Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

TAMPA, Fla.—Ross Fabian’s low-slung apartment building sits beside a pond that sometimes smells of dead fish. He has seen dead dogs in the pond. For many years the pond has served an important purpose, as a repository of sorts for the pollutants and contaminants that flow with Florida’s heavy rains from the industrial sites, brownfields and failing septic systems in Fabian’s unincorporated community, which neighbors the University of South Florida and is known as the University Area. Called Aarans Pond, it is part of a network of such artificial waterbodies across the region where stormwater collects before cascading through a…

The U.S. Army paid General Dynamics $533 million for an artillery factory that failed to produce a single usable shell. Instead of efficient, state-of-the-art production lines, half a billion dollars in taxpayer funding paid for machines that kept failing in bizarre ways, former workers told ProPublica’s Jesse Coburn. Giant robot arms would catch fire. The Texas factory’s signature device often cracked the steel meant for the shells. And workers regularly had to take a sledgehammer to certain machines to try to make them function properly. But the machines still botched nearly every shell. The boondoggle, which included a real-life dumpster…

Panama on Tuesday became the latest Central American country, after Honduras and El Salvador, to declare an emergency over El Nino, which has already forced a reduction in shipping through the Panama Canal. Panama’s Interior Minister Dinoska Montalvo said the declaration will allow authorities to “to be prepared for what may come with El Nino,” which has fuelled a severe drought that is ravaging harvests, sparking fears of famine. Meanwhile, El Salvador declared a state of maximum alert on Tuesday to activate monitoring, surveillance and aid efforts for affected communities. “We are declaring a red alert for meteorological and farming…

A Frankfurt Airport worker has died of malaria after a rare outbreak led to six employees contracting the serious infection spread by mosquitoes. It is believed the mosquitoes arrived at Germany’s busiest airport on a plane, according to German public health officials. The remaining five infected individuals are receiving medical treatment, a spokesperson for airport operator Fraport said. Traps have been installed at the airport and mosquitoes captured will be analysed in a laboratory to determine their species and origin.”Sadly, we must confirm that one employee has died as a result of the infection,” the Fraport spokesperson told the BBC.…

People on hold to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for more than 30 minutes would get £30 off their tax bill under a Reform UK government, Robert Jenrick has announced.Reform’s economy spokesman said HMRC’s treatment of taxpayers was “offensive to working people” and his party would tie the pay of senior HMRC officials to customer service targets.To prevent abuse, the tax credit for phone delays would be limited to two occasions in a given tax year, Jenrick said.HMRC has said it has improved its response times since a highly critical report by a committee of MPs, external, in January 2025,…

Shapor Naghibzadeh learned the value of a good story in 2009 as a Google sysops engineer. When hackers backed by China set their sights on the search giant as part of an effort dubbed Operation Aurora, he was called into a hastily assembled war room to explain what exactly was going on in the company’s servers. Tracing cyberattacks through disparate networks taught Naghibzadeh the value of verified knowledge. But it was a costly and time-consuming task. He thinks that LLMs can bring that same functionality to databases of all kinds in a fraction of the time. Naghibzadeh would spend the…

Adobe and Nvidia on Tuesday announced patches for dozens of vulnerabilities affecting their products, including flaws rated critical severity.  Nvidia Nvidia published four new advisories on Tuesday. One advisory alerts customers to 18 security vulnerabilities in NemoClaw and OpenShell, enterprise AI security and runtime infrastructure products designed to wrap around autonomous AI agents. Two of the vulnerabilities are critical and they can be exploited for code execution, privilege escalation, data tampering, information disclosure, and denial of service (DoS).  A dozen of the other weaknesses have a high severity rating and their exploitation can have a similar impact. Five vulnerabilities have…

Wall Street research company Bernstein expects Bitcoin to recover from its latest downturn, reclaim its 2025 high and set new records in the coming years heading into the peak of its historical cycle.Bernstein expects Bitcoin (BTC) to reclaim $125,000 by late 2026 under both its base and bull cases, according to a research report published Wednesday and seen by Cointelegraph.The company said Bitcoin gained 28% over the previous 10 days after falling about 50% from its October 2025 peak, a rebound that could signal the end of the current bear cycle.The analysts’ call comes as institutional investors and corporate Bitcoin…

Certain hardy microbes could survive on the moon. Previous lunar missions explored the moon’s equator, where high ultraviolet radiation and daily temperature swings make the surface inhospitable to life. But Artemis IV, set to launch in 2028, will land a crewed mission on the moon’s south pole. The pole’s unique topography could sustain some bacteria and fungi, meaning future missions should carefully consider the risk of contamination in the region, researchers report August 19 in Science Advances.    Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. At the poles, sunlight hits the moon’s surface…

A new study details a deep-sea expedition near the remote Christmas and Cocos islands, where researchers visited unexplored seamounts and identified 149 previously unknown marine species, including black corals, sea worms, sea cucumbers and a variety of fish.At a site they dubbed “The Shark Tooth Graveyard,” researchers discovered around 1,000 shark teeth, covering more than 22 million years of evolution.Researchers from institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. surveyed the seafloor down to 5,431 meters (17,818 feet), where conditions are cold, dark and high-pressure with limited food options for benthic species.Deep-sea research is notoriously challenging, but scientists…