Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Unite the Union general secretary Sharon Graham has warned the prime minister that scrapping the pensions triple lock would be “morally wrong”, as Andy Burnham prepares to deliver his first speech to Labour conference as PM.Burnham told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that he wants to use his speech to set out his “vision” to introduce an NHS-style social care system, free at the point of use.There is growing speculation about how such a care system could be funded, including removing the pensions triple lock in the future.Labour’s deputy leader Lucy Powell told BBC Breakfast the party is committed…

Yellow-eyed penguins, found only in Aotearoa New Zealand, are at risk of extinction.The “mainland” population is down to 117 breeding pairs, having declined more than 80% since the 2008-2009 breeding season; the only other population, which lives on New Zealand’s subantarctic islands, is believed to be larger but isn’t well surveyed.Set-net fishing, a type of gillnet fishing, has been one of several factors in the population decline.Following pressure from conservationists but over the objections of fishers, New Zealand’s government recently banned set-net fishing around the Otago Peninsula and established an annual fishing-related mortality limit of four yellow-eyed penguins.See All…

It’s been over a year since I wrote anything lengthy about the war in Ukraine, and I regret the omission. Other events have captured my attention, alas, even though the conflict is a continuing tragedy and is still casting a significant shadow over events elsewhere. Our fearless leader Ravi Agrawal’s recent account of his visit brought my attention back and led me to reflect on where the conflict is today and what might be done to bring it to an end after nearly five years. Anyone who approaches this topic should do so with humility, for no one has gotten…

I trust UK’s police judgement on suspects, Labour’s deputy leader saysWe are restarting our live coverage of the major incident at RAF Fairford after five British nationals who were arrested over the suspected plot were released on bail yesterday.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, suggested the suspected plot involved the hand of a foreign actor, and both him and the US president, Donald Trump, have expressed concern and surprise at the news that the suspects were released on bail.Speaking at the Labour party’s conference in Liverpool this morning, Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, refused to provide details on what…

A pro-democracy group has accused the Vietnamese government of abducting two of its members, an Australian and a Norwegian citizen, in Cambodia and taking them back across the border.Vietnamese authorities confirmed that they had arrested Tran Hiep and Nguyen Duc Thuan, but say they had entered the country using forged documents and planned to carry out terrorist activities.It said the men had admitted to being members of Viet Tan, which Vietnam sees as a terrorist organisation.Viet Tan called their arrest a “blatant fabrication intended to conceal the fact that the Viet Tan members were abducted in Cambodia and forcibly taken…

Burnham is told axing pension triple lock would be ‘electoral suicide’ as he prepares to address Labour conferenceGood morning. The day after Donald Trump won his first US presidential election in 2016, Ed Miliband (at that point just an ex Labour leader) went on the World at One and gave an astute assessment of the lessons to be learnt from Trump by progressives. Trump was offering “big solutions”, he said – a theory he later fleshed out in a book called “Go Big”. Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader at the time, and he certainly offered voters a “Go Big” vision…

OpenAI popularized the modern generative AI chatbot, but as its 2026 DevDay event approaches, it’s fallen behind in one of the industry’s hottest categories: continuously running, consumer-facing AI agents. On Tuesday, it will likely try to capture the lead in that race. Rumors abound that OpenAI will release its own AI agent, dubbed Aeon — its answer to Meta’s Muse, SpaceX’s Grok Bot, OpenClaw, and many more.Aeon could have a shot at success, but to beat the competition, it would need to pull together the best features of several different agent platforms. The ideal system would be as useful as…

H Company has released Holo4, a family of generalist computer-use models for AI agents. One set of weights clicks and types on screens. It also writes code and calls MCP or API tools. Holo4 ships in 2 sizes: Holo4 27B (dense) and Holo4 35B-A3B (Mixture of Experts, 3B active). Both serve a 256K context on the H Models API. Is it deployable? Yes. Holo4 35B-A3B ships Apache 2.0 weights for commercial self-hosting. Holo4 27B weights are CC BY-NC 4.0, so commercial use of 27B runs through the H Models API. What is Holo4 Holo4 is a vision-language model for computer…

Apple released security updates to fix a zero-day vulnerability exploited in “extremely sophisticated” targeted attacks on iOS devices. Tracked as CVE-2026-20700, this flaw stems from an out-of-bounds write weakness discovered by Meta Product Security in CoreGraphics, a framework used for two-dimensional vector graphics, image rendering, and text drawing across iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Successful exploitation of out-of-bounds write vulnerabilities can let attackers crash a program, corrupt data, or, in the worst case, gain remote code execution by writing data outside the allocated memory buffer. “Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in…

Bitcoin treasuries are loading up again.  Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, announced Monday that it had bought 1,665 coins last week for $142.7 million — its second buy in a row after a brief hiatus.  The Nasdaq-listed company added that it had also bought back $152 million in its preferred stock, STRC. Strategy now holds 847,666 bitcoins worth $70.5 billion, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Elsewhere, the fifth biggest bitcoin treasury, Strive, said it had last week snapped up 1,107 BTC for a total cost of  $94.5 million — bringing its holdings to…