How a small team at ‘Our World in Data’ built information tools that reined in Covid pandemic
Imagine trying to tackle Covid-19 with no idea of where it was spreading or how quickly, the mortality risk or the efficacy of treatments and vaccines. That describes the first half of 2020. Countries published intermittent snapshots of the situation. The World Health Organization (WHO) published case numbers in PDFs....
Pandora Papers detail how the ‘eating chiefs of Africa’ stash loads of cash in offshore accounts
A new global investigation exposing the offshore hideaways of some of the world’s most powerful personalities was launched this week after two years of discreet work by investigative journalists around the world. The project, known as Pandora Papers, is facilitated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which obtained...
Unhealthy sex-for-job scandals rock WHO as probe proves attempts to suppress truth
A damning report has found that the World Health Organization failed to prevent and tackle widespread sexual abuse during the Ebola response in Congo – a probe triggered by an investigation by The New Humanitarian and the Thomson Reuters Foundation has revealed. WHO staff knew of allegations in early May...
How world’s richest club owner Mukesh Ambani reduces Chelsea and Arsenal’s owners to just London beggars
Roman Abramovich may have a net worth of almost £11 billion ($14.9 billion) following a rise from street trader to business mastermind – but his fortune is dwarfed by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani The fortune of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani makes him the richest sports team owner on the planet...
Capitol Hill riot underlines ‘You can run, but you can’t hide’ mantra as Google tech unearths suspects
Using a traditional search warrant, the FBI investigators then obtained full geolocation and communication records for some of the suspects’ Google accounts that showed them allegedly travelling to Washington, DC, and admitting in a series of text and picture messages that he had been in the Capitol. One of them...
How secret Google geofence warrant is helping FBI nail down Capitol riot mob
Court documents suggest the FBI has been using controversial geofence search warrants at a scale not publicly seen before, collecting account information and location data on hundreds of devices inside the US Capitol during a deadly invasion by a right-wing mob on January 6. While Google receives over 10,000 geofence...
Journalists in Afghanistan fear being killed ‘every minute of their lives under a religious dictatorship’
Hundreds of journalists working in Afghanistan have fled or gone into hiding in recent weeks following the seizure of power by the Taliban. The leader of one of the IFJ’s affiliates in Afghanistan, who has worked for over 20 years with international media as a reporter and senior editor tells...
While China plans to stop financing new coal plants overseas, its domestic consumption has tripled
China’s pledge to stop financing new coal plants abroad, announced by President Xi Jinping at the United Nations summit last week, has raised hopes that the world could soon wean itself off the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. But although this is a positive step from the world’s biggest emitter of...
World’s largest publishers unite to tackle rising incidence of doctored images in research papers
Some of the world’s largest publishers have come together to tackle the growing problem of image manipulation in scientific papers. They have developed a three-tier classification system that editors can use to flag suspicious content and detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to deal with doctored images. Image-integrity specialists welcome the...
PhD ladder: Ashamed, some Western universities are taking steps to close undergraduate racial award gap
When it comes to explaining the awards gap in undergraduate degrees in the United Kingdom as a whole, student experience might be a factor because Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students often report experiencing racism on campus, and feeling that they do not fit in or that it’s not...