Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Military and government sources say the paramilitary RSF and allies advance into town of Kurmuk in Blue Nile state.Published On 13 Aug 202613 Aug 2026Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces and allies of the paramilitary group have advanced into a strategically important town on the Sudanese border with Ethiopia, military and government sources told Al Jazeera.They said the RSF and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – North (SPLM-N) entered Kurmuk in Blue Nile State on Thursday, as the army began to withdraw.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAn RSF statement said an RSF-led coalition had inflicted heavy losses on army troops…

Twenty-eight-year-old Jacob Fortinsky has been busy. “I was a groomsman at two weddings this weekend,” he tells me over Zoom. Also, the sports trading company he runs, Novig, launched its prediction market last week, facilitating $18 million in trading volume on its first day. Today, Novig launches a “responsible trading framework” in its exchange rulebook, codifying its guardrails as part of its effort to be seen as a kinder, gentler prediction market player.Unlike industry leaders like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow people 18 and older to participate, you have to be at least 21 to use Novig. Fortinsky says that…

Dyna Robotics has released Dyna-2, a world-action model for robot manipulation. It was pre-trained on more than one million hours of egocentric human video. That is roughly 170 years of continuous waking experience. Robot learning has been bottlenecked by action-labelled data, which teleoperation must deliberately produce. Dyna-2 tests whether ordinary human video can substitute. The research team trained a data ladder from 1,000 to 1,000,000 hours and measured what scales. Three results follow: a scaling law on human data, the first transfer of that law to unseen robot data, and evidence that video prediction drives the transfer. Is it deployable?…

Swati KhandelwalAug 11, 2026Cryptography / Software Supply Chain Mozilla has scrapped the cryptographic key behind Firefox and Thunderbird downloads for Linux after an unencrypted copy of it was committed by mistake to one of the company’s own private code repositories. That key is how a user, or a Linux distribution packaging the browser, confirms a downloaded Firefox tarball came from Mozilla and was not tampered with. That decision carries a cost for anyone who checks what they download: files signed with the old key stop verifying once a user imports the revocation. That covers older Firefox and Thunderbird downloads, not…

Tether completed the first full independent audit of its annual financial statements, with KPMG US issuing a clean opinion on the stablecoin issuer’s 2025 accounts.The audit covered Tether’s balance sheet, income statement and cash flows for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, including the assets backing its issued tokens and the liabilities they represent. Tether said the audited statements showed reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion.Unlike Tether’s quarterly reserve attestations, which it has published for years, the full audit subjected the company’s broader financial statements and underlying evidence to independent examination, including transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations and counterparties.Source: Paolo Ardoino As part…

Marine heatwaves are increasingly being recognized as more than an environmental problem. New research warns that prolonged periods of unusually warm ocean temperatures can also threaten human physical and mental health. Researchers from Adelaide University and the University of Hong Kong say marine heatwaves should be treated as an important public health concern. They argue that the effects on people have received relatively little attention, even as evidence continues to show how widely these events can affect communities. The consequences can be severe. The rapid strengthening of Hurricane Otis in 2023 and the destruction it caused in Mexico (an estimated…

The Sand Creek Fire had grown to 27,736 acres on Thursday after burning through parts of Maverick Mountain Ski Area in southwestern Montana, but firefighters succeeded in protecting the ski lodge and nearby Elkhorn Hot Springs as the blaze pushed through the area. Philip Knaub, operations section chief for the inter-agency Northern Rockies Complex Incident Management Team 3, said Thursday that Elkhorn Hot Springs was fully intact and no structures had been lost in the resort’s main facility area. The Maverick Mountain ski lodge and surrounding buildings also remained standing. The fire did burn through parts of the ski area.…

France’s energy giant TotalEnergies has selected Seoul-based Daewoo Engineering & Construction (Daewoo E&C) as the preferred bidder for a major package on a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Papua New Guinea, Oceania. Papua LNG; Courtesy of Santos Daewoo E&C has secured preferred bidder status for the engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning (EPCC) of the Papua LNG project’s central processing facility (CPF) and wellpads. The CPF and related infrastructure will process and treat natural gas produced from the Elk-Antelope gas fields before supplying it to a liquefaction plant at Caution Bay near Port Moresby. The large-scale resource development aims to…

Misleading discounts and obstructive cancellation procedures certainly deserve regulation. But presenting this as a significant response to the cost of living crisis feels like rearranging the cushions while the sofa is on fire (Subscriptions you can’t easily cancel, sales that aren’t sales – I’ll end the rip-offs that British people hate, 9 August).For millions of households, the problem is not finding the “unsubscribe” button. It is finding that £50 buys remarkably little at the supermarket, while housing and essential bills consume ever more of their income.Perhaps this is merely the appetiser and something considerably more substantial is coming for the…

It’s Friday, and as promised I have something fun for you: My colleague Chico Harlan, our global climate correspondent, is taking you on a high-adrenaline motorcycle ride through Lahore. And not just on any motorcycle. The bike he rode was electric — as are an increasing number of motorcycles on the streets of Pakistan.Thrills aside, Chico’s reporting shows something intriguing: The war in Iran has sped up the clean energy transition. In the countries most vulnerable to higher gasoline prices, like Pakistan, the most common vehicles tend to have two wheels, not four. In those countries, the electric motorcycle era…