Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The world’s forests provide essential ecosystem services, capture and store huge amounts of carbon dioxide, face enormous pressure, and need sustained economic incentives if they are to survive.So why has the voluntary carbon market consistently fallen short of its promise to support forest conservation and communities, a new op-ed asks.“The ecosystem services forests provide are worth something, and the people who live in and protect those forests must be the primary beneficiaries of that value. Anything short of that is not conservation but a new form of exploitation,” the author argues.This article is a commentary. The views expressed are…

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said one forest fire in southwest France had been “contained” even as another, much bigger one near Bordeaux continued to rage, and western Europe braced for new heatwaves this week. France and Spain are battling the worst wildfires in living memory, which have ripped through hundreds of hectares of woodland, destroying properties and forcing evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people. The return of searing temperatures, from Tuesday in France and from Wednesday in Spain, threaten to complicate fire-fighting efforts. Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the coming hours would be “absolutely decisive” to…

The views of Simion, a former football hooligan who relishes a fight with the establishment, matter: His party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), has a huge lead in opinion polls and may soon get a chance to put its case to voters if a snap election is called. He savaged the EU’s green deal, economic and defense policies, and said Romania did not want to return to a time when larger states dominated it. “We have been occupied by these kind of dictators like we have in Russia and we had in U.S.S.R., and dictatorial tendencies from…

At the main site of India’s momentous youth protests in New Delhi, municipal workers have already painted over anti-government graffiti and jet-washed the streets — but the mark made by the student-led movement on the nation’s politics will be much harder to remove.In just 36 days, the upstart Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) mobilised hundreds of thousands of students over failings in the exam system, forcing a rare climbdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the resignation of his education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.After years in which protests were largely ignored or suppressed in India and Modi dominated the political narrative, the…

Nanoleaf’s Blocks Combo XL Smarter Kit is a fun back-to-school buy that can add pops of customizable light and storage to your wall. It combines colorful smart lighting panels with a low-profile shelf and pegboard, and right now you can buy the kit for half off at $99.99 from Nanoleaf, which marks a new low price.The kit can hold up to 6.6 pounds and 3.3 pounds, respectively, making them handy for holding headphones, controllers, notebooks, a tablet, a small plant, or a couple of books. It comes with both large and small modular light panels that glow from edge to…

Arista has patched a maximum-severity command injection vulnerability in on-premises VeloCloud Orchestrator deployments that is being actively exploited in attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16812, is an unauthenticated OS command injection flaw with severity scores of 10.0, the maximum score that can be given to flaws. VeloCloud Orchestrator, also known as VCO, is a centralized management platform used to configure, monitor, and manage VeloCloud SD-WAN deployments and associated edge devices. According to an Arista security advisory published Monday, the vulnerability allows remote attackers to access privileged functionality that was intended only for internal use and should not be remotely accessible.…

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has launched a framework to assess banks’ preparedness for quantum-computing threats as the city expands its use of tokenized deposits, digital assets and blockchain settlement. On Monday, the HKMA introduced a white paper on quantum preparedness and the sector’s first Quantum Preparedness Index (QPI). The index gave the sector an overall readiness score of 2.3 out of 10, while the white paper found that around half of surveyed institutions had no formal post-quantum planning in place. The HKMA said it aims to achieve full sector readiness, represented by a QPI score of 10, by 2030.The…

Scientists have uncovered the first direct evidence that inherited genetics can strongly influence cancer risk and help determine how tumors develop over time. The results show that the genes a person is born with can interact with mutations acquired later in life, shaping the evolutionary path a tumor follows. The discovery may help explain why people living in similar environments can face very different cancer risks. It also suggests that future approaches to cancer prevention and screening may need to consider inherited genetics and the diversity found across human populations. Published in Nature, the mouse study also indicates that a…

Authorities in Mexico’s Jalisco state seized a parcel containing 105 queen harvester ants concealed in toys on July 9. The shipment, sent from El Salto in Jalisco and destined for Laos, was falsely labeled “collectible figures,” authorities said in a press release. The parcel delivery company reported a suspicious package to Mexico’s Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa). They found the ants. Each one stuffed in a test tube with a cotton ball, hidden inside two plastic toys; 18 of the 105 queen ants were dead, authorities said. The surviving ants were released in the Cerro Viejo Protected…

Nyazura, Zimbabwe – Bright fluorescent lights reflect off polished floors as Anymore Kadzunge returns for a routine check-up at a telehealth centre that helped diagnose the illness she had struggled with for months.The 38-year-old farmer sits quietly as a nurse wraps a blood pressure cuff around her arm. Moments later, the machine beeps with the reading.Only months earlier, Kadzunge had been struggling to work her fields or prepare meals for her family. She had spent three months experiencing chest pains and dizziness before walking 14km (8.7 miles) from her village of Chimbondi after a friend told her about the facility.A…