Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Cristiano Ronaldo says this season is likely to be his last as a player after a glittering career.The 41-year-old married his partner, Georgina Rodriguez, on Tuesday and is contemplating a future orientated around his family.A five-time Ballon d’Or and five-time Champions League winner, Ronaldo has won league titles in England, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia and is the all-time top goalscorer in men’s international football.The Portugal captain has spent almost four years at Saudi Pro League champions Al-Nassr, where he has one year remaining on his contract.”This is probably my last year of football, and I want to leave a…

Most people received the blaring alert at 19:00 BST on Friday – and it came as a surprise given the government had not told people it was coming, as it has done for tests of the system.The notification, which cautioned against the use of disposable barbecues, naked flames or fireworks, was the biggest use yet of the emergency alert system and Prime Minister Andy Burnham urged the public to take it “seriously”.A Cabinet Office press release, posted to their website at about 18:45 on Friday, was missed by many in the media, which meant there was little warning to the…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pushed back against the idea that he’s been painting an overly pessimistic picture of artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future. Amodei’s comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued — both on the All-In podcast and on X — that Amodei’s warnings about the dangers of AI have helped to fuel a backlash in the United States, particularly against data centers.  Claiming that Amodei has “lost the argument” when it comes to AI regulation (Anthropic has advocated for some regulations, including a California bill that imposes transparency requirements on large…

Cboe BZX is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an exception to its own generic listing rules so it can list funds targeting three times the daily performance of Bitcoin and Ethereum futures.The Aug. 10 proposal covers six Volatility Shares funds tied to Bitcoin, Ethereum, gold, silver, crude oil and natural gas. The crypto products would use futures traded primarily on CME rather than hold BTC or ETH directly.The filing remains pending. An SEC notice dated Aug. 14 said the funds’ registration statement was not yet effective and the shares had not been authorized for trading.The proposed funds…

Iran’s military announced on Sunday that it was offering a bounty equivalent to $30,000 for killing or capturing US soldiers, with the reward doubled if carried out by a woman. Army chief Amir Hatami said the plan had been drawn up following a “large number of requests” to participate, according to the IRNA state news agency. There has been no known deployment of US ground forces in Iran during the Middle East war, with the exception of a rescue mission in April for a downed American airman. Read moreFrom Tehran’s walls to the world: Iran’s visual propaganda as an art…

A statue of the Virgin Mary believed to be Europe’s tallest has been formally unveiled in a small Polish village.The 55.6-metre (182ft) concrete figure is roughly two double-decker buses longer than Rio de Janeiro’s smaller – if more prominently placed – Christ the Redeemer monument, though it still pales in comparison to a 98m Virgin Mary erected in the Philippines.The ecclesiastical sculpture in rural Konotopie was consecrated by a local bishop in a ceremony on Saturday, a day chosen to coincide with the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.Its inauguration comes at a time when the influence…

Todd Blanche, the newly confirmed attorney general, refused to say on Sunday that he would always act independently of White House control but claimed during an interview that President Trump has “never” demanded he prosecute specific people.Mr. Blanche, displaying a greater ease in fielding a variety of pointed questions than his predecessor, Pam Bondi, sought to balance his loyalty to the president and a commitment to the evenhanded administration of justice during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”“There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case, and act independently of the White…

The businessman and Reform UK backer Arron Banks commissioned a private intelligence firm to dig into the Conservative party chair, in addition to having paid for an investigation into a prominent journalist.Banks, a former Reform UK candidate and leave campaign donor, appeared to confirm on Sunday that he was behind an investigation into Kevin Hollinrake.The use of private investigators to look into Hollinrake was first reported by the Mail on Sunday, which said Banks had used Precision Risk and Intelligence, a firm he previously owned.As party chair, Hollinrake has led the Conservatives’ response to revelations about Nigel Farage’s finances, asking…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Something was in the air this week because we had a heck of a lot of electric aircraft news. Ba-dum-tss. But really, it’s no joke — two of the bigger deals of the week involved companies developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL). Together they illustrate how the burgeoning sector continues to consolidate and seek out near-term revenue streams even as they go through the…

In brief Gemini 3.7 Flash built a playable browser game from a single prompt in 2 minutes and 13 seconds, a task Gemini 3.6 Flash failed outright three weeks earlier. It failed our bridge logic puzzle with the same wrong answer as Claude Fable 5, and stopped short of actually calculating the math problem it correctly set up. The model runs at 75 cents per million input tokens through December 31, half of 3.6 Flash’s rate, before doubling to $1.50 on January 1. Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13, generally available in more than 160 countries on day…