Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

But a provision in the bill that would grant the White House authority to issue 100 percent tariffs on top buyers of Russian oil, and countries facilitating sanctions evasion, nearly derailed the measure’s passage in the upper chamber before lawmakers left town for August recess.An amendment pushed by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that would have stripped the tariff language from the bill entirely failed in a 64 to 32 floor vote Friday.Still, nearly one-third of the upper chamber voted in favor of striking the tariff language, highlighting Democrats’ worries about handing more tariff powers to a…

Brian Poindexter, until recently a little-known Democratic candidate in a solidly Republican House district, lit a Marlboro cigarette and jammed a screwdriver into the latch of a shed door he had built. He ignored his phone, which had been blowing up in recent days because of a political scandal rocking Ohio.“It’s crazy to have him running for Congress,” said the candidate’s father, Bob Poindexter, 68, who had made bolts for a living until he retired last year. He was watching his son work. “What would be really crazy is if he won.”That prospect is rapidly becoming less crazy, as the…

Nicola Surgeon has said she will not visit her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, in prison, has stopped speaking to him and views herself as a “mug” for worrying about his wellbeing and mental health earlier this year.During a podcast recording at the Edinburgh festival fringe, Scotland’s former first minister said Murrell had lied to her until the day he pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from the Scottish National party.He was imprisoned for five years in June, and Sturgeon revealed she had not spoken to him since then. Speaking to broadcaster Iain Dale, she said she had only discovered…

For more than a decade, the cybersecurity industry has been assigning names to different hacking groups. Some of them, like Fancy Bear, have crossed over into the mainstream because of their prominent hacks and memorable names. Others are only known within the cybersecurity industry.  Oftentimes, even industry insiders can’t keep track. In part, that’s because every company names hacking groups differently. That’s why there are resources like this one, which attempt to be a one-stop shop where cybersecurity professionals, government officials, policymakers, journalists, and the wider public can make sense of who is who.  Last month, Google became the latest…

The Head Mare hacktivist group has been exploiting vulnerabilities in unpatched TrueConf video conferencing servers to replace client installers with malicious versions that deliver backdoors. The exploited vulnerabilities allowed the attacker to execute arbitrary code with the highest level of privileges and deploy the PhantomCore and PhantomGraph backdoors. TrueConf is a video conferencing tool widely used in Russia, especially in the enterprise and government sectors, as a secure, on-premise alternative to Western tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Researchers at cybersecurity company Kaspersky discovered the attack in July. They found that Head Mare hackers used TCP port 4307, which is…

Bybit sued North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Lazarus Group in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The exchange won a preliminary injunction blocking unnamed defendants from moving or selling stolen crypto.Public court reporting describes the order as covering those identified assets, without confirming the full $1.5 billion stolen in February 2025 or disclosing the dollar value the injunction protects.This injunction landed roughly 532 days after the hack—about 17 months after North Korean hackers pulled off the largest crypto theft on record. Chainalysis tracked a consistent laundering pattern by DPRK-linked groups after a major theft, moving…

Claim: Video of an object smashing into the moon and creating a plume of dust authentically shows the Aug. 5, 2026, crash of the upper stage of a SpaceX rocket. Rating: In August 2026, part of a SpaceX rocket orbiting the moon since January 2025 crashed into the lunar surface, as previously predicted by scientists. Soon after the crashed happened, a video began spreading across social media, especially X, allegedly showing the crash. For example, one X post (archived) shared the video alongside a caption reading, “NEW: A SpaceX rocket has crashed into the Moon, leaving a 100 foot crater.”…

Four years ago, after a former police officer shot or stabbed more than 30 people in northeastern Thailand — the deadliest mass killing by a single attacker in the country’s history — Anutin Charnvirakul, the country’s health minister, vowed tighter controls on guns.Now the prime minister, Mr. Anutin on Friday found himself repeating that promise in the aftermath of another mass shooting, this time at a high school just northwest of Bangkok, the capital.That morning, a student at Debsirin Nonthaburi School used his grandfather’s pistol to shoot and kill both of his grandparents at their home before going to school,…

The US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect…

DEF CON — Varonis Threat Labs has disclosed a one-click vulnerability in Rovo, Atlassian’s enterprise AI assistant, that let a specially crafted link seed attacker-controlled instructions directly into a user’s live AI session.  Dubbed RovoBlast, the flaw required no jailbreak and no permission bypass, relying on the fact that the assistant simply treated externally supplied parameters as trusted input. Rovo functions as an AI layer spanning Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and third-party tools such as Slack, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace. It also carries autonomous agent features capable of completing multi-step tasks with no further user involvement, which is what enabled…