Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

When King Mohammed VI of Morocco addressed his people on Wednesday to commemorate his 27th year on the throne, he spoke hopefully of his North African nation’s future.Morocco, he said, was safe and stable, with a growing economy making great strides in tourism, investment and manufacturing.“This is a pivotal moment in our nation’s development,” the 62-year-old monarch said. “A time when confidence and optimism should prevail over despair and frustration.”Over the next two days, however, tens of thousands of his citizens tried to escape the country. Driven by a bleak sense of their prospects in Morocco, they braved confrontations with…

On Kudrinskaya Square the police cordon has been lifted outside the Balzi Rossi Italian restaurant. Investigators have left the scene. On Saturday night it had been surrounded by heavily armed police; a string of ambulances and emergency services vehicles had been parked outside.Standing next to the restaurant’s summer terrace I spot signs of what happened here. A shattered window, pock-marked walls – a bomb had exploded with deadly consequences. Russian state media reports at least three people were killed and 21 injured.Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee believes that a woman with an improvised explosive device had tried to walk into the…

Reform UK’s pledge to use Navy to stop small boats criticised ahead of press conferenceGood morning and welcome to our coverage of UK politics. Reform UK is today pledging to use the Royal Navy to stop small boat crossings if the party wins the next general election.The boats in the channel would be intercepted by the Navy and returned to France or Belgium under a plan called “operation fortress”.The party proposes to set up a joint military command with units from the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, RAF and British army as well as a surveillance command to track incoming boats.Similar…

A Reform UK proposal to use the military to stop small boats bringing migrants to the UK from France lacks substance, a former Royal Navy officer has said, suggesting the UK’s warships would be better used countering actual military threats.Reform’s political opponents have claimed its plans have more to do with distracting from the financial scandals surrounding its leader, Nigel Farage, than about solving the small boats issue, after the party proposed having the navy pick up people trying to make irregular Channel crossings and take them to France.“A billion-pound warship that’s configured for anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare, which…

Face computers are on the upswing, as companies, massive and tiny, are all vying for nuggets in the smart-glasses gold rush.That also means the industry is garnering its fair share of criticism, mostly focusing on the fact that creeps can abuse camera-equipped smart glasses to capture photos and videos of people without their knowledge or consent.The prime target for such criticism is the biggest company in the space, Meta. The company’s smart glasses can capture images, audio, and video of whatever and whoever the wearer is looking at. That alone is enough to alarm anyone concerned about protecting their privacy.…

Alibaba’s Qwen team has made Qwen3.8-Max broadly available and confirmed that its open weights ship next week. A second checkpoint, Qwen3.8-27B, is also going open-weights. Qwen3.8-Max is a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model. It accepts text, image and video as input and returns text. Is it deployable Yes, but the deployable surface depends on which artifact you are applying. The hosted API is deployable today by any company size. It is OpenAI- and DashScope-compatible, so integration is a base-URL and model-ID change. The open weights are a different matter. At 2.4T total parameters, the checkpoint is a multi-node datacenter artifact. Alibaba has…

Swati KhandelwalAug 03, 2026Data Security / Vulnerability Thermo Fisher Scientific has patched a flaw in select Applied Biosystems human identification software that could allow data files to be altered before analysis software loads them. The vendor’s July 31 security bulletin says nearly undetectable changes to .fsa and .hid outputs could occur if laboratory controls are circumvented. Thermo Fisher tracks the issue as CVE-2026-17583 and rates it High with a CVSS v4.0 score of 8.2. Five supported product lines have received updates that add digital signatures, while three end-of-life data collection products will receive no vendor update. Thermo Fisher credits Nathan…

Bitcoin entered BIP-110’s final ordinary 2,016-block window on July 25 with miner support at 0.89%. The proposal requires 1,109 blocks, or 55%, for ordinary lock-in, and its mandatory version-bit phase can begin in August if support stays below that threshold.Jameson Lopp has framed Consensus Cleanup, covenants, and quantum preparation as Bitcoin’s next agenda. He also occupies two sides of that transition: Lopp opposes BIP-110 and co-authored BIP-361, a draft plan for post-quantum migration.BIP-110 gives those debates a live governance reference because developers, miners, node operators, exchanges, custodians and holders each supply a different form of consent. The next proposals attach…

Native fish in the lakes and rivers of India’s Kashmir Valley are under increasing pressure from pollution, habitat loss, dam construction and other human activities, a recent review finds. These same threats are also likely giving exotic fish introduced to these freshwater habitats an edge, researchers say. “Our indigenous fishes are becoming vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered, while the introduced fishes are flourishing,” Durdana Qazi, co-author of the review and a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Fisheries, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology (SKUAST-K), told Mongabay. Kashmir’s lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands are home to native…

Scotland-headquartered offshore drilling contractor Odfjell Drilling has disclosed the return to work of its 17-year-old semi-submersible, following repairs in the wake of an equipment-handling incident that ended rig activity earlier this year. Deepsea Atlantic rig; Source: Odfjell Drilling Odfjell Drilling’s Deepsea Atlantic rig has resumed operations after spending a total of 106 days off-hire in the aftermath of an equipment-handling incident, which occurred in April 2026, when the blowout preventer (BOP) dropped to the seabed at an approximate depth of 1,100 meters. “Since the incident and, in addition to the relentless dedication and effort of Odfjell Drilling employees, the company has…