Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

New analysis by Indonesia’s largest environmental pressure group shows illegal goldminers have encroached Indonesia’s Jantho forest reservation, a vital reintroduction site for the charity workers and state biodiversity officials trying to save the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan from extinction.Global investors have rushed to buy gold to maintain wealth against inflation and political instability, exacerbated by the Trump administration and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The total area damaged by goldminers in Indonesia’s Jantho reservation according to satellite analysis exceeds 14 hectares (around 35 acres), equivalent to approximately 20 football pitches.A traditional administrator for the Jantho area in Aceh, a semiautonomous province…

Nearly 300 Iranian missiles and drones have bombarded Jordan during the Iran war, mostly targeting U.S. bases in a small Arab state that never wanted conflict with Tehran. After a July strike killed three American soldiers, a controversial petition from more than 100 Jordanian activists demanded that U.S. forces leave the country. On cue, Western angst erupted over the country’s survival. Fretful commentaries worried whether popular unrest would weaken a ruling monarchy that has long been one of Washington’s closest strategic partners in the Middle East. Yet my recent conversations with Jordanian officials, journalists, and commentators reveal a strikingly different…

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws, has found that Cisco, the global tech company, probably violated the civil rights of Middle Eastern, Muslim and other company employees.The determination, reached earlier this summer, is believed to be the first by the federal agency finding a major company at fault in connection to pro-Palestinian advocacy that swept campuses and workplaces in recent years.Complaints filed by employees in December 2024 detailed how, following the 7 October 2023 attacks in Israel, a Cisco internal communications platform was filled with racist and Islamophobic messages, which escalated after…

A 43-year-old Swiss man has been arrested following a shooting at a rave in Switzerland in which a woman was killed.Italian 22-year-old Maria Spinelli was killed and several others injured at a techno rave being held at a horse racing track in Aarau, a town about 46km (29 miles) west of Zurich on Sunday.The shooting initiated a nearly 24-hour manhunt before Aarau cantonal police confirmed they apprehended the suspect shortly before 01:00 local time on Monday (23:00 GMT on Sunday).”The investigation into the exact sequence of events, the background and the possible motive is currently under way,” police said in…

Andrew Griffith has replaced Sir Mel Stride as shadow chancellor as part of Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle of her top team.Claire Coutinho, previously the shadow energy secretary, after her maternity leave will replace Griffith as shadow business secretary and act as his deputy in the ongoing shake-up.Badenoch is forming a new shadow cabinet before the party’s conference in October.Dame Priti Patel has also been replaced as shadow foreign secretary by Tom Tugendhat.Badenoch paid tribute to Sir Mel’s work as shadow chancellor saying he helped the party rebuild economic credibility and become an effective opposition. A senior Conservative source said:…

Harmeet Dhillon offered a four-word summation of her four-decade campaign to tear down the ramparts of liberal academia during a private gathering last September.“I’m going after Harvard,” said Ms. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, according to audio of the event in New Haven, Conn., obtained by The New York Times.Ms. Dhillon, 57, has repurposed a unit created to address Jim Crow injustices into a battering ram against the elite left. In part, it represents the culmination of a mission she began as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College — to impose conservative change on liberal institutions…

Jack Wallen/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeaways ECH will help hide which websites you visit on your Android phone. By blocking 2G connections, you’re protected from malicious SMS-blaster connections.ECH is still being rolled out, so even if your phone supports it, your connection may still be unsafe. According to Google, Android 17 offers a few new ways of keeping your connections secure and private. On Thursday, the company announced that Android 17 is the first mobile operating system to support Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), a TLS privacy feature that hides destination domain names. The release also enforces…

Swati KhandelwalAug 31, 2026Malware / Endpoint Security The threat actor known as Silver Fox has been observed distributing the ValleyRAT backdoor disguised as a signed Chinese adware application, running the malware under a trusted process to slip past users who add such software to their antivirus exclusions. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said the attackers built the disguise around QN Wallpaper, a genuine Chinese desktop-wallpaper tool that in its unmodified form is adware, bundling partner apps and displaying ad banners. Once installed, ValleyRAT (also tracked as Winos 4.0) hands the operator full control of the compromised machine. Kaspersky said the attack’s…

Malicious actors exposed two decentralized finance (DeFi) lenders to over $84 million in losses over four days, using variations of a price-manipulation strategy previously targeted by US regulators.The larger incident hit Tectonic on the Cronos blockchain, where security firm GoPlus estimated roughly $75 million was affected.Three days earlier, Moonwell’s MAMO lending market on Base was left with about $9.1 million in residual debt following another attack involving an illiquid token. Related ReadingUS Court orders detention of Mango Markets exploiter over flight risk Illiquidity becomes a weaponThe Tectonic attacker appears to have exploited the protocol’s treatment of TONIC, a relatively thinly…

Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. Illustration by Oisín Mac Con Iomaire On a June night in 1996, in a basement apartment in Boston’s Chinatown, a killer put a pistol to the back of a young man’s head and pulled the trigger. The victim’s body was wrapped in quilts, lowered into the trunk of a car and driven about 20 miles southwest of the city, where it was dumped in the woods. It lay undiscovered through two New England winters until a dog walked home carrying a human bone.  For three decades, authorities…