Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A new help-to-buy scheme aimed at giving first-time buyers who cannot rely on the “bank of mum and dad” is to be introduced in a big policy announcement by Andy Burnham.The programme, called “Your first home”, is intended to help buyers in England who have a regular income but have been unable to save for a large deposit or don’t have financial support from their family.Under the scheme, first-time buyers will get a 20% equity loan to help them buy a new-build home, with an initial interest free period and a requirement of a minimum deposit of just 2.5%.Household income…

I don’t think I’m going to hurt anyone’s feelings by pointing out that Decap doesn’t have the name recognition of Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo, or Charli XCX. But his fingerprints are all over tracks from them, as well as many other artists, including Freddie Gibbs, Bad Bunny, Mac Miller, BTS, and even Ludwig Göransson’s score for Oppenheimer.Nicholas Piantedosi, better known as Decap, is a record producer, but perhaps more importantly, he’s the man behind Drums That Knock, a series of sample packs that have found their way onto countless records across genres. The line is so successful that, after debuting…

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 appears to be changing how it writes, with new analysis showing fewer obvious AI writing patterns, shorter sentences, and simpler wording compared with Opus 5. Claude Opus 5.5 is not only one of the best models for coding, but it also appears to be a bit better at writing, as Anthropic appears to be changing how AI writes. According to Arena, an AI benchmarking tool, Opus 5.5 has fewer obvious AI writing patterns, so you’re less likely to create AI slop content with this model. It also found that sentences are now shorter, which means you…

In brief StarkWare said the estimated cost of building a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in a week, as solvers in its Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge optimized the brute-force search that runs on a user’s own GPU before hitting the chain. The leading records were held by developers running AI models, including Anthropic’s Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi close behind. StarkWare cautioned the $67 is an estimate, not a price, and that the work doesn’t make Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own—it still favors a soft fork long-term.…

A Palestinian careers adviser who was allegedly directed to stop wearing a keffiyeh at a Sydney government school because it was a symbol that “may cause discord” has lodged a racial discrimination case in the federal court against the state of New South Wales.Wasim El-Haj, a former careers adviser at Sydney Girls High School – an inner-city selective government school – alleges the then acting principal told him in 2024 that the keffiyeh was seen as a symbol of conflict. He alleges the state’s conduct is unlawful for breaching the Racial Discrimination Act.El-Haj began wearing the keffiyeh – a traditional…

Andy Burnham has said he can deliver on his promise of radical change for the country despite severe economic headwinds, telling the Guardian: “There’s always things you can do; it’s just whether you’re prepared to do them.”The prime minister acknowledged public finances were “challenging” ahead of next month’s budget but said delivering fiscal stability would be “crucial”, because only then would the government be able to focus on fixing bigger problems.A series of global economic shocks, including the Iran conflict, has put the UK economy under intense inflationary pressure and pushed up borrowing costs, leaving the government limited room for…

Two companies now say they will accept advertising for director Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Elon Musk, following earlier reporting that a number of social media platforms had rejected the ads. The Hollywood Reporter published a story Friday saying that TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and X had all refused to run paid ads promoting the trailer for “Musk.” However, when TechCrunch reached out to Meta on Saturday, a spokesperson said, “This was an error and the ads are being restored.” We’ve asked Meta for more details and will update this article if we hear back. YouTube also posted an update Saturday,…

Supersonic Labs, a small AI lab from Brazil, has released Julia 1. It is a compact decision model, not a chatbot. You pass it context, a question, and 2 to 20 candidate answers. It picks one and returns a probability for every option. The model has 144.3M parameters and runs on a plain CPU. Is it deployable? Yes. The weights are on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0 and run locally with Python 3.11+ on CPU or a BF16-capable GPU. An ONNX build also runs in the browser via WebGPU. A hosted API is announced but not open yet. What Julia…

The Psychedelic Stealer malware distributed via compromised Ukrainian websites using ClickFix-style Cloudflare verification checks is part of a wider malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform called Lunex. The new findings come from Ontinue, which described the activity as a four-stage attack chain aimed at targeting Ukrainian-speaking users. “The attack chain begins with a fake CAPTCHA page and culminates in the deployment of a fully-featured C2 agent,” Ontinue threat researcher Rhys Downing said in a technical report. “The stealer extracts credentials and data from seven Chromium-based browsers, exfiltrates cryptocurrency wallets, and establishes persistent remote filesystem access through a PowerShell-based Native Messaging Host installed within…

In brief The Senate’s failure to advance the Clarity Act shifted crypto rulemaking from Congress to regulators, likely for the foreseeable future. Within 48 hours, the SEC unveiled a tokenized-stock innovation exemption, the CFTC issued no-action relief and sent a rulemaking to the White House, and the Fed proposed stablecoin reserve and capital rules under the GENIUS Act. Industry figures have embraced the regulatory path as “more viable” for now, but agency rules are slower, easier to challenge in court, and easier for a future administration to unwind than a law. For nearly two years, the crypto industry’s Washington strategy…