Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Over the weekend, Iceland voted against resuming talks to join the European Union. At the heart of the referendum question: fish. More than a decade since talks previously collapsed, Euroskeptics won 52.8 percent of the vote, according to the National Electoral Commission.  Just over 12,700 votes separated the two camps. While the referendum—which was moved forward a year because of Trump’s repeated threats to Greenland—was originally framed around Arctic geopolitics and security, it instead became a proxy vote on fish; namely, who gets to decide the future of stocks already facing pressures from warming waters and excessive fishing. “Our people…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Faceless megacorps scouring rural Wisconsin for land have put residents on edge – and it showed in the state’s primary earlier this month. The big story in Dairyland isn’t the narrow defeat of state Rep. Francesca Hong, who preached a data center moratorium before losing the Democratic primary by roughly 3,000 votes to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. The big story comes from a small but consequential place that residents love and vowed to protect. Wrightstown, Wisconsin, just wrote the playbook for communities confronted by the proliferation of AI data centers, sometimes planned in secret. Residents…

Claim: A Muslim cashier demanded a 17-year-old Christian boy remove his cross necklace while inside a Shields sporting goods store in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Rating: For years, social media users have copied and pasted the details of an alleged politically charged incident involving a Christian and a Muslim. The story, set inside a Shields sporting goods store in St. Cloud, Minnesota, tells of a Muslim cashier demanding a 17-year-old boy to remove his cross necklace. As one example, on Aug. 22, a Facebook user posted (archived) the account of a woman wearing a headscarf serving as a cashier. The story…

The US and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in response.The US president, Donald Trump, on Monday threatened further action. The US is to trying to prise open Tehran’s grip on shipping going through the strait, which before the war accounted for a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supply. Washington claimed that Iranian control over the waterway had been loosened by repeated US attacks…

Von der Leyen’s participation in the event has not been previously reported. The Commission president’s focus on space reflects mounting concern over Russian hybrid actions that appear to be taking aim at Europe’s reliance on satellites for everything from military communications to civilian navigation. GPS jamming and spoofing, for example, have surged recently around the Baltic Sea, disrupting thousands of flights, according to Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT. Von der Leyen herself got a taste of the potential risks last year when the private jet she was taking to Bulgaria experienced GPS interference. The space policy address also comes as von…

The government’s Cobra emergency committee met to discuss how to respond. After sign off from Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s de facto deputy Louise Haigh, the alert was sent at 19:00 on 14 August.It triggered a backlash on social media with some vowing to opt out of further alerts in their phone settings, domestic abuse charities and survivors saying victims with hidden phones were put at risk, and confusion about alerts sent multiple times.Dowden’s worry is that the wildfire alert was more like a public information campaign than an imminent threat to life across all of England and Wales.”People need to…

The prime minister’s announcement that he will keep hundreds of criminals behind bars who would otherwise have been released early is one he has wanted to make for weeks.Andy Burnham had already expanded the list of people ineligible for early release and had consistently said he wanted to go further.What is not clear is exactly what has changed to allow him to do so.Earlier this month, the Ministry of Justice warned that exempting any more prisoners risked “prisons reaching capacity and collapsing”.The prime minister himself previously said he had “pushed to the very limits of what is possible to do”.In…

Former Republican congressman George Santos has received a first-of-its-kind lifetime ban from the prediction market platform Kalshi, which has also fined him $71,356 for violating its rules around insider trading and market manipulation.According to the notice of disciplinary action Kalshi posted today, the former politician placed trades in markets related to whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address in February 2026. He then “began making a series of public statements regarding his attendance at the event in an attempt to influence the price” of certain contracts, some of which were “false or misleading,” per the notice.The…

ServiceNow has announced patches for four vulnerabilities, including three critical code injection flaws in the ServiceNow AI platform, each with a maximum severity (CVSS score of 10/10). The first of the critical bugs, tracked as CVE-2026-18885, allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the ServiceNow platform under certain circumstances. An attacker could exploit the weakness to gain access to and potentially modify arbitrary data, ServiceNow notes in its advisory. The second critical defect, CVE-2026-18886, is described as an improper access control issue. It could allow an attacker to create or modify arbitrary data and elevate their privileges. Tracked as…

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has said it expects trading volume with its new crypto rollout to hit 4 trillion rubles ($46.43 bln) in the first year, according to reports.  Volumes are also expected to hit 7.5 trillion rubles ($87.06 bln) by 2029, Sberbank Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board Anatoly Popov was quoted saying, as reported by Tass on Saturday.  The forecast was deemed “conservative” according to the news report. Sberbank in July revealed plans to debut a Bitcoin and crypto wallet as well as digital asset custody by December. The Bank of Russia in July published draft regulations for crypto…