Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is a longtime supporter of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and has controversially suggested that Israel has a biblical right to the territory and much of the Middle East. But Huckabee has been forced to confront the disturbing violence surrounding the expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territory, an issue that’s been a growing problem in recent years but has reached record levels in 2026, according to the United Nations. As Israeli settlers besieged Palestinian homes in the village of Qusra, including one belonging to a Palestinian American, Huckabee in mid-August referred…

Claim: An image authentically shows a baby sitting in a car seat hanging from the open window of a driver’s side door. Rating: Context Someone generated the image with AI. Genuine vintage photos do exist showing children in car seats suspended outside the driver’s side doors of parked vehicles. Despite social media speculation, no historical records indicate people drove cars with children in a seat hanging outside of the vehicle, nor does data suggest parents or guardians left kids hooked onto the door to avoid interior car heat while adults shopped. In summer 2026, people claimed a image spreading online…

Recent progressive wins of outspoken Israel critics in Democratic primaries have generated a lot of optimism. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat in Michigan after AIPAC and its allies spent more than $54m against him in what came to be the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in US history.In New Jersey, a surgeon named Adam Hamawy, who as a medical volunteer refused to leave Gaza until the last member of his team could evacuate, won a 12-person primary in a House of Representatives race.Years ago, such breakthroughs would have seemed impossible. For many on the left, it now…

To impose punishing tariffs around the world, President Trump has repeatedly turned to a series of decades-old, never-before-used trade powers, only to be slapped down by federal courts for overstepping the law.But those past defeats have hardly deterred the president, who reprised that exact strategy this week to commence his new trade war against Canada — risking yet another round of costly legal wrangling for the White House.This time, the uncertainty surrounds Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a little-known authority that allows the president to impose duties in response to unreasonable and discriminatory trade practices. On Saturday,…

Congressional Republicans are leveling some rare and uncharacteristically harsh criticism of President Trump for his decision to increase imports of ground beef at a lower tariff rate, warning that the move will hurt American ranchers.The decision, announced late last week, appeared to be a bid to lower costs across the country before the midterm elections in which Republicans are fighting to preserve their narrow majorities. But it has drawn dissent from even reliable allies of Mr. Trump, many of them from states and districts with large cattle-raising areas, who fear that the move could harm another important constituency: the producers…

Kerry Wan/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysApple announced its new Mac Mini and Mac Studio with the M6, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips. The M5 Ultra is its most powerful chip ever.Prices have also gone up, with the Mac Mini M6 starting at $899. Apple announced on Tuesday a new range of chip configurations for its Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktop devices with the base M6 processor, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips. The latter is the company’s most powerful chip to date, representing a new high-end processor tier with an 80-core GPU and four times…

Healthcare and services provider Nutex is investigating a data breach incident where an unauthorized third party exfiltrated information from company servers. The organization has disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the stolen data includes details that may be private or confidential. “Based on preliminary findings from the Company’s ongoing investigation, the Company believes that certain information maintained on the Company’s servers was accessed and exfiltrated by an unauthorized third party, including some information that may be private and/or confidential,” Nutex says. Nutex Health is a for-profit healthcare company that operates 28…

The United States is threatening to eject Iran’s trading partners from the dollar system while widening its power to sanction the country’s crypto sector, escalating a financial campaign that is already testing Washington’s leverage over China.On Aug. 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched “Operation Economic Outcast,” imposing sanctions on nearly 60 individuals, entities and vessels and opening five Iranian sectors to broader sanctions: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation and shipping.Treasury said the campaign would expand secondary sanctions exposure for foreign businesses that continue dealing with Tehran. He stated:“In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign…

Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission has documented a major change at Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, where a 76 sq km section of the glacier’s floating ice tongue broke away on August 4, 2026. The break represents Petermann Glacier’s largest loss of floating ice since 2012 and the biggest calving event recorded in the Arctic since 2020. It offers another striking example of how quickly conditions can shift across Earth’s polar regions. The newly formed tabular iceberg, also known as an ‘ice island’, is roughly the size of Manhattan and may be as much as 150 meters thick. Sentinel-1 Captures the…

Some of the largest fossil fuel companies on Earth are disproportionately responsible for the water crisis in the American West, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Tuesday. From 2014 to 2024, climate change sapped over a third of the region’s typical annual snowpack and decreased streamflows by about 13 percent, the authors found in the paper, which appeared in Nature’s Communications Earth and Environment journal. About half of those losses are attributable to emissions from “carbon majors,” 122 fossil fuel companies and cement producers, the study concluded. That carbon-major pollution has drained the West of trillions of gallons of water,…