Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at China’s role in U.S. sanctions on Iran, the killing of a former Zambian cabinet member, and a controversial medical exam for imprisoned Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. ‘Economic D-Day’ Senior Iranian leadership warned the United States on Friday that any new U.S. threats would be met with “crushing, punishing, and devastating responses,” just days after the White House announced that it would start targeting Tehran with its “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN.” Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at China’s role in U.S. sanctions on Iran, the killing…

The claim that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration intended to rename a U.S. Navy vessel that was originally named after Black World War II hero Doris Miller circulated online in August 2026. The claim originated from reporting by CNN on Aug. 20 that relied on three anonymous sources “familiar with internal discussions” of the Navy. The ship was originally announced as the USS Doris Miller in 2020, during Trump’s first term. Snopes has been unable to independently verify CNN’s reporting, but it appeared in 2026 the Trump administration referred to the ship only by its identification number, CVN-81, rather than the…

It was during a ceremony at a settlement in the occupied West Bank last September that Israel’s prime minister made his intentions clear. “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state,” said Benjamin Netanyahu. “This place belongs to us.”He was signing an agreement to push ahead with the expansion of a settlement in an area known as E1, just to the east of Jerusalem.In recent days, the opening up of tenders for the construction of some 1,200 settlement homes on the strategically important land has brought widespread condemnation.All settlements are illegal under international law…

TikTok has agreed to pay $400m (£293m) to the US to end a lawsuit alleging its platform violated childrens’ privacy, marking one of the largest ever settlements over the issue.The deal stems from a 2024 suit by the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden alleging TikTok and its parent company ByteDance collected “vast amounts of data” on millions of users under the age of 13.Doing so was against the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law enacted in 2000. It is the same law that dozens of US states are now suing Meta over.”Children and parents…

Anthropic has moved its most cyber-capable model into a product security teams can switch on themselves. As of August 21, 2026, Claude Security scans run on Claude Mythos 5, the Mythos-class model that until now reached only vetted defenders through Project Glasswing. The scan connects to a GitHub repository, traces data flows across files, and returns findings with a CWE category, confidence and severity ratings, and a suggested patch. Claude Security hands back a scan result instead of a prompt box, so the same model that finds vulnerabilities cannot be steered into writing exploits. The feature is in public beta…

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of trojanized npm packages that masquerade as working calendar and streak utilities but are engineered to stealthily deliver an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Linux implant dubbed RedC2 4.0. “When the module loads, it locates the bundled binary, marks it executable, and launches it as a detached background process,” TrendAI, Trend Micro’s enterprise cybersecurity business, said in a report published Thursday. “No install hook function call is needed; a single import anywhere in the dependency graph, even a transitive one, is enough to execute the payload.” The list of identified packages is below – streak-metrics-math@1.0.0,1.0.1 kit-map-vim@1.0.0 streak-map-cache@1.0.0 streak-map-kit@1.0.0 map-streak-kit@1.0.0…

Olenox Industries is an energy company that acquired Bitcoin miner CS Digital Ventures in May. It reported preliminary July production of 15.13 BTC against a June 30 balance sheet. The balance sheet carried $1.21 million of cash and $26.26 million of current liabilities.However, the output had a gross value of about $1.16 million at the Aug. 21 Bitcoin spot price of $76,371.25. It was not equivalent to disclosed revenue, sale proceeds or available cash. For part of the fleet, Olenox received the full Bitcoin output. It still owed a hosting invoice for power, management fees and profit share that had…

One of the nation’s largest environmental groups is challenging the Trump administration’s closure of a leading climate institute, filing a lawsuit Thursday in federal court saying the closure is unlawful. The administration had announced in December that it would dismantle the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, which conducts advanced climate and weather modeling. The closure is part of a broader assault on climate science by the White House. But the lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund also says it was an illegal act of political retribution against Colorado. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in…

As Sir David Attenborough has observed, “there’s nothing more magical than finding a shiny shell and knowing you’re the first person to have seen it for 150 million years”. Senior museum figures are campaigning for fossils to be classed as national treasures, according to the Waverley criteria, which control the export of objects considered culturally important to the nation. But the rules only cover natural treasures that are “made”, excluding fossils.These calls come after a private collection from the Jurassic Coast was sold to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi for a reported eight-figure sum. Both the Natural History Museum…

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, left Britain six years ago in a break with the royal family that opened painful public conversations about race, the monarchy and the role of the tabloids.Now, the couple — who are, officially, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — are moving back from the United States with their children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5.One thing is clear: They will not take up the royal duties they stepped away from in 2020. But much else remains uncertain.Why did they leave?Their departure from Britain came just two years after the couple’s fairy-tale wedding — once…