Two have been charged after a 75-year-old man from Aberdeenshire lost more than £100,000 in a cryptocurrency fraud. The matter was reported to police in July and officers from the north east division CID travelled to Coventry and Mexborough on Tuesday. With assistance from West Midlands and South Yorkshire Police, officers arrested two men, aged 36 and 54. Both were charged in connection with fraud allegations, and a report will be submitted to the procurator fiscal.
Author: Natalia Smirnova
Drugstore chain Walgreens Boots Alliance on Thursday announced that it will go private. The struggling company entered into an agreement with private equity firm Sycamore Partners valued at $10 billion. Sycamore will pay $11.45 per share, a premium of 8% to the stock’s closing price of $10.60 on Thursday. Shares of the company rose nearly 6% in extended trading. Walgreens shareholders could also receive an additional $3 in cash from future monetization of the company’s debt and equity interests in VillageMD. WALGREENS COULD ‘AGGRESSIVELY’ CUT COSTS IF PRIVATELY OWNED, ANALYST SAYS The company’s market value has shrunk to just more…
White House artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto czar David Sacks claimed Thursday that the federal government’s lack of a “long-term strategy” on cryptocurrency has negatively impacted American taxpayers. “Over the past decade, the federal government sold approximately 195,000 bitcoin for proceeds of $366 million. If the government had held the bitcoin, it would be worth over $17 billion today,” he claimed in an X post. “That’s how much it has cost American taxpayers not to have a long-term strategy.” He pointed to calculations by Grok, the xAI-developed AI chatbot, as the source of those figures. xAI is an AI company…
BJ’s Wholesale Club is planning to open dozens of locations over the next few years, several of which will be located in Texas. The company is planning to open between 25 and 30 clubs over the next two fiscal years, though “several” will be located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as early as next year, according to the membership club. The 25 to 30 new club openings include recently opened locations in Brooksville, Florida, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina — both of which opened last month — and a new location in Southern Pines, North Carolina, set to open this…
The National Center for Education Statistics is a relatively obscure federal agency, but its mission – to collect data on the state of education – affects every public school in the country. Now, this work is under threat because of cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. And that alarms a former Trump appointee who ran the statistics unit and fears it will become politicized. “You’re talking about millions of dollars worth of investment just vanishing because someone canceled a contract too early without knowing what they were doing,” said James (Lynn) Woodworth, who served as the commissioner…
Layoffs of U.S. workers surged in February to levels that haven’t been recorded since the last two recessions amid the Trump administration’s mass job cuts at federal agencies, canceled contracts and fears of a widening trade war. A report by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released Thursday said that planned job cuts surged 245% in February to 172,017 last month. That’s the highest level since July 2020, when the economy was reeling from restrictions related to the COVID pandemic, and the highest total for February since the Great Recession in 2009. The largest share of layoffs was in…
On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina filed for bankruptcy protection this week as it struggled to compete in the macroeconomic environment. The Tex-Mex chain, owned by Argonne Capital Group, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia earlier this week after reportedly shuttering 40 locations. According to its bankruptcy filing, the company operates 80 locations in the U.S. and internationally. Like its rivals, the company said it has seen a decline in traffic in recent years, struggled to retain workers and faced growing costs as minimum wages rose, according…
President Donald Trump recently made a surprise announcement that the U.S. government would invest in a crypto reserve including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Cardano. With the White House Crypto Summit on Friday set to embrace a pro-innovation regulatory framework, crypto looks set for a boom over the next four years. Well… maybe. While a White House Summit may help push currencies like Bitcoin further into the mainstream, the blockchain industry needs something more to really take off: energy — a lot more energy. TRUMP’S CRYPTO CZAR DECRIES GOVERNMENT’S LACK OF BITCOIN ‘LONG-TERM STRATEGY’ A recent study revealed that Bitcoin — just…
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday pushed back on concerns that have been raised about tariffs causing inflationary pressures that raise consumer prices, saying they would just lead to a one-time “price adjustment.” Bessent delivered remarks at the Economic Club of New York and participated in a question-and-answer period with FOX Business Network’s Larry Kudlow in which he was asked whether tariffs are inflationary. “Look, can tariffs be a one-time price adjustment? Yes… I would hope that the failed team transitory could get back together and think that nothing is more transitory than tariffs if it’s a one-time price adjustment,”…
President Trump, late Thursday, signed an executive order to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Crypto Czar David Sachs celebrated the move via a post on X. “The Reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime,” he wrote. “It is estimated that the U.S. government owns about 200,000 bitcoin; however, there has never been a complete audit. The E.O. directs a full accounting of the federal government’s digital asset holdings. The U.S. will not sell any bitcoin…