Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Haley Stevens had heard quite enough from people who had heard quite enough of Haley Stevens.“There’s those cool kids on the internet,” Ms. Stevens, a four-term Michigan congresswoman, said last week, rubbing her hands together at a rally for her Democratic Senate primary campaign, bobbing in a denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up. “They’re doin’ the cool kid chyaahhter.”That chatter — the stuff of “coastal elites,” she insisted — had centered on how she chatters. Some skeptics of Ms. Stevens, locally and nationally, heard the exaggerated Midwestern twang of a schlocky “Saturday Night Live” impersonation, with its raised a’s…

The age of rogue AI hacker agents has arrived—but it didn’t have to happen this way.After an OpenAI agent breached the Hugging Face platform earlier this month, the two companies said this week that the hacking spree was more extensive than previously thought and also involved intrusions into multiple third-party accounts and services as part of the attack on Hugging Face. The incident has made waves in the cybersecurity community amid broader discussions about how evolving AI capabilities are changing both offensive hacking and digital defense. But as more information emerges, many researchers have concluded that rather than elucidating AI’s…

Tencent has released AngelSpec, an open-source, torch-native training framework for speculative-decoding draft models. The release covers both autoregressive multi-token prediction (MTP) and the block-parallel DFlash family. Most speculative-decoding work searches for one drafter that scores well on an averaged benchmark mixture. Real serving traffic does not look like that mixture. AngelSpec treats workload heterogeneity as a first-class design constraint, and specializes structure, training data, and verification depth around it. Why one universal drafter underperforms Speculative decoding is lossless. A lightweight drafter proposes several future tokens, and the target model verifies them together in one forward…

Unauthenticated attackers could exploit a critical-severity vulnerability in the open source AI agent orchestration platform Ruflo to execute commands inside the container, Noma Labs security researchers warn. A popular automation assistant with over 67,000 GitHub stars, Ruflo (formerly Claude Flow) comes with a multi-model AI chat interface, agent swarms, persistent memory, and built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool calling. Ruflo allows organizations to use AI applications, courtesy of agent swarms (support for coordinating up to 100 agents on shared enterprise-grade tasks), long-term memory enabling agents to recall past interactions, and an integrated MCP server enabling agents to execute various tasks.…

Telegram, the messaging platform used by more than 1 billion people worldwide, is facing a major legal challenge in Australia over claims that it failed to stop the spread of terrorism-linked material.Australia’s online safety regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, launched civil penalty proceedings against Telegram in the Federal Court on Thursday, according to an official statement.The authority alleged Telegram breached its obligations under the country’s Online Safety Act to address “pro-terror” content by failing to act on multiple user complaints.The case adds to growing global scrutiny of Telegram’s moderation practices, following legal pressure on CEO Pavel Durov in Russia and France…

After decades in tourist camps and circuses, African elephants that were returned to the wild are behaving, in many respects, like elephants that were never captive. A new study offers cautious evidence that elephants can regain many wild-like behaviors. Eleven elephants living freely on South African reserves showed rates of vigilance, confrontation and self-directed touching broadly similar to those of wild elephants, researchers report July 29 in PLOS One. But stress measurements revealed a more complicated picture, hinting the need for further work to determine if the animals are well-adjusted. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week’s scientific…

By Katrina Michalak, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, Arizona State UniversityErin Orr was at the inception of her journalism career in the 1990s, working the business and real estate beat. As she was interviewing a source at an evening business event, the man repeatedly called her “honey,” commented on her dress, and drew her in for a lingering embrace — all in front of his wife. “It never happened again, which was good,” said Orr, 59, who is now executive director of the news nonprofit Investigate Midwest. “I also got out of reporting within probably six months of that because I was…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief. The highlights this week: The ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting takes place amid geopolitical turmoil, concerns about the governance of Indonesia’s president intensify, and we look at what’s new in Trump’s latest round of tariffs. ASEAN Summit Dominated by Middle East Last week’s meeting of the foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Manila took place against a backdrop of continued turmoil. The South China Sea and the war in the Middle East overshadowed proceedings as both China and the United States continued their track record of shooting themselves in…

30/07/2026 – 11:59Cooler weather and potential rain move into the French region torched by wildfires Higher humidity, cooler temperatures and a forecast for rain raised hopes of relief Thursday for a parched portion of southwestern France engulfed by wildfires that have charred an area four times the size of Paris in recent weeks. Local officials reported a “rather calm” night, with a fire that has not grown beyond the 42,000 hectares already affected. FRANCE 24’s Carys Garland reports from Lanton, France. 30/07/2026 – 11:16Spanish PM declares end to national emergency over Madrid and Avila wildfires Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has lifted the state of emergency over the wildfires…

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said an object that crashed into a field in eastern Poland in the early hours of Thursday was probably a Russian missile.The unidentified object caused a 10m-wide (33ft) crater a short distance from the village of Tarnawa Kolonia, about 100km (62 miles) from the border with Ukraine during a Russian attack on the city of Lviv.”All the indications are that it was a Russian Kh-101 ballistic missile, but we want to be 100% certain about the type of missile and who launched it,” Tusk said during a specially convened meeting in nearby Lublin.Ukraine’s acting…