Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The California valley with the most dairy farms in the state will follow stricter water pollution requirements following years of advocacy and a marathon six-hour meeting this week. The State Water Resources Control Board unanimously agreed to adopt the regulations under what several environmental groups call a long overdue dairy order.  Nitrogen from the manure dairies produce turns into excess nitrate in soil, waterways and groundwater, and can eventually contaminate drinking water. Families and children in the Central Valley “are living in crisis,” said Leslie Martinez, of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability and Defensores del Valle Central para…

Monday must have been a historical first. Never before have three of the four “nations” of the United Kingdom jointly demanded freedom to vote for its dissolution. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have lost confidence in England. They declared in Cardiff that the unionist government at Westminster is “coming to an end”.There was no such Celtic alliance against the Normans, Edward I or Cromwell. Celtic MPs have never formed a voting coalition in parliament. The Victorian Liberal party advanced “home rule for all”, but that was not independence and it got nowhere. Ireland rebelled, but it did so alone. When…

A shooting at a high school in southern Philippines has left at least one person dead and several injured.The incident happened on Friday afternoon at Banga National High School in South Cotabato, in Mindanao province.Local media and officials have reporting conflicting casualty figures. The identities of the shooter and the victims have not been confirmed.The Department of Education said in a statement that it was “deeply concerned by the reported shooting incident”.”Our immediate priority is the safety and well-being of our learners, teachers and school personnel,” the statement said, adding it was coordinating with authorities to verify the incident and…

There was even more excitement when Carney gave his own speech to the European Parliament a day later. Alas, there were fewer EU lawmakers present for Carney than there were for von der Leyen because of that long-standing MEP tradition of pissing off home at the earliest opportunity. Between those Strasbourg meetings, Carney made a whistle-stop trip to the U.K. to watch the biggest football match of the calendar: Everton vs Wolverhampton Wanderers in the third round of the second-most important domestic cup competition (sponsored by an energy drink). Carney went to watch football with Andy Burnham in what sociologists…

Heather Williams has been shouted at in the street, received death threats, threats of sexual violence, and had dog faeces left on her doorstep. At one point, she didn’t leave her home alone for more than three months.It was not how she expected her life to be when she first ran to be a Conservative district councillor in South Cambridgeshire nine years ago.“It is very intimidating. I’ve had people threatening to rape me in my sleep, a man once threatened to shoot me,” said Williams, now opposition group leader on the council. “You do question whether you’re doing the right…

Burnham to meet Irish PM at No 10 North as UK bids to get exemptions from EU’s ‘Made in Europe’ planGood morning. On Monday, at her summit in Cardiff with the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin president, joked about Liverpool being the 33rd county of Ireland. Andy Burnham is basically a Scouser; he was born in Liverpool and supports a Liverpool football team, despite being brought up in Culcheth, a village mid-way between Liverpool and Manchester, which made him enough of a Manc to be the city’s mayor. He also has Irish…

Design Within Reach carries some of the best and coolest home decor you can find, from modern couches to fantastic office chairs and fun designers like Herman Miller and Dusen Dusen. It’s not a cheap store to shop at, though, which is what makes these coupons something to jump on. Unlock online-exclusive discounts of up to 50%, free shipping, plus 20% off featured brands and 15% off office furniture bundles with Design Within Reach promo codes and Summer 2026 sale events. Save on hundreds of stylish items, including our favorite Design Within Reach office chairs, plus some other fantastic home…

Spinning up a flashy prototype with an LLM has never been easier, but in production, building an agent is just the opening 10% sprint. The real marathon, the brutal 90% that determines whether enterprise AI crashes or soars, comes down to relentless evaluation, regression testing, and post-deployment optimization. While anyone can ‘vibe code’ an AI assistant over a weekend, virtually no one can ‘vibe operate’ an autonomous system at enterprise scale without robust guardrails and deep data plumbing. Salesforce is not the first player to build an agent harness, but Agentforce is taking aim at the market’s heavyweights. By weaving…

Microsoft has fixed a known issue that causes copy-and-paste failures for some Excel users after installing the September 2026 KB5002914 security update. This follows a wave of customer reports on the Microsoft Q&A forums and Reddit that KB5002914 breaks copy-and-paste, autofill, and formula dragging in Excel. “Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified,” Microsoft said when it confirmed these issues earlier this week and blamed them on what it described as a code regression. “When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message.”…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved tokenized stocks trading in a move indicating that the regulator will push ahead with rulemaking despite the Clarity Act not moving forward.  Wall Street’s top regulator said Thursday that it was offering a five-year exemption to platforms that facilitate trading of tokenized stocks. Major crypto companies have long wanted to get such assets on the blockchain.  Lawmakers blocked the Clarity Act in a procedural vote on Tuesday. Regulators had said before the vote that regardless of whether the landmark legislation passed, they’d still start regulating the crypto industry.  Today, we are taking…