Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The UK foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has met his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, for the first time in New York amid warnings from senior Iranian security officials that the US has four to five days to respond to its conditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz.The previously unknown apparent deadline was specified by Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of the supreme national security council, in a TV interview on Wednesday evening, and it is unclear what action Tehran will take if the US does not respond to Iran’s preconditions for reopening the vital waterway.A faction inside Iran is arguing that Tehran…

ZDNET’s key takeaways Microsoft is launching a new Surface Mouse with haptic feedback. The mouse also comes with a customizable action button. Priced at $80 the new Surface mouse will reach stores on October 13. I’ve tried a lot of different mice with my Windows desktops and laptops. But the ones made by Microsoft have always been my favorites. I’ve used both the IntelliMouse and the Surface Mouse; however, both have been unavailable from Microsoft for years. Now, the Surface Mouse is finally making a comeback. Also: Microsoft’s most underrated Surface accessories are coming to business users In a blog…

BottleCap AI has released ThinkingCap-Qwen3.8-27B, the second model in its ThinkingCap series. It is a fine-tune of the Qwen team’s Qwen3.8-27B with one narrow goal: shorter reasoning traces. Across 12 benchmarks, it spends 37.2% fewer thinking tokens on average. Macro-average accuracy moves from 86.65% to 85.79%, a 0.86pp drop. Deployable? Yes. It drops in for Qwen3.8-27B on vLLM or SGLang, with FP8, NVFP4, GGUF and MLX builds. The repo is gated, and commercial use beyond the small-business license needs a BottleCap agreement. What Problem Does ThinkingCap Target? Reasoning models often spend more thinking tokens than a question needs. BottleCap’s position…

Island announced Thursday that it raised $400 million in a Series F funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to $6.4 billion. The latest funding round was led by Evolution Equity Partners and it brings the total investment in Island to well over $1 billion. The company will use the money to enhance its platform and boost growth. Island has developed an agentic control plane designed to govern both human interactions and automated workflows across endpoints, software, and networks.  Expanding beyond its core enterprise browser offering, the platform now uses an endpoint-outward SASE architecture to deliver zero trust network access (ZTNA),…

The crypto treasury model has largely lost its early advantage, with most digital asset treasury (DAT) companies no longer commanding the premiums that allowed them to raise capital and accumulate more crypto without diluting existing shareholders, according to a new report from DWF Ventures.The report, published Thursday, found that only four of the 20 largest DATs by assets under management trade above an mNAV of 1, meaning their market value exceeds the value of their crypto holdings. They are Bit Digital, Strive, Hyperliquid Strategies and BitMine. The widespread discounts suggest investors are no longer willing to pay the same premium…

NASA announced the winners of the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table Thursday, with the top $300,000 prize being awarded to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia, Pa. for the Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure (ANI) food system concept. This competition challenged solvers to explore innovative solutions for integrated space food systems that would provide safe, nutritious meals to astronauts living and working in space.    Mars to Table launched in January 2026 as a follow on to the Deep Space Food Challenge, which NASA ran from 2021-2014 in collaboration with CSA (Canadian Space Agency). The original challenge focused on prototyped novel food production…

The recent description of the tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo) from Bolivia comes amid a broader reassessment of wild cat taxonomy, with genetic research suggesting that several additional species may be waiting to be recognizedBrazilian biologist Tadeu Gomes de Oliveira says the number of recognized tiger-cat species could increase from three to six or even seven, while new research is also raising questions about the taxonomy of margays and other small cats.These distinctions can have direct conservation consequences: Oliveira estimates that no more than about 200 munoai pampas cats remain and argues that recognizing the population as a distinct species could…

Van Oord has named its two new subsea rock installation vessels (SRIVs) Vindnes and Vestnes, in line with the names of other vessels in the company’s SRIV fleet.Source: Van Oord The SRIV duo, being constructed in China at the Yantai CIMC Raffles Offshore shipyard, was designed by Norway’s Ulstein, will be equipped with a loading capacity of 35,000 tons, will be capable of handling large rock sizes, and will feature a DP2 dynamic positioning system. They will include multi-fuel engines, for biofuel and methanol, a DC-grid with large battery storage capacity, and an energy-efficient hull design and rock handling system.…

When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington today, there will be many issues on their agenda, from tariffs and trade to artificial intelligence and Taiwan. But Trump must ensure that China’s human rights crisis is high up on the list, too. Even if the U.S. president is not focused on these issues, others around him—his supporters, advisors, and those in Congress—do care. Trump himself has made promises in the past, such as getting Jimmy Lai out of jail, and has had successes that he can build on, such as securing the release of Ezra…

Claim: Former President Barack Obama thanked reporters in his final news conference as president, telling them, “You’re not supposed to be sycophants. You’re supposed to be skeptics,” and, “You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power.” Rating: In September 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his efforts to control how the news media covers him by banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. The outlets sued the Trump administration in response, calling it a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Critics of Trump have compared…