Last year, an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and eight Syrian and international media outlets reviewed thousands of official records to establish how the regime used the children to pressure their families and negotiate prisoner exchanges.

SOS Children’s Villages, a federation of over 130 member associations headquartered in Austria, pledged to investigate its role in what had happened. But neither of the two independent investigations commissioned by the charity have seen the light of day.

One report, delivered in December by a prominent Norwegian law firm, was later declared “compromised” by the head of the federation. In an internal meeting he blamed unnamed staff for “trying to manipulate the result of the report to basically make us look like we are the villains.”

A draft copy of the report, seen by Lighthouse Reports and its partners, states that SOS was not forced to accept children from the security services and that SOS’ international office in Vienna – not the local Syrian association – had ultimate responsibility for SOS facilities where security services brought most detainees’ children.

SOS’ German association – SOS Kinderdörfer weltweit – commissioned a separate report. It found that more than a dozen international staff were informed about the children early on but it “was not initially considered problematic” and only stopped 18 months later “ primarily due to “reputational concerns,” according to a statement about the findings by the German directors, which was later removed from the website.

In recent months, several SOS associations asked to confidentially review a copy of the Norwegian report and were refused. This has added to growing tensions threatening to break apart the charity, which was founded in 1949 by Austrian Hermann Gmeiner. In October 2025 SOS revealed that Gmeiner had repeatedly been accused of child abuse over decades.

Six SOS associations in Europe – who contribute significant funds to the organisation’s budget – have since decided to leave the federation and become independent charities; others are also considering leaving. In December, SOS faced a potentially fatal financial blow when the directors of the German association – the largest single contributor to SOS – voted to leave. But the board overruled them and dismissed the three directors in February.

The previous year, the German directors had set aside funds to compensate Syrian victims, and asked several other national SOS associations to contribute. Nothing has been distributed since.

In response to our questions, SOS Kinderdörfer weltweit said the investigation was ongoing and the statement was published prematurely and later taken down at investigators’ request. He said the board members were dismissed for breaches of duty, including ending the contract with the investigators, which had delayed progress in establishing a compensation fund.

A spokesperson for SOS Children’s Village International told us their board had taken “independent legal advice” regarding the Norwegian report and a review was still ongoing. “We remain deeply concerned about [the families’] circumstances and have expressed our willingness to support affected families. However, providing assistance in Syria depends on legal and practical conditions that require coordination with relevant parties.”

METHODS

The investigation interviewed former and current staff working for the SOS federation and its member associations around the world. We analysed and verified hundreds of pages of internal documents, correspondence and meeting records.

STORYLINES

Sisters Layla and Layan Ghbeis were eight and four when they were taken from their mother, Omama, and brought to SOS in 2015. It was three years before they were reunited with their parents in a prisoner exchange.

“I had hoped SOS would apologise and offer support, to compensate me for the harm they caused by separating me from my family,” Omama Ghbeis said. “No-one at SOS talked to us or gave us anything.”

Mohammad was taken by Assad’s security forces from the hospital just four days after he was born. His mother, still recovering from caesarean section, was sent to prison. The security officials texted his father Abdelrahman a picture of his baby: “If you want your family back, give us prisoners.”

It was years before he met his son, when he was finally released in a prisoner exchange between regime and opposition forces.

“Everytime I call my son or wife and they don’t answer, I panic” said Abdelrahman. “I drop everything and rush home, terrified that something might have happened to them.”

The post Silence Over Syria’s Stolen Children appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

A massive web of movement restrictions and control that is reshaping lives – fragmenting families, closing off towns and preventing access to jobs, education and healthcare.

Invisible to the outside world, this system is core to Israel’s accelerating infrastructure of control over Palestinian lives. Together with our partners at the Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), WIRED and Evident, we set out to quantify its effects and understand the consequences for communities.

We found that checkpoints have imprisoned a generation: nearly a third of people under the age of 25 say they have never even left their own district. A journey between neighbouring towns that should take ten minutes can take an hour. Collectively, West Bank residents lose about 30 years worth of time every day. That’s 77 hours stolen from each individual, per year.

This infrastructure enables Israel to control movement not just in and out of the territory, but also within it. Some cities, like Sinjil, are almost entirely enclosed by barbed wire and earthmounds, sealing in its 7,000 residents. Of Sinjil’s six access roads, only one entry point was passable at any point since 2023. Even the checkpoint on the sole passable road is closed at times.

METHODS

Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, closure times or when roads will be blocked off. Satellite data is almost non-existent and popular navigation apps, like Google maps, do not list checkpoints and are essentially unusable for Palestinians. To navigate this reality, Palestinians have created an ad-hoc system using Telegram and other messaging services to update each other on congestion and checkpoint status, and share checkpoint updates like weather reports on the radio.

This made mapping and analysis challenging. We built a novel dataset using UN OCHA maps, tens of thousands of Telegram messages and 2.6 billion GPS pings of vehicles that travel across the West Bank. With the Palestinian Institute for Social and Economic Progress, we conducted polls of over 1000 people about their experience.

The result is the most comprehensive dataset to-date on the Israeli military’s system of movement restrictions, the first map with GPS coordinates of checkpoints and a set of findings that illuminate and quantify the violence of their unpredictability.

KEY FINDINGS

Locked in: At the time of publication, Israel imposed a week-long “comprehensive closure” of the West Bank. During the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025, around 70 percent of checkpoints were closed, bringing life in the West Bank to a standstill.

Lost time: Average delays have increased by more than 50 percent since 2023 with waits frequently exceeding hours at a time. Detours cost commuters about 90 minutes each week. The average commuter loses about an hour and a half each week taking more roundabout routes. This additional travel time amounts to 77 hours lost per commuter, per year..

Destroying the Fabric of Society: 94 percent of West Bank residents said there was a checkpoint or gate separating them from close relatives and nearly all of these people said that visits with these relatives have become rarer as a result. A quarter of parents say that checkpoints have meant their children haven’t met close relatives who live in other towns. 69 percent of people polled reported cancelling social or family visits because of checkpoints.

Limiting access to Education: 30 percent of people polled said that checkpoints have impacted their ability to start or complete a university education. One in ten people have moved or thought of moving to because of checkpoints

Blocking Access to Essential Services: Nearly two thirds of people say checkpoints have been a barrier to their access to medical care. One in five communities had at least one more checkpoint on the most direct route to a hospital in 2025 than in 2023. A third of communities now cross at least three checkpoints to reach a hospital.

STORYLINES

For the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) checkpoints delays and closures carry fatal consequences. PRCS attributes 25 deaths since 2023 to the obstruction of its medical teams. Between October 2023 and August 2026 they documented 237 access denials and 240 mission delays by Israeli forces. In July 2026, a Palestinian infant, Ahmad Zaid, died after Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint reportedly blocked the vehicle transporting him for more than an hour.

