Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Bitcoin Cash jumped 28% to nearly $349 over 24 hours, the largest move among sizeable tokens, after CME Group said on Monday it will list Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures from Oct. 19.Futures on a regulated U.S. exchange give funds a way to take a position without holding the coin, which matters for institutions whose mandates bar them from custodying crypto directly. It also gives market makers a hedging venue, which usually tightens spot pricing.Bitcoin itself is trading around $85,800, down under 1% over 24 hours after matching Monday’s intraday high near $87,300 and meeting the same selling into it.…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief. The highlights this week: Malaysia’s Najib Razak is granted clemency by the king for a second time; the global fuel crisis puts regional airline AirAsia on the brink; and plans by Taiwan to open a new representative’s office in Cebu have created a stir. Malaysia’s top crook gets leniency On Friday, Malaysia’s king granted clemency for a second time to the country’s most notorious criminal—former prime minister Najib Razak—allowing him to serve his remaining sentence under house arrest. Convicted of embezzling millions of dollars from 1Malaysia Development Berhad, a state investment fund, Najib…

Last week on his GB News show, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage claimed that because of ongoing tax threshold freezes and the increasing value of the state pension under the triple lock “we’re going to be dragging about nine million pensioners into taxation”.This is misleading. We’ve contacted Mr Farage to ask what his figure is based on, but nine million is broadly the total number of pensioners who are currently paying income tax, most of whom would be paying it even without the threshold freezes.Around 600,000 more pensioners have been brought into paying income tax as a result of the…

The potential dangers of A.I. are weighing on many minds this week. They’re being discussed by world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly; they will almost certainly be discussed when Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sit down for talks tomorrow in Washington.Calls for global cooperation to slow the development of what is known as frontier A.I. — the most advanced, most capable A.I. models — have grown louder. So far there isn’t a whole lot of optimism about the world’s two A.I. superpowers reaching an agreement any time soon.But there’s a precedent for this moment. Today, I write about what…

Apple’s new texture and grain controls for stylizing photos will be more limited on older phones than initially expected.A confusingly worded press release from Apple indicated that the new features, announced alongside the iPhone 18 and 18 Pro earlier this month, would be “available” on older devices like the iPhone 16 and iPhone Air that “support the latest generation of Photographic Styles.”But it turns out that “available” didn’t mean that older iPhone models would have full access to those new features.Making texture adjustments to enhance or smooth a subject’s skin and adding film grain will only be an option when…

Voice input on phones has been solved for years. What has not been solved is the output. Speak into most dictation tools and you get back exactly what you said, fillers and false starts included, in a note you then have to clean up and move somewhere else. SpeakON attacks that gap with hardware: a 25 g magnetic button that snaps to the back of an iPhone, carries its own microphone, and writes finished text straight into whatever app is already open. The Positioning: a Communicator, not a Dictation App SpeakON calls the category an AI Communicator, and takes its…

D-Link warned customers of a maximum-severity vulnerability (CVE-2026-86296) with public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code and no patch, affecting legacy DIR-822A dual-band Wi-Fi routers. This security flaw stems from a stack-based buffer overflow and improper data handling in the DHCP server component and can be exploited without authentication or user interaction. Attackers without valid credentials on the same local network can send crafted DHCP packets to the device, trigger the overflow, and potentially crash the DHCP daemon or achieve remote code execution on targeted devices. D-Link also warned that the security researcher who found and reported the issue published a proof-of-concept…

In brief Polish prosecutors have charged a former police officer with organized crime membership, fraud and money laundering linked to the case of collapsed exchange Zondacrypto. Police are searching the fuel depot where Zondacrypto founder Sylwester Suszek was last seen before vanishing in March 2022. At least five others have been charged since August in a case that has drawn several thousand complaints from clients of the exchange. Polish prosecutors have charged a former police officer over the collapsed Zondacrypto exchange, as investigators search the fuel depot where its founder was last seen before he disappeared four years ago.Officers from…

Engineers have created a new type of concrete that is stronger than conventional concrete while also capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The findings, reported in Carbon Research, suggest that adding carefully selected natural materials could give concrete a second role beyond construction by helping remove CO2 from the surrounding air. Researchers at Mepco Schlenk Engineering College in India developed the mixture as a possible way to make construction materials more sustainable. Their approach targets a major environmental challenge: rising atmospheric CO2 levels driven in large part by fossil fuel use and cement production. The team, led by Srinivasan Revathi,…

Energy and marine consultancy ABL, part of Oslo-listed global consultancy group Aqualis, has been hired by Switzerland-based offshore contractor Allseas to support the lifting of a massive 60,000-ton topside in a single motion as part of a North Sea decommissioning project on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). Statfjord A platform; Credit: Harald Pettersen/Equinor ABL has been selected by Allseas as marine warranty surveyor (MWS) for the single-lift removal of Equinor’s Statfjord A topside. The Swiss player is the offshore contractor undertaking the engineering, preparation, removal and disposal (EPRD) of the concrete gravity-base production platform in the North Sea. Since Allseas’ Pioneering…