Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Denmark-headquartered power cable manufacturer and installation company NKT has completed the first cable pull-ins at Lemóniz in northern Spain, marking what it describes as an important construction milestone on a multibillion-euro interconnector, which will increase electricity exchange capacity between Spain and France from 2.8 GW to 5 GW. NKT Victoria; Source: NKT via LinkedIn NKT has reported that the cables for the Biscay Gulf interconnector were brought ashore from its NKT Victoria cable-laying vessel through a drilled route extending more than 1,000 meters. The landfall technique is intended to minimize disruption to the local environment. Developed by INELFE, the joint…

Europeans are rattled. A bomb-laden drone attacked a Ukrainian cargo plane in the eastern German city of Leipzig, but it failed to go off. In another incident, German authorities revealed that they had thwarted an assassination plot targeting the CEO of one of the country’s leading drone-manufacturing companies. Outside Rome, a titanic blast destroyed an ammunition factory whose products are used by Ukrainian forces—just a few days after another explosion hit a plant in Bulgaria whose owner was previously reported to have been targeted by Russian security services. And a Spanish fighter jet on a NATO air-policing mission shot down…

Claim: In August 2026, police raided and shut down a funeral home in Weston, Missouri, for operating as a “necrophilia brothel.” Rating: In late August 2026, a rumor spread online that police raided and shut down a funeral home in Weston, Missouri, for operating as a “necrophilia brothel.”  For example, a Facebook page called Post Of The Day shared the claim on Aug. 22 (archived), adding more details about the alleged crimes. The caption read, in part: Authorities in Weston, Missouri say an alleged necrophilia brothel was shut down Thursday night after deputies received a tip about illicit after-hours activity…

US CIA ​Director John Ratcliffe held ​talks with Russian intelligence officials during his visit to ​Moscow ‌on ⁠Tuesday but did not ‌meet President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin ⁠said on Wednesday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov ​told reporters that ‌Putin had been briefed on the outcome of ‌Ratcliffe’s talks, but declined to ​provide further details. Peskov said it was also too ​early to say ​whether such contacts ​between the two countries’ intelligence ​agencies could help pull US-Russia relations out of what he described ⁠as a “deep crisis”. The trip would be the first known visit to the Russian capital by a US…

“Ironing board” seats on some commuter trains will get extra cushioning, the transport secretary has said, more than a decade after the government spent £1.6bn of public money building the fleet.Heidi Alexander announced that more than 60,000 seats on all 115 Thameslink trains would get new cushions and backrests, replacing much-criticised thin and hard seats.She said the work, set to begin in 2027 and last two years, was “public ownership of our railways in action” as part of the new Great British Railways programme.However, some have criticised how the Department for Transport (DfT) awarded a £1.6bn contract for the trains…

Speech by Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the Deutsche Bundesbank’s Symposium on “Future of payments: trends and innovations in Germany and Europe”[1]Frankfurt am Main, 26 August 2026Two years ago, at this very same Symposium, I argued that Europe had a unique opportunity.[2]Tokenisation and distributed ledger technology, or DLT, were beginning to reshape financial markets. By representing and transferring assets in the form of programmable data files – tokens – they offered the prospect of making finance more efficient, enabling it to operate around the clock with greater automation and fewer intermediaries. At the heart…

Ikea has teamed up with Microsoft to launch a new assortment of gaming-inspired furniture and home accessories, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the first Xbox console. The nine-piece Yxstaby collection (good luck pronouncing that) includes a TV stand, laptop stand, side table, lounge chair, and multi-functional toolbox, with standout products like a stool, cushion, decorative platter, and mirrored display box being specifically designed around recognizable Xbox controller motifs.The Yxstaby range makes it easier to “bring play into a room and tuck everything away afterwards,” according to Ikea’s press release, with each piece created as a collaboration between Xbox and…

Autonomous trucking company Gatik has raised $200 million in Series D funding to expand its driverless freight operations across North America. The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from Millennium Management, ARK Invest, Intact Private Capital, and other investors.Gatik said it has more than $600 million in contracted revenue and has completed 85,000 fully driverless orders. The company reported a 99% on-time delivery rate across its operations.Its trucks currently move goods between distribution centres and stores across regional networks in Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, and Canada. Gatik operates dozens of fully driverless trucks and…

Swati KhandelwalAug 26, 2026AI Security / Application Security Aikido Security has published research that recreates the Australian gym-booking incident in a synthetic environment, finding that Claude Opus 4.6, running on the OpenClaw agent harness, exploited a client-side-only booking restriction in 9 of 10 runs. The original incident was first reported by ABC News on August 10, based on chat logs and screenshots the user supplied. He had asked an OpenClaw agent running Opus 4.6 to book him into a gym class. The agent booked sessions months beyond the window the site allowed. It then tested, without being asked, whether the…

In brief Judge Katherine Polk Failla adjourned Roman Storm’s retrial to April 26, 2027, in an order entered Tuesday. His motion for acquittal, argued on April 9, remains undecided. Storm was convicted in August 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, with the jury split on money laundering and sanctions violation charges. Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm will not be retried on the two counts a jury deadlocked on until the spring of 2027, after Judge Katherine Polk Failla adjourned the proceeding by more than six months.The order, entered Tuesday in the Southern District of New York,…