Ali Haj Ali has worked at Sama Pharmaceuticals, a medicine factory east of Nablus city, for over a decade. Today, he supervises the maintenance of the company’s production lines. When he leaves at the end of his shift at 4:30 pm, he has stopped expecting to reach his home before 8:00 pm, even though it’s only 16 kilometers away. Some nights, he doesn’t get home at all. He sleeps at the factory. Two offices hold a bed and a dozen mattresses for whomever can’t make the trip home.

Khalil Tufakji, a Palestinian cartographer and expert on Israeli settlements, has watched Israel assemble this system for decades. The purpose of checkpoints is the fragmentation of space, he said—“every city closes in on itself”— and in this way, the homeland shrinks to a city.

In Nablus, the West Bank’s commercial capital and home to major universities and hospitals, the number of checkpoints increased by 28 percent from 2023-2025 and delay times spiked to levels beyond anywhere else in the West Bank. Commuters in Nablus spent an average of nearly an hour and 50 minutes of additional travel time to avoid checkpoints.

The post Chokepoints: Suffocating the West Bank appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

It’s unlikely that the framers expected that sections requiring all data centre operators in the EU to report on their power consumption metrics and water usage would be especially controversial. Rules like this are standard in other industries.

Three years later, the situation looks very different. Countries – and companies richer than many countries – are racing to attain strategic advantage in AI. Silicon Valley insiders catastrophize about superintelligence and human survival. The White House has scolded EU regulators and declared itself to be in a race with China to win AI. And data centres – the massive buildings housing the tens of thousands of chips powering the unprecedented compute necessary for the newest AI models to function – are controversial.

These hyperscale facilities are now focal points for public resistance to AI companies. Accurate large-scale statistics on their relative performance, which could provide benchmarks for a clean versus a dirty data centre, are seen as a threat to the runaway growth of the industry.

Europe has strong right-to-know laws but the European Commission has gone from insisting that transparency was essential to public trust and regulating the environmental impact of data centres to stonewalling journalists.

Over the last year, we have used all lawful means to obtain the wealth of industry data held by the EU and its member states on the AI build-out. What we found is that the same data centre notorious among their neighbours for their noise pollution, exist behind a wall of silence in Europe.

METHODS

Reporters made Freedom of Information requests in all 27 EU member states, asking for disclosure of the full set of indicators collected under the Energy Efficiency Directive. These data include total energy consumption, amount and type of renewable energy consumption, amount of waste heat reused, average waste heat temperature, number of cooling degree days (a tracker for quantifying how much energy is needed to cool a building) and cooling system setpoints, along with types of refrigerants used in the cooling and air conditioning equipment of the data centre computer room floor. They also include total water input and potable water input, among other metrics.

We also requested a sample of the full dataset from the European Commission, since it holds all the data and was in the process of building a website to publish some aggregated totals and averages derived from it.

From the outset in October 2025, we faced non-disclosure. Ten countries told us they did not hold the figures relating to their own data centres, implying that they had no oversight of how these buildings impacted their energy efficiency goals and net zero commitments.

A half-dozen more argued for blanket confidentiality to protect commercial interests. We requested reviews, decisions by oversight bodies and court rulings where possible. We also pushed back against the European Commission’s decision not to release the data, arguing that they had not sufficiently considered the public interest. In most of these efforts we were unsuccessful. Across the continent corporate interests seemed to beat the public’s right to know.

With FOI laws and appeals processes largely exhausted, we turned to the Aarhus Convention, a binding international treaty, whose signatories include the EU and all its member states, that safeguards the public’s ability to participate in decisions relating to environmental matters. Participation requires transparency and in the opinion of experts we consulted, right-to-know provision in Aarhus supersede the commercial grounds given for non disclosure.

The resulting submission, the first of its kind we are aware of by an investigative newsroom, is now before the Aarhus Compliance Committee, a body that meets quarterly. You can find an executive summary and the full submission on our Methodology page.

STORYLINES

In France, the oversight body for information requests, the Commission d’Accès aux Documents Administratifs, ruled that the environment ministry needed to answer our request. The ministry honoured the letter of this ruling – by releasing a document with each column from the database jumbled in a random order, so that we could not derive anything useful from it. Our French partners, Mediapart, report that even a parliamentary committee examining the tech industry found itself stymied: “As long as nothing is made public, companies feel they can get away with anything,” the committee’s chairperson told us.

In Italy, Il Manifesto found that requests for new energy grid connections already exceed the total installed power in the country. In Greece, Solomon spoke to local residents who felt sidelined by new developments. “We are all being kept in the dark,” an MP said. In Spain, El Confidencial exposed the scale of Amazon’s macro-campus in the region of Aragón, the company’s biggest outside the United States.

In the Netherlands, the partial response that we did receive was potentially more disturbing for the gap it revealed. The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) which collects information for the EU on data centres, lists only 104 facilities in the filings it disclosed. According to the Dutch data center association (DDA), at the end of 2025 there were 186 commercial data centers with a capacity of 500 kilowatts or higher – the threshold for reporting under EU rules. So the RVO has no knowledge of almost half. According to the director of the DDA, Stijn Grove, the RVO can simply call them if they want to get a complete overview of the commercial data centers.

As well as fighting for the public’s right to know in the corridors of Brussels, we wanted to know what industry leaders thought about the trust problems they were encountering from the public as they scaled up their build-out. So we sent a reporter to the largest European industry conference, DataCloud in Cannes, to get a sense of what insider conversations were. What we heard was a roomful of industry leaders laughing as a company executive from QTS data centers described concerned members of the public as “cave people” – “Citizens Against Virtually Everything”. In a response to this investigation a QTS spokesperson explained that the company fully recognizes “questions around energy use and emissions, which are consistently addressed through transparent engagement and technical assessment.” The executive’s comment “referred to opposition towards all development in general. It was categorically not a dismissal of legitimate community debate about data centres.”

The post Data Centre Silence appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Amid its corporate offerings, TBI operates a Global Network for Change, a suite of paid-for services including “networking” at “selected policy moments such as UK Conference programming.”

Internal documents seen by Lighthouse Reports and UK investigative team, Democracy for Sale, show that corporate members include BP, Uber, AstraZeneca, Microsoft, Octopus Energy, Amazon, crypto outfit Coinbase, and Bridgepoint, an investment company chaired by former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn. Associate membership costs $25,000 a year, and higher tiers cost more.

TBI has never disclosed who the members are, what they pay or what they get in return.

