Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Antarctica’s four-foot-tall Emperor penguin may be the best-known member of the penguin family, but it is far from alone. Seventeen other penguin species live across the Southern Hemisphere, and many inhabit isolated islands that are difficult for scientists to reach and study. That remoteness may help explain how an entire species of gentoo penguin escaped recognition for so long. The birds live on the Kerguelen Islands, known in French as the Desolation Islands, nearly 2,000 miles from any permanently inhabited landmass. An international team led by researchers in Chile and at the University of California, Berkeley has now identified the…

A worsening convergence of drought driven by climate change, epidemic disease, and state neglect is creating a severe health emergency for the Indigenous Matsés people in the Peruvian Amazon. Mongabay staff writer Aimee Gabay traveled to Matsés territory to investigate the environmental threats to the region. Instead, she found Matsés communities suffering from severe outbreaks of malaria and hepatitis B, she tells host Mike DiGirolamo in a recent episode of the Mongabay Newscast. “When I arrived, interview after interview, I was asking questions about environmental threats, and people were like, ‘Well, people are dying on the streets’,” Gabay…

Saudi Arabia has retaliated with hundreds of air strikes in the region.The Houthis have also launched hundreds of drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia, including the capital city, Riyadh.Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said the UK will provide “defensive air-to-air refuelling” support for Saudi Arabia, involving a single British aircraft, a Voyager, based out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.Burnham said the announcement followed a request from Saudi Arabia for “military support”, which he agreed to on the advice of Defence Secretary Wes Streeting and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.A diplomatic source told AFP that France has…

Not all MEPs are equal. If you want to know how the European Parliament intends to shape major policy battles on deregulation, climate, tech and the EU budget, as well as prepare for the midterm top-jobs reshuffle and an election year that threatens to reshape the bloc, certain voices are more important than others. Of the Parliament’s 720 members, only a handful will truly influence what comes next — from heavyweights steering landmark legislation to dynamic duos working hard behind closed doors. They’ll be doing that work against a backdrop of two years of growing mistrust between Europe’s biggest mainstream…

“The speech” may have been in the making a long while, maybe for a lifetime, but Andy Burnham has only a week left for revision before his first conference as Labour leader. Expect hope, of course, that the future will be better, though the way is hard. Already his optimism means that fewer people think they will be worse off next year. But his most urgent task is the cultural wildfire that needs extinguishing before it takes hold.The rise of anti-migration neofascism is more threatening than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Shock tactics by a few hundred people in…

For a new British prime minister, the first meeting with a US president has always been a pivotal encounter, but officials are well aware of the added jeopardy of a public appearance alongside the most unpredictable president in American history.In advance of the meeting, the UK revealed that the UK and the US have, for the first time, fired an American torpedo from a British undersea drone in a military exercise.The torpedo, described as “heavyweight” by UK officials, is “designed to sink ships and deep diving submarines”, Downing Street said.It was launched in UK waters last week from a 12-metre…

Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US.The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water positive — replenishing more water than it uses — by the end of the decade. It recently disclosed some information about its water use, but we still have an incomplete picture of the company’s impact as a whole.Amazon announced the launch of a Colorado River Basin…

SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.7, its new flagship model for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work. Grok 4.7 is built on a larger base model and a longer reinforcement learning run. It still ships at the same price and speed as Grok 4.6. Is it deployable? Yes, as a hosted model. You can call grok-4.7 today through the xAI API, Cursor, Grok Build, OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. What Changed Under the Hood SpaceXAI lists 4 changes over Grok 4.6: A new, larger base model: Grok 4.7 does not reuse the Grok 4.6 base. A longer RL run on harder tasks:…

French cybersecurity firm CrowdSec has confirmed that approximately 300 private and public repositories were compromised and source code was stolen from them. The company provides open source, crowdsourced threat intelligence, including a lightweight security engine to detect and block attacks targeting servers, networks, and applications. Last week, the French outfit learned that source code had been stolen from its GitHub repositories in May 2026. CrowdSec has confirmed the report, noting that both private and public code was exfiltrated, and that roughly 300 repositories were affected, including approximately 170 private ones. “The private part contains the source code for our SaaS…

In brief X sued Vivek Kumar Sen, Zamyang Sherpa, and unnamed others in London’s High Court on September 17, alleging a bot network stole at least £207,384 ($278,000) from Creator Revenue Sharing. Six accounts, plus at least three booster accounts, allegedly posted near-identical Bitcoin content seconds apart and used Stripe accounts registered under mismatched names. X shut the program down September 7 and replaced it with Original Content Rewards, which excludes “artificially generated” engagement from payouts. X is suing two men it accuses of running a coordinated bot network to siphon money from its creator payout program, according to a…