Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Trump also said at this month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, that he planned to allow Kyiv to produce much needed Patriot air defense missiles.Zelenskyy, in the bipartisan meeting ahead of the vote, emphasized the impact sanctions could have on the course of the war. He also underscored several continued requests, according to senators who attended, including licensing to produce Patriot missile defense batteries, securing supplies of PAC-3 interceptors used in the Patriot system and sustained access to the Starlink satellite service to assist targeting for long-range attacks.The requests for military hardware and targeting assistance, along with sanctions on Moscow,…

Flawed and racialised models that underpin the AI-powered age-detection systems to be introduced by the British government will endanger children, rights groups and children’s charities have warned.Urging ministers to reverse plans to introduce facial age-estimation technology to screen migrants, critics have warned that black children arriving from conflict zones are at risk of being of thrust into the adult system.Maddie Harris, of the Humans for Rights Network, said the charity had worked with hundreds of children who were already being wrongly filtered into the adult system during age assessments at borders carried out by immigration officers.In May, the Helen Bamber…

‘If it’s the Tin Man, then I suppose I’ll vote for Nigel,” says a Clacton resident, a retiree on a slow stroll towards the seafront, when I ask whom she will vote for in the forthcoming byelection. “I would sooner have Farage than the Tin Man!” As political slogans go, it is as good as any.The sun is beating down, but the sky is hazy, which accurately describes the mood of this constituency since the Reform UK leader quit as MP for Clacton on 7 July, forcing a byelection that sent shock waves through Westminster and confusion through Clacton. I…

Ariana Grande filed a lawsuit on Monday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court against the currently unidentified hackers who allegedly stole and leaked private content. It aims to “uncover the identities of these currently unknown and unscrupulous individuals,” referred to as “John Doe 1 and John Does 2 through 100.” The lawsuit also says that “In 2023 alone, 45 unreleased songs” were “hacked, stolen, and leaked,” adding that hundreds of similar leaks have happened since Grande’s music debut in 2011.The stolen content is said to include “still-in-production, unreleased masters and demos, footage from recording sessions, music videos, behind-the-scenes photographs…

Liquid AI has released two open-weight bidirectional encoders, LFM2.5-Encoder-230M and LFM2.5-Encoder-350M. Both are masked language models built on the LFM2 hybrid backbone. Both carry an 8,192-token context. Encoders sit underneath classifiers, intent routers, safety filters, and PII detectors. Those jobs run continuously, usually without a GPU, and increasingly on longer inputs. BERT established the class. ModernBERT pushed its accuracy, speed, and context. Liquid AI’s argument is that the LFM2 architecture continues that line, because its cost grows more slowly as inputs get longer. How a decoder became an encoder The encoders are not trained from scratch. They are initialized from…

IP intelligence and bot detection company Spur Intelligence announced it has received a $200 million investment from Insight Partners. Founded in 2017 and operating fully bootstrapped for nine years, Spur will use the fresh funding to accelerate and scale its operations. The US-based firm provides real-time intelligence to help organizations gain visibility into anonymized, proxied, and obfuscated web traffic to reduce fraud and enforce compliance. As threat actors increasingly use VPNs, residential proxies, mobile gateways, bot networks, and anonymized services to bypass fraud and security controls, Spur enables organizations to identify intentionally obscured network connections.   The company has developed detection…

Options are derivative contracts used by traders to hedge price volatility risks. A call option offers asymmetric upside exposure in the underlying asset for a small upfront payment, much like a lottery ticket. A put option represents an insurance against price drops. Exchanges typically follow a playbook when offering derivatives as a product. They start with futures to build a deep, liquid order book and tight spreads, and only once that core market is humming do they layer on options as a second wave of more complex, higher‑margin products.A Binance representative shared volume figures for gold and silver perpetual futures…

At least seven people were killed on May 31 when a World War II bomb exploded in Fandoi village on Indonesia’s Biak Island.Interviews with officials indicate the explosion occurred while an unexploded wartime ordnance was being dismantled to recover explosives for illegal blast fishing.The HALO Trust estimates that unexploded bombs and ammunition have killed or injured around 25,000 people in neighboring Papua New Guinea since the end of the World War II, reflecting the region’s enduring wartime legacy.A casualty estimate for the Indonesian territory of the New Guinea archipelago is unclear.See All Key Ideas BIAK, Indonesia — The…

The vessel fleet required for first phase operations of the Northern Lights CO2 project in Norway has been completed with the arrival of the fourth liquefied carbon dioxide (LCO2) carrier from China.Source: Northern Lights Northern Purpose, custom-designed to transport liquefied CO2 as part of the world’s first cross-border CO2 transport and storage infrastructure, was built at China’s Dalian Shipbuilding Offshore Co. (DSOC) and was christened on May 19. Following delivery from Dalian, the vessel sailed from Asia to Europe and, as reported today, July 29, has arrived in Norway to support upcoming customer operations.  The 130-meter-long Northern Purpose is equipped with an LNG dual-fuel…

Key eventsIn Spain, thousands of people have been allowed back to their homes last night near Madrid, even as emergency services still continue to fight the blazes.Moha Haddad put out some fire at his house after being allowed to return to it following the wildfires in Navas del Rey, in Madrid province, Spain. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty Images24,000 evacuees returned to the area, with another 20,000 released from stay at home orders.More progress have been made overnight too, but local authorities urged caution as the new heatwave is set to hit the area.“Efforts will focus on securing the perimeter, monitoring…