This year TBI is hosting 21 events at the governing Labour Party’s annual conference, more than other think tank counterparts such as IPPR, Demos and ThinkLabour. Fourteen ministers are due to speak, including home secretary Shabana Mahmood and chief secretary to the treasury Emma Reynolds. Ahead of Sunday’s conference opening, TBI’s senior director of policy Ryan Wain celebrated having “more serving cabinet ministers than we’ve ever hosted,” and described the institute’s venue as a place where “people with power, meet people with ideas.”

A previous Lighthouse investigation, Blair and the Billionaire revealed the full extent of Larry Ellison’s support for and involvement in TBI. Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then. The scale of funding took the TBI from a headcount of 200 to approaching 1,000. It has subsequently downsized significantly, with these cuts attributed by some staff to the need to reduce dependence on Ellison.

METHODS

This investigation saw and analysed internal TBI documents, including pitch decks used to recruit corporate members, which set out membership tiers, fees and benefits. We compared the list of network members against this year’s published conference programmes to find where paying members were appearing next to ministers who oversee their industries.

We interviewed former TBI staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as well as anti-corruption experts and a member of the Ethics and Integrity Commission. We sent TBI a detailed list of questions.

STORYLINES

Dr Sue Hawley, the executive director of the UK-based Spotlight on Corruption said the scheme “looks and smells like a cash for access scheme with TBI able to trade on its unparalleled access and influence with those in government to facilitate secretive corporate lobbying.

She added that “there must be real questions here as to whether TBI is bending the rules around consultant lobbying.”

Several network members are set to share TBI stages with the ministers who regulate them. ServiceNow’s president will introduce a conversation with defence secretary Wes Streeting. Uber’s UK policy director will discuss self-driving cars alongside roads minister Justin Madders. An executive from investment firm General Catalyst, an investor in the prediction market app Polymarket, will join chief secretary to the treasury Emma Reynolds to talk about “unleashing the animal spirits in Britain’s economy.” TBI labels these events as “supported” by the companies but does not mention that they are network members.

TBI network members also include Netafim, an Israeli drip irrigation company accused by the UN of “perfecting age-old techniques of colonial exploitation” in Palestine. The company “has enabled intensive exploitation of water and land in the West Bank…depleting Palestinian natural resources” according to a report by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine.

Former TBI staff raised concerns from inside the institute. One employee, who has since left, said they were warned to be “really careful not to make it seem as if they [GNC members] are paying money for access,” and described that warning as “like an admission of guilt.” Another accused TBI of “trying to peddle influence for wealthy donors in a knowingly and intentionally opaque way.”

The documents also appear to show TBI selling its policy proximity. A pitch aimed at tech companies highlighted its “track record of shaping AI conversations” and its links to the UK AI Opportunities Action Plan, where a TBI staff member was seconded for almost a year. Coinbase gave feedback on early drafts of a TBI policy paper on blockchain.

In July, the Ethics and Integrity Commission called for informal meetings at party conferences to be disclosed. Commissioner Ian Blackford said TBI was “finding ways to grant access for corporates to ministers.”
In response to this investigation, TBI said it “does not engage in any lobbying on behalf of GNC members,” that it has a “rigorous independence policy” and that its conference events are comparable to those of other think tanks. It declined to say how much money the network has generated.

“In operating the Global Network for Change (GNC), TBI is no different to any other organisation that has sponsorship for events to cover their costs. TBI is an impartial and nonpartisan not-for-profit organisation, which presents its own views and does not engage in any lobbying on behalf of GNC members or others, nor are we asked to by them.

“The GNC membership scheme complies with all rules and guidance. The TBI events around party conferences are comparable to many other think tanks and dozens of private and public sector organisations will be attending fringe events at conference to participate in policy discussions.

The post Smells Like Cash For Access appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

A visual investigation by Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times using satellite imagery analysis, open-source data and verified footage found systematic destruction across Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, including tens of thousands of homes, schools, farmland and forests.

The analysis shows that much of the damage occurred after Israeli forces established control over emptied villages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas uninhabitable, destroying systems needed for civilian life, from water and energy infrastructure to medical care, a tactic rights groups and legal experts say appears designed to prevent residents’ return.

“We see nothing but destruction, the colour of ash,” says Fadia Bazzi, who is from Bint Jbeil, one of the towns bordering the de-facto border between Lebanon and Israel, that has been reduced to rubble and emptied of its 30 thousand residents.

Most of the destruction documented by Lighthouse and the FT came after an initial ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon on April 16.

Since October 7 2023, Israel has seized about 1,000 sq km from neighbouring Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, relocating populations and creating wastelands within these so-called buffer zones.

Lebanese public research institute the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) estimates that almost 85,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed in the south — likely an undercount as at least 20 to 30 per cent of buildings have yet to be assessed amid ongoing Israeli attacks.

“It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at rights group Amnesty International. “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”

Destruction of towns and villages

Satellite analysis across Khiam, Taybeh, Bint Jbeil and Haddatha found clearance beyond isolated buildings and town centres, encompassing almost entire municipalities. In some areas, the damage radiated outwards over time.

We found evidence of controlled detonations and demolitions by Israeli forces and civilian contractors in dozens of border communities.

In Lebanon, the wreckage extends beyond combat damage or sites Israel claims are Hizbollah infrastructure to the broad clearance of villages under Israel’s effective control.

On a trip to one stretch of the occupied area in late April, the FT saw entire villages with barely a building left standing: historic markets, squares and winding streets reduced to a sea of concrete. The sound of blasts, apparently from building demolitions, continued through the day.

The Israeli campaign builds on methods used during a previous war with Hizbollah in 2024, when Israeli forces carried out air strikes and controlled demolitions despite a ceasefire that nominally brought the conflict to an end.

Destruction of water infrastructure

According to figures from the local authorities and the CNRS, at least 2,500km of the infrastructure used to collect, store and carry water to homes and businesses, from pipelines to boreholes, has been destroyed.

“Water is the most important element for life to return to south Lebanon,” said Sonia Ben Salem of Action Against Hunger, which has verified damage done to hundreds of sites via satellite. “Without it, we cannot see a massive return to those areas.”

Environmental destruction

The country’s ancient olive groves have been worst affected, Lebanese officials say. They have long sustained both identity and economy in southern Lebanon, which produces about 40 per cent of the nationwide harvest. Tens of thousands of trees need replanting.

Lebanon’s environment ministry and rights groups have documented Israel’s widespread use of white phosphorus — an incendiary chemical that triggers fires and can leave contamination in soil and water — in both populated and agricultural areas. Israel says it uses white phosphorus lawfully to clear brush and create smokescreens, but use over populated areas can violate international law.

