Featured

    This is the age of the zombie. The undead maraud around our popular culture. Stick on the telly, and they’re attacking Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. At the cinema, reanimated carcasses lurch through everything from Resident Evil to World War Z. The headlines might burst with blundering boastful strongmen, but our nightmares are full of blank-eyed walking corpses. Unthinking, unquestioning, neither alive nor dead, the zombie is horrific. It is also us. Britain in 2018 is stalked by zombie ideas, zombie politicians, zombie institutions stripped of credibility and authority, yet somehow still presiding over our lives. Nowhere is this more true than in the way we run our economy. This September marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. In autumn 2008,...

    A builder kidnapped, raped and murdered his teenage niece before dumping her body in a locked freezer because he was jealous of her relationship with her Muslim boyfriend, a court heard. Mujahid Arshid, 33, allegedly tied up 19-year-old Celine Dookhran and another young woman, bundling them both into the boot of his car and taking them to a £1.5 million house in Kingston that he was renovating. He is accused of raping both women at the abandoned house before slitting their throats. The body of Celine, a Barclays bank clerk and aspiring make-up artist, was later found in a padlocked deep freezer at the house, but the other woman, who was badly wounded, managed to convince Arshid not to kill her and raised the alarm, it is alleged. Prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC said ...

    Mansfield MP Ben Bradley A Tory MP recently appointed to a prominent party position has apologised after is emerged he had written a blog post suggesting benefit-claimants should have vasectomies. Ben Bradley, who was promoted by the Prime Minister this month to become Conservative vice chairman for youth, wrote the UK could be drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters without a cap on welfare payments. In a 2012 post on his personal blog, titled consbradders32 and uncovered by Buzzfeed News on Tuesday, the Mansfield MP wrote: Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can't afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free. Theresa May and new Conservative Party appointments He added: Families who have never worked a day in their lives having fo...

    A British supermarket believes it will be the first retailer in the world to make its own-brand products plastic free within five years. Iceland, the frozen food specialist, says it has worked with environmental charities and experts to develop paper and pulp alternatives that are fully recyclable, affecting more than 1,000 lines. We've created a monster, managing director Richard Walker told Sky News. Plastic does not degrade, it lasts for half a millennium. Every minute there's a truckload of plastic waste entering the ocean. It's ubiquitous, it's in everything, it's in up to 50% of what the average supermarket sells. The time to act is now. Take our ready meals. They are in a board carton sleeve which is good, made of paper, but the problem is the black plasti...

    When the Road Traffic Act 1988 was drawn up, the idea of smartphones and sat nav being commonplace in everyone’s car was still the stuff of science-fiction films. By 2003, things had already changed significantly, requiring an amendment to the Act stating: No person shall drive a motor vehicle on the road if he is using a hand-held mobile telephone to address the growing issue. The changes also made it an offence to send text messages, pictures or use the internet while driving, but using a phone as a sat nav wasn’t specifically outlawed, leaving a legal grey area. Motorists concerned with their use of a smartphone sat-nav app in the car and where best to position a phone or portable sat-nav device while driving need to do even more investigating and may find mixed...

    Drivers in West Yorkshire received the highest number of speeding tickets in Britain during 2017, according to the latest official data. Leasing company UK Carline submitted freedom of information requests to the UK’s police forces and the results revealed which areas have the most instances of speeding, as well as the top speeds people were caught travelling at. West Yorkshire police issued the most speeding tickets during 2017, racking up more than 142,000 offences, just under 80,000 more than Surrey which registered the second highest number of offences, at 62,623. Top 10 police forces issuing speeding tickets in 2017 10) Dorset – 45,344 9) Norfolk – 49,730 8) Humberside – 49,982 7) Lancashire – 51,455 6) Kent – 53,590 5) North Wales – 57,224 4) Dundee – ...

    Although the UK would still be the biggest loser from crashing out of the EU single market and customs union without a new trade deal with a cost to the economy of £125bn by 2020 the EU would also suffer a bigger economic hit than previously thought by the end of the decade, according to the consultancy Oxford Economics. The analysis spells out the negative implications of Brexit for the largest European economies, as ministers prepare for complex negotiations with Brussels over the UK’s future trading relationship with the single market bloc. Although the focus has so far been on the impact for the UK, the report shows the risks for both parties in the event Britain falls back to trading on World Trade Organisation rules, which would lead to greater costs from tra...