Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

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…

Four crew members are set to launch to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to perform research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will support the mission as spacecraft commander and pilot, respectively, joined by CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov as mission specialists. Crew-13 will lift off no earlier than 11:10 a.m. EDT, Thursday, Oct. 1, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and join the space station’s Expedition 75 crew. Throughout its…

Over the course of 2025, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam lost a combined 746,168 hectares of tree cover (1.8 million acres), including more than 154,000 hectares (380,000 acres) of primary forest, according to Mongabay’s analysis of data published by the University of Maryland and Global Nature Watch.However, the rate of deforestation in each country dropped when compared to 2024, continuing a decline that data show started in 2023.Experts say fewer wildfires, stricter enforcement and lower market rates for commodities could explain the drop.Mongabay’s analysis also found almost 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of forest loss occurred within protected areas,…

Subsea Micropiles is investing £5 million (approximately €6 million) over the next three years to expand its manufacturing and offshore operations at Montrose Port in Scotland, supported by £1.45 million (approximately €1.7 million) from Scottish Enterprise.The company plans to expand its infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities at the port to support the production and maintenance of subsea technology for offshore survey and construction. The investment is expected to create around 80 jobs over the next three to five years.Subsea Micropiles announced the investment on September 28, during a visit to its Montrose facility by Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney and Scottish…

The German leftwing party Die Linke won the state elections in Berlin on 20 September. It’s unclear whether the party will be able to form a coalition, appoint its lead candidate Elif Eralp as mayor, and follow through on her core campaign promise: to socialise the housing stock of the city’s biggest real-estate companies. A barrage of accusations started to circulate immediately after the results came in. Even by the standards of present-day polarisation, the pitch was extreme.On the basis of one leaked chat and one rapper’s performance, the party was described as schmoozing with criminal clans and endangering the…

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he expected a formal answer on Tuesday from the United States to Tehran’s proposal to open the Strait of Hormuz, state media reported. Qatari intermediaries “presented ideas, and we discussed them; they are set to raise the matter with the American side once more, after which the final US response will be conveyed to us”, Araghchi said late Monday. Iran’s top diplomat, who is in New York for the UN General Assembly, said “the Qataris hope this will be done by tomorrow”. Read moreTrump expects Iran talks next week after rejecting seven-day truce proposal…