Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

As the United Nations General Assembly opens this year, happy talk about future goals has ceded ground to a survivalist mindset. Even the theme of the 81st session of UNGA—“Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations That Delivers for All”—reveals deep-seated anxieties. Trust that must be restored, after all, has been lost. Global conflict is at its highest point since 1945. The 80th UNGA session did not bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine or the war in Sudan. In February, the United States and Israel began a new conflict in Iran that left Tehran in a position to…

The shooting of an 11-year-old boy in Sydney’s north-west was a “tragic reminder” of the danger of guns, the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has said while the opposition defends “backflipping” on a gun buyback.The child was transported to Westmead Children’s hospital in a critical condition on Monday evening after suffering gunshot wounds to his face and neck at a unit in Norwest, NSW police said.Five other people were home at the time, including four 18-year-old men and a 44-year-old woman, none of whom were injured.One of the men was charged with concealing a serious indictable offence, while two…

Although the National Rally is a member of the Patriots group in the Parliament, the ECR would still gain an ally if Le Pen wins, helping it push a more Euroskeptic agenda. For example, National Rally’s proposal to halve its EU budget contribution does not concern Procaccini. On the contrary, he welcomed it, saying his group “doesn’t believe in a super-giant budget.” Right-wing majority Since the 2024 European election, the EPP has increasingly relied on votes from groupings to its right in Parliament to pass measures such as laws scrapping EU green rules and toughening migration policy. EPP chief Weber…

With five days left to save up to $200 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass, each day we will list a reason why you should join 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators at San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 13-15. Grab your ticket savings before prices go up on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Plus, get a second of the same ticket type at 50% off. Register now. Reason No. 1: Discovery Part of the value of Disrupt has always been finding breakouts early. The startup you haven’t heard of yet. The technology moving from experiment to real product. The…

Oracle provider Pragma classified 6 of 22 mainnet market and rate feeds as critical risk in a Sept. 18 assessment, warning lenders that an available token price does not establish that collateral can be sold to cover a loan.The liquidity report followed a Sept. 17 borrowing exploit at Nostra, a lending protocol on Starknet. Nostra’s account reported that a manipulated NSTR oracle price allowed one account to borrow approximately $3.5 million of other assets against NSTR collateral.Pragma placed BROTHER, DAI, DOG, EKUBO, LORDS and NSTR in its critical category, with nine other feeds rated high risk. The assessment does not…

“This investigation shows just how quickly and dramatically these bacteria can change,” says Dr Charlene Rodrigues, consultant in Pathogen Genomics at UKHSA.”The fact this outbreak variant was able to spread to so many young people was due to the social environment, a place where lots of close social mixing takes place.”Speaking exclusively to the BBC, she said bacteria are known to undergo changes like this, known as horizontal gene transfer.Such changes can make infections more severe, and may mean they get past the immune system because people haven’t encountered them before. These events, while rare and unpredictable, could happen again,…

The absurdities of the Trump administration and its hangers-on could be written off as a distraction if the stakes weren’t so high. People might be used to banal trolling on social media platforms, but the global hegemon has forced this petulance onto hundreds of millions of people who are worried about their future and the future of the world. That makes the trolling something worse than distracting.The White House’s online personality is at once extremely disconcerting and extremely juvenile. It’s easy to be stunned by the scale and brazenness of it. During a trade dispute with Canada, and feeling insulted…

The United States, Denmark and Greenland will on Tuesday sign the announced US security deal for Greenland on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Denmark’s government said. US President Donald Trump said last Friday that the arrangement will give America “permanent control” over security for Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory in the Arctic that he has long coveted. The office of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that she, Trump and Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen would sign the deal at 1430 GMT in the UN building in New York. Frederiksen said Monday that the agreement,…

Some of the standards Google has set include using “premium materials,” like aluminum, magnesium, or carbon fiber, to make them lightweight. They need at least 16 GB of RAM, deliver more than 45 tera operations per second (TOPS), a touchscreen (LCD or OLED), a backlit keyboard, a haptic trackpad, Dolby Atmos speakers, studio-quality microphones with noise cancellation, and at least 14 hours of battery life. Googlebooks will receive 10 years of software updates.They must feature the Glowbar—the signature LED strip on the laptop’s exterior that identifies the machine as a Googlebook. It’s a callback to the glowbar Google used on…

Many developers find that an agent idea works inside Claude Code or Codex, then struggles once they rebuild it with their own loop. The Strands Agents team at AWS is targeting that gap with Strands harness, a fully assembled, general-purpose agent harness. It runs locally or deploys to a cloud provider, ships for Python and TypeScript under Apache 2.0, and starts with one line of code. The team reports 28% lower cost than other harnesses running the same Claude or GPT models across 6 benchmarks, with near-equal accuracy. Is it deployable? Yes. It runs locally, and a bundled skills file…