑week referral‑to‑treatment target has been backed by Professor Sir Mike Richards, England’s former national cancer director, and Baroness Louise Casey, who’s leading a major review of adult social care.In a report, Alzheimer’s Society and the King’s Trust said a “cancer-style revolution” was needed to improve dementia care, which they described as being “stuck in the 20th century”.In a speech at Alzheimer’s Society conference on Thursday, Social Care Minister Alison McGovern expressed support for the report, external.She…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldA top Florida Republican lawmaker warned that Hispanic voters felt “betrayed” by Donald Trump, issuing a stark rebuke of the president’s immigration crackdown ahead of the midterm elections.María Elvira Salazar broke with Trump in a 30-second ad filmed in front of the White House as a growing cast of Republicans distance themselves from the president and his policies to avoid defeat in the November vote. “Mr President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar, a member…

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United…

OpenAI on Wednesday published a framework for reporting instances of model misalignment, along with six reports on problematic behavior observed over the past six months. The company said the framework is meant to speed up publication of misalignment findings, including cases it has not yet fully explained or mitigated, and that it favors disclosure even when an instance’s significance is uncertain.  Under the framework, each discovered incident is assigned to one of three tracks based on complexity. OpenAI said its Hugging Face incident would have fallen under the framework’s slowest investigative track, which covers complex investigations, especially those involving third…

In brief Vitalik Buterin rejected the idea that AI-powered hacking means cybersecurity is doomed. He argued that AI could make formal verification practical across entire software systems. The comments build on Ethereum’s push toward AI-assisted security, privacy, STARKs, and quantum resistance. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says AI does not spell the end of cybersecurity, arguing instead that advanced models could help make crypto software harder to break.In a Wednesday post on X, Buterin argued that AI will not give hackers an insurmountable advantage, adding that crypto holders—including himself, with roughly 90% of his net worth in crypto—are betting that security…

Available for 35 daysNuclear fusion energy, the idea of copying the sun’s heat source on earth to make limitless commercial energy is famously always 30 years away. This month, the UK and US have agreed to combine the brains of their nuclear fusion supercomputers in an attempt to improve models of plasma behaviour using AI. Tom Whipple is joined by interim CEO of UKAEA Tim Bestwick to understand what challenges must be overcome to make commercialised nuclear fusion a reality. With under a fortnight to go before the winner of the coveted Royal Society’s Trivedi Book Prize is announced, we…

In February, Hungary’s flagship public broadcaster, M1, debuted a new daily program called Horrors of War. “Forced conscription, families torn apart, poverty, and countless victims,” the presenter said at the start of the first broadcast, standing amid computer-generated rubble while artificial explosions lit up the studio. The program then cut to images of bombed apartment blocks, grieving civilians, and shattered streets in Ukraine. “Last year alone, 2,500 civilians were killed,” the 17-minute episode concluded. Debuting nearly four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, but just two months before Hungary’s general election in April, Horrors of War was not intended to inform…

Cheung, Steven. “Jon Jackoff Has to Be the Biggest Cuck Loser in Politics. Instead of Denigrating Hard Working People Serving Their Country,.” X, 17 Aug. 2026, https://x.com/StevenCheung47/status/2089360945210335245. Post.Haberman, Maggie, and Jonathan Swan. “Devoted Aide Who Keeps Good News Flowing Will Follow Trump to the White House.” New York Times , 25 Nov. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/us/politics/trump-natalie-harp.html.Holmes, Kristen, and Adam Cancryn. “Meet Natalie Harp, the Aide so Close to Trump She Once Rode in an SUV Trunk to Accompany Him.” CNN, 18 Aug. 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/politics/natalie-harp-trump-aide.Jira, Violet, and Sammy Westfall. “What to Know about Natalie Harp, the Trump Aide Whom Ossoff Put in the…