Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Andre Lavoie joined SpaceX in 2009 as an engineer, designing the pressure tanks that help power its rocket. He was paid partly in stock – a common trade-off at start-ups as a hiring incentive.Some 17 years on, those 200,000 shares he was given are worth about $23m (£17m) – and the 63-year-old says he’s ready to start cashing them as soon as he can.”Every chance I get going forward, I’ll sell a little bit more,” he tells the BBC. “The shares have been going up so radically it keeps messing up my life plans – you really can’t know the…

Matthew Kincanon spent Saturday drinking coffee from his favorite mug and planning an afternoon with friends, until the Old Trails Fire exploded across the Spokane River, a few miles from his home.  Although the fire was small by most standards—a few hundred acres—it was poised to move from the hiking trails and open spaces at Spokane’s western edge into the town’s suburban sprawl. “ I knew I had to leave when I saw billowing smoke,” said Kincanon, a local journalist who has spent his whole life in Spokane. He grabbed a few essentials—clothes, his laptop, a few childhood mementos—and evacuated his…

On Aug. 1, in response to the storming of the Spanish exclave of Ceuta by more than 70,000 migrants crossing from Morocco, 22 European leaders signed a letter criticizing Spain. The unwillingness of the vast majority of the European Union’s member states to provide support to the country whose borders were breached by unarmed foreigners is an ill omen for what the continent’s reaction to an armed attack would actually look like. In their joint letter, the leaders laid blame for the border crisis at Spain’s decision to provide a path toward regularization for irregular migrants as well as a…

Home Middle East Live Issued on: 06/08/2026 – 05:48Modified: 06/08/2026 – 07:23 Smoke rises from a hill following Israeli air strikes, after the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning to the village of Mansouri, Lebanon, August 5, 2026 in this screengrab obtained from social media. © Reuters ⁠Two Israeli reserve soldiers were killed during combat in southern Lebanon, the military said Thursday, where Israel has been fighting Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Iran said an agreement with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz is in its final stages, while US President Donald Trump suggested a deal could be announced within days. Follow…

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic primary race for Senate in Michigan, according to The Associated Press, giving progressives a victory that signaled liberal voters’ anti-establishment mood and shifting sentiment against Israel.Dr. El-Sayed, 41, a former public health official, narrowly defeated Representative Haley Stevens, a four-term moderate, on Wednesday in a hostile race that was dominated by the politics of Israel and the role of big money in American elections.He fiercely criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza and promised to pull back American military support, while she vowed to continue sending U.S. military aid to Israel without conditions.While most Michigan…

There are obvious similarities between Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who won a close victory on Wednesday in the Democratic Senate primary in the battleground state of Michigan.Both are young, progressive politicians who are also Muslim. They focused their campaigns on lifting the working class. Super PACs marshaled tens of millions of dollars to oppose their candidacies. And both have overcome that resistance as they have helped fuel the Democratic Party’s ascendant left wing.But is it fair to call Dr. El-Sayed Michigan’s “mini-Mamdani,” as some people have begun to do? According to Mr. Mamdani,…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Accounting & Consulting services myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the age of artificial intelligence, what happens to people who sell the human variety? It’s a pressing question for a lot of professions (not least opinion writers), but is especially acute for strategic consultants, who not only sell ideas but charge a lot for them. In other professional services industries such as law and accounting, the provider is paid in part for taking on legal responsibility. Someone has to sign off on accounts or legal opinions, whether they were…

In a talk that was a last-minute addition to the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, employees from OpenAI presented new details about a recent, high-profile incident of rogue AI hacking that has created a maelstrom within the AI and cybersecurity industries.About two weeks ago, OpenAI disclosed an incident in which AI agents powered by two of the company’s models escaped containment while looking for the solutions to a cybersecurity benchmarking test and went on a hacking spree culminating in a breach of the AI collaboration platform Hugging Face.In their conference talk on Wednesday, Eric Wallace, who…

A Canadian man pleaded guilty today to his role in accessing company accounts at cloud storage provider Snowflake and stealing data from at least 165 organizations in a scheme to extort millions of dollars from victims. ​26-year-old Connor Riley Moucka, also known as Alexander Moucka and Waifu, was arrested on October 30, 2024, for stealing data of hundreds of millions of individuals from companies using Snowflake’s storage service. Between February and October 2024, Moucka and John Erin Binns, also indicted for these attacks, accessed Snowflake accounts not protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA) using logins stolen via infostealer malware. Without MFA…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country — but citizens won’t be using Bitcoin to pay for goods just yet.  News agency Tass reported Tuesday that the new law will allow only registered entities to operate as exchanges, and puts limits on the amount of crypto retail investors can use.  For now, retail investors are limited to trading most liquid cryptocurrencies, capped at 300,000 rubles ($3,700) per year. Qualified investors have no restrictions, according to the report.  But the new law still prohibits…