Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Every minute, 23 girls around the world wed, according to the Girls Not Brides campaign, a coalition of more than 1,000 organisations across 100 countries. No child should be married. But girls are far more likely to be affected than boys, accounting for nine in 10 of those wed before 18, and their spouses are often much older men. The consequences, beyond the immediate threat of sexual violence, include the shortening of their education, increased risks of poverty and domestic abuse, and poor health, including high rates of maternal mortality. In spring, the Center for Global Development thinktank estimated that…

Videos of a woman telling police officers “I’m Muslim, you can’t arrest me” are fake.The clips, which have been shared on Facebook, show a woman wearing a niqab arguing with police in a supermarket, with an angry crowd of people behind them. In one clip, the woman claims “I’m Muslim, you can’t arrest me”, to which the officer replies: “That’s not how it works. You’re under arrest for theft.”The video ends with two women in niqabs being led away by a pair of police officers. A caption on all the posts says: “A shocking confrontation at a British supermarket has…

The Trump administration has threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if planned renovations for the performing arts venue are not allowed to be carried out, court documents show.Attorneys from the justice department have also asked for President Donald Trump’s name to be put back on the building after it was removed in June following a court order.”An order blocking the Board from appropriately recognising President Trump,” the lawyers argued, “will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop”.The venue has been among the storied sites in Washington that Trump has sought to renovate since…

The speech at the annual Meeting Rimini festival comes as Metsola seeks a third term at the helm of Parliament, potentially positioning her for a bid for the European Commission presidency in 2029. A Maltese national fluent in Italian, she regularly travels to Italy and meets officials in Rome, fueling speculation that she is working to build Italian support for 2029. Metsola took a stab at the EU’s own landmark packaging regulation, which passed during her last mandate — a law Italy has lobbied against in Brussels. The rules “impose rigid and counterproductive burdens on European small and medium-sized enterprises,”…

Wes Streeting has described receiving a mass of homophobic abuse since he was made defence secretary last month, while also saying his appointment had been welcomed by some in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as a sign of change.Until 2000, gay men and lesbian women were banned from serving in the UK military, with about 200-plus personnel thrown out of the forces each year due to their sexuality – an estimate, as proper records were not kept.Streeting, who is the first out gay defence secretary, told the All Talk podcast hosted by Iain Dale: “I have experienced more online homophobia…

If the system that elects MPs to Westminster was obviously the most democratic one available, there would be no need to use alternative modes when electing the UK’s devolved assemblies or England’s regional mayors. The fact that first past the post (FPTP) was not preferred when establishing those institutions reflects an acceptance that there are better ways to turn popular opinion into fair political representation. So why should the Commons stick with an inferior system?This question is raised by an amendment tabled to the representation of the people bill, which returns to parliament next week. The call to establish an…

Jack Wallen/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Google has changed the way sideloading works on Android.You must confirm you’re not being coerced into doing so.There’s also a 24-hour waiting period before the setting is available.Sideloading apps on Android is the process of installing an app from a downloaded APK file. Think of it like installing an app from an .exe or .msi file on Windows. You download the file, tap on it, and wait for it to install.That process has been around for quite some time. However, Google has, on and off, put…

“> Condition 1: Agents have to be reliable at the length of task a junior actually gets The best measurement we have here is METR’s time-horizon work. They time human experts on real software tasks, then find the task length at which a model succeeds 50% of the time. The main result is that this horizon doubled roughly every seven months from 2019 to 2025. METR’s updated Time Horizon 1.1 expanded the task suite by 34% and doubled the count of tasks running eight hours or longer. Independent readings of the 2024 to 2026 window suggest the doubling has since…

Meta has reached a proposed settlement worth up to approximately $18 billion with a bipartisan coalition of 52 attorneys generals over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to encourage compulsive use by children and teenagers. The settlement, which is awaiting court approval, resolves a lawsuit filed in 2023 by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general. The lawsuit accused Meta of designing features that drove compulsive use among young users while misleading users, families, and the public about the risks of its platforms. The attorneys general also alleged that Meta illegally collected and…

Bitcoin’s security-budget debate usually starts with one total: how much miners collect in transaction fees as the block subsidy shrinks.A July 2026 NBER working paper by Fabian Schär, Dario Thürkauf, and David Yermack points to a second variable. Using data from 2017 through 2025, the authors report that larger fee differences between adjacent Bitcoin blocks are associated with more competing blocks at the same height and a longer wait for the next block.The evidence is observational and identifies a network-level relationship, while miner intent and the cause of any individual block race remain unresolved. The finding still gives wallets, miners,…