Connect with us

Crypto World

Dubai’s New AI Immigration Cleared 9.4 Million Travelers: The Future of Travel?

Published

on

Dubai’s New AI Immigration Cleared 9.4 Million Travelers: The Future of Travel?

Dubai’s AI border systems cleared 9.4 million travelers between January and June, its immigration authority says. Only a fraction of them walked past a camera without a passport, a boarding pass, or an officer to face.

The technology works. That makes the questions about it harder to wave away. Its speed is measured in seconds. Its safeguards are not measured publicly at all.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens

Advertisement

Dubai AI Immigration Scaled, But the Fast Lane Stayed Small

Dubai’s General Directorate of Identity and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) runs the system. It counted 9,464,057 users in the first half of 2026.

Almost all of them passed through Smart Gates, the older e-gate network. That was 9,024,736 crossings.

Just 439,321 people used the fully document-free lane, which GDRFA calls Travel Without Borders, or the Red Carpet. That is 4.6% of the total.

So the walk-past-a-camera experience is real. It is also rare, and it sits in one building. The lane runs at Terminal 3. GDRFA opened it in 2025 and has said it is extending it across departures and arrivals.

Advertisement

Using it takes one step in advance. Travelers link their passport to a biometric photo at a counter once. After that, cameras match the face to that record and pull up the flight automatically.

Up to 10 people can walk through together. Cases the system treats as suspicious are flagged for a manual check by an officer.

“Just by walking through this corridor, you have completed your exit,” said Brigadier Walid Ahmed Saeed, Assistant Deputy Director for Airport Affairs at GDRFA Dubai at the launch.

The speed claim is less settled than it looks. GDRFA says average processing fell from 12.5 seconds to 3.4 seconds, and calls that a 60% cut.

Those three figures cannot all be right. A drop from 12.5 to 3.4 is a 73% cut. A 60% cut from 12.5 would stop at 5 seconds.

Advertisement

Earlier accounts of the same lane cited 6 to 14 seconds per traveler. GDRFA has not said whether the lane sped up or the yardstick moved.

The Questions Scale Makes It Harder to Defer

The idea is not new either. Dubai installed airport e-gates in 2002. In October 2018, it opened a walk-through Smart Tunnel in Terminal 3, billed at the time as a world first.

That tunnel already needed no documents and claimed under 15 seconds. A 2021 upgrade cut the walk to between five and nine seconds. The document-free lane is the latest step in a 24-year program, not a debut.

Accuracy is the first open question. In December 2019, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tested 189 face algorithms from 99 developers.

Advertisement

False positive rates varied by factors of 10 or more across demographic groups. In high-quality passport-style photos, they ran highest for West African, East African, and East Asian faces, and lowest for Eastern Europeans. Women were falsely matched 2 to 5 times more often than men.

GDRFA has not published error rates for its own system.

Data is the second question. A face cannot be reissued like a password. Worldcoin’s iris-scanning network met that objection for years. The digital identity privacy risks raised there now apply to a state border camera.

Advertisement

Biometrics have drawn scrutiny elsewhere. China raised alarms over risks in biometric collection by private operators. Binance engaged a biometric verification partner to comply with Japan’s identity rules before re-entering the market.

Dubai’s rules are lagging behind its cameras. The UAE’s Personal Data Protection Law took effect on January 2, 2022. Its implementing regulations are still unpublished. No regulator clearly supervises private-sector compliance.

On June 14, the UAE created a Federal Authority for Artificial Intelligence and Data. It absorbs the AI Office, the Emirates Data Office, and the telecom regulator’s digital government arm. Writing those missing rules is its inheritance.

Jobs are the third question. Routine passport checks need fewer officers. The work shifts toward the manual checks and keeping cameras running.

Advertisement

Dubai has solved the engineering. That 4.6% share shows how narrow the showcase lane still is. Whether the new authority publishes retention periods and error rates will show how it weighs everything the cameras take.

