Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

She added: “But there’s a serious point, isn’t it? If you are saying that you want to be a globally competitive city that has a growing economy and delivers for your residents, then you’ve also got to put your grown-up shoes on. “And when people come to town, you’ve got to make sure that you’re hosting world leaders in a way that reflects the U.K. in a professional and serious way.” ‘Cool, calm heads’ Craig, who grew up in Northern Ireland, was pressed on Trump’s incendiary recent call for Irish reunification. She urged caution on the issue — but declined…

Andy Burnham’s first address to the Labour party conference as prime minister is due to address Britain’s rising energy costs and sluggish economic growth with plans for a new government-backed body to invest in the electricity grid.The proposals to set up GB Grid, first revealed by the Guardian, build on the party’s manifesto pledge to create Great British Energy, a state-owned company to invest in renewables, but with the tougher challenge of lowering bills and supercharging the economy.“We have a cost crisis. We all know it,” Burnham is expected to say. “The price of energy is crippling for businesses, and…

Firefox will look a little different the next time you launch it — more bubbly, with some new pops of color. The browser’s latest update brings a design overhaul to all desktop and mobile users, aimed at modernizing Firefox with bubble-like tabs, a rounded address bar, and refreshed colors, icons, and themes. The desktop and mobile versions of the browser will also now share the same design language. According to Mozilla, the design changes will have “no cost to your browser performance.”Mozilla says the overhauled design is a “renewal” for Firefox, following major updates over the last year, like home…

Google Cloud AI Research, with UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford and Washington University in St. Louis, has released RRSI (Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement). It lets an LLM agent rewrite its own harness: prompts, tools, memory, control flow and sub-agents. Model weights never change. RRSI constrains the improvement loop itself, so gains hold on benchmarks the agent never optimized against. Deployable? Yes, as a research framework. The code is Apache 2.0, needs Python 3.10+, and accepts any LiteLLM model string. Defaults assume Claude Opus 4.8 on Vertex AI. Why Self-Improving Harnesses Overfit Harness evolution loops propose edits, score them on a fixed evolve set…

Agentic cybersecurity firm Reco today announced raising $55 million in a strategic funding round that brings the total raised by the company to $140 million. The investment round was led by AT&T Ventures, with additional support from new investors Forestay and Quadrille Capital. Founded in 2020, New York-based Reco provides organizations with an overview of the agents that are active in their environments and the risks they pose. The company shows security teams which identities the AI agents use, their permissions, what data and which systems they reach, and the workflows they can initiate. Using the Reco Graph, it maps…

The US–Greenland security deal isn’t really about ice or minerals. Dr. Pippa Malmgren says it’s about the space race. The former White House economic advisor and founder of the Geopolitica Institute explains why missile tracking and satellite ground stations make the Arctic critical, and why Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands are next. She then connects geopolitics to markets, from US debt to China’s Treasury selling to the future of Bitcoin. Chapters:0:00 Dr. Pippa Malmgren on Greenland, the Arctic, and the Space Race2:04 Diego Garcia, the Chagos Islands, and America’s Strategic Bases2:51 100% Debt-to-GDP: The Administration’s Plan to Grow Out…

Wednesday, August 26 began as a regular day for Prakash Pyakurel, a 43-year-old shopkeeper in the bustling town of Dhunge Bazaar in the northern belt of Central Nepal. Then sometime around 9:10 a.m. came the muffled crackle of a police loudspeaker. The words were “impossible to hear” over the noise of the town, he says. Pyakurel took a couple of minutes to piece together that the announcement was calling for evacuation. He lost time closing the shop before sprinting home to alert his parents and daughter. In their living room, just a few hundred meters from the Trishuli River, they…

While there is no single prescription for energy security, strengthening “response capacity,” such as by establishing stockpiles, substituting sources, and diversifying suppliers, is essential. The point is not to eliminate vulnerabilities altogether, but to ensure that there are options when disruption arrives. GENEVA/HOUSTON/LISBON—The largest energy-supply shock in modern history has delivered a surprising lesson: the global energy system is remarkably adaptable. When the Iran war disrupted passage through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly one-fifth of global oil supplies and liquefied natural gas was affected. But worst-case scenarios have been broadly avoided, thanks to years of investment in resilience. …

A video being shared widely online wrongly claims it shows “a queue of all Muslim Women waiting to enroll their children for FREE Daycare” in the Netherlands.The social media posts show a sped up clip of a person walking past a long queue of women outdoors, who are mostly wearing hijabs, lining up to enter the doors of a large building. It’s been shared with a caption which says European governments are giving free state welfare to “Africans and Muslims outside the EU”, and suggests the video shows only Muslim parents waiting to sign up for subsidised childcare in a…

News organizations ask court to bar White House enforcement of access ban until case is resolvedThree news outlets that Donald Trump banned from White House have asked a federal court to block the ban until the case is resolved.The media organizations say the administration has “persisted in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing its ban” despite a judge’s restraining order – including selectively barring CNN from White House pool duties, AP reported.“The White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS Now, and POLITICO if allowed the opportunity,” lawyers for CNN, MS…