Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

BP has put its North Sea oil and gas business up for sale as it looks to end six decades of production from the basin.The firm announced on Friday morning it had launched a formal process to market its North Sea business for a potential sale. The move comes as BP’s new chief executive, Meg O’Neill, tries to simplify the company and cut its debt levels.O’Neill said: “The North Sea remains integral to the UK’s energy system. However, as we focus our portfolio and direct capital to our highest-value opportunities, we believe our North Sea business will be better positioned…

Chinese super embassy planning permission decision upheld at High CourtThe construction of a new Chinese “super-embassy” in London, which is set to be built near the Tower of London, can go ahead after a high court challenge against the decision to grant planning permission was dismissed, PA Media is reporting.The Royal Mint Court Residents’ Association (RMCRA) brought legal action against the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.It said the presence of the embassy could lead to terrorist attacks or the repression of protests, while being used to enforce “draconian” Chinese laws in…

Sony has received a lot of backlash from PlayStation fans since announcing that it’s killing physical game disc production, but that hasn’t swayed its decision. During Sony’s latest earnings call, chief financial officer Lin Tao said that while the company “put in a lot of thought and time” when considering the opposition put forward by its gaming community, Sony has come to the conclusion that it will “cautiously move this forward.”“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing, that’s the big factor,” Tao said through an interpreter. “It’s…

JetBrains Research Open-Sources KotlinLLM. KotlinLLM is an IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Kotlin/JVM projects that adds a language feature called Smart macros. A Smart macro is a regular Kotlin function call whose body is generated Kotlin code. The public API is deliberately small. asLlm(from, hint) converts an input of type F into a typed value T, such as a data class, enum, list, or primitive. mockLlm() generates a stateful implementation of an interface T, whose behavior depends on which methods are called on it. val issuesApiUrl: String = asLlm(repoInput, hint = “GitHub API URL: get all issues, including closed”) val issues:…

Threat actors are impersonating IT support staff in Microsoft Teams calls to gain remote access to corporate devices and deploy Chaos ransomware in attacks targeting North American organizations. Sophos tracks the campaign as STAC4749 and says it targeted dozens of organizations between February and June 2026. At least three of these intrusions led to the deployment of Chaos ransomware, with one attack going from initial access to encrypting files in less than 17 hours. Sophos says about 95% of the attacks targeted organizations in Canada (50%) and the United States (45%). The threat actors targeted organizations across numerous sectors, with…

In brief New York State wants Kalshi shut down and stripped of three times its gains, with damages put at a minimum of $36 billion. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sought a restraining order against New York’s enforcement a day earlier. Kalshi has been restrained in Michigan and Washington and refused relief in New York, with Minnesota the lone exception. New York State is seeking at least $36 billion from Kalshi, asking a state court to shut its prediction market down and strip it of three times whatever it has earned. Attorney General Letitia James filed the petition on Friday…

Wildland fires occur across Europe every summer, but those that erupted in Spain and France in July 2026 were among the largest and most disruptive the two countries have faced in decades. Some of the most consequential fires emerged in southwestern France’s Gironde Department and Spain’s Ávila and Madrid provinces in mid-July, where blazes forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes. Government officials in Spain say that a fire in Ávila, after charring around 50,000 hectares (124,000 acres), is the largest on record, surpassing a blaze that burned in Larouco, Quiroga, and Oencia in…

UK-headquartered energy giant Shell has reached an agreement with Hungarian multinational oil & gas company MOL Group for the sale of its 100%-owned subsidiary BG Cyprus Limited for up to $720 million. BG Cyprus holds a 35% non-operated interest in the Cyprus Offshore Block 12, containing the Aphrodite gas field located approximately 170 kilometers southeast offshore, in the eastern Mediterranean. Discovered in 2011 and appraised through subsequent drilling campaigns, it is estimated to hold around 104 bcm (632 MMBoe) of contingent gas and 8 MMbbl condensate resources. The produced gas is expected to be sold to the Egyptian Natural Gas…

Andy Burnham’s “pausing” of the Starmer government’s prisoner release scheme and the resignation of its architect, James Timpson, are disasters. They indicate a Downing Street that puts populism ahead of policy. England and Wales’s prisons are a total disgrace. Timpson was the first justice minister in 15 years prepared to handle them. Now he has gone. Although he said it had been an “honour” to serve in the government, it is reasonable to assume he resigned in disgust.In August 2024, the prison population in England and Wales hit a record high. The following March, a savage report from the public…

Claim: A video authentically shows Black children throwing water balloons, shooting water guns and dumping water on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer to protect Latino neighbors. Rating: In July 2026, people alleged a video showed Black children protecting Latino neighbors from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The clip featured multiple young-looking Black people throwing water balloons, shooting water guns and dumping water on a man wearing what appeared to be a uniform and a tactical vest. For example, on July 24, a TikTok user’s post (archived) described the video as showing “a group of Black children…