Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Lobbying expenditures dropped about $100 million in the second quarter of 2026. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) Lobbying spending neared $1.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026, the second-highest second-quarter total since Congress started requiring quarterly lobbying reports in 2008, with pharmaceutical companies, major manufacturers and tech firms ranking among the top spenders at the midpoint of the year. The Q2 total was down 0.5% – or, about $6.9 million – from the same period in 2025, when it set the second-quarter record, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of federal lobbying reports. The modest dip marks a cooling off after…

China is becoming the indispensable lifeline for Russia’s sanctioned liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Between August 2025 and June 2026, the southern Chinese port of Beihai received more than 40 cargoes from Russian LNG projects under U.S. sanctions. Offered to Chinese buyers at discounts reportedly reaching 30 percent to 40 percent below prevailing Asian spot prices, these cargoes represent more than isolated acts of sanctions evasion. Together, they point to the emergence of a sanctions-resistant LNG trading system. That system would not exist without solving two problems: moving sanctioned LNG out of Russia and finding a reliable destination for it.…

New Delhi, India – The vapour heat treatment (VHT) facility in Rehmanpur village of Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh – used to sterilise fruit and vegetables – was preparing for the busiest time of the year when Japanese quarantine inspectors turned up in March.Export documents had been cleared, shipping schedules finalised, and growers in the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat reserved their best Alphonso and Kesar mangoes for export to Japan, one of Asia’s premium markets.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listEverything appeared set for the season to begin when production ground…

Nigel Farage can be confident of victory against a man posing as an ennobled space traveller with a dustbin on his head. At least, in Clacton he can.The refusal of major parties to contest this week’s byelection sets the bar low. But even if the competition were more serious than Count Binface, the Reform UK leader would be the favourite to win on his chosen turf. He picked the constituency as his safest shot for a parliamentary seat in the 2024 general election for a reason. Now he is betting that the stench of scandal around his personal and party…

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s special projects lead and the company’s former COO, announced his departure after an eight-year stint at the AI lab. In an internal memo he later posted to X, Lightcap told colleagues he’d be starting “something new.”“Over the last few months, I’ve been focused on the next horizon and what would stand in the way of mission success,” Lightcap wrote. “I believe there are a few important new things the world will need to get right as we enter this next period. I … am excited to help you all advance the mission from a different vantage point.”…

Cisco informed customers on Tuesday that it has released patches for a zero-day vulnerability affecting firewalls running Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) software. The security hole, tracked as CVE-2026-20349, is related to the processing of HTTP requests.  A remote, unauthenticated attacker can cause an appliance to reload and enter a denial-of-service (DoS) condition by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to the Remote Access SSL VPN service.  The vulnerability was discovered internally by Cisco and also reported by an external researcher.  Cisco said it became aware of active exploitation in August 2026, but…

The demand for this bullish exposure suggests some investors expect the ongoing choppy price action in BTC to end with a decisive move toward $70,000. Perhaps, they expect the CPI to come in softer-than-expected, lifting risk assets higher. Economists currently expect the July report to show headline CPI rising 0.1% month-over-month and 3.4% year-over-year. Core CPI, which strips out food and energy, is forecast to rise 0.2% month-over-month and 2.5% year-over-year, according to consensus estimates from Reuters, Dow Jones, and Bloomberg surveys.Other traders are less focused on direction and more interested in a jump in volatility.“We reiterate our recommendation to…

Members of Peterborough Astronomical Society will be watching from Ferry Meadows country park.Luton Astronomical Society has an event taking place at Stopsley Common in Bedfordshire and the Bedford Astronomical Society is hosting another at the Piazzi Smyth Observatory at Bedford School.West Stow Country Park in Suffolk will be hosting a pre-booked eclipse event from 17:45, while Dash Astronomical Society has moved its planned event at fire-hit Dunwich Heath to nearby Darsham Village Hall.In Essex, people can watch the partial eclipse from Southend-on-Sea pier, Munnings Museum in Dedham hosts an event and Loughton Astronomical Society is holding another at Theydon Bois…

In India’s Western Ghats, sacred groves – small, community-protected forest patches dedicated to local deities – are far more effective at regenerating native tree species than surrounding village lands, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough. For the study, a research team from the Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF) mapped and measured 82 giant, old-growth trees across 20 species in the village of Vanzole in the northern Western Ghats, the mountain chain that runs alongside India’s west coast. The researchers defined giant trees as those that measure more than 1 meter (3.3 feet). The researchers found…

Richard Eltringham (Letters, 5 August) argues that climate change necessitates switching to a planting palette of drought-tolerant non-native species. It’s not as simple as that. Horticulturists focus on the value of non-native plants for pollinators, but other ecological interactions (for example, food plants for insect larvae) are harder to replace. Native oaks support 2,300 other species; drought-adapted non-natives can’t substitute for all these interactions.Our native species themselves aren’t tied to a preindustrial climate; there is evidence of rapid microevolutionary changes in oaks in response to recent climate change, so those crisping saplings might be part of selection for drought adaptation.…