Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

For years, the U.S. and South Korea militaries have participated in one of the largest military exercises in the world, with thousands of troops from both countries preparing for possible North Korea aggression.On President Trump’s orders, the Pentagon curtailed this year’s exercises and scaled back some live-fire components of the drill, which were already underway.Current and former military officials say the move is likely to undercut U.S. military readiness in the region at a time when allies are questioning the Trump administration’s commitment to longstanding partnerships and countering China.The president’s decision is also unlikely to affect the person he hoped…

Three of the country’s worst illegal dumps are due to be cleaned up using taxpayers’ money, the government has announced.Sites in Kent, Surrey and West Yorkshire will be assessed for clearance, with Prime Minister Andy Burnham saying the “toxic dumps have blighted communities for too long”.Fines for waste offences will also rise from £300 to £5,000 to deter, catch, and punish those who dump illegally, and the Environment Agency will have more powers to seize assets bought with the proceeds of crime by those involved.But opposition parties said illegal dumps were a small part of a much bigger issue with…

Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition as it works to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. Cognition CEO Scott Wu disputed the report soon after it published, writing on X that the story was inaccurate and that Cognition “is not for sale,” adding that the two companies haven’t been in talks. The report comes a few days after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding startup, whose deal closed last week.  SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI company, xAI, earlier this year.…

In this tutorial, we design an end-to-end preference-learning workflow using the Anthropic HH-RLHF dataset and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We begin by preparing a robust Colab environment, loading and parsing chosen–rejected response pairs, and auditing the dataset for structural and length-based preference biases. We then run lexical shortcut diagnostics to determine whether surface-level linguistic patterns can separate preferred from rejected responses, prepare conversational data with tokenizer-aware length filtering, and construct a version-robust DPO training pipeline with TRL and optional LoRA adaptation. Finally, we fine-tune a Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct model, evaluate reward accuracy and training behavior, analyze performance across individual HH-RLHF subsets, inspect…

In a large-scale campaign that researchers dubbed CameraSwarm, hackers compromised more than 14,500 Dahua IP cameras mostly in Ukraine and Russia. The operation ran for at least 35 days between June 17 and July 22, compromising devices by exploiting vulnerabilities, brute-forcing logins, and  using offline recovery codes from serial numbers for cloud-registered cameras. Researchers at threat intelligence company Hunt.io discovered the campaign after finding a working directory on an HTTP server that the operator left unprotected. Hunt.io recovered 407 MB of data comprising 2,616 files across 234 directories, including source code, logs, credentials, captured camera images, shell history, and exploitation results,…

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. The company has a stable of almost 200,000…

A mother’s age can influence the physical traits and behavior of her offspring in humans and across many other animal species. Researchers refer to these changes as maternal age effects. Although the phenomenon is common throughout the animal kingdom, scientists are still working to understand the biological processes underlying it and why it has persisted over evolutionary history. “Maternal age effects are incredibly common, from invertebrates up through humans, elephants, other primates and other mammals,” said Kristin Gribble, an associate scientist in the Bay Paul Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory. “Nearly all forms of life show some level of…

European coastal waters recorded unprecedented sea surface temperatures in July 2026. A new study has found that human-induced climate change primarily drove the temperature surge, pushing marine ecosystems past their limits. The rapid analysis was conducted by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global network of researchers who analyze the influence of climate change in extreme weather events. WWA scientists focused their analysis on the warmest 14-day periods within July. They chose this specific time frame because sea surface temperatures normally peak in late summer (August-September). The authors analyzed July to isolate how early-season ocean heat is changing as…

Hours before the United States invaded Panama in 1989, opposition leader Guillermo Endara was sworn in as the Central American country’s president at Fort Clayton. Washington had roughly 30,000 troops on the ground and could dictate the outcome. This January, the Venezuelan opposition hoped history would repeat itself. Instead, they now find themselves navigating a far more ambiguous U.S. strategy and praying that the White House hasn’t sold them out entirely. After years of organizing against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—often from exile or underground—the opposition, led by María Corina Machado, expected that his removal in January would finally open a direct…

Four workers in Japan have died after being struck by a train at Shin-Kanuma Station, north of Tokyo, authorities say.The collision happened around 10:46 local time (01:46 GMT) while the workers were removing weeds from the train tracks, local media reported.When emergency services arrived at the scene three workers were trapped under the train, while one was on the platform, police said.Train service has been suspended on the Tobu Nikko Line due to the accident, according to the railway company operating the line.A passenger on the train told Japanese public broadcaster NHK that they heard a “strange noise” before the…