Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

ADI Chain’s job is to turn those deals into blockchain tokens and handle payments using stablecoins (digital tokens pegged 1-to-1 to real currencies like the UAE dirham or the U.S. dollar), so money moves instantly without a traditional bank wire. For now, this is aimed at “qualified institutional participants,” or large, vetted investors, not everyday retail buyers.Shipfinex CEO Capt. Vikas Pandey said the partnership would let the company “create a regulated digital route into this market, with every instrument tied to a real vessel, its economics and its legal structure.”No maritime asset tokens have been issued yet and Shipfinex doesn’t…

For thousands of years, potatoes have been central to life in the Andes. Indigenous Andean communities were the first to domesticate the starch-rich crop, turning it into a dietary staple long before potatoes spread around the world. Now, researchers have found evidence that this ancient reliance on potatoes may also have shaped human evolution. Indigenous people in Peru today carry more copies of a gene involved in starch digestion than any other known population. A new study co-led by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo suggests that natural selection began favoring Indigenous Andeans with especially high numbers of…

A massive wildfire within a national park in Indonesia has forced a total closure of one of the country’s best-known tourist destinations. Some 899 hectares (2,222 acres) of savanna and forest within Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park (TNBTS) in East Java province have been destroyed by fire as of the morning of Aug. 11, the provincial disaster management agency told Mongabay. The fire, which broke out on Aug. 3 in the park’s eastern entrance, is suspected to be human-caused, TNBTS chief Rudijanta Tjahja Nugraha told local media. TNBTS spokesperson Endrip Wahyutama confirmed the blaze originated along a path…

Adrian Chiles’s emotional response to Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan really resonated with me (I’d never cried during a live broadcast – then three poignant words had me sobbing, 30 July). I read it and my heart both sobbed and cheered for Katriona’s younger self and the woman she has become.With its linear narrative, rich cultural references and “rags-to-riches” form, it might be taken for a tale of “that was then but this is now”. However, the defining part of the book is the epilogue, making clear that Katriona’s account of growing up in grinding, abject poverty is a story of…

A major earthquake struck Colombia on Monday, killing more than 100 people, damaging hundreds of buildings in the country’s west and prompting a frantic search for survivors.The 7.4-magnitude earthquake was the most powerful recorded in the South American nation in the past decade, the Colombian Geological Survey said.President Abelardo De La Espriella of Colombia, who had been sworn into office just three days before the quake, declared a state of emergency and said that he would directly lead the disaster response.Here’s what to know.Where did the earthquake happen?The epicenter of the quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, was about…

Andy Burnham is off on his travels this week, aiming to reconnect No 10 and the government with voters and communities across the UK. But just weeks before he set out his stall as prime minister, promising to rebalance the economy with growth in every postcode, a government agency, National Highways, underlined the pulling power of the country’s dominant city-region. It announced that a giant tunnelling machine, 16.4 metres in diameter, “the largest ever used in Europe”, was to take England’s most expensive road under the Thames.The Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), so far priced at £10bn-£11bn, is proving to be…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldThe writer is author of ‘A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore’In the 100-year history of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Donald Trump is the only US president who has spoken there twice. His speeches, given six years apart to celebrate Independence Day, used it as a backdrop to offer his vision of American history and exceptionalism.The sculpture of four presidents carved into the billion-year-old granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills has become a symbol…

ZDNET composite; Getty Images / D3DamonMore than 90% of ransomware attacks now try to delete or tamper with backups before a payload ever fires, according to a recent ransomware report. And nearly 60% of the attacks that go after backups succeed. Outages are no longer just IT headaches; they’re a risk for the entire enterprise.Delayed recoveries bring business-critical processes to a halt, hamper team productivity, and lead to permanent customer losses. Many service disruptions result from a common, albeit costly misconception: Backup isn’t recovery. In one U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, for example, 94% of surveyed SMB leaders believed their…

webAI has released TwIL-LM, a two-model family of formal-logic reasoners at 1.7B and 3B parameters. The 3B member, TwIL-LM3, is a merged fine-tune of SmolLM3-3B; the 1.7B member is a PEFT LoRA adapter for SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct. Both target autoformalization: translating English into first-order logic and checking whether a conclusion follows from its premises. Both run locally, with a 1.06 GB quantized build for the 1.7B and a 1.78 GiB Q4_K_M GGUF for the 3B. webAI’s announcement frames the release around beating gpt-oss-120b on four of five formal-reasoning lanes. Is it deployable? Partially. Non-commercial use only, as…

Attackers shut down a steam turbine and the process-water treatment system at a Polish combined heat and power plant by coming in over the private cellular network the local grid operator uses to reach remote equipment. The plant supplies heat to roughly 50,000 residents. Recovery began at about 7:30 a.m. while the intruders were still active inside the network, and customers lost neither heat nor electricity. CERT Polska disclosed the December 2025 incident on August 8 after an investigation lasting more than three months. Poland’s prime minister had said in January that two CHP plants were hit. This is the…