The value of the best-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has reached a new high. For the first time ever one Bitcoin bought $69,202 (£54,404) on Tuesday afternoon, surpassing the previous high just below $69,000 (£54,242) recorded in November 2021. Money: Elon Musk loses title of world’s richest man It comes, as the previous high did, as a ‘halving’ event approaches, whereby Bitcoin ...

Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Threads suffered widespread problems on Tuesday afternoon, with users locked out of their accounts and pages failing to load properly.  Facebook outages reported on Down Detector shot up just before 3pm, with more than 300,000 problems logged. More than 25,000 Instagram outages were also reported via the website, which collates status reports from several sources, including ...

Voters in San Francisco, a famously liberal stronghold, embraced unusually conservative policies this week as they passed a pair of controversial ballot measures that take increasingly aggressive steps to curb the city’s intertwined troika of troubles: Homelessness, drug addiction and crime. The initiatives require drug screening for welfare recipients and give police more surveillance power and less oversight, measures that ...

The New York judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal trial later this month for alleged business records fraud has ruled that jurors’ names will be shielded from the public but known to the lawyers, the former president and his consultants. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan issued a ruling largely granting the request by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to ...

President Biden heads into his third State of the Union address on Thursday rather unpopular — and with key voters more than a bit concerned about his age and his ability to steadily guide the country for another four years. He is about even or narrowly trails former president Donald Trump in early polls of their now-solidified rematch. As The ...

Official Washington loves the State of the Union address. If the White House Correspondent’s Dinner is the Golden Globes, SOTU is the Oscars: the serious event that serious people attend and at which serious issues are discussed. The Constitution mandates that the president update Congress on the state of things every so often, an edict that over the decades has ...

The House on Thursday passed a measure that would require the detention of any migrant who commits theft or burglary. The bill, which passed with the support of all House Republicans in attendance plus 37 Democrats, is named after nursing student Laken Riley, who was found dead last month after going out for a run in Athens, Ga. Police believe ...

If you have not been paying attention to the effort by House Republicans to build a case for impeaching President Biden, here is a quick recap. The impeachment inquiry was announced in September as then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was fending off pressure from his conference’s right-most flank. By that point, Republicans had been in control of House committees for ...

As political leaders and guests shuffled into the U.S. Capitol for President Biden’s high-stakes State of the Union address Thursday night, overhead views of the chamber revealed a sea of white. Dozens of Democratic congresswomen donned the color in what they said was a statement about reproductive rights. (They also wore pins saying “fighting for reproductive freedom.”) The show of ...

A State of the Union address generally is a product of many hands and is carefully vetted. But State of the Union addresses are political speeches, an argument for the president’s policies, so context is sometimes missing. Here’s a roundup of a dozen claims in Tuesday night’s speech that caught our attention, listed in the order Biden made them. As ...