Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Studies have shown no connection between COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy and increased risk of miscarriage. Despite this, Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson resurrected a long-debunked claim of an astronomical rate of miscarriage after vaccination while also accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of deceiving the public about the safety of the shots during pregnancy. On Aug. 10, the lawmakers released texts from the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s government-issued cell phone from January 2021. “Privately over text, Fauci admitted concerns about COVID vaccine side effects ‘associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,’ yet told…

US President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to allow him to continue building a $400m (£295m) ballroom at the White House without congressional permission. The emergency application comes one week after an appeals court ordered construction to stop until Congress approves, upholding a ruling won by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued the administration last year. In the latest filing, US Solicitor General D John Sauer asked that work be allowed to continue while the administration appeals the stop-work order, which he called “dangerous”.Trump has long argued the White House lacks a large event space and…

“We have a fire and rescue service across the country that isn’t properly set up to deal with these incidents,” Burnham said.”We don’t have the capability in the way that we should have to fight these fires.”There’s thousands of firefighters out there today doing back-breaking work, in full kit, in the most difficult conditions”, he added.He said the UK must face up to the “changing climate” and transition to “more clean energy”.His comments came ahead of the appointment of Baroness Blake of Leeds as fire minister.Friends of the Earth urged the prime minister to tackle the “root cause” of the…

In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some unexpected things to say about his venture capital rivals on the West Coast. “It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,” Kushner wrote about AI in the letter, leaked to Bloomberg. “It would also be a grave error in our minds to let excitement weaken our investment discipline. … Within Silicon Valley in particular, the industry can become fixated on hyperincremental technological turns rather than where the technology ultimately leads.” While his secretive New York-based firm, just like those in Silicon Valley, is betting heavily on AI,…

A maximum-severity SAP Commerce Cloud remote code execution vulnerability patched three days ago is already being targeted in attacks, according to threat intelligence company Defused. Commerce Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris) is a cloud-based e-commerce platform used by online stores owned by high-profile global brands and large retailers. Tracked as CVE-2026-58231, this critical flaw stems from an improper authorization weakness in the core Data Hub Adapter extension for Commerce Cloud that threat actors without privileges can exploit in low-complexity attacks to execute arbitrary code. “SAP Commerce Cloud allows an unauthenticated attacker to abuse a default authentication client and submit…

Gen Z traders on Binance are allocating a growing share of their equity activity to exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with the products accounting for 25% of the cohort’s trading volume in early August, according to Binance Research.ETFs accounted for 21.9% of Gen Z net equity inflows in July, up from 18.5% in June, while the share going to individual stocks fell to 74.2% from 77%.The analysis examined activity across direct equities, tokenized stocks and traditional finance perpetuals, comparing Gen Z accounts with Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers on measures including trading frequency, net flows and leverage use.The younger cohort traded…

Certain kinds of clouds are misbehaving – appearing more often and lower in the sky than they used to. To help identify the factors influencing these changes (e.g. shifts in Earth’s long-term weather patterns), scientists have asked people around the world with cameras to submit fresh images of these clouds as a part of the NASA-supported Space Cloud Watch project. Now, one volunteer has developed a new tool to help other Space Cloud Watch volunteers work more efficiently.  The misbehaving clouds are “noctilucent”  or “night-shining” clouds (NLCs). These clouds scatter light from the Sun long after sunset and long before…

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Farmworkers, their loved ones and advocates lined up out the door of a California state legislative hearing room this week to urge elected officials to hold pesticide regulators accountable for failing to protect their communities from life-threatening chemicals.  Women spoke of being sprayed while working next to fields treated by crop dusters and seeing coworkers caught in drifting pesticide clouds. They spoke of suffering from asthma and liver disease and watching family members die of cancer. They spoke of being exposed to pesticides while pregnant, having children born prematurely, with birth defects, autism, ADHD or other neurodevelopmental problems. Children…

“[N]othing ages faster than today’s idea of the future,” wrote architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, which may explain why readers treasure the rare novel that correctly predicts what’s to come. The classics of the prescient genre tend be speculative and dystopian—1984, Parable of the Sower, The Handmaid’s Tale—but can also be realist fiction. Take English author Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, published in the United States in 1956, which predicted the future by describing the present. The Quiet American takes place in 1950s Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh’s forces are fighting French colonial powers for independence. It’s narrated by Thomas Fowler,…

A video circulating in August 2026 allegedly shows Twitch streamer and left-leaning political commentator Hasan Piker making derogatory remarks about Black people and saying he wishes the U.S. would return to a time of lynchings. The video circulated in light of Piker’s support of, and campaigning for, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party’s Senate candidate in Michigan. In sum, the video, which consists of fragmented excerpts from three different streams, genuinely shows Piker speaking, in that it isn’t a deepfake or AI-generated. Yet the video is heavily edited and presents Piker’s spoken words without full context, and in some cases out…