Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A palm oil grower in an Indonesian village on Sumatra island, around 100 miles west of Singapore, has spent 15 years studying the role of mangroves in coastal ecosystems and pushing local action to restore coastal forests.Research shows this area of Sumatra’s northern coastline, which is separated from the Strait of Malacca by a narrow channel and the island of Bengkalis, is experiencing coastal abrasion of more than 6 meters per year, due primarily to mangrove loss.Indonesia pledged to restore around 600,000 hectares in five years by 2024, which researchers say was likely the world’s most ambitious reforestation initiative…

Have you got the “luteal uglies”? I’m not trying to insult you, merely deploying the latest hormonal buzz phrase on social media, which refers to the phase in a woman’s cycle, two or so weeks between ovulation and menstruation, when she apparently feels at her lowest and most unattractive due to a drop in oestrogen levels.Women’s hormones have become trending topics and, as someone who only found out what a “luteal phase” is when she Googled it, mid-fertility panic, in her late 20s, I am somewhat in awe of the expertise with which younger women discuss their menstrual cycles now.…

We’ve seen an incorrect claim that “not one of the 56 Muslim countries is taking in refugees” being shared again on Facebook.As we’ve explained before, millions of refugees are hosted by countries with majority-Muslim populations.According to the latest data from the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, five of the ten nations in the world that hosted the most refugees as of the end of 2025 are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which describes itself as “the collective voice of the Islamic world”, and are listed by Pew Research Centre as having Muslim majority populations. These countries are…

Former Barcelona and PSG star Lionel Messi, who won World Cup 2022, hints at retirement.Argentina superstar Lionel Messi, one of the greatest footballers to play the game, has hinted that he may soon retire from the sport after the death of his father.The 39-year-old, who was part of the Argentina side that was defeated by Spain in the FIFA World Cup 2026 final, rose to the top of the game from the youth ranks at Spanish club Barcelona.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listAfter his country’s defeat by Spain in July in New Jersey at the World Cup, Messi…

Germany’s postwar foreign intelligence service was founded in 1956 with far more legal constraints than intelligence agencies elsewhere. Those restraints have had the side effect of making Germany particularly dependent on the U.S. for intelligence gathering. In view of the growing threat from Russia, leading politicians now argue that it is time for Germany’s spies to be given the ability to hit back harder. That argument took on new urgency following the sighting of an explosive-laden drone at Leipzig-Halle Airport in eastern Germany last week that was found near a Ukrainian Antonov plane used to transport munitions. Dobrindt, in remarks…

Andy Burnham has been warned that the UK economy could barely grow next year if disruption in the Strait of Hormuz continues until the end of 2026.Treasury sources have confirmed that internal modelling presented to the new prime minister and chancellor suggests UK GDP growth could be as low as 0.3% in 2027, as first reported by Bloomberg.Government officials say they routinely plan for all possible scenarios.The UK economy saw a strong start to the year, but growth then faltered with the conflict in the Middle East affecting some businesses. The Iran war has pushed up oil and fuel prices,…

From record-smashing temperatures, wildfires, hosepipe bans and thousands of premature deaths, the climate crisis has left its mark across the summer of 2026.Tackling the root cause – the burning of fossil fuels – and ending the crisis will take years. So will fixing the UK government’s calamitous failure to protect lives and livelihoods against the long-predicted affects of global heating.But the climate emergency is right here, right now, and here are 10 policies that Andy Burnham’s government should consider announcing urgently.1. Reject drilling licences for the Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gasfieldsThis would be a vital and confidence-boosting sign that…

Google’s latest flagship phones are finally here: On Wednesday at a Made By Google event in New York City, the company unveiled the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel 11 Fold. The phones are available for preorder now, and will hit stores on Aug. 20.Also: Every Pixel device announced at Made by Google 2026: 11 Pro Fold, Pixel Watch 5, and moreThe Pixel 11 line features a brighter screen than its predecessor, an updated camera system, and over 30 hours of battery life. It runs on the Google Tensor G6 processor. You can preorder the…

“While investigating an unrelated vulnerability, Trellix Advanced Research Center stumbled across a vulnerability in Python’s tarfile module,” Kasimir Schulz, a vulnerability researcher for Trellix’s Threat Labs, wrote on the firm’s blog. “Initially we thought we had found a new zero-day vulnerability. As we dug into the issue, we realized this was in fact CVE-2007-4559.” According to NIST, CVE-2007-4559 is a directory traversal vulnerability in the extract and extractall functions in the tarfile module in Python that allows user-assisted remote attackers to overwrite arbitrary files via a “..” sequence in filenames in a TAR archive. Bad actors can create exploits with…

If you’ve scanned headlines over the last year, you’ve likely seen the prevailing market narrative: Bitcoin miners are abandoning their operations and pivoting to AI data centers, signaling a retreat from proof-of-work. To casual observers, this looks like a surrender. Proof that Bitcoin was just a temporary placeholder until a “better” compute workload arrived. However, if you look through the lens of power infrastructure and thermodynamics, that story gets the reality completely backwards. The migration isn’t a sign of bitcoin weakness; but a long-overdue, structurally bullish rebalancing of global energy pricing. Here is the underlying reality that the market completely…