Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The UK is reviewing its deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, the defence secretary has said.Wes Streeting confirmed the deal was being looked at again after US President Donald Trump called it “terrible” at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.The original agreement would see the UK cede sovereignty of the territory to Mauritius and pay an average of £101m ($136m) per year to lease back a joint UK-US military base there, prized for its strategic location in the Indian Ocean.In April the deal, agreed under Sir Keir Starmer, was paused indefinitely because Trump pulled his support.Streeting said…

Motorola is the first company to announce a phone running Qualcomm’s top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip. The Signature 27 looks set to be Motorola’s most advanced flagship in some years, though we’re still waiting for the full specs, price, and release date.Any prospective buyers will first have to get over the design, which seems guaranteed to earn mixed reception. The aluminum phone has a thin body, available in either black (sorry, “Pantone coal smoke”) or green (“Pantone capulet olive”), with a woven tactical texture on one and a “feather-inspired” finish on the other. Either way, it slopes…

By Farukh Rakhimov, Head of Compliance, Data Protection and Information Security at AdTech HoldingRoughly 7,600 fake GitHub repositories, 6,600 fraudulent profiles and more than 14 million downloads: that is the scale of FakeGit, a malware campaign documented by Island in July 2026. Over 800 repositories impersonated AI skills and MCP servers, distributing SmartLoader and the StealC infostealer.Fake repositories are nothing new. The surprise was who recommended them.Gemini and ChatGPT independently suggested the same malicious walmart-mcp repository. The agents found the attacker’s project and handed users installation instructions.Attackers no longer need to deceive users directly. They can deceive the assistants users…

Swati KhandelwalSep 23, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security A new security vulnerability in Next.js could allow attackers to run code on a server via ImageResponse, the feature that generates Open Graph and other social preview images, Vercel said. The risk applies when an app puts values an attacker controls, such as text read from the request URL, into the image. Vercel, which develops Next.js, fixed the flaw on September 22 in version 16.3.6. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-94545, affects Next.js 16.2.0 through 16.3.5 when ImageResponse runs on the Node.js runtime, which Next.js uses by default. Vercel’s advisory rates it critical, with…

“Our $100 million investment and five-year commitment represent long-duration conviction,” said Richard Teng, co-CEO of Binance said in an email to CoinDesk. “We are helping to build a more inclusive, transparent, and compliant digital economy. A stable, trusted digital dollar should not be a privilege–it should be available to anyone with a phone. That’s the future this partnership is designed to deliver.”The new arrangement replaces Circle and Binance’s earlier USDC deals from November 2024 and August 2025. Either company can end the five-year partnership early if specified events occur.The shares were sold in an unregistered private placement, which limits Binance’s…

Pennsylvania’s data center industry has promised economic growth and a revival of the state’s industrial strength. But a new report issued Tuesday finds little evidence of job growth and warns that adding more of the massive computer complexes could repeat a long history of industrial facilities exploiting the communities that house them. The research group Data & Society spent almost two years investigating the material, social and political impacts of the industry on Pennsylvania, where 66 data centers could be built if all current plans move forward, according to Data Center Proposal Tracker, an independent website. Of the total, five…

I addressed a group of more than 100 European ambassadors recently on the big challenges facing the continent this year and next. My main point to these senior diplomats was that, perhaps counterintuitively, Europe’s biggest external challenges over the next 12 months will come from Russia and China, rather than the US.Europe’s relationship with Trump’s America remains difficult. The US president has weakened confidence in Nato, raised new transatlantic trade tensions and introduced uncertainty into everything from US support for Ukraine to his territorial designs on Greenland. Yet paradoxically, and notwithstanding Trump’s latest tariff threats over the EU’s outreach to…

The United States and Iran have engaged in hours of indirect talks through mediators on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, but accounts differed over whether officials from the two countries met directly.US special envoy Steve Witkoff said mediators had “shuttled between” the American and Iranian delegations throughout Tuesday.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list“Today, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, we engaged in lengthy talks with the Iranian delegation through the mediators, who shuttled between the two sides throughout the day,” Witkoff said in a post on X.“They successfully…

Nscale, the Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider, buried a significant relationship with ByteDance in its pitch to investors, only mentioning the Chinese tech giant in an obscure filing despite its accounting for nearly three-quarters of its sales last year. Beijing-based ByteDance was one of the first major customers for Nscale’s nascent cloud-computing business, renting access to advanced Nvidia AI chips in Norway, according to people familiar with the matter and SEC filings. But their relationship was indicated only in a document published on Friday alongside Nscale’s main filing for a US initial public offering that did not directly mention ByteDance by name. Nscale emerged…

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