Author: aliakhan00901

The average rate on a five-year fixed mortgage has dropped below 5% for the first time since May 2023, as the cost of borrowing continues to fall steadily.The average five-year fixed rate hit 4.99% on Thursday, from 5% a day earlier, according to financial information service Moneyfacts.Although the percentage drop may only equate to a small financial saving, it may signal a shift in market sentiment, with Moneyfacts describing such moments as a “symbolic turning point”.Even the smallest rate drop can boost buyer confidence and spur greater competition among lenders.Meanwhile, the average two-year fixed rate mortgage, which fell below 5%…

ZDNET’s key takeaways The Acer Swift 16 AI is regularly priced at $1,250.Its 16-inch OLED display, well-designed lightweight form, and marathon battery work together to create a laptop that feels more premium than its price would suggest.Its speakers, however, leave much to be desired, and it has its fair share of bloatware. jul / 2025Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Acer’s Swift 16 AI is a thin and light laptop with a gorgeous OLED display, nice full-sized keyboard, and Intel Core Ultra 7 or 9 “Lunar Lake” processor starting at $1,200: a competitive price for a device that feels…

Now here’s a first: Two months after dropping “KPop Demon Hunters” on Netflix, the streamer is putting the animated hit in theaters — and not just the cursory Oscar-qualifying run its prestige titles get in New York and Los Angeles. This one is going wide, in more than 1,700 venues, for karaoke-captioned screenings in which audience participation is encouraged. Dress up! Sing along! Give in to the catchy choreography … that’s how it’s done done done! I’ve been on the Huntr/x train since the beginning and bought tickets to the first screening of the day at Los Angeles’ Alamo Drafthouse…

Former Wales rugby league international Ben Flower had been brought in to work on the contact area and co-captain Kate Williams had praised the higher intensity training.But ex-international Siwan Lillicrap described Wales as “soft” as they were torn apart by Scotland’s back three – not least hat-trick hero Francesca McGhie.Wales had a tackle success rate of 85% – compared to Scotland’s 90% – but they missed some crucial ones.Centres Hannah Dallavalle and Courtney Keight as well as full-back Nel Metcalfe all failed to stop the opening-minute try.And it was a similar story for the fourth – at the start of…

If you’ve ever taken even a cursory glance at a hurricane forecast, you’ve seen some version of the “cone of uncertainty.” It sounds like some other-dimensional realm of indecision, but it’s a mainstay for communicating hurricane forecasts. Though these maps pack in plenty of valuable information, it can be a bit tricky to interpret them if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at.Here Scientific American walks you through all the forecast components and what they mean—and, almost as crucially, what they don’t. We also point you to some other resources that are often the most helpful for those staring…

Last month, while flying out of Denver, I was surprised to see my carry-on luggage pulled aside at the TSA checkpoint. A security agent opened it up and pulled out my power bank, inspecting the fine print on the back. After a pause, he nodded and said it was fine, but added that some of these don’t pass. It was the first time in years of frequent travel that my external battery had triggered a manual check, and it caught me off guard. That quick check wasn’t random. In response to safety concerns surrounding lithium-ion batteries, the TSA has stepped…

Queensland gets new public sex offender registryQueensland will create a new child sexual abuse offender register with laws expected to be introduced to parliament this week.Known as “Daniel’s Law”, named for 13-year-old Daniel Morcombe who was abducted in 2003 and murdered, the register will establish a three tier system for publicly reporting information.These include a website that will publish the photograph and details of offenders who have failed to comply with their reporting obligations and whose whereabouts are unknown, a searchable database will be created to identifies certain offenders within specific areas, and a process will be establish for parents…

But it struggled with more complex phrases. Pushing the frontier Once the mental privacy safeguard was in place, the team started testing their inner speech system with cued words first. The patients sat in front of the screen that displayed a short sentence and had to imagine saying it. The performance varied, reaching 86 percent accuracy with the best performing patient and on a limited vocabulary of 50 words, but dropping to 74 percent when the vocabulary was expanded to 125,000 words. But when the team moved on to testing if the prosthesis could decode unstructured inner speech, the limitations…

Each year, we at ESPN Fantasy endeavor to help with your fantasy football draft prep, including sleepers lists and cheat sheets. In this column, you will get the best of both worlds, as ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter offers his personal list of early-, mid- and late-round targets in 2025 fantasy leagues.Below are some players who could be fantasy standouts this season and outperform their current average draft position (ADP). If given a choice at certain junctures in the draft, or in tiebreaker situations, these are players who will receive strong consideration.Fantasy Football Gridiron GauntletFREE to play. Become ESPN fantasy…

QUICK FACTSName: Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul)Where it lives: Steppes and high-elevation grasslands in Central Asia, particularly Mongolia and ChinaWhat it eats: Small rodents, including gerbils, hamsters and pikas, small lizards and birdsPallas’s cat, also known as a manul, is a feline from Central Asia that yelps like a small dog and has such short legs that it sometimes struggles to run after prey. Researchers think it is one of the oldest living cat species in the world, having diverged 5.2 million years ago from a leopard ancestor.Although it looks stocky, Pallas’s cat isn’t actually much bigger than a domestic cat…