Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has told allies that it is considering a major financial campaign to support the Republican Senate nominee in the Michigan general election this fall, after it failed its biggest test of the primary season on Tuesday.AIPAC’s super PAC spent $32 million in an unsuccessful effort to boost Representative Haley Stevens over Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a relentless critic of Israel, during the state’s Democratic primary.After Dr. El-Sayed’s victory, the group is unbowed and now appears willing to put what is expected to be tens of millions of dollars behind Mike Rogers, the Republican, as some…

A federal judge in Texas ruled on Wednesday that a strict permitting process for short-barreled guns and suppressors under the National Firearms Act was unconstitutional because Republicans in Congress had removed a $200 tax for a permit.Without the tax, Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas wrote, Congress had no legal basis to impose permit requirements for the weapons.Gun rights groups and gun manufacturers, many of whom had filed and supported the lawsuit, immediately claimed a major victory, while gun-control lobbyists said the ruling would in effect deregulate dangerous firearms and accessories that had been restricted since…

Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis.Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind’s CTO, is stepping up to become Google’s SVP of DeepMind and will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will remain Google’s chief AI architect as well.“​​As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human…

SkillOpt is a text-space optimizer developed by a team of researchers from Microsoft, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, and Fudan University. SkillOpt trains a single natural-language skill document while the target model stays frozen. An optimizer model reads scored rollouts and proposes bounded add/delete/replace edits. A held-out selection split accepts an edit only when the score strictly improves. The exported artifact is one file, best_skill.md. The transfer tables report three columns. Baseline is the target’s no-skill score. Direct is SkillOpt trained in-domain on that exact target. Transferred applies a skill trained elsewhere, with no further optimization. The useful comparison…

Black Hat USA 2026 – Las Vegas – Browsers such as Claude in Chrome, Gemini in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, and Copilot Edge are vulnerable to a new class of zero-click exploits that can allow attackers to hijack their artificial intelligence agents and turn them against users.The problem stems from how the AI agents pull information from multiple sources, such as emails and webpages, while working on a task without reliably distinguishing between trusted and untrusted content. An adversary who can slip malicious instructions into that content can weaponize the agent and use its access to act on the…

Time is running out to get a vote on the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act, though bipartisan work is intensifying with the White House reviewing the latest draft behind closed doors, according to reports.  Senator Thom Tillis said that bipartisan language drafted and sent to the White House last week is currently being reviewed by the White House. “We’ve got people working with White House right now…they’re going through some of the lines right now,” he was quoted and first reported by Punchbowl News Senior Reporter Brendan Pendersen.  Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to file cloture on the crypto market…

Stanford researchers have identified a previously unknown immune cell that destroys nearby cells by exploding. The process unfolds so rapidly and completely that the cell disappears within minutes, leaving virtually no trace. The discovery was made in planarian flatworms, small aquatic animals known for their extraordinary ability to regenerate. Even when cut into pieces, these worms can rebuild missing tissues and, in some cases, produce complete new organisms. Studying how their immune systems have survived and adapted over hundreds of millions of years could offer useful clues for modern medicine. In a study published in Cell, the researchers named the…

Vinod Rishi rose from field postings in West Bengal to some of India’s most senior wildlife positions, including serving as the first director of Project Elephant.Trained as an engineer, he brought a practical, evidence-based approach to conservation, testing official claims and scientific methods against conditions on the ground.His work helped shift wildlife management beyond individual protected areas toward broader landscapes, particularly elephant habitats, migration corridors, and conflict-prone regions.Colleagues remembered him as humble, determined, and collaborative, while his later writing revealed a close attention to individual animals and the places they inhabited.See All Key Ideas A tiger once put…

Houston-based subsea energy equipment and services specialist KOIL Energy Solutions has entered into a strategic alliance with Pipeline Network, a consultancy focused on the oil & gas pipeline services sector, with the aim of expanding its international presence, operational capabilities, and customer support across the Eastern Hemisphere.Illustration; Source: KOIL Energy According to KOIL, customers will have access to an expanded portfolio of subsea products, rental equipment, and field services thanks to the combination of its subsea technology expertise with Pipeline Network’s established regional presence and operational capabilities across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia‑Pacific. “This strategic alliance represents an important…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief. The highlights this week: African governments try to distance themselves from Pretoria following xenophobic attacks, Spanish politicians seek to make sense of the border incident in Ceuta, and renewed clashes erupt in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. South Africa has long been a leader of the African continent, but the country’s influence may be waning as its reputation takes a hit following widespread violent attacks on Black African migrants within its borders. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has experienced recurring waves of xenophobic violence, which have killed an estimated 705 people over the past…