Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Researchers at the School of Public Health at the LKS Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed), have found that completing brisk interval walking once per week can reduce body fat and improve cardiorespiratory fitness in adults with central obesity. The benefits were comparable to those seen in participants who exercised three times per week, which is the frequency commonly recommended in traditional exercise guidance. The findings support once weekly brisk interval walking as a practical therapeutic option for adults with central obesity, especially those who have difficulty fitting several workouts into their schedules. The study was published…

Your editorial is right that noise pollution deserves to be treated as a public-health issue rather than a mere irritation (The Guardian view on noise pollution: keep it down, 28 July). Yet one obvious source of urban noise receives little attention: modified cars and motorbikes whose exhausts and engines have been made far louder than manufacturers intended.Anyone living in a city or town knows the difference between the background hum of traffic and the explosive revving, popping and roaring produced by a small minority of drivers and riders. These vehicles can wake entire terraces, disrupt outdoor spaces and make life…

At least 14 people were killed in a suicide bombing outside a police station in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday evening, officials said, the worst attack in a surge of militant violence that has reignited fears in a region once dominated by the Pakistani Taliban.The attack took place in the Swat Valley, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, as residents and civil society activists gathered near the police station for a peace rally to protest the recent rise in attacks.Pakistan’s interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, said that police officers had “sacrificed their lives to stop the suicide bomber from entering the police station,” averting…

The chancellor, John Healey, has said the government is standing by to prevent the public from “being taken for a ride at the pump or the till” as the Iran war continues to hit prices.While he said there had been “no significant evidence of so-called price gouging” during the crisis, he used a weekend column to tell the big retailers that ministers were “watching closely” for any signs of profiteering.Healey faces a difficult economic balancing act as the energy price shock caused by the months-long conflict in the Middle East reignites the cost of living crisis.Last week the Bank of…

Andy Burnham has pledged to be “relentless” in tackling small boat crossings after tens of thousands of migrants entered the Spanish territory of Ceuta, and he said “safe routes” for refugees were necessary to tackle trafficking gangs.Speaking during a visit to Dover, the prime minister said he had been assured by the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, that approximately 98% of the estimated 50,000 people who entered Spain’s north African territory of Ceuta last week had now been returned to Morocco.But while that dealt “substantially” with the immediate issue, “of course there’s a broader issue about the Schengen area and…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on smartphones and Android, follow Dominic Preston. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.Believe it or not, it didn’t all start with Samsung. Royole, a now-bankrupt manufacturer of flexible displays, was the first to release a commercial folding phone, the “charmingly awful” FlexPai. Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold followed a year later, plagued by a variety of faults that saw review units break within days. That launch went so badly that it…

In brief The Coldcard exploit is ongoing, with Galaxy Research now tracking about $88.6 million stolen across 4,585 addresses in three waves. Galaxy’s Alex Thorn described the sweeps as deliberate and likely LLM-orchestrated, warning that every single-sig Coldcard address created after the March 2021 firmware flaw will eventually be drained. The breach has spurred an unusual reversal of the “not your keys, not your coins” ethos as users move Bitcoin back to exchanges. The theft of Bitcoin from compromised Coldcard hardware wallets is still underway, with researchers now tracking losses of roughly $88 million and warning that every vulnerable device…

Mathematicians have concluded that a perfectly fair election system is impossible in a specific mathematical sense. No voting method can always ensure that local victories produce local seats, national seat totals accurately reflect overall vote shares, and the size of parliament remains fixed. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen examined proportional representation and first-past-the-post systems. Their analysis found that every method for electing a national legislature involves compromises, usually among local representation, national proportionality, and the total number of parliamentary seats. Election Systems Under Growing Pressure Several northern European elections over the past decade have…

Governments are told that public services must shrink because money is tight. Yet a new Tax Justice Network report says that countries could capture an extra $500bn a year without raising corporate tax rates. The answer is to tax multinational profits where real economic activity happens – known as unitary taxation. No new profit is created. Revenue simply shifts from tax havens where profits are “booked” to the countries where workers produce and customers spend.Making that principle a global tax standard depends on UN talks opening in New York on Monday. Modelled on the UN climate regime, a fiscal framework…

Two firefighting helicopters have collided west of Athens, killing the two-person crew of one of the aircraft, as efforts to control a massive wildfire barrelling towards the outskirts of the Greek capital intensified.Gale-force winds that have pushed flames towards settlements on Athens’ western fringes were caught on video on Sunday downing one of the helicopters.“The pilots … were taken unconscious to hospital, where their death was confirmed,” said the fire department’s director of communications, Vassilis Vathrakogiannis.As Europe’s wildfire crisis fractured along different routes, and in further proof of the destructive force of climate-driven wildfires across the continent, the blazes ripped…