Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

US President Donald Trump and tech executives have signed a voluntary accord aimed at ensuring their AI models “behave as intended.”The accord comes amid growing concerns over the safety of increasingly capable frontier AI systems. Trump has resisted a slowdown, citing competition with China. The agreement places much of the responsibility of managing AI risk on the companies developing the systems. The White House accord, named “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities,” calls for internal controls, independent external audits and board-level oversight “to ensure its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.” The accord also leaves open the…

In accordance with a contract on-ramp clause, NASA has added Blue Origin’s New Glenn 9×4 launch service to the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract. The New Glenn 9×4 launch service will be available to NASA’s Launch Services Program Office to use for future missions. The NLS II contracts are multiple-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with an ordering period through June 2030, and an overall period of performance through December 2032. The NLS II contracts include an on-ramp provision that provides an opportunity annually for new launch service providers to compete for future missions and allows existing contractors to introduce launch vehicles…

Mary, who has moved on to do a postgraduate course, is now managing her social anxiety better. After her undergraduate degree she got support from the NHS in the form of a talking therapy called CBT.It is considered the gold standard treatment for social anxiety and encourages people to re-frame their thoughts and change their behaviours.Prof David Clark, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, says he would like to see more people come forward for therapy but says people can also take steps to help themselves.The first step, he says, is to stop obsessive self-focus. “People with social anxiety…

If the steelworks remain shut, hundreds of thousands of people may lose their jobs, and the resulting waves of migration will reach far beyond Ukraine, Zinchenko warned. “A humanitarian catastrophe is looming.”The end of steelmaking in Ukraine would also have severe consequences for its defence capabilities and reconstruction. Steel is vital for producing military equipment, as well as for making shelters and repairing countless buildings damaged by Russia.Russia has justified its attacks on the steel plants for that reason, alleging that the plants in Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih were all producing military hardware.”We attempted relaunching Zaporizhstal. We restarted a furnace,…

Tap the questions below How many people cross the English Channel in small boats? Between 1 January and 27 September 2026, a total of 19,135 people crossed the English Channel by small boat from France. This was down by 42% on the same period the previous year. These crossings have become the most common way for people to be detected entering the UK illegally since 2020. Nearly all those who arrive by small boat claim asylum. Under international law, this means they are allowed to stay in the country while their asylum application is considered. Small boat arrivals made up…

The U.S. government on Tuesday launched its very own AI chatbot — or do we have to call it an SI chatbot now? Regardless, the engineers who worked on the chatbot would undoubtedly know that as a government-hosted, public-facing AI tool, the internet was going to red team the heck out of this thing. The government partnered with Google and SpaceXAI to help build the America.gov chatbot, which has proved difficult for people to jailbreak so far. (It’s worth nothing, however, that the chatbot says that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a fact that President Donald Trump still denies.)…

Microsoft is taking Windows Subsystem for Linux beyond just running Linux distributions, as WSL Containers is now generally available. You can get the feature by running wsl –update, and once installed, there’s a new wslc.exe command-line tool. Microsoft also includes container.exe as an alias, so you can use more familiar container commands. “WSL containers CLI: wslc.exe to directly build, run and deploy Linux containers on Windows, or use its built-in alias container.exe to run the same familiar container commands,” Microsoft explained. There’s also a WSL Containers API, which allows Windows apps to programmatically launch and interact with Linux containers. “Access…

In brief Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money, a privacy wallet it shut down three years ago, on its privacy-first Ethereum layer-2, Aztec Network. Users send stablecoins to tags like bob.zk.money. Payments inside the wallet are private, but deposits from Ethereum remain public. Transactions are capped at $2,500 during the early rollout. The original zk.money drew more than 75,000 wallets and $100 million in volume. Three years after pulling the plug, Aztec Labs is bringing zk.money back from the dead.The privacy-focused Ethereum developer relaunched the self-custodial wallet Tuesday, letting users send and receive stablecoins without broadcasting balances, amounts, or recipients to the…

NASA’s 2027 Human Lander Challenge is seeking ideas from college and university students to help address one of the most critical needs for sustained lunar exploration: reliable communications. As NASA prepares for long-term human presence on the Moon through the Artemis and Moon Base programs, communications systems will be just as important as spacecraft and rockets. A resilient communications system will connect astronauts, rovers, habitats, landers, mission support teams on Earth, and more. Reliable communications are essential for ensuring safety, coordinating complex operations, and enabling timely decision-making in the harsh and remote lunar environment. “Reliable communications will be at the…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief. The highlights this week: Chinese President Xi Jinping leaves Washington without much to show for his White House summit, U.S. student numbers in China haven’t recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, and F-35 fighter jet parts land in Beijing’s lap in a mistaken shipment to Hong Kong. What to Make of the Trump-Xi Summit Chinese President Xi Jinping left Washington last week with the air of a man who has just made a dutiful social call to an aging relative. The summit between Xi and U.S. President Donald Trump was—as widely expected—a nothing burger, ending…