Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The US government announced on Wednesday that it has disrupted a hacking platform and botnet used by Chinese threat actors in attacks aimed at military and critical infrastructure systems. According to the Justice Department, the disruption efforts targeted a state-sponsored group called QTFY, which has been operating from a company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology. QTFY has offered its hacking services to the Chinese government and others, enabling attacks against many critical systems in the United States since its establishment in 2018.  Disruption of QTFY hacking platform The US government has targeted two hacking services offered by QTFY: the scanning…

The nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen reported that US President Donald Trump “left investors at least an estimated $4.7 billion underwater” since 2022 through his and his family’s digital asset ventures.According to Public Citizen, investors lost billions of dollars through the Trump family World Liberty Financial governance token, the president’s nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards launched in 2022, his memecoin Official Trump (TRUMP) and Trump Media’s digital asset treasury. The bulk of the estimated losses, according to the organization, came from investors in the TRUMP memecoin, with $3.2 billion lost, while buyers of World Liberty Financial‘s USD1 stablecoin “haven’t suffered…

A recently proposed form of magnetism known as altermagnetism could eventually help researchers make computer memory smaller, faster, and more efficient. Now, scientists have found evidence that ruthenium dioxide, a quantum material previously considered nonmagnetic in its bulk form, may display this unusual magnetic behavior when prepared as an ultrathin film only a few atomic layers thick. Rice University physicist Ming Yi, working with Bharat Jalan of the University of Minnesota and Milan Radovic of the Paul Scherrer Institute, reported the findings in Science Advances. “Ruthenium dioxide was one of the first materials to be proposed as an altermagnetic candidate,…

In August 2024, excavation crews breached the last of four dams on the Klamath River in far northern California, marking the first time in over a century 100 years that salmon could swim above the dam sites.  Now, new research published on Thursday shows that in the two years since dam removal, over 20,000 chinook salmon have migrated up the Klamath River, many past the former dam sites and into traditional spawning grounds.  “The biological response has been much faster than I, and most of us, expected,” said Damon Goodman, lead author of the study and Mount Shasta-Klamath regional director…

The U.S. military is considering what units to cut and what to keep in Europe as part of the Trump administration’s rethink of force posture on the continent. But competing priorities could stymie the Defense Department’s ability to make the major drawdowns that some officials are pushing for. On July 27, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby announced the start of a six-month review of U.S. forces in Europe, meant to move “fast and irreversibly toward Europe taking primary responsibility for its conventional defense.” And this week, he traveled to Europe for meetings with NATO leaders and U.S. military personnel to…

The claim that Canada walked away from trade negotiations with the U.S. because President Donald Trump demanded changes to the country’s French language rules is still under investigation.  The rumor stems from declarations by Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney. In two separate speeches, Carney said that “at the last minute,” U.S. trade negotiators demanded that Canada bend rules designed to protect one of the country’s two official languages, French.  Carney said the rules specifically relate to Canadian and French-language content on online streaming platforms and translation requirements for unregistered trademarks that are not in French. This was consistent with a…

Pact with Caracas would bolster US oil supplies for years to come, but may face legal challenges.Published On 28 Aug 202628 Aug 2026US President Donald Trump’s administration is working on a deal to lock in long-term access to some of Venezuela’s crude reserves, Reuters sources have said.The agreement, which insiders said could be signed and made public soon, is expected to operate in a way that would let the US government secure a group of Venezuelan oilfields to be developed by American companies, with the resulting supply guaranteed for the US.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list“This is real…

Another strategy emerged later in June after videos of mass raids in Penza flooded social media, one of the poorest cities in European Russia. They showed police and military officers, sometimes accompanied by men in balaclavas, appearing to stop civilian men at checkpoints, on the street and on public transport, loading them into minibusses and taking them to military enlistment offices where some were then forced to sign contracts to fight in the war.Penza authorities have repeatedly denied any involvement in the alleged abductions and forced recruitment. The Penza campaign is alleged to be part of a broader government effort…

A federal judge on Thursday once again temporarily prohibited the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out a plan to restrict mail-in voting, put in place after a directive from President Trump.Federal District Judge Indira Talwani had cleared the way for the Postal Service to move forward just the day before, but on Thursday, she issued a new order concluding that the agency’s plan, released late on Friday, appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules fewer than 70 days before an election.She wrote that a group of Democratic-led states that had sued “face irreparable harm…

The giant flash flood that tore through settlements near Nepal’s border with China on Wednesday came as a brutal reminder of the growing risks to people in the Himalayas, a mountain range scientists say is deeply vulnerable to climate change.It is too early to establish definitively what caused Wednesday’s flood, but scientists said satellite imagery before and after the disaster suggested that a large portion of cliff north of the Langtang Lirung mountain close to Tibet collapsed, snapping off a huge chunk of glacier sitting over it. The force of tens of millions of cubic metres of falling rock and…