Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Central Tokyo has experienced 35 consecutive days of rainfall, setting the longest continuous rainy streak since records began in 1886, reported local media citing Japan’s weather agency. Rains began on Aug. 27 and have continued daily as of Sept. 30. This spell breaks the previous record of 33 consecutive days of rainfall set in 2019, from June 27-July 29, according to Tokyo-based news site Japan Today. Tokyo typically sees its rainiest period in June-July. The nonstop rains in September are due to a combination of a stationary autumn rain front (known locally as akisame-zensen), intensified by approaching typhoons,…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Data centers may provide a major economic development opportunity for local communities in Wisconsin, but concerns around water and energy use and potential costs to residents have made them increasingly controversial. A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum aims to put those issues — and Wisconsin’s data center debate — into context. Researchers examined tax incentives supporting those projects as well as their energy and water use. Three major data center projects are in varying stages of development in Mount Pleasant, Port Washington and Beaver Dam. Others have been proposed but canceled in DeForest, Greenleaf…

Another day, another apocalyptic warning about the likelihood that rampantly uncontrollable artificial intelligence will solve all of our problems, including the problem of being alive.Hot on the heels of disgruntled Anthropic researchers announcing the end of civilisation by 2030, we’ve now had the portentously named Hugging Face incident, as well as the Australian government’s grim discovery of a rogue AI’s attack on its Medicare website. Swarms of experts are now falling over each other to warn us that much, much worse is on the way.Thank God, then, that PM Uncle Andy has thrust Britain on to the bleeding edge of…

Russia has launched the largest attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the spring, primarily targeting Kyiv and the surrounding region, Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi has said.At least six people were killed and 33 others injured across the country in the overnight attacks, including a child in the Kyiv region, local authorities reported.The strikes also impacted people’s power supplies, with Ukraine’s biggest private energy firm, DTEK, saying power to 8,000 homes had been restored following “a difficult night” for the capital.The Russian defence ministry said one of its targets was the Trypilska power station, the largest supplier of electricity to…

“We hope that the Committee of Independent Eminent Persons will exercise the legally required neutrality, even though people with clear political affiliations … have been appointed,” said Alexander Sell, vice president of the Europe of Sovereign Nations, and the president of its foundation. The ESN is the European home of the Alternative for Germany party. “In a true democracy, party representatives should not be involved in decisions regarding the funding of their political rivals,” Sell said. In July, the European Parliament green-lighted the process to deregister and defund ESN after the authority alleged breaches of EU values, including anti-immigration, antisemitic…

On Tuesday, OpenAI launched a new product called Dots, an always-on AI agent with a bubbly, blobby avatar. While the colorful avatar might evoke a smile, the biggest laugh from the launch is (we imagine) being had by Elon Musk, the former OpenAI founder who left, launched competitor Grok, and unsuccessfully sued. That’s because the domain “dot.com” belongs to Musk’s xAI, and it currently redirects to the download page for xAI’s Grok chatbot app. According to the Whois domain owner registry, that domain name was just transferred in July. It is entirely possible that xAI bought the domain for normal…

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget revealed today that attackers who stole $387.5 million last week breached its systems after exploiting a zero-day flaw in third-party security products. According to Bitget, two separate investigations by blockchain security firm SlowMist and Google Cloud’s cyber-defense arm Mandiant said the threat actors accessed Bitget’s wallet environment after compromising two security appliances with zero-day exploits. After the breach, the attackers dropped web shells on one of the hacked appliances and malware on the crypto exchange’s production wallet job server, as well as a custom withdrawal tool used to launch the cryptocurrency theft after midnight on September 25.…

Dan Tapiero says a new bull phase has begun in the core assets of the digital asset space. The founder and CEO of 50T Funds explains where he’s seeing real revenue growth underneath the hood, from stablecoins and tokenization to Kraken, Ledger, and Polymarket, and why Hyperliquid has been leading the market. Chapters:0:00 Dan Tapiero on What Makes a Digital Asset Company Worth Backing1:25 Passing on FTX, Celsius, and BlockFi – Why Valuation Matters3:50 Where the Real Revenue Growth Is: Stablecoins, Tokenization, and Kraken5:15 Bitcoin, Solana, and Why Hyperliquid Is Leading This Bull Phase6:59 Raising the $500M 50T Fund and…

Kinetics has decided to further expand its LNG infrastructure fleet through the conversion of the Arctic Voyager LNG carrier into an FSRU to be named LNGT Akdeniz, which will be a multi-spec unit with a storage capacity of approximately 143,000 cubic meters (cbm) and a regasification flow rate of 650 million scfd, with Moss-type cargo tanks and an expected economic life of 20 years.Mehmet Katmer, General Manager of Kinetics, commented: “The global LNG market continues to show strong demand for flexible, rapidly deployable regasification infrastructure. Growing focus on security of energy supply, the need for flexible import capacity and the…

Sitting in a pediatric intensive care unit last year, watching a ventilator keep her 17-month-old daughter alive, Emily Marris scoured the contents of her phone for evidence to give to California health and food safety investigators.  She had bought raw goat milk from a farm recommended to her in a Facebook group run by her chiropractor. Marris had hoped the milk, unprocessed and natural, would help with her daughter Brooklyn’s constipation. But doctors now suspected the unpasteurized milk, which hadn’t been heated to kill off pathogens, was the source of the toddler’s severe E. coli infection.  To the regulators who’d…