Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

U.S. President Donald Trump has cribbed many things from former President Richard Nixon, among them tariffs; price controls; and now, apparently, government interference in energy markets. Soaring energy bills are a concern for any sitting president (see the early 1970s or the mid-2020s), and energy prices are skyrocketing. Gasoline in the United States now averages $4.47 a gallon, but more to the point, diesel is now $6.52 a gallon on average, up from $3.69 from one year ago. That is absolutely hammering truckers and farmers.  U.S. President Donald Trump has cribbed many things from former President Richard Nixon, among them…

Argentina’s poverty rate increased to 32.3 percent in the first half of 2026, partly erasing gains made under President Javier Milei as incomes fail to keep step with rising prices, official statistics showed Thursday. The rate grew 4.1 points compared to the last half of 2025, the national statistics agency Indec said. The rate of extreme poverty also shot up from 6.3 percent to 7.5 percent. Children were the worst hit, with 44.5 percent of Argentines aged 14 years and younger classified as poor, and 10.8 percent as extremely poor. Indec considers adults who cannot afford a basic basket of…

Tondelier et Mélenchon en tête A ce stade de la campagne, c’est… Marine Tondelier qui remporte la palme du rejet, talonnée par Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Pas moins de 81% des sondés situent en effet entre 0 et 3 les chances qu’ils votent un jour pour la candidate Ecologiste. Ils sont 73% à en dire de même pour l’Insoumis, et même 98% à 100% chez les catégories de la population se reconnaissant dans les termes “réfractaires”, “autoritaires”, “anti-assistanat”, “traditionnalistes”, ou encore “libéraux”. Une différence majeure, toutefois, entre les deux principaux épouvantails de notre classement : là où seuls 9% de personnes interrogées…

Some in Labour’s ranks believe Burnham is planning for an early election, with party HQ recently launching “operation second term”, to beef up its campaigning and organising strength.Burnham does not have to call an election until August 2029 – but going to the country early – perhaps as early as next spring – could deliver him a mandate of his own and free him from the constraints of Sir Keir Starmer’s 2024 manifesto.Recent polling has suggested that a “Burnham bounce” is real, though not dramatic. The party has moved from just under 20% in the polls at the end of…

That NHS boards have imposed minimum two-year waiting times for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism assessments shows a health service struggling to deal with the consequences of huge changes in understanding of and social attitudes to these conditions.Sharp rises in referrals for clinical assessments over the past six years mean nearly 1 million people in England are on ADHD waiting lists, with the average wait already over a year (64 weeks). About 295,000 await an autism assessment.Formal diagnosis has grown in recent years, slowly from the early 2000s and rapidly since 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, annual incidence of…

Lightspeed is sharpening its India strategy around AI, targeting $250 million for a new early-stage fund as the venture firm bets the technology will drive the next wave of startups in one of the world’s largest markets. The Silicon Valley venture firm is already a major investor in AI companies including Anthropic, xAI, and Databricks. In India, it has backed Sarvam AI, one of the country’s leading large language model developers and a startup selected by the Indian government to help develop sovereign AI models. The new fund, Lightspeed India Partners V, will be half the size of its $500…

Swati KhandelwalSep 25, 2026Cloud Security / Vulnerability A flaw in Cloudflare Containers let a paying customer read data that other customers’ containers had left behind on the same server, Cloudflare and the researchers who found it said on Thursday. The data came from disk space that earlier containers had used and given up, not from any live workload, and an attacker could not choose whose data they got, according to Cloudflare. The company has fixed the flaw across its service and says customers need to do nothing. Cloudflare Containers runs customers’ programs inside containers on servers shared by many accounts,…

Ondo Finance launched three on-chain portfolio tokens on Sept. 24 using investment strategies BlackRock developed for the company. The tokens give buyers economic exposure to diversified baskets, but they are securities issued by Ondo, not interests in BlackRock funds.Only eligible non-US investors who complete onboarding can redeem the tokens directly with Ondo, according to its launch release and product terms.The first three products are Ondo High Income (BLKHIon), Ondo Diversified Growth (BLKDIGon) and Ondo High Growth (BLKGRWon). They draw on portfolio strategies BlackRock developed for Ondo, and Ondo implements the allocations using tokenized assets and rebalances the portfolios on a…

About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system began as an enormous cloud of gas and dust. Over the next several million years, this “solar nebula” changed dramatically. The cloud collapsed and flattened into a disk, eventually giving rise to the sun at its center and the planets that formed around it. Gravity has long been considered the main force behind this transformation. New research from MIT, however, suggests that magnetism may also have been an important part of the process. Scientists found evidence of ancient magnetic fields preserved in some of the oldest meteorite material ever identified. The researchers…

She argued there were too many “unknowns” about the impacts of concentrations of PCBs on the body and no treatment for those found to have elevated levels in their blood.”All we could do is give [people] a number that we can’t really interpret and then we can’t make right.”She felt this could “create even more worry and that is a health harm in itself”.”There is nothing that blood testing can do that would magically take those worries away – it would only potentially magnify them,” Jones said.Asked whether the cost of implementing a blood testing regime was also a factor,…