Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Wildlife photographer Joel Sartore’s National Geographic Photo Ark turned 20 this year and reached its 18,000th animal, a critically endangered red handfish.The project aims to photograph every species living in the world’s zoos, aquariums, and sanctuaries, so the portraits can move people to care about extinction.Some animals Sartore has photographed, including the northern white rhino Nabiré and the frog Toughie, were among the last of their kind, and have since gone functionally or entirely extinct.After more than 30 years as a photographer, Sartore keeps a relentless pace and is preparing his son Cole to carry the Photo Ark forward.See…

Follow the money. If you want to know how the tech giant Meta really feels about the $18bn it agreed to fork out to end a landmark lawsuit against it – an outcome widely hailed as a victory for campaigners – just look at its share price. It didn’t go down when word came on Wednesday that Meta had settled with the 29 US states that had argued that the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms harmed children. On the contrary, Meta stock went up, initially surging by 5%, before levelling out at a gain of just over 1.25%. There could…

Published On 28 Aug 202628 Aug 2026Kathmandu/Nuwakot/Trishuli, Nepal – Loknath Chaulagain is looking for his 23-year-old nephew Sudarshan at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.A bus conductor, Sudarshan was waiting at the checkpoint in Timure, a town bordering Tibet, when the flash flood that devastated parts of Nepal and Tibet struck on Wednesday. His family says a phone call went through to his number at 9:54am local time – after the flash flood struck the border region – but Sudarshan did not pick up the call. Since then, his phone has been unreachable.The family has been searching for him…

“If I become foreign minister or prime minister later, have I fulfilled this simply by asking the EU, ‘what are you willing to give us?’ And is my job done?” wondered Gunnlaugsson. “They can’t explain how to honor the vote if it’s a ‘Yes,’” he said, referring to the current Social Democrat-led government. The right-wing politician rose to prominence during the 2008 financial crisis as the spokesperson for a campaign against using Icelandic taxpayer money to bail out the country’s largest bank and repay foreign creditors in the U.K. and the Netherlands. He founded the Centre Party in 2017. Gunnlaugsson…

A summer holiday to the south of France scuppered Sir Ed Davey’s attempt to give blood to the NHS.The Liberal Democrat leader had been poised to donate at the Brixton Donor Centre but, after filling out paperwork, was told he could not go ahead due to his recent trip to the Charente region.The NHS says those returning from certain parts of France between May and November should wait four weeks before donating due to the risk of mosquito-borne viruses.A Liberal Democrat spokesperson said Sir Ed would return to give blood once the 28 days had passed.His visit to the south…

Speech by Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy”Jackson Hole, 28 August 2026It is a great pleasure to discuss Darrell Duffie’s paper “Tokenized finance and the perimeter of central banking” at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.[1]Tokenisation in wholesale finance has emerged as one of the most promising applications of distributed ledger technology (DLT), allowing financial assets and money to be represented as digital tokens on programmable platforms.The potential benefits of tokenisation are substantial. This is particularly true for the euro…

As a jury trial kicked off last week in an Oakland, California, federal court, state lawyers argued the tech company knew that millions of 11- and 12-year-old users were on Instagram and Facebook over the years, yet “did little to keep them off” the platforms.Although the trial had only gone on for five days, state lawyers relied heavily on information found in millions of internal Meta documents provided in the case. They included internal research, employee emails, and chat logs that went all the way up to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.One piece of internal research on Instagram stated: “Teens have…

The first area is customer intent. If a customer changes a privacy setting, opts out of personalization or asks for certain data to be deleted, that choice should not stop at the system where it was first recorded. In practice, the same data may already be used by other services, caches, event pipelines, analytics systems or machine-learning workflows. The challenge is making sure the customer’s latest choice is understood and respected across all of them, even when those systems do not update at the same time. This is where privacy becomes a distributed-systems problem, and freshness of data becomes just…

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) pulled in more money than the entire US Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) market gained on Aug. 27.IBIT attracted $277.6 million during the trading session, while US spot Bitcoin ETFs collectively recorded $242.3 million in net inflows, according to Farside Investors data. That means BlackRock’s fund accounted for roughly 115% of the market’s net result.The notable gap came from redemptions elsewhere. Fidelity’s FBTC lost $83.6 million, and Grayscale’s GBTC shed $27.2 million, producing $110.8 million of combined outflows.Meanwhile, smaller products offset part of that pressure. Bitwise’s BITB, ARK 21Shares’ ARKB, VanEck’s HODL, MSBT and Grayscale’s lower-fee…

France-based geophysical services company Viridien, formerly known as CGG, has launched a new reimaging program in the U.S. Gulf, expanding its Walker Ridge initiative to deliver enhanced seismic insights and support further infrastructure-led exploration in the deepwater region. Map showing location of the Walker Ridge reimaging extension program; Courtesy of Viridien Earth Data Viridien has recently begun its Walker Ridge reimaging extension in the U.S. Gulf, which, with the support of industry partners, expands on the success of its original reimaging program. The company claims that fast-track results for this new project are already available. The 4,406-square-kilometer extension covers 189…