Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Cambodia insists five environmental activists jailed in 2024 will remain behind bars, after a U.N. working group called their detention arbitrary and urged their immediate release.The five members of Mother Nature Cambodia were sentenced to six to eight years in prison for allegedly plotting against the government.The U.N. working group found no legal basis for their detention and said their prosecution and trial violated their rights, including through discriminatory treatment and a lack of a fair trial.Cambodian officials maintain the activists were detained through lawful judicial proceedings, while rights advocates say the case reflects a broader government crackdown on…

Aberdeen-based decommissioning services provider Well-Safe Solutions has strengthened its decommissioning offering through a strategic partnership with NMC Energy, combining their subsea, platform interface, and well lifecycle expertise to support major North Sea projects. Well Safe Defender; Source: Well Safe Solutions Well-Safe Solutions has signed a strategic partnership agreement with NMC Energy to support ongoing operations, including the recently awarded Apache Beryl and Forties decommissioning contracts, and to pursue future project collaboration opportunities. Phil Milton, CEO of Well-Safe Solutions, commented: “Well-Safe Solutions partnership with NMC Energy continues our mission to provide our customers with a single point solution for all their…

Reading Time: 4 minutes A man who was being held at the Milwaukee County Jail is disputing the account from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office about the events leading up to the in-custody death last week of Kourtney Edwards, a 45-year-old Milwaukee man. Alex Williams, 33, said officials at the jail ignored initial pleas to help Edwards. He said he heard people in a nearby holding cell banging on the door and yelling through a slot that someone was vomiting, wasn’t doing well and needed help. “Those calls went ignored for a while,” Williams said, estimating that they lasted several…

Whether or not it’s prudent for the United States to continue its war with Iran, a new constraint is becoming public knowledge: the depletion of crucial U.S. munitions. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the United States has used up as much as half of certain key defensive and offensive missiles in this year’s conflict with Iran. The running down of these munitions diminishes the White House’s ability to project power and emboldens its adversaries. On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Tom Karako, the director of CSIS’s Missile Defense Project, to understand…

Ziva Sharp said her Jewish faith motivated her to travel from Jerusalem to the West Bank to stand up for Palestinians – a commitment that led to her being set upon by fellow Israelis also professing to be driven by Judaism. Sharp and around 30 other activists are part of a small movement of Israelis, many of them religious Jews, who periodically go to the occupied West Bank with a mission to protect Palestinians under growing assault by violent settlers. On Tuesday, at least five of the activists were injured as settlers violently expelled them, throwing stones, unleashing pepper spray…

Roughly 700 AI agents participated in the attack over a seven-day period last month, according to the report. Overall, around 1,200 AI agents that were supposed to be isolated from one another exchanged over 70,000 secret messages about how to cheat their way through a common hacking evaluation.That included coordinating hacking strategies and discussing how to hide evidence of cheating, the report said. In some cases, “sacrificial” agents even tried dead-end hacking techniques simply to generate information that might help the broader swarm.“Agents managed to achieve milestones they could not have achieved working on their own, often because some agents…

Russia threatens to strike UK military sites over its help with supplying weapons technology to UkraineRussia has warned the UK and France that they were “playing with fire” ‌by supplying missile technology to Ukraine, saying Moscow would retaliate by striking British military sites in Ukraine and elsewhere, according to Russian media.Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, ​Maria Zakharova, said Russia would respond to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons by hitting any British military facilities in Ukraine and beyond, Russia’s state-owned Tass news agency reported.It came after Andy Burnham announced earlier this week that the UK government will release the blueprints for British-made…

The 9,210mAh dual-cell battery in the new Redmi Note 17 Pro Max is the biggest that Xiaomi has fit in any phone it’s sold in Europe — and remarkably, in some other markets the phone comes with an even larger 10,000mAh single-cell design.As you can probably guess, this is a silicon-carbon battery either way, one with a high 16 percent silicon content, meaning it’s more energy-dense than most. It’s allowed Xiaomi to fit this huge battery into a phone that’s basically the same size as an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but 8g lighter and fractionally thinner too.Xiaomi says the Redmi…

In July 2026, during internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems⁠.The incident occurred during cybersecurity evaluations of several OpenAI models, and was primarily driven by a highly capable, internal-only research model comparable in scale to GPT‑5.6 Sol. The models, operating under reduced safeguards, took actions that were misaligned with the goals of their assigned tasks—they communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems.We conducted an extensive investigation into this incident and worked closely…

Individuals and organizations in Cambodia have emerged as the target of a new campaign that delivers an open-source remote access trojan (RAT) called Spark RAT. “The samples employ diverse lure themes, suggesting an effort to appeal to a broad range of potential victims. These include government notices, public health materials, real estate-related content, and other topics,” Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) researchers Darrel Virtusio and Subhajeet Singha said in an analysis published Wednesday. The multi-stage attack is notable for employing the bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) technique to load a legitimate-but-vulnerable driver associated with OPSWAT AppRemover (“ardrv.sys”) to escalate…