The post Dubai’s New AI Immigration Cleared 9.4 Million Travelers: The Future of Travel? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Crypto World

Mark Zuckerberg Meta AI Predicts an XRP Surge Few Saw Coming

Published

on

Mark Zuckerberg Meta AI Predicts an XRP Surge Few Saw Coming

Meta AI predicts a supply driven repricing for XRP, and this price prediction calls the current setup the cleanest since 2017. At $1.07, the case is built around four catalysts rather than a single trigger.

The first is what Meta AI labels an ETF super cycle. After the SEC settled with Ripple in August 2025 and reclassified XRP as a commodity, 11 spot ETF filings followed, with Bloomberg now placing approval odds between 87 and 95%.

Five ETFs already sit on the DTCC list, $1.3 billion in inflows have arrived since November 2025 with zero outflows recorded, and $5 to $8 billion more is projected for 2026, the exact flow level Standard Chartered ties directly to its $8 bull case.

The second pillar is Ripple’s banking push. The company secured initial approval for a federal trust bank charter from the OCC, making RLUSD the first stablecoin under both state and federal oversight at once.

Advertisement
Source: Meta AI XRP Price Prediction

RLUSD is now live on more than 40 chains through Wormhole and the XRPL EVM Sidechain, with BNY Mellon, a custodian managing $53 trillion in assets, serving as primary custodian.

Institutional adoption on XRPL itself is the third leg. Ripple is targeting 2026 as the pivotal year for banks and asset managers actually using on chain liquidity pools, with the XRPL EVM Sidechain already holding more than $105 million in TVL, an SBI blockchain bond worth $64.6 million, and an Archax equity and debt tokenization push expected to drive real settlement demand by mid 2026.

Regulatory tailwinds round out the case, with the CLARITY Act or an equivalent market structure bill unlocking RWA tokenization while 1.35 billion XRP has already been withdrawn from exchanges, tightening available supply.

The base case price target sits at $2.45 to $2.80, drawing on 21Shares and a revised Standard Chartered figure. The bull case runs to $4.94 to $8.00 if ETF flows clear $5 billion and XRPL captures 1 to 2% of the $10.9 trillion tokenization market, a range Meta AI notes would mean a 330 to 650% move from $1.07.

The bear case is not dismissed. If CLARITY stalls and monthly ETF inflows stay under $132 million, 21Shares own bear scenario points to $1.60, a 16% decline, with downside risk extending to $0.86 to $1.00, though Meta AI argues the ongoing supply contraction limits how deep any flush could realistically go.

Advertisement
Xrp (XRP)
24h7d30d1yAll time

XRP Has Spent A Year Grinding Lower With No Real Bounce To Show For It

XRP peaked near $3.65 in August 2025, and the decline since has been remarkably steady rather than sharp, a long staircase of lower highs stretching from that summer peak all the way through the following winter.

February brought the sharpest single break, a gap down from above $2.30 to under $1.60 in a matter of days, and price has spent every month since compressing into an increasingly narrow range.

Price closed today at $1.07531, up 0.04%, in a session ranging between $1.06900 and $1.08182. Support sits at $1.00, the psychological floor that lines up closely with the bear case’s own downside target, then $0.86 below that if the supply contraction argument fails to hold.

Advertisement

Resistance stacks first at $1.20, then $1.40, then the far heavier ceiling near $1.60 that has capped every recovery attempt since February. The signal line reads 45.68 against 45.82, a gap so narrow it is effectively flat, and both lines have been drifting in that same tight band for months without any real separation.

That is not a chart building toward a breakout in either direction. For Meta AI’s base case near $2.45 to become plausible, XRP first needs to clear $1.60, a level this chart has not touched since before the February breakdown, regardless of how tight exchange supply has become in the background.

You Were Right About XRP. It Just Didn’t Pay.

Every trader has had the same experience. You read the analysis, you form a view, the market proves you correct, and it makes you nothing.

Advertisement

The problem isn’t the call. It’s the instrument. When you buy spot to express a view about one thing, you take on exposure to everything: liquidity, sentiment, unrelated flows, whatever happens in an unrelated market at 3am.

Your opinion was about a single question. Your position is exposed to all of them at once.

