Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A person has been fined for using a foghorn to wake a sleeping polar bear in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a local official said.The incident happened earlier this month after someone sounded the alarm from onboard a vessel, which was sailing in a fjord in northwestern Svalbard – about 1,000 km (620 miles) from the North Pole.On Thursday, a person – who has not been named – was fined 50,000 kroner (£3,890) over the incident, the governor of the territory confirmed. Under local regulations in the region, “it is forbidden to needlessly disturb, attract or pursue a polar bear”, which was…

In the Supreme Court term that ended in June, President Trump suffered three stinging losses.Or were they merely temporary setbacks?Trump has said that none of the three rulings — on tariffs, the Federal Reserve and birthright citizenship — will stand in his way. Other paths exist, he said, to get to where he wants to go.The administration insists that it will comply with the Supreme Court’s judgments and reasoning.“All actions taken by the president since the recent Supreme Court rulings are consistent with the holdings and analysis set forth by the court,” said Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman.Solicitor General…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Cyber Security myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The personal details of nearly 14,000 crypto holders have been exposed in a data breach affecting what is meant to be the most secure way to hold keys that give access to digital tokens, potentially putting them at risk of criminal attack.Trezor, which sells hardware crypto wallets, said on Thursday that a data breach at one of its shipping providers had resulted in the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of 11,742 buyers of the secure devices being exposed, while a…

With the revelation that ICE will spend up to $20 million by March on gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to subdue an individual, according to a notice published earlier this week by the Department of Homeland Security, it’s worth looking at how this apparel, designated as a nonlethal tool for law enforcement, actually works.These shock gloves go by the unsubtle acronym of GLOVE (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies, based in Lexington, Kentucky. The GLOVE, previously used in jails and police departments in the US, looks and functions like a normal pair of…

WordPress on Wednesday announced patches for a high-severity vulnerability that allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely. Tracked as CVE-2026-65640 (CVSS score of 8.8), the security defect can be exploited by attackers with Author-level user or higher permissions via malicious Postscript file uploads. According to WordPress’ advisory, the issue affects only installations that use Imagick and Ghostscript, as it was discovered in Ghostscript’s handling of certain embedded files. Successful exploitation requires that an attacker has file upload rights. “WordPress version 7.0.4 has been released, containing a fix for the vulnerability, and as a courtesy to users on older branches,…

A team at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has developed a new type of stainless steel that could overcome a major limitation of conventional stainless steel and potentially lower the cost of producing green hydrogen. Led by Professor Mingxin Huang of HKU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the researchers created stainless steel for hydrogen (SS-H2), a material designed to resist severe corrosion under conditions that ordinary stainless steel cannot withstand. The advance is the latest result from Huang’s “Super Steel” Project. His team previously developed stainless steel with anti COVID properties in 2021, along with exceptionally strong and tough forms…

The “enabled emissions” that come when oil and gas drillers use artificial intelligence to find and exploit new energy reserves are far more damaging to the climate than the emissions that come from the data centers that power AI platforms, a new study by two former Microsoft employees concludes.  Will and Holly Alpine spent years building AI platforms before founding a nonprofit, the Enabled Emissions Campaign, to hold tech companies accountable for helping expand fossil fuel production. Their study, published in Nature, found that AI tools used by oil and gas companies have made production faster, cheaper and more profitable,…

In his article on China’s latest tool for suppression of minorities, the “ethnic unity” law, Simon Tisdall seems to take it as read that western governments will continue to pay lip service to notions of human rights in China while pursuing short-term economic goals, ultimately destructive to their own productivity (President Xi never wastes a good crisis. As Iran, Ukraine and Palestine distract the world, he tightens his grip, 8 August).This has been the pattern since June 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre. His faint hope that the young urban Chinese might overturn Xi’s regime is a judgment on the failure…

What was claimed A photo shows a “ring of fire” total solar eclipse at its peak over Stonehenge. Our verdict It’s fake. The picture contains Google’s SynthID watermark. The eclipse visible from the UK on Wednesday 12 August was partial, not total. A picture being shared online with claims it shows a total eclipse over Stonehenge isn’t real.The image has been circulating on Facebook with captions saying: “This is what Totality looks like.” But the picture is fake and the recent eclipse didn’t reach totality in the UK.A partial eclipse was visible to many people across the country on Wednesday…

A cloud of dust billows behind Maarten Janse’s tractor as he spreads a mixture of compost, straw and manure over a field to nourish the parched soil. Janse’s farm on the fertile land of the Netherlands’ southwestern Zeeland Province is drying out despite his efforts to make it more drought resistant as accelerated human-caused global warming and a supersized El Nino batter fields across Europe. The drought that is roasting much of Europe this summer is taking a heavy toll on crops across the continent, from potatoes in the Netherlands to corn in Bosnia and grapes in Italy. Even when…