Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

School closures are an alarming symptom of Britain’s shrinking birthrate. Several factors have contributed to falling enrolment, but the most significant is that people are having fewer children. Declining pupil numbers could be an excuse to free up spending for an ageing population. Instead, the government should see this as an opportunity to improve the quality of provision for young people.The fall has been most acute in inner London, where 90 schools have shut since 2021. In Southwark, where the number of children born each year has dropped by more than a third since 2010, eight primary schools have closed…

Interview with Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, conducted by Jean-Claude Bourbon and Marie Dancer on 16 and 28 September 202630 September 2026You have experienced all the major crises: the financial crisis of 2008 when you were the French Minister of the Economy, the Greek crisis and sovereign debt crisis in Europe when you were head of the International Monetary Fund, then later, as President of the ECB, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now the conflict in the Middle East. Has it become the normal state of affairs for the world to be in a crisis situation?…

ZDNET’s key takeaways Apple has unveiled a new security option called Impersonation Risk Detection. Added in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, this tries to protect you from social engineering scams. Apps that support the feature will warn you of a potential threat. Social engineering scams often succeed because they evade traditional security protections to trick you into doing something that puts you at risk. Now, Apple has created a new defense designed to protect iPhone and iPad users from these types of scams: Impersonation Risk Detection Also: A stranger can learn a lot about you in 5 minutes online –…

Cisco released security updates to address a critical zero-day in the Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (tracked as CVE-2026-76504) that attackers are actively exploiting to escalate to admin privileges. Formerly known as SD-WAN vManage, Catalyst SD-WAN Manager is network management software that lets admins monitor and manage up to 6,000 SD-WAN devices from a single dashboard. “In September 2026, the Cisco PSIRT became aware of active exploitation of this vulnerability,” the company warned on Wednesday. “Cisco strongly recommends that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability.” The CVE-2026-76504 vulnerability affects all deployments regardless of system configuration, was found…

Brazilian state-controlled oil company Petrobras has developed two blockchain applications using Cardano to track sustainability data for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and its Diesel R renewable fuel.According to a Wednesday announcement from the Cardano Foundation, the first application, developed with PUC-Rio’s Ledger Labs, tokenizes environmental attributes associated with SAF into digital tokens designed to prevent the same claim from being used more than once.The application uses a Book-and-Claim model, which allows the environmental benefit to be separated from the physical fuel and assigned to an airline, company or passenger even if the SAF is used elsewhere.The tokens, known as CS-SAF, contain…

First, the bad news: Of all the rivers in the contiguous United States, only 6 percent are both in healthy condition and meaningfully safeguarded. The good news is that many more may be just one repair away from thriving. A new map highlights where conservation money and attention would do the most good as the climate warms, researchers report September 16 in PLOS One. The effort is the most comprehensive to date, assessing the health of the lower 48 states’ rivers and streams. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. “We can…

Sri Lanka will host the first ever dedicated global conference on snakes from Oct. 1-4 in Kandy, central Sri Lanka.There will be several scientific sessions including plenaries, symposia, workshops and special events attended by more than 500 researchers and conservationists from 25 countries.Sri Lanka is home to some 112 snake species and is a biodiversity hotspot, with more than 56% of the country’s snake species found nowhere else on Earth.See All Key Ideas KANDY, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s cultural capital of Kandy will step into the global scientific spotlight from Oct. 1 to 4, 2026, as it…

In the aftermath of Andy Burnham’s speech to the Labour conference, media discussions are focusing on how to define social care and estimate its cost (How will Burnham’s national care service work – and how will it be funded?, 29 September).Most arguments assume that any new system will look like the existing one, with services outsourced to large companies, using contracts without scope for innovation, with rigidly defined targets, often delivered using poorly rewarded, precariously employed migrant workers.The reality is that many of the services needed by elderly and incapacitated people – such as cleaning, meal preparation, transport to medical…

Claim: Locks of Love, a charity that purports to provide hairpieces to children who have medical hair loss, scams donors by selling most donated hair for profit, resulting in over $8 million in revenue in 2023. Rating: What’s True Locks of Love sells donated hair that’s unusable in its children’s hairpieces in order to offset manufacturing costs. What’s False Contrary to the claim’s suggestions, Locks of Love is not a scam and it is highly rated by various credible charity accountability organizations. Tax filings indicate the charity has over $8 million in total assets — not revenue — which would include everything…

Tennessee’s execution of Christa Pike for a murder she committed at 18 years old was halted Wednesday about an hour before it was set to begin, as a federal appeals court sought to review whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered at her sentencing. The Tennessee attorney general’s office immediately asked the US Supreme Court to vacate the ‌stay order. This would have been the state’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years.  Read moreUS judge bars prosecutors from seeking death penalty against Luigi Mangione Pike, now 50, and her boyfriend were…