That’s what Kalshi is. A CFTC-regulated exchange where the prices are set by traders taking real positions, which is why the odds tend to move before the headlines do.

It isn’t free money. A contract that resolves against you goes to zero, and being directionally right on a slow timeline still loses if the contract expires first. Event trading pays for precision about timing, not just direction.

Advertisement

But the analysis above was free. What you do with it doesn’t have to be.

→ Get up to $25 to trade your first market on Kalshi

Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop on ByBit

The post Mark Zuckerberg Meta AI Predicts an XRP Surge Few Saw Coming appeared first on Cryptonews.

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Crypto World

Senator Warren Questions US AI Chip Policy After Trump Crypto Investment: Report

Published

on

Senator Warren Questions US AI Chip Policy After Trump Crypto Investment: Report

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.

All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Crypto World

NFT firm founder indicted for using treasury to support ‘DJ hobby’

Published

on

NFT firm founder indicted for using treasury to support 'DJ hobby'

Taj Tarsha, the founder of Few and Far, which claimed to be building an NFT exchange, has been indicted in the Southern District of New York for securities fraud and wire fraud.

The allegations in the indictment detail how Tarsha, along with the Few and Far team, raised over $10 million from investors by selling the rights to their future FAR token.

Subsequently, Tarsha allegedly “misappropriated millions of dollars raised by the company, using investor funds to gamble at an online casino, speculatively trade cryptocurrency, fund unrelated business ventures, and serve as collateral to finance his purchase of a luxury condominium in Miami.”

Additionally, he used some of the funds to support his “DJ hobby.”

Advertisement

Read more: Justin Sun’s NFT marketplace managed just four sales last month

According to the indictment, Tarsha was cynical about the NFT ecosystem, describing it as:

  • a “bubble”
  • “the last [company] I have in me”
  • “the last juice I have to squeeze”
  • a “magic ticket to a 10-30M exit.”

Similarly, he also apparently told his then-fiancée that he’d taken assets from Few and Far, something he knew was “unethical.”

Eventually, the Few and Far team apparently realized that assets had been misappropriated, leading to Tarsha being removed from the firm’s multisignature wallet.

Tarsha then allegedly “paid Co-Founder-1 and the operations director a significant amount of company funds to induce them to hand over control of the company’s multi-signature wallet.”

Advertisement

Tarsha also allegedly reached directly out to investors as part of his ploy to regain control.

Eventually, Tarsha and the rest of the team did launch the token, which subsequently lost more than 99% of its value.

Few and Far never launched the promised NFT exchange.

Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on XBluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Advertisement

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Crypto World

Crypto firm RedotPay says it will defend itself ‘vigorously’ against Binance lawsuit

Published

on

Crypto firm RedotPay says it will defend itself ‘vigorously’ against Binance lawsuit

RedotPay, which describes itself as the world’s largest stablecoin payment card issuer, told CoinDesk Wednesday it will defend itself “vigorously” against a $470 million Binance lawsuit alleging it poached 470,000 users.

“RedotPay is aware of legal proceedings initiated by Binance and will vigorously defend all claims,” the firm said in an emailed statement. “The Company rejects the unfounded allegations made against it and its co-founders.”

Binance affiliates filed a lawsuit against the founders of the Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments company, alleging they diverted nearly half a million Binance customers to the competing platform in a scheme that caused nearly $473 million in losses, according to a Bloomberg report.

“Since March 2026, the Binance Group has discovered that RedotPay Group had been allowing and encouraging Binance Pay funds to be used, without segregation, for the prohibited use within RedotPay, including card top-ups for RedotPay Card,” Binance said in the filing, according to Bloomberg.

Advertisement

“While Binance does not comment on ongoing litigation, where necessary we will use courts and other forums to pursue what is right,” a spokesperson told CoinDesk via email.

Source link

Continue Reading

Crypto World

As Warsh and the Fed contemplate fewer meetings, markets brace for potential volatility ahead

Published

on

hide content

Chair of the Federal Reserve Kevin Warsh speaks during a news conference at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2026.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Add the possibility of fewer meetings into the mix of how Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh wants to reduce the central bank’s footprint on financial markets, a move that some experts say could introduce both volatility and opportunity for investors.

