Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

This past April, while attending his nephew’s bar mitzvah on Cape Cod, Eric Umansky woke up to an inbox full of emails from people from his past. They all wanted to know the same thing: Was he actually throwing a party Saturday night?The New York–based journalist wasn’t sure what party they were referring to, or why random acquaintances he’d met in passing 15 years ago were emailing him. On deadline and already stressed about work, he checked his phone, where more messages inquired about a supposed Paperless Post invite he’d sent for a “Special Private Dinner Party” at 7 pm…

Asian countries account for almost half of Adoption IndexAlmost half of the top 20 nations in terms of grassroots crypto adoption are in the Asia Pacific region. According to Chainalysis’s newly released 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, Japan ranks at number 4, followed by South Korea (5), India (6), Thailand (8), China (12), Indonesia (14), Australia (15), Vietnam (18) and the Philippines (19), which totals nine countries out of 20 on the index.A big growth area in the APAC region is cross border stablecoin transfers.Tianwei Liu, co-founder and CEO of StraitsX, told Cointelegraph that in Asia, fragmented currencies and payment…

However, Karin Prien, a member of the CDU, criticised the decision.”Anyone who banishes Stolpersteine and memorial sites commemorating Jewish life from public spaces to the cemetery is prioritising death over life and rendering Jewish people invisible once again,” she told Bild.She said her own CDU party in Saxony also bore responsibility for the decision.Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said that removing memorials from the cityscape was “completely the wrong approach”.She told the Funke Media Group that she was “appalled that a democratic party would stoop to supporting such a transparent manoeuvre by…

As Labour party conference approaches, politicians will debate spending priorities, fiscal pressures and the UK’s place in the world. Before those discussions begin, I want ministers to picture a hospital ward I visited in Sierra Leone with Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund).Inside the special-care baby unit at Makeni regional hospital were rows of tiny premature babies, some no bigger than my hand. Around them stood dedicated nurses and anxious parents, all willing these newborns to survive.Then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. It was 2019, and I noticed a UK aid sticker fixed above a tiny incubator.…

OpenAI has confirmed it’s aware of a new security incident in which its AI agents uploaded user-provided images to third-party image-hosting services. OpenAI says most users were not affected, as it could only identify 53 incidents where agents accidentally uploaded images to the internet. The disclosure comes from OpenAI’s broader investigation into misaligned agent behavior following the Hugging Face security incident. “As part of our ongoing investigation, we have identified cases where agents in our research environment transmitted training and evaluation data while using third-party services,” OpenAI noted in a blog post. “This is not an appropriate use of this…

In brief Bitget confirmed a $387.5 million breach detected on September 24, after attackers spoofed transaction data to trigger legitimate-looking transfer approvals from hot and warm wallets, not by stealing private keys. The haul includes roughly 103 million XRP worth $157 million. CEO Gracy Chen says IP addresses and on-chain patterns match techniques used by North Korea’s state-linked hackers. Hackers stole roughly $387.5 million in crypto from Bitget yesterday in what is believed to be the biggest crypto hack of the year. The likely suspect is, as usual, North Korea—though that’s yet to be confirmed, and Bitget says law enforcement…

The brain uses an extraordinary amount of energy compared with most other organs. Even so, it can continue processing information when energy is limited by adjusting how available resources are used. Scientists are still trying to understand how the brain manages this energy budget as it moves through different internal states. Sleep offers a useful way to study that question. Although the body is resting, the brain remains active, especially during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is closely associated with dreaming and memory processing. REM sleep is often described as “paradoxical sleep” because the body is mostly still while…

Tunis, Tunisia – For nine-year-old Yassar Naouar, visiting his father in prison has become an exercise in staying strong. He tries not to cry in front of Wael, fearing that seeing his son in tears would make an already painful situation harder for him. After leaving the prison, Yassar finds a corner where he can finally let the tears fall.Hichem Naouar, Yassar’s grandfather, says the boy has changed since his father was detained. He now sleeps beside his mother after waking up screaming at night and his results at school have worsened. When Yassar told his mother that other children…

Anthropic lost a legal battle to overturn one of the supply-chain risk labels that the US Department of Defense slapped on the company, as a federal appeals court in DC on Friday refused to second-guess the Trump administration.“The department had ample support for its conclusion that the continued integration of Claude into the department’s information systems, by the department or its contractors, presented a statutorily covered national-security risk,” the judges wrote in a majority opinion. “As Anthropic admits, the company encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to prevent.”Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Cohen says…

The Federal Reserve’s proposed rules for the payment stablecoin issuers it supervises include a crisis clock measured in hours. An issuer whose reserves fall below the value of its outstanding tokens would have 24 hours to notify the Fed and submit a plan to restore full backing.Unless it closes the gap or the Fed directs it to proceed with that plan, the issuer must begin liquidating reserves and redeeming tokens by 5 p.m. on the next business day. The Fed says that window comes to less than 48 hours in many cases.The 392-page proposal also lets the issuer keep minting…