Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Victorian Liberals pledge to scrap power link to NSW and ‘throw open the doors’ to gasBenita KolovosThe Victorian Coalition has pledged, if elected in November, to scrap VNI West, a proposed 240km transmission line linking Victoria to New South Wales.The project was designed to connect the Victorian and NSW electricity grids and integrate power generated from wind and solar projects in both states. But as we reported earlier this year, backlash to the project has been strong, thanks in part to new laws that will allow the state body overseeing the project to access private land without a landholder’s consent.In…

At the only debate in a runoff election that will most likely determine the next senator from South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham stumbled over a question about the importance of Taiwan to U.S. interests, saying she was “not that informed on national security.”The awkward moment, which prompted boos from the audience, underscored her biggest vulnerability in the race to succeed her brother, the late Lindsey Graham. Ms. Graham has the full support of President Trump, but she lacks the experience of her opponent, Representative Ralph Norman, who easily explained why Taiwan is an economic ally for the United States and…

OpenAI is announcing security updates following the July news that its AI broke out of a sandboxed environment and accidentally hacked Hugging Face, including improvements to its research environments, monitoring, and alignment techniques. The company had already put the brakes on a new model, Astra, that it thinks could have “critical” cybersecurity capabilities, and the company says it instituted a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on its “latest models intended for deployment” while it tightened up security. The company’s “largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold.”For its frontier model research, OpenAI now requires stronger sandboxes for workloads…

A critical-severity security vulnerability in GitLab CE/EE could allow a remote attacker with no account or login credentials to manipulate or delete publicly accessible projects and user data by exploiting the platform’s GraphQL functionality.The bug, identified as CVE-2026-19478, is a code-injection flaw, and is one of two flaws the project disclosed this week. GitLab wants organizations running self-managed versions of its software development and DevOps platform to immediately upgrade to new versions released Monday, but patching is not going to eliminate the risk to enterprises and others managing projects there.Two Pre-Auth GitLab Problems Affect Self-Managed UsersGitLab has assigned the critical…

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has floated the idea of expanding SOL’s supply, paying for a company with incremental tokens, then using the acquired business’s revenue to buy and burn SOL. The posts sketch a tokenomic cycle, but leave its issuance and acquisition mechanics undefined.In an Aug. 15 post, Yakovenko called the concept more bullish than simply lowering inflation. He clarified the next day that company revenue would fund SOL purchases and burns, which he characterized as returning value to holders.As of Aug. 18, the reviewed official merged-proposal directories contained no acquisition SGP or SIMD.Protocol approval cannot buy a company with…

Five years ago this month, Kabul fell to the Taliban. The images from that week still define how many Americans think about Afghanistan: the crush at the airport gates, families passing infants over barbed wire, desperate men clinging to the fuselage of departing planes. It was a dramatic and high-profile failure of U.S. foreign policy. But in the following years, Washington has found new, quieter ways to fail Afghans. This time, the failure has a body count that the Trump administration has so far refused to acknowledge. In May 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed concerns that the administration’s…

Claim: A video authentically showed a Fox News graphic that falsely suggested national average gas prices fell between August 2025 and August 2026. Rating: Context The graphic inaccurately suggested that the national average gas price was $4.13 in August 2025 compared to $4.06 on the day it aired in August 2026. A Fox News spokesperson confirmed to Snopes that the network aired a correction during its “America Reports” program and on the FOX Business Network on Aug. 18. In August 2026, social media posts claimed (archived) a video authentically showed a Fox News graphic that falsely suggested national average gas…

McDonald – a former member of rival Blood street gang offshoot Mob Piru and enforcer at Suge Knight’s Death Row Records label, which represented Shakur – testified that he was not with Shakur when the shooting took place.He was repeatedly questioned by Davis’s defence attorney Michael Sanft about whether he witnessed the attack and whether he knew who was there at the time. Under oath, McDonald raised his voice and arms, saying he didn’t want to answer many of these questions because it “wouldn’t be good” for the defendant. McDonald looked over at Davis at one point, saying, “talk to…

Political commentator Tim Montgomerie has told BBC Newsnight he will fight his suspension from Reform UK for criticising senior party figures in media interviews.He said his appeal against suspension would be a test case of whether Reform could tolerate free speech.The party said Montgomerie had been suspended in line with its rules after public criticism he made.Montgomerie is a right-of-centre political commentator who defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK in 2024, and who has seen himself as a critical friend of the party leadership.But it seems he is now regarded as more of a critic and less of a…

She never takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts.She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.She is Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old West Wing aide who is the utmost gatekeeper to President Trump, a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside the usual chain of command. The public’s interest…