Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

by Paul Kiefer / Wisconsin Watch, Wisconsin Watch July 30, 2026 We Energies reassured shareholders on Wednesday that Oracle’s ongoing dispute with state regulators over new credit rating requirements for data center operators poses no threat to the planned hyperscale data center in Port Washington.  WEC Energy Group CEO Scott Lauber, head of We Energies’ parent company, told investors during a quarterly earnings call that the Port Washington facility remains on track to come online as soon as late 2027. In a “worst-case scenario” in which Oracle backs out of the project, “there are a lot of opportunities for that…

After being stuck for more than a year in legislative purgatory, the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s legislation mandating sweeping sanctions on Russia is one big step closer to becoming law. The bill easily passed a procedural vote in the Senate this week and is expected to pass the full Senate with a large bipartisan majority later this week.  If the companion bill passes the House of Representatives later this year—as ample support suggests it will—the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 will mark a rebirth of Republican support for Ukraine after more than four years of war…

Pervasive climate of fear condemned amid human rights violations and crackdowns on opposition.Published On 30 Jul 202630 Jul 2026The United Nations has condemned Uganda for its clampdown on dissent and opposition groups.The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk expressed his criticism of the country’s increasing pressure on dissidents and others in a statement issued on Thursday.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list“I am appalled that the authorities are increasingly targeting any form of dissent, and deepening restrictions on the fundamental freedoms of all those living in Uganda,” Turk said. “Those who dare to speak out are silenced.”His…

In Britain, young people are expected to become independent in their 20s. Yet the UK’s economic model increasingly denies them the means to do so. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), commissioned partly for the BBC, finds that the proportion of 25-year-olds living with their parents has risen from 25% in the 1990s to 42% today. The research says “co-residence” among those in their 20s and 30s has increased by more than a third over two decades. The rate in Britain remains well below Italy and Spain, where leaving home is frequently more about finding a partner than…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Companies that do just one thing are surprisingly rare, especially in Silicon Valley, where ambition and radical self-belief are the norm. But some take multitasking to a new level.Take Meta Platforms. Its shares fell 9 per cent on Thursday, after second-quarter earnings missed expectations. What spooked the market wasn’t that, though: ignore a couple of one-off charges and operating profit would have matched the $22bn forecasts. More unsettling is that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is firing in multiple directions with little, so…

A trip to college—or even to avoid hard nights at home during high school—might come with an expense you didn’t think about: a good office chair. Dorm chairs are hard, awful, and not exactly ergonomic.Luckily, there are some decent back-to-school office chair deals right now among chairs I can vouch for. My colleagues at WIRED and I have been testing and tracking the best office chairs for more than seven years. The ProtoArc Flexer Pro ($176) is half the price it was last year, probably the best deal at the moment. Others of our budget favorites, like the Staples Dexley…

Google DeepMind has released Gemini Robotics 2, the intelligence layer for its next generation of robots. The release moves the stack past table-top manipulation into whole body control, five finger dexterity and multi robot teamwork. It ships as three separate models with three different access tiers. Most robots today are pre-programmed or tele-operated for narrow, repetitive task sequences. They do not adapt to unpredictable environments, and skills rarely transfer between robot bodies. Gemini Robotics 2 targets all three limits at once. TL;DR Three models ship together: a VLA, an embodied reasoning VLM, and an on-device…

Amazon linked multiple high-profile open-source software supply chain attacks targeting the Node Package Manager (npm) ecosystem to North Korean hackers. The cloud computing giant linked the compromises of the typo-crypto, debug, chalk, and axios libraries to the Sapphire Sleet threat actor, also known as BlueNoroff and Stardust Chollima. Initial activity started with trojanizing the typo-crypto package in March 2025, which Amazon believes served as a testing ground. It then escalated in September of the same year with the compromise of the widely used debug and chalk packages, affecting an estimated 10% of cloud environments within two hours. In March 2026,…

BitMEX settled 35 derivatives today, July 30, closing any remaining positions and canceling open orders as the exchange moved another step toward its September shutdown.BitMEX’s settlement log shows 33 contracts closing almost on the stroke of noon, at 12:00:05 UTC. EURUSD and USDCHF followed at 12:32:25 and 12:33:25 UTC. With prices now posted for the full 35-contract batch, the early settlement flagged in BitMEX’s July 22 notice is complete.BitMEX attributed the delistings to insufficient trading interest and its planned exchange shutdown. It described the process as an early settlement, not a margin liquidation. Related ReadingBitMEX shuts down without an FTX…

Upon taking office in May, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi knew he would face the challenge of dealing with Iran-backed armed groups in the country. He might not have known how quickly or how intensely: On July 27, drones reportedly launched from Iraq targeted oil facilities in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province. Although Iraqi armed groups denied responsibility, two days later Saudi Arabia and the United States carried out coordinated strikes against Iran-backed factions, reportedly killing at least 20 militia members. Whether the exchange remains contained is unclear. But it has already demonstrated Zaidi’s predicament: how to restrain armed groups capable…