Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief. The highlights this week: Protests turn ugly in Indonesia as pro-presidential thugs emerge, Thailand cracks down on badly-behaved foreigners, and an unhealthy haze engulfs the region. Thugs come out as government popularity slips Indonesia’s gangsters have a long history of acting as arms of the state in a crisis. Last week, we saw one of the most blatant examples of this since the country’s democratization in 1998. The sequence of events was as follows. On Thursday, there was a protest in Jakarta focused on issues including corruption. While there were fears of a…

As the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln docked Wednesday morning in Thailand, the first of some 5,000 crew members were expected to begin arriving in the beach town of Pattaya to begin a handful of days of shore leave.For the sailors and Marines serving aboard the beleaguered aircraft carrier, this is the first significant break they have had in more than nine months. The nuclear-powered Lincoln left its home port of San Diego before Thanksgiving and deployed to the Middle East.After disembarking at the port of Laem Chabang, north of Pattaya, crew members were expected to bus into the city, where many…

Ukraine’s president has told airlines that Russian airspace will be “effectively closing” as his country escalates its drone strikes. “We want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, everyone who still uses key Russian airports: the Russian sky is becoming completely dangerous,” Volodymyr Zelensky says.Most Western commercial airlines do not fly over Russia as a consequence of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, but carriers in countries such as China do.Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by saying that Zelensky’s comments amounted to a “declaration of state terrorism”, while adding that Russia would continue its own intensifying attacks…

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Benjamin Franklin’s adage goes. Yet that simple prescription has been hard to follow in the current NHS. As has been frequently highlighted, one of the biggest challenges for the health system is not just how much we spend per capita, but where and when it is spent. In England, there has been an ongoing shift within the NHS budget towards acute hospital care – treating people in hospitals, often after they are already quite ill – while funding for primary care such as GPs has fallen.The consequence is that the…

The CEO of a flying car company backed by Larry Page has left the company. Ken Karklin, who was Pivotal’s CEO for more than four years, left the role this week, according to a press release. Pivotal said Karklin is “pursuing new endeavors” but didn’t offer any other information about the executive’s departure from the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) firm. “Leading Pivotal has been the privilege of my career. Together, we’ve moved beyond the promise of light eVTOL and proved it out in practice,” Karklin said in a statement. “This industry has moved past prototypes and press releases;…

Agentic assistants have a structural problem: the context that makes them useful — deal documents, privileged files, client records — is exactly the context users cannot send to a cloud endpoint. This week, Perplexity shipped its answer for Mac. Hybrid compute splits a single Perplexity Computer task between frontier models in the cloud and a compact model on the user’s Mac, with an on-device privacy gate deciding what may cross the boundary. Perplexity also open-sourced the classifier behind that gate. Is it deployable? Yes, hybrid compute is live for Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers on any Apple silicon Mac running…

Researchers at Forescout’s Vedere Labs used Anthropic’s Claude to port a working remote code execution (RCE) exploit from one WAGO programmable logic controller (PLC) to another. They succeeded but only after extensive researcher oversight, several hours of dedicated work, and hundreds of dollars in API costs. The starting point was a previously developed exploit for the WAGO 750-852 PLC, based on CVE-2021-31886, a pre-authentication buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server that allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary ARM shellcode on the targeted PLC. For their experiment, Forescout researchers set out to adapt that exploit to a related but…

In brief Robinhood Chain generated $1.595 billion in 24-hour DEX volume. DeFi TVL reached $738.11 million. Stablecoin market capitalization rose to $796.74 million. Daily trading volume on Robinhood Chain’s decentralized exchanges jumped 61% between Aug. 28 and Sept. 1, rising from $989 million to $1.595 billion, according to DeFiLlama.The Ethereum Layer 2 also held $738.11 million in DeFi deposits and nearly $797 million in stablecoins as of Sept. 1. Separately, DeFiLlama recorded $353.96 million in daily perpetual futures volume and $2.524 billion in assets bridged to the network.Myriad: Where does Solana price go next? Click to make your prediction.Each figure…

Researchers at Flinders University have found new evidence that coffee and tea may have different relationships with bone health in older women. Published in Nutrients, the study tracked nearly 10,000 women aged 65 and older for 10 years. The researchers examined whether regular coffee and tea consumption was associated with changes in bone mineral density (BMD), an important measure used to assess osteoporosis risk. Osteoporosis is a major health problem worldwide. It affects roughly one in three women over age 50 and is responsible for millions of fractures each year. Because billions of people drink coffee or tea every day,…

Representatives of 20 Indigenous subtribes in Raja Ampat gathered in Arborek for Heyul Pelei Koranu Fyak, a gathering to strengthen unity and find common ground over the future of the archipelago.The gathering came as nickel mining has created divisions within some Indigenous communities, including on Manyaifun Island, where opposition to a mining project led to intimidation and conflict among residents.Participants issued the Arborek Resolution, which rejects extractive activities that damage Raja Ampat’s landscape, seascape, culture and Indigenous communities, while calling for permanent protection of the region.The gathering also promoted a broader vision of Indigenous-led development and solidarity, the Arborek…