Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A city in Nepal has received far more bodies than its morgues can accommodate.Bharatpur, the headquarters of Chitwan district, lies downstream from the devastated sites of the floods that killed hundreds of people this week, with many more still unaccounted for. The district has become the main collection point for bodies that were caught in the initial torrent of floodwaters, or that have been floating to the banks of the Bhotekoshi River since.By Friday afternoon, the remains of more than 220 people had washed down to the district, according to Nepal’s disaster management authority. But the morgues at hospitals across…

James Cleverly has resigned from the shadow cabinet to run for mayor of London.The Tory heavyweight, who was once home and foreign secretary and is shadow minister for housing, communities and local government, told the Sunday Times he will resign with immediate effect.The MP for Braintree, who lost his bid to lead the Conservatives to Kemi Badenoch, is considered a more moderate voice in a party that has lurched to the right. On breaking the news to Badenoch, Cleverly told the Sunday Times: “She took it very well. Kemi has been very gracious.”He added: “Our route to getting Kemi in…

Joseph Fink is the cocreator and cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale, arguably the most important fiction podcast ever. He’s also the creator of the noir podcast Unlicensed and Alice Isn’t Dead, which takes some of the conspiratorial cosmic horror of Night Vale and turns it into fodder for a more serious series about relationships, trauma, and the open road. There’s also a sequel series out now called Don’t Tell Alice that takes the story down an even darker path in which protagonist Keisha is the one with a secret.Joseph is also an accomplished author. In addition to co-writing the…

Pakistan has launched its virtual asset regulatory regime in less than six months while using just 8% of the budget allocated to build it, according to Bilal Bin Saqib, the country’s Minister of State and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA). Speaking at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong on August 28, Saqib said approximately $200,000 was used to build and operationalize the new regulatory framework, leaving roughly 92% of the approved budget unspent. “We used only 8% of our approved budget to get this done,” Saqib announced. “Government should not measure success by how much money it…

Dogs and humans may share some of the same biological patterns tied to lifespan, according to new research from the Dog Aging Project. The finding could give scientists a useful new way to investigate how aging works in both species. In a study recently published in The Journals of Gerontology, researchers examined metabolites, small chemicals and molecules created during normal processes in the body. They found that certain combinations of these metabolites were associated with earlier or later death in dogs in ways that closely resembled patterns previously identified in humans. “The molecules that are risky for dogs or protective…

TELA, Honduras — Mario never set out to become a lionfish hunter. An engineer by training and founder of the local dive center Tela Divers, he simply wanted to do something about the growing number of invasive lionfish appearing on the reef where he learned to dive. Native to the Indo-Pacific and thought to have arrived in the Caribbean through the aquarium trade, lionfish have spread rapidly across the region. With few natural predators, they consume large numbers of native reef fish. In Tela, Mario and a group of fellow divers began experimenting with their own specialized spears, then…

I write this while sitting on Charmouth beach in Dorset with my required reading of the Saturday Guardian, as I do regularly. Your editorial (The Guardian view on the export of fossils: they deserve national treasure status, 21 August) produced a hollow laugh as – this being the centre of fossil hunting on the Jurassic Coast – I am surrounded by armies of hammer-wielding tourists busy smashing the daylights out of any rock available around them. The vast majority have no idea which stone types are likely to bear fossils and don’t report any finds even if they are lucky.…

Entire towns wiped out. Roads, bridges and communication lines washed away. In just a matter of moments, tens of thousands of people were left devastated and disoriented as catastrophic floodwaters tore through the tranquil Himalayan valley.Four days later, as the rescue efforts in Nepal and neighboring Tibet continued on Saturday, the staggering scale of the flood’s devastation was coming into focus.The official count of missing people jumped to over 2,400, more than double the figure from a day before. The death toll rose to at least 675 and was expected to keep climbing. The morgues in several of the towns…

Comulytic Note Pro AI voice recorder pros and cons Pros Mic pickup quality is excellent.Battery life is superb.The card is small, unobtrusive, and easy to use. Cons Not a fan of proprietary charging cables.The app works hard to upsell users to paid tiers — and they’re not cheap.I have lingering privacy concerns. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.I’m old enough to have been taught a bunch of skills that are now essentially dead. Shorthand is one of those skills that I learned and used, and has since been pushed out of my brain by “Simpsons” quotes. I look…

Google has released Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash (gemini-omni-1.1-flash), a production update to its native multimodal video generation and editing model. The release moves Omni from a capable generator to a directable one: scene extension now reads up to 10 seconds of prior context instead of a single final frame, first and last frames can be pinned to control camera movement, drafts render in 360p at a third of 720p cost, finals upscale to 4K, and video clips can be passed as references for character consistency. Gemini Omni Flash is built on three properties Google distinguishes from prior video models: native…