Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Polls open in Clacton, as research shows Farage has spent more than £10,000 in byelection fight against Count BinfaceGood morning. In the media, August is known as the “silly season”. With parliament not sitting and many people on holiday, there is less proper news than normal, which means the nonsense stories get (even) more attention than usual. We are almost slap bang in the middle of the month, and today we’ve got a silly season classic in Clacton, where Nigel Farage, the Reform UK candidate, is fighting a byelection in which his main opponent is a joke candidate who dresses…

If you’re looking for home and office furniture that will be part of your life for the long haul, Herman Miller is a go-to for well-designed, long-lasting furniture. Whether it’s upgrading your work-from-home setup with a better office chair or amping up your curb appeal with stylish new house numbers, Herman Miller can help. There are several pieces from Herman Miller that we love here at WIRED: the Herman Miller Embody is our “buy it for life” office chair, while Herman Miller’s Spout Sit-to-Stand standing desk is where I’m currently writing from. The brand is known for its thoughtful, high-quality…

Intel and AMD on Tuesday announced patches for a total of more than 80 vulnerabilities across their products. Intel has published 42 new advisories covering 72 vulnerabilities. The company patched several high-severity flaws in PROSet/Wireless WiFi software that could allow an attacker to escalate privileges or conduct a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. In addition, high-severity vulnerabilities have been addressed in Xeon processors (privilege escalation), Data Center Attestation Primitives (information disclosure), Alias Checking Trusted Module for Xeon processors (privilege escalation), TDX (privilege escalation), Active Management Technology (DoS), PROSet/Wireless WiFi software (local code execution, privilege escalation and DoS), and CSME and SPS (privilege…

In brief Grok Bot completes tasks across apps, websites, and inboxes. According to SpaceXAI, multiple bots can communicate, share context, and divide work. The service requires access to workplace accounts and potentially sensitive company data. Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is joining the race to build AI agents that can navigate software and complete work for users.Launched on Tuesday for Windows and iOS, Grok Bot operates through a cloud-based computer that allows it to sign into workplace tools, navigate websites, and manage email inboxes. According to SpaceXAI, users can assign tasks in plain English rather than building automated workflows, leaving Grok Bot…

Researchers at the University of Basel and the Technical University of Munich have found a new way to examine how electrons move together inside one of the most elusive forms of matter, the Wigner crystal. By using light to probe this delicate quantum state, the physicists uncovered properties that had previously been extremely difficult to observe. When electrons are restricted to a two-dimensional plane and interact strongly enough, they can begin behaving very differently from ordinary electrons. Instead of moving independently, they arrange themselves into a repeating pattern similar to the orderly structure of atoms in a conventional crystal. This…

The tools the environmental justice movement spent decades building are being pulled apart. The Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative—meant to steer 40 percent of the benefits of federal climate spending toward “disadvantaged” communities—has been unwound, and the Trump administration has moved to terminate environmental justice grants, some mid-project. Lemir Teron’s timing could hardly be sharper. In his new book, “Unlearn Power: Strengthening Communities in the Age of Environmental Crisis,” the Howard University associate professor argues that the race-neutral “disadvantaged communities” language at the center of those programs was always a compromise worth abandoning because it flattened distinct injuries into a single…

Argentina star Lionel Messi hinted at retirement on Wednesday before featuring in Inter Miami’s defeat by Leon.Published On 13 Aug 202613 Aug 2026Lionel Messi made an emotional return to action following his father’s death and hinted at retirement, but it was not enough to prevent his Inter Miami side from being knocked out of the Leagues Cup in a 3-2 loss to Mexico’s Leon.The Miami captain flew back to Florida from Argentina on Tuesday night after attending the funeral of his father, Jorge, on Sunday and came on at half-time to a massive ovation.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of…

When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes long-term plans, they call it communism. Any sustained state intervention attracts the prefix “Soviet-style”, and triggers vicious attacks across the billionaire media. So governments have developed a bias against long-term thinking. This may explain why we no longer maintain strategic food reserves.In Britain, where soils have parched, market analysts warn that we’re facing the most severe food security crisis in decades. In normal years, crop failures at home don’t threaten our security, thanks to global trade. This is one of the reasons why hunger and famines…

Anthropic recently made the decision to watermark Claude’s outputs — inserting invisible code into the chatbot’s editorial text that marks it as AI-generated. Anthropic rolled out this new policy to satisfy the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code, which now requires tech companies to label content that has been AI-generated or edited in a manner identifiable to computer systems. Yet while European regulators may be happy, some AI users are decidedly not. One need look no further than Reddit to find evidence of brewing discontent, though other posters on the site are not in agreement. One of the more histrionic posts…

SpaceXAI just released Grok 4.6. The release is a post-training upgrade over Grok 4.5 rather than a larger base model. SpaceXAI held the foundation constant and spent the improvement on a longer supplemental training run, regenerated supervised fine-tuning trajectories, and reinforcement learning in agentic environments. Agents that stay on a task across many steps without drifting. Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, up five points from Grok 4.5 and tied with GPT-5.6 Sol Max. The model takes 500,000 context tokens, is live today in Cursor and Grok Build, and adds a new xhigh reasoning-effort level above…