Advertisement

Since taking office in May, Warsh has implemented several measures that reverse decades of Fed culture in which policymakers have been aggressively transparent — some say overly so — about where they think monetary policy is headed.

Thus far, he has curtailed so-called forward guidance, or how the Fed signals its future rate moves, dramatically shortened the post-meeting statement and provided cryptic and often evasive answers when questioned about his views during the two news conferences he’s held so far.

Now comes the possibility, discussed in what one Fed source described as mostly hypothetical terms, of reducing the long-held schedule of eight meetings each year for the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

Such a move would further curtail the communications output from the Warsh Fed — and lead to some uncertain outcomes for the stock and bond markets.

Advertisement

“Certainly, it’s going to increase volatility,” said George Catrambone, head of fixed income for the Americas at DWS Group. “Having less transparency forces market participants to hedge or have a wider dispersion of outcomes.”

‘Nothing magical’ about schedule

The Fed has used various meeting strategies over the decades.

Until the early 1980s, it met nearly monthly before changing to eight a year under former Chairman Paul Volcker. Moreover, the Fed is free at any time to call meeting, though the market implications could be substantial given that such a move would be considered an emergency.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari told CNBC on Wednesday that he is fine with re-examining the meeting schedule.

Advertisement

“I don’t think there’s any magic number about eight or 10 or six. You know, we always have the ability to call emergency meetings if things happen, but that’s a big event,” he said. “When the FOMC calls an emergency meeting, it really sends a signal that we’re concerned about something. And so, you know, I think I’m open-minded. I don’t have a strong view.”

Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson on Tuesday expressed similar sentiments, telling CNBC, “it’s healthy to have a good discussion about that.” Other Fed experts take a similar tack that having a fewer meetings a year might not be a big deal to markets.

“There’s nothing magical about eight meetings,” said Bill English, the Fed’s former head of monetary affairs during Warsh’s first stint there and now a Yale professor. “There are costs associated with having a lot of meetings, but on the other hand, you don’t want to have so few meetings that you end up not acting in a timely way.”

English said he once proposed six meetings a year, but with each including a news conference as well as an update to the Fed’s Summary of Economic Projections. Overall, he sees eight as “close to the right number” and instead is more concerned about other aspects of Warsh’s strategy.

Advertisement

“I really don’t like this effort to communicate much less,” he said. “Explaining more about why you’re doing what you’re doing helps the public to understand it. It helps the public to anticipate it. It makes monetary policy more effective, and also it it just seems like it’s appropriate to make the Fed accountable.

Muted market reaction

So far, markets either have been willing to give Warsh the benefit of the doubt, or simply have been too focused on geopolitics to care about the Fed rumblings.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has added about 3,500 points, or 7%, since Warsh took over from now-Governor Jerome Powell on May 22. Bond yields on net have risen though not dramatically, with the policy-sensitive 2-year Treasury up about 8 basis points, or 0.08 percentage points, while the benchmark 10-year yield has risen about the same.

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon
Advertisement
hide content

Dow since May 22

Those moves have come despite Warsh defying a tradition of open communication that dates back into the latter part of the 20th century while also establishing five task forces aimed at a top-to-bottom rethinking of the Fed’s approach to policy, communications strategy and data utilization, among other things.

“He’s kind of getting away with it,” said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide. “Warsh is really the first Fed official that I’ve seen explicitly say he wants the Fed to have less direct impact on market movement.”

Indeed, Warsh has told market participants explicitly that they should be reacting to data, not the vagaries of Fedspeak.

Advertisement

“Market participants are learning to play the ball, not the referee — and market prices will continue to respond in the direction and magnitude they see fit,” Warsh said during last week’s news conference. “This is, in my view, a change for the better — and we are just getting started.”

Still, some investors think Warsh’s strategy is risky.

“The main takeaway is more volatility,” Dario Perkins, head of global macroeconomics at TS Lombard, said in a note in which he deemed the result of Warsh’s approach “a regime of continuous market repricing.”

