Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The claim that a Texas city paid a family farm $10 in exchange for land meant to be used for a park and then sold the land to a data center developer for $10 million is still under investigation.  Deeds from Williamson County, Texas, show that four members of the Cromwell family sold a plot of land to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation for $10 “to be held in the trust for future use as parkland” in July 1999. The land changed hands four more times until NCP Travis TPP Project LCC, a data center developer, bought it from…

Bamako, Mali – An unprecedented battlefield partnership between a separatist movement and an al-Qaeda affiliate has transformed the conflict in northern Mali, shifting the military balance and deepening divisions over how, if at all, the war can end.When the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) launched a joint offensive on April 25, 2026, the conflict entered a phase unlike any before.A war that had long pitted the Malian state against multiple armed groups gave way to a coordinated campaign stretching from Kidal and Anefis to Tilemsi, Gao and Sevare, posing the most serious challenge to the Malian…

The frontier of physical AI is a Jenga game in a warehouse in San Leandro, California. That warehouse is occupied by Encord, a company that builds data tooling used to train AI models. Andrew Ceja is a pilot—the company’s term for its robotic trainers—and he’s carefully pulling wooden blocks from a tottering tower while wearing a headset with a camera that tracks what he sees. That alone is fairly common for collecting robot training data, but this headset includes sensors that measure his brain waves as he carefully disassembles the block tower. Encord is one of a small but growing…

Alpaca says it custodies more than $1.5 billion of shares backing tokenized equities, which, by public tracker measurements, would represent most of the market.With DTCC preparing to launch its own tokenization service in October and the SEC warning that third-party stock tokens can expose investors to additional ownership and intermediary risks, the numbers reveal a concentrated brokerage layer beneath a market promoted as decentralized.Tokenization is the practice of representing a real-world asset as a digital token on a blockchain, so that owning the token stands in for owning, or at least tracking, the thing itself. Applied to equities, it means…

Wildfires advanced towards the outskirts of the historic French city of Bordeaux, at the heart of the country’s winelands, on Sunday as France and Spain battled blazes that have already forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. About 220,000 people have been evacuated in France, while in Spain more than 75,000 people have been evacuated and a further 30,000 ordered to shelter in place, authorities said. Read moreWildfires force more than 300,000 people in France and Spain to flee In France, fires have ravaged the Cap Ferret peninsula on the Atlantic coast, a popular tourist destination, and spread…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging…

Bitcoin is trading near $64,500 this weekend, sitting between $65,000 resistance above and $62,500 support below, the two prices that will define its week.Bitcoin climbed as high as $66,990 on July 21, a one-month high, before slipping back under $65,000 and turning that former breakout line into overhead resistance. Trading volume over the past 24 hours has run more than 40% below its recent average, a reminder that whatever prints over the weekend needs Sunday’s close to confirm it.Four prices now split the weekend into a decision map, two above the current range and two below it.A close back above…

Iran’s supreme leader calls for ‘absolute, unconditional termination’ of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon amid reports of renewed diplomacy.Published On 26 Jul 202626 Jul 2026Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has said that peace between Tehran and Washington is contingent on Israel stopping its attacks on Lebanon.Khamenei made the statement in a post on X on Sunday.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listIran “has designated the preservation of Lebanon’s territorial integrity, and the absolute, unconditional termination of the Zionist regime’s aggression as the primary condition for any agreement to ending the imposed war against the aggressive US”, he wrote.Khamenei also voiced…

The Bank of England could be forced to tear up its economic forecasts and raise interest rates later this year if oil prices return to above $100 a barrel, according to City economists.Before a meeting of Bank officials on Thursday, economists said that while an interest rate hike would probably be avoided this week there could be some in the future because of conflict in the Middle East.The UK economy has remained relatively resilient since Donald Trump’s war on Iran began in March, but this could be at risk after fighting reignited last week, the economists added.The breakdown of the…

There’s something about a movie like The Room, Troll 2, or Fateful Findings that I find irresistible. These sorts of “so bad they’re good” films are marvelous curiosities where ambition far outstrips resources, ability, and self-awareness to become something much greater than the sum of their parts. Champagne and Bullets (also released as GetEven and Road to Revenge) is a film on par with those classics of outsider cinema.The movie is almost entirely the work of one man, John De Hart. Hart wrote, directed, and stars as Rick Bode in the film. He even performs a musical number early in…