Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A series of deadly heat waves from May to August overwhelmed Germany’s healthcare and emergency response systems and led to an estimated 16,000 heat-related deaths during the summer, the most heat mortalities ever recorded in the highly developed country. At the 2026 Extreme Weather Congress in Hamburg this month, experts from local and regional governments, hospitals and universities said that Germany’s advanced climate research and weather technology provided accurate forecasts of persistently dangerous high temperatures, but the death toll exposed gaps between scientific knowledge and the country’s adaptation efforts, as well as shortcomings in the emergency response.  A report released…

Greggs has announced plans to close four of its factories, in a move that could result in 740 job losses over the next two and a half years.The bakery chain said it was consulting on the closures, which would initially cost £60m when including disruption costs and redundancy payments, but then could create £20m of savings each year by 2028.The proposed cuts come as Greggs reported stronger sales growth in its most recent quarter at 7.7%, up from 7.2% in the first half of the year. The company said the closures, “whilst difficult, are necessary” to ensure it can grow…

Among the areas being considered for closer cooperation are semiconductors, quantum technologies, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and space. In the waiting room Von der Leyen touches down in Albania for talks on Wednesday as part of her tour of the Western Balkans. She’ll also visit Kosovo and North Macedonia, which will miss out on an expedited pathway to join the EU under the new plan, and will use her visit to demand economic benefits of closer alignment. “Gradual integration should be tangible for our citizens and businesses,” Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, told POLITICO. “We want greater access to the EU…

Andy Burnham says rejoining the EU among all ‘the options’ being considered for better relationship with EuropeGood morning. Andy Burnham’s speech is getting a mixed review in the papers, but there is general consensus that it is a consequential one – not one that we will have forgotten within a fortnight or so, but one that will make the next list of all-time important Labour conference speeches of the last 50 years.If you are still catching up, here are three good places to start.Pippa Crerar’s overnight splash for the Guardian.Rafael Behr’s take in comment.The Guardian’s view in its editorial.The conference…

Since it was introduced by the coalition government in 2011, the triple lock has guaranteed that the UK state pension rises each year in line with whichever is the highest of inflation, average wages, or 2.5%.Burnham said that from April 2030, instead, it would only rise in line with the highest of inflation or 2.5%.The prime minister added that “it will hold its value relative to earnings over time”.We are still awaiting full details from the government, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think tank, external says the new proposed system would ensure that the state pension rises by…

LG makes many of the best TVs you can buy. Its C-series TVs are our top pick for the best OLED TV and have been for quite some time. Pair it with one of the brand’s great soundbars, and you have a top-tier home theater setup that will last for years. While WIRED loves LG mostly for its TVs, the brand is an electronics giant that makes excellent computer monitors and very competitive home appliances like smart refrigerators. These are all big-ticket items, though, so here’s where to find LG promo codes and other ways to save on LG discounts for these often big-ticket items.Save 20% With Today’s LG Promo CodesIf…

Perplexity has released Photon, an in-house retrieval and ranking engine written in Rust. It replaces an open-source engine Perplexity had forked for its AI-native search stack. Photon now handles retrieval and ranking for all production traffic. It also powers a new Fast Search mode in the Perplexity Search API. Perplexity reports single-call latency of 160 ms at p50 and 230 ms at p95. Is it deployable? Yes, as a hosted API. Set search_type: “fast” on POST /search and pay $1 per 1,000 requests. Photon itself is not open source, so the engine cannot be self-hosted. Why Perplexity Replaced its Old…

Ravie LakshmananSep 30, 2026Vulnerability / Network Security Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed technical details of a recently patched critical security flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88772 (CVSS score: 9.5), has been described as a memory overflow bug in the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol handling that’s rooted in the NetScaler Packet Processing Engine (NSPPE). “Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway contain an improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer vulnerability that could allow for remote code execution or denial-of-service,” the U.S.…

In brief Anthropic posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025 on $4.6 billion in revenue, though about $34 billion of it was a non-cash charge tied to convertible financing. Its operating loss topped $8 billion, and the company plans about $518 billion in cloud and computing spending in coming years, against $20.28 billion in cash at the end of 2025. The prospectus warns its AI models could pose existential risks to humanity, while backers eye a valuation above $2 trillion for an IPO expected after November’s midterms. Anthropic lost nearly $42 billion in 2025, according to a…

Scanning the specimens is not a trivial process. Not only does each one need to be photographed, but the tiny labels containing important scientific information, often handwritten, sometimes centuries ago, also have to be recorded. The team involved calculated that it would have taken hundreds of years to do this manually, but using robots and AI this process can now be done in a decade, according to Sarah Addezio, the DiSSCo UK’s programme delivery director.”What we’re able to do now is connect and analyse that information at a scale that’s unprecedented and has not been possible before.”One hundred museums, botanic…