Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Badenoch proposes welfare reform that would stop many jobless under-25s getting universal creditGood morning. The Conservatives start their conference at the weekend and Kemi Badenoch is kicking off proceedings by announcing a significant plan for welfare reform – stopping many under-25s from being able to claim universal credit, the main unemployment benefit.Instead, they would get a new Get to Work Allowance – which would be subject to conditions from day one intended to help people find work. If after six months they are still out of work, they would go on to a new benefit, a Subsistence Allowance, worth just…

But there’s a debate over what constitutes the best, and safest, sodium ion battery design. Plus, more than one, external US company working in this space has floundered in recent years, external.China leads the world in sodium ion battery manufacturing at present so US competitors are going to have to work hard to keep up.The prize that awaits is the possibility of batteries made in the US with 100% US-sourced materials. This is unlike lithium ion batteries, where China dominates the materials, external supply chain as well as manufacturing.For Tan, China has helped his company get to market. The Unigrid…

The Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) is notifying millions of military service members that hackers stole their data after breaching the Pentagon’s human resources management system in October 2025. In data breach notification letters shared online by affected individuals, the DMDC told affected military personnel that “a small number of unauthorized users” had access to their sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII), between October 2025 and July 2026 after exploiting a vulnerability in its file-sharing systems. The stolen data varies by person and includes Social Security numbers (SSNs), names, dates of birth, contact information, sex, race, and military…

Robinhood is bringing crypto perpetual futures to US customers, with up to 10x leverage on Bitcoin and Ether. Nicola White, Robinhood’s vice president of institutional crypto, explains how the CFTC no-action letter, the Bitstamp exchange, and Robinhood Derivatives made it happen, and why the company wants markets to be always on. Chapters:0:00 Robinhood’s Hood Summit: 24/7 Stock Trading and US Crypto Perps0:40 Why Robinhood Wants Markets That Never Close1:32 Bitstamp Perps and the CFTC No-Action Letter2:19 Tokenized Stocks, the Basis Trade, and the Path for US Perps3:20 Bitstamp’s Volume and the Retail–Institutional Merger4:54 What Institutions Want to Do With Bitcoin6:00…

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pliny the Younger documented what he witnessed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. His account did more than preserve the story of one of history’s most famous volcanic disasters. It also recorded enough information about when the eruption occurred to give modern scientists an unusually precise historical reference point for testing volcanic dating techniques. Researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Center, UC Berkeley and the University of Padua in Italy now report in Science Advances that this historical benchmark has helped them significantly improve the precision of argon-argon dating. By…

For Europe’s fishing industry, it turns out size does matter. Of 60,000 European-flagged fishing boats, just 638 are responsible for most of the harm, according to a new report by French non-profit BLOOM. The largest in the fleet, at 108 feet or longer, pose the greatest threat to food security, cost taxpayers the most and cause unparalleled environmental harms.  As the European Union decides how to spend its almost $8 billion fisheries budget for 2028-2034, environmentalists are calling for the dismantling of these “mega-industrial” ships. “They’re one percent of the fleet, and they threaten 99 percent of fishers,” said Claire…

Emma Joyce was sick and vomiting for days until she stopped breathing in her parents’ arms, in a small gray farmhouse in rural Idaho. It was August 2009, and she was 3 years old. The following summer, Emma Joyce’s little sister got sick. Ava Joan wouldn’t eat or drink anything but a few grapes and some Sprite in a sippy cup. She was breathing hard and fast. And when she vomited, it came out black, the hallmark of internal bleeding. She died in her mother’s arms in July 2010 from a complication of untreated diabetes. Less than two years later,…

After the German far right’s victory in regional elections earlier this month, the Sept. 20 vote in Berlin offered a startling rebuttal—but also a new set of political questions for Germany’s political system. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party scored a record high in the city, but the clear winner was the Left party and specifically Elif Eralp, its candidate for mayor. Having won an unprecedented 26 percent of votes, Eralp is now in position to lead coalition talks with Social Democrats and Greens to cobble together a left-of-center “red-red-green” government. But the moment that Berlin’s election results lit up…

Fighting in Sudan’s Kordofan region has intensified since late 2025, turning it into one of the main battlegrounds in the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), now in its fourth year.The vast region, which comprises North, West and South Kordofan states, lies where the two sides’ areas of control meet, between the army-held central region and the RSF-controlled Darfur in the West. In recent months, the SAF has pushed the RSF out of much of North Kordofan.The battle is increasingly being fought from the air. Drone strikes on towns in North Kordofan…

Ventura, whose party has surged in recent election cycles, is often described as a Portuguese Trump for his confrontational tactics and heated campaign rhetoric targeting Portugal’s ruling elite. The Chega leader traveled to Washington, D.C. for Trump’s inauguration and borrowed the MAGA slogan during last year’s parliamentary election campaign, saying he wanted to “make Portugal great again.” But with Portugal now among many European countries hit by increasing fuel prices caused by war in the Middle East, Ventura appears to be turning on his American role model — like other populist chiefs across Europe who have jabbed the U.S. president’s…