Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The FBI on Tuesday called on ShinyHunters group members to come forward in the wake of the alleged leader’s arrest. The suspected leader, Pepijn van der Stap, of Amsterdam, was arrested on September 15 in the Netherlands while on probation after serving three of the four-year prison term he was sentenced to in 2023 over hacking and extortion activities. The Dutch police on Tuesday said the 24-year-old man is suspected of “playing a role within the hacking group ShinyHunters” and of planning two murders. “After his arrest on September 15, a lot of information was found on his laptop, including…

In brief Democratic staff on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations analyzed 846 sanctioned wallets tied to Iran and its proxies. They found 84% transacted exclusively, or nearly exclusively, in Tether’s USDT. Tether published a statement the same day citing $550 million of Iran-linked freezes this year, without addressing the report. Of 846 cryptocurrency wallets sanctioned or targeted for seizure over links to Iran and its regional proxies, 84% transacted exclusively or nearly exclusively in Tether’s USDT stablecoin, according to a report released by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).The report, titled “Tethered to Terrorism,” comes from Democratic staff on the Senate…

NSTGRO Homepage Omar AlyousefUniversity Of MemphisPolycatenated Architected Materials (PAM) for Origami-Inspired Space Docking Ports Cade ArmstrongUniversity Of Texas at AustinIntelligent Multi-Agent Constellations for Cooperative Cislunar Operations Laurel BarnettHarvard UniversityPhotonic SNSPD Readout and Feed Forward System for Improved Optical Communication Capabilities Katie BarcakWilliam Marsh Rice UniversityCompact magnetic heat switch for thermal management of long duration low power exploration missions Austin BodinUniversity Of Colorado, BoulderRapid Robust Trajectory Design via Motion Funnels in Multi-Body Systems William BodnarNorth Carolina State UniversityNear-field Thermophotovoltaics for Extraterrestrial Surface Power Generation Diana BolanosUniversity of California, BerkeleyOrigami-inspired lattice architectures for robotic assembly and reconfiguration of modular space structures Annalise…

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. On April 9, a farmer named Rupalal heard noises in a well at his field in Dhawadi village in the state of Rajasthan in India. He looked down and saw a leopard 21 meters (70 feet) below. A Rajasthan Forest Department team arrived at the scene and lowered a cage into the well, but the leopard would not enter. So Pratap Singh Chundawat, a ranger, descended into the shaft by rope. He tranquilized the animal with a dart gun, and the…

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote and Kenya’s President William Ruto are set to break ground on a $16bn (£12bn) oil refinery in Lamu, on Kenya’s northern coast.Upon completion, the refinery is expected to process 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day, making it East Africa’s largest industrial project by capacity. Ahead of the launch, some local residents took to the streets to demand more compensation for land used for the refinery.Speaking to the BBC, Dangote dismissed the protests as games played by local marketers and international players, insisting the refinery would go ahead and would be ready by 2030 as planned.The…

Sixteen English councils spent more than 80% of their core funding on adult and children’s social care last year, highlighting the growing financial pressure on other local services.Guardian analysis of government figures found that councils responsible for social care spent a net £42.8bn on adult and children’s services in 2025-26, equivalent to a record 71.9% of their combined core spending. Adult social care took 44.5% and children’s services accounted for 27.4%. In 2017-18, care costs made up 62.4% of councils’ core spending.The overspending, which is driven by an ageing population with increasingly complex care needs, rising inflationary pressures and growing…

Andy Burnham has opened the door to the UK rejoining the EU, saying Britain could “go all the way”, as he prepares to reconsider Labour’s post-Brexit red lines.The prime minister used a series of interviews after his emotional Labour conference speech to spell out how wide-ranging his consideration of Britain’s future with Brussels could be because Brexit had caused “more harm than good”.Burnham said the government could keep the current arrangements, seek a customs union, return to the single market or “go all the way” in what would be full EU membership. Speaking to the BBC, he said ministers would…

The US executive branch is no longer acknowledging the existence of “artificial intelligence.” Going forward, official policy websites, policy documents, and press releases will refer only to “Super Intelligence,” thanks to a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump.“The word super is the best word of all, and it’s the simplest,” Trump said at an event announcing the launch of America.gov earlier on Tuesday, and said Chinese President Xi Jinping, who visited the White House last week, “loves it” too. “We don’t want to hear artificial. Because it’s not artificial. It’s very powerful, it’s very brilliant. It’s going to…

Human approval is valuable, but “a human is in the loop” is not a complete control. Security leaders should ask what information reaches the reviewer, whether the AI can shape that information and whether one person can approve an irreversible action. Credentials also leak, dependencies are compromised and systems are misconfigured. A capable agent can search this environment quickly, retry continuously and share what it learns. The question is not whether a sandbox reduces risk. It does, but whether the organization has mistakenly treated that sandbox as the full security boundary? Build the jail and plan for leakage Back to…

Anthropic’s planned IPO could force a fast-growing crypto derivatives market to reconcile its synthetic valuation with Wall Street’s actual price.Pre-IPO perpetual contracts linked to the artificial-intelligence company generated $643 million in trading across 12 crypto venues through Sept. 21, already exceeding the $590 million recorded in all of August, according to Binance Research.About $80 million of Anthropic-linked open interest was outstanding at the September snapshot. On Binance alone, open interest rose 88% over 30 days to $31.2 million from $16.6 million.The growth has taken place without publicly traded Anthropic shares anchoring the market.Instead, traders are buying and selling cash-settled contracts…