Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Banks are planning to offload $15bn of debt tied to a Google-backed data centre in Texas that has been leased to Anthropic, as Wall Street lenders grow wary of holding AI infrastructure debt on their balance sheets.A consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley is planning to tap the bond market to refinance the debt they committed to the 2,000-acre data centre campus under construction in Hubbard, Texas, as soon as the loans are drawn, according to people familiar with the matter. The…

pros and cons Pros The X-Sense XP0H-WN features smoke and carbon monoxide detection.It lasts a decade with a 10-year sealed battery.It’s easy to install and is interconnected. Cons Unfortunately, these alarms aren’t smart, so you don’t get phone alerts, but they do work with a wireless network. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.My home is almost three decades old, and when I moved in, it still had the original smoke detectors. This is, of course, less than ideal, as smoke detectors must be replaced every 10 years — seriously. Also: This tiny device quietly monitors your home for electrical…

CopilotKit has just released the Channels SDK. It is an open source library that puts an existing agent inside a messaging platform. The core assumption is focused and verifiable. You already have an agent. It already has a model, tools and business logic. Channels gives it a place to work with people, without a rewrite per platform. It runs on Slack and Microsoft Teams as early access surfaces. Discord and Google Chat are named as planned. Installation is two packages: npm install @copilotkit/channels @copilotkit/runtime The connection to your agent is AG-UI, the agent-user interaction protocol CopilotKit maintains. Anything that speaks…

A popular AI notetaker is allowing hackers to spy on any of its users’ conference calls.Tl;dv (Too Long; Didn’t View) is a meeting assistant that automatically joins, records, and transcribes video calls, unless its users specify otherwise. Its website boasts that it’s trusted by more than two million users worldwide, including at brand name companies like Salesforce, Forbes, and Cloudflare. In fact, its marketing may be modest. Tl;dv is used across dozens of government agencies, plus large universities and major organizations, across the globe. We know this now because a hacker got into its Google Firebase environment and lurked in…

GameStop has agreed to swap $1.4 billion of zero-coupon convertible notes for stock, a deal that would retire about one-third of its note principal if it closes. The resulting shareholder dilution will remain unknown until the company discloses the final share count.The company’s Aug. 3, 2026 filing covers about $400 million of notes due in 2030 and $1 billion due in 2032. If the transaction closes, GameStop would have about $1.1 billion of the 2030 notes and $1.7 billion of the 2032 notes remaining.Both series carry a 0% interest rate, which means that the exchange would not reduce GameStop’s current…

There’s a thriving illegal wildlife trade in Cambodia that caters to high-ranking government officials and wealthy Chinese nationals, according to a report on a yearlong undercover investigation by the U.S.-based NGO Earth League International (ELI). The report, titled “Sandokan,” identified five kingpins allegedly running transnational criminal networks involved in wildlife smuggling, human and drug trafficking, and sophisticated scam centers, reports Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman. The investigation found that products made from parts of endangered species, including tigers, rhinos and elephants, are openly sold in shops and exclusive restaurants across the country. ELI investigators documented tiger bone wine sold in…

Last week, 186 passengers had to be evacuated from the cruise ship Viking Ullur, after it ran aground on a sandbank in the Danube. Others have been left stranded, unable to move between Vienna and Budapest. Passengers stood on deck, the Habsburg splendour around them out of reach as the river fell to 41cm in Budapest, within 8cm of its 2018 all-time low. Elsewhere on the Hungarian stretch of the river, new record lows were recorded.Farther east in Romania, the Danube recorded its lowest water levels since 1996. A river’s flow is measured in cubic metres per second, and at…

Bowen says energy bills are ‘higher than we would like’, but claims nuclear could fix things quickly are from a ‘fantasy world’Bowen says energy bills are ‘higher than we would like’, but any claims nuclear could fix things quickly are from a ‘fantasy world’Chris Bowen, the federal energy minister, is speaking at the National Press Club this afternoon in Canberra.He said Australians are “right to be concerned” about high power prices, saying bills are “higher than we would like”. But, he said, the answer to that problem is working hard every day to get them down.Chris Bowen speaking at the…

PARIS — Entre ses interventions et interviews données à intervalles réguliers et sa récente lettre aux Français, Bernard Cazeneuve, pas encore officiellement candidat, avance ses pions petit à petit dans la campagne présidentielle. En matière d’énergie, notamment, l’ancien Premier ministre compte faire entendre une voix singulière à gauche. La décarbonation n’est “pas une option” pour celui qui, comme tous ses concurrents, érige la souveraineté énergétique en objectif prioritaire et pense qu’il faut électrifier la France pour résoudre le problème de surproduction d’électricité. Il défend une “économie décarbonée qui ne soit pas une écologie punitive”, décrypte son entourage. Sauf que Bernard…

A former MP has urged the Tory leader to drop an election candidate who was previously jailed for a campaign of antisemitic abuse against her.Kemi Badenoch on Tuesday defended the Conservative party’s selection of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a former neo-Nazi, insisting she believes in “second chances”.Writing on social media, Luciana Berger, who is now a Labour member of the House of Lords, said: “For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t believe this man should have *any* role in public life – because of both his racism and his view of women.”Directly addressing the Conservative leader in a thread of comments online,…