Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

“I’d describe it as a magical eeriness.” Lisa Redfern’s description to the Guardian conveys the combination of beauty and wrongness that accompanied Wednesday’s partial solar eclipse in Britain. Crowds across the country assembled as the sun’s power seemed to wane, twilight changed tone abruptly, the temperature fell and the familiar landscape took on an unnatural appearance. In a divided world, there is comfort in coming together in awe. Ms Redfern, speaking from Cornwall, was right that Britons “may not see another one. We have to make the most of these moments.” The country has to wait 55 years for another…

What was claimed A video shows children at an English school being taught about the Islamic Salah, praying five times a day. Our verdict That’s not what the video shows. The clip was originally posted by an Islamic pre-school in Australia. Posts being shared on Facebook wrongly suggest a video shows an English school teaching children about Muslim prayers. In fact, the clip was filmed at an Islamic pre-school in Australia.The video shows a woman leading a group of children in a song about Salah—the Muslim practice of praying five times a day. It’s been shared on Facebook with a…

Israeli troops have forced two Palestinian families to leave their besieged West Bank homes, the day after a top Israeli commander personally promised he would end a violent settler campaign to drive them out.Israeli soldiers also took over eight other homes in Qusra early on Thursday, telling the village’s mayor, Abdul Azim Wadi, that the buildings were needed for a days-long operation to remove the settlers. They later relinquished six. Settlers still roam the village.The Palestinians’ ordeal began on Sunday when Israeli settlers and soldiers set up a tent blocking the entrance to three homes on the edge of the…

Leavitt’s departure comes on the heels of a leave of absence this summer after the May birth of her second child, Viviana. She returned to the White House last month.Leavitt gave birth to her first child, Niko, during the 2024 presidential campaign, returning to work quickly when the president was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.Leavitt, in a post on X, described the job as “the honor and adventure of a lifetime,” but said she had decided to step away to devote her time to being a mom.“The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter,…

Nearly 100 children have been wrongly identified and detained as adults under Shabana Mahmood’s “one in, one out” deal with France, the Guardian can disclose.Home Office staff said that of 304 age-disputed cases arising from the scheme over nine months, 94 (31%) – were ultimately found to be minors. Children are supposed to be excluded from the scheme, while government policy limits immigration detention of unaccompanied children to 24 hours.The figures have emerged in a letter sent to the Home Office minister Anna Turley from Jane Leech, the interim chair of independent monitoring boards (IMBs), which scrutinise prisons and immigration…

Jack Wallen/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET key takeaways Google is removing Assistant as an option in September.This leaves only Gemini for things like hands-free calling.Gemini is not nearly as reliable as Assistant for this feature.Google is officially shutting down its Assistant tool in September, leaving Android with only one official option for a digital assistant: Gemini. Unleash the chorus of groans.We all know that Google is pushing Gemini into every corner of Android. The company wants it to write our emails, summarize web pages, doctor our photos, do our shopping for us, reserve tables…

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash, the newest model in its Flash tier, three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash. The model card describes it as a refinement of 3.6 Flash with algorithmic improvements to the core reasoning foundation — not a new pretraining run. It accepts text, images, audio, and video across a 1M-token context window, returns up to 64K output tokens, and supports customizable thinking configurations that trade quality against cost and latency. The knowledge cutoff stays at March 2026. The gains concentrate in three places: software engineering, document-heavy knowledge work, and web development. The sharper argument is price.…

Cyber defenders need to shake off traditional best practices and switch from reactive patching to building inherently resilient systems in the face of AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, according to a senior security manager at Microsoft. David Weston, group manager in the Windows team at Microsoft, told delegates at Black Hat USA that traditional approaches to vulnerability remediation fail to work in an era when AI tools are making vulnerability discovery and exploit development cheaper, faster, and more scalable. Weston’s keynote — entitled “The End of Rare: Defending When Offense Is Cheap” — challenged industry vulnerability best practices that Weston said where…

In brief Tether said KPMG issued an unqualified opinion, the best outcome, on Tether International’s 2025 financial statements. The company called it the “largest inaugural financial audit in history.” The audit follows years of scrutiny over USDT’s backing and Tether’s push to expand in the U.S. Tether said Thursday that Big Four accounting firm KPMG issued an unqualified audit opinion—industry jargon for the best possible result—-on the 2025 financial statements of Tether International, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin USDT.In a post announcing the audit, Tether called the review the “largest inaugural financial audit in history,” saying KPMG examined…

U.S.-headquartered LLOG Exploration, a subsidiary of Harbour Energy, has decided to move forward with the development of a subsea tie-back to an existing floating production system (FPS) in the Gulf of America (U.S. Gulf of Mexico). Who Dat; Source: Delmar Following a minor riser leak at Who Dat in February 2026, the joint venture (JV), comprising LLOG (operator, 40%), Karoon (40%), and Westlawn (20%), kept progressing a structured remediation plan, with the removal and analysis of the riser planned to start in the third quarter of 2026. The E manifold production is anticipated to come back online in 4Q 2027, subject to…