Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

White House officials are almost certain to revise the Trump administration’s new artificial intelligence guidelines and expand its oversight of AI models, according to people familiar with the matter.The White House announced this month that it had developed an AI framework, where the most powerful models created by US labs would be tested for safety by the federal government before they could be released publicly. The administration has not made the framework public, and reportedly has no plans to do so.The AI framework currently deals only with so-called closed models developed by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI. But the…

Attempts to exploit a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-71362) in Adobe’s Commerce and Magento e-commerce platforms have been detected, potentially allowing attackers to hijack customer accounts. The flaw is described as an incorrect authorization vulnerability that could be leveraged to “gain elevated access to sensitive resources” without authentication and is one of the seven issues that Adobe addressed in a security update yesterday. Although the software vendor states in the advisory that it is not aware of exploits in the wild for any of the fixed flaws, eCommerce security company Sansec says that its Shield web application firewall (WAF) is already blocking…

Just a day after real-time flight tracking website FlightAware filed a lawsuit against prediction markets platform Kalshi over use of its name and data, the flight data company gave notice of voluntary dismissal of the case. In a Tuesday filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, attorneys for FlightAware said that they had voluntarily dismissed the case against Kalshi. The flight tracking company had filed the lawsuit a day earlier, claiming that Kalshi had used its “data and name to run gambling markets on flight cancellations.”While the immediate turnaround could suggest a closed-door settlement, neither…

Women are about twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s disease as men. But women who take estrogen as hormone therapy after menopause have fewer telltale neurological signs of Alzheimer’s disease after death than women who don’t, scientists report August 12 in Neurology. Previous studies of menopausal hormone therapy have produced conflicting results. Some have suggested that estrogen could protect against dementia, while others show no benefit or even potential harm, especially when hormone therapy begins after age 65. A caveat is that many these studies have relied on measures of cognitive decline or blood tests, which are more ambiguous than…

A new study points to the easing of gun restrictions during the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro as a primary driver of illegal wildlife hunting in Brazil.By mapping social media posts, researchers documented more than 4,000 animals killed from 157 native species across the country, coinciding with a surge in gun purchases by sport hunters.The primary hotspots are concentrated in the Amazon’s Arc of Deforestation, where forest loss, environmental degradation, gun availability and agricultural expansion compound pressure on wildlife.Researchers are calling for stricter firearm controls, stronger law enforcement and coordinated conservation policies to curb an environmental impact they…

Reading Time: 6 minutes This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Milwaukee election officials spent Tuesday trying to prove they had a better way to count absentee ballots — faster, smoother and with less reason for anyone to doubt the process. Then, after 15 hours of nearly flawless work, a few minutes of human error blew up the plan. At around 11:10 p.m. on Tuesday night, city officials left their central count facility without exporting results from five of its nine tabulators, forcing them to race back under police…

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at evolving wartime tactics from Ukraine and Russia, a new amnesty law in Lebanon, and a deadly ferry disaster in Zimbabwe.  “A Unique Operation” Russia and Ukraine traded heavy—and atypical—blows on Tuesday that saw Moscow bombard Ukraine with North Korean ballistic missiles and Kyiv carry out what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called “a unique operation” on a Russian Black Sea naval base. Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at evolving wartime tactics from Ukraine and Russia, a new amnesty law in Lebanon, and a deadly ferry disaster in Zimbabwe.  “A…

Trump says press secretary Karoline Leavitt will leave role to spend more time with familyKaroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, will leave her role at the end of this month to spend more time with her family, including her two young children, Donald Trump announced today.The president said that said it was a “decision I totally understand and respect”, while adding that Leavitt would become one of his “top outside advises” when she leaves the administration.Leavitt was 27 when she assumed the role of press secretary at the beginning of Trump’s second term. She is the youngest person in…

A lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in New York challenges a plan to sell early access to President Trump’s posts on Truth Social for up to $100,000 a month, arguing the First Amendment “guarantees equal access to the President’s public announcements.”The lawsuit also charged Mr. Trump “stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company.” The complaint was filed by Freedom of The Press Foundation and The Intercept.The lawsuit noted that since Mr. Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he has published thousands of posts…

The streaming platform Twitch will now use creators’ content to help train generative AI models for its parent company, Amazon. This move has inspired swift and concentrated backlash from the Twitch community, especially because creators are opted in to having their content used for this AI training by default. For Amazon, these stream recordings are incredibly valuable, offering thousands of hours of audio and video content to help train AI models. But Twitch users worry that since creators have to manually opt out, they might be surrendering their content to train Amazon’s AI content models without even knowing it. This…