The ministry has also accused Israel of spraying herbicides over 2,000 hectares of agricultural land throughout the past three years of conflict, based on soil samples gathered in border areas — acts it says amount to “ecocide”.

Attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel

The destruction has also hollowed out medical care, with dozens of healthcare facilities damaged or destroyed by air strikes. Lebanon’s health ministry says 135 healthcare professionals have been killed on duty, many in so-called double-, triple- and quadruple-tap strikes.

These target the same location minutes or hours after the first attack, often hitting medics and civilians who arrive to help victims. Insecurity Insight, which tracks attacks on healthcare globally, documented more than 30 such incidents.

Lighthouse verified and geolocated footage of 10 of them.

Methods

Remote sensing

To map the destruction of villages across South Lebanon, we analysed Sentinel-2 satellite imagery captured between March and July 2026, covering the occupied area that the Israeli military designated as its “security zone.” We built an automated detection pipeline in Google Earth Engine that tracks the loss of colour in false-colour composites: intact villages, with their mix of vegetation, rooftops and varied surfaces, appear in distinctive magenta, or mixed grey/pink tones, while cleared, demolished or rubbled ground collapses toward uniform grey and white. By compiling the imagery into fortnightly composites and comparing each one against the period before it, we could produce indicators not only where buildings had been destroyed but when (to within roughly two weeks).

We checked these results town by town, stepping through the satellite imagery in chronological order to confirm the pattern and timing of destruction. We then grouped the damaged buildings by when they were first hit, relative to the 16 April 2026 ceasefire, allowing us to compare the scale of destruction before and after the ceasefire event. Trends showed the largest share of destruction came after the ceasefire: 65 per cent of destruction indicators occurred after 16 April, compared with around a third before it.

Cataloguing Strike Patterns

We examined a database from Insecurity Insights of documented incidents where health care workers were targeted. We isolated the ones where it appeared that health care workers were targeted in sequential airstrikes while doing their work.

We tried to collect as much visual evidence and information as possible, the evidence category for the sequential airstrikes that we inspected include: Media reports, posts showing people mourning the killed rescuers, visual evidence of the airstrike captured by locals living nearby or by the rescuers themselves. Whenever possible we geolocated the airstrike and used before and after Sentinel 2 imagery to confirm the damage in the geolocated area.

For the incident that we declared as verified, the criteria for the verification are:

1. Visuals showing an affected ambulance on the targeting site
2. Posts showing the names of the killed rescuers

The post Making Southern Lebanon Unlivable appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Overwhelmingly, cobalt ores mined in Katanga are sent to China to be refined into the pure metal. Historically, there is also a third mineral in Katanga’s rich deposits – uranium. Much of the uranium acquired for the Manhattan Project came from the region’s Shinkolobwe mine. But exports of uranium from the DRC are supposed to be banned.

Lighthouse’s reporting on hidden exports of uranium from the DRC began with a leaked memo from the International Atomic Energy Agency that we obtained in 2024. The previously unreported document was dated 2009 and cited credible information indicating that uranium was present in “significant quantities” in most cobalt ore from Katanga. The uranium was “actually exported as a by-product of cobalt,” the memo stated.

Since that document was written, cobalt mining in the DRC has scaled up dramatically and those mines have overwhelmingly sent their ore to China. By 2023, China was responsible for refining 80 percent of the global supply of cobalt, with the vast majority of the ore coming from mines operated by Chinese companies in the DRC. According to recent estimates 95 percent of Congolese cobalt goes to China.

In September 2024, Lighthouse teamed up with Sébastien Philippe, now assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then a senior researcher at Princeton University’s Program on Science & Global Security, to ask how much uranium could be making its way to China in exports of cobalt ore.

If the situation described in the IAEA memo had continued unabated, uranium extracted from Congolese cobalt ore could be strategically significant to China. In the past decade, China’s nuclear weapons stockpile has doubled to around 600 warheads and is expected to reach 1,000 warheads by 2030, according to estimates from the Pentagon. China’s known imports and domestic production of uranium do not come close to accounting for the scale of this expansion. China’s Ministry of Defence has previously objected to US reports on the size of its nuclear arsenal and accusation of a non-transparent buildup.

METHODS

Confirming the previously unreported supply of Congolese uranium required a combination of rigorous scientific assessment of the potential supply chain and traditional reporting from human sources as well as any leaked documents they could provide.

Philippe was joined by Princeton postdoctoral researcher Ryan Manzuk, a geologist whose interests span from geochemical modelling to advanced remote sensing. He set upper and lower bounds for the amount of uranium exported from each mine from 2000 to 2024, based on prior analyses of the concentration of uranium ores at sites across the Katanga region, extrapolated to each mine by geochemical modelling. That involved a trip to Europe in January 2025 to gather data and consult with other experts — most importantly at the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium, which holds a large collection of geological samples collected from Katanga.

As evidence of the scale of uranium distribution across the cobalt deposits became clearer, we focused on understanding whether the uranium was being separated from the cobalt ore at mines in the DRC. Our partners at the Financial Times provided input on ore production figures for each mine and scoured trade databases for data on the supply of chemicals — notably phosphoric acid — that would be required to extract uranium from cobalt ores before export.

The data on chemicals supplied to mines in the DRC aligned well with insights gained from source reporting with industry insiders and leaked documents on processes at key Katanga mines. This allowed Manzuk to account for the separation of uranium before export of cobalt ore at some mines, refining the model’s estimates for total unreported uranium exports.

While the chemicals trade data indicated that separation of uranium in the DRC was not happening at the required scale, Manzuk explored the cutting edge of remote sensing to examine the chemical composition of tailings piles and ponds—the waste materials and slurry left behind after initial processing of mined ore. We hoped this would reveal the presence or absence of attempts to separate uranium from cobalt ore at the mines.

In January 2025, we approached the company Planet Labs about data from its Tanager satellite, which delivers “hyperspectral” imagery with images containing 424 separate bands at different wavelengths. In theory, it should be possible to obtain from these images detailed spectra quantifying the presence of particular minerals in a mine tailings pile or ponds.

Planet provided images for several of our target mine sites but we were frustrated in this effort, for two main reasons.

First, we were interested in spectra reflecting from the Earth’s surface, while Tanager had so far focused on the upper atmosphere to detect plumes of methane leaking from oil and gas facilities. This means that Planet’s engineers had not yet operationalized methods to correct surface images for the scattering and absorption of light caused by water vapour, aerosols of microscopic particles, and other components of the atmosphere. Second, there was a shortage of reference spectra for uranium-rich minerals such as autunite that we wanted to detect, making any comparisons difficult.

