Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Victory of United Russia party strengthens Putin’s hand even as the war with Ukraine grows more unpopular.President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has won a record supermajority in tightly orchestrated parliamentary polls that excluded virtually any genuine opposition, near complete official results show.With over 58 percent of votes secured, United Russia, which has dominated Russian politics for 25 years, is on track to win more than three quarters of the seats in the lower house, the State Duma, according to the results announced on Monday after three days of voting that ended on Sunday.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of…

Some of the most affluent areas of England have had the sharpest rises in the proportion of young people claiming disability benefits for ADHD and autism since the pandemic, according to new research.Claims for the personal independence payment (Pip) benefit for these health conditions were typically proportionally far higher in deprived areas with higher rates of poverty, low educational outcomes and insecure employment.However, the fastest growth in ADHD and autism-related Pip claims has been in some of the country’s most prosperous areas such as Wokingham, Warwick, and parts of Hampshire and Surrey.This trend probably reflects swifter access to ADHD and…

ZDNET’s key takeaways Apple has settled a class-action lawsuit alleging false advertising with Siri AI. To get your cut, you must have bought a certain iPhone model in 2024 or 2025. Qualifying iPhone buyers could receive anywhere from $25 to $95 per device. Did you buy an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 in mid to late 2024 or early 2025? If so, you may be able to score some money from Apple over a settlement to a Siri AI class-action lawsuit. Apple has agreed to settle a lawsuit filed in March 2025 that alleged false…

Ecommerce platform BigCommerce has alerted multiple merchants to data breaches after attackers compromised credentials for third-party Ribon applications and used them to inject malicious scripts into online stores. The cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecommerce platform confirmed the credential compromise on September 17 and immediately removed the apps to protect its customers. UK-based online spirits vendor Master of Malt is one of the BigCommerce customers that received the notification. The retailer said the attacker accessed shopper information. The hacker used the compromised credentials to access shopper data in BigCommerce environments between September 13 and September 17, the company said. In updates on…

Crypto spent 15 years building rails — lending, tokenization, stablecoins — and Jordi Visser argues the users it was built for were never meant to be human. In this conversation with Grace Remington and Sean Hagan, Visser lays out his Ghost Rails thesis, comparing today’s moment to the 14-year gap between Netscape going public and the App Store finally putting the internet in everyone’s hands. He explains why AI agents, not retail wallets, are the inflection point for the agentic economy, and why that’s “extremely positive” for Bitcoin specifically. If you’ve wondered what actually breaks the liquidity-driven narrative around this…

Depending on your locale, equinoxes can be seen as harbingers of longer nights and gloomy weather, or promising beacons of nicer temperatures and more sunlight. Observing and predicting equinoxes is one of the earliest skills in humanity’s astronomical toolkit. Many ancient observatories around the world observed equinoxes along with the more pronounced solstices. These days, you don’t need your own observatory to know when an equinox occurs, since you’ll see it marked on your calendar twice a year! The word “equinox” originates from Latin, and translates to equal (equi-) night (-nox). But what exactly is an equinox? An equinox occurs twice every year, in March and…

The recent disaster that sent a wall of water and debris roaring down rivers of the Tibetan Plateau serves as a warning for future hydropower development on Nepal’s rivers, especially the Karnali, the nation’s last undammed watershed.Two proposals have targeted the Karnali — which is home to Indigenous communities and provides habitat for endangered fish and reptiles — seeking to bore tunnels through its mountains, drain miles of riverbed, and turn whitewater into megawatts.“A free-flowing Karnali River is an insurance policy — ecological, cultural, and now, unmistakably, physical — against the very disaster that just killed hundreds of people…

Tom Dolphin’s excellent article on the failings of NHS management made sombre reading (The Letby inquiry report makes one thing crystal clear: too much NHS management is scandalously poor, 16 September). Yet I believe that most of our public services are thoroughly over-managed, with frontline professionals neither listened to nor respected by their institutional superiors, and at risk of damaging their careers if they speak out about poor decisions, excessive workloads and impossible targets or “performance indicators”.Like so many of our current woes, the rise of managerialism can be traced back to the public service reforms of the Thatcher governments…

Claim: U.S. President Donald Trump called the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran “small potatoes.” Rating: Context Some people sharing the quote claimed Trump was specifically referring to the deaths of 18 service members during the conflict. He was in fact referring to the conflict itself. A rumor circulated online in September 2026 that U.S. President Donald Trump had called the Iran war, initiated by the United States and Israel in February 2026, “small potatoes.” Users shared the claim on social media and Reddit. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., shared the purported quote and added, “Tell that to the families of the 18 troops…

FIFA President Gianni Infantino proposed an outside review of how the governing body makes major decisions on Monday, acknowledging in a letter to members that its handling of a now-abandoned ​investment plan had ‌caused concern. “First, I will ask the Council whether it wishes to commission an independent external ⁠review of FIFA’s current governance framework for major strategic initiatives and recommend potential improvements,” Infantino wrote to the FIFA Council and all 211 member association presidents in ‌a letter seen by Reuters. Read moreUEFA, CONCACAF demand FIFA make $2.1 billion payout to member groups amid funding row He also said he…