Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Hope again. That was the prime minister’s message to the country this week. A national social care system, greater public control of water and energy, help for first-time buyers and a crackdown on rogue landlords and empty homes. With clarity and conviction, Andy Burnham set out a bold plan to put Britain on a new path, steeped in Labour values.It felt like a conference speech that would be remembered for years to come, marking a decisive break with a broken political model that has let British people down for decades. And perhaps most encouraging of all was the prime minister’s…

Claim: Between 1950 and 1979, late actor John Wayne bought 1,200 foreclosed homes for homeless veterans of the Vietnam War. Rating: In September 2026, a rumor spread that late actor John Wayne acquired 1,200 foreclosed homes between 1950 and 1979 and gave them to homeless Vietnam War veterans. Several posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X made the claim, all sharing the same image with the same text. One X post said, “what a wonderful man he was” (archived): The text on the image said the actor had allegedly spent $43 million on these homes: After John Wayne died in…

Clashes broke out last week after months of tension between the government and the party that controls Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).They both accuse each other of violating a 2022 peace deal that ended a brutal two-year civil war, which according to an Africa Union mediator is estimated to have cost 600,000 lives.Last month, seven armed movements, including the TPLF and an Amhara militia known as Fano, formed an alliance with the stated aim of removing the government in Addis Ababa.There is disagreement over which side started the latest fighting.The TPLF says it was responding to a federal…

Green Party co-deputy leader Rachel Millward has said her party would nationalise water companies in England and Wales, criticising Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s plans to bring them under public control as “vague”.Millward told the BBC the country’s water system was an “absolutely unmitigated disaster”, arguing there had been “radical underinvestment” over decades.She said Burnham’s plan, which involves removing limits on government ownership of shares in water companies and giving mayors more powers to scrutinise them, did not go far enough.The Green Party of England and Wales has long called for public ownership of water companies, describing privatisation as a failed…

HP is announcing a new laptop that’s squarely aimed at Apple’s MacBook Neo. The 2026 HP OmniBook 5 14 starts at $699.99 with an Intel Core 5 315 “Wildcat Lake” processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. Much of that sounds pretty familiar, being in lockstep with both Apple’s Neo and its recent competition from Dell, Asus, and Acer — the HP even offers a similar four color options in silver, pink, blue, and green. But one thing that separates the OmniBook is its inclusion of an OLED display on all configs.The OmniBook 5 14 can be configured much…

Hackers started exploiting a high-severity OS command injection vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) shortly after patches were rolled out, before public disclosure, Microsoft reports. Tracked as CVE-2026-73570 (CVSS score of 8.9), the flaw exists because, in ZCS before 10.1.20, untrusted input during SNMP notification processing is improperly sanitized. Thus, if the zimbra-snmp package has been installed and SNMP notifications have been enabled, an attacker could trigger the security defect via specially crafted SMTP requests. Successful exploitation of the bug allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution with the privileges of the Zimbra user. Patches for CVE-2026-73570 were rolled…

Investment bank TD Cowen has said that Bitcoin is more than an asset — and will be increasingly used as financial infrastructure to underpin institutional products. Writing in a Tuesday note, TD Cowen said that after attending a BitcoinTreasuries Conference this week in New York, it noticed institutions were more than interested in just accumulating the leading cryptocurrency.  The comments come as major banks around the world delve deeper into the technology that underpins Bitcoin, with firms offering — and using — crypto products for customers and to streamline their own services.  JUST IN: Investment bank giant TD Cowen says…

Scientists had a rare view of what could be humpback whale mourning when they spotted a female attending the body of a dead calf. The sighting suggests that baleen whales may experience grief, marine biologist Olaf Meynecke and rescue boat captain Andrew Mulville report September 16 in Discover Animals. Some toothed whales, such as orcas, have been seen spending long periods with dead calves,  occasionally carrying them at the surface for days. Such demonstrations of apparent grief are rarely seen in baleen whales. This may be because newborn baleen whales are born without the fat stores that would cause a…

Documents obtained by Mongabay show Vantara, the controversial private zoo in India run by billionaire Anant Ambani, was in talks with Brazilian authorities to form a “strategic conservation partnership” focused on the country’s threatened species.The zoo also proposed a conservation partnership on Spix’s macaw, a parrot species endemic to Brazil but extinct in the wild; 26 of the birds were sent from Germany to Vantara in 2023 without Brazil’s consent.Representatives from Vantara met with Brazilian officials in 2025 to discuss this partnership. A Brazilian delegation was scheduled to visit the Indian zoo in 2026; that trip was canceled at…

Centrica and Ksi Lisims LNG have entered into a heads of agreement (HOA) for the sale and purchase of 1 million tonnes per annum of LNG on a free-on-board basis for 20 years. This is a proposed 12 mtpa floating export facility in British Columbia, designed to be among the world’s lowest-emission LNG facilities.The deal, which is subject to the completion of a sale and purchase agreement (SPA), strengthens the resilience of the European firm’s LNG portfolio, adding supply for its customers during a time of continued volatility in global energy markets.Chris O’Shea, Group Chief Executive at Centrica, commented: “Energy…