Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Bitcoin market cap must rise to ARK Invest’s roughly $16 trillion 2030 base case, requiring about 78.6% annual growth from the current level; institutions and digital-gold adoption carry almost the entire scenario.CryptoSlate’s Bitcoin market cap stands at near $1,263,920,244,537. Reaching $16 trillion by Dec. 31, 2030, from that point requires a 12.659-fold increase in a little over four years.However, July 2026 spot-Bitcoin ETF flows expose weak demand in the most visible US institutional channel. The current Farside daily table sums to just $172.8 million of net inflows for US spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. ARK’s scenario reaches far beyond one month and…

On the Riviera di Ponente, sandwiched between the glitzy resort towns of the Ligurian coast, sits the Albenga plain. Dotted with campsites and bungalows, the area developed during Italy’s postwar boom as an affordable refuge for workers to escape the smog of nearby industrial cities like Turin and Milan. While much of the surrounding coast is now given over to boutique lidos, this corner of the riviera is still a place where families gather in the shade of eucalyptus trees to play cards, share picnics and nap through the afternoon heat to the chorus of cicadas. These are the stubborn…

The Labor government has pledged a new single-service opt-out register for gambling ads – an idea similar to the Do Not Call register for spam calls – as part of amendments to its wagering ad bill, as well as restrictions on inducements and limiting commissions for agents.Communications minister Anika Wells has also confirmed gambling companies will face a new levy to pay for the register, a beefed-up measure to curb wagering ads, after concerns were raised through a Senate inquiry that Australians would struggle to find or complete individual opt-out options on each online service.The measure falls short of calls…

It is hard to find the words to describe the agony for those who have experienced preventable baby loss, injury or maternal death. Understandably, families who have been through this have campaigned relentlessly for local and national investigations. Every family deserves to know what caused their loss or trauma, but current and past reviews have failed to deliver on resolution and accountability.The vital debate about how to ensure safe maternity care has intensified since the publication of two reports, led by Valerie Amos and Donna Ockenden, and the appointment of Yvette Cooper as secretary of state for health and social…

More women will die if ministers include domestic abusers in the early prison release scheme, the parents of a woman murdered by her partner shortly after he was freed have warned.Michaela Hall, a 49-year-old charity worker, was killed in her home in Cornwall, by Lee Kendall in 2021 two weeks after he was released from prison, where he had been serving a sentence for assaulting her.The Probation Service incorrectly assessed Kendall as medium risk, despite the fact he had strangled Hall, threatened her with weapons and police had received 34 pieces ofintelligence about his abuse against her.At an inquest into…

The race for faster AI inference is on, and markets gave Cerebras and its purpose-built chips a warm welcome in its IPO debut in May. But French startup Kog is betting that there’s a lot more power to be squeezed out of conventional GPUs. The startup hit the front page of Hacker News in May with a tech preview aimed at proving that “extremely fast single-request decoding is possible on the standard datacenter GPUs enterprises already own” — such as the AMD MI300X and Nvidia H200 GPUs it used for its demo. Some were disappointed to hear this didn’t extend…

Blockchain analytics company Chainalysis has sued the United States government over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) decision to award a sole-source contract to competitor TRM Labs. On July 27, Chainalysis Government Solutions filed the challenge in the US Court of Federal Claims. The relevant motion became publicly accessible through CourtListener’s RECAP archive on Sunday. A federal award notice values the contract at about $94.6 million and says it covers forensic software and support services for Homeland Security Task Force investigations. The one-year award runs from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027. Chainalysis alleged that ICE’s decision was “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.”…

A pond near a Surrey gardens is at its lowest level for nearly two decades, a local wildlife charity has said.The pond at Pond Farm on Wisley Common, adjacent to RHS Garden Wisley, has been drying up over recent weeks as the hot weather persists.James Herd, director of reserves management at Surrey Wildlife Trust (SWT) where he has worked for 17 years, admits he has “never seen the pond so low” in that time.”It is a very obvious visual indication of the scale of the drought,” he said.The UK has experienced its fifth heatwave of the year, while meteorologists at…

President Donald Trump has handled the war with Iran in an unconventional fashion, to say the least. Based on the reporting that has emerged thus far, the president’s long-standing hostility toward Iran, dating back to the 1979 hostage crisis, combined with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to decapitate one of his country’s fiercest adversaries, helped drive the military operations that have now been underway for nearly six months at a cost of at least $37.5 billion. Since the war began, negotiations over a resolution have been chaotic. Americans have witnessed announcements of ceasefires, violations of those ceasefires, and statements…

The claim that a Canadian man named Garnet Harper, who died of kidney failure in 2023, was denied a kidney transplant because he wasn’t vaccinated against COVID-19 remains under investigation.  It was true that Harper died from kidney failure on May 22, 2023, according to his obituary. Harper’s wife said he was denied a referral for a kidney transplant because he had not received the COVID-19 vaccine.  However, Snopes relies on primary evidence, such as medical records and officials’ confirmation, to rate claims. Since we were unable to independently verify that Harper’s vaccination status directly led to him being refused…