Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some unexpected things to say about his venture capital rivals on the West Coast. “It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,” Kushner wrote about AI in the letter, leaked to Bloomberg. “It would also be a grave error in our minds to let excitement weaken our investment discipline. … Within Silicon Valley in particular, the industry can become fixated on hyperincremental technological turns rather than where the technology ultimately leads.” While his secretive New York-based firm, just like those in Silicon Valley, is betting heavily on AI,…

A maximum-severity SAP Commerce Cloud remote code execution vulnerability patched three days ago is already being targeted in attacks, according to threat intelligence company Defused. Commerce Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris) is a cloud-based e-commerce platform used by online stores owned by high-profile global brands and large retailers. Tracked as CVE-2026-58231, this critical flaw stems from an improper authorization weakness in the core Data Hub Adapter extension for Commerce Cloud that threat actors without privileges can exploit in low-complexity attacks to execute arbitrary code. “SAP Commerce Cloud allows an unauthenticated attacker to abuse a default authentication client and submit…

Gen Z traders on Binance are allocating a growing share of their equity activity to exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with the products accounting for 25% of the cohort’s trading volume in early August, according to Binance Research.ETFs accounted for 21.9% of Gen Z net equity inflows in July, up from 18.5% in June, while the share going to individual stocks fell to 74.2% from 77%.The analysis examined activity across direct equities, tokenized stocks and traditional finance perpetuals, comparing Gen Z accounts with Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers on measures including trading frequency, net flows and leverage use.The younger cohort traded…

Certain kinds of clouds are misbehaving – appearing more often and lower in the sky than they used to. To help identify the factors influencing these changes (e.g. shifts in Earth’s long-term weather patterns), scientists have asked people around the world with cameras to submit fresh images of these clouds as a part of the NASA-supported Space Cloud Watch project. Now, one volunteer has developed a new tool to help other Space Cloud Watch volunteers work more efficiently.  The misbehaving clouds are “noctilucent”  or “night-shining” clouds (NLCs). These clouds scatter light from the Sun long after sunset and long before…

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Farmworkers, their loved ones and advocates lined up out the door of a California state legislative hearing room this week to urge elected officials to hold pesticide regulators accountable for failing to protect their communities from life-threatening chemicals.  Women spoke of being sprayed while working next to fields treated by crop dusters and seeing coworkers caught in drifting pesticide clouds. They spoke of suffering from asthma and liver disease and watching family members die of cancer. They spoke of being exposed to pesticides while pregnant, having children born prematurely, with birth defects, autism, ADHD or other neurodevelopmental problems. Children…

“[N]othing ages faster than today’s idea of the future,” wrote architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, which may explain why readers treasure the rare novel that correctly predicts what’s to come. The classics of the prescient genre tend be speculative and dystopian—1984, Parable of the Sower, The Handmaid’s Tale—but can also be realist fiction. Take English author Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, published in the United States in 1956, which predicted the future by describing the present. The Quiet American takes place in 1950s Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh’s forces are fighting French colonial powers for independence. It’s narrated by Thomas Fowler,…

A video circulating in August 2026 allegedly shows Twitch streamer and left-leaning political commentator Hasan Piker making derogatory remarks about Black people and saying he wishes the U.S. would return to a time of lynchings. The video circulated in light of Piker’s support of, and campaigning for, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party’s Senate candidate in Michigan. In sum, the video, which consists of fragmented excerpts from three different streams, genuinely shows Piker speaking, in that it isn’t a deepfake or AI-generated. Yet the video is heavily edited and presents Piker’s spoken words without full context, and in some cases out…

Trump dismisses concerns about conditions on USS Abraham Lincoln, confirms replacement carrierAs he left Washington, Donald Trump dismissed the reports about the mental health crisis and living conditions on board USS Abraham Lincoln.When he was asked by reporters whether family members were worried about the situation, the president said “no, they’re not.”The vessel has now been on a record-breaking deployment for more than 250 days, but Trump said that it had not been at sea for too long. “Not nearly enough,” he said.The president also confirmed that the USS Abraham Lincoln would now be replaced by another aircraft carrier. On…

Farmers must not carry the risks of the climate crisis alone, Andy Burnham has said, as he announced £65m of funding to help them manage the devastating drought.The prime minister is stepping up his response to the immediate climate crisis after facing a backlash from his own MPs and Labour’s grassroots for not addressing the climate crisis despite wildfires tearing through Britain and a drought affecting food producers. Labour MPs argued Burnham had taken too long to talk about the climate crisis and had not made it a priority.Some farmers have had to harvest their crops early, while others are…

PayPal CEO Enrique Lores’ turnaround plan for the fintech company could include a sale — of itself. The prospect first popped in July when Stripe and private equity giant Advent offered to buy PayPal for $60.50 a share in a deal that would have valued it at $53 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. PayPal balked. But apparently, negotiations never stopped and a deal could come together in the coming weeks, according to new reporting by the WSJ, which cited unnamed sources. PayPal declined to comment on the report. A Stripe spokesperson said the company doesn’t “comment…