Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As delegates gather this week in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, momentum is building toward a more ambitious global response to land degradation. In fact, there are five promising signs that this time could be different. RIYADH—Every second, land degradation claims four football fields of healthy terrain, resulting in a yearly loss equivalent to two Spains. As one would expect, the costs of these losses are staggering, putting billions of people at risk and draining the global economy of nearly $1 trillion annually. Left unchecked, up to…

What was claimed The brush used in cervical smear tests is sterilised in “cancer-causing” ethylene oxide. Our verdict Overexposure to ethylene oxide can be dangerous, but medical devices sterilised with it are not unsafe. We’ve seen claims circulating online that the brush used in cervical smear tests is sterilised in a “cancer-causing” chemical called ethylene oxide.Ethylene oxide is a gas that is commonly used to sterilise all sorts of medical devices, including swabs and speculums. Although overexposure can be dangerous, there is no credible evidence it endangers patients who come into contact with sterilised medical devices. Posts sharing the claim…

EU sends assistance to Belgium and Spain as they battle wildfiresThe European Commission has deployed assistance to Belgium and Spain as part of the bloc’s civil protection mechanism.Two Swedish planes from the EU’s firefighting fleet were dispatched to Belgium, alongside two helicopters each from the Netherlands, Norway and Germany, the executive arm of the bloc said.Over in Spain, 104 ground firefighters and 36 vehicles from France joined local efforts to fight various blazes.The EU is also continuing to support emergency efforts with satellite mapping through its Copernicus service.ShareKey eventsClosing summaryJakub KrupaAnd, on that note, we will be closing the blog…

A seven-year-old boy is among four seriously injured people in hospital after a crash in County Kildare in which five teenagers were killed while driving the wrong way down a motorway.Two women are in a critical condition, while another woman and the boy are in a serious condition after the head-on crash.It’s believed the injured family – two women aged in their 30s and one in her 20s, and the young boy – were travelling to the airport to go on holiday. Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Micheál Martin said his thoughts and prayers were with the injured and the death…

The Supreme Court for a second time refused a request by President Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.The announcement on Monday did not include the justices’ reasons, which is typical when the court issues routine orders. There were no noted dissents.Mr. Trump paid Ms. Carroll in July, a few days after the court initially turned away the president’s appeal. He also made a long-shot request to the justices that they reconsider, which the court formally declined on Monday.The…

At a lower cost, each of Raj’s delivery meals consistently tastes better than the (admittedly not great) Punjabi restaurant down the street from me—less sugary, more rich, with saffron-tinged basmati and chicken that remains juicy and plump, not overcooked. Raj’s Indian gravies offer the most compelling argument for me to order CookUnity, in a city (Portland) where the best Indian food is often a half-hour drive into the suburbs.But, of course, Raj’s meals are available only to those served by the Seattle hub. Others, near Los Angeles or Atlanta, may have other local chefs who offer similarly compelling arguments. I…

GitHub is down for some users as a widespread outage is causing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and several other services. GitHub confirmed the outage at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, when it said it was investigating reports of performance problems affecting some of its services. The problems quickly spread across several parts of GitHub that developers rely on, including API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests. According to GitHub’s status page, the company is seeing error rates of around 20% across its web experience and API traffic. The outage appears to be even worse for…

Since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope first revealed little red dots (LRDs) in 2022, astronomers have been trying to determine exactly what these strange objects are. The compact, extremely distant red sources appear throughout the early universe, but their true nature has remained difficult to explain. One leading idea is that little red dots are supermassive black holes known as active galactic nuclei. However, they do not behave quite like the active galactic nuclei astronomers observe in the nearby universe. LRDs are common at high redshift, but their numbers fall sharply at lower redshifts. (The higher the redshift, the greater…

ADES Holding Company, an oil and gas drilling services provider that is part of Saudi Arabia-headquartered ADES Group, has secured the green light to restore all temporarily suspended offshore rig operations in Saudi Arabia, as offshore activity across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region continues to recover. Illustration; Source: ADES As a result of the conflict in the Middle East, some of ADES’ offshore rigs in the GCC region received temporary suspensions in March 2026 due to regional tensions. The company has now obtained resumption notices for all of its temporarily suspended offshore rigs in Saudi Arabia. The resumption is perceived…

Did you know that there is a major Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it’s on track to be the deadliest ever? It is already the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history, with the fastest community transmission we have ever seen. It’s estimated that there have been at least 4,900 cases and more than 2,300 deaths, giving a mortality rate close to 50%. The situation is bad. That’s the consensus among global health experts.Yet this Ebola outbreak isn’t attracting much media or public attention. If I compare it with working on the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the current…