Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

He looked like one of the many digital nomads appearing in Vietnam these days as he plopped his bag on a table near the back of a stylish cafe and ordered a coffee.Then he ripped off his shirt and ordered everyone to leave.Security footage captured the man, Shaymus Lilly, 34, an Australian brand strategist, clearing counters and shattering windows at Gé Cafe in the coastal city of Da Nang. He smashed a stranger’s phone and choked a young Vietnamese man before police officers hauled him away.Witnesses wondered if he was mentally ill and followed him to the station. The only…

The agency’s two Republicans, Chair Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty, voted to end the ownership cap, which restricts broadcast owners from holding stations that reach a combined more than 39 percent of US TV households, while Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented. It formalizes a policy Carr has long criticized, and which he announced last month that he would seek to end at Thursday’s open FCC meeting. In place of a set limit, the FCC says, there will now be “granular, case-by-case review” to determine if broadcast consolidation is in the public interest. That will let the agency avoid having…

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-2.6B, an agentic model that runs entirely on-device. It plans, calls tools, and works through multi-step tasks on phones, laptops, PCs, and robots. The model has 2.69B total parameters, a 131,072-token context window, and a 128,000-token vocabulary. Pre-training used approximately 34 trillion tokens. Two checkpoints shipped: LFM2.5-2.6B-Base for fine-tuning, and LFM2.5-2.6B post-trained for agentic workloads. Because inference stays local, data never leaves the device and the marginal cost of each run is near zero. Liquid AI reports tool-use and instruction-following scores competitive with models nearly four times its size. Is it deployable The answer is Yes. Both…

Coinspect has identified CryptoJS.lib.WordArray.random() as the weak random number generator behind the Ill Bloom wallet drains. Introduced in the JavaScript cryptography library 12 years ago, the function supplied weak entropy that affected wallet apps used to generate recovery phrases. Coinspect’s on-chain analysis puts the measured theft across two sweeps since late May at a lower bound of roughly $5.7 million. The blockchain security firm, which coined the Ill Bloom name in July, has now confirmed five applications that used the generator as an entropy source for recovery-phrase generation: RRWallet, which Coinspect says is discontinued. No fix. Bexo Wallet, which Coinspect…

But many of the issues holding the bill up are now political, rather than strictly about the language in the legislation.Lawmakers have come to agreements on the vast majority of their outstanding issues on the bill, which saw independent approvals from the Senate Banking Committee and Agriculture Committee. The biggest remaining issue was an agreement on a so-called ethics provision targeting Trump, who disclosed he made north of $1 billion from his various crypto businesses in 2025.While Trump had agreed to an ethics provision brokered by Senator Cynthia Lummis, Senate Democrats — and some Republicans, including Thom Tillis — said…

Scientists have long believed that warm, salty water flowing from the Indian Ocean around the southern tip of Africa and into the Atlantic helps support one of the planet’s most important ocean circulation systems. This flow, known as Agulhas Leakage, has been considered a major contributor to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which forms part of the global ocean conveyor system. New findings from an international research team based in the Netherlands, USA, China and UK suggest that this relationship is more complicated than previously assumed. Their results indicate that changes in Agulhas Leakage do not always produce the…

Over the past two decades, Belize lost around 20% of its forest cover — more than 350,000 hectares (865,000 acres). Much of it is the result of agricultural expansion by Mennonites, the conservative Christian denomination that arrived in the country more than six decades ago. To understand the corporate machinery that’s allowed the Mennonites to expand so quickly, often outbidding private landowners and environmental groups trying to protect the rainforest, a Mongabay investigation conducted extensive interviews and reviewed dozens of land records. The investigation found a unique system of strategic land titling and pooled financial resources, with communities…

The claim that the U.S. had burned through “virtually all” of its precision strike missiles during its war on Iran stems from an Aug. 4, 2026, report by news outlet Reuters citing anonymous sources “familiar with the data.”  Also on Aug. 4, CNN reported that anonymous “senior U.S. military commanders” said “nearly 80% of interceptors for a key missile defense system” had been depleted. While the claim circulating on social media is based on real news media reports from reputable outlets, we left the claim unrated because the reports are based on anonymous sources, which Snopes does not rely on…

Israeli forces arrest dozens of Palestinians near Jerusalem amid uptick in military and settler violence in West Bank.Published On 7 Aug 20267 Aug 2026A “large-scale” Israeli raid in the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank has injured at least 51 Palestinians, the Jerusalem Governorate told Al Jazeera.Israeli forces demolished commercial shops near the Qalandiya checkpoint on Thursday, before imposing a curfew on the neighbouring town of Kafr Aqab and sealing off roads linking the area to Jerusalem.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listThe Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said 35 people were hospitalised after severe beatings and…

Deadline reported Thursday that the upcoming The Legend of Zelda movie will feature Australian actor Uli Latukefu as the villain Ganondorf, and the publication notes that “We hear Latukefu inked a multi-picture deal.”Nintendo or Sony haven’t formally confirmed that there’s more than one movie in the works, though it’s been rumored that Nintendo and Sony might be planning a trilogy. Still, it’s not exactly unexpected that more Zelda movies might be on the way, especially given the huge success of the recent Super Mario films at the box office.Nintendo initially announced the live-action Zelda movie, which it’s making with Sony…