Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As far as most of the world is concerned, the Republic of Somaliland doesn’t exist. That’s inconvenient, because this nonexistent country now sits right next to one of the world’s most high-profile conflict zones, with massive repercussions for the global economy. Somaliland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, commonly known by the nickname Irro, was in Washington in mid-September before heading to New York this week to make the case for the United States to recognize—or at least more formally engage with—the de facto state that, as far as official U.S. policy is concerned, is a breakaway province in northern Somalia. Somaliland…

CNN and MS NOW reporters say they have been denied entry to cover a White House state dinner despite a judge ruling their access to the grounds must be restored.A federal judge said in an overnight ruling that the White House ban on three outlets – CNN and MS NOW and Politico – was likely unconstitutional and that the administration must allow them access, for now. Trump barred them last week, accusing them of “fake news”.Journalists with the three outlets were allowed back in on Thursday morning. Then in the evening, a CNN reporter and a producer and an MS…

Pressed on whether he had any principled objection to the technology, he declared, “I’m quite willing and happy to learn,” he added. “I feel it’s my moral duty also to use it so that I have personal experience, and I hope it helps me with my work.”   Speaking on the fringes of Axel Springer’s WELT AI Summit in Berlin, Czerny called on European politicians and bishops to respond more clearly to warnings about the risks of frontier AI models forfeiting human control and oversight.   “There should be a dialogue between the bishops and the European governments to express the concern of the population to handle…

The significance of residual hormone production may decrease over time. Still, says Walter Rocca, a professor of epidemiology and neurology at the Mayo Clinic, that doesn’t mean the ovary has become unimportant.“I am convinced until proven otherwise that removing ovaries even after menopause is not advisable,” he says, with a caveat for women at an increased risk of ovarian cancer.Just how long that importance persists after menopause is still an open question, says Stephanie Faubion, medical director of the Menopause Society. It’s also unclear, she says, how much the answer may vary from woman to woman. “We just have huge…

Black Forest Labs (BFL), the lab behind the FLUX image models, has released FLUX 3 Action. It is a 7B open-weights World Action Model (WAM) for robot control. The model reads camera frames, robot state and a text instruction. It then predicts future video frames and the next chunk of actions together. On the RoboLab-120 leaderboard, it ranks first at 42.92% task success. Is it deployable? Yes, with conditions. The DROID policy needs about 32 GB of GPU memory in BF16 on an H200. It fits 24 GB cards with FP8 quantization and text encoder offload. The FLUX Kommunity License…

A new botnet malware called Carbonato is targeting insecure hosts running Docker daemons to install the Hermes Agent AI framework and take control. The malware features worm-like capabilities and was discovered in an unauthenticated Docker registry that contained nearly 60 repositories and 4.3 GB of image data. ThreatDown researchers retrieved operational evidence spanning October 2024 to August 2026. The archive also included details about the botnet and a separate campaign that distributed counterfeit cryptocurrency wallet apps. According to ThreatDown, Carbonato spreads across Docker hosts with an API exposed on port 2375 without authentication. The malware connects to that API and instructs…

Two pools that exchange TIX for other issued tokens accounted for 97.24% of the seven-day automated market maker (AMM) volume in XRP Ledger (XRPL), according to XRPL.to’s Sept. 24 feed.Neither pool contains XRP, so the outsized reading says far more about the provider’s volume measure.XRPL.to listed a 2.82069 billion seven-day volume total, including 1.68 billion for XPM/TIX and over 1 billion for RLUSD/TIX.XPM/TIX and RLUSD/TIX generated 97.24% of XRPL.to’s reported seven-day AMM volume, although neither pool contained native XRP.Those figures describe the provider’s tally. The two pools were created Sept. 21 and list the same TIX issuer and pool creator,…

Researchers led by Prof. An Xu at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found that a magnetotactic bacterium (MTB) called Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1 (AMB-1) can extend healthy lifespan in the Caenorhabditis elegans model. The team also identified the main mechanism behind the effect — suppression of a form of cell death known as ferroptosis. The findings were published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine. Magnetic Bacteria and Healthy Aging Aging gradually reduces normal physiological function and raises the risk of many chronic diseases. Researchers have explored drugs and genetic approaches as possible anti-aging…

Gorillas are among humans’ closest relatives, with a common ancestor dating back around 8 to 10 million years. Both species of gorilla alive today are on the edge of extinction: The eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei) is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, while the western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) is critically endangered. In its latest assessment of the eastern gorilla, the IUCN found a mixed picture of gorilla conservation. Some of the gorilla populations remained stable, while others faced declines — of roughly 60% for the subspecies Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) — in the last 20…

The claim that Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr was a member of a “child sex trafficking cult” is still under investigation. The allegation stemmed from an investigation The Guardian published on Sept. 22, 2026. According to it, for about 10 years Carr was a member of a Washington, D.C., Alcoholics Anonymous group that former members described as a cult. Some former members claimed the group’s leaders, all older men, sexually exploited them when they were teenage girls.  Snopes found no indication that The Guardian’s reporting was inaccurate or misleading, but cannot rate the claim without independently confirming the reporting.…