Even without this analysis, the modeling work progressed well. A peer-reviewed paper authored by Manzuk and Philippe, now published in the academic journal Nature Communications, concludes that a range of between 2,000 and 5,000 tonnes of uranium were exported from the DRC to China in shipments of cobalt hydroxide ore between 2000 and 2024. Even on the lower end of the range, that is enough uranium to fuel a gigawatt nuclear reactor for a decade or more. Our reporting does not indicate whether and how this uranium has been used in China.

Despite the scientific case, much of the cobalt mining industry continues to deny that it has a problem with uranium in the DRC. On paper there are strict national and international limits on the safe parts per million (ppm) of uranium present in cobalt exports and measures in place to test for radioactivity. In practice there have been a number of contamination incidents throughout the supply chain.

Interviews with dozens of industry sources including mining executives, traders, apnd metallurgists, revealed the lack of systematic checks on uranium contamination in the cobalt ore. Collaborating with the Financial Times, we obtained trade data indicated that mining companies import phosphoric acid, used to remove uranium from ore, in large quantities only after major incidents where contaminated exports were flagged.

“It’s when you have an issue that you’re monitoring where the uranium is,” said a senior metallurgical engineer who worked in the Katanga region.

Some experts, including Doug Alexander, former head of metallurgy at the Eurasian Resources Group, a company that mines in Katanga, suggested that there were, in effect, two different supply chains: one where efforts were made to contain uranium contamination once it was flagged; and one where lower cobalt quality products with higher impurities, including uranium, were headed to China.

A stream of leaked documents and spreadsheets, coming from Tenke Fungurume Mining (TFM), one of the largest cobalt mines in the DRC, reinforced the conclusions from the scientific modelling. TFM was formerly owned by the US company Freeport-McMoRan, but acquired by the Chinese company CMOC in 2016.

Internal TFM memos and spreadsheets confirmed the production of cobalt samples rich in uranium, with the maximum level reaching 1,100 ppm in December 2016, or 15 times the level that should be allowed for export.

The documents described experiments in the removal of uranium from cobalt ore at TFM towards the end of its period under US ownership. But according to three informed sources, comprehensive removal was not implemented. Indeed, a second batch of leaked TFM documents we obtained confirmed that significant quantities of uranium were present in batches of cobalt ore from TFM as late as June 2021.

Other key documents came from STUK, the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, describing the separation of uranium from shipments of cobalt at Freeport-McMoRan’s Kokkola refinery in Finland. One 2014 permit gave the refinery a 10-year authorisation to produce and hold uranium separated from cobalt ore as long as the quantity remained below 10,000 kilograms per calendar year — the level at which it would have become subject to safeguarding protocols for nuclear materials overseen by the IAEA.

Faced with the evidence gathered in the investigation, officials in the DRC told journalists we worked with at the Financial Times that uranium contamination of cobalt ores was a real concern, both from the perspective of the health of miners and those living near the mines, and for the safeguarding of nuclear materials.

Steve Muanza, the head of the DRC’s nuclear energy agency, said it is “technically possible” and even “likely” that Chinese companies are extracting uranium from cobalt ore exported from the DRC. He said his agency had requested funding to install radiation monitors for trucks leaving the DRC for Zambia along the DRC’s National Highway One.

In a nation riven by war and with a long and porous border, however, shutting down covert exports of uranium will be extremely challenging. Assessing the full extent of risks to the communities living near mine sites will also need urgent attention.

Responses from relevant companies:

Cmoc denied any uranium contamination of its cobalt ore. “There are no instances of uranium levels exceeding applicable limits,” the company said. Cmoc added that all the Tenke cobalt hydroxide “complies with local regulatory requirements” and that it is “not aware of the source of the historical data” used in this investigation.

Freeport Mc Moran, the previous owner of Tenke operation, declined to comment.

Umicore, the current owner of the Kokkola refinery in Finland, said in a statement that “uranium is treated as an incidental impurity, not as a co-product or value stream”, and that the company follows “strict regulatory and contractual acceptance criteria”. Both Orano and Glencore did not comment on our findings, when ERG said that the company follows “all applicable regulatory requirements” regarding uranium at its Metalkol mine.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, China’s Ministry of Defense objected to American reports on the size of its nuclear arsenal, and recently accused the US of “peddling the narrative of China’s massive and non-transparent nuclear build-up”.

An IAEA expert said the agency believed that the DRC was meeting its safeguarding obligations and that most of the time, the uranium, contained in cobalt “ends up in the tailings” they added, referring to mining waste.

Read full response from relevant companies here.

The post Congo’s Hidden Uranium Exports appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Legislators and government officials have worked to rein in this public health crisis by enacting laws that require food companies to be transparent about their ingredients and limit the advertising of unhealthy foods.

In public, the world’s biggest and richest food companies such as Coca Cola, PepsiCola, and Mondelez say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court to delay, dilute, and derail public health laws, which the companies say violate their rights.

This cross border collaboration with health academics and an international media coalition shed light on how transnational corporations use legal tactics – lawsuits and legal threats – to stymie public health efforts in six countries where such tactics are most apparent: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, India, Britain, and the United States.

We found:

– 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods.

– The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, representing a significant burden on the governments defending their health policies.

– Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than 1 in 3 came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez

Their actions are not only prolonging the public health crisis but also cost countries billions of dollars in both legal and healthcare costs. In addition, they have a chilling effect on policymakers that wish to better their citizens’ health but do not have the resources to engage in drawn-out legal fights with food companies.

METHODS

We constructed a dataset of challenges to laws aiming to improve population nutrition between 2010 and 2025 in these countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, U.S., UK, and India.

With the exception of India, cases were included when a regulation that sought to improve public health through better nutrition was being challenged (i.e. validity, scope, or implementation). We made an exception for cases in India where influencers were being sued, as they were taking over the role of the government in making the nutritional value of products more transparent.

We only included cases that were verifiable through official legal databases, court records, or reputable secondary sources.

We excluded cases solely concerning non-manufacturers such as fresh produce or when companies were appealing fines and other judgments unrelated to public health policies.

This research was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Caldas (Colombia); Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center (United States); the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil); and the University of Sydney (Australia). They found more lawsuits through a systematic legal search in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico.

An upcoming academic paper will be published alongside the media articles, looking at the dataset from a scientific perspective.

This dataset built on the work and insight of El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico), the FULL database developed by the Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments at the O’Neill Institute and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, CAJAR (Colombia), and ACT (Brazil).

STORYLINES

– Mexico

More than a third of Mexican schoolchildren and 41% of adolescents were overweight according to a 2022 national survey.

