Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Markets ignore obvious risks for years until some unexpected trigger turns buyers into sellers. This summer’s rising global bond yields reflect investor concerns across advanced economies over ballooning government debts, persistent inflation, and shrinking central bank balance sheets. But no sovereign analyst of U.S. treasuries can ignore the signs of rising U.S. geopolitical risks everywhere from Tokyo, to Tehran, to the U.S. Treasury itself. Traditionally, investors have loaned money to the U.S. government because they believe that the country’s business model will reliably produce the world’s most innovative companies regardless of any drama in Washington. But they also expect leadership…

It’s not yet clear how many lives were lost when floodwaters tore through northern Nepal on Wednesday. But the scale of the destruction — at Nepal’s border with the Tibet region of China and along the gorges of the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli Rivers — can already be seen from the air and felt on the ground.“Thoughts first for human life,” Kanak Mani Dixit, a famous Nepali publisher, wrote on social media, “then infrastructure along the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli.”Twenty-five miles of roads were erased, according to the Department of Roads, stranding a quarter of a million Nepalis who live in the most affected…

More recently he was treated with cortisone for a rare blood condition, haemolytic anaemia, which causes the number of red blood cells in the body to be reduced. He entered hospital on 17 August and his son became regent, taking over his activities.This year alone the Norwegian royal family has faced compounded personal health challenges and scandals that have left them under almost constant public scrutiny.The rape trial of Marius Borg Høiby, convicted of a litany of offences by judges in Oslo in June, hung over the royal family for many months. He has now appealed against a four-year jail…

Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley has criticised Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s cost of living and retail policies as “populist reactions”.In a letter to Burnham, Ashley accused him of “jumping on ‘everyday fixes’ or bandwagons” while businesses struggled with the government’s “disastrous” business rates policies and higher employment costs.He also described a previous proposal of increasing business rates on large warehouses to help reduce them for pubs and clubs as “delusional”.A Downing Street spokesperson said Burnham would “build a new economy that backs British business, delivers growth in every postcode and ensures the essentials in life… are affordable again.”Promises including cutting…

He bounded into the packed rally, a spring-heeled intruder whose very presence announced a coup at last year’s Labour conference. And so it was. Andy Burnham spoke with ebullient self-confidence, yet without aggression or a barrage of insults. They tried to stop him with a bogus constitutional fix barring him from standing in Gorton and Denton. But those Labour hierarchs lost it without him. His subsequent Makerfield victory proved their mistake and opened the door right into No 10 without dispute.At that standing-room-only rally on proportional representation he made a pitch-perfect noteless speech of personal passion about the failure of…

The UK has its own measures in place to protect children online.The Online Safety Act mainly put restrictions on what content young people can see online.But the UK government has gone further than the US ban already.Earlier this year, it announced an outright social media ban for under-16s, which will take effect in 2027.Some other measures will apply to 16 and 17-year-olds, such as curfews and restrictions during certain hours of the day.The US has to some extent followed the same path: Start by policing the content on the platforms, then move on to restricting access to social media.But the…

Academic researchers have disclosed a Rowhammer attack impacting NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory that defeats error correction codes (ECC), the mitigation NVIDIA recommends against GPU Rowhammer, and enables denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation to a root shell. Dubbed GPUThor, the attack was developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, who hammered four DRAM banks for 24 hours each on four Ampere-class cards, inducing bit flips on each. The following GPUs were tested and found vulnerable – RTX A6000 (48 GB GDDR6) RTX A5000 (24 GB GDDR6) RTX A4500 (20 GB GDDR6) RTX A4000 (16 GB GDDR6) Mounting the…

Ethereum’s next attempt to expand base-layer throughput includes contracts and transactions that create persistent state, which would cost far more gas for new accounts, storage slots, and deployed bytecode.The Ethereum Foundation said the candidate Glamsterdam schedule is designed to support roughly three times more base throughput by aligning gas charges with the network resources each operation consumes.The two proposals are scheduled for Glamsterdam, yet EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 both retain formal Review status. Ethereum’s official roadmap plans the upgrade for the fourth quarter of 2026, with fixed Sepolia, Hoodi, and mainnet fork dates still unannounced.That leaves builders a testing window before…

Deep inside the brain, a small group of nerve cells helps control how strongly pain signals are felt. Under normal conditions, this system can suppress pain traveling through the spinal cord. After nerve damage, however, the same circuitry can become overactive and help sustain chronic pain. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have now identified a mechanism that helps explain this switch and may offer a way to reverse it. In mice, they found that receptors on cells in the brain’s main alert and stress center can act as biological brakes that restrain pain. These receptors…

Read this article in English. Esta historia cuenta con el apoyo del Centro Pulitzer. JALAPA, Guatemala—En una tarde calurosa y bochornosa, en el pequeño pueblo montañoso de El Duraznal, Soila Elizabeth Cruz recogía basura plástica atrapada en la tierra debajo de una cerca con alambre de púas, mientras los camiones pasaban zumbando. La comunidad se reúne cada tres a cinco meses para recolectar los desechos ubicuos, dijo Cruz en español mientras arrojaba botellas de plástico destruidas y envoltorios en una gran bolsa de basura.  “Estamos haciendo esto como comunidad, así se ve limpio y organizado”, dijo Cruz, conocida como Betty.…