Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Japanese payment provider PayPay added Binance Pay on Sept. 30, letting eligible overseas visitors pay from their crypto balances at participating offline stores in Japan. Merchants receive the proceeds in Japanese yen.PayPay’s launch announcement says the integration runs through HIVEX, a cross-border payment network. For visiting Binance users, funds held in their crypto accounts can cover a yen-denominated purchase, with conversion handled during payment.Binance says the feature is exclusively for visitors who have completed its identity verification and is unavailable to Japan residents. Its launch blog sets out that restriction, while PayPay specifically excludes Binance Japan users residing in Japan.This…

The 2024 inauguration of the Chinese-built Chancay Port in Peru has reinforced calls to build road infrastructure through the Amazon, connecting Brazil to the Pacific coast, with authorities in Acre, on Brazil’s border with Peru, wanting their state to be part of a strategic corridor to the Pacific.Acre already has a road connection to Peru through the BR-317 highway, but local politicians running for election this year defend the extension of the BR-364 from Cruzeiro do Sul in Acre to Pucallpa in Peru’s Ucayali department, saying it will ease connectivity for local communities and encourage economic development.A new report…

Last year, after it emerged that a private White House chat group about U.S. strikes on Yemen mistakenly included a journalist, the inevitable headlines and media coverage meant someone had to take the fall. Then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz departed after just 101 days in the job. Waltz, a decorated war hero who had previously represented Florida’s 6th district in Congress, was later named U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If the role seemed like a relegation to a place U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t hold in high regard, Waltz himself disagrees: “President Trump is a New Yorker,” he told…

A pilot on a plane travelling from Dubai to Tel Aviv stabbed the other pilot and then apparently tried to crash the aircraft Wednesday before being subdued by passengers and crew. The Boeing 737 made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, where the unnamed pilot was detained, but not before an abrupt descent prompted Israel to scramble warplanes over concerns of a possible hijacking. Here are some past examples of plane hijackings and attempted hijackings potentially involving pilots or crew members: An off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot tried to cut the engines of a Horizon Air jet travelling from Everett, Washington,…

That, indeed, has been the official Russian stance for some time: that what is happening in Ukraine amounts to a European war on Russia. It is a narrative that skips over the fact that in 2022 it was the Kremlin that launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that Russia continues to wage war there.How far would Russia go to sever European support for Kyiv?Is Moscow, for example, actively preparing to initiate military conflict in Europe with a Nato member state? That seems unlikely. After more than four-and-a-half years of war Russia’s army has not yet managed to occupy the…

Reddit is further limiting who can use the “Old Reddit” experience as part of its efforts to combat scraping and automated traffic. Reddit recently started forcing users to log in to be able to use Old Reddit, but in the “next few months,” the company says that you’ll have to be logged in and have used Old Reddit within the last six months from when the change rolls out to be able to continue browsing the platform with the classic experience.Reddit says the six-month window covers “the vast majority of all Old Reddit users.” The announcement didn’t go into detail,…

NVIDIA has released Kumo Tabular, a new family of tabular foundation models (TFMs) for classification and regression. If you have followed TabPFN or TabICL, the setup will look familiar. The model takes labeled rows as context and predicts new rows in one forward pass. There is no training, no hyperparameter tuning, and no feature engineering. Kumo Tabular comes in Small, Medium, and Large versions, spanning about 28M to 215M parameters. It runs through NVIDIA’s open-source structured-data-models (SDM) library. Is it deployable? Yes. Weights ship under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, which permits commercial use. The SDM code is Apache-2.0, and it needs…

Security researchers have published the first public proof-of-concept for CVE-2026-86950, an Apple CoreGraphics flaw Apple says may have been used in attacks against specific targeted individuals. The trigger is a malicious PDF with a crafted embedded font that crashes unpatched iPhones and Macs. The code causes a crash, not an execution error. Turning the memory corruption into a working exploit is separate work the analysis does not demonstrate. Apple patched the flaw on September 28, crediting Meta Product Security with the discovery and noting it may have been used in an “extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions…

Base’s Cobalt upgrade, scheduled for mainnet Sept. 30 at 18:00 UTC, will let issuers of B20 tokens configure balance seizures separately from ordinary transfer restrictions. For a token that enables the feature, a holder could remain free to transfer while still being eligible for administrative reassignment.B20 is Base’s native ERC-20-compatible token standard, offered in Asset and Stablecoin variants. It already gives administrators control over roles and policies governing balance movements, and now it will also govern the administrative powers over those balances.Role assignments identify who can exercise a particular power, while policy settings determine which accounts an operation can affect.…

The global wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry that mixes legal business and illegal transactions. It’s a major driver of biodiversity loss, and even legal trade is often unsustainable.Canada is a significant player but struggles to enforce a key law that bans the import of wildlife taken illegally in other countries.This gap allows various protected species to be brought into Canada illegally, sold and sometimes bred.See All Key Ideas It is far easier than one might expect to access the illegal wildlife trade in Canada. Chris Shepherd, a senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, knows…