Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Andrius Kubilius, the European Union’s commissioner for defense and space, is facing a challenge not seen in 100 years or more, he says. On the geopolitical stage, the EU must regain its balance atop shifting tectonic plates: Russia is again a threat, powers like China are rising, and the United States is reducing its commitment to the defense of Europe under a new program dubbed “NATO 3.0.” On the battlefield, the rise of drones and autonomous warfare is calling into question the viability of the traditional weapons and tactics in use for decades. In response, the EU is wielding its…

A fraudulent funeral director broke the trust of families on an “almost industrial scale” as their loved ones’ bodies were left “rotting away”, a court has heard.Robert Bush, owner of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, appeared at Hull crown court on Monday for a five-day sentencing hearing. He previously pleaded guilty to 67 offences, including 30 counts of preventing lawful and decent burial.Several family members read out their victim impact statements to the court, recounting nightmares and PTSD from Bush’s offending, with some breaking down in tears and struggling to speak.On his way into court, Bush, 48, from Otley,…

Penalties issued under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s landmark content moderation law, are also contested. Chinese e-commerce giant Temu has argued a Commission fine of €200 million levied against it in May is “disproportionate” — though it’s far below the DSA’s higher threshold for fines, which is 6 percent of the company’s annual global revenue. A Commission official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that calculating fines under the DSA includes consideration of factors like “gravity, nature, duration [and] mitigating circumstances.” The GDPR leaves the levying of fines to national independent privacy regulators rather…

Meta on Monday said it is rolling out its Meta AI chatbot within Threads’ DMs, giving users a way to chat with the AI assistant. Although Threads users in select markets could already interact with Meta AI in public posts, like people can with Grok on X, this new integration lets users talk with the AI assistant privately. By giving users an easier way to talk to an AI chatbot, Meta is looking to keep users within its ecosystem, with an eye towards discouraging them from using third-party assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Meta AI is already available…

Perplexity has released pplx, an official command line client for its Search API. The tool returns grounded search results and extracted page text, all as JSON. According to its docs, it targets humans and coding agents equally. It is not a chat client. There is no conversational mode, no model selection and no synthesized answer. Two surfaces, one output contract The tool exposes exactly two working surfaces. pplx search web runs a live web search. pplx content fetch pulls a URL and returns cleaned page text. The contract around them is the interesting part. Per the official pplx-cli Agent Skill,…

Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies announced on Monday the launch of the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents.  The effort builds on existing work from the Linux Foundation’s recently launched Akrites initiative and the OpenSSF community. Inaugural partners of the Open Secure AI Alliance also include Adobe, Cadence, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudera, Cloudflare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell, DoorDash, Elastic, HPE, Hugging Face, IBM, LangChain, Microsoft, Naver, NetApp, Nous Research, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red…

Tether’s gold-backed token XAUt has received Shariah certification from Amanah Advisors, a move that could expand access to the token among Islamic financial institutions and investors seeking Shariah-compliant exposure to physical gold.The certification found XAUt’s structure complies with key Islamic finance principles, including full backing by physical gold, the absence of interest and leverage, and transparent reserves. Each XAUt token represents one troy ounce of physical gold stored in Swiss vaults, according to Tether.The designation gives Tether a clearer pathway to market XAUt to Islamic financial institutions and investors that require Shariah-compliant investment products. Tether said it expects the certification…