Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Tropical forests hold up to $714 billion in potential drug value, with the Amazon accounting for $215 billion of the total, according to a new analysis.Ongoing deforestation threatens to permanently erase undiscovered plant species and lifesaving medicinal compounds before scientists can study them.While pricing nature highlights its economic value to counter clearing, experts warn it risks repeating past extraction and resource grabs unless paired with strict benefit-sharing and local scientific leadership.See All Key Ideas An analysis by the London-based group Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA) supports a claim conservationists have made for decades: Tropical forests are worth more standing…

The Nobel peace prize is not a contest determined by fame. Yet the betting markets consistently gravitate towards the biggest names in global politics – among them this year, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.That misses what the prize is for. The real work of building peace is often done far from the headlines: by courts that uphold international law, journalists who document atrocities, and humanitarian organisations that protect communities. With the 2026 prize due to be announced on 9 October, the Nobel committee has an opportunity to remind the world that peace is built through institutions and cooperation, not just…

Streeting thanks farmer who alerted police to suspicious activity but says she only has a ‘partial picture’The defence secretary, Wes Streeting, has spoken to the media from the Labour party conference this morning about the incident near RAF Fairford.Streeting said he was grateful for the vigilance of the members of the public who are thought to have helped alert the emergency services to the suspected terror plot.He renewed his thanks in particular to the local farmer who rang the police after she reportedly saw “a large group of hooded and masked men” near RAF Fairford early on Sunday morning.Speaking to…

Avanti West Coast will be renationalised in spring, as Andy Burnham declares “enough is enough” for passengers who have put up with a rail service “that has failed them time and time again”.The rail operator, which is one of the worst in the country for train delays and cancellations, will come under public ownership from March when its contract ends.The Labour government has been nationalising passenger rail services across the country as their contracts have expired, as the public body Great British Railways prepares to take full oversight in 2027.Avanti had among the highest proportion of train cancellations in Britain,…

John Healey will promise “a new age of industrialisation” for the UK, when he delivers his first Labour conference speech as chancellor on Monday.Healey will tell delegates “our coal mines are not coming back”, but that Labour will remake Britain’s industrial past “for the modern age” by backing advanced manufacturing.He will also announce plans to boost Britain’s shipbuilding industry, with new orders for Royal Navy floating docks and a maritime research vessel.With just a month to go until his first Budget, the chancellor is under pressure to cut spending or raise taxes to tackle the ballooning cost of government borrowing.But…

Fireworks AI has released Ember-1, a specialized model from Fireworks Research built by post-training Moonshot AI’s open-weight Kimi K3. Ember-1 learns to produce shorter reasoning traces while keeping task accuracy. This is different from lowering the reasoning effort setting at inference time. According to the Fireworks release post, Ember-1 delivers Kimi K3’s quality with about 40% fewer tokens. Is it deployable? Yes, but only through the Fireworks serverless API as a Research Preview. Fireworks has not released Ember-1’s weights, training code, or exact training algorithms, so self-hosting is not an option today. The Problem: Reasoning Models Think Too Much Fireworks…

A former U.S. Army soldier has been sentenced to 70 months in prison for hacking and extorting at least 10 U.S. technology and telecommunications companies between April 2023 and December 2024. 21-year-old Cameron John Wagenius (also known online as ‘kiberphant0m’ and ‘cyb3rph4nt0m’ ) was arrested in Texas in December 2024. He pleaded guilty in February 2025 to hacking AT&T and Verizon after being charged on two counts of unlawfully transferring confidential phone records, and in July 2025 to multiple counts of aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and extortion related to computer fraud. According to court documents, while on active…

Victorian police have apologised to the family of a man who died after being held for five hours in a police cell without medical treatment for a significant head injury.John Makai, a 58-year-old father of 10, died in 2023 from serious head trauma that went untreated despite him being unresponsive in a Broadmeadows cell, the Victorian coroner’s court heard on Monday.On the first day of an inquest into his death, footage was shown in court of Makai being dragged from a divisional van into police cells, and repeatedly failing to respond when officers checked on him through the cell door.The…

Good morning. John Healey, the chancellor, is the main speaker at the Labour conference. He was a surprise appointment to replace Rachel Reeves, he is unveiling his budget four weeks on Wednesday, and some of the pre-briefing suggests when the budget does come, it will be a relatively low-key affair, with a lot of decisions postponed until the spending review next year. And so we are definitely not expecting huge announcements at lunchtime today.But there will be some striking language. Healey is going to promise a “new age of industrialisation”.According to the overnight briefing from Labour, he will explain that…

Leveraged funds moved 1,599 contracts further net short in standard CME Bitcoin futures during the week to Sept. 22, reversing the prior week’s easing, while asset managers added 411 contracts to their net long. The CFTC snapshot captures two major trader groups moving in opposite directions as Bitcoin enters a new week. At five BTC per standard contract, the funds’ change amounts to 7,995 BTC-equivalent of net futures exposure.The funds held 4,745 long contracts and 12,698 short contracts on Tuesday, leaving a net short of 7,953, compared with 6,354 a week earlier. Their longs fell by 800 contracts and their…