Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Senator Lindsey Graham, the Trump opponent turned outspoken ally who died at 71 this month, will be honored with two days of funeral services this week.Congressional leaders will have a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday, and a funeral service will be held at Washington National Cathedral later in the afternoon. On Wednesday, he will be remembered in his home state, South Carolina.Here’s what to know:What’s happeningElected leaders and other public figures will attend closed ceremonies at the Capitol and Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday, before a procession and public funeral in South Carolina on the next day.Mr. Graham’s…

Key eventsWelcome to the ConversationAndy Burnham has been prime minister of the UK for a week, during which time he has announced a slew of policies as he makes his start on shaping Labour’s narrative for the next three years in government.From re-introducing a £2 cap on bus fares in England (and providing funding for the devolved governments to follow suit), via a VAT cut to energy bills, to confirming a 20% cut in business rates for hard-pressed hospitality firms such as small live music venues and pubs, Burnham has attempted to demonstrate that he knows cost of living pressures…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.CXMT’s initial public offering is a great illustration of what happens when tokenmaxxing meets Chinamaxxing. The chipmaker’s shares rose 466 per cent on its first day of trading in Shanghai, briefly making it China’s most valuable company.On one hand, it couldn’t really have been otherwise. CXMT sold a tenth of its post-IPO share capital; sure, that’s twice as much as Elon Musk’s SpaceX sold in its June debut, but the $8.5bn CXMT raised is only a fraction in monetary terms. And since…

Chinese tech giant Baidu has started testing autonomous vehicles in London as part of its partnership with Lyft and Freenow, the German taxi and multi-mobility app that Lyft now owns. Baidu is the latest in a string of companies to test self-driving technology in the UK ahead of commercial robotaxi deployments. The testing, which began Tuesday with human safety operators, comes nearly a year after the two companies struck a strategic partnership to deploy Baidu’s purpose-built Apollo Go RT6 robotaxi across key European markets through the Lyft platform. The vehicles will eventually be available through Freenow, which Lyft acquired in 2025…

In this tutorial, we deploy the 1-bit Bonsai-27B language model using the PrismML fork of llama.cpp, which provides the specialized CUDA kernels required to decode the model’s Q1_0_g128 GGUF quantization format. We begin by validating the GPU runtime, installing the required Python dependencies, compiling the CUDA-enabled inference binaries, and downloading the compressed model weights from Hugging Face. We then test the model through llama-cli, launch an OpenAI-compatible local inference server, and interact with it through a reusable Python client that supports standard completions, streamed responses, multi-turn conversations, and code generation. We also examine optional configurations for throughput benchmarking, quantized key-value…

Google has announced that Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is adopting a new cryptonym-based naming convention for tracking threat actors. According to the internet giant, the schema moves away from sequential numbers and disparate identifiers, relying instead on two-word combinations for each activity cluster. The first word, Google explains, is a unique and memorable term that may have been used in public reporting and which is meant to represent the threat actor. A randomly generated term will be used if none exists. The second word is meant to place each threat actor into a specific category based on motivation, attribution,…

Lido, a liquid staking protocol that lets users earn Ethereum staking rewards through its stETH token, has launched an upgrade to its staking infrastructure that aims to improve validator efficiency and decentralization.The upgrade introduces Curated Module v2, which adds support for Ethereum’s 0x02 withdrawal credentials. The change allows validators to increase their effective balance from 32 ETH to up to 2,048 ETH, according to a Lido update on Monday.Lido said the migration could reduce Ethereum’s validator count from about 880,000 to roughly 628,000, a decrease of about one-third. The migration has not started yet, and the figures are based on…

Dry thunderstorms that popped up over the Cascade Range on the evening of July 15, 2026, peppered Oregon and Washington with thousands of lightning strikes as they moved east across the states. By the following day, NASA satellites had begun to detect large numbers of wildland fires burning throughout central and eastern Oregon. Though initially small, these blazes strengthened as they were fanned by gusty winds and raced through landscapes parched by extreme drought and baking in summer heat. When NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the image shown above on the afternoon of July 26, smoke poured northeast from dozens of…

A new experiment found that sitting in a restored urban forest while listening to birdsong lowered people’s stress and improved their mood more than any other setting tested.Researchers had 106 students at North Carolina State University in the U.S. sit in either a restored forest or a paved plaza while hearing birdsong or traffic noise, isolating the effects of place and sound.Both the natural setting and the birdsong helped independently, and the benefits were largest when combined.The forest was a human-made restoration completed in 2006, suggesting cities could build mental-health benefits into parks rather than relying on remote wilderness.See…

Australian energy player Santos has marketed, sold and loaded the first condensate cargo from the Barossa gas project for delivery to SK Innovation E&S in South Korea. Source: SK Innovation E&S Approximately 300,000 barrels of condensate were loaded from the BW Opal floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel at Barossa on July 24 aboard the Aframax tanker Boccadesse for delivery to South Korea, where it will feed SK Incheon Petrochem’s refinery in Incheon, producing predominantly naphtha and jet fuel. The cargo is expected to arrive at Incheon Port in early August. Of the 3 million barrels produced annually at…