Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

I’ve been to two weddings where the bride and groom refused to play the Killers’ pop-rock hit Mr Brightside, and both ended in divorce. Well, not yet or anything – but I’m sure it’s coming. How happy can a couple really be if they’re not willing to play the biggest banger to ever bang moments after their hearts have been bound together as one? There are some things that should never be missing from a wedding unless you outright detest your guests. Canapes, yes. Cake, sure. And the opportunity to scream, “Comin’ out of my cage and I’ve been doin’…

Nato is working to get Ukraine the air defences it “urgently needs”, its secretary general has said, after Kyiv failed to shoot down a single Russian missile in an attack on Wednesday, and as Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Moscow was seeking to significantly boost missile ⁠production ahead of winter.Speaking at a National Security and Defense Council meeting on winter resilience, the Ukrainian president did not rule out the idea that stalling missile supplies from western allies were “aimed at making Ukraine, so to speak, more willing to compromise” in peace talks with Russia.After meeting Nato’s Mark Rutte, Zelenskyy said: “It…

The Commission — which has a workforce of some 30,000 — hired a chief confidential counsellor, Lene Naesager, to deal with staff harassment issues, in May 2024. She has a team of 40 counsellors across the Commission and its executive agencies. Since September 2024, the chief counsellor, who reports to Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, has received 960 reports from “colleagues feeling harassed, alleged harassers, witnesses, managers and HR correspondents,” according to a Commission spokesperson. However, the chief counsellor “has no mandate to investigate and is not entitled legally to qualify the conduct as harassment as defined in the Staff Regulations,” the…

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has told allies that it is considering a major financial campaign to support the Republican Senate nominee in the Michigan general election this fall, after it failed its biggest test of the primary season on Tuesday.AIPAC’s super PAC spent $32 million in an unsuccessful effort to boost Representative Haley Stevens over Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a relentless critic of Israel, during the state’s Democratic primary.After Dr. El-Sayed’s victory, the group is unbowed and now appears willing to put what is expected to be tens of millions of dollars behind Mike Rogers, the Republican, as some…

A federal judge in Texas ruled on Wednesday that a strict permitting process for short-barreled guns and suppressors under the National Firearms Act was unconstitutional because Republicans in Congress had removed a $200 tax for a permit.Without the tax, Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas wrote, Congress had no legal basis to impose permit requirements for the weapons.Gun rights groups and gun manufacturers, many of whom had filed and supported the lawsuit, immediately claimed a major victory, while gun-control lobbyists said the ruling would in effect deregulate dangerous firearms and accessories that had been restricted since…

Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis.Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind’s CTO, is stepping up to become Google’s SVP of DeepMind and will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will remain Google’s chief AI architect as well.“​​As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human…

SkillOpt is a text-space optimizer developed by a team of researchers from Microsoft, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, and Fudan University. SkillOpt trains a single natural-language skill document while the target model stays frozen. An optimizer model reads scored rollouts and proposes bounded add/delete/replace edits. A held-out selection split accepts an edit only when the score strictly improves. The exported artifact is one file, best_skill.md. The transfer tables report three columns. Baseline is the target’s no-skill score. Direct is SkillOpt trained in-domain on that exact target. Transferred applies a skill trained elsewhere, with no further optimization. The useful comparison…

Black Hat USA 2026 – Las Vegas – Browsers such as Claude in Chrome, Gemini in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, and Copilot Edge are vulnerable to a new class of zero-click exploits that can allow attackers to hijack their artificial intelligence agents and turn them against users.The problem stems from how the AI agents pull information from multiple sources, such as emails and webpages, while working on a task without reliably distinguishing between trusted and untrusted content. An adversary who can slip malicious instructions into that content can weaponize the agent and use its access to act on the…

Time is running out to get a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act, though bipartisan work is intensifying with the White House reviewing the latest draft behind closed doors, according to reports.  Senator Thom Tillis said that bipartisan language drafted and sent to the White House last week is currently being reviewed by the White House. “We’ve got people working with White House right now…they’re going through some of the lines right now,” he was quoted and first reported by Punchbowl News Senior Reporter Brendan Pendersen.  Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to file cloture on the crypto market…

Stanford researchers have identified a previously unknown immune cell that destroys nearby cells by exploding. The process unfolds so rapidly and completely that the cell disappears within minutes, leaving virtually no trace. The discovery was made in planarian flatworms, small aquatic animals known for their extraordinary ability to regenerate. Even when cut into pieces, these worms can rebuild missing tissues and, in some cases, produce complete new organisms. Studying how their immune systems have survived and adapted over hundreds of millions of years could offer useful clues for modern medicine. In a study published in Cell, the researchers named the…