ISLAMABAD: Silver outperformed gold in a powerful rally across precious metals on Friday, as speculative trading, thin year-end liquidity and growing expectations of US interest rate cuts pushed prices to record levels. Rising geopolitical tensions further fuelled demand for safe-haven assets, lifting the entire sector to strong weekly gains.
Spot gold climbed 0.6% to $4,504.79 an ounce in early trading, after touching an all-time high of $4,530.60 earlier in the session. US gold futures for February delivery gained 0.7% to $4,535.20. Silver surged far ahead of gold, jumping 3.6% to $74.56 an ounce after briefly hitting a record high of $75.14.
Kelvin Wong, senior market analyst at OANDA, said momentum-driven and speculative activity has dominated gold and silver trading since early December. He pointed to thin liquidity, expectations of prolonged US rate cuts, a weaker dollar and heightened geopolitical risks as key drivers behind the rally. Wong added that gold could approach $5,000 in the first half of 2026, while silver may climb toward $90.
Gold is on course for its strongest annual performance since 1979, rising nearly 72% so far this year. The rally has been supported by policy easing from the Federal Reserve, strong central bank buying, growing exchange-traded fund holdings and continued efforts by some countries to reduce reliance on the US dollar. Silver has surged an even more dramatic 158% year-to-date, helped by persistent supply deficits, its designation as a critical mineral in the United States and robust industrial demand.
With markets now pricing in at least two US rate cuts next year, non-yielding assets such as gold are expected to remain attractive in a lower interest rate environment.
Geopolitical developments have also added to bullish sentiment. The United States has imposed a temporary quarantine on Venezuelan oil exports, while recent US strikes against Islamic State positions in northwest Nigeria have heightened global risk concerns.
Other precious metals also posted sharp gains. Spot platinum jumped 7.8% to $2,393.40 an ounce after reaching a record $2,429.98, while palladium rose 5.2% to $1,771.14, extending gains from a three-year high in the previous session. Both metals, widely used in automotive catalytic converters, have benefited from tight supply conditions, tariff uncertainty and a shift in investor interest away from gold. Platinum is up about 165% this year, while palladium has gained more than 90%.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Nearly a week after a massive power outage plunged parts of San Francisco’s west side into darkness, many residents in the Sunset and Richmond Districts say they’re still struggling to recover, especially seniors, immigrants, and small business owners who were preparing for important winter holidays.
By Friday morning, the Sunset District looked busy and back to normal, but community leaders say what happened the weekend prior has left many frustrated and feeling hopeless.
RELATED: Impacted by the SF power outage? Here’s how to file a claim with PG&E
“We have a lot of seniors who live here in the Sunset District. When the power went out, they were really struggling,” said David Lee, who lives in the neighborhood and is the Executive Director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee. “A lot of them are isolated, many don’t speak English, and they didn’t know where to turn.”
Over in the Richmond District, Myron Lee says his family went nearly 50 hours without power.
“Dad, you know, he needs machines to clear his airways when he sleeps, so he wasn’t sleeping in the night,” Lee said. “Really stressful for everyone involved.”
Lee says neighbors wanted to check on one another, but security gates commonly installed in front of homes in the Sunset and Richmond made it difficult to knock on doors and without power, they couldn’t ring the doorbells. At the same time, he says spotty cell service made communication and access to information even harder.
“I think a lot of monolingual Chinese in this area, no information expressed to them,” he said, explaining that while he was able to eventually find resources at the Richmond Rec Center, many others never heard about the help that was available.
Lee shared photos of his parents’ refrigerator, filled with food that had to be thrown out after days without power. For many families, the timing made the loss especially painful.
RELATED: Mayor Lurie calls for PG&E rate cuts after holiday outages as SF leaders demand answers
The outage hit just as Chinese families and Asian-owned businesses were preparing for Dongzhi, or the Winter Solstice, a holiday that celebrates the arrival of winter, often with large family meals and special dishes.