“Investors have to get used to FOMC meetings at which they don’t know the outcome ahead of time,” he added. “That will also provide new trading opportunities. It goes without saying that this may well be what Warsh has wanted all along.”

Advertisement

Potential ramifications

Concerns already have been raised about the chairman’s feelings over forward guidance, and that has been exacerbated by a loosely defined reaction function — a delineation of the economic conditions that would cause the Fed to react. Warsh also has spoken critically about the Fed’s “dot plot” of individual officials’ rate expectations and declined to submit his own dot when the Federal Open Market Committee last updated the grid in June.

Adding to the information vacuum by only meeting, say, four or six times a year raises further concerns that a market that has for decades looked for cues from the Fed now will have to guess at policy.

“Obviously, if the the dot plot changes or if guidance changes, I don’t think that’s the end of the world,” Hackett said. “If you stop start having less meetings, that’s a different level, and that could be seen as disruptive.”

One potential consequence would be longer-term yields rising faster than shorter-term rates, what the market refers to as a bear steepener, said Komal Sri-Kumar, president of Sri-Kumar Global Strategies. The implication is that fixed income investors would see the Fed holding short-term rates low and causing inflation expectations to rise.

Advertisement
Stock Chart IconStock chart icon
hide content

10-year Treasury yield in 2026

“Bondholders are not babies trying to have their hands held,” Sri-Kumar said. “The bondholders are saying, ‘Please don’t make my life more difficult by introducing even more uncertainty.’”

The federal government literally can’t afford a spike in yields as it struggles with financing costs for the $31.1 trillion in outstanding Treasury debt held by the public.

Advertisement

If investors sour further on government debt, it will make Bessent’s job tougher at a time when interest on the debt is second only to Social Security in government outlays. The Treasury Department estimates it will spend $1.3 trillion this year on debt financing costs.

In a CNBC appearance Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the Warsh approach as a “detox” for markets.

There are plausible benefits and plausible drawbacks, and after such a short time, nobody really knows if the new approach will work. In the meantime, Warsh has a very important speech coming up when the Fed holds its annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming at the end of August, a time that prior chairmen used to lay out new agendas.

“Warsh is trying to undertake a very large change in terms of how to communicate the data and how to interpret it,” said Catrambone, the DWS bond strategist. “I would say we should also provide a little bit of grace.”

Advertisement
Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Source link

Continue Reading

Crypto World

Fed Governor Cook says she’s ‘prepared to act’ on rate hike to address inflation

Published

on

Fed Governor Cook says she's 'prepared to act' on rate hike to address inflation

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook speaks at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research in Palo Alto, California, U.S., May 27, 2026.

Ann Saphir | Reuters

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook said Wednesday that she’s ready to support an interest rate hike unless the inflation numbers improve.

Advertisement

“Inflation is too high, and I consider the risks to the inflation side of the dual mandate higher than the risks to the employment side at this point,” Cook said during a speech in Anchorage, Alaska. “As such, I am prepared to act by raising rates, if necessary.”

While acknowledging that the June data showed inflation easing thanks largely to a sharp slide in energy prices, the policymaker said there shouldn’t be too much read into a single data point, particularly with the pace of price increases running well ahead of the Fed’s 2% goal.

Cook was part of a 9-3 majority that voted last week to keep the central bank’s benchmark borrowing rate in a range between 3.5%-3.75%. She explained that her vote came from a desire to see how possibly waning impacts from tariffs, an energy supply shock due to the Iran war and pressures from the artificial intelligence buildout impact prices.

“If I do not see signs of continued disinflation soon, I am prepared to act,” Cook said. “With five years of above-target inflation, the risk grows that higher inflation may become entrenched in price- and wage-setting behavior, leading to persistence that would be much harder for us to attack. The longer inflation is above target, the more likely this scenario becomes.”

Advertisement

Other environments might allow the Fed to wait longer before acting, but she said, “We do not have that luxury in this one.”

