Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Senator Darline Graham’s acknowledgment at a televised debate this week that she was “not that informed on national security” has magnified her biggest vulnerability in the race to succeed her brother in the Senate, reviving questions about her level of political experience.Ms. Graham, who most recently led the state’s commission for the blind, had never held elected office when she was tapped last month to finish the term of her brother, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. With President Trump’s backing, she is now running for a full six years.Her opponent in the Republican primary runoff, Representative Ralph Norman, a five-term…

The near-bottomless demand for unique AI training data from top labs and corporations is driving a massive boom for a cohort of data-labeling startups. One of these fast-growing businesses is Micro1, a four-year-old startup that expanded its gross annual run rate from $100 million to $500 million over the past eight months, according to a person familiar with the company. Like its peers that hire domain experts such as doctors, lawyers, and scientists on a contract basis, Micro1 retains roughly 60% to 70% of that figure, putting its net annual run rate between $150 million and $200 million. While Micro1…

Blockchain Optimism’s governance has approved a proposal to repurpose 546.9 million OP tokens previously reserved for user airdrops to support ecosystem growth and institutional adoption.OP currently has a market cap of roughly $214 million, with a circulating supply of about 2.29 billion tokens, according to CoinGecko data.The new Strategic Ecosystem Fund will support partnerships with chains, protocols and institutions, as well as incentives to increase activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet and grow OP Enterprise.The decision drew pushback from some delegates who argued the tokens had been promised to users and questioned how the foundation would measure returns from the…

Women are diagnosed with autoimmune diseases far more often than men, and new research from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and UNSW Sydney may help explain why. Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system mistakenly targets the body’s own healthy tissues. Lupus, for example, can affect as many as nine women for every one man, yet the genetic factors behind this striking difference have remained poorly understood. Researchers have now identified more than 1,000 genetic switches that behave differently in female and male immune cells. These differences appear to contribute to greater activity in inflammation-related pathways in females, offering…

Activist group says the ‘twisted’ Hong Kong judicial system had long ago decided that the pair were guilty.Published On 21 Aug 202621 Aug 2026A Hong Kong court has found two pro-democracy activists guilty on national security charges in a trial widely viewed as exemplifying the erosion of freedom of expression in the Chinese city.Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, were found guilty of “incitement to subversion” for their role in organising candlelit vigils to mark Beijing’s deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, in a Hong Kong…

We are now one year away from the latest possible date — Aug. 22, 2027 — that Spain can hold a general election. For embattled Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, it looks like it’s going to be a bruising ride to get that far. He insists he will seek reelection, brushing aside the predictions that he is doomed by pointing to his well-established knack for defying political gravity. But this time, the odds are especially stacked against him and his fragile minority government, which has never appeared so isolated. The challenges that lie ahead are so daunting that Sánchez could well…

He said some had claimed bad weather was the biggest factor in a reduction of crossings this year.”But what that demonstrates is absolutely that the French are being effective in preventing a number of these small boats.””Clearly, every single day that one slips through the net and crosses, it’s one too many, and that’s why it’s absolutely critical to us to not take our foot off the gas and to keep working hard with our French partners and stop this from happening.”In the last week, 425 migrants made it across the Channel on five boats during three days of good…

The Trump administration on Thursday expanded U.S. sanctions against Cuba, targeting the nation’s construction ministry, eight state-owned companies, and a nonprofit believed to have ties to Cuba’s spy network.The new economic penalties are intended to ratchet up the pressure on Cuba’s Communist government, which President Trump has been seeking to overthrow and replace with leadership more friendly to the United States. Earlier this month, the C.I.A. — which has sought to depose the Cuban Communist Party since the 1960s — established a secret task force aimed at using covert means to achieve regime change in Cuba.Human rights experts with the…

Riot Games is already winding down work on 2XKO, the free-to-play League of Legends fighting game, less than a year after its initial launch. Riot says “active development” will conclude at the end of 2026 because the company hasn’t “seen enough players stick with the game to get to a path toward sustainability.” Servers will stay online “beyond 2026,” and Riot is unlocking all playable characters and refunding money spent on the game.2XKO launched in an early access beta on PC in October 2025 and hit PS5 and Xbox Series X / S in January. But shortly after, Riot announced…

Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI’s Grok chatbot to send a user’s name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique “Cryptographic Context Injection,” said the transfer completed without a confirmation step and with no visible warning in its proof-of-concept demonstration. There is no patch, no CVE identifier, and no user-facing workaround, and the writeup does not report any exploitation in the wild. Asked which build…