Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In his article on China’s latest tool for suppression of minorities, the “ethnic unity” law, Simon Tisdall seems to take it as read that western governments will continue to pay lip service to notions of human rights in China while pursuing short-term economic goals, ultimately destructive to their own productivity (President Xi never wastes a good crisis. As Iran, Ukraine and Palestine distract the world, he tightens his grip, 8 August).This has been the pattern since June 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre. His faint hope that the young urban Chinese might overturn Xi’s regime is a judgment on the failure…

What was claimed A photo shows a “ring of fire” total solar eclipse at its peak over Stonehenge. Our verdict It’s fake. The picture contains Google’s SynthID watermark. The eclipse visible from the UK on Wednesday 12 August was partial, not total. A picture being shared online with claims it shows a total eclipse over Stonehenge isn’t real.The image has been circulating on Facebook with captions saying: “This is what Totality looks like.” But the picture is fake and the recent eclipse didn’t reach totality in the UK.A partial eclipse was visible to many people across the country on Wednesday…

A cloud of dust billows behind Maarten Janse’s tractor as he spreads a mixture of compost, straw and manure over a field to nourish the parched soil. Janse’s farm on the fertile land of the Netherlands’ southwestern Zeeland Province is drying out despite his efforts to make it more drought resistant as accelerated human-caused global warming and a supersized El Nino batter fields across Europe. The drought that is roasting much of Europe this summer is taking a heavy toll on crops across the continent, from potatoes in the Netherlands to corn in Bosnia and grapes in Italy. Even when…

Mali is a former colony of France, and has been gripped by a security crisis fuelled by an Islamist insurgency since 2012. It was one of the reasons given for Goïta leading a coup in 2021 but attacks by jihadist groups have continued and even increased.At the time of the arrests last year, Mali’s Security Minister Gen Daoud Aly Mohammedine said “fringe elements of the Malian armed security forces” had been detained for seeking to “destabilise the institutions of the republic”.”These soldiers and civilians” were said to have obtained “the help of foreign states”, the minister said.Vezilier was said to…

Four days after Alex Pretti was fatally shot while filming officers taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the Homeland Security Department quietly opened an investigation at its office in St. Paul.The target was not the Border Patrol agents who had killed Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old government nurse, in late January. Instead, it was several left-leaning political organizations — labor unions, a climate change group, socialist collectives — that investigators believed had provided help and money to what they described as the “violent opportunists and agitators” on the street, according to newly released government documents.As part of…

Ford made a $2 billion bet two years ago when it closed its Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky and scrapped the assembly line system it had used for more than a century. Its goal was to transform the factory into one capable of making a new generation of affordable EVs. The auto giant provided an update on Thursday, stating that its factory overhaul is on track and in 2027 will be ready to start producing the Fathom, an all-electric midsize truck that costs less than $30,000 and the first EV built on its new universal platform. Ford said it expects…

With nearly three decades of innovation in business communications, RingCentral has grown into a global company generating more than $2.6 billion in annual revenue, with thousands of employees worldwide. Today, the company is extending its tradition of innovation by embracing AI-native ways of working. By giving every employee room to experiment with ChatGPT Work and Codex, RingCentral has ensured that anyone at the company, regardless of engineering experience, can build transformative products and infrastructure.“When you put real AI tools in everyone’s hands, the whole company becomes a product organization. Every one of our products—including but not limited to our Agentic…

Hackers started targeting a fresh critical-severity Adobe Commerce vulnerability immediately after public disclosure, webstore security firm Sansec reports. Tracked as CVE-2026-71362 (CVSS score of 9.1), the security defect is described as an incorrect authorization issue that allows unauthenticated attackers to elevate their privileges. Adobe resolved the flaw on August 2026 Patch Tuesday, saying it had no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation, but warning that threat actors have targeted Commerce before. Shortly after Adobe’s advisory was published, Sansec warned that it blocked the first exploitation attempts targeting the CVE. According to Sansec, the flaw can be exploited by remote, unauthenticated attackers to…

The CEO of Delio, identified only as Mr. Jeong, received a 15-year prison sentence in South Korea after being found guilty in a $50 million fraud case that affected more than 1,100 people, local news outlet Newsis reported Thursday.Delio, which went bankrupt in November 2024, accepted bitcoin BTC$62,907.49 and ether ETH$1,866.68 deposits, promised high yields and then locked customers out of their funds overnight on June 14, 2023. It”While operating Delio, the defendant falsely obtained a virtual asset trading license and defrauded victims of approximately 70 billion won in virtual assets,” the Seoul Southern District Court said when handing down…

Talking through a difficult problem can help some people organize their thoughts. But according to cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, language itself is not required for logical reasoning. In research published recently in the journal PNAS, a team led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko found that people can successfully solve problems requiring logical reasoning even when their language abilities are severely impaired. Brain imaging also indicated that regions responsible for processing language are not recruited for logical reasoning. Are Language and Thought Really Connected? For thousands of years, philosophers, linguists,…