“It was a total loss for the business owners,” Lee said. “Their supplies, their food, completely stocked up with seafood and everything they needed for a busy winter solstice, which is why the Chinese community really saved up and planned for this special weekend.”
Community advocates say many small, family-run businesses in the area had invested heavily in inventory for the holiday, only to see it spoil.
PG&E is offering $200 bill credits to residents impacted by the outage and up to $2,500 for businesses that lost inventory or revenue. But many in the community say that doesn’t come close to covering their losses.
“Let’s start by increasing the credit that people are getting because $200 doesn’t cut it,” Lee said. “And let’s make sure businesses get the recovery they need.”
In a statement to ABC7 News on Friday, PG&E said customers can pursue a separate claims process for other compensation.
RELATED: San Francisco PG&E customers start seeing power restored after massive outage
Lee worries many in the elderly, immigrant Chinese community will not know how to fill out the forms for such a process. He also feels the city of San Francisco should have a list of the most vulnerable residents, where city workers can check up on them and provide services in these sorts of emergencies.
“I hope the city is preparing for the next blackout,” said Lee.
According to PG&E, as of Friday, the Mission Substation, where the issue first began, is now safe and stable. There are several generators onsite at substations to provide temporary power for customers still impacted by the outage on Saturday.
“These units were put into service on Monday morning, and will be turned off as soon as repairs are complete,” said Tamar Sarkissian, a spokesperson with the utility company. “We are working on a case-by-case basis to support customers that live within close proximity to the generators.”
Sarkissian adds that PG&E representatives were at the Richmond Center on Wednesday, answering questions in Chinese, and that there will be additional outreach in Chinese.
There are dedicated Chinese and Spanish customer service lines.
Mr Nundy said: “There were people staying in the room above the bar, but luckily we had rooms available to relocate them to in case there was anything wrong structurally.
“They were ok about it all, but they were quite shocked. They were woken around 05:20 with a big bang.”
The crash took a radiator off the wall and shut down the heating system at the pub, but it was quickly repaired and heating and hot water was back in the building by 11:00.
Mr Nundy said it was “lucky” the incident had not happened at a different time as, a few hours earlier on Christmas Eve, that part of the 430-year-old pub had been “full of people”.
He said: “I dread to think what could have happened if it had happened when it was busy.”
Cook County will host a countywide scavenger hunt for middle and high school students during winter break.
The scavenger hunt will include nine participating businesses from Grand Portage to the Gunflint Trail to Tofte. Each business will provide students with one word from a larger phrase. After contacting all nine businesses, students are instructed to email Youth Prevention Coordinator Rocio Rivas to receive the final clue.
Students may contact participating businesses by phone if they are unable to visit in person.
“We don’t want the businesses to have problems with helping their clients during this activity,” Rivas told WTIP. “So we chose several businesses that we knew have more than one employee, or are not that busy at this time of the year.”
Rivas said the idea for the scavenger hunt came directly from students, who were asked what activities they wanted during winter break.
The scavenger hunt will run from Dec. 26 through Jan. 3. A wrap-up gathering will be held Jan. 8 at North Point, where students can share what they learned. All participants will receive a prize, with an additional prize awarded to those who complete the phrase correctly.
Rivas assembled a scavenger hunt packet that includes a list of participating businesses, a suggested script for calling or visiting, and space for students to record what they learn from each interaction. Posters with a QR code linking to the packet are posted throughout the community. Students and families may also contact Rivas directly at Rocio.Rivas@co.cook.mn.us for more information or to participate.
“This is all with the purpose to have the youth feel seen, supported and welcome across the community and increase the positive interactions between the youth and the adults in our community,” Rivas said.
Additional activities for students are also scheduled during winter break. The Art Colony hosted an arts and crafts class featuring origami, figurines and magnets on Dec. 26 and will host another session on Dec. 30 from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
North House Folk School will host drop-in crafts and handmade games on Jan. 3 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
WTIP’s Josh Hinke spoke to Rocio Rivas about these winter break activities. The audio of that conversation can be found below.