This is the country where we found the most lawsuits (193 out of 239), many of them were against the country’s labelling regulation. Quinto Elemento Lab reveals the companies’ arguments: that the laws were a violation of their constitutional rights and that the measures “demonized” their products or violated consumer rights. For example, a local Pepsi bottler argued that in certain rural areas of Mexico, it was safer to drink soft drinks than the available water. In court, the judges rejected many of the legal arguments that the companies presented.

– Brazil

According to the UN, in 2022-2024, more than 1 in 4 adults in Brazil were living with obesity while nearly 1 in 9 children were overweight.

Some of the 17 lawsuits in Brazil have been dragging on for close to a couple of decades, with no predicted conclusion in sight, according to Agência Pública and O Joio e O Trigo.

In all but one, the plaintiffs were industry associations, which experts told us is a way for companies to keep their valuable brand names away from litigation that may harm their image. Some of the world’s largest food companies are members of these Brazilian associations, including Coca-Cola, Ferrero, Kellogg’s local brand, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, and PepsiCo. 11 of the lawsuits were against the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency, ANVISA, which has been hamstrung as a result. The plaintiffs disputed a regulation that required the advertising of food and beverages with low nutritional value to display more information.

– Colombia

More than half of Colombia’s population is overweight, and treating the diseases caused by unhealthy foods cost the country an estimated 1.3 billion euros in 2021.

We found 18 lawsuits in Colombia, mostly targeting taxes on unhealthy products and front-of-package labelling. Nearly all of them were constitutional challenges brought about by individual citizens as enabled in the country’s constitution. However, Cuestión Pública finds that many of the plaintiffs were lawyers who had done work for food companies. The submissions also used many of the same arguments wielded by the companies. In 2022, while the creation of the health tax was being debated, sugary beverage and ultra-processed food companies donated 5.85 million Euros to political parties, accounting for 40% of all donations to political parties that year.

– U.S.

Two in three adults in the U.S. are overweight and a quarter of adolescents are living with obesity, according to the CDC. The Make America Healthy Again movement supported Trump’s presidency bid.

The American Beverage Association sued to overturn a soda tax in Santa Cruz, which it has so far failed to do. Santa Cruz Local uncovers details of the group’s earlier success squashing a soda tax effort in Watsonville, a neighbouring city. The Santa Cruz lawsuit has far-reaching consequences: the recent victory for the city could unlock the ability for charter cities across California to tax sugary beverages. We found that the soda industry recruited and leveraged the credibility of prominent Black and Latino leaders to amplify opposition against public health taxes within their own communities. We have also identified five other lawsuits. The ABA was involved in four of them.

– Europe

In Europe, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, or cancer are responsible for 80% of the disease burden, according to the European Commission.

Follow The Money discovers that European countries have struggled to pass taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, as they come under industry pressure. Unlike in Latin America, European governments frequently face legal threats before legislation is adopted. Industry groups repeatedly invoke EU state-aid, competition and internal-market rules, creating uncertainty that can delay or derail policies without a single lawsuit being filed. Plans for a joint European sugar tax have also been weakened.

L’Espresso and Il Fatto Alimentare explain the role Italian confectionary giant Ferrero plays around the world in stimying public health laws, and how the family-owned company’s influence both domestically and internationally is connected to the country’s agroindustry rather than its famous cuisine.

– England

As of 2024, 66% of adults and 26% of children in England were either overweight or living with obesity, according to the National Health Service.

In 2021, a year before Kellogg’s sued – and lost – against the country’s nutrient profiling model contained in the Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021, it sent a pre-action letter to the Department of Health and Social Care, claiming the health rating of its cereals should be measured with the milk it is usually consumed with.

A mere two weeks before the ruling against Kellogg’s, Ferrero and Eat Natural, a subsidiary of Ferrero, also sent pre-action letters over the same regulations.

– India

Nearly one in three Indian women and more than one in four men are overweight or obese. One in five people have high blood sugar levels.

The Wire traces the long journey of India’s front of pack labeling regulation, which the Indian food regulator, the FSSAI, has been developing since 2014. Over that time, it has done numerous consultations, studies but it has stalled regulating, blaming a lack of consensus between the industry and civil society. Research by ATNi commissioned by Lighthouse Reports showed that India’s proposed labelling system is actually consistently more lenient compared to similar systems in Australia and France.

Meanwhile, influential instagram celebrities have made videos comparing the nutrition of various products such as instant noodles, baby food, and others. They’ve been sued by the companies whose ingredient labels they were analysing.

The post Big Food vs. The People appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Their pleas for intervention to preserve traditional French farming may have come far too late.

An investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Le Monde reveals that the forces currently forcing many small-scale French cattle producers out of business were set in motion decades ago, when competition authorities allowed a single industrial group to swallow up its rivals.

Our investigation reveals how competition authorities put French farmers at the mercy of family-owned industrial giant Groupe Bigard, which now slaughters more than one in every three cattle in France.

Thanks to those mergers, one in every five French farmers now faces slaughtering options within a reasonable driving distance that are so dominated by Groupe Bigard that they would generally be considered unlawful under French competition law.

Even if forced to drive further to slaughter cattle, which stresses animals and leads to reduced profits, more than half French farmers face a market which would raise competition concerns.

This loose regulation has paved the way for industrialized agriculture to take over the French cattle industry: farmers were forced to accept huge financial losses, subsidised by the tax payer, whilst Groupe Bigard raised its margins – and consumers paid more for their meat.

Antitrust scholar Professor Peter Carstensen describes such conditions as a “serious structural problem which is going to harm producers for sure”.

According to Austin Frerick, our findings show that the mergers were “devastating for French farmers” . He said they provided “a textbook example of what happens when competition authorities fail to do their jobs. They allowed the market structure to consolidate, squeezing farmers and gouging customers.

“It’s not just the farmers who are losing out here. The Competition Authority’s failure has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from French taxpayers to a single corporation, Bigard, through subsidies required to cover these losses.”

METHODS

This investigation has endeavoured to understand how a handful of big French slaughterhouse firms, led by Bigard, ended up with so much power, which farms across France are most impacted, whether the concentration of market control is legal — and how this growing power may have harmed farmers.

To measure the changes to market concentration we linked several datasets obtained from the ministry of agriculture by FOI:

• The location, capacity and owners of the slaughterhouses
• The distribution of cattle farms across France, by administrative district
• How Bigard’s slaughterhouses had changed hands over the past 30 years

For each administrative district, we calculated key concentration metrics within three driving time ranges: 1h30, 2h30 and 4h, corresponding to roughly the 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of travel times for beef cattle in France.

We then evaluated those metrics against thresholds used in competition law in different countries, and showed how those metrics changed due to mergers greenlit by the Competition Authority.

