Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

England’s mayors should face much greater official scrutiny to avoid Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda being “derailed by one bad decision”, a thinktank has said.Ministers will set out plans next month to give regional leaders control over potentially billions of pounds of additional funding under a “transformational” shift of power outside Whitehall.From 2028, mayors will be able to keep a share of income tax generated in their areas – giving them greater scope to borrow for major infrastructure projects – as well as retain business rates from 2027 and raise further funds through a “tourist tax”.IPPR North, whose researchers have worked…

On November 4, TechCrunch’s Founder Summit will bring a vital one-day crash course on startup building to Boston’s SoWa Power Station. Founders shouldn’t have to learn the hardest lessons the hardest way, and this event is designed to make the challenges of starting a company easier and the highs that much greater. Instead of months of trial and error, you get direct access to the investors and founders who’ve already made the calls you’re now facing. We’re talking everything from fundraising and hiring to AI strategy, and topping your category. Don’t take our word for it. Explore the full agenda…

Swati KhandelwalSep 22, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security WordPress has fixed a critical flaw in its core software that lets an attacker with no account make a site load a PHP file from outside its theme folders. On some servers, that can go further, allowing the attacker to run their own code. The fix shipped on September 22 in WordPress 7.1.2, with fixes for every branch the project still supports, back to 4.7, and WordPress is telling site owners to update now. WordPress rates the flaw as critical, assigns it a CVSS score of 9.2, and assigns it CVE-2026-87902. Reaching it…

In brief Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Moonshot are all set to address the UN Security Council on AI risks Wednesday. The briefing follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development while urging continued U.S. chip export restrictions on China. The meeting lands two days before President Trump’s September 24 summit with Xi Jinping. The UN Security Council will spend Wednesday afternoon listening to the people who build the technology it’s most worried about.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI safety researcher Yoshua Bengio, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue are all scheduled to brief the 15-member…

Foremost among them is a shortage of grid capacity. The renewables’ build out has significantly outpaced transmission infrastructure, a point of major concern for policymakers.”In the first quarter of 2026, transmission constraints accounted for nearly two-thirds of all renewable energy curtailment at 300 gigawatt-hours (GWh),” according to Ember, a global energy think-tank.Put simply, that means a bulk of the clean energy that was produced in India was wasted because the country’s transmission lines have been dogged by missed targets, with one out of four inter-state projects facing delays of over a year.The difficulty lies in matching the speed of generation…

Bragg says proposal to use super for mortgages not ‘controversial’Andrew Bragg, the shadow housing minister, said he believes in “big debates” about housing after pushing his new proposal yesterday to allow people to use their superannuation as collateral to get a home loan.The policy hasn’t been adopted by the opposition, and leader Angus Taylor said yesterday it wasn’t Coalition policy.Bragg told RN this morning the housing system needed a revamp, and lawmakers were responsible for hosting those ideas: double quotation markWe’re a great country, and we should be able to have big debates, as we had in the 80s and…

China’s rising energy clout comes despite the fact that it is by far the world’s biggest oil importer. But it has used that purchasing power to build a massive stockpile of crude and has emerged as a key supplier of petroleum products in the region. In recent months, Beijing has shown that its entry into those petroleum markets — or its absence — can determine what happens to energy consumers around the world.And China is cementing its role in the global energy economy in part by offering a new type of energy security for vulnerable countries reliant on Middle Eastern…

Still only 44, James Graham has become a formidable chronicler of our national story. On themes such as the rise of Rupert Murdoch, social upheaval in post-industrial Britain and the neuroses of the England men’s football team, the playwright and screenwriter has made it his vocation to read the signs of our times and write them up for the stage.Graham’s new play goes a bit further back in history, but its subject matter is characteristically of the moment. Opening this week in the West End, The Standard of Living offers a portrait of the sentimental and intellectual passions of John…

Charities have condemned footage of far-right activist Daniel Thomas using a blade to slash an inflatable dinghy in the Channel while a rescue worker was onboard, in a further escalation of organised anti-immigration protest.Hundreds of protesters gathered in the early evening at Gosport in Hampshire, aiming to disrupt the planned disembarkation of asylum seekers, but the Border Force vessels carrying them landed instead in Dover.Thomas, who styles himself as Danny Tommo, spent Tuesday afternoon in a small boat on the Channel, filming himself as he tracked two dinghies carrying asylum seekers from France to the UK.As rescue workers assisted them…

Now that Paramount has reached a settlement with the 12 states that were suing to block its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the studio is even closer to becoming one of the world’s biggest production houses. In addition to spending at least $300 million more on film and TV projects produced in the US, Paramount says that it will release a minimum of 30 movies annually after it absorbs WBD. On paper, these goals make it sound like Paramount is trying to ensure that the entertainment industry won’t be harmed by its WBD acquisition. But when you…