Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Renewable energy companies are driving most of Brazil’s plans for new data centers, according to a recent joint analysis by The Intercept Brasil and Mongabay. As of December 2025 there were 68 requests to connect data centers to Brazil’s national power grid with 65% registered by renewable energy companies, including wind and solar power plants, the investigation found. Brazil produces more renewable energy than it can distribute across its territory, and the national power grid cannot always absorb all the power generated by renewable energy plants. Doing so would cause disruptions in provision, and potentially even blackouts. To…

If you’ve visited our website in the past few days, you may have noticed things look a little different. Behind the scenes, the change is much bigger.We’ve moved investigatemidwest.org to a new platform designed to make it easier to read our work, subscribe to our newsletters and support our journalism.For the first time, our newsletters have a home on the website, so you can go back and catch up on editions you may have missed. Free members receive our weekly newsletter, while supporting members help fund our journalism and receive additional benefits. Both can sign in to manage their membership…

Yemen’s humanitarian situation was already grim before the country fell back into full-blown civil war this month. Now, the renewed fighting between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and Saudi-backed government forces is exacerbating long-running challenges. Top aid organizations are raising grave concerns about the conditions that millions of Yemenis are facing while warning that growing insecurity on the ground and inadequate funding are making it difficult to deliver assistance. Carl Skau, the acting executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), told Foreign Policy last week that the situation in Yemen was a “huge concern.” Skau visited Yemen several weeks ago…

Probe finds spyware, hidden microphones and pre-infected phones used to surveil journalists, activists, rights defenders.Amnesty International has denounced Morocco’s intelligence agency for using spyware, hidden microphones and pre-infected phones in the “unlawful surveillance” of journalists and human rights defenders.Moroccan authorities host an “expansive and vast” surveillance apparatus that they use to “ultimately silence journalists, activists and other critical voices”, the rights NGO said in a report published on Thursday.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listThe report, Inside Morocco’s surveillance machine, is based on the testimony of a former employee of the Moroccan domestic intelligence service (DGST), as well as leaked…

Later in the morning, two drones hit the Pivdenny bridge, one hitting the base of a central stanchion.Ukrainian 5 Kanal TV reporter Mariana Mykytenko described how one of the passengers on her metro train shouted the word “Shahed”, referring to Russia’s Iranian-designed drones, before the blast sent dust pouring into their carriage.No-one in her compartment was hurt, she said, and “the train took people to Vydubychi station on the right bank, then it didn’t go any further”. The right bank is on the west side of the Dnipro river.Metro trains were suspended but road traffic was eventually allowed to resume.…

Conservative deputy leader Alex Burghart has described pensioners as a “special case” as he reaffirmed the party’s commitment to the state pension triple lock.He argued that retirees deserve different treatment because, once they stop working, they can do “absolutely nothing” to increase their income.Prime Minister Andy Burnham has set out plans to end the existing state pension triple lock from 2030 to help fund a new national care service.In a round of interviews with BBC local radio stations, Burghart suggested that any “difficult decisions” on welfare should focus on working-age benefits.He told BBC Radio Berkshire that it was “obvious” there…

Airbnb rolled out its new AI-powered search this week as part of its fall update, a significant step for a company that has been slow and deliberate about AI. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky has said in the past that a chatbot-only interface is not fit for travel discovery. With more AI on the way to the Airbnb app, I caught up with Chesky over Zoom to talk about how the company is approaching it, where interfaces are headed, why consumer AI still isn’t working, and what role voice will play. Chesky hasn’t changed his mind on chatbots. He said…

Ravie LakshmananOct 01, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a WordPress compromise in which threat actors deployed multiple persistence mechanisms to ensure that the final payload kept returning without having to infect the site again. The backdoor has been codenamed SC after the “SC_” markers present in the injected content. Sucuri has described the malware as a “self-healing mesh” that’s blockchain-controlled. “The payload lives in at least eight places at once, spread across files, the database, and shared memory, and every one of those places can rebuild all the others,” security researcher Gabriel Barbosa said. “Delete…

There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. For now, that time has not arrived. But as Congress closed a door, regulators opened a window.Both the SEC and CFTC moved with remarkable speed. Just two days after CLARITY failed, the SEC issued an “Innovation Exemption” allowing certain venues to trade tokenized U.S.-listed stocks onchain using automated market makers and liquidity pools. Chairman Paul Atkins called it a “bridge toward durable rulemaking.”The CFTC has also been stripping away practical barriers, providing relief to certain software providers and updating guidance around tokenized investments and blockchain-based recordkeeping.Congress declined to…

A newly developed textile covering helped strawberry plants produce more than three times as much fruit in tunnel field trials, while showing no harmful effects on plant health. Researchers say the technology may also offer a way to reduce water use and reliance on pesticides in strawberry production. The fabric, called Plant Armor, is designed to be placed directly over strawberry plants. Its three dimensional structure creates a barrier that keeps insects from reaching the plants, while the layered material still allows sunlight, rain, and air to pass through. In tunnel field tests, strawberries protected by Plant Armor produced yields…