Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldThe writer is author of ‘A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore’In the 100-year history of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Donald Trump is the only US president who has spoken there twice. His speeches, given six years apart to celebrate Independence Day, used it as a backdrop to offer his vision of American history and exceptionalism.The sculpture of four presidents carved into the billion-year-old granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills has become a symbol…

ZDNET composite; Getty Images / D3DamonMore than 90% of ransomware attacks now try to delete or tamper with backups before a payload ever fires, according to a recent ransomware report. And nearly 60% of the attacks that go after backups succeed. Outages are no longer just IT headaches; they’re a risk for the entire enterprise.Delayed recoveries bring business-critical processes to a halt, hamper team productivity, and lead to permanent customer losses. Many service disruptions result from a common, albeit costly misconception: Backup isn’t recovery. In one U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, for example, 94% of surveyed SMB leaders believed their…

webAI has released TwIL-LM, a two-model family of formal-logic reasoners at 1.7B and 3B parameters. The 3B member, TwIL-LM3, is a merged fine-tune of SmolLM3-3B; the 1.7B member is a PEFT LoRA adapter for SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct. Both target autoformalization: translating English into first-order logic and checking whether a conclusion follows from its premises. Both run locally, with a 1.06 GB quantized build for the 1.7B and a 1.78 GiB Q4_K_M GGUF for the 3B. webAI’s announcement frames the release around beating gpt-oss-120b on four of five formal-reasoning lanes. Is it deployable? Partially. Non-commercial use only, as…

Attackers shut down a steam turbine and the process-water treatment system at a Polish combined heat and power plant by coming in over the private cellular network the local grid operator uses to reach remote equipment. The plant supplies heat to roughly 50,000 residents. Recovery began at about 7:30 a.m. while the intruders were still active inside the network, and customers lost neither heat nor electricity. CERT Polska disclosed the December 2025 incident on August 8 after an investigation lasting more than three months. Poland’s prime minister had said in January that two CHP plants were hit. This is the…

South Korea is nearing an Aug. 11 deadline for public comments on proposed crypto seizure rules that could give exchanges just seven days to disclose customer holdings once served with a court order.The Supreme Court’s proposed amendments to the Civil Execution Rules would create a standardized process for creditors to freeze, identify and liquidate virtual assets held by debtors. If finalized on the current timetable, the rules are expected to take effect Oct. 1.That would leave exchanges and other virtual asset service providers roughly seven weeks after the consultation closes to prepare for a more formal role in civil debt…

In Guernsey, Dr Jean Dean, from La Société Guernesiaise’s astronomy section, advised people to head to the west coast of the Channel Island to enjoy the spectacle.She said people needed to use eclipse glasses or have their back to the sun and project it onto a piece of card.Eclipse glasses have been given out are Les Bourgs Hospice charity shops in St Martins and St Sampsons.Dean warned that if anyone looked directly at the sun they would “burn your retina in your eye and you will be permanently blind”.She stressed people should not use the eclipse glasses with other optical…

The UK could be forgiven if, like Brenda from Bristol, it feels it has had too much politics of late. The long death rattle of the Starmer government against a backdrop of relentless excitement from the White House has left everyone suffering a severe case of overwhelm. We all deserve a holiday – even Andy Burnham, exhausted after a few weeks in the job.So the political and media class may think they are doing us a favour by turning the forthcoming byelection prompted by the resignation of the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, into a joke. But it is not…

Nvidia ⁠has partnered with six major Wall Street financial institutions to raise ⁠more than $500bn (£370bn) capital for artificial intelligence infrastructure.The Nvidia chief executive, Jensen Huang, said on X that the company has ⁠the option to backstop up to $125bn, or 25% of the potential deals.The move highlights how surging demand ⁠for AI computing capacity is drawing institutional investors, as governments, companies and ​startups race to build out ‌datacentres.Big tech companies have signalled that spending on AI ‌would not slow down, with combined outlays set to surpass $730bn this year. However, there has been concerns over the link between high…

The Trump administration is making an intense push to identify and deport noncitizens who registered to vote, even if they did so inadvertently or never cast ballots — an unusually aggressive approach that is helping it promote baseless claims that voter fraud is rampant.State audits and studies have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and there have been no instances in which their votes are known to have swayed an election. It is against federal law for noncitizens to register to vote or actually vote, and doing so can carry steep penalties, including jail time and deportation.In the…

I’m just another girl who dreams of owning her own L.L.Bean Boat and Tote, and I know I’m not alone. But the favored beach bag isn’t the only thing L.L.Bean is beloved for, both on the WIRED team and off of it. I’ve slept on its famed flannel bed sheets for our Best Flannel Sheets story, while another editor has raved that the Zip Hunter Tote Bag is the only tote bag you need. We’ve even been obsessed with L.L.Bean’s duck boots for years.Safe to say, there’s no lack of great gear, like travel totes, you can get from L.L.Bean.…