Author: Vidya Saras

UK government borrowing has climbed to its second-highest level on record for the first eight months of the financial year, underlining the scale of the challenge facing Rachel Reeves despite stronger tax receipts. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the government borrowed £132.3 billion between April and November, £10 billion more than over the same period last year. The only higher total for that stretch of the year was recorded in 2020, when emergency spending during the Covid-19 pandemic pushed borrowing to unprecedented levels. Borrowing in November alone came in at £11.7 billion, £1.9 billion lower…

On-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant has revealed why the XRP price keeps crashing, recently dropping below the psychological $2 level. The platform noted that the XRP ETF approval has failed to stop the selling pressure but instead looks to have escalated it.  Why The XRP Price Is Crashing Despite ETF Success In a CryptoQuant report, analyst PelinayPA revealed that the XRP price is facing significant selling pressure from whales holding between $100,000 and 1m XRP and those holding above 1m. These XRP whales are said to account for the majority of inflows into the crypto exchange Binance.  Related Reading These transfers…

Many of you know that the Ethereum platform grew out of the realization that blockchains can go far beyond currency, together with a frustration with the limitations of previous projects. The core idea was simple: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing users to build any kind of applications on top. Over time, the vision evolved and expanded. The blockchain remains a crucial centerpiece, but it is ultimately only part of a larger vision of “web 3.0” as described by Gavin Wood here: a more secure, trustworthy and globally accessible internet for agreements, finance, auditing, tracking and simple…

Walking into a casino has always been about flashing a shiny card, shaking a host’s hand, or lining up at the front desk. Now a new pass is entering the scene: the NFT. Short for non-fungible token, an NFT can sit in a crypto wallet and still open real doors in the gaming world. Sportsbook fans interested in mixing tech with table games should swing by www.norge-casino.com for fresh ideas on modern RTP figures. By turning membership cards into digital collectibles, operators hope to make entry faster, safer, and a lot more fun. Each token acts like a barcode that…

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that was another executive order that came out. I think it was literally titled something around eliminating data silos. Another thing that on its surface sounds good: data silos, inefficient, sounds bad, but there’s a really good reason to keep a lot of this information separate. You don’t necessarily want the federal government to be able to knit all of that together to track you across any platform to know your financial data, your health data, your whereabouts, all of that.Brian Barrett: Yeah. I mean, the Trump administration now wants to vet, what is it, five years…

Politics / December 19, 2025 This week’s “Elie v. US” explores the authoritarian threat beneath Trump’s bonuses for military families. Plus, a case for getting rid of the Second Amendment. Ad Policy Donald Trump addresses the nation on December 17, 2025.(Doug MILLS / POOL / AFP via Getty Images) This is a preview of Nation Justice Correspondent Elie Mystal’s new weekly newsletter. Click here to receive this newsletter in your inbox each Friday.  As you know, there was another school shooting this week, this time at Brown University. The coverage has been what we’ve all come to expect: Republicans act like there’s nothing…

Even networks long considered “untrainable” can learn effectively with a bit of a helping hand. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown that a brief period of alignment between neural networks, a method they call guidance, can dramatically improve the performance of architectures previously thought unsuitable for modern tasks.Their findings suggest that many so-called “ineffective” networks may simply start from less-than-ideal starting points, and that short-term guidance can place them in a spot that makes learning easier for the network. The team’s guidance method works by encouraging a target network to match the internal representations of…

A shift to Telegram More recently, the researchers identified a new Tonnerre variant that’s advertised as v50, as well as an unknown new Foudre version that goes along with it. These versions use a new C2 server structure and, most importantly, can download a file from the server that enables Telegram communication via its API. The Telegram feature is enabled only for a select number of victims, but the researchers managed to use the API to query the configured Telegram channel. It had two members, one of which was a channel bot and one user named Ehsan written in Farsi,…

Veteran trader Peter Brandt said the potential passage of the US Clarity Act is unlikely to have a significant impact on Bitcoin’s price, after indications that it could pass Congress as soon as January.“Is it a world-shaking macro development? Nope. Needed for sure, but not something that should redefine value,” Brandt told Cointelegraph on Friday. “Having an asset regulated, particularly an asset for which die-hard investors never wanted to be regulated, is not an earth-shattering event,” he added.His comments came after White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks said on Thursday, ”We are closer than ever to passing the…

Vicki Gunvalson might not be the only OG appearing on season 20 of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” According to new reports, Jacqueline Laurita, a “Real Housewives of New Jersey” alum, was approached to appear on the upcoming season. Laurita appeared on several seasons of the Jersey-based iteration of the popular reality TV franchise. Years after her move from the Garden State to Las Vegas, Laurita and her family relocated to Orange County, California. In addition to her proximity to the show, producers reportedly want her to appear on the series because of her established connections with the other…