Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As the United Nations searches for its next leader, diplomats say there are key qualities they would like to see in the next secretary general. They seek someone who proactively puts the U.N. at the center of resolving global conflicts and enforces cost-cutting and reform.The topic of who will succeed António Guterres when he steps down in December is expected to be hotly debated this week behind closed doors in diplomatic meetings during the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York. The conversations “will drive a lot of the candidates’ fortunes and separate contenders from pretenders,” said Daniel Forti, the…

Donald Trump has praised Andy Burnham as a “natural businessperson” and said the UK was “more up” than under Keir Starmer. But he berated the UK for its decision to give up the Chagos Islands.In their first face-to-face meeting, Trump gave a warm assessment of the relationship, saying he thought Burnham had a “lot of assets on his side” and would be a “great prime minister”, adding: “We talked about everything from Rolls-Royce to energy to immigration – we covered a lot.”At a joint press conference after their talks at the UN general assembly in New York, Burnham said he…

Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET ZDNET’s key takeaways Claude Opus 5.5 could be a big win for power users. Developers may see faster coding with fewer steps. Anthropic says the upgrade is safer, cheaper, and less wordy. Less than two months after the release of Claude Opus 5, Anthropic is back with Opus 5.5. The big pitch for Opus 5 was that it had “near Fable” performance at half the price. This time, the headline is that the workhorse AI Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance for most work and costs about 40% less to run. “Our customers use Box AI on…

A new Windows malware named ClosedQuorum uses Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral AI models to autonomously determine the actions to take during post-compromise stages of an attack. The Go-based malware acts with no commands from a human operator, using reconnaissance information and a voting system to decide its next step on infected hosts. When votes are tied, DeepSeek has priority at making the final call, based on the option it considers most appropriate, followed by Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. Cisco Talos researchers analyzing ClosedQuorum say that the models are restricted to a predefined set of decisions, including: steal —…

European asset manager 21shares has launched the region’s first exchange-traded product tied to Zcash, extending the privacy coin’s reach into regulated markets following its strong performance over the past year.On Tuesday, 21shares listed its physically backed Zcash ETP on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam, allowing investors to gain exposure to ZEC through brokerage accounts without holding the cryptocurrency directly.The asset manager also introduced an ETP tracking ETHFI, the governance and utility token of Ether.fi, a decentralized finance protocol that offers staking and other crypto-based financial services. The ETHFI product is physically backed and trades on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam.Both ETPs carry…

Stanford researchers have directly observed quantum jumps of sound in a mechanical resonator for the first time, marking the latest milestone in a line of quantum physics research that stretches back more than a century. Quantum jumps — sudden transitions from one energy state to another — have been part of quantum theory since the early 1900s. Researchers first demonstrated them in trapped ions in 1986, followed by photons, the fundamental particles of light, in 2007. Sound, however, remained a more difficult target. A team led by Stanford physicist Amir Safavi-Naeini has now recorded these jumps directly, with the findings…

The Brazilian government has created four new sustainable development reserves in the Amazon as part of an effort to mitigate environmental damage from the controversial plan to fully pave the BR-319 highway. The road will pass through one of the most intact parts of the rainforest, which conservationists warn will lead to increased deforestation. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed on Sept. 8 the decrees that would protect more than 668,000 hectares (1.65 million acres) of Amazon rainforest under a sustainable-use model, which allows existing residents to remain on the land and extract forest products. “The federal…

Carnegie Clean Energy has completed the foundation structures of the scaled CETO wave energy unit in preparation for deployment at Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP) as part of the ACHIEVE Programme. CETO is a fully submerged, point absorber-type wave energy technology device. A submerged buoy sits a few meters below the surface and moves with the ocean’s waves. This orbital motion drives a PTO system that converts this motion into electricity. Carnegie Clean Energy reported today, September 22, that the final preparations had been completed for the foundation, making it ready for deployment of the CETO Buoyant Actuator commencing in…

As head of pharmacovigilance at a clinical trials technology company, I was not surprised that a review of global research found that women are less likely than men to be offered active treatment for the same conditions (Women with same health conditions as men ‘less likely to be offered active treatment’, 16 September).This inequality costs lives. A British Heart Foundation-funded study found that women were less likely than men to receive recommended care after a heart attack. Research in 2018 estimated that more than 8,000 women’s deaths may have been prevented over 10 years had they received the same standard…

Misleading claims that the former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer won a court case in 2003 “that gave illegal migrants access to UK benefits” are being shared again online.The posts likely refer to a 2003 case, in which Mr Starmer was a barrister, concerning access to accommodation and financial support for some asylum seekers.But eligible asylum seekers could already legally access financial support and accommodation before this.Mr Starmer represented five asylum seekers who took the government to court, challenging the legal basis for the Home Office refusing financial support for asylum seekers who did not make an asylum claim “as…