Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

BRUSSELS (AP) — A scorching summer that dried up rivers and killed tens of thousands across the European Union from Portugal to Hungary has shown that the bloc needs to develop new tools to meet a worsening climate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday. She said that this instability led her to propose a new European Heatwave Plan as well as a future European firefighting fleet of airplanes. Currently, the EU operates a small fleet itself but coordinates a network of aircraft, water trucks and volunteers that move across the 27-nation bloc as fires ignite.…

Adrian Chiles (Driverless cars are taking us on a road to nowhere, 10 September) wants to know who asked for driverless cars. I did. I have an eye condition called nystagmus and will never be able to drive unless a “tech-bro willy-waver”, or anyone else, finds a cure. Fortunately, not every driver is as reckless as the ones Chiles despairs of, and the most careful of all may not even be human.Waymo, Google’s sister company, says its cars have far fewer crashes causing injuries than human drivers. In July, the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that its cars…

People with child support debts to be banned from leaving AustraliaTanya Plibersek says the new child support legislation (which my colleague Tom McIlroy brought you a moment ago) will enforce travel bans of child support dodgers – meaning they won’t be able to fly overseas.Plibersek says there is more than $2bn of unpaid child support in Australia.She says the system can be used as an “insidious form of domestic violence where you can continue to harass or intimidate your ex”.She says the new rules will help recover “some” of the outstanding debts. double quotation markIf people move from the private…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldOn a Monday night in late August, Ryan Morrow joined 120 other members of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem to take solace in song and transcend a country filled with political discord.“We all may sing a different voice part within the hymn but we still sing one hymn, right?” he says.Morrow, a 40-year-old music teacher, can trace his family roots back to the early Moravian settlers who founded Bethlehem in 1741 after fleeing what is now part of Germany and…

Microsoft’s head of AI has warned Anthropic’s approach to training its AI model Claude could have a “disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity”.Mustafa Suleyman said his rival risked creating something “impossible” to control by treating it like a human – including by telling it it “may be conscious” and was “deserving of independent agency”.”We must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret,” he wrote.The comments are the latest in a series of stark warnings from the AI industry on the possible dangers of the technology. The BBC has contacted Anthropic for comment.”AIs are…

Computational papers ship code that readers must clone, install, configure and debug. That cost keeps useful methods locked inside PDFs. A Stanford team led by Jiacheng Miao and James Zou proposes a fix. Paper2Agent was published in Nature on 16 September 2026. It converts a paper and its codebase into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Any MCP-compatible agent, such as Claude Code, can then run the paper’s methods through natural language. The authors describe the result as a virtual corresponding author. Is it deployable? Yes. The code is MIT-licensed and installs as a skill…

Dark Reading’s Becky Bracken: Hello and welcome to Dark Reading Confidential. It’s a podcast from the editors of Dark Reading, bringing you real-world stories straight from the cyber trenches. I’m Becky Bracken, senior editor and your host. Today, I have taken a little editorial liberty and invited somebody I very much wanted to hear from right now: Hal Pomeranz. Hello, Hal.Hal Pomeranz: Hey, Becky, how are you?DR’s Becky Bracken: I’m OK. I’m hanging in, I think like a lot of people.Hal, you’re a longtime expert — your resume is distinguished. You’ve been at the SANS Institute, and you are now…

In brief The House Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act. The proposal covers transaction fees, stablecoins, mining, staking and lending. The bill must still pass both chambers of Congress before reaching the president. The House Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act Wednesday, sending a proposal to overhaul crypto taxation to the full House.The committee announced the markup on Monday, scheduling the session for lawmakers to review H.R. 10357, consider amendments and vote on whether to send it to the full House.Myriad: Will Democrats sweep midterm elections? Click to make your…

An international research team has identified a previously unknown prehistoric animal that lived in what is now Tanzania roughly 240 million years ago during the Triassic period. The species, named Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, could do more than add a new animal to the fossil record. According to researchers led by the University of Bristol, the discovery may help scientists more accurately date one of the world’s most important fossil regions and refine the timeline for the earliest stages of dinosaur evolution. The findings were published September 15 in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology. They suggest that some fossils from Tanzania once…

Wolf howls have mystified listeners for ages, prompting a range of questions. For more than three decades, wildlife biologists, using traditional research methods, have sought answers from the wolf packs of Yellowstone National Park, among the most studied on Earth.Jeff Reed, a native Montanan, linguist and computer engineer, has joined the Yellowstone researchers in a quest to decode what he calls “wolfish” by deploying the latest technology. Reed’s bioacoustic listening devices collect massive amounts of ambient sound annually from the vast Yellowstone soundscape.Using large-language models and artificial intelligence, Reed has isolated more than 8,000 hours of continuous wolf vocalizations,…