Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

I agree with the need for protection of the vital habitat wildlife ponds create (Editorial, 24 July). One challenge to framing adequate legislation may be that some natural ponds tend to come and go. Many will dry out and gradually convert to boggy ground as plants take over, and new ponds will form.The Latin name for the common frog is Rana temporaria (temporary frog), reflecting that some of the pools in which frogs breed are not permanent. Thus we are trying to shield a moving target, which is more complicated than a wood, a river or a meadow that generally…

Sen. Rand Paul has pointed to a line in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary to claim that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases privately “knew” in January 2020 that the coronavirus did not come from a wet market, saying this contradicted Fauci’s public statements regarding a natural origin of the virus. That misconstrues Fauci’s original statement. The origin of the virus that causes COVID-19 hasn’t been definitively proven, so the question remains open. But the scientific evidence supports a natural spillover from an infected animal to humans rather than a leak from a lab. In…

Advocates warn expiring contract could leave 24,000 children without legal representation, increasing risk of expulsion.Published On 31 Jul 202631 Jul 2026Immigration advocates have warned that children who entered the United States without documentation or a legal guardian could soon lose their legal representation.That could lead to higher rates of deportation as a federal contract providing the service expired on Friday.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list“We have no understanding of what’s going to happen to those children come next week,” Melissa Lopez, the executive director of Estrella El Paso, said during a news conference earlier this week.“We don’t know…

Khan’s lawyers argue that this reflects a deliberate “Palantir strategy,” whereby the company enters into low-cost public contracts, often badged as pilots, “with the intention, objective and/or effect of avoiding the requirements of effective, transparent competition and/or procurement law,” before “influencing” the public authority into awarding further contracts “without conducting an effective, transparent competition and/or complying with procurement law.” The statement also says the Met Police intentionally avoided obtaining approval of its procurement strategy from MOPAC and repeatedly provided MOPAC with “misleading and/or inconsistent” information to give the impression that firms other than Palantir were in contention. These factors meant…

Several major unions will boycott the Labour Women’s Conference this year, due to a ban on trans women taking part.The annual event is traditionally held on the eve of the main party conference in September and aims to get women more involved in policy making.Labour’s decision to ban trans women, external from the main hall, but not fringe meetings, at this year’s event in Liverpool is because the party considers this the least restrictive way of balancing accessibility and compliance with new laws that came into force in April last year.But the move breaches the equalities policies of most of…

There is an orange cloud in the sky. I’m not referring to the wildfires ravaging parts of Europe and East Anglia, though they are connected. I mean the looming pall from across the Atlantic that threatens to spoil the sunny start to the premiership of Andy Burnham – and whose name is Donald Trump.Burnham’s first 10 days or so in office have gone about as well as he or any of his team could have dared hope. His net approval rating has risen by 17 points, according to one early poll, gaining ground with every category of voter except supporters…

Lance Whitney/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysMicrosoft has pushed out a new Windows 11 app called OneDrive Photos.The app lets you access, view, and edit your OneDrive photos.The app groups photos of the same people via facial recognition.Earlier this week, I noticed a new app called OneDrive Photos pop up in the Start menu on my Windows 11 PC. Being the curious type, I opened the app to snoop around and see what it could do. As its name indicates, it lets you view and even edit any photos you’ve stored in OneDrive, either…

print(“n[10] Plots”) k = min(4, S) idxs = np.linspace(0, S – 1, k).astype(int) fig, axes = plt.subplots(3, k, figsize=(3.1 * k, 7.2)) axes = np.atleast_2d(axes) for c, i in enumerate(idxs): axes[0, c].imshow(rgb[i].transpose(1, 2, 0)); axes[0, c].set_title(f”frame {i}”, fontsize=9) d = depth[i].squeeze(-1) axes[1, c].imshow(d, cmap=”turbo”, vmin=np.percentile(d, 2), vmax=np.percentile(d, 98)) axes[2, c].imshow(depth_conf[i] > THR, cmap=”gray”) for r, lbl in enumerate([“RGB”, “depth”, f”conf > {THR:.2f}”]): axes[r, 0].set_ylabel(lbl, fontsize=10) for a in axes.ravel(): a.set_xticks([]); a.set_yticks([]) plt.tight_layout(); plt.savefig(f”{OUT}/depth_strip.png”, dpi=110); plt.show() plt.figure(figsize=(11, 3)) plt.subplot(1, 2, 1) plt.hist(depth_conf[::max(1, S // 15)].ravel(), bins=120, color=”#4477aa”) plt.axvline(THR, color=”crimson”, ls=”–“, label=f”threshold {THR:.2f}”) plt.yscale(“log”); plt.xlabel(“depth confidence”); plt.ylabel(“pixels (log)”) plt.legend(); plt.title(“Confidence distribution”) plt.subplot(1,…

A Chinese-speaking threat actor is suspected to be behind a fresh wave of cyber attacks targeting government organizations mainly located in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab Republic, since January 2025. These targeted organizations operate across several sectors, such as healthcare, research, government offices, ministries of foreign affairs, logistics, law-enforcement agencies, urban planning and facilities management, and public educational establishments, per Kaspersky. The activity has not been linked to any known adversary or group. The attacks are characterized by the use of two new obfuscated backdoors the Russian cybersecurity company is tracking as OctLurk and…

In brief Google removed an AI image-generation feature from Google Earth on July 31, just a day after its July 30 launch, saying users were sharing generated imagery that appeared to violate its policies. Journalists and open-source researchers showed the Nano Banana tool could easily fabricate events that never happened—a blast crater in Los Angeles, a flooded U.S. Capitol, Iran’s Kharg Island on fire—raising fears it could supercharge misinformation. Google’s defense that images carry a SynthID watermark failed to reassure critics, and the company said it would only restore the feature after adding stronger guardrails, giving no timeline. Google has…