Markets expect the central bank could act as soon as September but are pricing in higher odds for an October move, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch. Earlier in the day, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, one of the three dissenting votes for the rate decision, told CNBC that he still believes higher rates are necessary.

Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Crypto World

AI Agent Faked Identities to Push Malicious Code During Cyber Test, AISI Finds

Published

on

AI Is Handing Hackers Tools That Once Belonged to Elite Attackers

The UK AI Security Institute (AISI) disclosed that an AI agent, built on Anthropic’s Mythos 5, autonomously ran a social engineering attack during cyber testing. The agent opened a pull request containing malicious code on a real open-source project and created fake identities to win a maintainer’s approval.

The attempt failed. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the code.

AISI says its investigation has not identified any resulting real-world harm. The model also ran with its developer’s cyber classifiers deliberately switched off and open internet access, a test configuration that is not commercially available.

How the AI Agent Ran Its Malicious Code Campaign

AISI logged 19 unsanctioned actions in 10 of 122 evaluation runs conducted in late July, according to its report. 17 traced to Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, and two to a single run of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

Advertisement

The agent researched the project’s human maintainers and created multiple fake identities. It used them to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code.

When the pull request was publicly challenged, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless. The model also considered adopting a fresh identity to continue.

The playbook recalls the 2024 XZ Utils backdoor, in which a human-run persona spent years earning a maintainer’s trust before planting hidden code. AISI’s report does not draw that comparison, but the contrast is hard to miss. The activity unfolded over several days, between July 25 and July 28. 

AISI stressed that nobody asked the model to lie.

Advertisement

“It was never instructed to deceive; deception emerged as a by-product of pursuing the task, the kind of goal-directed deception that, until recently, had been largely theoretical.”

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens

The institute said so in its disclosure. It also acknowledged that misconfigured prompts led the agent to believe some tasks could not be solved within their intended scope. Although the behavior also appeared in runs where the agent had the instructions it needed to stay on task. 

Security teams caught the activity on July 28, when the agent used the Tor anonymity network to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub. GitHub confirmed the actions violated its terms of service. AISI also worked with the platform to remove artefacts left behind by the agent and to notify the users it interacted with. 

Advertisement

The report argues that the case signals a shift in the source of risk: harm can arise not only when people misuse publicly available models but also when capable agents in privileged settings act beyond their authorized scope. 

AISI said the case points to a broader shift in the AI risk space. The institute now plans an independent review with METR, an AI evaluation nonprofit, as well as tighter network controls and real-time monitoring for future tests.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch leaders and journalists provide expert insights

The post AI Agent Faked Identities to Push Malicious Code During Cyber Test, AISI Finds appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Advertisement

Source link

Continue Reading

Crypto World

The Search for Accountability in California’s Wildfires

Published

on

The Search for Accountability in California's Wildfires

What comes next in the Eaton Fire investigation?

SoCal Edison quickly acknowledged that its equipment most likely caused the Eaton Fire. In reports to the California Public Utility Commission in January 2025, SoCal Edison said it had detected a “fault” on one of its transmission lines.

Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokesperson for SoCal Edison, told TIME that the utility company is reviewing the report, and the findings are “generally consistent with what [the company has] been saying regarding the ignition of the Eaton Fire.”

“As we have said, Edison believes that it’s likely that its own equipment was associated with the start of the Eaton Fire,” she says. However, it is “definitely” not just the equipment to blame for how intense the fire became.

Advertisement

“A fire of the size and magnitude of Eaton is rarely the result of just one thing,” she explains.

With nearly 1,000 lawsuits against SoCal Edison from the families of the deceased, as well as those who lost their homes in the fire, the company filed its own countersuit in January 2026, accusing Los Angeles County, local water agencies, and the Southern California Gas Company of failing to warn residents about or prevent the spread of the fire.

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Crypto World

Sesame Street Has A New Extreme Weather Episode. Here’s What Climate Experts Think

Published

on

Sesame Street Has A New Extreme Weather Episode. Here's What Climate Experts Think

Sesame Street plans to provide resources to help families, including a printed and digital storybook, to help children heal when the things they love are lost, articles and activities that support children and families as they deal with environmental stressors like heat or air quality,  and plans to distribute “go bags” with essentials to support families during evacuations and periods of displacement. 

