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Pyongyang has accused the US of pushing the world ‘to the brink of nuclear war’.Published On 14 Aug 202614 Aug 2026North Korea has denounced major United States-South Korea military drills set to start next week as a provocation that heightens tensions on the Korean Peninsula.The US-Japan-South Korea military cooperation is turning into a nuclear alliance, and North Korea will respond to a new level of threat with a new level of deterrent, a spokesperson for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday, according to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listPyongyang routinely denounces military…

Zelenskyy moved his reshuffle plans forward so he could offer the ambassadorship to Yulia Svyrydenko, the outgoing prime minister, according to a former senior Ukrainian official and a Republican foreign expert familiar with the background to the shake-up. But she declined, disrupting his plans.  “It is no secret that I counted on and offered Yulia Svyrydenko the post of ambassador to the United States,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in late July. He added that he was looking for a candidate with the highest possible qualifications: “a person at the level of a deputy prime minister, minister, or prime…

Nigel Farage did not turn up to savour his victory in the by-election he triggered himself.Overnight he told a rally of Reform UK supporters he had been advised there was an “organised campaign to disrupt and degrade the result” and wanted to avoid being “demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.When the official result did come in hours later, it confirmed the Reform UK leader had indeed won this by-election convincingly with 22,239 votes, but without any serious opposition after the other main parties did not put up candidate.Farage’s allies say he has been both emboldened and re-energised by this race, and…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket last year over regulatory concerns, underscoring enduring cautious sentiment towards prediction markets. JPMorgan notified Polymarket that it needed to find a new bank in October, according to people familiar with the matter. Polymarket is now working with a new lender, the name of which could not be learnt. At the time, Polymarket was banned from allowing US customers to use its platform following a 2022 enforcement action by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for operating…

I’ve been trying to become fluent in Spanish for the last decade. After spending most of my adult life surrounded by multilinguals, I often feel like I’m playing an impossible game of catch-up. Like everyone else, I’ve tried to become regimented with practicing on an in-phone app like Duolingo, which attempts to ‘game-ify’ language learning, but mostly ends up with a sad and sick-looking green bird icon guilting me to practice every time I open up my phone.Babbel aims to help people actually learn the language through practical conversation and grammar, using proven pedagogical methods and speech recognition technology. Each…

Cactus Compute has released Needle 2, an open 45M-parameter model for tool calling, device use, and structured extraction. The entire model ships as a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in about 28MB of RAM. Weights are trained and deployed at CQ2-bit using Cactus Quants, and the model is sealed inside the company’s own C++ engine, so there is no runtime to install and no download at inference time. Reported decode throughput is 500 tokens/sec on a Raspberry Pi 5, 400–1,500 tokens/sec on Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and 300–700 tokens/sec on sub-$200 phones. The design…

The Jewelbug hacker group has been carrying out espionage operations targeting governments and militaries while also engaging in cryptocurrency fraud. Although the threat actor has targeted government agencies and organizations in critical sectors, including defense, telecommunications, education, and aviation, its cryptocurrency-related activity suggests that they may also operate as a hack-for-hire group that seeks to profit from cybercrime. In a recent operation, Jewelbug (also known as Earth Alux and REF7707) compromised webmail accounts belonging to 15 government tenants as part of a campaign targeting a country in the Middle East. Researchers at Symantec found that the espionage campaign and the cryptocurrency fraud…

Stablecoin giant Tether has announced that KPMG U.S. completed the first independent audit of its reserves after years of struggling to get a Big Four accounting firm to do so. The San Salvador-based company, which issues the largest stablecoin in existence, USDT, said the audit was “the largest inaugural financial audit in history.” Tether for years was criticized for being coy about its reserves and not having an independent audit of what it holds behind its flagship token. Tether said over the years that it was eager to work with a Big Four firm for an audit.  “For years, some…

Wainwright has been searching for new English colonies since he started working for Butterfly Conservation in 2004.He even visited the Wallington estate that year but found none.But on his most recent visit, Wainwright said they found one “within a few minutes”.”I was hopeful – I’m always hopeful- but I definitely didn’t expect it because I’ve been to so many sites to look for this species over the years, so my heart and head were in two different places,” he said.”It was one of the highlights of my career.”Overwhelmingly it was just a feeling of relief that we weren’t just fighting…

Nigel Farage has seen off Count Binface to win the Clacton byelection in a contest boycotted by every other major political party.The Reform UK leader in July triggered the byelection in an attempt to shake off a deepening scandal over a £5m gift he received from the cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne.After a campaign in which a record-breaking 34 candidates vied for the coastal seat, Farage held on to Clacton, with 22,239 votes (62.8%) of the vote.His nearest competitor, Count Binface, a parody candidate dressed as an intergalactic rubbish bin, won 9,455 votes (26.7%). The turnout was 44%.Farage had been widely…