Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

On a cold January night in 2005, two Marines knocked on the door of David and Joanne Fuller and told them that their son, First Lt. Travis Fuller, had died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. A numbness took over Joanne’s body. She sat at the kitchen table next to David, who was crying. She didn’t cry, and doesn’t remember speaking.Nothing in her life has even come close to that feeling, she told me.“It’s like if you came home and your house had burned down,” she said. “It’s a shock, and there’s nothing you can do.”That woodenness remained as they…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the German economy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Germany’s biggest overhaul of its pension system in more than two decades is set to hand hundreds of billions of euros in retirement savings to global asset managers, at the expense of insurers. Executives expect a relatively small group of fund managers to grab the majority of inflows resulting from reforms to replace the country’s guaranteed Riester pensions with accounts loosely modelled on US 401(k) plans, which take effect in January. The new regime will slash the fees that can be charged…

This summer, every meal feels like a risk.Just as the US is recovering from a major cyclospora outbreak stemming from tainted iceberg lettuce, salmonella has turned up in jalapeños, eggs, and even dog food. The jalapeño-related outbreak is now responsible for at least 431 illnesses and 57 hospitalizations in more than two dozen states. Meanwhile, a dual-pathogen outbreak of E. coli and salmonella linked to alfalfa sprouts has affected 55 people across 15 states.But is it just your overactive imagination that these outbreaks are worse than normal?To answer that, WIRED tallied up publicly available numbers from the Food and Drug…

A China-nexus cyber espionage actor tracked as Fire Ant has expanded a long-running campaign beyond VMware hypervisors to compromise Cisco IOS XR routers, Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System (TACACS) servers, and Linux management hosts used to route, authenticate, and manage high-value networks. Sygnia, the incident response firm that investigated the intrusion, said the actor turned the compromised routers into collection platforms, capturing network traffic, harvesting credentials, and suppressing the logging and telemetry that defenders rely on to reconstruct an attack. The firm assessed that the hacker group used its foothold to explore paths to connected high-value environments, including critical infrastructure.…

A new XRP Ledger study says two or three extra peer connections per participating node can sharply raise the number of nodes a targeted attack must remove to disrupt modeled consensus.XRPL consensus depends on enough trusted validators receiving one another’s messages. A separate peer-to-peer network carries those messages between servers, so extra routes could keep validator traffic moving if an attack removes the network’s busiest hubs.The Aug. 26 arXiv paper tests random K-out augmentation. K is the number of new undirected edges each participating node creates to peers chosen uniformly at random.At 60% participation and K=2, the model’s quorum critical…

Two remarkably successful theories explain nearly everything we observe in the universe, from tiny atoms and molecules to planets, stars, and galaxies. Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter at very small scales, while Einstein’s theory of gravity explains how stars and black holes move and how the Universe expands. Despite their enormous success, the two theories still do not fit neatly together. Physicists have spent decades searching for a theory of “quantum gravity” that could combine them into one consistent description of nature. The Challenge of Quantum Gravity A central expectation is that gravity itself should ultimately follow the…

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In the forests around Pemaluan in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, researchers led by Wendy Erb at the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics in the U.S. have placed audio recorders on mountains, beside caves, and among mangroves. Over 18 months, they sampled 20 sites, collecting the calls of gibbons, frogs, hornbills, insects, and other wildlife. They want to establish a baseline before Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital city, alters the surrounding landscape, according to a video produced by Mongabay, Scientific…

Etu Energias, a privately owned Angolan energy company, has taken steps to increase its stakes in two offshore blocks from Cabinda Gulf Oil Company (CABGOC), a subsidiary of U.S.-headquartered energy giant Chevron, through a deal that will make it the largest interest holder in one of Angola’s longest-producing deepwater assets and could see it take over operatorship of one of these blocks. Illustration; Source: Chevron Etu Energias has signed a sale and purchase agreement (SPA) with Chevron’s Angolan subsidiary to acquire a 31% working interest (WI) in Block 14 and a 15.5% WI in Block 14K offshore Cabinda for a…

Donald Trump must look back at the start of 2026 with a wistful sigh. The U.S. president rang in the new year with a grand bash at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, attracting guests such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani. At the party, Vanilla Ice pumped out “Ice, Ice, Baby.” A live speed painter conjured up an image of Jesus Christ. Since Christ himself wasn’t around to do the honors, Trump promised to autograph the painting and then personally auctioned it off for $2.75 million. The first year of the president’s second term…

CDC. “Measles Cases and Outbreaks.” Measles (Rubeola), 1 May 2024, www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/. Accessed 9 May 2025.—. “Measles Vaccination.” Measles (Rubeola), 17 Jan. 2025, www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccines/index.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fvaccines%2Fvpd%2Fmmr%2Fpublic%2Findex.html. Accessed 9 May 2025.Christensen, Laerke. “Trump Claimed Autism Rates Are Rising. Here Are the Facts.” Snopes, Snopes.com, 8 Mar. 2025, www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/09/trump-autism-rates-facts/. Accessed 9 May 2025.Dubé, Ève, et al. “Vaccine Hesitancy, Acceptance, and Anti-Vaccination: Trends and Future Prospects for Public Health.” Annual Review of Public Health, vol. 42, no. 1, Apr. 2021, pp. 175–91, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-090419-102240.Gorvett, Zaria. “The Controversial Cells That Saved 10 Million Lives.” BBC, 4 Nov. 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20201103-the-controversial-cells-that-saved-10-million-lives. Accessed 9 May 2025.Hayflick, L., and P. S. Moorhead.…