China challenges Google in quantum error correction with Zuchongzhi 3.2 processor
In an experimental demonstration using a superconducting processor named Zuchongzhi 3.2, China has announced a significant advancement in quantum error correction, dubbed “quantum supremacy 2.0.”
Zuchongzhi 3.2 processor successfully operates a surface-code logical qubit at a distance 7.
The noteworthy factor is that as the code distance increases, the logical error rate decreases. This inverse relation is a critical aspect of China’s latest quantum error correction technique that rivals Google’s earlier achievements with its Willow results.
What sets China’s claim apart is an all-microwave leakage suppression architecture designed to minimise “leakage,” where qubits escape the computational states assumed by error-correcting codes.
Addressing leakage is crucial, as it can lead to correlated failures that traditional decoders struggle to manage. This new method makes leakage control a vital design consideration, as previous research also advocated for its importance in maintaining clean surface-code cycles.
While China’s results aim to match Google’s benchmarks, they do not yet demonstrate the capability to run large computations on multiple interacting logical qubits.
Transitioning from a single logical qubit to many brings complex engineering challenges and new error pathways.
IBM’s roadmap emphasises that scaling to practical fault-supressing systems will require efficient codes and real-time decoding pipelines.
As the industry is adopting the “error correction era,” the focus is shifting to make error correction repeatable, automatable, and economically scalable.
With multiple groups achieving below-threshold behaviour, the next challenge is expected to lie in efficiently stacking logical qubits and maintaining manageable error budgets during actual computations.
Patrick Borunda and his dog Rosemary at his home in Yacolt, Wash., on Dec. 2, 2025. A PacifiCorp transmission line is planned to be built next to Borunda’s property in the coming years.
Erik Neumann / OPB
Patrick Borunda lives off a winding road under the shadow of tall Douglas fir trees in the rural town of Yacolt, Washington, in northeast Clark County. His modest house overlooks a small pasture and barn, once inhabited by 30 alpacas he raised for fiber and breeding. Today, the herd has been winnowed down to four geriatric animals along with Borunda’s Anatolian shepherd Rosemary, who keeps the coyotes away at night.
“For the most part, people pretty much stay to themselves,” Borunda said of the community. “People enjoy their solitude.”
Borunda and his partner Marit Federcell moved to Yacolt in the mid-1990s. When they bought their home, they took a gamble. PacifiCorp, one of the region’s largest electric utilities, owned an easement on the edge of their property. Nothing had happened with the adjacent land since it was set aside 50 years earlier, so they figured the purchase was a reasonable risk.
That all changed in the past year, when word got out that PacifiCorp had plans to develop the easement, which fell on the path of a 40-mile transmission line stretching from the Swift Reservoir dam, just south of Mount St. Helens, through Clark County to Camas, where it would then cross the Columbia River to feed electricity to Troutdale, Oregon.
Borunda and his neighbors have a range of worries if the approximately 100-foot-tall power lines go in: wildfire risks, contamination of their groundwater from herbicides in the power line buffer, lost property values from living under buzzing lines. And they wonder how the development will change the character of their community.
“Essentially, we’re in the woods right now,” Borunda said. “All of a sudden, we’re going to be in the middle of a huge clearing.”
Patrick Borunda looks at a map of the proposed PacifiCorp power line across Clark County on Dec. 2, 2025.
Erik Neumann / OPB
The Clark County project is just one example of the conflicts emerging between communities and utility companies as the Pacific Northwest electric grid expands to serve the growing need for power across the region.
Borunda and his neighbors are trying to stop the power line or lobby the electric company to reroute its path. Their group of about a dozen people goes by the name “Move the Line East,” and that’s just what they hope to do.
Their hope is that PacifiCorp will shift the transmission line east, where they believe it could travel south on federally managed land in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest with less impact on private property owners.
Electricity demand is increasing in Washington and Oregon due to the growth of data centers, increases in electric vehicle use and the shuttering of coal-fired power plants.
