Exclusive: Labour’s Rushanara Ali plans to intervene in elections bill amid warnings of foreign interference

A former Labour minister has added her voice to those of a growing list of experts and senior MPs calling for a ban on political donations in cryptocurrency as concerns grow over foreign interference in British elections.

Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP who helped draft the elections bill when she was a minister in the communities department, called for the government to strengthen the legislation with an outright ban on donations in digital currencies.

A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives

There’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.

We’ve entered into a Faustian pact with these companies: “While it’s brilliant to have access to high-quality products and software, very often for ‘free’, it’s important to remember that there is a trade-off involved – often of our personal data and privacy,” says Lisa Barber, tech editor at Which? We give these companies our attention and our information, which they then turn into big bucks and apparently unassailable monopolies.

Depop, which is owned by Etsy, has 7 million active buyers on its marketplace, nearly 90% of whom are under the age of 34

The online seller eBay has agreed to purchase the secondhand fashion marketplace Depop from Etsy for about $1.2bn in cash, the companies announced on Wednesday, with eBay hoping the acquisition will help it capture a younger demographic.

Used clothing has become increasingly popular, with Gen Z shoppers searching for unique items that cost less than new ones, and who want to keep older items from heading to landfill.

By trusting the US, we handed Trump a kill switch. Yet Europe’s digital sovereignty is an achievable goal

The French judge Nicolas Guillou knows exactly how deep Europe’s dependence on US tech is. Guillou and his colleagues at the international criminal court are under US sanctions. They can no longer use e-commerce, book hotels online or hire a car. Their home smart devices ignore them. Credit cards from European banks no longer function, because Europe has still not developed its own EU-wide payments system, so most electronic purchases go through Visa and Mastercard. Converting euros to foreign currencies is extraordinarily difficult because everything passes through dollars. Living in Europe is no protection against Donald Trump bricking your digital life.

This dependence is not limited to mod-cons. Last year, the chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee said that he regretted his part in Denmark’s decision to buy US-made F-35 fighter jets: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse. Buying American weapons is a security risk that we can not run.” He is not alone. Spain has abandoned plans to buy F-35s.

Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

At its new Stone Mountain, Georgia, facility, Roomba-like robots shuffle between stacks, another adds shipping labels while another arranges packages in pallets

One of the reasons Amazon is spending billions on robots? They don’t need bathroom breaks. Arriving a few minutes early to the public tour of Amazon’s hi-tech Stone Mountain, Georgia, warehouse, my request to visit the restroom was met with a resounding no from the security guard in the main lobby.

Between the main doors and the entrance security gate, I paced and paced after being told I would have to wait for the tour guide to collect me and other guests for a tour of the 640,000-sq-ft, four-story warehouse.

A leaked pitch to reshape Ethereum’s leadership exposed deep divisions over politics, power and ether’s static price

US crypto developer Danny Ryan submitted a proposal in November 2024 to Vitalik Buterin, the founder and symbolic leader of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain powering the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum’s de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift.

Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too. The EF could now “exercise a stronger voice” without compromising its ethos of decentralization, Ryan said – and he was open to leading that charge if appointed as the foundation’s new executive director.

Workers informed after message erroneously said affected employees in US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been told

Amazon has told workers it is cutting 16,000 jobs around the world to streamline its operations, hours after sending out a message to staff about the layoffs apparently in error.

It is the second big wave of job cuts at the US online retail company, and comes just three months after the company said it was slashing 14,000 roles. Amazon employs about 1.5 million workers worldwide.

OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Stripe are rumoured to be among ten of the biggest companies considering IPOs

You’ve probably heard of “unicorns” – technology startups valued at more than $1bn – but 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the “hectocorn”, with several US and European companies potentially floating on stock markets at valuations over $100bn (£75bn).

OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Stripe are among the big names said to be considering an initial public offering (IPO) this year.

Regime appears to have turned to digital currency issued by Tether in the face of sanctions

Iran’s central bank appears to have been using vast quantities of a cryptocurrency championed by Nigel Farage, according to a new report.

Elliptic, a crypto analytics company, said it had traced at least $507m (£377m) of cryptocurrency issued by Tether – a company touted by the Reform UK leader – passing through accounts that appear to be controlled by Iran’s central bank.

Gold is up 70% while the cryptocurrency is down 6% after it failed to bounce back from a rapid October sell-off

Another week, another record high for the price of gold. And another blow to the bitcoin fan club’s hopeful thesis about owning “digital gold”. This year has been hard for the bitcoin brigade: while real gold soared in value, their cryptocurrency didn’t. Correlation went out of the window. Gold is up 70% so far in dollar terms; bitcoin is down 6%.

In theory, conditions should have been perfect for bitcoin if, like gold, it is supposed to be a store of value in uncertain times. Geopolitical tensions have been high all year, with Donald Trump’s unclear intentions towards Venezuela now added to the mix. Or, if you take the view that bitcoin is a hedge against currency debasement by governments, the news flow ought to have been encouraging. The US budget deficit remains enormous: the International Monetary Fund predicts the country’s debts will climb from 125% to 143% of annual income by 2030, or more than Greece and Italy.

Exclusive song for online retailer prevents a hat trick of Christmas No 1s for Wham!, as Kylie becomes first woman to secure UK No 1 singles in four different decades

Kylie Minogue has scored her first UK Christmas No 1, and eighth No 1 single overall, with the song Xmas.

She beat competition from Wham!’s mega-streaming Last Christmas, which has been Christmas No 1 for the past two years: it was last week’s chart-topper but drops to No 2. Also in the race was Lullaby from the charity campaign Together for Palestine, which reached No 5.

The assorted items that I would class as rubbish sold within five minutes – and I have never wanted so much to engage in dialogue with a buyer

We have a lot of differing opinions about Vinted activity in my household. My son thinks [sic] “old people have a massively inflated idea of how much things are worth”, so he would never flog anything on my account, lest he get tainted with oldness. It was hard to know where to start on this argument, between “maybe we just have nicer stuff”; “the worth of everything is determined by the price people will pay for it, in a citizen economy”; and “I am not old”.

My daughter, conversely, is happy to funnel her wares through me, which is how I arrived at peak Vinted, its very spirit in a single item: I posted a bag of random tat for £2. It sold within five minutes.