Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Stand With Crypto, an advocacy organization launched by Coinbase in 2023, endorsed 32 candidates for House of Representatives seats ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections based on their digital asset policy views. In a Monday notice, Stand With Crypto said its slate of 32 candidates for the 2026 midterm elections was part of efforts to influence digital asset policy in the federal government. The organization said it had endorsed politicians who were “proven digital asset policy champions,” also targeting competitive races “where Stand With Crypto advocate numbers are most likely to influence outcomes.”“Crypto Voters have become a durable, motivated voting…

Coverage plans are ready for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope prelaunch and launch activities. Roman is NASA’s next-generation observatory designed to explore some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark energy. NASA and SpaceX are targeting Roman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch coverage begins at 6:20 a.m. Live coverage of these events will stream through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online: https://www.nasa.gov/live Named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace…

Dr Sue Mann, national clinical director for women’s health, said: “Offering millions of women an alternative test they can do from the comfort of their own homes will be a game-changer – making it easier than ever for them to get tested.”There are lots of reasons that may stop women from getting their cervical screening – embarrassment, lack of time or worries about discomfort – and these kits provide a discreet and convenient option we hope will encourage more women to take up the life-saving test.”The kits contain a swab, similar to a long cotton, bud which is used to…

Research suggests that children who grow up closely connected to their surroundings can develop sophisticated understandings of their local environment.A recent children’s book reading was part of a gathering of Indigenous communities in Arborek that brought together representatives from 20 Indigenous subtribes in Raja Ampat, as well as Indigenous people from other parts of Indonesia and abroad.The book turns the biodiversity of Indonesia into a visual story about what could be lost if mining damages the environment.The author and illustrator hope that seeing their home, animals and stories represented in a book will encourage the children to tell more…

Regarding Nesrine Malik’s article (Here is the news from the US: Woke 1.0 is over. But what did progressives do wrong?, 18 August), the mistake of Woke 1.0 was to believe that a self-evident truth was, well, a self-evident truth. I grew up in a divided society in which it was crystal clear, at least to my community, that we were second-class citizens. Nothing ever seemed to change and in the end we fought a war over it. Today attitudes are a lot different, but new truths are universally embedded.What we learned was that the self-evident truth of “first-class” citizens…

Claim: U.S. President Donald Trump proposed eliminating property taxes for people age 65 and older who have paid off their mortgages. Rating: Context The federal government does not control property taxes, which are levied at the state and local levels. In August 2026, a rumor spread online that U.S. President Donald Trump proposed eliminating property taxes for people age 65 and older who have paid off their mortgages.  People shared the claim on Instagram and Facebook. An X user claimed Trump had already announced such a measure, which would affect “HOMEOWNERS 65+ WHO OWN THEIR HOMES OUTRIGHT” (archived):  Meanwhile, Snopes…

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced new economic sanctions on Tehran, describing the measures as an “economic D-Day” as the US war on Iran approaches the six-month mark.US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the sanctions on Monday, alongside a naval blockade of Iranian ports.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listBessent said the sanctions target key sources of Iran’s revenue, including its oil and gas industry, and called on countries around the world to cut economic ties with Tehran.What are the sanctions?The Treasury Department said the sanctions will target Iran’s aviation, digital assets, gold, technology and…

In declaring a new “economic D-Day” for Iran on Monday, President Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are reaching for yet another strategy to grope their way out of a military adventure gone wrong. Along the way they are reversing the usual approach to coercing adversaries to bend to American will.Ordinarily, Washington approaches a problem like dismantling Iran’s nuclear program with straightforward diplomacy. If that goes nowhere, officials mix in escalating economic sanctions, adding an element of coercion. Military action is a last resort, and only if the president determines that risking American lives is worth the possible benefit.But Mr.…

Bitdefender VPN was reliable in my time using it, as well. I didn’t experience any connection drop-outs or periods of unusually slow performance.These are solid results, though not the best. For example, I saw slightly better speeds (up to 540 Mbps, the same as when not connected to the VPN) while using IVPN with the WireGuard protocol enabled, for example.Still, Bitdefender is plenty fast, very reliable, and I can’t say I found the gap in performance noticeable outside of in particular testing. I expect that most people will find the data rates provided by Bitdefender VPN to be more than…

Information extraction teams face a recurring choice. Small encoder models are cheap but rigid, and large language models are flexible but expensive per document. Fastino released GLiNER2.5 to narrow that gap. The release replaces span enumeration with boundary prediction: the model scores where an entity starts and ends instead of scoring every candidate span against a width grid. That single change removes the maximum entity width, allows a 4,096-word context, and keeps computation linear in sequence length for a fixed schema. It also unlocks joint entity-relation decoding, cross-task label constraints, and per-span attributes. Across 16 zero-shot benchmarks, the multilingual checkpoint…