Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday approved a resolution holding Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal last week to answer questions from the panel, whose chairman, Senator Rand Paul, has said repeatedly that he wants to see Dr. Fauci in prison.The vote, along party lines, clears the way for the committee to recommend that the Justice Department prosecute Dr. Fauci for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena, a misdemeanor under federal law. But that does not mean the department will take up the case.For a contempt resolution to carry the force of Congress,…

Nearly 10,000 people were referred to the government’s anti-terrorism scheme, Prevent, in the year to September 2025, Home Office figures show, a record number for the programme.Figures show 10,293 referrals were made in England and Wales for 9,957 people – up by 39% from the previous 12 months and the highest number in a single year since records began in 2015.Where the age is known, 393 referrals were for children under 10, the largest proportion concerned 11 to 15-year-olds at 36%, followed by 16 to 17 year-olds at 13% of referrals. The Home Office said the spike was in part…

The sale of gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) for $55bn (£41bn) to a group of buyers including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has been finalised.The American company is known for making and publishing best-selling games such as EA FC, formerly known as Fifa, The Sims and Mass Effect.The investors, who include Affinity Partners – led by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner – are taking EA private, meaning all of its public shares will be purchased and it will no longer be traded on a stock exchange.It is thought to be the largest leveraged buyout in history, meaning a…

AI security company Zenity has disclosed the details of two AI browser hacking techniques targeting Claude in Chrome and ChatGPT Atlas, demonstrating how they can be used for account takeovers, phishing, and making unauthorized Amazon purchases. Zenity described its research in two separate blog posts published on Wednesday, one covering the ChatGPT Atlas research and one covering the Claude in Chrome attack. ChatGPT Atlas hacking Zenity researchers discovered that OpenAI’s agentic browser, ChatGPT Atlas, is vulnerable to zero-click indirect prompt injection (IPI) due to fundamental architectural design issues rather than traditional software bugs.  By exploiting ‘intent collision’ through a single…

What Clarity declines to do is impose customer identification duties on software that has no customers. Software that takes no custody and controls no transactions is in no position to identify anyone. Requiring KYC on code does not create a compliance obligation on intermediaries; it creates a prohibition on publishing code.Tokenized securitiesThe last worry is that stocks will migrate to decentralized shadow markets with few investor protections. As clearly stated in section 10505, a security does not cease to be a security simply because it settles on a blockchain. Securities remain under SEC authority, and Section 10301 is the provision…

University of Maryland astronomers have identified a dormant supermassive black hole positioned far from the center of its host galaxy. The discovery marks the first time scientists have found an inactive black hole at such a great distance from a galactic core. Because the black hole was not actively consuming matter, it would ordinarily have remained invisible. Its location was exposed only when it tore apart a passing star, producing a brief but powerful burst of light. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 27, 2026. “This is a novel result. What’s new is that, until…

As new electricity generation skews toward solar and battery storage in Texas, Republican state senators are questioning whether it’s time to impose minimum standards for building gas plants and move away from free trade in the state’s electricity marketplace.   The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, reported last week that 70 percent of generation in the 460-gigawatt interconnection queue is from solar and battery storage. Natural gas facilities make up less than 17 percent of that line. And while it’s an uptick from three years ago, when there were less than 10 gigawatts of gas power…

Houston-headquartered oil and gas company Murphy Oil is making inroads in developing an oil field off the coast of Vietnam, with the start-up on schedule for the next quarter. The firm is also pursuing other hydrocarbon projects not just in Southeast Asia, but also in other regions of the world. FSO PTSC Lac Da Vang (FSO PTSC LDV); Source: OceanStar Elite Murphy Oil has advanced its Lac Da Vang (Golden Camel) development project in Vietnam toward first oil by completing the pipeline installation work and launching a floating storage and offloading (FSO) vessel, which will be deployed at the field.…

*Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault, self harm, and distressing conditions in detention.  The second Trump administration has arrested, detained, and deported a record number of people: nearly 600,000 as of July 11, 2026. There are over 65,000 people currently being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the administration has set a target of 2,000 immigration arrests per day. For years, we have been using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to learn more about the conditions people are being held in and the kind of treatment they are receiving. Recently,…

A Republican-controlled US Senate committee voted to hold Dr Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after the veteran public health official repeatedly pleaded the fifth amendment to parry a hostile inquisition into his stewardship of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.Fauci, the former director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), who led the agency for 38 years before retiring in 2022, gave the same response to multiple questions while refusing to give clarifying answers during a tense hearing last week, citing his constitutional protections.The Senate homeland security and government affairs committee voted in favor of referring a…