UK Treasury drawing up new rules to police cryptocurrency markets
Cryptocurrencies will be regulated in a similar way to other financial products under legislation coming into force in 2027,The Treasury is drawing up rules that will require crypto companies to meet a set of standards overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA),Ministers have sought to overhaul the crypto market, which has ballooned in popularity as a way of investing money and making payments,Cryptocurrencies have not been subject to the same regulation as traditional financial products such as stocks and shares, which means that in many cases consumers do not enjoy the same level of protection,The government said the new rules would make the crypto industry more transparent, boost consumer confidence and make it easier to detect suspicious activity, impose sanctions and hold companies accountable.
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, said: “Bringing crypto into the regulatory perimeter is a crucial step in securing the UK’s position as a world-leading financial centre in the digital age.“By giving firms clear rules of the road, we are providing the certainty they need to invest, innovate and create high-skilled jobs here in the UK, while giving millions strong consumer protections, and locking dodgy actors out of the UK market.”Crypto companies, which can include crypto exchanges and digital wallets, must register with the FCA if they provide services that fall within the scope of the UK’s money-laundering regulations.The changes mooted by the Treasury will bring companies that provide crypto services into the remit of the FCA and mean the services are regulated in the same way as other financial products, including by being subject to transparency standards.Lucy Rigby, the minister for the City of London, said: “We want the UK to be at the top of the list for crypto assets firms looking to grow and these new rules will give firms the clarity and consistency they need to plan for the long term.
”The cryptocurrency market has suffered from turbulence amid growing investor fears about a potential artificial intelligence bubble,Banking industry data in October showed that the amount of money lost to investment scams by UK consumers had surged by 55% in a year, with fake cryptocurrency thought to top the list,A Chinese woman living in the UK was convicted in September over a multibillion-pound bitcoin fraud,Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, orchestrated a fraud in China between 2014 and 2017 that left 128,000 people out of pocket,The 45-year-old stored the proceeds in bitcoin but UK authorities made a breakthrough in the case when they raided a Hampstead mansion in 2018 and seized devices from Qian holding 61,000 bitcoins, worth more than £5bn at current prices.
The Metropolitan police believe it is the largest single cryptocurrency seizure in the world,Qian pleaded guilty at Southwark crown court on Monday to acquiring and possessing cryptocurrency that was criminal property,Ministers are also drawing up plans to ban political donations made with cryptocurrency, amid concerns that it is difficult to determine their origin and ownership,Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which became the country’s first party to accept contributions in digital currency this year, is believed to have received its first registrable donations in cryptocurrency this autumn,It has set up a crypto portal to receive contributions, saying it is subject to “enhanced” checks.
Reform this month received £9m from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency investor and businessman based in Thailand – the largest donation made by a living person to a British political party.
Elon Musk teams with El Salvador to bring Grok chatbot to public schools
Elon Musk is partnering with the government of El Salvador to bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country, according to a Thursday announcement by xAI. Over the next two years, the plan is to “deploy” the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an “AI-powered education program”.xAI’s Grok is more known for referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and espousing far-right conspiracy theories than it is for public education. Over the past year, the chatbot has spewed various antisemitic content, decried “white genocide” and claimed Donald Trump won the 2020 election.Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, is now entrusting the chatbot to create curricula in classrooms across the country
Disney wants you to AI-generate yourself into your favorite Marvel movie
Users of OpenAI’s video generation app will soon be able to see their own faces alongside characters from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and Disney’s animated films, according to a joint announcement from the startup and Disney on Thursday. Perhaps you, Lightning McQueen and Iron Man are all dancing together in the Mos Eisley Cantina.Sora is an app made by OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, which allows users to generate videos of up to 20 seconds through short text prompts. The startup previously attempted to steer Sora’s output away from unlicensed copyrighted material, though with little success, which prompted threats of lawsuits by rights holders.Disney announced that it would invest $1bn in OpenAI and, under a three-year deal perhaps worth even more than that large sum, that it would license about 200 of its iconic characters – from R2-D2 to Stitch – for users to play with in OpenAI’s video generation app
Musk calls Doge only ‘somewhat successful’ and says he would not do it again
Elon Musk has said the aggressive federal job-cutting program he headed early in Donald Trump’s second term, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), was only “a little bit successful” and he would not lead the project again.Musk said he wouldn’t want to repeat the exercise, talking on the podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a rightwing personality with a rising profile who was a Doge adviser and who is married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration deputy chief of staff.Asked whether Doge had achieved what he’d hoped, Musk said: “We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.”Doge created chaos and distress in the government machine in Washington DC, and by May more than 200,000 federal workers had been laid off and roughly 75,000 had accepted buyouts as a result of purges by Musk’s external team of often-young zealots
ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’
Pregnant immigrants in ICE monitoring programs are avoiding care, fearing detention during labor and deliveryIn early September, a woman, nine months pregnant, walked into the emergency obstetrics unit of a Colorado hospital. Though the labor and delivery staff caring for her expected her to have a smooth delivery, her case presented complications almost immediately.The woman, who was born in central Asia, checked into the hospital with a smartwatch on her wrist, said two hospital workers who cared for her during her labor, and whom the Guardian is not identifying to avoid exposing their hospital or patients to retaliation.The device was not an ordinary smartwatch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled
From ‘glacier aesthetic’ to ‘poetcore’: Pinterest predicts the visual trends of 2026 based on its search data
Next year, we’ll mostly be indulging in maximalist circus decor, working on our poetcore, hunting for the ethereal or eating cabbage in a bid for “individuality and self-preservation”, according to Pinterest.The organisation’s predictions for Australian trends in 2026 have landed, which – according to the platform used by interior decorators, fashion lovers and creatives of all stripes – includes 1980s, aliens, vampires and “forest magic”.Among the Pinterest 2026 trends report’s top 21 themes are “Afrohemian” decor (searches for the term are on the rise by baby boomers and Gen X); “glitchy glam” (asymmetric haircuts and mismatching nails); and “cool blue” (drinks, wedding dresses and makeup with a “glacier aesthetic”).Pinterest compared English-language search data from September 2024 to August 2025 with those of the year before and claims it has an 88% accuracy rate. More than 9 million Australians use Pinterest each month
UK police forces lobbied to use biased facial recognition technology
Police forces successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system known to be biased against women, young people, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that another version produced fewer potential suspects.UK forces use the police national database (PND) to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches, whereby a “probe image” of a suspect is compared to a database of more than 19 million custody photos for potential matches.The Home Office admitted last week that the technology was biased, after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men, and said it “had acted on the findings”.Documents seen by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates reveal that the bias has been known about for more than a year – and that police forces argued to overturn an initial decision designed to address it.Police bosses were told the system was biased in September 2024, after a Home Office-commissioned review by the NPL found the system was more likely to suggest incorrect matches for probe images depicting women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under
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