Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Fedorov criticised bureaucracy in the UK and other countries supporting Ukraine for delays in supplying weapons.The UK is a longstanding supporter of Ukraine, spending £16bn supplying weapons since the war began. It was confirmed last week that British-made drones have been used to attack Russian targets.Fedorov said he was grateful for British support but blamed “bureaucracy and red tape” for delays in receiving promised equipment.”Governments are lagging behind the realities on the ground. It’s not only the issue for UK, but for other countries as well that announce some assistance and we are not getting it until the end of…

Scottish people have always been known for their friendliness. “We’re not like the south of us,” they say, referring to England. The official slogan of Scotland’s largest city, “People make Glasgow”, appears everywhere – on T-shirts, buildings, bus stops and mugs. And when I first moved to Scotland from India in 2018, I was immediately welcomed by kind strangers and helpful neighbours. People showed curiosity, rather than intrusiveness. They respected queues; told me I fit right in. Music, art and cultural events were considered inclusive spaces in the city, with calls for diversity, creativity, inclusion – all the good things.As…

Nina Raemont/Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Deciding between two generations of the same product can be a tough proposition. Do you care more about novelty or overall value? Do you err on the side of maximalism or minimalism? Are you willing to spend a little more for a few new features?Also: I replaced my Samsung with the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold – a week later, I’m going backThat’s the age old question around here, and it’s rarely an easy one to answer. Nevertheless, we try our hand. This week’s challenge comes in the form of the…

By Allison Dries-Padilla, Missions Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 14, 2026 This week of Curiosity Mars rover operations takes us back to our “regularly scheduled programming.” After taking a slight detour to investigate the “erosional surface” we are back on course to ascend Mount Sharp. As we transition into fall in Gale Crater, temperatures and the likelihood of dust storms begins to drop, but Curiosity is still on the lookout for the last gasp of late-season local and regional dust storms. Monday’s plan for Sols 4982 to 4985 began with Curiosity standing face…

Wildfires in New England rarely make national news. The spotlight is more often on the catastrophic fires of Western states, but the Northeast’s fire season has been quietly heating up. In 2025, severe drought quadrupled Maine’s late summer fire activity. In 2024, another drought quintupled Connecticut’s fall wildfires, and one firefighter died while controlling a blaze. It was also Massachusetts’ most active fall fire season in 40 years.  Across the border, Nova Scotia saw its largest wildfires in recorded history in 2023, and more than 10 million acres burned in Quebec, creating a smoky haze that spread thousands of miles…

Hackers linked to Iran have been blamed for a cyber-attack that caused a British power plant to be temporarily shut down.The incident involved a small-scale energy generator, according to the UK government and at no point was there there risk to the wider energy system.However, it marks an apparent escalation in the threat posed by Iran after the UK said it had given permission for the US to launch “defensive” operations against Tehran from British bases.The power plant was shut down for four days as a result of the attack last month, according to the Sunday Telegraph, which first reported…

There is a convention, when someone launches a spinoff of a hit TV show, of having the star of the original appear in the pilot to give it a boost. As it is in Hollywood, so it is in Washington.Thus the first episode of “The Great American Road Trip” — the family-reality-show-meets-sponsor-showcase-meets-political-branding-exercise starring the secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy — includes an Oval Office cameo from President Trump. The former “Apprentice” host, in effusive M.C. mode, grants his blessing to the legacyquel, as Duffy and his family begin a six-episode tour.It’s a fitting project for an administration in which camera-readiness…

Water is supposed to be the simplest thing we consume. The premium bottled water industry has transformed it into something that requires a backstory.Supermarket shelves now distinguish between glacial, iceberg, volcanic, spring, mineral, and alkaline water. Restaurants are introducing water menus, while trained water sommeliers assess bottles by their mineral composition, mouthfeel and provenance. At the extreme end of the category, Svalbarði Polar Iceberg Water sells Arctic water for as much as €100 (around $116) a bottle.The category’s growth rests on a mixture of verifiable differences and carefully constructed associations. Water can contain different minerals. Those minerals can change how…

In this tutorial, we implement a document intelligence pipeline with deepDoctection 1.2.x that combines layout detection, table structure recognition, OCR, reading-order reconstruction, annotation linking, and structured export in a single workflow. We configure the analyzer explicitly with DocLayNet-based layout detection, Table Transformer structure recognition, and DocTR OCR, then inspect the resulting Page objects to understand how deepDoctection represents text, figures, tables, relationships, provenance, and reading order. We also extend the framework by registering custom object types and implementing our own PipelineComponent for extracting monetary and date entities while classifying documents by their tabular characteristics. Finally, we assemble a custom pipeline…

Circle now has a federal bank charter. However, the charter provides no ordinary checking accounts, FDIC-insured savings accounts, or mortgages.Circle National Trust is part of a new federal cohort built around custody, fiduciary administration, stablecoin reserves, and settlement.Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Bridge, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Morgan Stanley and World Liberty Financial have all received some form of Office of the Comptroller of the Currency approval since December. Most are still completing conditions required before opening.Washington is giving crypto companies the regulatory shell of banking while separating it from the business model Americans usually associate with a bank. The result…