Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The Supreme Court continues to make consequential rulings in the shadows. I analyzed tens of thousands of case files from the court’s online archives, parsing through filings to separate simple requests for deadline extensions from challenges to long-established constitutional rights. I discovered that in the term that ended in 2025, the justices issued more substantive decisions on their emergency docket than in cases argued in open court. Experts told me this was likely the first time this has happened in the court’s modern history.  Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to my questions.  Since I reported that story…

Vitalii Kim, Ukraine’s newly appointed minister for veterans’ affairs, has a job few would envy: helping Ukraine’s over 1 million veterans while operating on a shoestring budget, in a war where the shooting is far from over. Ukraine has to “build the engine while it’s driving the car,” he told Foreign Policy last week while visiting the United States to speak with U.S. officials and nongovernmental organizations. Vitalii Kim, Ukraine’s newly appointed minister for veterans’ affairs, has a job few would envy: helping Ukraine’s over 1 million veterans while operating on a shoestring budget, in a war where the shooting…

Michael Carrick has struck a defiant tone after Manchester United equalled their worst start to a Premier League season, but a woeful 1-1 draw at Fulham left the beleaguered boss under mounting pressure.Trailing to Lisandro Martinez’s farcical own goal, United were just moments away from a third successive defeat on another dispiriting afternoon for Carrick on Sunday.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listMatheus Cunha’s deflected 89th-minute equaliser spared United from new humiliation.But escaping with a barely deserved point against a winless side placed second-from-bottom of the Premier League was hardly cause for celebration.With only one win so far this…

The government must not ignore a “national safety scandal” in maternity services, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has said, as figures suggest life-altering childbirth injuries in England have reached record levels.Lib Dem analysis of NHS figures showed the number of women suffering potentially life-threatening levels of blood loss is the highest ever recorded in England.Three in every 100 women suffered serious tearing injuries requiring emergency surgery in the first half of this year, something Sir Ed said was a “devastating indictment of our NHS maternity services”.The government is expected to publish a new national maternity and neonatal action plan…

21 September 2026Pontes enables wholesale tokenised asset transactions to be settled in central bank moneyLaunch marks first step in implementing the Eurosystem’s strategy for tokenised financeBanks and market infrastructures to join in a gradual approach The Eurosystem today launched Pontes, a solution that enables wholesale transactions in tokenised assets to be settled in central bank money. Pontes is the first initiative under the Eurosystem’s strategic programme to make central bank money fit for a tokenised future and to support the development of this rapidly evolving financial ecosystem. “The Eurosystem is working to enable a more integrated, innovative and resilient European…

Meals can include classic Midwestern meats and twos, but also barramundi filets topped with a “Niçoise” olive topping, Caribbean-spiced chicken thighs, and the occasional premium-priced filet mignon with truffle butter. More than half of meals contain 30 grams or more of protein, and more than half are no-gluten-added, usually with rice or potato sides. (Though take note that Factor is not prepared in a fully gluten-free facility.)In the past couple years, Factor has also branched out to add more fresh ingredients and even baked goods. There are calzones now. Flatbread pizzas. Mixable salads and warmable soups, each available as a…

StepFun has released Step 5 Preview, its new flagship model for agentic work. The target workloads are software engineering, professional knowledge work, and finance. The main pitch is cost. StepFun team states the model delivers comparable intelligence at a substantially lower task cost. That is the ‘Pareto frontier’ framing in the launch title. Is it deployable? Yes, as a hosted API and on the StepFun platform. Self-hosting waits for open weights. StepFun says open weights land on October 15, 2026. By simple arithmetic, 600B parameters need about 1.2 TB in BF16, before KV cache. Plan…

Threat actors are leveraging ClickFix-like lures to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called ChainScript. “ChainScript has appeared under multiple build names, including ComponentTask33, UpdateDigital, HostShared, and OrchidViolet66, while presenting itself as Spotify, Zoom Workplace, and Microsoft Teams software,” Blackpoint Adversary Pursuit Group (APG) researchers Sam Decker, Andi Ursry, and Nevan Beal said. Like many malware families observed in recent months, ChainScript employs an EtherHiding-style command-and-control (C2) discovery technique that makes use of a Polygon smart contract to locate its active WebSocket infrastructure. ChainScript is a full-featured RAT that provides extensive remote access to the operator, including interactive…

Crypto markets are demonstrating robust resilience to start the week, with bitcoin approaching the $84,000 threshold, for the time being at least shrugging off the immediate hawkish sentiment from last week’s Federal Reserve rate hike, which pushed the benchmark target to 4.00%.The macro calendar centers on midweek U.S. jobless claims and housing and durable goods figures. Meanwhile, cross-asset markets continue to digest the policy path following recent rate decisions from the Bank of Japan and Bank of England. On the market structure front, attention centers on the SEC opening its tokenized securities pilot framework.What to Watch(All times ET)CryptoSept. 22: The…

At some point between the tiny world of particles and atoms and the much larger world we experience every day, quantum behavior appears to fade away. Quantum mechanics allows particles to exist in combinations of possible states, a phenomenon known as superposition. That strange feature inspired Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment involving a cat that is both alive and dead until it is observed. Yet objects in the everyday world do not behave that way. Physicists call the loss of these distinctly quantum effects decoherence. Exactly why decoherence happens, and whether gravity plays a role, remains one of the major open…