Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A government consultation will look at “whether the 182-day threshold is set at the right level and what impact a modest reduction might have”.It also proposes five new possible exemptions for accommodation that cannot be used as permanent homes, including properties on owners’ farms.Jones said: “I have heard representations from a number of businesses that are making meaningful contributions to their local economies but are unable to meet the current threshold.”This consultation will help us find a solution that works better for everyone, including businesses, local authorities and local areas.”I am committed to getting the balance right – keeping homes…

Some Labour MPs had been calling for Abbott to be readmitted to Labour and more than 38,000 people had signed a petition backing her return. Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy told BBC Newsnight that Abbott had “given over 40 years of her life to the Labour movement and she is pleased to be back in the party that is her home”.She said she understood some Labour MPs might have concerns but that Abbott had been “very clear and sincere in her apology”.However, Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told the same programme he was “very sad,…

Jorg Greuel/ Photodisc via Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysMicrosoft’s ISO downloads for Windows have ballooned in size.In the last 10 years, the download has doubled to more than 8 GB.The most likely cause is Microsoft’s AI files for Copilot+ PCsWindows downloads are bigger than ever. I noticed this a few times over the past six months (“Huh, I don’t remember a download being this big before”) but hadn’t had time to dig into the details.Then I saw a recent post from Michael Niehaus titled “How can Windows 11 keep getting bigger?” and I realized,…

JetBrains is warning of a critical authentication bypass vulnerability affecting TeamCity On-Premises that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution. The security issue is tracked as CVE-2026-63077 and can be leveraged by an attacker with HTTPS access to a TeamCity server to bypass authentication via the agent polling protocol and execute arbitrary operating system commands with the privileges of the server process. “All versions of TeamCity On-Premises are affected,” JetBrains warns in the advisory, adding that “TeamCity Cloud customers are not required to take any action, as the necessary measures have already been applied.” TeamCity is a commercial continuous…

Astronomers looking for evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth may have overlooked promising signals simply because they have concentrated on a relatively narrow portion of the radio spectrum. Most radio SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) projects have targeted frequencies between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. This region is often called the ‘water hole’ because it falls between the natural radio emissions produced by hydrogen and hydroxyl, which combine to form water. Researchers have long considered this quiet region of the spectrum a potentially logical meeting place for interstellar communication. An advanced civilization might recognize the importance of hydrogen and hydroxyl and…

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In the Central African Republic, a country often seen mainly through the lens of instability, a different story is unfolding in its southwest. In March, Mongabay Africa program director David Akana and I spent time in and around Dzanga-Sangha National Park, speaking with researchers, conservationists, community members, and park officials. What we heard was not quite reflected in the usual narrative. Bayanga, the town at the park’s edge, has seen a modest rise in visitors. Dzanga Bai, where forest elephants gather…

Opening summary: Trump claims Gaza deal reached – but hurdles remainDonald Trump claims a deal has been reached for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza, but many hurdles and conditions remained in the Palestinian territory.“The agreement will be carried out in carefully structured phases,” the US president said on social media. “As disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors.”Senior Hamas officials have reportedly agreed to the plan, but the…

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they…

pros and cons Pros Very comfortable, masks most disruptive noise.Stayed in my ears each time I wore them.Easy-to-use app. Cons Expensive.The sleep data takes a while to load.The sleep staging greatly overestimated and underestimated various cycles. more buying choices Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Summer is always the hardest time to get good sleep for me. Not only because temperatures make falling asleep harder, but also because outdoor activities and sunlight keep me out into the night. That means falling asleep later and waking up earlier to seize the day. My neighbors seem to be doing the same,…

PolyAI has introduced Dialog-RSN-1, a dialog model that perceives the caller’s audio directly instead of reading a transcript. It fuses turn-taking, speech recognition, function calling and response generation into one audio-native model, and is already handling live production calls. Key Takeaways Dialog-RSN-1 is audio-aware on the input side only; TTS stays separate, so the output voice remains controllable. It runs as a request-based LLM probed on demand, not an always-on stream that pins a GPU. Turn-taking is the model’s first output token: EMPTY, ONGOING or COMPLETE. PolyAI reports sub-300ms responses, +11% relative containment at a restaurant group, and −37% latency…