Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The coastal dune system in Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil is among the most surreal landscapes on Earth. At first glance, the park looks like a desert, but it is far from it. This place receives about 125 centimeters (50 inches) of rain per year—slightly more than Seattle and double what falls in London.  The result is a paradox: rows of sparkling white quartz dunes, some rising 30 meters (100 feet), soar over a mosaic of blue and green freshwater lagoons. The park’s name stems from the Portuguese word lençóis, meaning “bedsheets,” a reference that makes the most…

Belle Glade is one of the poorest cities in Florida, a majority-Black farmworker community on the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee, where clean and reliable drinking water has never been a given. But when Belle Glade looked to the largest source of federal money for fixing drinking water systems, it ran into an obstacle that has nothing to do with how poor it is. Under Florida’s rules, the deepest form of federal drinking water aid—principal forgiveness, essentially a loan that never has to be repaid—is reserved for communities that are both home to fewer than 10,000 people and low income,…

Belgian shipping company Exmar has taken delivery of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier (LNGC), which will be upgraded to function as a floating transshipment unit (FTU), dedicated to the LNG bunkering market. LNG carrier Simaisa; Source: Exmar Exmar has confirmed the delivery of the 146,000-cubic-meter (cbm) LNG carrier Simaisa, which is secured under an initial seven-year charter contract. The company explains that this vessel will soon undergo a dry-dock, including modifications to make it suitable as a floating transshipment unit for the LNG bunkering market. According to the Belgian shipping player, the FTU will receive large parcels of LNG…

Claim: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores will require shoppers to present photo identification. Rating: Context The rumor misrepresents a statement from Jeanny Pak, interim president and CEO of the nonprofit New York City Economic Development Corp. Pak said the city-run stores may utilize a “library card-esque” system aimed at managing supply, and preventing bulk buying and reselling of goods at higher prices. However, the stores won’t require people to show ID to shop, and they will not have systems verifying identity, residency or income, a spokesperson for Mamdani’s office confirmed to Snopes. In summer 2026, a…

Lithuanian minister warns against Russia’s ‘false flag’ strike on the BalticsLithuania’s defence minister Robertas Kaunas warned that Russia could be considering possible “false flag” provocations against Nato countries in the Baltic region.A “false flag” is a term for an event or attack which would later be blamed on someone other than the actual perpetrator.Kaunas said there was no specific date for any potential Russian actions, but authorities were closely monitoring Russia’s plans and exchanging information with Poland and other Nato allies.“We are assessing and monitoring the threat level,” he said, quoted by LRT.BNS news agency reported that one scenario believed…

On the night of the 2020 election, a small error caused the publication of incorrect results showing that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the heavily Republican county. The county’s clerk at the time, Sheryl Guy, who had just cast her own ballot for Mr. Trump, explained her mistake and quickly corrected the tally. But then a team of lawyers and computer experts working to help Mr. Trump challenge Mr. Biden’s win across the country descended on Antrim and produced a report claiming that the election there showcased errors in voting machines. The report was quickly debunked, but that didn’t…

More than 1,900 small high street businesses including mini-marts, vape shops and car washes are licensed to sponsor foreign workers under a specialist scheme intended for high-earning individuals despite visa rules being tightened, BBC Verify has found.The Home Office scheme allows registered employers to recruit workers from overseas who meet a certain skill level. The rules were tightened in July 2025 to restrict the scheme mostly to graduate-level employees who would be earning at least £41,700.But a year on from the rule change, BBC Verify has found more than 1,500 grocery and convenience stores, 150 taxi operators, 100 barber shops,…

Meta, considered a bit of a straggler in the AI harnesses realm, is making strides to catch up. This week, the company released a new terminal coding agent aimed at programmers looking for assistance with complex tasks across large software code bases. Muse Code, which is currently available in beta, can accomplish “complete software engineering tasks across large repos,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a social media post on Wednesday. Those tasks include “planning changes, writing code, validating the results,” he added. Code, which can be installed with a single command, is powered by Meta’s previously released coding model,…

Prime Intellect has open-sourced Prime Agent, a self-improving coding harness designed around two abstractions, the Recursive Language Model (RLM) and Continual Harness. Fixed tool schemas and context compaction force a model to work around its own scaffolding. Prime Agent replaces both with a persistent Python REPL and a rewritable harness. With Opus 5, it reports 95.5% on ARC-AGI-3, above the reported human expert baseline of 95.4%. It is MIT-licensed. Is it deployable Yes, today. Prime Agent installs on Linux or macOS with one command. It runs on subscription logins (Codex, Claude Pro/Max, GitHub Copilot), API keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq,…

Hackers exploited a SQL injection vulnerability to install a post-exploitation toolkit directly inside an Oracle database that was used to breach a corporate network. The attack was discovered by Huntress on July 27, 2026, after its security platform detected credential theft on a server hosting an Oracle database server. Apache access logs showed that the attackers gained access through a vulnerable search engine endpoint in a public-facing Java application running Apache Tomcat. The application failed to properly validate input submitted through an autocomplete search feature that allowed the attackers to issue SQL commands to the Oracle database. Huntress traced the malicious requests…