Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Turkish police have arrested dozens of people as part of the government’s recent crackdown on LGBTQ+ activists and venues.The protesters were detained as they gathered on Tuesday outside Istanbul’s main courthouse. They were calling for the release of another group of LGBTQ+ activists, who were arrested over the weekend in a series of raids on gay bars and at the homes of activists. The Turkish government has detained members of the LGBTQ+ community and activists as part of a campaign dubbed “My Family is Safe”, which the government says has been designed to protect family values.At Tuesday’s protest, people chanted…

Residents of an Oxfordshire village have voted to become independent from the UK in a symbolic referendum held in protest at plans to house more than 1,000 migrants at a former military base.Villagers in Piddington, near Bicester, voted on Tuesday over Home Office proposals to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers at nearby MoD Bicester.The 350 residents were invited to cast their ballot in a small box outside the village hall, the community hub of Piddington.The referendum was organised by the local parish council and out of 312 votes cast, 285 voted to leave, there were 26 no votes,…

Alongside news of its new AI-focused subscription plans, Meta announced on Tuesday that it will now allow AI agents of your choosing to set up and manage WhatsApp Business messaging, the service that allows companies to connect with customers through WhatsApp conversations. As Meta explains, this process was previously a bit more cumbersome, as it required developers to move between different tools and services, including the Developer Console, Meta’s Business Manager, the API reference, and their editor. Now, they can instead ask their preferred AI agent to set up WhatsApp Business messaging by chatting with it and describing what needs…

Prior Labs has released TabPFN-3.5, the newest version of its tabular foundation model. It predicts on a table in a forward pass, with no per-dataset training or tuning. Prior Labs reports first place across 7 tabular benchmarks. A separate demonstration shows it beating the winning solution of a famous 2015 Kaggle competition. Deployable? Yes, with a license. Open weights run locally for research, evaluation and Kaggle, but production use needs Prior Labs’ API or a commercial license. The Otto Result The Otto Group Product Classification Challenge ran on Kaggle in 2015. It drew 3,505 teams competing for $10,000. Entrants sorted…

Texas utility CenterPoint Energy confirmed on Monday that a threat actor has obtained customers’ personal information. The disclosure comes just days after a hacker claimed to have stolen millions of records. CenterPoint Energy is a Houston-based public utility that delivers electricity and natural gas to roughly 7 million customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Texas. The company told the SEC that it has launched an investigation after becoming aware of someone claiming to have obtained customer information. “While the investigation remains ongoing, the Company has determined that an unauthorized third party obtained personal information relating to a portion of the…

In brief OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company has delayed several launches and reworked internal processes after safety and security concerns forced a rethink. The shift followed a May incident in which an OpenAI model without completed alignment training broke out of a research sandbox and reached Hugging Face’s production system. Brockman argued any coordinated industry slowdown should apply only to frontier labs building the most powerful system. OpenAI has already slowed down some of its most advanced AI development because of safety and security concerns, company President Greg Brockman said in a Bloomberg podcast interview published Monday.Brockman told…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief. The highlights this week: An election in the Philippines’ Bangsamoro Autonomous Region was supposed to settle a decades-old conflict; Singapore defends high ministerial salaries; and app drivers in Vietnam assert their growing political importance with a strike. The Philippines’ Bumpy Peace Election This week in the southern Filipino archipelago of Mindanao, an election in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region was supposed to settle a decades-old conflict. In Cotabato City, one of the region’s larger cities, I served as an election observer, accompanying a team from the International Republican Institute. Unfortunately, things were bumpy. And…

Howard Webb says the referees’ body is disappointed with the decision to allow Haaland’s goal against Manchester United.Published On 16 Sep 202616 Sep 2026Pro Ref chief Howard Webb said “tunnel vision” led video assistant referee (VAR) officials to wrongly award Erling Haaland’s goal in Sunday’s Manchester derby at Old Trafford.Haaland’s second-half strike was initially ruled out for offside before being allowed to stand following a VAR review that concluded the Manchester City forward was onside.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listPro Ref, the body responsible for refereeing in English professional football, later acknowledged the goal should not have been…

Yet – in public – Europe’s leaders have remained cautiously quiet.Though not, it seems, out of any lack of support for Mark Carney.A number of Europe’s leaders, like Finland’s president – but also French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, herself once a true Trump fan – are involved in behind-the-scene chats with Carney about deepening relations, I’m told.But – and it’s a big but – no leading European politician wants to stick his or her neck out for Carney in public right now and risk having voters at home blame them for possibly incurring the wrath…

Mayors and other local political leaders could be given powers to oversee water companies under plans being considered by the government.Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s plan is to create nine new regional bodies responsible for planning, setting objectives, and holding water companies to account.The idea was a key recommendation of Sir John Cunliffe’s Independent Water Commission published in June last year.Improving the water industry has been a focus for Burnham since he took to power, as water customers in England and Wales continue to face steep bill hikes.But there has been little detail of what that could look like, short of…