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Spirit Energy, a North Sea operator, has finished a multimillion-dollar decommissioning campaign in the UK sector of the North Sea, plugging and abandoning (P&A) three gas wells that have reached the end of their productive lives and removing more than 234 tons of subsea infrastructure. Well-Safe Protector rig; Source: Spirit Energy Spirit Energy has completed a £40 million ($55 million) decommissioning campaign in the North Sea, which involved more than 114,000 hours of work and brought together specialist vessels, a rig, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and teams from across more than 30 UK supply chain partners, including DeepOcean and Well-Safe…

As Iran’s economic woes become harder to hide, the Trump administration is increasingly convinced that tightening pressure will eventually work. On Aug. 19, the U.S. president announced “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country.” Iran’s economy is certainly battered. Since the war began, the rial has depreciated, and prices have risen. President Masoud Pezeshkian has acknowledged that the country’s revenues have also fallen sharply. U.S. President Donald Trump’s team sees this as evidence that, despite the failure of heavy bombing campaigns to topple Tehran’s government, Iran’s economy is approaching a point of no return. But how close…

The claim that Abdul El-Sayed’s mother worked for a terrorist organization that provided financial support to Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Hamas is misleading and missing context.  The rumor stems from the Midwesterner, a conservative news website. The outlet reported that El-Sayed’s biological mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA-USA), a former humanitarian aid organization associated with a worldwide network, the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), that the U.S. Treasury deemed a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization in 2004.  While the Department of Justice convicted several of IARA-USA’s former officers for engaging in prohibited financial…

Nearly six months since the United States and Israel launched the first missiles in their war on Iran, Washington is pivoting to a strategy of tougher sanctions and economic isolation in a bid to force Tehran to accept its terms for a peace deal.On Monday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced “Operation Economic Outcast”, targeting Tehran’s remaining sources of revenue while also threatening penalties against those who continue doing business with Iran.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listBessent described the latest wave of sanctions as “the single greatest financial offensive ever” against Iran, and warned that banks and businesses…

Kavala, 68, became a symbol of a government crackdown on civil society in Turkey following his arrest in October 2017.He and others were accused of orchestrating and financing anti-government protests in 2013, which started in Istanbul’s Gezi park before spreading across Turkey.The demonstrations posed the first serious challenge to the rule of Erdogan, who was Turkey’s dominant prime minister at the time and became its directly elected president the following year.Human rights group Amnesty International says prosecutors falsely alleged that the Gezi park protests were an attempt to overthrow the government. In 2019, the ECHR demanded Kavala’s immediate release, describing…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Canada has announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50 per cent on $20bn worth of US imports a day after Donald Trump said he would raise duties on Canadian cars, in the latest salvo of an escalating trade war between the two neighbours.Finance minister François-Philippe Champagne on Tuesday issued a 99-page list of hundreds of US goods that will face increased levies in Canada from September 8, including steel, dairy products and agricultural equipment.“When the US asked too much and offered too…

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Labor Day means the end of summer and back to school — but not without snagging a good deal on a new laptop. There are some notable sales happening before the holiday, and we’re tracking price drops on both Macs and PCs that we recommend personally — not just for students, but for the office, for creators, or everyday use.Also: The best laptops of 2026: Expert tested and reviewedAll the laptops on this list we’ve either tested in our lab, gone hands-on with, or are familiar with through testing similar models. We approach…

MIT engineers have built an AI tool that forecasts extreme weather without training on historical disaster data.Kai Chang, a mechanical engineering graduate student, and Professor Themis Sapsis developed the tool. It produces maps of events that have not appeared in a region’s historical record but remain statistically-possible. Each map also carries estimates of the event’s likely duration and intensity, alongside a separate estimate of the area it might affect.Forecasting extreme weather events without historical precedentSapsis holds the William I. Koch Professorship in Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at MIT. Both researchers are affiliated with the MIT Center for Computational Science and…

The Linux Foundation said Tuesday it will take on governance of TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation and Compliance Evidence), a new open specification for producing verifiable evidence of how AI agents and other confidential workloads run.  Contributed by confidential computing vendor OPAQUE, the specification was developed jointly with AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII). TRACE creates a hardware-backed, cryptographically verifiable record that ties together the runtime environment, the software executed, the policies applied, the classification of any data involved, and which tools an AI agent invoked.  The resulting artifact is designed to be portable across different cloud providers,…

The Human Rights Foundation has announced support for more projects around the globe, this time giving over 500 million satoshis — worth $396,854 at today’s prices — in grants to 16 projects based in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Coming from the HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund, the grants will help projects that want to strengthen the Bitcoin protocol, expand practical Bitcoin access and facilitate secure messaging and community infrastructure for dissidents, among other things, according to the NGO.  The grants are the second round of funding to come in 2026, after the NGO announced it had supported 26 projects in…