Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Parrotfish play a vital role in reef ecosystems by producing sand from consumed coral and maintaining healthy reefs by grazing algae; in doing so they support the sediment accretion processes that help low-lying atolls naturally grow and adapt to rising sea levels.A grassroots social media campaign in the Maldives raised awareness about the ecological importance of parrotfish, helping build widespread public support for their conservation after the species began proliferating in local fish markets during the COVID-19 pandemic.Public backing from the #FishForTomorrow campaign led the Maldivian government to ban the catch of all parrotfish species in 2020, making the…

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where our team has spent the last week taking turns falling sick. But don’t worry, we rallied so that we could bring you this week’s edition. All right, here’s what’s on tap for the day: A Chinese AI conundrum in Washington, another potential Hormuz reopening, and the cost of Trump’s new battleships. Here we go again. No, we’re not talking about the latest U.S. attempt to reach a deal with Iran (though there’s more on that below). Instead, we’re talking about Washington’s latest freakout over China’s artificial intelligence capabilities. Many people (us included)…

The claim that the U.S. military was responsible for four deaths in the crash of a private medical transport plane in New Mexico in May 2026 is still under investigation. It was true that the military was testing technology that jammed GPS signals at the time of the crash, based on FAA communications on the day of the crash and the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report.  However, no evidence has come to light definitively confirming or disproving that the signal jamming was the sole or partial cause of the crash. Posts claiming that the U.S. military was responsible for…

Marles says Tony Burke’s speech was moved, not cancelledMarles was asked about home affairs minister Tony Burke’s delayed speech before the National Press Club about migration policies.The deputy prime minister said the decision was merely a move of date, not a cancellation. Marles said: double quotation markIt’s not unusual for dates to be moved around in people’s diaries and in terms of presenting speeches of that kind. I think what’s important here in terms of migration policy is complex. It’s one that we’ve been working on since we’ve come to government. Tony Burke will be talking about that and he’ll…

Arrests of migrants working illegally in the UK have doubled since Labour has been in government, the Home Office has said.It said more than 17,000 arrests had been made since July 2024, a 122% increase on the previous two years, with a record number of immigration raids and arrests in the last six months. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: “This surge in enforcement activity takes us to the highest level in British history. Illegal workers and rogue employers have nowhere to hide.”Reform UK said Labour was “insulting the intelligence of the British public” with these new figures.The number of people…

President Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday aimed at limiting the number of people who are eligible for birthright citizenship and cracking down on “birth tourism,” in which women give birth in the United States to get automatic citizenship for their newborns.The new orders came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, rejected the president’s previous efforts to end birthright citizenship for undocumented citizens through executive orders.During an Oval Office event, Mr. Trump told reporters that the June 30 Supreme Court ruling was a “very, very unfortunate decision.”“This was done right after the Civil War,” Mr.…

The watch’s insecurity and the spying it enabled might be expected given the gadget’s pedigree: It’s sold by an obscure company called CJC, costs less than $30, and was made by an equally obscure manufacturer, YiQingTeng Electronics, in Shenzhen, China. More troubling, perhaps, is that the online platform it’s built on—and the one that allowed Stykas and Solferini to so thoroughly hack it—is used by dozens of other brands of smartwatch, many of which have likely been left vulnerable to the same forms of digital stalking.At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference today, Stykas and Solferini plan to present their findings…

Swati KhandelwalAug 06, 2026Virtualization Security / Linux Zapscape, a new Linux kernel vulnerability, could allow an attacker with kernel privileges inside an L1 guest virtual machine (VM) to escape KVM isolation and execute code on the host. The risk applies when nested virtualization is exposed to untrusted guests. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-64561 and affects KVM/x86’s shadow memory management unit (MMU), which manages shadow page tables used for nested guest memory translation. Security researcher Hyunwoo Kim, who disclosed the bug, said the demonstrated exploit path can run commands on the host with kernel, or root, privileges. The upstream fix…

In brief SEC documents obtained by 404 Media show the agency subscribed to Airlines Reporting Corporation’s Travel Intelligence Program, which held over one billion ticket records. The data included names, credit card numbers, routes, and an alert system that flagged new bookings by people the agency was monitoring — likely without a warrant. ARC, co-owned by Delta, United, and American, sold the data until lawmaker pressure forced a shutdown in 2025. The Securities and Exchange Commission bought access to a worldwide airline ticketing database holding more than one billion records, according to SEC documents obtained by 404 Media through a…

mRNA flu shots have officially arrived. On August 5, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first influenza vaccine that uses the same technology underpinning COVID-19 shots. The flu vaccine, called mFlusiva and produced by Moderna, will be available for people ages 50 and older at select drug stores ahead of the upcoming flu season, the Massachusetts-based company said. Influenza kills thousands of people in the United States each year and hospitalizes tens of thousands more. The FDA’s approval is based on a study of 40,000 individuals who got either a dose of mFlusiva or a conventional flu shot.…