Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

“The expansion of Alabuga and its affiliated enterprises should be viewed not merely as a problem for the Ukrainian front, but as a long-term challenge to the security of the whole of Europe,” said Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre. In-housing production Moscow is working to increase its domestic carbon fiber production to reduce its reliance on imports from China as it aims to manufacture around 130,000 drones for its national “Unmanned Aerial Systems” project by 2030, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, this year. Russia…

Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.Molly McCann Sanders has a lot in common with many of the other women who helped Donald Trump win a second term as president. A pro-life Catholic who lives in Texas, she has staunchly conservative opinions on immigration and a fierce hatred of eminent domain—the practice of the government taking private property…

In brief Over two years, Bitcoin gained 28% while the median mid-cap altcoin lost 74% and Ethereum landed roughly sideways, per a Glassnode and Bybit report—a stark reversal of the usual “altseason” rotation. Leverage has pooled in the riskiest corners: Bitcoin carries futures open interest worth about 2% of its market cap, versus roughly 24% for PEPE. This week’s rebound above $80,000 dragged majors up with it, while ETF flows still tilt heavily toward Bitcoin’s $55.2 billion over Ethereum’s $13.1 billion. The gap between Bitcoin and the rest of the market has become a chasm. Over the past two years,…

The Black Death is best known for the catastrophic wave of plague that swept through Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing millions of people. But the disease did not vanish once that initial disaster passed. Plague returned again and again for more than four centuries, repeatedly disrupting cities, economies, and societies across Europe and surrounding regions. A study led by researchers at the University of Tartu is now offering a much more detailed look at what happened during those centuries. By analyzing DNA from the plague bacterium preserved in archaeological human remains, scientists were able to reconstruct how the disease…

On 8 September, OpenAI claimed that its AI agents had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the most famous and difficult challenges in mathematics. Had a human solved it, they would have collected both prize money and plaudits from their fellows. The announcement instead ignited what some mathematicians have called an “existential crisis” in their field over the power of AI, and accusations that OpenAI misused human work.The maths behind Navier-Stokes is difficult to understand, but the critiques levelled by mathematicians will be familiar to artists, office workers, or anyone else concerned about AI. OpenAI’s results, like any arising from…

The sister of Pakistan’s imprisoned former prime minister, Imran Khan, has been arrested ahead of next week’s protests held in his support, his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has said.Aleema Khanum was detained in the eastern city of Lahore on Sunday afternoon, PTI officials said, calling it an “illegal detention”. Her son is demanding her return.The order for Khanum’s arrest, which came from Lahore’s deputy commissioner, alleged that she was mobilising Imran Khan’s supporters “through social media and public meetings”. It added that she will be detained for 30 days.Khanum is a vocal critic of her brother’s detention, regularly speaking to…

No international relationship has more power to determine the success of Andy Burnham’s premiership. So you might imagine the stakes for the prime minister’s first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump on Tuesday would be high.Yet Burnham may prove to be a lucky general. The balance of risk has shifted. Trump is unpopular at home, where inflation remains high, and is mired in an intractable conflict in Iran that has the potential to sink his midterm dreams.When Keir Starmer first visited Trump in February 2025, the situation could not have been more different. The notoriously unpredictable president had just won the…

We’re seeing a big debate over AI safety and a potential slowdown, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently published a plan to “pace the frontier,” while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly echoed President Donald Trump’s claims that the AI backlash is a hoax and regulation is unnecessary. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed whether executives like Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are serious about wanting to slow down. While I was surprised at how many industry leaders seemed to throw their support behind Amodei’s plan, Sean noted that the…

Solana validator coordination now operates on a 250-millisecond target slot time. A slot is the network’s target interval for a validator to produce a block, so the change gives users more frequent opportunities for transactions to land while giving validators less time to pass production from one leader to the next.The change became effective at epoch 1037 on Sept. 18, according to the Solana engineering changelog and a Solana Compass report that placed the transition at about 05:06 UTC. One early Sept. 20 sample covering 60 one-minute windows observed about 266ms per produced slot. Epoch 1037 skipped about 0.05% of…

For 10 years, physicist Stephan Schlamminger had been chasing one of the most stubborn numbers in science. Now, after a decade of experiments, corrections, and painstaking analysis, the answer was sitting inside a sealed envelope. He was not entirely sure he wanted to open it. Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), had spent much of the previous decade trying to measure the universal gravitational constant. Known to physicists as big G, this fundamental number determines the strength of gravitational attraction throughout the universe. The number hidden in the envelope was the key that would…