Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

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…

Strategy, which holds the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury, sold BTC for the second week in a row to repurchase its STRC preferred stock.The company sold 1,690 Bitcoin for $108.6 million between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9, according to a Monday 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).Strategy used the proceeds to buy back 1.15 million shares of its STRC preferred stock for $108.6 million. STRC is a variable-rate preferred stock designed to pay monthly dividends.The transaction marked Strategy’s fourth disclosed Bitcoin sale of 2026, bringing its total Bitcoin sales for the year to 6,948 BTC, while the…

Citations Ballotpedia. Hall Pass – May 6, 2026. C.C. Miller and S. Mervosh. How much screen time is your child getting at school? We asked 350 teachers. New York Times. Published online November 12, 2025. R.D. Silverman et al. The effects of educational technology interventions on literacy in elementary school: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research. Vol. 95, October 2025, p. 972. doi: 10.3102/00346543241261073 A.E. Flanigan et al. The interplay among digital distraction, self-regulation of learning tendencies and motivational influences: A transnational investigation. The Internet and Higher Education. Vol. 67, October 2025, p. 101023, doi: 10.1016/j.iheduc.2025.101023 M. West. An Ed-Tech…

Gabon has ended its 19-year fisheries partnership with the European Union, which allowed EU industrial vessels to target tuna in Gabonese waters in exchange for payment, arguing the agreement no longer serves the country’s economic interests. The decision follows a June 2025 Council of Ministers meeting at which the government announced it would seek to renegotiate the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA), before formally ending it on June 29, 2026. In a statement last year, the Gabonese government said the massive exploitation of fishery resources wasn’t commensurate with the returns Gabon should receive in exchange. In a speech…