Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Fires in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province have sent haze across the border into Malaysia, where worsening air pollution has forced six schools in Sarawak state to switch to online classes.Indonesia is entering the peak of its fire season, with West Kalimantan accounting for more than half of the nearly 49,000 hectares (121,000 acres) burned across six priority provinces as of Aug. 9.The fires are also threatening biodiversity, including orangutan habitat and rehabilitation efforts in West Kalimantan, while a separate blaze has forced the closure of Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park on the island of Java.Authorities have deployed tens of…

Recent biographies of Ronald Reagan return to a familiar question: How did conviction come to be mistaken for competence? Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend and William Inboden’s The Peacemaker approach the 40th president from different moral perspectives, but both describe a leader whose composure steadied a disoriented state. Reagan appears less as a policy innovator than as a custodian of calm, a figure who made reassurance feel like governance. This emotional sensibility became a governing method. In the late 20th century, U.S. bureaucracy learned to mistake repetition for renewal, and procedure for integrity. Rather than fix systems, they…

Bill DeLind thought the Picasso print that was stolen from his Milwaukee gallery in 2018 was gone forever. But then police called last week and asked him to look at an artwork that a local landlord found while cleaning out a vacant apartment.DeLind immediately recognized the stolen Torero print, one of 30 known to exist signed by Picasso.“I was overwhelmed,” DeLind said Friday. “I was at a loss for words. It was an overwhelming moment for me.”The sticker from his DeLind Fine Art Appraisals was still on the back of the framed print, just as it had been placed there…

It is a question prompting at least some debate within the party.”When he goes down this angry route he doesn’t help himself,” the prominent Reform activist Tim Montgomerie told Radio 4’s The World At One.Montgomerie, the founder of the ConservativeHome website, defected to Reform two years ago. He praised Farage’s political ability but added: “It’s very frustrating how he’s behaved today. He needs to get a grip of this problem.”Montgomerie argued Farage and Reform were at their best when they were more positive rather than “inward looking” and focused on “grievances.” The “grievances,” as Montgomerie puts it, are real and…

Privacy advocates and musicians rallied outside Madison Square Garden on Friday, pushing for new legislation to prevent facial-recognition technology at the venue and other public spaces in New York City.“MSG and its CEO, James Dolan, have been flagrantly abusing biotechnology,” City Council member Shahana Hanif said at the event on Friday, after leading a chant of “ban the scan.” In January, Hanif proposed a bill that would prohibit public venues from using biometric recognition tech such as Madison Square Garden’s facial-recognition systems.Madison Square Garden is well-known for its biometric data collection practices. As WIRED has previously reported, fans who are…

Hardware crypto wallet provider Trezor says the personal information of nearly 14,000 people was compromised in a data breach. The incident, it says, did not involve Trezor’s systems but rather its third-party shipping provider, ShipMonk. Trezor was notified of the attack on August 10. Customers in the US, the UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal who placed orders between May 10 and August 8 were affected.   “We’re extremely sorry to inform our community that customer personal information, including full names, phone numbers, email addresses, and shipping addresses, has been accessed by an unauthorized actor during this breach,” Trezor says…

Israel’s Bank Leumi has partnered with Galaxy Digital to let customers trade Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Solana (SOL) through the bank’s investment platform, with the service expected to launch in early 2027.The companies said Friday that customers of Leumi and Pepper, its mobile banking arm, will be able to buy, hold and sell the three cryptocurrencies through a dedicated section of the Leumi Trade app. Leumi and Galaxy said the rollout would make Leumi the first Israeli bank to offer digital asset trading services to customers.Leumi will use GalaxyOne Institutional for trading and related services, while Galaxy’s custody infrastructure…

When laboratory mice experience brain damage, e.g., from an injection, Jan Deussing repeatedly notices the same response. A particular group of cells appears and becomes active around the damaged area. Although Deussing, a research group leader and experienced neurobiologist, had observed the phenomenon many times, he did not know exactly what type of cells were involved. The mystery became an ideal research question for a master’s student. Clemens Ries, who had recently joined the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry for an internship as he approached the end of his biology degree, took on the challenge. Identifying the Brain’s Repair Cells…

Officially recognized as a collection of quilombos, or traditional Afro Brazilian communities, by the government in 2023, Brejão dos Negros is still awaiting the land titles it has been demanding for 20 years.The federal land reform agency has demarcated more than 8,000 hectares (19,800 acres) of the territory, but the communities have been authorized to use less than a tenth of this area.This delay has left them vulnerable to land disputes; the encroachment of shrimp farms into mangrove areas, which harms fishing and shellfish gathering; and increased salinization of the São Francisco River, which affects their crops and hinders…

This spring, during Holy Week, a priest visited a Ukrainian drone unit near Zaporizhzhia. He prayed with the combatants for their protection, then sprinkled holy water on a Gara strike drone, consecrating the machine before it flew against Russian lines. That drone still required a human operator, but many of those envisioned by the world’s advanced militaries do not. As weapons become increasingly autonomous and artificial intelligence displaces human decision-making, wars can become easier to start and harder to control. Few leaders have addressed these concerns as pointedly as Pope Leo XIV did in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On…