Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Kevin Warsh was handpicked to lead the world’s most important bank, with a remit from U.S. President Donald Trump to do one thing: lower interest rates. But economic reality, especially stubborn inflation, won’t allow the Federal Reserve to do that, and so it is now facing the wrath of both financial markets and the White House. Add to that a novel, confusing, and contradictory communication style, and Warsh’s early steps as Fed chair have been less than encouraging. That is problematic when what the Fed says, almost as much as what it does, has huge implications for the United States…

Claim: U.S. President Donald Trump said, “You know, grass is like human beings. Grass has a life also.” Rating: Context In August 2025, Trump made one of his first — if not the first — public remarks of this kind, specifically using the word “lifetime.” He said, “You know, grass has a lifetime like people have a lifetime. And a lifetime of this grass has long been gone when you look at the parks where the grass is old, tired, exhausted.” In late July 2026, people shared a rumor alleging U.S. President Donald Trump said on more than one occasion,…

Four men stabbed in Covent Garden, woman arrested for assaultFour men were stabbed in central London on Wednesday, with police arresting a woman in connection to the attack.Police responded to reports of a stabbing at Endell Street in Covent Garden at 12:27pm, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.There, they found four men – aged 34, 39, 42 and 52 – with stab wounds. They were transported to a major trauma centre, according to the London Ambulance Service.A 47-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and assault, police said. Investigators believe the stabbing was mental…

Re-opening the Strait of Hormuz is essential to bringing down the cost of living in the UK, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has said ahead of talks with US counterpart Marco Rubio.The Labour minister is in Washington for his first official one-on-one meeting with Rubio.The pair are also expected to discuss the war in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Miliband was invited to the US capital by Rubio after they met on the sidelines of a foreign ministers’ summit in the Philippines, where the former Labour leader made his debut as foreign secretary.The White House was reported to be…

The taxi app company Uber and the autonomous technology developer Wayve have been granted the first minicab licences in London allowing them to offer self-driving taxi rides to paying customers – but with a human safety driver in place, for now.The companies said they would start trips in the UK “later this summer” before the full public launch.The San Francisco-headquartered Uber and London-based Wayve are racing against the Google-owned Waymo and its Chinese equivalent Baidu’s Apollo Go to launch self-driving taxi services in London. Their progress is being watched closely because the British capital will be one of the first…

Owala Cloud Insulated Bag: This packable tote is surprisingly easy to inflate with just a few breaths. I love that it zips shut, a feature other cooler totes are often lacking. It’s pretty roomy inside but folds flat for easy storage and transportation. While it’s handy for tasks like keeping picnic snacks cold, especially if you add your own ice packs, this isn’t really a traditional cooler. I wouldn’t recommend adding ice cubes to it. But if you want a bag that keeps things cold for longer, it’s reliable.Arctic Zone Titan Deep Freeze Backpack Cooler: I don’t love backpack coolers…

Blocklists were already losing ground before AI entered the picture. Phishing domains have been getting shorter-lived for years, campaigns have been burning infrastructure faster, and the gap between blocklists and attacker campaigns keeps getting wider. AI just finished the job. Attackers are using AI to generate phishing pages from screenshots in minutes, spin up and tear down infrastructure faster than any blocklist can track, and iterate on tooling at a cadence that makes indicator-based detection functionally useless.  89% of phishing domains are now active for fewer than two days, with just 6.5% surviving past 15 days. By the time a…

In brief The UK’s AI Security Institute found 19 unsanctioned actions across 10 of 122 evaluation runs, 17 of them from Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and two from OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. One agent opened a malicious pull request on a real repository, then used accounts it controlled to endorse it and pressure the maintainer. Separate agents found a GitHub token one of them had leaked publicly and used a shared repository to coordinate. The UK AI Security Institute has disclosed that AI agents took “sustained, unsanctioned action” on the live internet during a cyber evaluation in late July, including cases that…

In warm, sunny weather, certain marine algae along American coasts and elsewhere can flourish into harmful algal blooms, producing a substance known as saxitoxin. This neurotoxin is deadly for many animals, and is the cause of paralytic shellfish poisoning in people who eat contaminated seafood. But an unlikely animal has an antidote: the American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), which probably also encounters the toxin in its freshwater habitats.  A jab of a protein produced by the frog rescued mice from a deadly dose of the toxin, researchers report July 16 in Nature Communications. Previous research had shown that the protein, called…

Environmental activists opposed to the oil refinery project cite risks to the local ecosystem and the community’s livelihoods.The Kenyan government insists that the project will boost the East Africa region’s economy, and create 60,000 jobs during its construction and then operation.Opponents demand absolute transparency with the local community and seek adequate inclusion of all stakeholders during the Environment Impact Assessment process.See All Key Ideas Billionaire Aliko Dangote’s choice of Lamu, Kenya, for his oil refinery project, estimated to cost $17 billion, has elicited mixed reactions, with environmental activists warning of its potential risks to the local ecosystem and…