Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

After decades of livestock pressure, 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of farmland in South Africa’s Albany thicket biome need rehabilitation — the way a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts.Carbon finance seems the most likely source of funding, kickstarting the process with the mass planting of an endemic drought-tolerant succulent called spekboom (Portulacaria afra).Until now, restoration projects have been artisanal, but that’s changed with a $91 million loan to a new entrant and tech giant Amazon throwing its hat into the ring.A flush of new funding shows growing faith in a business model for ecosystem restoration, but there’s…

Thursday, American Oversight sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking a criminal investigation into Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over his apparent false statements to two U.S. Senate committees about the purpose of his 2019 trip to Samoa on behalf of his former organization, Children’s Health Defense. The request, sent to Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, points to a newly revealed Jan. 20, 2019, letter in which Kennedy personally proposed that Children’s Health Defense travel to Samoa to conduct an examination of…

I was delighted to read Polly Toynbee’s demolition of compulsory GCSE resits (How can we stop destroying the prospects of a generation? Scrapping compulsory GCSE resits will be a start, 24 August). Of course, level 2 qualifications in maths and English should be accessible to all school leavers who need them. However, the depressing treadmill of resitting resits is thin educational gruel and Michael Gove should be ashamed for espousing such a killjoy policy.As a governor at a large further education college in Bedford, I find it depressing to receive data at every single board meeting focusing on GCSE resit…

The US military is experiencing a “beyond critical” shortage of advanced missile interceptors in Europe, largely driven by President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, a US defence official in Europe and a NATO official told The Associated Press, raising concerns about vulnerabilities in NATO countries to a potential Russian attack. The US defence official said the most concerning shortfall involves Patriot missile interceptors, which can shoot down Russia’s high-speed ballistic missiles. The NATO official confirmed the low inventories of Patriots among American and NATO forces in Europe. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. In the…

Uefa claims that the valuation of the stakes to be sold were not independently verified and would have been offered too cheaply, calling the proposed sale “a fraudulently off-market price promoted by Infantino for his own benefit”.The application adds: “Under the terms Infantino announced, those investors stood to acquire a permanent financial interest in Fifa’s commercial arm for $4.2bn, implying an absurdly low enterprise value of only approximately $20bn, a figure that was neither the product of an open, competitive auction, nor tested by any independent valuer.”In the application, Uefa is applying to a court in Florida to attempt to…

With control of the Senate hanging in the balance, President Trump is heading to Houston on Thursday to raise money to help a Republican ally who has been struggling.The Republican National Committee is holding a fund-raiser that Mr. Trump said will benefit Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general who is running for Senate. He was trailing his Democratic rival, James Talarico, in several recent polls.“So I’m going to help Ken Paxton, and I’m going to spend a lot of time in Texas,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, before departing for Houston.Mr. Trump called Mr. Paxton a…

A backlash is underway within Democratic ranks after House leaders named a vocally pro-Israel Democrat to their top slot on a key panel that oversees Middle East policy, the latest reflection of bitter divisions in the party over support for the Jewish state.Democrats on Tuesday chose Representative Jared Moskowitz of Florida to serve as the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, elevating a lawmaker facing a tough re-election race who has called for “unwavering support” for Israel. Mr. Moskowitz has backed continued U.S. aid to Israel even as many Democrats have turned against…

Oura/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on GoogleZDNET’s key takeaways A lawsuit targets Oura’s allegedly inaccurate sleep tracking features. The plaintiff alleges that Oura’s sleep tracking has “a coin flip’s chance of being correct.”Oura has defended its technology and methodology for its smart ring. Can a smart ring that measures biometric signals such as heart rate, body temperature, and breathing rate use these data points to accurately determine sleep stages? That question is at the heart of a recent lawsuit in which Oura finds itself entangled. Also: I wore the Oura Ring 5 for a month, and two big upgrades make it so much…

Presented by Gravitee Agent complexity is the insidious shadow lurking inside enterprises right now that needs a light shone on it.That’s because enterprises don’t deploy a single agent and watch it run, they deploy fleets, each one calling APIs, calling other agents, reaching into applications that were never built with a machine decision-maker in mind. That’s the failure mode that should keep you up at night: a windy, complicated system nobody can see clearly enough to govern. But why do things get so opaque so quickly?Add a second agent to a system, and you’ve added one connection. Add a tenth,…

Chris Wheeler is the CISO at Resilience. He has a long history in cybersecurity: a threat researcher and analyst at Efflux Systems and then threat analytics manager at Arbor Networks. He joined Resilience as threat intelligence lead but left in 2020 to become VP and SOAR lead at Morgan Stanley. He returned to Resilience four years later, first as VP of information security, and subsequently CISO. It is fair to suggest he has security in his blood. His father was a university IT administrator. “He was always kind of tinkering with these different systems, and I inherited the same kind…