Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

An Amazon Web Services data center is situated near single-family homes in Northern Virginia, known as “data center alley.” (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images) Virginia residents say they don’t want data centers in their neighborhoods. Politicians have expressed hesitancy about unchecked expansion. But the money trail raises questions. Three Northern Virginia Democrats representing the world’s largest data center market have received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from industries positioned to benefit from the artificial intelligence and data center boom. Northern Virginia has been dubbed “data center alley” for the large number of massive, windowless structures proliferating in…

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a new Iraqi front in the Iran war, Russia’s social media crackdown, and wildfires across Western and Southern Europe. New Battlefield Players U.S. and Saudi forces launched joint strikes on Iran-backed militant groups in Iraq on Wednesday, upending a fragile pause in fighting amid indirect U.S.-Iran peace talks and adding another front to a rapidly expanding regional war. Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a new Iraqi front in the Iran war, Russia’s social media crackdown, and wildfires across Western and Southern Europe. New Battlefield Players U.S. and…

Investigators say that scarcity has fuelled increasingly sophisticated paper-leak rackets, linking teachers, middlemen and exam-centre staff. Computer-based testing closes some of those vulnerabilities. But it creates others.Misra says even relatively minor technical failures can affect candidates in ways that are difficult to quantify.”A non-functional mouse is not just about pausing the timer,” he said. “It is also about disruption to concentration.”He also worries about equity.He says success in CBT increasingly depends not only on subject knowledge but also on digital familiarity and opportunities to practise in simulated testing environments – advantages that remain unevenly distributed and may favour students attending…

The Greens, riding high on their Gorton and Denton by-election victory, have put significant effort into this campaign — with MPs and leader Zack Polanski arriving to knock on doors. Coggins said that Labour have just put “a new singer playing the same song” with their leadership switch-up, and argues that voters are skeptical to trust Burnham before he has a record on delivery. About the Thursday contest, Coggins said the Greens hope to make it into the second round with Labour. “We find a lot of people don’t know about the SV, and once they understand that they can…

The Dreadnought-class submarines will replace the UK’s four Vanguard-class vessels that have been in operation since 1992, carrying Trident missiles to provide a nuclear deterrent.Those Vanguard submarines are due to be retired in the 2030s, with the Dreadnoughts entering service at the same time.The project has taken 20 years to get to this stage and was first announced in 2006 by the then Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. A decade later, in 2016, MPs formally approved building the new submarines.Thursday’s announcement of £8.4bn marks the start of what has been called the fourth phase of the project.The spending was already…

Barack Obama, the only Democrat to win Iowa in a presidential election in the last quarter-century, famously loves basketball. Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee in the state’s high-stakes Senate race, does, too — he was a two-time Paralympic gold medalist on the U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball team.So for one of the former president’s first endorsements of the midterm elections, he appeared in an endorsement video shooting hoops with Mr. Turek, a centrist state lawmaker who is seeking to become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Iowa in more than a decade.Last week, Mr. Obama joined Mr. Turek…

RAMageddon won’t be the only reason your next phone costs more — Qualcomm is about to raise prices on all its processors, as well. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on Wednesday that “prices are going to go up” on the company’s products starting on September 1st, CNBC reports. The price hikes were rumored last week to be “a percentage in the double digits.”Qualcomm announced the planned price increases while reporting a 20 percent year-over-year drop in revenue from its handset business, the lowest it’s reported since 2021. In its quarterly earnings presentation, Qualcomm said this drop is due to “unprecedented…

Chinese cybercriminals have been using full-service mobile malware frameworks to steal money from popular finance apps.On June 18, China’s National Cybersecurity Reporting Center issued a warning on WeChat to the general public. Cybercriminals were masquerading as provincial public security services, spreading a fake app that promised citizens “one-stop handling” of public safety issues online. Anyone who downloaded the app unwittingly infected their mobile device with information-stealing malware. The warning also listed two IP addresses associated with the campaign.Those IP addresses led the independent researcher NetAskari, and hunt.io, down a rabbit hole. At the end of it was a substantial cybercriminal…

The CEO of the American Bankers Association, Rob Nichols, has said that the banking lobby wants the Clarity Act to succeed — but small edits to the bill still need to be made. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box show Wednesday, Nichols said that while there is a “lot of good” in the Clarity Act, the issue around stablecoins and local lending needs to be fixed.  JUST IN: 🇺🇸 American Bankers Association CEO tells CNBC “There’s a lot of good in the Clarity Act” 👀”I do think that the crypto and the banking sectors can coexist. I think we can be…

As NASA’s Curiosity rover recently began climbing up a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande,” it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each one about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across. The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande. In a 360-degree panorama that the rover captured on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days, or sols, of the mission, the polygonal shapes spread in all directions for as far as…