Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

We’ve spotted social media posts claiming that the recent flash flood on the Nepal-Tibet border was caused by a research project studying the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.Claims shared online say the floods, which have killed more than 547 people, were “made by” the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska.But as we’ve explained many times before, HAARP cannot control or manipulate the weather or natural disasters.HAARP is a high-frequency transmitter, used to study higher layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere and the thermosphere, starting at an altitude of around 37 miles. Join 74,000 newsletter subscribers…

Mount Kailash, a peak of snow and granite in the Himalayas, is a spiritual site revered by followers of four religions that attracts thousands of pilgrims a year.People heading to or from the mountain make up a significant number of the hundreds missing in the floods that devastated parts of Nepal and Tibet this week. At least two groups, totaling about 130 people, were near the Gyirong border crossing between Nepal and China when the floods struck, according to tour organizers and relatives.The peak is sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and those belonging to the pre-Buddhist Bon religion.The mountain rises…

The socialist-led government of Pedro Sánchez has appealed for calm and accused Vivas’s People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox of stoking the tensions. José María Figaredo, a member of Congress for Vox, is being investigated for a possible hate crime after saying, soon after the migrants’ arrival, that they should be “hunted down, one by one”.Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told a congressional committee: “We have heard during these weeks rhetoric and comments that contribute to the stigmatisation of immigrants and which feed social division at a moment when what we need is responsibility and statesmanship.”Javier Celaya, who represents Ceuta…

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has revealed he will not vote on the assisted dying bill for England and Wales unlike his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer.MPs are likely to get the chance to debate and vote on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in two weeks’ time.The bill is identical to the one put to Parliament last year, where it passed in the House of Commons but stalled in the Lords after an unprecedented number of amendments meant it ran out of time.Burnham said he has his “own personal views on the issue” but it was “a matter for…

The boiling cauldron known as Drumcree that used to scald and torment Northern Ireland each summer gradually cooled two decades ago, leaving it as a name for the history books.Instead of pitched battles between Orangemen and police around the parish church near Portadown in County Armagh, and the murderous sectarian violence they triggered across the region, gave way to a de facto truce.The Orange Order still wished to march down Garvaghy Road in the run-up to 12 July celebrations – a route opposed by the mainly Catholic residents – but its members no longer tried to storm lines of police…

Sweden is perhaps one of the world’s hottest tech hubs right now. It has long been home to Spotify and Klarna, but this latest wave of companies — from legal AI startup Legora to vibe-coding tool company Lovable — has left everyone wondering what’s going on in one of the world’s happiest countries. Sophia Bendz, a general partner at Cherry Ventures, stopped by Equity to break down the latest in Stockholm’s startup ecosystem. Her answer for why the country has produced so many buzzy startups: Being a founder is actually cool. When she worked at Spotify years ago, the cool…

Shaders are still the hardest thing to ship on a normal web team. WebGPU gives you the hardware, then hands you adapters, bind group layouts, and pipeline descriptors before a single pixel moves. Vercel spent that cost internally building the shaders on vercel.com, and has now open-sourced the result. vgpu is a TypeScript library that treats .wgsl files as importable modules, exposes one Gpu context, and runs the same shader in a browser canvas, in headless Node.js, and in a CI snapshot test. Is it deployable? Yes,vgpu is MIT licensed and published to npm, so pnpm add vgpu is the…

Over 8,300 Internet-exposed Gitea instances are still unpatched against a critical security flaw exploited in ongoing remote code execution attacks, according to cybersecurity watchdog Shadowserver. The code injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-60004) targeted in these attacks was reported by Salesforce security researcher Shai Rod, and it allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account by submitting malicious patches via the diffpatch API endpoint. While successful exploitation requires repository write access to repositories hosted on vulnerable servers, Gitea comes with self-registration enabled by default, allowing unauthenticated attackers to register an account, create a new repository,…

In brief Solana closed its first binding on-chain governance vote, passing SGP-0002 to double the network’s disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, hitting the 1.5% issuance floor by 2029 instead of 2032. The vote came down to the wire, passing 67.0% to 66.67% required, after Kraken opposed it through the count before flipping at the last minute. Validators also ratified SGP-0001, the Solana Constitution, with 86% support, but rejected SGP-0003, a “Resource and Inclusion Fee” that would have burned up to 14x more SOL daily. The Solana network will soon print a lot less SOL on a yearly basis, as…

Some people seem to get eaten alive by mosquitoes each summer, while others sail through the season with nary a bite. Certain mosquito species are attracted to, or repelled by, different subsets of people depending on the components of their body chemistry and skin microbiome, researchers report July 30 in iScience. Understanding how mosquitoes choose their hosts could help prevent the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, including dengue, West Nile and yellow fever. “We want to understand what people’s risks are for being bitten because all of these mosquitoes that we studied are vectors of disease,” says Matthew DeGennaro, a neurogeneticist…