As far as measuring harms to farmers, we sought advice from competition experts. They told us that a hallmark of a company or group of companies being able to exert market power is an increase to the “price spread” – the difference between what supermarkets are charged for products and what farmers are paid. Where that metric increases, it suggests that slaughterhouses are squeezing farmers and gauging consumers.

We were able to obtain figures from France’s Price Observatory which confirmed exactly this trend between 2013 and 2019 – a period when cattle farmers’ losses were reaching their nadir. This analysis was not available for the earlier, pre-merger period, so we used a more approximate measure: the difference between consumer prices and the farmgate prices. They confirmed the same trend: whilst farmer prices were falling, consumer prices were rising.

We were then able to measure how this trend had been active at the corporate level: we analysed Groupe Bigard’s financial statements to measure how the company had benefited from its growing power: not only did the company’s profits increase five-fold between 2004 and 2023, but the main operating company’s profit margins more than doubled; and paid out €300 million in dividends over the last decade.

STORYLINES

Thierry Thil has been farming cattle, pigs, goats and free-range poultry, in the Moselle region, close to France’s borders with Germany and Luxembourg, for thirty years.

He works 70 hour weeks for €900 a month.

But as Bigard’s power has grown, Thierry’s mixed farm has become harder to maintain. As the industry giant acquired more slaughterhouses in the region, it closed some sites and moved others towards slaughtering just one single species – which supports company profits but not producers who maintain mixed farms.

As a result of Bigard’s changes, Thierry now has to take his animals across the border to Luxembourg, which is costly and heavy in administration. It also leaves him vulnerable: as happened last autumn when an outbreak of lumpy skin disease

“It’s stressful taking an animal to the abattoir. You’ve no idea how stressful it is,” says Thierry.

Farmers, seeking an alternative to Bigard, planned to open an abattoir at Thionville, supported by Thil along with around 190 other farmers in the region. It would have been a lifeline. But just as they were supposed to sign the contract, the bank pulled out.

Martine Cordel, then “a very young elected representative on the Chamber of Agriculture” Thierry’s neighbour Martine Cordel was witness to the beginnings of Bigard’s takeover of what were previously farmer-owned abattoirs.

The slaughter industry “put pressure on the [farming] trade to sell its 50 per cent stake in the abattoir, threatening to leave Metz otherwise”, she recounts.

Martine maintains a short supply chain: the family farm sells its produce through short supply chains at L’Ayotte, the first farmers’ market to open in Moselle. She also backed the abattoir at Thionville, believing it would provide farmers like her an essential service. She lost €10,000 when the bank pulled out.

Bigard’s influence extends beyond the slaughterhouses. As Mayor of Autun, Remy Rebeyrotte, championed the re-establishment of the town’s abattoir. It now slaughters cattle from the local area and provides meat for public services and the town’s supermarkets. But Rebeyrotte says he experienced “hostility” about the project from some farmers attached to powerful co-operatives. Some belonged to a cooperative with close links to Bigard. Bernard Joly, former president of the abattoir, is convinced that the fear of Bigard prevented such co-operatives from supporting the abattoir.

Unless the French authority reforms its approach to regulating mergers and supporting sustainable agricultural practices, more and more farmers are going to face the decision about whether to go big or get out.

According to Frerick, the situation would only get worse unless authorities intervene. He said the French Competition Authority should re-evaluate the mergers it approved and implement policy changes to ensure such purchases are not allowed in the future.

According to Anne Witt, a professor of law at the EDHEC Business School, the Competition Authority’s failure to consider the impact on farmers is part of a wider culture in which competition authorities have focused primarily on protecting ‘consumer welfare’ whilst ignoring the broader context of the value chain. “Who cares if a company leaves the market as long as consumer welfare is not affected?”

There is evidence that trends may be shifting.

French competition scholars say the findings reveal issues that go beyond competition policy and merger-control. According to antitrust scholar Professor Walid Chaiehloudj, current competition policy has failed to provide sufficient protections to farmers and regulators should lower the thresholds at which they allow mergers to take place.

But he also suggests more radical reforms: that in order to properly serve the public,competition law should start to actively incorporate higher order objectives like food-sovereignty into its decision making.

The post Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Still, little is known about how the UAE co-opts regional governments to achieve its aims in Sudan.

Lighthouse Reports, Evident and Sudan War Monitor travelled to eastern Libya to reveal how the UAE network works on the ground. Through a combination of open source and on-the-ground reporting, the investigation sheds new light on one of the UAE’s most entrenched operations in their vast network of support to the RSF.

As the international community has failed to intervene in Emirati meddling, the UAE has meanwhile built a sprawling network of complex logistics, military bases, financing, and weapons trafficking routes to prop up the Rapid Support Forces and fuel their war efforts in Sudan.

METHODS

The investigations drew on a long term analysis of activity across TikTok, Facebook and Telegram. We reviewed thousands of posts and built an archive of more than 500 relevant clips showing convoy movements between Libya and Sudan, activity at key desert checkpoints and camps, and developments in the border triangle. We verified and connected this material through geolocation, analysis of uniforms, vehicles and other identifying symbols, and social-network analysis of accounts linked to the RSF, the Libyan National Army, and associated networks.

We complimented these efforts with analysis of high resolution commercial satellite imagery of specific sites. Using a custom processing workflow with publicly available Sentinel-2 data., we tracked changes in vehicle routes across remote stretches of the Sahara, helping us understand how smuggling and asset transfers developed in response to changing conditions on the ground. These findings informed reporting trips and interviews.

We worked with ⁨Conflict Insights Group, a public benefit research firm, that conducted analysis of telephones located at Camp 17. CIG used publicly available adtech data, which is information from cookies that users agree to sell to third party vendors when they visit a website or use a mobile application. The information includes movement data, language settings, and other details that users consent to selling to a third party vendor, which CIG purchased. CIG found evidence of at least two South American mercenaries at the site in the summer of 2025. One device located at Camp 17 was set to Colombian Spanish and visited the site from 11-12 June 2025. Another device was set to Argentinian Spanish, and used a military grade phone on 13 aug 2025.

This investigation received kind support from Maltego and IRBIS OSINT-platform.

STORYLINES

Our reporting, including interviews with LNA officers, RSF defectors, and Sudanese military sources, unveiled four previously unidentified RSF camps in Libya, contrary to claims by the RSF that they do not conduct troop training outside of Sudan and contrary to LNA insiders’ claims that the RSF operations in Libya were largely wound down by late 2025.

In Kufra, we embedded with the Libyan National Army in the border triangle area where we had been tracking RSF training and transit sites via social media analysis and heat maps of tracks from suspected RSF resupply convoys throughout the desert for months.

