Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Uganda has unveiled a statue of Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Israel’s prime minister, who was killed during the Entebbe hostage rescue mission 50 years ago.Uganda’s army chief Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba said the monument honoured his courage and selfless service.Netanyahu was the only Israeli soldier killed in the raid, which rescued more than 100 hostages, after two Palestinians and two Germans hijacked an Air France flight that had taken off from Tel Aviv and diverted it to Uganda’s international airport.Kainerugaba described the mission as “one of the most significant episodes in modern history” and spoke of the now close…

OpenAI has revealed Astra, an unreleased model designed to tackle complex, long-running tasks, after an internal version produced ten significant advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science. In a new research post, OpenAI described Astra as “our next major model” and said the problems had seen no progress on their central results for at least a decade, and in most cases, much longer. According to OpenAI, its internal research focused on a wide range of areas, including high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, arithmetic circuit complexity, group theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography, and extremal combinatorics. OpenAI also says it’s advancing rapidly in science.…

An Aave governance proposal would wind down the lending protocol’s V3 markets on six blockchains and retire dozens of low-use token listings, a cleanup covering $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in debt.Risk service provider LlamaRisk, working with other Aave service providers, recommended offboarding 50 low-use reserves and 21 matured Pendle principal token listings across 11 deployments. It also proposed retiring all 25 reserves on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos. The balances were measured on July 28.An ARFC is a detailed proposal and precursor to an Aave Improvement Proposal; it is not, by itself, proof of…

Scientists have conclusively identified a source in the Milky Way that can accelerate protons to some of the highest energies known in our galaxy. The discovery could help researchers better understand cosmic rays, the extremely fast particles that travel through the space between stars and affect events throughout the galaxy. Cosmic rays consist mostly of protons, along with a much smaller number of electrons. Some reach energies greater than those produced by human-built particle accelerators. The Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France can propel protons to nearly the speed of light, yet the natural accelerators found…

Thirteen people died on Saturday in the crash of a tourist plane visiting the Nazca region in southern Peru, according to the country’s tourism ministry.It is not yet known what caused the crash. Flights from the coastal region where the tours originate had been suspended on Friday because of strong winds and limited visibility, but resumed on Saturday before the accident. The Nazca region draws tourists hoping to see the large ancient formations drawn into the earth and visible from the sky known as the Nazca Lines.The small plane, carrying a pilot, co-pilot and 11 passengers, had taken off from…

Lucy Powell has said she wants to be an ambitious “tiger mum” for all young people, whatever their route through education, after the government was accused of dumbing down England’s schools with plans to create more vocational routes.The new education secretary said secondary pupils should be able to pursue academic excellence as well as high-quality vocational training, and it was a “false trade-off” to suggest schools could not provide both.In an interview with the Guardian, Powell said she did not have “lower ambition” for those children following technical routes, and her critics – including Michael Gove, the former Tory education…

Andy Burnham has pledged his government will be “relentless” in curbing the number of people arriving in the UK on small boats.The prime minister said progress had been made and the government was “changing the whole approach”, with enforcement officers tackling people-smuggling gangs doubled on both sides of the Channel.”People want to see this issue addressed,” he said in Dover, adding: “We also need to build a system that offers safe routes for people as well, because that also takes away the selling point of the gangs.”The Conservatives said that Labour had not delivered on its promises on migration, while…

Two minutes and thirty seconds into the title track of Rachika Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing, an absolutely massive drum and bass beat drops. As a fan of Nayar’s debut record Our Hands Against The Dusk, it caught me off guard. That album has no percussion on it at all. Heaven Comes Crashing is almost entirely drum-free, too. There are some rapid-fire mechanical hi-hats on the second track, “Tetramorph,” and the back half of track six, “Gayatri,” has what sounds like a snare buried deep in the mix. But it isn’t until track seven that Nayar delivers an unexpected drum explosion,…

[Update 11:45 UTC, July 31: Adds Kalshi’s response in the sixth and seventh paragraphs.]New York has sued prediction market platform Kalshi, alleging it operates an illegal, unlicensed gambling business by offering event contracts on sports, elections and other outcomes.The lawsuit seeks to stop Kalshi’s alleged illegal gambling operation in the state, require the company to forfeit illegal gains, pay restitution to users and pay civil penalties equal to three times those gains.“No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple,” Attorney General Letitia James said in Friday’s statement. “We are taking them to…

Regarding your editorial on cricket fair play (30 July), as an elderly cricket fan, I can remember being told as a small boy to watch a Yorkshire wicketkeeper who was known, when standing up to the bowler, to nudge the stumps with his toe when the ball was close enough to make it look like “bowled out”. But in those days, league cricket was serious business and not played for fun.Tony BrownKingston, Ontario, Canada May I present the Seagull outboard race scandal of 1963? At a regatta in Coverack, I was hanging over the bow to keep it down when…