Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

For decades, conservationists have argued that protecting nature cannot rely indefinitely on donor funding. To endure, conservation efforts must generate enough economic value to sustain themselves.That search for sustainable financing has prompted governments, investors and conservation organizations to experiment with models that seek to align commercial returns with environmental protection.On Tanzania’s Pemba Island, a company called Asili is betting that sea cucumber ranching can do both. The venture is building the infrastructure needed to cultivate and process sea cucumbers for sale while supporting the restoration and protection of marine ecosystems.Yet, significant questions remain. Can enough sea cucumbers be produced…

The Analects: A Contemporary Translation, Confucius trans. Erin Cline, Liveright, 240 pp., $24.99, February 2026 Save for Mao Zedong, there may be no more famous Chinese figure than Confucius, who is believed to have lived from 551 to 479 B.C. Acclaim started early: Soon after Confucius’ death, all sorts of sayings were attributed to him, often collected in writing. Of these collections, the Analects became the most important, emerging between the 2nd and 1st century B.C. Confucius and the Analects became foundational aspects of Chinese culture, and one of the main lenses through which to understand China. Since the 1930s,…

The Israeli military said it struck and killed three militants on Friday in the occupied West Bank, a rare air strike in the Palestinian territory that has seen growing tensions. The West Bank, a partly semi-autonomous territory home to the Palestinian Authority, has seen soaring violence by Israeli settlers but has recently avoided Israeli military strikes that have devastated the Gaza Strip since the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas. Military raids on Palestinian towns in the West Bank are common, but Israel last carried out a strike there in February 2025. AFP photos showed Israeli soldiers on Friday removing…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Airbus is exploring a sale of its US space business as the Franco-German planemaker focuses on building a pan-European satellite champion through a three-way merger.The company is gauging interest from prospective buyers for the US business, according to people familiar with the matter. Airbus US space systems include a factory in Florida and the Arrow family of small satellites that can be mass produced for both commercial and government communications and imaging, including national security needs. Airbus in 2024 took full control…

Everyone’s waiting for Nvidia to confirm this week’s most interesting tech deal: A reported $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, a platform for sharing open-weight AI models and benchmarks. Now best known as the target for a team of reward-hacking OpenAI agents, Hugging Face is at the center of the ecosystem of developers building and deploying LLMs that aren’t owned by frontier labs. Think of it as a kind of GitHub for the AI era. Rumors of that deal come after Nvidia struck a $6 billion agreement with Poolside, an open-weight model builder, that will see most of its employees…

Most robotics launches ask you to trust a demo video. Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux robotics team at Hugging Face, is instead shipping the training loop. This week it opened pre-orders for Microduck, a 25 cm bipedal robot in which every movement — walking, sitting, kicking, roller-skating, standing back up after a fall — is a neural policy trained in a physics simulator and exported to the hardware. It costs $399. The training environments, the reward functions, the domain-randomization settings, and the sim-to-real recipe are all public on GitHub. Microduck follows Reachy Mini, which has shipped more than 10,000 units, but…

A maximum-severity vulnerability in the GiveWP plugin for WordPress allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the hosting server. The security issue is identified as CVE-2026-82222 and affects GiveWP through version 4.16.7.1. It was reported by bug researcher Udin Chan on July 28 through the Patchstack vulnerability intelligence platform. The GiveWP plugin has more than 100,000 installs and allows collecting donations and managing fundraising campaigns. Patchstack researchers explain that exploiting the vulnerability is possible by chaining three distinct issues: An unsafe helper for unserializing PHP data A donation-processing flow that stores attacker-controlled serialized objects A gadget chain in libraries…

Institutional crypto exchange operator Bullish has provided USD.AI with a $100 million stablecoin-based debt facility to finance loans secured by GPU infrastructure, the companies announced Friday.USD.AI will use the facility to lend to AI infrastructure operators, with the loans secured by the underlying GPU hardware rather than the borrowers’ broader corporate assets.USD.AI is an onchain financing platform developed by Permian Labs that provides financing backed by AI computing hardware, connecting stablecoin liquidity with demand for GPU infrastructure financing.Bullish said it plans to list USD.AI’s sUSDai across multiple trading pairs and support the token with a dedicated market-making program, which it…

On March 15th 1991 Hà Đình Đức happened to be passing Hồ Gươm, the small lake at the center of Hanoi, when he saw its giant softshell turtle surface. Đức went home and marked the date on his calendar. He was a zoologist, but the encounter created an “invisible bond” between himself and the turtle, almost “hypnotizing” him. He said it changed the course of his life. A research project later gave him an official reason to study the animal. When the project ended, he carried on. For the next quarter-century he photographed it, recorded its appearances and…

On Nov. 16, 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky listened on speakerphone to an unfamiliar voice. This new interlocutor, speaking with a reedy U.S. accent, had a plan for Zelensky: a series of bullet points, all approved by the U.S. president, for what Zelensky would have to do to end Ukraine’s war with Russia. The list of demands ran on and on. There were new limits Ukraine would have to place on its military, preventing Ukraine from ever matching Russia’s battlefield advantages. There was the reality that Ukraine would have to give up any dreams of ever joining NATO. There were…