Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A vote on the long-awaited Clarity Act will be delayed until September as lawmakers go on recess today.  As first reported by POLITICO, citing comments from Majority Leader John Thune, the vote on the landmark bill will now have to wait until lawmakers return from August recess.  Bipartisan work has gone into the Clarity Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives last year, but some Republicans have accused Democrats of stalling the bill.  BREAKING: 🇺🇸 President Donald Trump says “I see it more and more where people are paying with Bitcoin, they don’t even know about cash anymore.”…

The night belongs to Lime bikes in the capital this summer. Buses and tube carriages are boiling, cars crawl between low traffic neighbourhoods and Thames Water roadworks, and pedestrians plod through the sticky heat. But Lime riders exist in a different, breezier realm: whirring along, chatting in pairs or blissfully alone, weaving through the city’s tree-lined maze, choosing impulsively between destinations, rarely stopping for anything or anyone.“My favourite part of a night out is Lime biking home,” writes Annie Lord, a dating columnist and author, in Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling. “As I ride up a hill, the bike’s electrics click…

The US embassy in London is offering grants of up to half a million dollars for new “public education” programmes in what has been criticised as interference in British domestic politics.Using language that the pro-Trump Maga movement has sought to appropriate, a funding notice identifies a goal of fostering a “national conversation” about “shared civilizational values” underpinning US-UK ties. Priority will go to applicants aiming to celebrate “freedom of speech” and “limited government”.It comes after senior Trump officials voiced sharp criticism of British authorities and repeated misinformation on a range of fronts including abortion and digital regulation, and allied with…

The TUC is urging the new chancellor, John Healey, to order a “root and branch” review of the Office for Budget Responsibility, claiming the forecaster’s approach holds back investment.With Andy Burnham promising “good growth in every postcode”, the union umbrella body is calling on Healey to use his first budget on 28 October to re-examine the assessments of the watchdog.In particular, it accuses the OBR of downplaying the benefits of public investment, by assuming it “crowds out” private capital – an approach disputed by some economists.Paul Nowak, the TUC’s general secretary, said: “For too long, the OBR has been a…

Shortly after 10.30pm on Monday 8 June, as a summer twilight lingered over Belfast, a horrific scene unfolded on Kinnaird Avenue: a man straddled and repeatedly stabbed a figure lying on the ground in a bloody assault that ended only after onlookers intervened.Others captured the drama on cameraphones and uploaded the footage to social media. Once seen, the grainy images were hard to forget, and by dawn on Tuesday 9 June they were ricocheting around X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and other platforms.Many commentators highlighted one aspect: the assailant was black, the victim white.Police had a suspect in custody – he…

pros and cons Pros Pocketable, practical design.Sharp, vibrant and bright screens.Features a less-reflective folding display with minimized crease.All-day battery. Cons No telephoto camera.Punch-hole cutout on the inner display can be distracting.No built-in magnets for Qi2.2 charging. more buying choices Seven years of folding phone innovation have led Samsung to finally embrace a wide-format design with its new Galaxy Z Fold 8. The compact, BlackBerry-esque phone unfolds into a mini tablet, with aspect ratios that feel more natural than its taller Fold 8 Ultra sibling. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a shorter, wider folding phone, but this is indeed…

Gen Threat Labs followed two H1 2026 campaigns where attackers used legitimate accounts, browser settings and blockchain data as part of the attack path. The Gen Threat Report is a twice-yearly examination of the biggest cyber threats shaping the digital landscape, offering an in-depth look at the trends affecting consumers around the world. Gen’s H1 2026 Threat Report has its share of headline numbers. Scams accounted for almost 46% of Gen threat detections in the first half of the year. Malvertising represented almost another 30%. Gen blocked 114.2 million e-shop scam attacks and 20.3 million tech support scam attacks during…

AI-assisted security campaign focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin Red Team, said it generated 6,700 findings across 425 projects in its first 55 hours. The campaign labeled 1,029 of them high or critical.The Aug. 6 update measures how much material entered a security triage pipeline, and its effect on software security remains unreported.The retrieved thread omitted audit-ready definitions and denominators for the severity counts, as well as case-level outcomes, an aggregate false-positive rate, and a fix rate.Those missing fields prevent a calculation of how many alerts became confirmed vulnerabilities, how many maintainers rejected or downgraded, and how many led to…

Thomas Wright’s short, effective new book diagnoses how Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s foreign policies signal a transformed world order, albeit in different ways. Wright, who served on Biden’s National Security Council from 2022 to 2025, combines a scholar’s insight and a practitioner’s experience to shed light on a changing world. However, the book is limited by a lack of meaningful discussion about both Israel-Palestine, and the future of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy. Wright focuses on a few major themes, the most important of which is the idea that the post-Cold War world is over. Barack Obama, he argues,…

When thousands of unarmed students marched toward the Indian Parliament building last month in a rare challenge to the government, they were met by a wall of riot police officers determined to stop them.Officials had blocked internet in the area, initially slowing the emergence of details of the crackdown. But videos taken by protesters and witnesses began circulating, revealing that security forces beat people with sticks and fired tear gas and pellet guns at them. The footage led to accusations of excessive force being wielded against peaceful demonstrators.The New York Times has verified and analyzed images and video footage shared…