Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

President Trump announced on Wednesday that he had nominated Dr. Heidi Overton, a White House domestic policy official and a proponent of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, to serve as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that has had significant staff turnover and political interference in recent months.In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump called Dr. Overton “a ROCKSTAR in my Administration.” He said he needed her leadership at the F.D.A. to “ensure that the U.S. remains the WORLD LEADER for Scientific Discovery and CURES.” He also said he expected her to…

Jack Wallen/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysThere’s finally a Linux distro that makes Arch and Hyprland easy.Mainstream OS is everything you need in a desktop.This distro is beautiful, useful, efficient, and free.Every time I test an Arch-based distribution, I think, “When will Arch be my go-to?” Likewise, when I test the Hyprland tiling window manager/compositor, I think, “When will Hyprland be my go-to?”And then I run into a Linux distribution that not only combines the two, but does so in a way that leaves me wide-eyed in amazement, thinking, “Why hasn’t someone done this…

A previously unreported cyber espionage operation dubbed SilkParasite has been observed targeting government bodies in Central Asia. The intrusion set makes use of seven remote access tool (RAT) families, five of which have never been previously documented: DriveSilkRAT, CookiETagRAT, NomadRAT, GoginRAT, and NodeEdgeRAT. SilkParasite, first discovered in late 2025, is assessed to be a China-nexus threat cluster with medium confidence. “What makes SilkParasite interesting is the traces of AI-assisted development running through otherwise expert code, which is a different thing from AI-generated malware,” Bitdefender Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Unlike other operations that rely…

Four of the five candidates supported by ads funded by the cryptocurrency-aligned political action committee (PAC) Fairshake won their primaries or otherwise advanced on Tuesday, potentially a bellwether for the industry’s influence in the 2026 midterm elections.On Tuesday, Democratic and Republican candidates supported by media funded by the Fairshake-affiliated PACs Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, respectively, notched wins across three US states. Altogether, the PACs spent about $3.6 million on House and Senate races in Alaska, Florida and Wyoming.Democrat Lois Frankel won re-election in Florida’s 23rd congressional district after Protect Progress spent more than $150,000 on supportive media. Defend…

Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, NASA and Katalyst Space announced Wednesday the LINK spacecraft will not capture or boost an agency satellite to a higher altitude to extend its science mission as planned. However, LINK still will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration. “NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not…

Merck and Moderna are calling this a personalised vaccine, meaning it works by targeting an individual patient’s tumour.In order to create this new jab, scientists used mRNA technology – which was used for some Covid-19 vaccines – to target specific mutations within the cancer cells by surgically removing a small part of a patient’s tumour and then sequencing its DNA.The result is a personalised anti-cancer jab which is specific to the patient’s tumour and instructs the immune system to recognise and attack any tumour cells that remain. The two companies are testing other similar personalised vaccines for lung, bladder and…

Egypt is famous for ancient ruins but its protected areas and biosphere reserves contain another kind of heritage: Fossil valleys, desert plants, coral-linked coastal systems, migration routes, geological formations and human knowledge shaped by arid environments.Deserts expanses are not empty — or merely open spaces between archaeological monuments — but rather are places full of life, and this point matters urgently, a new op-ed argues.“If conservation is to work in these landscapes, it must listen more carefully. It must see local ecological knowledge not as anecdote, and interpretation not as decoration, but as tools for making protection more grounded,…

For months health experts have warned that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) could surpass the one that swept west Africa in 2014-16. This week, the authorities in the DRC announced that a grim milestone has already been passed: at least 2,325 people have died from the virus, making it the deadliest of the country’s 17 outbreaks and the fastest-growing in history.There is no effective vaccine against Bundibugyo – a rare strain of the virus that spread fatally undetected during the spring, often being misdiagnosed as malaria or typhoid. In contrast to neighbouring…

What was claimed A compilation of six videos shows damage caused by the recent earthquake in Indonesia. Our verdict Two of the videos actually show an earthquake in the Philippines in October 2025, and one shows damage from an earthquake that hit Taiwan in April 2024. Clips of old earthquakes in Taiwan and the Philippines have been included in a video compilation supposedly showing damage from the recent earthquake in Indonesia.A 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia on 15 August killing at least 70 people.Three of the clips in the compilation shared online show real footage from the Indonesian earthquake, but…

A father, mother and their teenage daughter who died off the Sussex coast on Tuesday have been identified.Sussex police named the victims as Hassan El-Khawas, 55, his partner, Zeina Alayn, 37, and their 14-year-old daughter, Sara El-Khawas. A younger girl who was also part of the family is in hospital in a critical condition. She has not been named.The Palestinian embassy in London said El-Khawas was a British man of Palestinian descent.Police, paramedics, coastguard crews and a lifeboat attended the scene at Shoreham-by-Sea, where four people were pulled from the water.Sussex police said the cause of the tragedy was still…