Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Bitcoin starts the week with new August highs as traders weigh the impact of crunch US inflation data.Key points:US CPI and PPI data comes amid fluctuating bets on Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes in 2026.The Japanese yen remains at the forefront as it creeps back toward the key 160 level against the US dollar.Bitcoin (BTC) traders see the area around $65,800 as crucial for bulls after BTC/USD hits new month-to-date highs.Larger Bitcoin wallets contrast with retail holders after a conspicuous two-month accumulation spree.Baskets of onchain indicators still see the bear market continuing in the second half of the year. CPI, PPI data…

Kazakhstan has released its first tiger into the wild more than seven decades since the last confirmed sighting of the big cat in the country. On July 31, 2026, an adult female Amur tiger called Umit, which means “hope” in Kazakh, leapt from her cage on the back of a pickup truck, as she was released into the wilderness of the 450,000-hectare (1.1 million-acre) Ile-Balkhash State Nature Reserve in southeastern Kazakhstan. According to a statement issued by the Kazakhstan government on Aug. 3, Umit is fitted with a satellite tracking collar to monitor her movements and behavior in…

When we spoke in April with a woman who had survived a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) massacre on the border of Sudan, she did not ask for revenge. For more than two years, the RSF has carried out attacks in the country that amount to crimes against humanity. But instead, the woman asked whether anyone would write down what had happened to her—whether it would be believed, and whether it would matter. That question, repeated to both of us for decades across war zones, is the reason for the International Criminal Court (ICC), established by the Rome Statute in 2002.…

Much of Europe is bracing for yet another heatwave following periods of scorching temperatures that have driven rivers to record lows, ignited historic forest fires and contributed to thousands of deaths. Parts of Britain and France on Monday were already under extreme heat warnings with forecasts of temperatures around the mid-30s Celsius. Unusually high temperatures were also forecast in coming days across a swathe of countries not accustomed to the heat, such as Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. Watch moreFrench farmers ‘heavily impacted’ by climate crisis, both psychologically and economically. Europe’s weather warning system MeteoAlarm on Monday said scorching temperatures are…

A small boat has crossed the English Channel carrying 230 people, the largest number to make the journey in a single vessel.It breaks the previous record set in July, when 165 people made the crossing on a single vessel.The boat arrived in the UK in the early hours of Monday.A picture taken off the coast of northern France showed the inflatable boat was so full many passengers had to dangle their legs in the water as it entered the busy shipping route.A Home Office spokesperson said this latest incident demonstrated the “reckless and dangerous tactics employed by criminal gangs… who…

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has proposed that all foreign prisoners are sent to serve their sentences abroad in order to scrap Labour’s early release scheme.Farage said his party was exploring options with third countries over renting prison spaces, including El Salvador, which he said Reform chairman Lee Anderson would visit soon for initial talks.Reform said removing foreign nationals from the prison estate, as well as building emergency “Nightingale” prisons, would enable changes to be made to sentencing laws so that serious criminals serve out their full terms.Labour said the plan “does nothing” for the current situation as it would…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldDonald Trump likes a four-letter acronym. The most famous is Maga. He and his team are also fond of Fafo. Shortly after the US capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the White House posted an image of a stern-looking Trump — with the Fafo acronym emblazoned beneath it. When Pete Hegseth assembled senior American military commanders last September, he told them: “Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision and ferocity…

David Gewirtz/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Claude turns narrated screen recordings into reusable skills.My skill cut hours of tedious research to just 30 minutes.The tradeoffs: high usage, slow runs, and fragile control.Last month, Anthropic announced a new Claude Cowork feature: the ability to narrate a screen recording and turn it into a Claude skill. I tried it and, well, as they say, “All magic comes with a price.” Let’s set the stage by defining what we’re after here. A skill is a very detailed canned prompt that can be run like a…

ByteDance’s Seed team has introduced SeedRealtime, a native audio-visual full-duplex LLM. The model fuses audio, video and text in a single unified architecture. It interacts in real time over continuous multimodal streams, rather than one turn at a time. Seed positions it as a step toward omni-modal interaction, and claims three breakthroughs: joint audio-visual understanding, proactive interaction, and natural conversational timing. The architectural target is the cascade: chained ASR, VLM and TTS modules that add latency and lose information between stages. SeedRealtime instead runs perception, understanding, decision-making and expression in parallel inside one end-to-end model. Turn-taking moves inside the model…

A member of “The Com,” a loose-knit online cybercrime collective that targets children and teenagers, has been sentenced to two years in prison for blackmail and sextortion offenses against nearly 120 victims worldwide. 20-year-old Justin Swaddle from Leeds (known as ‘Epstein’, ‘Rugen’ and ‘Moscow’ on Snapchat, Telegram, and Discord) was first arrested in October 2023 by West Yorkshire Police. Swaddle was sentenced today after pleading guilty to multiple child sexual abuse offenses and blackmail at Leeds Crown Court on July 2. “Justin Swaddle targeted young and vulnerable victims all over the world to abuse and scare them into carrying out…