Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

When bovine TB led to the loss of his entire herd, dairy farmer Mervyn Kelso struggled with the sadness of the empty fields and the silence of the milking yard.It was a traumatic time for a man who had farmed his whole life, and it was hard watching his neighbours tend to their cows.His sister suggested he should join the Farmers’ Choir and that turned out to be a “great lifter”.Fast forward four years, and Mervyn has sang for the King, met musical royalty and his choir is up for a national award. Mervyn’s first batch of cows were lost…

Ursula von der Leyen brought a new mascot to her annual State of the Union address to the European parliament: the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney.The leader of a plucky, like-minded liberal democracy, locked in an unsought trade war with its much bigger bully of a neighbour, Carney crossed the Atlantic and attended this flagship event of Europe’s political calendar to demonstrate his country’s shared values and desire to get closer to the EU. He was rewarded with a standing ovation and the first ever offer of an (invented) status of “associate member” of the EU.The grand-sounding title is more…

“All parties in the Duma, every single one, voted in favour of 170 laws to support the special military operation,” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov told me with obvious pride about the last parliament.”In that sense there is 100% agreement in the Duma.”I caught up with Zyuganov on the campaign trail outside Moscow at a bread and biscuit factory. As I watched rows of identical-looking loaves speeding along the conveyer I thought about Russia’s parliament. It’s not that all parties in the Duma are identical: some are more nationalist, others – like Zyuganov’s party – more left-wing. But when it…

Households feel the impact of a rising Bank rate through higher borrowing costs, but can benefit from more generous savings rates.Given the global picture, and market expectations of a higher Bank rate, a host of major lenders have already increased the cost of new fixed-rate mortgages in recent days.Andrew Montlake, chief executive of mortgage broker Coreco, said that the latest data showed that “the inflation dragon has not been fully slain”.”If inflation proves sticky, lenders’ funding costs stay under pressure, which makes cheaper mortgages harder to deliver,” he said.”We are already seeing lenders reprice upwards, so this will do little…

When Snap debuted its long-awaited smart glasses, Specs, earlier this year, the reveal was not only underwhelming but also a genuine disaster. The glasses — which cost a whopping $2,200 and are vaguely reminiscent of scuba gear — inspired jeers online and calls for the company’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, to resign. The company’s stock subsequently nosedived. Since then, Snap has clearly been looking for an opportunity to explain why Specs — a heavy, expensive piece of hardware that most casual consumers will probably be unable to afford — deserves to exist. This week, the company had its chance to make that argument.…

Parallels Desktop for Mac has a flaw that lets an ordinary local account run code as root, the highest level of access on a Mac, software company JFrog said this week. The attack needs code already running on the machine as a normal user, so it does not work over the network. JFrog says the fix is in Parallels Desktop 27, a version that Intel Macs cannot install. Yuval Moravchick, who leads JFrog’s vulnerability research team, published the finding on Tuesday and calls it ParaShells. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-90894, an identifier JFrog assigned itself, and JFrog rates it…

In brief The Fed raised its benchmark rate 25 basis points to a 3.75%-4.00% range in a unanimous vote, its first hike since 2023. Warsh said the economy “has indeed strengthened” but called inflation “the problem,” and declined to comment on Trump’s reaction. Bitcoin briefly spiked but then stabilized near $75,500, as the hike had already been priced in by markets. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since 2023, lifting its benchmark range to 3.75%-4.00% in a unanimous vote. It’s the clearest signal yet that Chair Kevin Warsh’s inflation talk was never just talk.”The…

While the calendar indicated that astronomical summer was winding down, a swath of the south-central United States was sweltering under a heat dome in mid-September 2026. This map shows air temperatures in the contiguous U.S. on September 15, 2026, at 4 p.m. Central Time (21:00 Universal Time), modeled at 2 meters (6.5 feet) above the ground. It was produced by combining satellite observations with temperatures predicted by a version of the GEOS (Goddard Earth Observing System) model, which uses mathematical equations to represent physical processes in the atmosphere. The darkest reds indicate areas where temperatures approached or exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104…

Conservationists are racing to rescue six orangutans believed to remain in a fire-affected High Conservation Value area inside an oil palm concession in Indonesia.At least five orangutans have already been rescued, according to YIARI, an Indonesian conservation NGO.First Resources, which owns the concession, says it enforces a strict “zero-burning policy” across all planting activities.Another, larger conservation area that once supported an estimated 200 orangutans has also been affected by fire.See All Key Ideas JAKARTA — Conservationists are racing to rescue orangutans from a fire-ravaged peat-swamp forest inside an RSPO-certified oil palm concession in West Kalimantan, with smoke still…

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief. The highlights this week: Nigerian President Bola Tinubu presses on with military reforms ahead of 2027 elections, Africa’s richest man launches the continent’s biggest-ever initial public offering, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo plans to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has appointed Maj. Gen. Ibikunle Ajose as the new top army commander for the northeast, the epicenter of the country’s Islamist insurgency, after the previous leader spent less than two years in the role. The move is the latest in a series of military…