Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Businesses could face costs of up to £2.9bn a year because of a crackdown on zero hours contracts, according to the government’s own analysis.Labour’s employment reforms are set to cut the number of hours staff can work before they must be offered guaranteed time.Official analysis released on Wednesday showed it could cost employers between £350m and £2.9bn, based on the eventual threshold of hours the policy impacts.Skills Minister Baroness Jacqui Smith said the reforms would ensure workers are “fairly paid” but business groups said the cost to employers was “disproportionate” compared to how much it would help workers.Government analysis said…

Fermi, the AI nuclear power firm, has named a new CEO more than three months after firing co-founder Toby Neugebauer from the top executive post. Fermi said Wednesday it has hired Lee McIntire, an independent member of the company’s board who has held chief executive positions at CH2M Hill and TerraPower, the nuclear power startup founded by Bill Gates. Fermi America, which was co-founded by former U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is developing an AI campus in Amarillo, Texas, called Project Matador that will eventually use nuclear reactors to power data centers. The announcement, along with Monday’s news that it…

Fortinet on Wednesday announced patches for eight vulnerabilities across its products, including high-severity authentication bugs in FortiWeb and FortiManager. In FortiWeb, the company resolved an improper authentication issue impacting deployments configured with specific, non-default settings. A remote, unauthenticated attacker could exploit the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-26035, “to log in to the FortiWeb GUI/CLI with a random username and password,” Fortinet explains. The weakness is associated with the wildcard setting for administrator accounts, which is disabled by default. When it is enabled, the system will match any username on a remote server with the Remote User account. “When wildcard is enabled,…

A study presented at USENIX Security ’26 identified 65,340 risky crypto addresses involved in misuse across Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, with 126,982.94 ETH and 17,726.7 BNB in associated native-token losses.The researchers valued losses associated with those risky crypto addresses at more than $574.8 million. But the two newly described active attack vectors directly account for about $15.7 million, or 2.7%, of that figure. The full paper also used May 2025 reference prices of $4,408 per ETH and $847 per BNB, rather than each token’s dollar value when the losses occurred. Related ReadingSomeone just drained long-forgotten dormant Ethereum wallets, and…

WiFi signals could potentially be used to identify people and map their surroundings without relying on cameras or requiring the person being observed to carry a connected device. “By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present,” says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL, KIT’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability. “This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition,” explains the cybersecurity expert. Because the technique analyzes radio waves moving through a…

Netherlands-based heavy lifting and transport provider Mammoet has assisted Aibel, which is responsible for the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) of a topside segment of an unmanned processing platform to be deployed at a gas development in the Norwegian North Sea, with critical heavy-lift and marine activities for the project. Munin topside; Source: Mammoet Mammoet has confirmed the completion of the Munin project deliveries to Aibel, which is responsible for the EPC delivery of the Munin topside for Aker BP‘s Yggdrasil development in the North Sea on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). Topsides construction has taken place at Aibel’s yard…

Reading Time: 7 minutes In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it. In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.” And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities and state agencies…

Westbrook, a former NBA Most Valuable Player, holds the record for the most career triple-doubles in league history.Published On 13 Aug 202613 Aug 2026Triple-double king and former NBA MVP Russell Westbrook ‌announced his retirement after 18 seasons on Wednesday via social media.“Sometimes you don’t even know when you’ve already ⁠watched the end. You ⁠had to be there. And now it’s over,” Westbrook wrote on his social media post.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listWestbrook’s decision was announced during a three-and-a-half-minute video. He didn’t respond to any of the questions by the ⁠narrator, but the theme made it clear Westbrook…

What the Kremlin had assumed in 2022 would be a short, successful “military operation” has become the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.Yet a confident President Putin continues to predict victory for Russia.”There will never be ‘victory’,” counters Dmitry Muratov. “Because what has been going on for nearly five years – no matter how it ends – can no longer be considered a victory.”It cannot be a victory when two Slavic nations have ripped a million people to shreds. Or more than a million.””It seems to me that the situation with Ukraine now is this: you can…

Starting last fall, the Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes from a firm in Northern Virginia.That was an enormous price tag, but the department said it had no time to consider other offers. The planes were needed urgently for deportation flights.But since then, the department has barely used this new fleet — for deportations, or anything else.Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets. Just months after acquiring them, the department sought to loan or lease two to other agencies, including one for the use of F.B.I. director Kash Patel,…