The TransAlta power plant in Centralia is the last coal-fired power plant in Washington state. It was set to close at the end of 2025 before being ordered to continue operating for 90 days by the Trump administration in mid-December.
The need for electricity has increased so much that one 2025 estimate by the consulting firm Energy + Environmental Economics warned the region could see rolling blackouts during extreme weather events as soon as next year.
There are also major limitations in current transmission lines owned by the Bonneville Power Administration, according to an analysis by OPB and ProPublica. PacifiCorp’s proposed transmission line across Clark County would create a new route for electricity that currently runs through BPA lines to Portland.
PacifiCorp’s proposed project will help meet the region’s future electricity needs, while lowering costs for customers, according to company spokesperson Simon Gutierrez.
An analysis by the utility showed it will save money by building its own transmission lines, rather than paying Bonneville Power for its infrastructure, he said. And the company already owns easements on most of the proposed transmission route.
“Nobody wants any disturbance in their neighborhood, but this is a need that we’ve identified to continue providing safe, reliable electricity to our customers,” Gutierrez said.
The project is still in its early stages, with construction set to begin in 2028 at the earliest. Gutierrez said he will begin public presentations about the plan in 2027 and that he’s currently meeting with residents upon request to address their safety concerns.
“Part of the route is pretty much sealed because it’s an existing easement the company purchased many, many years ago,” Gutierrez said. “Property owners should have been aware of that easement, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise for folks.”
Power lines for people – or for data centers?
The electricity will be for residential use in the Portland area, according to Gutierrez. The question of whether it could provide power for more controversial data centers is “ongoing and fluid.”
PacifiCorp has made similar arguments that its work has a public benefit before, only to have its plans change over time.
The company’s proposed 300-mile Boardman-to-Hemingway power line project was, for years, pitched as a way to get power to 805,000 customers in Idaho. But according to the Oregonian/Oregonlive, this summer, after years of planning, the project’s intended user was changed to an unnamed private industrial customer that is likely a data center.
The shift has raised questions about whether PacifiCorp can legally seize land through eminent domain it needs for a project that would have to benefit the public.
After years of raising alpacas at their home in Yacolt, Borunda and his wife now only have four of the animals. Dec. 2, 2025.
Erik Neumann / OPB
County Councilor Sue Marshall represents the largest district that would be affected by the transmission line in Clark County. She shares the concerns of residents over wildfire risk and the potential use of eminent domain if the company wants to site transmission lines on property it doesn’t own.
But even the community members’ idea of moving the development onto federally managed land would threaten forests, streams and wetlands, she said.
“Each potential path, you’d have to really look at the pros and cons of all that, and the least impactful,” Marshall said. “I would imagine PacifiCorp is looking at the least costly.”
Concerns over the electric utility’s role in wildfires are far from unfounded. In November, PacifiCorp said it had settled 4,200 wildfire claims since the 2020 Labor Day fires at a $1.6 billion price tag for the company, with more settlement payments on the way.
In recent years, the company has continued to beef up its safety protocols to guard against wildfires, Gutierrez said. Those protocols include heightened safety settings for electrical equipment to immediately de-energize power lines in case of interference or if there’s a wildfire burning near equipment. PacifiCorp proactively shuts off power during times of extreme fire risk, and the company has meteorologists that monitor fire conditions around the clock, he said.
At this stage, Marshall said, she’s trying to understand the facts surrounding the power line project.
“There’s fears of the unknown,” she said. “There’s fears seeing what’s happened to other places.”
Alida Cantor, an associate professor of geography at Portland State University, is familiar with the tension faced by local communities put in the crosshairs of energy projects. Her work focuses on how changes to our energy systems impact communities, especially when it comes to grid transitions to renewables.
There are three categories of concerns that often come up with energy siting projects across the West, she said. Do people feel like they’re adequately involved in the process? Are there less-impactful places where energy projects can be sited? And how can communities be compensated for the changes?
The Swift Reservoir transmission line traveling through parts of rural Clark County to deliver electricity to Portland is another example of a common tension: rural communities that feel they’re “bearing the burdens so that urban communities can keep on using power,” Cantor said.
