Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

by Paul Kiefer / Wisconsin Watch, Wisconsin Watch July 28, 2026 The chief federal judge for Wisconsin’s Eastern District has begun clearing a path to bond hearings for immigrants in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, months after attorneys first asked her to rule on challenges to the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. Over the past month, Judge Pamela Pepper has sided with at least four immigrants challenging the legality of their detention — her first rulings on a Department of Homeland Security policy that has landed thousands of immigrants nationwide in custody, sometimes for months. Pepper’s rulings place her…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief. The highlights this week: The death of a Chinese child in a gene-editing trial sparks outrage, COVID-19 cases surge across China, and South Korea’s stock market plummets in response to Chinese chipmaking advances. Fatal Gene-Editing Trial Sparks Outrage A joint investigation by Science and Retraction Watch into the death of a Chinese child during a gene-editing trial—and the subsequent cover-up—has sparked outrage online. Six-year-old Mei, a pseudonym, had a genetic defect that caused moderate learning difficulties. Her parents, a well-off professional couple, enrolled her in a gene-editing trial led by prominent neuroscientist Zilong Qiu at…

Goudrane and Adre, Chad – The water tanks had been bone dry for four days when a water truck crested the ridge above Goudrane refugee camp in eastern Chad, home to about 50,000 Sudanese refugees.Hundreds sprinted across the burning sand towards the slowing truck. For many families, one filled jerrycan meant another day of survival.The women at the front of the crowd fell first. They screamed as children clambered over them. Some sank to their knees, losing their grip on their jerrycans. Within 10 minutes, the crowd had surged around the truck until its 6,000 litres (1,585 gallons) of water…

Instead, Mélenchon wants France to strengthen ties with China as well as French-speaking countries in Africa, as well as South American countries. He sees the United States as an imperialist danger, while Germany — despite its turbulent relations with President Donald Trump — views the transatlantic relationship as paramount to its foreign policy. Mélenchon is opposed to Germany’s deeply held attachment to its free-market economic model and favors a planned economy instead. Mélenchon is also critical of Germany’s rearmament and the continued presence of U.S. nuclear weapons on its soil, which he said: “raise serious security concerns for neighboring countries.”…

Iran considered attacking a seaport in Ukraine in response to a Ukrainian strike on an Iranian ship, but a flurry of diplomacy has calmed the situation for now, according to Iranian and Western officials.Ukraine, which has accused Iran and Russia of supporting each other’s military operations, struck an Iranian commercial cargo ship in the Caspian Sea on Saturday, killing a civilian sailor. Iranian officials vowed to retaliate.Some people briefed on the intelligence said that they expected Iran to fire a ballistic missile with a small warhead at Ukraine, to make a symbolic point but cause relatively little damage. Other officials…

The New England Journal of Medicine this was not.When Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s pandemic diary was made public over the weekend by his Republican nemeses, it provided a rare, unfiltered look at the private thoughts of one of the most polarizing public officials in America as he led the nation through crisis. A typical entry is one dated May 21, 2020. It begins by noting the global death toll from the pandemic (234,100) and continues, typos intact, this way:“Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is…

Runlayer, a startup that offers a secure Model Context Protocol gateway — a standard for letting AI models and agents securely pull in outside data and tools — has filed a lawsuit against HR software startup Rippling, according to the complaint seen by TechCrunch. The lawsuit is a cautionary tale for anyone selling AI infrastructure to enterprise customers, especially to other tech companies, that increasingly have the engineering muscle to just build the thing themselves. In the suit, Runlayer describes an extensive product trial conducted by Rippling as a prospective customer, during which the MCP startup shared everything from its…

In this tutorial, we configure and operate Kimi CLI as a fully non-interactive AI coding agent. We install the CLI through uv with an isolated Python 3.13 environment, configure Moonshot API authentication through a TOML-based provider and model definition, and build a reusable Python wrapper for executing non-interactive CLI commands. We then apply Kimi to a realistic project workflow in which we inspect a codebase, identify implementation risks, autonomously modify source files, generate unit tests, execute validation commands, and iterate until the project passes its test suite. We also explore structured JSONL event streams, persistent multi-turn sessions, plan mode, model…

Swati KhandelwalJul 28, 2026Vulnerability / Artificial Intelligence JFrog has confirmed that OpenAI models exploited a zero-day in self-hosted Artifactory while trying to reach the open internet from a sealed evaluation environment. Artifactory is JFrog’s software repository manager. OpenAI says the models then escalated privileges and moved laterally until they reached an internet-connected node. JFrog says it has since developed and released fixes for cloud and self-hosted customers. The Artifactory exploit occurred inside OpenAI’s environment. OpenAI says a separate attack path later reached Hugging Face’s systems. JFrog says its cloud customers are already protected. Self-hosted users should review the Artifactory release…

Bitcoin traders have spent the past month reducing protection against a price decline while the Fed has made its next decision harder to predict.The Bitcoin options put-to-call open-interest ratio has fallen to approximately 0.52 from 0.76 in late June, meaning about 52 put contracts remain open for every 100 calls. Meanwhile, Fed Funds futures assigned around a 35% probability to a quarter-point rate increase after the implied probability briefly reached 40% on Monday.Chart showing the target rate probabilities for the Fed’s July 29 meeting as of July 28, 2026 (Source: CME FedWatch)So the two markets are now sending opposing signals.…