Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Andy Burnham does a nice line in nostalgia. His first party conference speech as prime minister was full of fond memories for the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, when working-class families could sense their lives steadily getting better. The underlying message of his address was that, given time, he could rekindle that optimism and return the country to how it was before Margaret Thatcher wrecked everything.Much of what Burnham says is true. The 1980s was a decade of deindustrialisation, asset-stripping and financial deregulation that has shaped modern Britain – and not in a good way.But listen a bit more…

John Healey is under growing pressure to offer fresh energy support for households in next month’s budget as millions face a 4% rise in charges from Thursday to an average of £1,723 a year for a typical home.In his speech at Labour’s conference in Liverpool this week, the chancellor warned that the government had limited resources to cushion the worldwide economic shocks hitting Britain, while arguing his budget would have fiscal discipline at its core.The quarterly energy price cap, set by the regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, will rise to its highest level in three years despite Andy Burnham’s decision…

Once the most talked-about TV show in the country, South Park, is on Paramount+. Don’t you want to know what got Trump in such a tizzy?Stream the much-buzzed-about South Park, fan-favorite Yellowstone, original series MobLand, and rebooted crime drama Dexter & Dexter on Paramount+. The streaming network has bingeable TV series for almost everyone. Whether you want to revisit Lindsay Lohan’s old look in the classic Mean Girls flick or wonder how many more sequels Tom Cruise has left in him with Top Gun: Maverick, there’s a bevy of films to stream, too.If you’re like me and have at least half a dozen streaming services, our Paramount+ coupon codes can help…

Perplexity Research and turbopuffer have released pplx-embed-v2-context-9b-preview, a contextual embedding model for RAG pipelines. Each chunk is embedded with the full document in view. The real change is the training signal. The model learns to retrieve the answer along with the context needed to verify it, not one ‘gold passage.’ P Is it deployable? Yes, as a self-hosted preview. Weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT license. Loading requires transformers>=5.4.0 with trust_remote_code=True. It is not yet on the Perplexity API. The model card notes that weights and interface may change without backward compatibility. Why the gold passage falls short…

Google and Mozilla on Tuesday announced fresh Chrome and Firefox updates that address over 100 vulnerabilities. The latest Chrome release was rolled out with fixes for 32 security defects, including a critical-severity buffer overflow issue in ANGLE tracked as CVE-2026-102331 and reported by an external researcher. Google addressed 25 high-severity security weaknesses, most of which are uninitialized resource and use-after-free vulnerabilities. It also resolved five high-severity type confusion flaws in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. The browser update also fixes high-severity improper privilege management, UI misconfiguration, out-of-bounds read/write, cross-site scripting (XSS), and buffer overflow issues. External researchers reported 15…

In brief Stand With Crypto unveiled a bipartisan slate of Senate and House endorsements, including its first Senate picks. The group, which judges candidates on crypto policy “regardless of party,” is ramping up ads in six House races, building on its August endorsement of 32 House incumbents. The push follows the Clarity Act’s 49-50 Senate failure and amid heavy crypto political spending. Stand With Crypto, the advocacy group Coinbase launched in 2023, unveiled a bipartisan slate of Senate and House endorsements Wednesday, sharpening its electoral push roughly a month before November’s midterms and two weeks after the Clarity Act collapsed…

Much of the Saskatchewan River Delta, a large inland delta that straddles the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, is too wet for extensive farming. But amid the delta’s winding channels, lakes, and marshes, an “island” of straight-edged fields breaks up the curvy contours. These fields, west of the town of The Pas, make up Manitoba’s northernmost agricultural area. Known as the Carrot River Valley (Pasquia Area Settlement), the area lies within the Rural Municipality of Kelsey. Its actively farmed land spans more than 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) between the Carrot and Pasquia rivers—tributaries of the Saskatchewan River—and is surrounded…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief. The highlights this week: Civil war resurges in Ethiopia’s Tigray region after four years, African countries seek greater sovereignty and representation at the United Nations, and Chad accepts a surge of Sudanese refugees fleeing war. A long-predicted resurgence of Ethiopia’s civil war began last week when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized three airports in the country’s northern Tigray region. The rebels also launched attacks in the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions days after forming an alliance with six other armed groups to oust Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government. “We are in…

A rumor that circulated online in September 2026 featured the claim that U.S. truck drivers planned to strike over high fuel costs beginning on Oct. 1. According to users’ posts, the strike would lead to catastrophic food and supply chain shortages. However, no proof supported this unfounded rumor. The claim spread in part because of a video one social media user originally posted on Sept. 15. Other users then reposted his clip without first looking for credible evidence. A spokesperson for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association told Snopes the organization had no knowledge of an upcoming strike. We also emailed…

Estonian aerial athlete Jaan Roose has completed his first crossing of a 160-metre long highline suspended 120 metres above central Seoul on Thursday.Roose, a three-time slackline world champion, will step out on to a narrow polyester ribbon between the Koreana hotel and the Dong-A Media Center, near the capital city’s famous Gyeongbokgung palace and Gwanghwamun square.Livestream of Jaan Roose slackline attempt in SeoulThe 34-year-old has made a name for himself slacklining dramatic urban environments, such as his 185-metre high feat between Qatar’s Katara towers.In 2024, he became the first person to slackline the strait of Messina between mainland Italy and…