Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Ghulam Kehar rose before dawn in early June to attend the day’s first prayer at his local mosque in Irving, Texas, before heading off for a monthslong deployment with the U.S. Coast Guard.He had been deployed before, but this time was different. He felt apprehensive about leaving his wife and four children behind in Texas, even for a short while.Rhetorical attacks on Muslims by top Texas leaders had become more pronounced, and seemed to be trickling down. At his mosque, the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, and others across the state, congregants and religious leaders swapped stories of ugly comments directed…

Nina Raemont/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysGold and higher Play Store users are getting Pixel discounts.You can sign up for a Play Pass trial to get free gold status.Discounts are between $125 and $175, depending on status.Last week, Google sent out email promos to random users with a chance to save up to $150 on the new Pixel 11 series. If you missed that email, there’s a trick you might still be able to leverage to save. You might not have paid much attention to your Play Store status level thus far, but every time you spend…

AI safety testing firm Irregular has published its account of an incident in which models being evaluated inside one of its testing environments took offensive security actions against real systems rather than the simulated targets they were meant to attack.  The Israeli company, which last year raised $80 million in funding, has been in the news in recent weeks after it came to light that AI models it tested on behalf of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta escaped their test environments and carried out real-world attacks. Irregular’s core business involves partnering with major AI labs to stress-test models before they are…

Bitcoin (BTC) is starting the new week at around $63,000, but bear-market history continues to repeat with weekly close below a key long-term trend line.Key points:Bitcoin has been trading in a range between $57,700 and $67,300, but last week’s close came with a drop below the key 200-week moving average at $64,216.Markets are pricing in near-70% odds of a hold by the Federal Reserve in September, as July meeting minutes are due this week.Japan Q2 GDP figures fall short of expectations at 1.1% as analysis warns of “global tightening” that could impact Bitcoin and risk assets. Bitcoin sees weekly close below…

Ursula Quitterer calls it “Compound 10,” a chemical substance developed by her research team that could potentially slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Quitterer, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at ETH Zurich, has so far tested the experimental treatment in mice. The results were encouraging. The nerve cell death typically associated with dementia slowed significantly, and the treated animals lived longer. The work behind the compound began nearly 20 years ago, when Quitterer received brain tissue samples from patients treated by a doctor and colleague at Ain Shams University Hospital in Cairo. The tissue had been removed during tumor surgery from…

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. On April 20, on the south coast of Timor-Leste, Jafet Potenzo Lopes saw three green pigeons. He had not seen the species for years. The birds were Timor green pigeons, and the site, in Manatuto municipality, had no previous record of them. With the species nearing extinction, finding three birds in a new place was encouraging. The latest estimates suggest how few remain. A study published this year in Oryx, drawing on more than 1,400 days of field surveys between 2002…

When Chris McCausland won Strictly Come Dancing in 2024, he held his trophy aloft and said: “It’s for everyone out there that thought and got told they couldn’t do something. It just shows with opportunity and support and determination, anything can happen.” Later that month, he delivered Channel 4’s Alternative Christmas Message. In it, McCausland warned that Access to Work (AtW), a scheme run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), was under threat due to a lack of funding.AtW provides grants to employers and self-employed workers to cover the cost of reasonable adjustments a disabled person may need…

In the past month, three earthquakes of magnitude 7 or above have struck Indonesia, Colombia and Mexico, killing hundreds of people. In June, two powerful quakes seconds apart levelled swaths of northern Venezuela.The run of disasters has prompted a question asked after every cluster of big earthquakes: Is the Earth shaking more than it used to?In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera examines a decade of earthquake data to see how 2026 compares and explains how and where earthquakes strike.The 10 largest earthquakes of 2026According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), there are about 20,000 earthquakes recorded globally each year,…

The demand comes at a sensitive moment. Latvia has been one of Europe’s staunchest supporters of Ukraine, sharply increasing defense spending since Moscow’s full-scale invasion, even as sanctions and the collapse of bilateral trade have cut deeply into economic links that once ran eastward. But ahead of an Oct. 3 national election, parties arguing that Riga should demand more in return for sanctions and military support are gaining ground. The European Commission has proposed substantially increasing EU-level defense funding in the 2028-2034 budget, including a €125.2 billion security, defense industry and space pot in the European Competitiveness Fund. That money…

Foreign nationals would be excluded from most benefits under a Reform UK government, the party has said.The ban, part of a proposed overhaul of Britain’s benefits system, would include European Union (EU) nationals with settled status in the UK.It would require renegotiating the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU, potentially meaning that British expatriates living in the EU could lose equivalent rights.Reform claims the policy would save £21bn a year by its fifth year, but Labour insists the “vast majority” of migrants have no access to benefits and the Conservatives have dismissed the plans as “cobbled together”.Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economy…