Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

To understand the differences between Donald Trump’s somewhat restrained first term and the outrageous abuses of his second, you need to appreciate the long afterlife of the president’s late mentor. Roy Marcus Cohn was the kingmaker from hell. An odious man born of an odious mother—Dora Cohn was “mean, vicious, ugly, and foul-mouthed,” one family member said—Cohn was an only child spoiled shamelessly by his doting heiress mom. Dora created “a person who was totally free of the rules that you and I or most people go by,” one of Cohn’s law partners later said. A brilliant lawyer who graduated…

A video of an elephant rescuing a man from floodwaters has been shared online with the suggestion that it shows the recent flooding in Nepal.One post claims: “In Nepal, elephants were seen saving people from the devastating Flood”, while another includes “#Nepal” in the caption. We’ve not been able to verify the origins of the footage ourselves, but this video has been online since at least 9 August, more than two weeks before yesterday’s flash flooding in Nepal. Several hundred people have been confirmed dead following the disaster, which reportedly took place after the collapse of part of a Himalayan…

Nepal’s early flood warning system relied on a conventional network of river gauges that was ill-equipped to sufficiently alert locals of the deadly wall of water that swept through the country’s valleys on Wednesday, according to scientists and disaster response researchers.Geologists believe that the catalyzing event for the flash floods in Nepal and Tibet was a dual high-altitude landslide and glacial avalanche that unleashed huge volumes of water. Experts in disaster response say that the speed of the cascade, coupled with its extremely remote origin in the Himalayan mountains, made it nearly impossible for Nepal’s warning system to alert residents…

Die sich verschlechternde Sicherheitslage in Libyen erschwert allerdings die Bemühungen des Landes, sich als zuverlässiger Lieferant für Europa zu positionieren. Der Schmuggel von Kraftstoff durch Banden und Milizen hat die Fördermengen des Landes in den letzten Jahren beeinträchtigt, und politische Gruppen nehmen zunehmend die Energieinfrastruktur ins Visier. Anfang dieses Monats griffen Drohnen ein Kraftwerk und eine wichtige Raffinerie in Zawiya in der Nähe von Tripolis an, dem Sitz der international anerkannten Regierung im Westen des Landes, was zu großflächigen Stromausfällen führte. In derselben Woche kam ein hochrangiger Geheimdienstmitarbeiter bei einem Autobombenanschlag ums Leben. Auf die Frage, wie das Land angesichts…

It makes a pleasant change. Not so long ago, Keir Starmer was falling over himself in his efforts to keep things sweet with Donald Trump. Offering the US president a second state visit within minutes of meeting him. Everyone knows you should never put out on the first date: it only makes the other person think you’re a pushover. Sure enough, The Donald banked the marching bands and the Windsor silver service, made polite conversation for three days and then went back to trash-talking him.Yet still, Starmer just sat there and took it. As if one word of criticism would…

The number of asylum seekers living in hotels has halved in a year, Home Office figures show.Sweeping changes to the asylum system have also led to a significant drop in legal arrivals and asylum claims, but the numbers of asylum seekers housed in private accommodation has increased as the government moves people from hotels into privately rented houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).There were 16,021 asylum seekers housed in 160 hotels at the end of June, down from 32,041 at the same point last year and a peak of 56,018 in September 2023.Asylum hotels have been a flashpoint for the far…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is senior strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and was a member of the Federal Reserve Board of GovernorsContrary to the assertions of some commentators, the recent rise in interest rates on long-dated US Treasuries is not indicative of financial markets starting to question the soundness of US debt, nor of credibility problems at the Federal Reserve.To see why, we can divide the yield investors receive into a real component and a…

Google is adding new ways for users to plan and book trips through AI Mode, its conversational search experience, the company announced on Thursday. Users will now be able to ask AI Mode to track flight prices, book hotels, and see the cost of flights and hotels in points or miles. The updates indicate that Google is looking to position AI Mode as an AI travel agent of sorts, as it’s moving beyond simply helping users find information to actually handling parts of the trip-planning and booking process itself.  Users can now describe to AI Mode when and where they…

In this tutorial, we use Anthropic’s claude-protein-binder-design dataset, which contains 1,440 AI-designed miniprotein binders tested against 16 targets. Because the release includes both computational predictions and real wet-lab results from two independent labs, we can go beyond simply studying the designs. We evaluate how well structure predictors identify successful binders, whether combining predictions improves performance, how rankings translate into practical testing budgets, and how much disagreement comes from the assays themselves. Also, we train a target-aware classifier to test whether these signals can reliably predict experimental success. import subprocess, sys, warnings, itertools, math warnings.filterwarnings(“ignore”) import importlib.util _needed = {“huggingface_hub”: “huggingface_hub>=0.24”,…

Two men suspected of being members of the notorious cybercrime group TeamPCP have been arrested and charged by Australian authorities. The suspects, Ruben Ian Thomson, 21, and Louis Michael Gaebler, 23, have been arrested in Perth. They face several charges related to their alleged role in a cybercrime syndicate that is believed to have caused financial losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. Thomson has been charged with five types of offenses related to computer hacking and money laundering. He faces between 3 and 20 years in prison for each charge. Gaebler has been charged with computer hacking, and the…