Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As authoritarian countries such as Russia, China and Iran are more active in engaging in long-arm strategies to silence their critics in the UK, transnational repression is garnering more attention. It is right that the Metropolitan police and other British law enforcement agencies have specific units and mechanisms to counter it. But it takes more than just confronting this long-distance repression to make political dissidents of these authoritarian countries feel safe in the UK, and the UK government is not living up to expectations.The threat is real. Members of the Hongkonger community have received threats from the Chinese regime –…

Morning opening: ‘Coming weeks will be tough,’ Macron warns, as France enters new heatwave amid firesJakub KrupaThe return of searing temperatures, from today in France and tomorrow in Spain, will complicate efforts to fight massive wildfires raging in the Bordeaux region and a number of sites in Spain.On a visit to a crisis centre in Bordeaux, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, warned: “The coming weeks will be tough and we have to hold out.” France’s President Emmanuel Macron and France’s interior minister Laurent Nuñez listen to SDIS 33 Fire and Rescue Service Departemental director Marc Vermeulen during a situation briefing…

And now, the second anniversary of the EU’s landmark AI Act on Sunday is set to trigger sweeping new powers for the European Commission to police how top companies deal with the risks stemming from their most advanced AI models. Europe’s AI Office will have the power to demand that top frontier labs submit to evaluations and grant access to their models, risking major fines if they don’t comply. These regulatory capabilities arrive not a moment too soon after last week’s security incident, where an AI agent, driven by two OpenAI models, hacked into the American AI development platform Hugging…

Burnham says pause in early prisoner release scheme ‘a real process’ and he will do ‘anything I can’ to minimise riskAndy Burnham has recorded a pooled TV interview this morning.Asked about the Sentencing Act, and whether he was considering amending the legislation before it came into effect, Burnham just insisted that the pause in the process he announced last week was “real” and that further statements would be made in due course.He said: double quotation markThe pause is real, and it was one of the first things I did coming into office last week. So the September releases [are] on…

Amazon filed an FCC application on Saturday to launch a new Leo satellite constellation that will provide direct-to-device satellite service for “voice, messaging, data, and emergency services.” If approved, Amazon will begin deploying the new constellation of 5,105 satellites in 2028. It says it plans to partner with mobile network operators to offer direct-to-device satellite service, similar to Starlink’s partnership with T-Mobile.Earlier this year, Amazon announced it’s acquiring Globalstar’s satellite network and taking over its deal to provide direct-to-device satellite services for Apple devices. Amazon says its new constellation will “use Globalstar’s spectrum,” adding that it plans to “collaborate with…

Microsoft AI has released MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, its first model built specifically for cyber defense. The model does not ship as a standalone endpoint. It runs inside MDASH, Microsoft’s multi-model agentic scanning harness. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is a transformer with self-attention and sparse Mixture-of-Experts layers. It carries 137B total parameters with 5B active, and a 256k context length. Inputs and outputs are text only. It is a cybersecurity-specialized fine-tune of MAI-Code-1-Flash, the lightweight agentic coding model already embedded in GitHub Copilot and VS Code. The release describes it as derived from the MAI-Thinking-1 lineage. Benchmarks CyberGym is a public suite of 1,507 real-world vulnerability…

The Coca-Cola Company has confirmed that hackers stole data from its dairy subsidiary, Fairlife, during a ransomware attack earlier this month. In a short statement earlier today, the global beverages giant says that it is still working to restore some of the impacted systems and operations, but most of the production in the U.S. has been resumed. Coca-Cola disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 16, revealing that a ransomware attack had disrupted production operations at Fairlife. Fairlife is a producer of ultra-filtered milk, protein shakes, and nutritional drinks. It operates…

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, will build crypto infrastructure by December, according to a report by Russian news agency Interfax.  A key piece will be a digital depository that tracks clients’ crypto rights and records off-blockchain transactions, while also handling wallet transfers to execute client orders, Interfax reported Monday.  Sberbank this month revealed plans to debut a Bitcoin and crypto wallet plus digital asset custody by December.  The news comes as the State Duma mulls over a new law “On Digital Currencies and Digital Rights,” which sets up comprehensive Russian regulation of crypto. The proposed law covers retail purchases through licensed…

Fat tissue is often viewed as something the body would be better off without. Scientists now know, however, that adipose tissue is an active and essential organ that supports many important processes, including energy storage, hormone production, and metabolic regulation. Too much fat can increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems. Yet the opposite can also be dangerous. In rare genetic and autoimmune conditions such as familial partial lipodystrophy type 2 (FPLD2), abnormal fat loss and uneven fat distribution can also lead to diabetes and other metabolic diseases. A Longstanding Fat Loss Mystery Elif Oral, M.D.,…

Climate change is causing frequent, well-studied, extreme heat events. Less well understood is the additional heat stress experienced by billions of people as a result of those extreme heat events. However, a new study published in Nature Climate Change aims to change that. The study analyzed more than 70 years of climate data stored in the ERA5-HEAT data set, which includes heat stress data going back to 1940. The researchers combined that climate information with population data to estimate human exposure to hazardous heat worldwide. The study found that nighttime “feels-like” temperatures have increased faster than daytime temperatures.…