Keen to show us that they were combatting trafficking and had shut down any alleged flow of weapons into Sudan, Lieutenant Enheish Fattah of the LNA’s Subul Al Salaam brigade flatly denied that the LNA facilitated RSF activities in Libya.

“No, that’s all rumors. People are trying to create conflict between the Libyan and Sudanese armies,” Lieutenant Fattah said when questioned on 2025 clashes between the Sudanese Army and the LNA in the border region, in response to increasing frustration of the Sudanese Army and its backers in Egypt about LNA support for the RSF.

Interviews with eight RSF defectors still living in Libya, revealed the full scale of their operations there, which extend from small-scale training activity and transit points in Benghazi to more robust sites in the desert in the border triangle region. These sites include staging sites to prep weapons and modify vehicles for war, training sites where RSF soldiers say they trained alongside the LNA and UAE-contracted Colombian mercenaries, and convoys of trucks carrying fuel and alleged weapons from Libya back into Sudan.

Defectors told us that they were expected to return to Sudan to train their fellow RSF soldiers based on the training they received in Libya.

One defector who agreed to speak on camera to Evident, revealed the location of a previously unknown training camp located approximately 20 kilometers outside of Benghazi.

He described arriving in Libya and being sent to Benghazi through Kufra. Others, he said, were sent to a military camp in Jufra for training. Of his own time at the camp known to him and others in RSF as Camp 17, he told us “there are many here in Camp 17. They are in charge of cars, supplies, and ammo and oversee delivery of them.”

He said the RSF would bring “around 40 or 50, maybe up to 70 or 80” soldiers at a time to train in Camp 17. They would receive their training from LNA soldiers and Colombian contractors.

“RSF is mainly supported by the Emirates,” he told us, adding “but no one can speak up or ask.”

Libyan authorities failed to meaningfully engage with us on the reality of what is happening inside Libya or on their collaboration with the UAE to support the RSF. We traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to interview a spokesman for the RSF government, Tassis, who denied the claims revealed in our reporting.

While the scale of Sudan’s war is almost impossible to account for due to the lack of humanitarian access and the level of violence across the country, recent estimates put the death toll at nearly 400,000 people. Regional analysts insist that the level of support from the Emirates for the RSF has allowed violence, particularly in the Darfur region, to spiral out of control. We interviewed survivors from Khartoum and Darfur in Kufra and in Benghazi to understand the true impact of Emirati meddling on Sudanese civilians. They arrived in Libya after arduous journeys from Sudan – some traveling through Chad – often harassed by RSF soldiers and human smugglers throughout their journey.

“When we reached Libya, we had nothing left,” Fatima, a mother of four living in Kufra told us. “I have nothing left but my children and my honor.”

The post Inside the secret network fueling Sudan’s war appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

It’s a decision that can have huge consequences: a child wrongly assessed to be over can be put into accommodation for adults, often forced to share bedrooms with adults they don’t know, and they can be liable for detention and forced removal.

Last July, the UK Home Office announced that after several years exploring which scientific and technological methods would best assist the age assessment process, it had concluded that the “most cost-effective” option would be to use AI. Last month, the Home Office signed a contract with Cognitec Systems, a Dresden-based facial recognition company, to supply the age estimation algorithm. It announced that the technology would be used by immigration officers at the border from next year to “crack down on fake claims by small boat arrivals posing as children.”

As the UK begins to trial this technology, and as anti-migrant politics become increasingly mainstream across Europe, other countries will be watching to assess if they, too, can use AI to deter migration. It has already been mooted: an EU Parliament briefing published last July floated the possibility of using AI to assess the age of asylum applicants.

This investigation and audit, based on exclusive leaked material from the UK Home Office and technical assessments from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), raises critical questions about whether this type of tech is fit for this new, high-risk purpose.

METHODS

We conducted our own analysis of benchmark data for Cognitec’s system published in April 2026 by NIST, which carries out regular assessments of facial age estimation vendors. Our methodology for analysing the data in the internal Home Office evaluation and the NIST report can be found here.

We were informed by sources of the existence of an internal Home Office evaluation of facial age estimation technology for use on asylum seekers. We requested a copy of the document under Freedom of Information law, but the Home Office refused to disclose it on the basis that it was in the public interest for the department to have a “safe space” to debate the issue “away from external interference and distraction.” We obtained a leaked copy of the report, which tests the technology from seven competing companies.

The UK’s interior ministry disbanded an advisory committee on age assessment days before the AI plans were announced. Two scientists who sat on that committee told us that they had not been consulted about the plans and had grave doubts over the technology. One said he thought the committee had been dissolved in order to prevent them being consulted.

STORYLINES

Our analysis of NIST data revealed that Cognitec’s system misclassified more than two thirds of 16-year-olds as adults when fed photos from the US border, and performed significantly worse on people from African countries. Across all four NIST datasets, the system predicts more than half of 16-year-old West Africans as being over 18, compared with less than a quarter of 16-year-old Eastern Europeans.

The internal Home Office report found that the “best performing” vendor’s FAE technology tended to overestimate the age of teenagers, with 17-year-olds on average predicted to be 18 or over. It also found that it performed worse on female faces.

Crucially, the system described in the report also shows significant bias against Sub-Saharan Africans, with the error rate for this cohort being double that of other groups. This is particularly significant because the top nationalities arriving to the UK on small boats are now Sub-Saharan, and this group also formed the largest group of asylum seekers who had age assessments raised in 2025, according to the Home Office’s own data.

The Home Office report shows that error rates for Sub-Saharan girls are particularly high, at 4.6 years on average, meaning a 14-year-old girl from Sub-Saharan Africa could be predicted to be an adult.

It also notes that many asylum seekers may undergo stress-induced ageing from trauma or travel and that this appears to impact FAE accuracy, although it was unable to systematically test this.

Professor Tim Cole, a former member of the AESAC, the Home Office age assessment committee that was stood down just before ministers announced the use of the age estimation software, said he believed the Home Office dismissed the committee because they didn’t want members to scrutinise the move to AI.

“I suspect [it was] for the reason that we would have been quite damning about it,” said Cole, emeritus professor of medical statistics at UCL’s Institute of Child Health.

The Home Office claimed FAE technology was an “assistive tool” that “does not overrule human judgement”.

Anna Bacciarelli, senior researcher on technology, rights and investigations at Human Rights Watch, said this was of little reassurance given the “well-established phenomenon” of automation bias, whereby people – in this case immigration officers – are prone to trusting a computer’s decision over their own judgment.

She added that the move by the UK set a “dangerous precedent”, saying: “This really is a world-first. If it goes ahead in the UK, other countries at entry points across Europe are likely to follow suit and use of this inaccurate and invasive technology could become widespread.”

The post Asylum by Algorithm appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.