Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election, as President Trump refused to accept defeat and pumped out false claims about voter fraud, Mike Rogers was a clear and consistent voice of reproach.Mr. Rogers, a former Republican representative from Michigan, denounced Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the election as “cause for both concern and alarm.” He ripped the president’s pressure on Georgia’s top election official “as more gangster than presidential.” As for Mr. Trump’s role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Rogers declared, “You’re damn right you had responsibility for this.”But as he aims…

A New Mexico Court judge on Thursday ordered Meta to pay a fine of $567 million, on top of the $375 million levied in March, in a case regarding social media harms and addiction. This brings the total fines the company has to pay to $942 million. The court also ordered Meta to make changes to how its platforms function in the state: It wants the company to remove Like counts, and only show such metrics to children under 18 with approval from a parent or a guardian. Push notifications to underaged users in the state are also to be…

Latest NewsPublishedAug 9, 2026The rules, effective Jan. 1, 2027, cover transactions above $10,000 sent to overseas providers or self-custody wallets, along with other transfers flagged for review.Brazil’s central bank will require virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to place precautionary holds of up to 24 hours on certain transfers to foreign platforms or self-custody wallets as part of new measures aimed at preventing fraud. On Friday, the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) said the requirement will apply to funds received above $10,000, either in a single transaction or based on a customer’s total transactions in a day. Providers must also hold other…

HAIGLER, Neb.—The far southwestern corner of this state unfurls in a rolling sea of dusky-green prairie where cattle have outnumbered people for generations. A sign along U.S. Highway 34, just before the road crosses into Dundy County from Colorado, reads “Welcome to Beef Country.” Another along State Highway 27, which wanders north from the shortgrass hills of northwest Kansas, declares Dundy a “livestock friendly county.”  Nearly everything here—the farm supply stores, the corn fields, the gas stations, the hotels, the schools, the bars—operates, one way or another, in service of the great American beef machine. Every grumbling cattle-hauling semi-truck, every…

For some people, eclipse chasing is a family affair. Jared Kho, 37, has travelled the world to witness total solar eclipses since 2012, following in the footsteps of his parents, Janet Tay and Koh Joo Beng, who have been travelling together to observe eclipses for almost 20 years. Jared experienced his very first total solar eclipse aboard a ship “somewhere between Tahiti and Australia” in 2012, when he was 23 years old, according to the travel journal his mother keeps to document the family’s expeditions and the astronomical phenomena they observe. “My father and I have been observing eclipses together for years,”…

SpaceX said this week that it will build natural gas power plants to supply electricity to the Terafab semiconductor factory it plans to build in Texas, according to a report from Bloomberg.  Riley Trettel, who leads energy and data center development for SpaceX, said in a public meeting on Wednesday that his company will be “bringing our own power” for the project, which will also include “very large battery arrays.” Notably absent from the Bloomberg report — and other SpaceX announcements related to Terafab — is any mention of terrestrial solar power for the facility. Tesla, which is also a…

In this tutorial, we develop an end-to-end sentiment analysis workflow using the Stanford NLP IMDb Large Movie Review Dataset and compare classical machine learning with parameter-efficient transformer fine-tuning. We begin by establishing a reproducible environment and auditing the dataset for class ordering, review-length skew, duplicate leakage, and preprocessing artifacts before training a strong TF-IDF and Logistic Regression baseline. We then fine-tune DistilBERT with LoRA through PEFT, evaluate it using accuracy, macro-F1, ROC-AUC, confusion matrices, and ROC curves, and examine threshold selection and probability calibration through Expected Calibration Error and reliability analysis. Beyond headline metrics, we investigate confident errors, performance across…

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to an active “widespread email-driven phishing campaign” that employs adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to take control of Microsoft 365 accounts with an aim to identify key personnel involved in financial workflows and gather related email. “The campaign uses residential proxies to disguise malicious sign-ins as ordinary consumer traffic,” Arctic Wolf Labs said. “Automated activity maintains compromised sessions at approximately eight-hour intervals.” The activity is assessed to impact organizations across healthcare, education, manufacturing, government, and professional services sectors located in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It shares tactical overlaps with Payroll Pirate attacks tracked by Microsoft under…

In brief Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into DeFi lending venues and exchanges more than tripled to $7.4 billion over the year to Q2, CoinShares and Token Terminal said. Total DeFi deposits fell by approximately 15% across the same period, while RWA spot trading volumes rose roughly 220%. Almost 70% of that collateral sits on lending venues built on Ethereum, with Plasma and Solana behind it. Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into decentralized lending platforms and exchanges more than tripled over the past year, climbing from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, while total deposits across DeFi fell by approximately 15%.The…

Ekaterina Alexandrov took down four-time Grand Slam singles champion Aryna Sabalenka in a three-set marathon in Toronto.Published On 9 Aug 20269 Aug 2026World number one ‌Aryna Sabalenka suffered a setback in her US Open ⁠build-up after ⁠she was beaten 7-6(3), 4-6, 6-4 by Russia’s Ekaterina Alexandrova in the fourth round of the Canadian Open ⁠in Toronto on Saturday.The 16th-seeded Alexandrova fought a hard battle, lasting nearly two and a half hours, to secure her quarterfinal berth.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listSabalenka, a four-time Grand Slam champion and reigning US Open winner, recovered from a set down to force…