United Kingdom

    Property prices in Britain may be surging due to a horrendous imbalance of supply and demand — but the market is poised to implode. Why? Because Britons are not earning enough money to either get on the housing ladder or are spending such a large portion of their wages on mortgages that may not be sustainable. Well, not unless everyone suddenly gets a huge pay rise over the next year or so. That's the assumption in the latest figures from think tank Resolution Foundation, which show that lower- and middle-income households are spending 26% of their salaries on housing, compared to 18% back in 1995. In London, households spend 28% of their income on housing. The think tank said this is the equivalent to adding 10 percentage points onto income tax. Only the rich are not feel...

    A glamorous uni graduate who tried to dodge a speeding fine by paying a legal expert to make it go away been JAILED. Ayesha Ahmed - who has 2:1 in international relations and politics - has ruined a potentially promising career for the sake of not paying a small fine and taking three points on her licence. Ahmed, of Dudley, West Mids., was caught speeding in her BMW twice within five minutes by a mobile camera van parked near her home in July 2014. But rather than accept a driver awareness course for travelling at 39mph and 40mph in a 30mph zone, the 27-year-old graduate paid £450 to a man who claimed he could exploit a "legal loophole" enabling her to escape punishment. Ahmed's notices from police were then returned to enforcement officers, falsely claiming a woman from W...

    The Independent Two million refugee children are already holed up in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan (Picture: [copyright]) MPs’ have voted against an attempt to compel the Government to offer sanctuary in the UK to 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe. Labour peer Lord Dub’s amendment to the Immigration bill was rejected 294 to 276, giving a majority of 18, following a Commons debate on Monday. The Government resisted defeat despite suggestions Tory rebels may defy their party and back the Lord Dub's proposal who was saved from the Nazis and brought to London on the Kindertransport programme and led a parliamentary campaign to take in youngsters from camps near Calais and elsewhere in Europe who, he says, are hugely vulnerable to exploitation, sexual violence and dis...

    A picket line outside the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, as thousands of junior doctors begun the first all-out strike in the history of the NHS after the Health Secretary said the Government would not be "blackmailed" into dropping its… Junior doctors are once again walking out on strike over a new contract being imposed by the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Here’s everything you need to know about it. What time does the junior doctors’ strike start? This week’s junior doctors strike lasts for two working days. It starts at 8am on Tuesday 26 April, and goes on until 5pm the same day. It then resumes at 8am on Wednesday 27 April and continues until 5pm that day, when it ends. Will emergency care still be available during the strike? Junior doctors will not be provid...

    What a long distance David Cameron has travelled in the course of his party leadership. It is almost 10 years since he caused offence in Washington with a speech on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, in which he sought to distinguish himself both from neo-conservatives and from the presidential poodle that Tony Blair had supposedly become. “We will serve neither our own, nor America’s, nor the world’s interests if we are seen as America’s unconditional associate in every endeavour,” he said. “Liberty grows from the ground,” he further insisted. “It cannot be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone.” In the White House, there were those who wondered what sort of friend to America this prospective prime minister could conceivably turn out to be. They need not have worried. On ...

    The oldest message in a bottle spent 108 years, 4 months and 18 days at sea before it was finally delivered, reports LiveScience.com After being cast into the sea by the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (MBA) in November 1906, the message washed up at Amrum Island, in Germany, on April 17, 2015. This year, Guinness World Records recognized it as the oldest message in a bottle ever found. One of more than 1,000 bottles thrown into the North Sea by marine biologist George Parker Bidder, the bottle was part of a research project on the patterns of ocean currents. More than a century later, a letter containing an original postcard from one of his bottles arrived in the mail at the MBA's Plymouth laboratory in the United Kingdom. A German woman discovered the...

    Around 600 curry houses across the country have shut in the past 18 months and there are fears that a further 4,000 restaurants - around a third of the industry - could follow. Curry house owners say the increasingly tough immigration rules mean they are struggling to bring highly-skilled chefs over from Asia and it is making it difficult for these businesses to grow. As a result, restaurants are increasingly unable to provide adequate customer service or fulfil orders. British Curry Awards founder, Enam Ali, and his supporters are campaigning for the Government to ease immigration restrictions. He has sent a 75-page document to the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Business Secretary and employment minister Priti Patel, to urge them to introduce one-year visas for c...

    A mum has penned a heartfelt open letter to Heathrow Airport security staff after she claims they forced her to dump four gallons of frozen breast milk. Jessica Coakley Martinez frequently travels for work but pumps and freezes her breast milk for her son as she jets off around the world. The mother-of-two from California claims she has been able to haul the frozen milk through airports around the world - but the only time it has been an issue was at London's Heathrow. In her open letter, posted on Facebook, she wrote: "You humiliated me and made me feel completely defeated as a professional and a mother." She describes the embarrassment and inconvenience of storing the milk for the sake of her son as she flies across the globe. She continued: "It meant lugging this giant ...

    Police officers take part in a security exercise at the Pierre Mauroy Stadium, Villeneuve d'Ascq, northern France Jihadi terrorists are not being blacklisted on a European Union terrorist database and could be left free to travel to Britain because members states cannot agree on the definition of a foreign fighter, an internal EU report has revealed. A document written by the Dutch government, the current President of the EU Council, said an “absence of common standards” between EU countries which “diminishes the impact of information sharing” on a pan-EU terror watch list. The loophole will add further pressure on the Government to review border security. This week The Telegraph launched a campaign to highlight weaknesses in border security. In the restricted 10-page docu...

    A report calls for an urgent inquiry as it warns of rip-offs by online travel agents Online travel agents are exploiting, misleading, and ripping off customers to such an extent an urgent top level probe is needed to police them, a Lords report warns. Rigged pricing, fake reviews, doctored search options, and "intimidation" of hoteliers to stop them offering cheaper deals have all been identified as dodgy practices deployed in the burgeoning digital travel sector by the upper house's EU Committee. Peers have insisted a rapid investigation by the Completions and Markets Authority is needed to bring the industry into line. Committee chairman and Labour peer Lord Whitty said customers are getting a raw deal when they log on for travel bargains. "We heard of an array of worry...