Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Women preparing meals for more than 1,000 students at Tiyani Secondary School in South Africa’s Limpopo province no longer rely only on firewood. Instead, much of the cooking is powered by biogas generated from cattle dung collected from Tiyani village. This community-led project could reduce pressure on forests while cutting greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. The pilot project was established in 2022 with support from the University of Venda. Every weekday, four community volunteers from Tiyani use an ox-drawn cart to collect cattle dung from nearby households. The manure is then mixed with water and fed into a…

This has not been a good fortnight for the concept of diversity and inclusion. The fallout from the Jason Arday affair has been an all-out attack, by the rightwing media and political classes, on institutional efforts to reduce inequality.Arday was the Black academic who, in a fanfare of publicity, had been appointed a professor at Cambridge University in 2023. At the time, British institutions were still struggling to address the widespread issues of systemic racism thrown up by the murder of George Floyd three years earlier.Last month Arday faced allegations of plagiarism over his PhD thesis, and amid massive scrutiny…

A health care company that pays people for their blood plasma is pausing operations in Canada months after two donors died in Winnipeg, Manitoba.The deaths, last October and in January, brought the scrutiny of Canada’s health regulator, politicians and the public toward Grifols, a Spanish company that operates Canada’s only for-profit plasma collection business at 17 clinics.On Thursday, the company described that scrutiny as unwarranted and a reason for its move to stop collecting plasma in Canada temporarily.“In light of the unfounded attention that has been focused on compensated plasma collection, Grifols has proactively and voluntarily decided to pause plasma…

Leah Feiger: I mean, from the Trump White House, which has historically been so anti-AI-regulation that its very own AI czar for the first year of the Trump presidency, David Sacks, was like, “We’re not regulating,” to now where the White House has a slightly toothless, but still there, policy of sorts, especially in response to all these national security threats, hacking threats, et cetera. Clearly no one, no matter how AI celebratory or positive you are, can’t even remotely pretend right now that you don’t have to take these things seriously, and it’s not just going to solve child…

A browser extension central to Belgium’s national identity card system was built like Swiss cheese, letting hackers steal victims’ identities and payment information, and even perform code execution on their local machines, a researcher warns.The “Connective” signing extension allows Belgian citizens to use electronic ID cards (eIDs) to authenticate to government and banking services online. Its vendor, Nitro Software Belgium, boasted in 2021 that it was used by more than 60 Belgian government agencies and departments, 8 of the 10 largest banks in the country, and more than 1,000 enterprises. It currently has more than 2 million individual users, according…

In brief The Bitcoin Red Team is using Chinese AI models to search Bitcoin projects for security flaws. Calle said developers have confirmed numerous critical and high-severity vulnerabilities. They warned that unmaintained projects should not be trusted. The Bitcoin Red Team is using Chinese AI models to search nearly the entire Bitcoin open-source ecosystem for security flaws, according to pseudonymous developer and Red Team lead Calle.The volunteer group combines AI tools with human review to examine wallets, Lightning applications, software libraries, and other Bitcoin projects. Researchers privately report credible findings to developers so the flaws can be fixed before details…

A new study warns the Timor green pigeon is on the brink of extinction after decades of neglect, despite being listed as endangered since 2000.Researchers estimate just 100-500 birds remain, with Timor-Leste now the species’ last viable stronghold after it has all but disappeared from Indonesia.Scientists say hunting has been the biggest driver of the bird’s collapse, while the absence of a recovery program, regular monitoring and sustained funding have allowed its decline to continue.Conservationists argue the species can still be saved, but only through urgent action that combines stronger enforcement with community-led protection rooted in Timorese customary conservation.See…

Several months into his tenure as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei is beginning to put his own stamp on Iran’s military and national security establishment. In a sweeping series of appointments, he has effectively recreated Iran’s senior command, reorganizing the institutions responsible for managing both war and diplomacy. Many of the appointments were necessitated by the extraordinary attrition that Iran’s military leadership has suffered across successive rounds of war since June 2025. But Khamenei’s choices also reveal how Tehran is rebuilding its security establishment around the lessons of these conflicts and preparing for a prolonged confrontation with the United States and…

Earlier, videos shared from Qusra overnight into Thursday showed a dozen Israeli security vehicles – including a bulldozer. In later footage – filmed in the daylight – there was a long line of Israeli security forces on the road to the Palestinian village.The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had “dismantled two illegal outposts”.It added that it had detained one Israeli and confiscated equipment on the outskirts of the Qusra and Jalud areas, near Nablus.One of those asked to leave their home was Qaher Odeh, who said more than 20 soldiers had entered his house on Thursday morning. “I was…

OpenAI’s leaders are rallying workers to respond to one of the largest crises in the company’s history—which spans across its AI safety, cybersecurity, and alignment divisions. The ChatGPT-maker says it has slowed down research, spent millions of dollars, and told several teams to drop everything to focus on investigating a set of rogue AI agents that breached the platform Hugging Face in a quest to complete an internal security test.OpenAI is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days. However, the Hugging Face incident has inspired OpenAI leaders and employees to examine how the AI…