News (old posts, page 928)

Monzo fined £21m after customers used No 10 and Buckingham Palace as addresses

FCA finds digital bank failed to employ adequate controls when signing up new clients

The digital bank Monzo has been fined £21m over weak financial crime controls, after it allowed customers to register for accounts with “implausible” home addresses including 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and Monzo’s own headquarters.

The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) penalty follows a lengthy investigation, which discovered that Monzo’s internal controls failed to keep up with a rise in customers, which ballooned from 600,000 in 2018 to more than 5.8 million in 2022.

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Inside RFK Jr’s conflicted attempt to rid America of junk food

‘Maha’ promised to tackle ultra-processed foods – but is it hijacking the food movement instead?

Over the space of the last year, Robert F Kennedy Jr. has made the term “ultra-processed foods” something of a household phrase.

Once a term only used by nutritionists and food policy researchers to describe the most processed foods in the supply chain (think: chips and sodas, packaged bread, microwave dinners and even some yogurts), ultra-processing has become a calling card of the “Make America Healthy Again” (“Maha”) movement.

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US only has 25% of all Patriot missile interceptors needed for Pentagon’s military plans

Exclusive: Low stockpiles for the crucial Patriot missile interceptors led to Trump administration pausing transfers to Ukraine

The United States only has about 25% of the Patriot missile interceptors it needs for all of the Pentagon’s military plans after burning through stockpiles in the Middle East in recent months, an alarming depletion that led to the Trump administration freezing the latest transfer of munitions to Ukraine.

The stockpile of the Patriot missiles has fallen so low that it raised concern inside the Pentagon that it could jeopardize potential US military operations, and deputy defense secretary, Stephen Feinberg, authorized the transfer to be halted while they reviewed where weapons were being sent.

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Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know | Rebecca Solnit

We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – especially now

Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas’s Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it’s 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS).

There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are.

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How terrorist groups are leveraging AI to recruit and finance their operations

Counter-terrorism agencies are scrambling to maintain an advantage and thwart attacks as access to digital tools eases

Counter-terrorism authorities have, for years, characterized keeping up with terrorist organizations and their use of digital tools and social media apps as a game of Whac-a-Mole.

Jihadist terrorist groups such as Islamic State and its predecessor al-Qaida, or even the neo-Nazi group the Base, have leveraged digital tools to recruit, covertly finance via crypto, download weapons for 3D printing and spread tradecraft to its followers, all while leaving law enforcement and intelligence agencies playing catch up.

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