Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The U.S. announced a historic oil deal in August that gives it access to more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves in Venezuela, which is structured through a private company, North American Blue Energy Partners.It’s part of a U.S. attempt to increase investment in Venezuela’s natural resources, most notably oil and gas.The country has one of the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, at an estimated 300 billion barrels. However, it’s heavier and harder to refine than the oil in other countries.Observers expressed concern about increased greenhouse gas emissions and oil spills, as well as the…

UK-headquartered subsea power specialist Verlume and German marine technology company SubCtech are pooling resources to develop and deliver integrated subsea power solutions for offshore energy and defense applications. Verlume Halo Subsea Battery Technology; Courtesy of Verlume Verlume and SubCtech have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate on the development and delivery of integrated subsea power solutions, building on an established working relationship between the two companies and formalizing a shared commitment to deepen the partnership and pursue new commercial opportunities across the offshore energy and defense sectors. The MoU brings together two complementary areas of expertise by combining…

National lawmakers propose paying her fine should the WTA impose it on her for skipping the concurrent mandatory China Open.Published On 16 Sep 202616 Sep 2026Filipino tennis star Alex Eala is firm on representing her country at the Asian Games regardless of the Women’s Tennis Association’s (WTA) decision to grant an exemption from the mandatory China Open, the Philippine Tennis Association (PHILTA) has said after filing a request on her behalf.“We have formally requested an exemption and we respect the WTA’s process. At the same time, Alex has made her decision to represent the Philippines at the Asian Games, and…

Both she and other European leaders have found a reliable ally in Carney as they deal with similar problems.In particular, they have faced Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs and his threat to annex Greenland which is a sovereign territory of EU member Denmark.But “associate membership” of the EU does not currently exist and the process, if agreed, could take years.Earlier this year, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggested – to a mixed reaction – that Ukraine could be granted this new status.Some countries in the western Balkans including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia are already on the…

Andy Burnham is expected to meet Donald Trump for the first time in person at the UN general assembly next week in New York.Last month the Guardian reported British officials had stepped up their preparations for a face-to-face meeting between Burnham and Trump after the prime minister said he hoped to attend the assembly of world leaders.The trip to New York next week will be Burnham’s first appearance as prime minister at the UN general assembly and one of his most significant foreign policy engagements since entering Downing Street.Burnham has spoken to the US president at least twice on the…

Amazon today announced that its Alexa+ conversational assistant is available in India with Hindi support. The new assistant can hold conversations for longer and maintain context while doing so. The feature is available to all customers in the country in Early Access in Hindi and English. After the early testing period, the company will make the assistant free for Prime customers. For non-Prime customers, the price would be ₹2,000 per month ($20.85). The company said that the new Alexa has a more expressive voice and can handle complex multi-step tasks, including ordering groceries from Amazon’s quick commerce service Amazon Now…

Nums AI has released Causilo, a pretrained tabular foundation model for classification and regression. Causilo comes with a scikit-learn interface, Apache-2.0 code and pretrained weights on Hugging Face. On TabArena, it has the highest Elo among single models for both classification and regression. Is it deployable? Yes, for research and evaluation today, on CUDA or CPU. Commercial, production and hosted API use need a separate license from Nums AI. What Causilo Does Causilo is an in-context learning model. Calling fit does not update the pretrained weights. It stores the training rows as context and predicts query rows in one forward…

Attackers now exploit a critical-severity ConnectWise ScreenConnect vulnerability in the wild, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). ConnectWise shared temporary mitigation measures for this missing-authorization flaw on September 7, advising security teams to disable TransferFiles permissions to block potential attacks. The vulnerability (now tracked as CVE-2026-84869 and patched in ScreenConnect 26.6.5 and later) affects ScreenConnect clients and can let threat actors with basic privileges transfer or execute files in low-complexity attacks that don’t require user interaction. CISA added the security flaw to its catalog of actively exploited flaws on Friday and ordered U.S. federal agencies to secure their…

In brief Five hundred officers will be recruited across police forces, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service. The £500 million comes from the economic crime levy and runs over three years. It will build upon Operation Destabilise, the case against Russian cash-to-crypto networks. Britain will recruit 500 officers to trace and seize criminal money, backed by £500 million over three years, the Home Office said on Tuesday.The money funds a new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy and comes from the economic crime levy on regulated firms. Officers will be spread across police forces, the National Crime…

White-tailed eagle chicks have successfully fledged from wild nests in England for the fourth consecutive year.Two out of five pairs of eagles released by a reintroduction project successfully bred and raised young with one chick fledging from a nest in Dorset and two more in Sussex.The project, run by Forestry England and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, aims to return the species to England. Nine birds have been born in the wild since it began in 2019.”This year’s breeding success is another important milestone in the return of this lost species to England; it shows what can be achieved by…