Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Kevin Rideout, an American missionary pilot who was seized in Niger last fall, is in U.S. custody and on his way to the United States, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.The release of Mr. Rideout, a 50-year-old pilot who was kidnapped in October outside his home in Niger’s capital, Niamey, while working with an evangelical group, has been a priority for the White House and the military’s Africa Command since his abduction.Details of how and precisely where Mr. Rideout was released were unclear late Thursday, said the two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.…

Matthew Miller/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Most people are limited to either an Android or iPhone, and the rest of their devices follow suit to that ecosystem. For the past three weeks, though, I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch Ultra 3 and a Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 at the same time to see how life is on both sides of the fence. The two flagship smartwatches have big displays, are made for larger wrists, and feature rugged designs for the outdoors. Both support cellular connectivity, meaning you can use them without a phone. They also have safety features for anyone in…

You’re not alone if you just received an “Apple Threat Notification” saying it detected a “mercenary spyware attack targeted at your iPhone.” Some users on Reddit are reporting that they received these alerts today after Apple sent out a new batch of threat notifications on August 13, but the feature itself is not new. Apple sent a new batch of alerts to users on August 13 Source: Reddit Apple has been sending these threat notifications multiple times a year since 2021, when it detects highly targeted mercenary spyware attacks. It’s also worth pointing out that Apple does not identify the…

Soluna Holdings, a renewable-powered data center operator spanning Bitcoin mining and developing AI infrastructure, reported rapid revenue growth in the second quarter alongside weaker consolidated profitability.The company reported $15.1 million of revenue for the three months ended June 30, up 145% from $6.2 million a year earlier. A new presentation of pass-through electricity costs added $4.4 million to both revenue and cost of revenue, with no effect on gross profit, operating loss or net loss. Excluding that change, revenue still grew 73%.Project Kati 1 completed 48 MW of construction and recorded its first positive site gross profit of $82,000. Project…

One of the most enduring mysteries that has been puzzling scientists forever is how the Sun’s outer atmosphere – the corona – is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. And how does the corona continue to remain so hot despite frequent eruptions during which it loses huge amounts of energy?Astrophysicists in India now say the latest findings from Aditya-L1, the country’s first solar observation mission in space, have provided them some vital clues to unlocking those mysteries. Their findings are revealed in a recent paper published in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal Letters.The temperature variations in different regions of the…

Women preparing meals for more than 1,000 students at Tiyani Secondary School in South Africa’s Limpopo province no longer rely only on firewood. Instead, much of the cooking is powered by biogas generated from cattle dung collected from Tiyani village. This community-led project could reduce pressure on forests while cutting greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. The pilot project was established in 2022 with support from the University of Venda. Every weekday, four community volunteers from Tiyani use an ox-drawn cart to collect cattle dung from nearby households. The manure is then mixed with water and fed into a…

This has not been a good fortnight for the concept of diversity and inclusion. The fallout from the Jason Arday affair has been an all-out attack, by the rightwing media and political classes, on institutional efforts to reduce inequality.Arday was the Black academic who, in a fanfare of publicity, had been appointed a professor at Cambridge University in 2023. At the time, British institutions were still struggling to address the widespread issues of systemic racism thrown up by the murder of George Floyd three years earlier.Last month Arday faced allegations of plagiarism over his PhD thesis, and amid massive scrutiny…

A health care company that pays people for their blood plasma is pausing operations in Canada months after two donors died in Winnipeg, Manitoba.The deaths, last October and in January, brought the scrutiny of Canada’s health regulator, politicians and the public toward Grifols, a Spanish company that operates Canada’s only for-profit plasma collection business at 17 clinics.On Thursday, the company described that scrutiny as unwarranted and a reason for its move to stop collecting plasma in Canada temporarily.“In light of the unfounded attention that has been focused on compensated plasma collection, Grifols has proactively and voluntarily decided to pause plasma…

Leah Feiger: I mean, from the Trump White House, which has historically been so anti-AI-regulation that its very own AI czar for the first year of the Trump presidency, David Sacks, was like, “We’re not regulating,” to now where the White House has a slightly toothless, but still there, policy of sorts, especially in response to all these national security threats, hacking threats, et cetera. Clearly no one, no matter how AI celebratory or positive you are, can’t even remotely pretend right now that you don’t have to take these things seriously, and it’s not just going to solve child…

A browser extension central to Belgium’s national identity card system was built like Swiss cheese, letting hackers steal victims’ identities and payment information, and even perform code execution on their local machines, a researcher warns.The “Connective” signing extension allows Belgian citizens to use electronic ID cards (eIDs) to authenticate to government and banking services online. Its vendor, Nitro Software Belgium, boasted in 2021 that it was used by more than 60 Belgian government agencies and departments, 8 of the 10 largest banks in the country, and more than 1,000 enterprises. It currently has more than 2 million individual users, according…