Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The Justice Department filed charges on Tuesday against the owner of Surro Connections, a surrogacy firm in Washington State, claiming that the business stole more than $1 million from customers hoping to become parents.That owner, Megan Hall-Greenberg, was the subject of a 2025 New York Times investigation into Surro Connections’ sudden collapse. The firm closed abruptly in December. Parents-to-be lost tens of thousands of dollars that Surro had said it would use to pay surrogates to carry pregnancies.The seven families The Times interviewed said they lost $20,000 to $81,000 each. Many had to scramble to secure extra funds by taking…

A top spokesman for the Secret Service and two other agency officials have been placed on leave amid an internal investigation, two senior Trump administration officials said on Wednesday.The Secret Service’s communications director, Anthony Guglielmi, who has worked at the agency since 2022, was placed on administrative leave, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.In a statement, the Secret Service said that “three non-law enforcement personnel” at the agency were on administrative leave “pending an investigation into potential misconduct.” The investigation is being conducted by…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If Amazon’s business section had shelves, they would be amply stocked with books on how to invest like Warren Buffett. But the death of Dolly Parton at the age of 80 is a reminder that similar inspiration lies in the music section.Parton will mostly be remembered for the 100mn records she sold, the Whitney Houston classic she wrote, towering blonde hair and what the FT’s obituary calls “fabulous folksiness”. She was an entrepreneur and corporate chieftain, too. While her finances were not…

Google says that 3.5 Transcribe “represents a major advancement from our previous transcription model, Chirp 3,” especially regarding multilingual performance and wording error rates. The transcription model allows users to “edit naturally with just your voice,” according to Google, and can automatically format text and remove filler words like “um” and “uh.”Users can provide a customized vocabulary to the model, allowing 3.5 Transcribe to automatically adapt transcription to unique spelling requirements and specialized jargon to prevent those words from being edited manually. It can also attribute speech for up to three speakers in pre-recorded audio, alongside providing word-level timestamps.Alongside 3.5…

Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team analyzed 405 malware samples tied to AI in some way, from ransomware partly written with the help of LLMs to installers that simply borrowed the name of a popular AI app. The researchers found that roughly 97% of the samples in the dataset never left a sandbox, research repository, or internal testing environment to reach a real target. Unit 42 cross-referenced the 405 file hashes against endpoint telemetry, network sessions forwarded for sandbox analysis, and internal alert records generated whenever a sample actually ran. Only 12 hashes surfaced on live endpoints, while a somewhat…

Bitcoin Core has merged a redesign of its optional transaction index that cut about 40 GB from the database in one contributor’s mainnet test. Operators using -txindex retain their existing indexes through an upgrade; capturing the full saving requires recreating the database.Pull request #35531, merged into Bitcoin Core’s master branch on Aug. 15, reduced the author’s rebuilt mainnet txindex from about 66 GB to 26 GB. The roughly 61% reduction is confined to this optional index. Bitcoin’s blockchain and the rest of a node’s data directory remain outside the measurement.The code is merged upstream. Stable binaries follow a separate release…

NASA’s Earth-observing satellite missions track dozens of features of a changing planet — aerosols, sea levels, land cover, cloud cover — over years and decades. Sustaining that record for the scientific and operational communities who depend on it requires more than engineering talent. It requires planning for an uncertain future: anticipating where a mission delay or on-orbit event might create a gap in the data those communities rely on. Lindsey Jacobson’s work helps NASA anticipate those disruptions before they happen and gives senior leaders options for managing them.A Pathways intern in engineering, Jacobson supports NASA’s Earth Science Division through the…

To improve living conditions in Nigeria, new roads like the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway are needed.But these can and must be built in such a way that protects mangroves, swamps, and remnant forests, using knowledge and tools like environmental and social impact assessments.“The question is not whether Nigeria should develop. It is whether development will be intelligent enough to avoid destroying the natural infrastructure that already protects coastal communities,” a new op-ed argues.This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.See All Key Ideas Nigeria needs road infrastructure for improved living…

“It has been said,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once remarked, “whoever possesses Iceland holds a pistol firmly pointed at England, America, and Canada.” Churchill was often preoccupied with the defense of Iceland during World War II, recognizing the tiny island in the middle of the North Atlantic to be of outsized importance in the global power struggle. In 1940, he sent troops into neutral Iceland in hopes of staving off a German counterinvasion. By the following summer, Britain’s army was stretched thin, and Churchill transferred Iceland’s defense to the United States—an obligation that remains to this day. Iceland’s strategic…

Tim Curry, the English actor best known for his star turn as Dr Frank-N-Furter in the cult classic musical film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” has died at the age of 80, his manager said Wednesday. Curry, who had struggled with his health for more than a decade after a debilitating stroke, died at his home in Los Angeles. A cause of death was ​not immediately given. The actor, who launched his career in London’s West End theater district, first played the gender-bending mad scientist in “Rocky Horror” before reprising the role in the 1975 film, which is still a staple…