Residents in Clark County likely will have limited options to negotiate, since PacifiCorp owns the right to the land it plans to develop.
Cantor said it could, however, be in the utility’s interest to create an agreement with affected community members simply to maintain goodwill.
“They do rely on communities thinking of them as a good neighbor,” she said.
Patrick Borunda stands next to his house in Yacolt, Wash., on Dec. 2, 2025.
Erik Neumann / OPB
At this point, Borunda and his group are mostly trying to educate residents about what the project could mean for Clark County. They hope other entities that have more leverage, like the county or state, will step in to decide if a company like PacifiCorp or a group of concerned citizens know what’s best for the region.
A new £5.9m railway bridge has been rolled into position in West Dunbartonshire while the line is closed until the new year.
Network Rail said teams faced an “intense nine-day engineering sprint” to complete the work near Bowling harbour after trains stopped on Christmas Eve.
The 1,860 tonne concrete structure was moved into position on Boxing Day.
Replacement buses are running from Dalmuir and Balloch/Helensburgh Central and between Glasgow and Crianlarich until trains resume on 2 January.
The new bridge will open up additional direct road access in the area – a former Exxon industrial site on the banks of the Clyde.
It is hoped the project will aid development of the Bowling Strategic Development Site, led by West Dunbartonshire Council.
Laura Craig, scheme project manager at Network Rail Scotland, said: “Building such a huge bridge on site and then moving it into position is an incredible task, and it’s been amazing to see the planning and teamwork come together so successfully.
The £5.9m project is being funded as part of the Glasgow City Region Deal, a package agreed between the UK and Scottish governments with local authorities in a bid to improve infrastructure and economic growth.
Councillor David McBride, West Dunbartonshire Council’s infrastructure convener, said: “This is a landmark moment in this major project and I am delighted to see such significant progress on the site.
“While there has been some disruption on the trains, this has been minimised by the work being carried out over the festive period.”
Rail services on a route between Kent and East Sussex are being disrupted by a signalling system fault, a rail operator said.
Southern said services travelling between Ashford International and Hastings/Eastbourne are delayed by up to 30 minutes while engineers carry our repairs.
The incident was first reported by the company shortly after 07:00 GMT, stating the issue lay with track circuits used to detect trains.
It said some trains on the single-track route may run to a revised calling pattern, or terminate/restart at Hastings.
Dozens of new electric buses are now in service as part of a multi-million-pound project, a transport firm said.
Plymouth Citybus and Go Cornwall Bus said 50 zero-emission double-deckers were operating across routes in Plymouth and the Rame peninsula as part of a project to replace almost half of its fleet with “cleaner, quieter and more accessible vehicles”.
The vehicles were added to the fleet through a £31.87m project jointly funded by bus operators, the Department for Transport, Plymouth City Council and Cornwall Council.
Richard Stevens, managing director of Plymouth Citybus and Go Cornwall Bus, said the electric buses marked an “important moment” for the firms.
Dozens of new electric buses are now in service as part of a multi-million-pound project, a transport firm said.
Plymouth Citybus and Go Cornwall Bus said 50 zero-emission double-deckers were operating across routes in Plymouth and the Rame peninsula as part of a project to replace almost half of its fleet with “cleaner, quieter and more accessible vehicles”.
The vehicles were added to the fleet through a £31.87m project jointly funded by bus operators, the Department for Transport, Plymouth City Council and Cornwall Council.
Richard Stevens, managing director of Plymouth Citybus and Go Cornwall Bus, said the electric buses marked an “important moment” for the firms.
“This fleet brings cleaner air, quieter streets and an improved travel experience for our passengers,” Mr Stevens said.
The project has also provided an upgrade to Milehouse bus depot in Plymouth.
Wrightbus, the manufacturer of the double-deckers, has also funded the planting of 500 trees – 10 for each electric bus – across Plymouth and south east Cornwall as part of the project.
