Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—For the first time in more than 40 years, Alabama utility regulators this week convened formal hearings to potentially decrease profits for one of the state’s major monopoly utilities.  The Alabama Public Service Commission held the hearings on Thursday and Friday to consider the allowed rate of return for Spire Alabama and Spire Gulf, subsidiaries of Spire Inc., which provides natural gas to nearly 2 million homes and businesses across Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.  The hearings were triggered when Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office—which represents the public in rate matters—could not reach an agreement with Spire on…

US President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche has been narrowly confirmed as attorney general – the nation’s top law enforcement official.The vote brings to an end a lengthy standoff between Senate Republicans and the Trump administration over Blanche, who has served as acting attorney general since April.Blanche won confirmation in a 50-49 vote overnight, with two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, joining all Democrats to oppose his nomination.Senator Bill Cassidy cast the deciding vote, a decision closely watched in Washington given the years of acrimony between the Louisiana Republican and Trump.Some Republican senators had raised concerns…

Meloni slammed Madrid after it rolled out a scheme to grant legal status to more than 1 million unauthorized migrants earlier this year, and called for a debate on the consequences of the measure during a meeting of European leaders last month. As the Ceuta crisis unfolded, the Italian premier spearheaded the drafting of a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa in which 22 EU leaders argued Madrid’s migration policies had undermined the security of the bloc’s external borders. “We have a duty to effectively deter and relentlessly combat illegal migration, by coordinating our…

Fifa has been forced to U-turn on plans to sell off a slice of the World Cup after fierce opposition, with threats of future boycotts and calls for the governing body’s president, Gianni Infantino, to quit.But why were a group of tech investors interested in the World Cup in the first place, and are similar proposals in the future inevitable? In a world in which AI could upend human recreation and pastimes, executives at Thrive Eternal, a spin-off of venture capital firm Thrive Capital, saw an opportunity to lead a group of investors to place cash in the biggest sporting…

Researchers found a way to bypass recent mitigations for Spectre v2 speculative execution side-channel attacks and developed an exploit to leak secrets from Linux machines. ​The method works against Spectre v2 defenses on AMD and Intel processors that rely on sanitizing or isolating branch predictors, which researchers generically refer to as neutralization-based mitigations. Spectre v2 is also known as Branch Target Injection (BTI) and is a variant of the Spectre class of vulnerabilities. It exploits a processor’s indirect branch predictor and causes it to mispredict the target of an indirect branch, leading to speculative execution along an attacker-influenced code path.…

While acknowledging bipartisan support exists for the legislation, Rafique said party politics are likely to outweigh the industry’s push for regulatory clarity.He dismissed Democratic concerns over ethics provisions as inconsistent, arguing lawmakers should instead adopt broader restrictions on public officials participating in financial markets.Despite his skepticism, Rafique described the Clarity Act as critical to the future of the U.S. digital asset industry. He said clear federal rules would help retain entrepreneurs, investment and intellectual property that are increasingly being built overseas.”Without clarity, entrepreneurs will continue to stay offshore,” Rafique said, pointing to companies such as Hyperliquid and Backpack, which chose…

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have found that teenagers who start using cannabis may develop memory and thinking abilities more slowly than teens who do not use it. The findings were published in Neuropsychopharmacology and were based on data from more than 11,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term investigation of brain development among young people in the United States. “Adolescence is a critical time for brain development, and what we’re seeing is that teens who start using cannabis aren’t improving at the same rate as their peers,” said Natasha Wade,…

Heirloom rice varieties have been cultivated in Sri Lanka for centuries and flourished before the country’s “Green Revolution” that modernized agriculture in the mid-20th century.Around 2,500 of these heirloom rice varieties are currently preserved at Sri Lanka’s Plant Genetic Resources Centre.Traditional rice varieties possess various nutritional and medicinal properties which are useful in the management of non-communicable diseases, researchers say.Scientific recommendations have been developed to help farmers minimize climate-related risks during the upcoming cultivation season.See All Key Ideas WASGAMUWA, Sri Lanka – Prior to the 1940s and the Green Revolution, Sri Lankan paddy farmers cultivated traditional rice, locally…

The internationally recognized government of Yemen said its forces had retaliated on Saturday against Iran-backed Houthi rebels after days of attacks on the military, the latest in a surge of fighting that threatens to tip the country back into full-scale civil war.The escalation reflected how the stability of the Middle East now hangs in the balance across multiple fronts. Despite a lull in fighting between the United States and Iran, the region is waiting to learn whether a deal can be finalized to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and stave off another round of conflict.The Yemeni government’s counteroffensive follows a…

The prominent Reform UK member and Brexit campaigner Arron Banks is said to have set private investigators on a Sunday Times journalist after he broke a series of stories about Nigel Farage.Banks is alleged to have paid for the services of investigators to examine Gabriel Pogrund, editor of the paper’s Insight investigations team.The detail emerged in the New Statesman on Friday. When approached for comment, Banks did not appear to deny it. He is said to have instructed Precision Risk and Intelligence, a firm he once owned, to examine Pogrund.The Sunday Times and the Guardian have broken a series of…