Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Tunis, Tunisia – More than 15 years after Tunisians rose up to topple longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, familiar grievances are again being heard on the streets from north to south.A slogan from the 2011 revolution is being heard again: “employment, freedom and national dignity”.This time, those demands are being fuelled by water cuts, electricity outages, rising prices, medicine shortages and a struggle to make ends meet, problems increasingly affecting Tunisians across social and economic divides.But the anger is unfolding in a very different political environment.The discontent comes as Tunisia marks five years since President Kais Saied suspended parliament,…

Nearly three dozen demonstrators charged with disrupting a church service in Minnesota this winter to protest President Trump’s immigration crackdown attacked the indictment on Monday with a flurry of motions that raised questions about the fairness of the case and the investigative tactics used to make it.The jointly written motions were among nearly 50 court submissions filed on Monday in Federal District Court in St. Paul, the broadest assault so far that defense lawyers have made against the charges. Some of the other defendants in the case — including Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, who has long been a…

Mr. Parnell withdrew from a Senate race in November 2021 after a judge ruled that his estranged wife should have primary custody of their three children in a case in which she accused him of spousal and child abuse. The order was later vacated and Mr. Parnell has shared custody with his wife for several years, a Pentagon official said.Mr. Parnell, who spoke at the 2024 rally in Butler, Pa., where Mr. Trump was nearly assassinated, has a strong relationship with the president, officials said. But senior administration officials said Mr. Parnell likely would struggle to be confirmed by the…

JMGO’s 4K 120Hz Iris Ultra Max all-in-one Google TV projector is now available outside China. It gets its name from a new dual-iris system that lets it produce an impressive 10,000:1 native contrast, according to JMGO. It boosts the contrast — always an issue with projectors — by placing two separate physical apertures (irises) along different points of the internal optical path to control light scatter and brightness far more aggressively than a single iris can. It also promises to produce a very bright 6,500 ISO lumen image from its triple-laser light engine.Last year at IFA, 6,000 lumens from an…

How do you benchmark a web search API when the thing being tested can read the answer key? A search agent has a fetch tool. If the gold labels sit in a public dataset, the agent can download them mid-evaluation and skip retrieval entirely. A similar problem arises when the answers are already encoded in the model’s parametric memory: a correct response no longer demonstrates that web search worked. Keenable’s answer is NEEDLE, a live open-source benchmark that rebuilds its query set from fresh public sources rather than freezing one. News queries are regenerated hourly from RSS feeds and Google…

Most security leaders (92%) worry that the growing use of AI agents will create new security risks. And for good reason. AI agents can now execute a full attack chain in double quick order, evidenced by the Hugging Face incident. AI agents broke into Hugging Face’s production environment and, in a little over four days, took 17,600 actions. In a separate lab test, an AI agent reached full domain administrator access in just 40 minutes. These are the kinds of incidents that once took humans multiple days to carry out, but with AI, they run on their own, end-to-end, with…

In brief Abbott ordered Texas agencies to halt state funding for Flock cameras, his office confirmed to the Texas Tribune. The Tribune found the state helped install at least 3,200 cameras since 2023, much of it funded by a $1 auto-insurance fee meant for catalytic converter theft; Abbott cited a “crackdown” amid misuse cases. The order adds to a bipartisan backlash, including Bernie Sanders’s planned federal legislation. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock Safety’s AI-powered surveillance cameras, the latest blow to the license-plate-reader company as backlash over its nationwide network intensifies.Abbott issued the directive…

There is something striking about the way the UK’s summer temperature record is being broken. In a climate that isn’t changing, new records should generally become progressively rarer, because every time a record falls, it raises the bar for the next one.Instead, all five of the UK’s hottest summers on record have occurred since 2000, external. And until last year, the margins between them were tiny: the four hottest were separated by just five hundredths of a degree. Then came 2025. The record jumped by 0.34C. Now, just a year later, it looks like that record has gone too.”Record-shattering” sounds…

In East Africa, many communities are experiencing both malnutrition and a loss of biodiversity due to deforestation.Despite this, tree-planting programs frequently focus on fast-growing, non-native species that can be utilized for timber, rather than food-bearing native trees.A recent workshop in Malawi provided landscape restoration workers with a tree-planting guide for local species and gathered information about what organizations and communities need to plant these trees more frequently.These findings are summarized in a new paper.See All Key Ideas When the sugary-sweet masuku plum is in season in Malawi, locals go wild over it. “They will eat it while traveling,…

TenneT Netherlands has selected compatriot survey company Deep to perform annual offshore cable integrity surveys between 2026 and 2029.Source: Deep Deep announced today, August 31, that it would use hydrographic and geophysical techniques to determine the level of seabed cover above the cables, identify objects and seabed features that could pose a risk to their integrity. Selected findings will also be visually inspected where required to provide additional information for assessment. “We are proud to contribute to the safe and reliable operation of TenneT’s offshore grid,” said William Waggeveld, Commercial Director at Deep. “Regular monitoring is an essential part of…