Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Tether completed the first full independent audit of its annual financial statements, with KPMG US issuing a clean opinion on the stablecoin issuer’s 2025 accounts.The audit covered Tether’s balance sheet, income statement and cash flows for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, including the assets backing its issued tokens and the liabilities they represent. Tether said the audited statements showed reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion.Unlike Tether’s quarterly reserve attestations, which it has published for years, the full audit subjected the company’s broader financial statements and underlying evidence to independent examination, including transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations and counterparties.Source: Paolo Ardoino As part…

Marine heatwaves are increasingly being recognized as more than an environmental problem. New research warns that prolonged periods of unusually warm ocean temperatures can also threaten human physical and mental health. Researchers from Adelaide University and the University of Hong Kong say marine heatwaves should be treated as an important public health concern. They argue that the effects on people have received relatively little attention, even as evidence continues to show how widely these events can affect communities. The consequences can be severe. The rapid strengthening of Hurricane Otis in 2023 and the destruction it caused in Mexico (an estimated…

The Sand Creek Fire had grown to 27,736 acres on Thursday after burning through parts of Maverick Mountain Ski Area in southwestern Montana, but firefighters succeeded in protecting the ski lodge and nearby Elkhorn Hot Springs as the blaze pushed through the area. Philip Knaub, operations section chief for the inter-agency Northern Rockies Complex Incident Management Team 3, said Thursday that Elkhorn Hot Springs was fully intact and no structures had been lost in the resort’s main facility area. The Maverick Mountain ski lodge and surrounding buildings also remained standing. The fire did burn through parts of the ski area.…

France’s energy giant TotalEnergies has selected Seoul-based Daewoo Engineering & Construction (Daewoo E&C) as the preferred bidder for a major package on a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Papua New Guinea, Oceania. Papua LNG; Courtesy of Santos Daewoo E&C has secured preferred bidder status for the engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning (EPCC) of the Papua LNG project’s central processing facility (CPF) and wellpads. The CPF and related infrastructure will process and treat natural gas produced from the Elk-Antelope gas fields before supplying it to a liquefaction plant at Caution Bay near Port Moresby. The large-scale resource development aims to…

Misleading discounts and obstructive cancellation procedures certainly deserve regulation. But presenting this as a significant response to the cost of living crisis feels like rearranging the cushions while the sofa is on fire (Subscriptions you can’t easily cancel, sales that aren’t sales – I’ll end the rip-offs that British people hate, 9 August).For millions of households, the problem is not finding the “unsubscribe” button. It is finding that £50 buys remarkably little at the supermarket, while housing and essential bills consume ever more of their income.Perhaps this is merely the appetiser and something considerably more substantial is coming for the…

It’s Friday, and as promised I have something fun for you: My colleague Chico Harlan, our global climate correspondent, is taking you on a high-adrenaline motorcycle ride through Lahore. And not just on any motorcycle. The bike he rode was electric — as are an increasing number of motorcycles on the streets of Pakistan.Thrills aside, Chico’s reporting shows something intriguing: The war in Iran has sped up the clean energy transition. In the countries most vulnerable to higher gasoline prices, like Pakistan, the most common vehicles tend to have two wheels, not four. In those countries, the electric motorcycle era…

The Trump administration is encouraging American companies to conduct their own cyberattacks against criminal hackers, a move that White House officials say will help address digital scourges like ransomware but that some former officials and security experts warn could lead to chaos.Under a national security memorandum that President Trump signed late Wednesday, select companies would work with the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to strike foreign cybercriminal groups with hacks under certain conditions. The attacks would allow both surveillance of the criminal networks and specific types of hacking operations that could lead to disruption, manipulation or destruction of information systems…

The Trump administration is launching a new program that will allow private firms to perform cyberattacks against foreign criminals, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The private firms would operate “under the control and oversight” of the federal government, giving them permission to surveil and disrupt criminal networks, according to a presidential memorandum published on Wednesday.The Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security will oversee the private firms, which must meet requirements in “technical proficiency, proven performance of cyber operations, facility security,” and more. Companies in the program must hold a bond or escrow of at least $1 million that…

Yesterday, Liquid AI released LFM2.5-VL-3B. It is a 3.1B-parameter vision-language model built for on-device deployment. The model reads digital screens across mobile, web, and desktop. It grounds objects to coordinates, parses documents and charts, and calls tools from text or image input. Liquid AI reports an average of 69.4 across 28 vision benchmarks. That matches InternVL-3.5-4B and sits 0.7 points behind Qwen3.5-4B, both 4.7B models. The model is non-reasoning, so it answers directly and keeps latency low. It fits in roughly 3 GB of memory and decodes 228 tokens/s on an Apple M5 Max. Is it deployable? Yes, the checkpoint…

A presidential memorandum issued on Wednesday expands federal capabilities against foreign cybercrime by establishing a program that allows vetted private US companies to conduct offensive and intelligence-gathering cyber operations under federal control. Managed by the National Coordination Center (NCC), the program authorizes participating companies to execute ‘cyber surveillance operations’ and ‘cyber effects operations’ targeting foreign cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).  The initiative operates under co-executive directors designated by the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, ensuring all operational actions remain under direct federal supervision. To participate, US companies must undergo rigorous vetting and sign formal contracts with the…