Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

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…

Die AfD steckt in einem Konflikt über ihre einstige Kernforderung. Während Parteichefin Alice Weidel und der europapolitische Sprecher Peter Boehringer den EU-Austritt als Ultima Ratio ins Spiel bringen, wirbt der Chef der Parteijugend Pascal Hohm für den Erhalt des Euro. Warum dieser Vorstoß für Turbulenzen sorgt, analysieren Pauline von Pezold und Frederik Schindler. In Sachsen-Anhalt greift die AfD derweil nach den Schalthebeln der Macht: Der Abgeordnete Tobias Rausch soll Landtagspräsident werden, während Ulrich Siegmund im Dezember als Ministerpräsident kandidiert. Ob das Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht dabei zum heimlichen Mehrheitsbeschaffer wird, zeigt der Blick hinter die Kulissen des neuen Landtags. Für diplomatischen…

A number of people have admitted to tears during Andy Burnham’s Labour party conference speech, and most of them mean when he talked about his father, who died very recently. But then there were a few (not me) who welled up when he announced a commission on electoral reform. It was just the sheer shock of it: that we may finally have a prime minister who will follow through on his own long-held beliefs and remain loyal to his long-term support base, even if it makes him avoidable enemies and, medium-term, destroys Labour’s only-trodden path to victory. It felt a…

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has reacted warmly to Andy Burnham’s suggestion that the UK could rejoin the EU.“Welcome back,” the French leader said in English with a smile at a news conference in Madrid on Wednesday. Macron continued in French: “If the British want to come back and if the prime minister is moving in that direction, I think that is very good news, both for his country and for the Europeans.”Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said his country would open its arms to any bid from the UK to rejoin the EU.The two leaders were responding to the…

Speech by Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the 8th Annual EC-EIB-ESM Capital Markets SeminarLuxembourg, 30 September 2026Inflation is back and weighing once again on people’s everyday lives. Just as the euro area was putting the post-pandemic inflation surge behind it, new shocks have hit. For monetary policy, this sequence of shocks poses challenges. It can affect the behaviour of households and firms, the formation of inflation expectations and, ultimately, the persistence of inflation.[1]The ECB has adapted to this shock-prone environment in two ways.First, as of 2023 we have made our monetary policy framework more…

When the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in 2018 that he had created the first gene-edited babies, the experiment was widely condemned as reckless and premature. It ended with He in prison.But that hasn’t stopped the push for gene-edited human embryos, with biotech entrepreneur Cathy Tie arguing that doing so isn’t just urgent—it’s a “moral imperative.”Tie is the 30-year-old founder of Origin Genomics, a company that launched in March with plans to bring gene-edited embryos to IVF clinics. In a new commentary published in the journal Trends in Genetics, she argues for public funding and new regulatory pathways to advance…

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning of a new critical vulnerability in MikroTik RouterOS that could lead to remote code execution or cause a denial-of-service condition. Tracked as CVE-2026-84411, the security issue is a pre-authentication integer underflow in RouterOS’s web-management HTTP request handling. CISA says that a single crafted request can produce code execution with root privileges or denial of service. “The web management service in affected RouterOS versions contains an integer underflow in its HTTP request body handling that is reachable before authentication,” reads the alert. “This can be leveraged by an unauthenticated network attacker…

Stablecoin card spending is accelerating to record levels, but the payment rail remains a fraction of the traditional card market.Paymentscan tracked about $1.17 billion in spending through Sept. 30, already above August’s completed total and the highest monthly figure in its displayed series.Cuy Sheffield, head of Visa’s crypto unit, described stablecoin-linked cards as being in “hyper growth mode,” as issuers increasingly connect dollar-denominated tokens to existing card networks rather than wait for merchants to accept crypto directly.Notably, the growth has continued even without a corresponding increase in payment frequency. Paymentscan recorded 11.0 million transactions in September, down from 11.07 million…