It’s an important first step in getting children and families more equipped for dealing with extreme weather events—which most Americans are woefully underprepared for. In one 2025 survey of 2,000 adults by Talker Research, 90% said it’s critical to be prepared for extreme weather, but only 46% had an emergency plan in place. 

The episode opens the channel of communication in an age appropriate way, experts say. “It’s covering all of the bases,” says Adam Rainear, associate professor of communication and media at West Chester University, whose work focuses on climate communications. “It’s giving the messaging so that kids are aware and alert, but also not making them afraid of everything around them.” While Elmo and his friend Abby acknowledge their fear, they focus on having courage—and when Elmo’s courage falters as the power goes out, his dad steps in to help with words of encouragement and an exercise to help calm him down. 

Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Crypto World

What Happens to Crypto If the CLARITY Act Fails This Week? Hougan Explains

Published

on

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said the CLARITY Act could fail to pass this week, but that would not mean the end of the legislation or the crypto industry’s progress.

The US Senate is scheduled to leave for its August recess on Friday, August 7, and return on September 14. Under Senate rules, lawmakers must file for cloture on the CLARITY Act by Wednesday, August 5, for the bill to have a chance of receiving a vote before the recess.

Crypto Without Clarity

A failure this week would also not necessarily end the act. Hougan expects the legislation to enter a “walking dead” state. That could lead to fresh efforts to pass it in September or during a December lame-duck session. Congress often combines several measures into year-end omnibus legislation, and creates another possible route for the bill.

For Hougan, the bigger issue with that uncertainty is its effect on investors. Some professional investors are holding back from crypto because they do not want to commit capital while the outcome of CLARITY remains unclear. They may wait to see whether the legislation passes or fails and how markets respond.

Advertisement

If the bill does not pass this week, Hougan said a sharp drop in its Polymarket odds could actually help remove that uncertainty. He said the market may wobble initially, but a clearer outcome could leave crypto better positioned for a rally in the fall.

The Bitwise exec sees the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as another potential path for the industry. Chair Paul Atkins recently said the agency is ready and able to introduce rules addressing the same issues covered by CLARITY. Hougan said these rules may be more supportive of crypto and innovation in the short term than a bipartisan congressional bill. The risk, he explained, is that a future administration could appoint a less supportive SEC chair and reverse those policies.

Despite this, Hougan noted that crypto has already built too much momentum for a future regulator to stop its progress. He cited BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, efforts by Nasdaq and JPMorgan to tokenize assets, and work by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase on a stablecoin platform. He also pointed to Robinhood’s blockchain, which connects with DeFi applications including Uniswap and Morpho.

The industry is also gaining a stronger position within the US banking system. For instance, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted trust charters to Circle, Ripple, Paxos and other firms. Outside the US, governments including those in the European Union, Japan and Russia are also pursuing pro-crypto legislation.

Advertisement

The exec said the situation resembles the early development of the internet. Congress failed to advance major telecom reform in 1994, but the internet continued to expand. Netscape, Amazon and eBay emerged, and the number of websites grew rapidly. Congress eventually passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Long-Term Impact

Hougan’s argument comes as other crypto industry figures have also highlighted the wider regulatory impact they believe CLARITY could have. Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon, for instance, recently said that the bill could help prevent another FTX by giving regulators clearer oversight of crypto exchanges and establishing rules around disclosure, fraud and insider trading.

Dixon said that the market outside stablecoins, which he estimated at around 85% of the market, still lacks a comprehensive federal regulatory framework. Additionally, major banks and fintech firms are now moving beyond experiments, with significant blockchain deployments already live or expected to launch.

While agencies such as the SEC and the CFTC can address many issues, if CLARITY does not pass, Dixon added that legislation offers more lasting rules and gives businesses greater confidence to make long-term investments.

Advertisement

The post What Happens to Crypto If the CLARITY Act Fails This Week? Hougan Explains appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2025