Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

In tropical cities, urban heat islands (UHIs) exacerbate an already challenging hot-humid heat burden for residents. UHIs are formed by urban artificial surfaces like concrete and asphalt that retain heat by day and slowly release it at night, never giving cities a chance to cool.Natural and infrastructure solutions can be implemented to combat the UHI effect and cool cities. These include creating shade by planting trees or extending roofs; inducing wind to blow down urban streets; constructing green roofs and walls; painting roofs light colors; and changing social practices to avoid midday heat.But sufficient funding is needed to implement…

Sen. Susan Collins was one of three Republican senators who voted against passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, and she cited the legislation’s many changes to Medicaid as the main reason. But an ad from a Democratic outside group falsely claims she “voted to support Donald Trump on the largest Medicaid cut in history.” Democrats have criticized Collins, who is running for reelection in Maine, for her earlier procedural vote on a motion to advance the OBBBA to the Senate floor for consideration. But the ad ignores the fact that she ultimately voted against the bill…

The two big drags on the president’s popularity are the cost of living and the Iran War, with one bleeding into the other. The conflict has caused gas prices in the US to spike to above $4 a gallon, a painful hike to any US business that relies on transport.But in Kingsport, support for the president approaches an almost-religious fervor. The city voted overwhelmingly for Trump in all three of his elections. So did wider Tennessee, a Republican state for more than 25 years.When it comes to the Iran conflict, most residents either outright support the military action or rationalise…

The U.S. official added that Israel remains skeptical that Hamas will follow through on their commitments, while noting the country was similarly skeptical that Hamas would release the Israeli hostages.“We basically have built a lot of credit with them. And I think that they’re willing to give us more of a shot to see if we can get to the next phase,” the official said. “We’re in an uncomfortable position for everyone, but I think that there’s a pathway to get through it.”The idea that Israeli troops are at least planning to withdraw — especially if that withdrawal goes to…

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge on Wednesday for throwing an activist to the ground near Chicago last year during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the region.A judge in Cook County, Ill., sentenced the agent, Adam Saracco, to 12 months of supervision on Wednesday and ordered him not to have contact with the activist he had clashed with, Robert Held.Mr. Saracco, 41, was charged with misdemeanor battery earlier this year after the altercation in December. At a gas station in Brookfield, Ill., Mr. Held was filming Mr. Saracco when Mr. Saracco approached…

By any metric, the horror film Obsession has been one of the most extraordinary Hollywood success stories of 2026.Made on a budget of around $750,000 and released in May, it went on to earn $488 million worldwide, catapulting 26-year-old director and screenwriter Curry Barker—originally known for his YouTube sketch comedy—to the top of the industry’s “it” list.So why, you might ask, are people creating a stink over Universal Studios, the international distributor of Obsession, adding its lead female character, Nikki, to the cast of the Halloween Horror Nights event at its Hollywood theme park? Even though the actor who plays…

An ongoing data theft campaign uses custom tools to steal data exposed to anonymous users through Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow customer portals.  The data-theft campaign, dubbed City-Forum by SaaS security firm Reco, has been traced to a single server that has targeted multiple organizations worldwide. These organizations include telecommunications companies, banks and financial services firms, enterprise software vendors, security and data privacy companies, and public-sector portals. Reco says the attacks are ongoing, with activity continuing to increase. The City-Forum data theft attacks Reco says all of the attacks originate from the IP address 158.220.87.79, hosted by German VPS provider Contabo, and…

In brief A team or researchers found that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all use a single global encryption key for AI reasoning tokens. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public GitHub and Hugging Face repositories, the researchers recovered 182 credentials, including 62 live API keys, 33 passwords, and 30 personal email addresses. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google deployed server-side patches after responsible disclosure, but historical session logs already shared publicly remain decodable. Security researchers have found a way to read the encrypted “inner thoughts” of every major AI reasoning model—and uncovered 62 live API keys and 33 passwords buried in…

As a young girl raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Lindsey Waitt dreamed of working for NASA. Her dream is now a reality as she embarks on her role as a NASA test project engineer with the Artemis launch team – an integral part of the agency’s missions that will enable humans to return to the surface of the Moon after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When she was in middle school in the late 1990’s, Waitt recalls meeting NASA Space Shuttle astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Albert Sacco, Jr., a former professor at the college, during a visit to…

Elizabeth Goldman is a co-director of Global Nature Watch, previously known as Global Forest Watch, a database measuring forest loss that’s frequently cited in Mongabay reporting. She joins this week’s podcast to detail GNW’s updated 25-year analysis of global forest fire trends. The picture is stark: Forest fires burn twice as much forest today as they did 20 years ago, and historic fire seasons are the “new normal,” she says.“Catastrophic, large-scale fires are becoming more of a normal. The last three years are the worst three years in the record-keeping in our data set,” Goldman says. “Fires now burn twice…