Tag: Featured

    Benefit fraud has reached record levels after it rose by £200 million in the space of a year, the Department of Work and Pensions has admitted. Fraud swallowed up almost £2.1 billion of the department’s total budget of £174 billion the equivalent of £40 million per week. It means that the DWP now loses almost twice as much money to fraud as the entire budget of the Foreign Office, which is £1.1 billion per year. MPs said David Gauke, the Work and Pensions Secretary, now had questions to answer over why the figures have gone up despite repeated assurances that they would be brought under control. Figures released by the DWP show that in 2016/17 the total amount of money lost to overpayments which counts both fraud and errors by staff stood at £3.6 billion, up £300 million f...

    Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding day has reportedly been revealed. And there's good news for those hoping for a bank holiday for the Royal Wedding - but not for the reason you think. The happy couple will reportedly break from royal tradition and tie the knot on a weekend. The nuptials will take place at Windsor Castle on Saturday, May 26, according to The Sun. Harry and Meghan's big day happens to coincide with the Spring Bank Holiday weekend, which means Brits will have Monday May 28 off work anyway. Earlier this week, Downing Street there were no plans for a bank holiday to celebrate the Royal wedding in 2018. Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman said there was "no precedent" for one - a blow to the millions who wanted a day off. Kensington Palace confirmed on...

    Little more than two weeks after arriving in the UK, Meghan Markle has dived straight into her strange new world as Prince Harry’s fiancee with an introduction to that royal staple the walkabout. Nottingham was chosen for her inauguration into the firm, and her first step in a career that will include an abundance of royal waves, handshakes, tree plantings and ribbon cutting. Meghan Markle is an American actor, best known for her role in the hit series Suits. She has described herself as an actress, a writer, the editor-in-chief of my lifestyle brand the Tig, a pretty good cook, and a firm believer in handwritten notes. She has also campaigned for humanitarian causes. The 36-year-old grew up in Los Angeles. She studied at a girls Roman Catholic college there before attendi...

    Rogue states and terrorists will get their hands on lethal artificial intelligence in the very near future, a House of Lords committee has been told. Alvin Wilby, vice-president of research at French defence giant Thales, which supplies reconnaissance drones to the British Army, said the genie is out of the bottle with smart technology. And he raised the prospect of attacks by swarms of small drones that move around and select targets with only limited input from humans. The technological challenge of scaling it up to swarms and things like that doesn't need any inventive step, he told the Lords Artificial Intelligence committee. It's just a question of time and scale and I think that's an absolute certainty that we should worry about. The US and Chinese military are testi...

    Net migration is estimated to have fallen by nearly a third to 230,000 in the year to June, new figures show. It is the first time that a full year of data has been available since the UK voted to leave the EU last June. The figure is still short of the Conservatives' target to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. Net migration is the difference between people coming to the UK for more than a year, and the number of people leaving the UK for a year or more. In this 12-month period, 572,000 people arrived in the UK, and 342,000 emigrated, the Office for National Statistics report showed. Immigration specifically fell by 80,000 people over the year and three-quarters of that drop was down to fewer EU citizens coming to live in the UK, figures showed. Nicola White, ...

    Donald Trump's re-tweets of far-right group Britain First are a betrayal of the special relationship, Sadiq Khan has said. The Mayor of London launched a blistering response to the US President's promotion of three anti-Muslim videos on Wednesday. Many Brits who love America and Americans will see this as a betrayal of the special relationship between our two countries, Mr Khan said on Thursday. It beggars belief that the President of our closest ally doesn't see that his support of this extremist group actively undermines the values of tolerance and diversity that makes Britain so great. Theresa May Mr Khan, who was targetted directly by the US President for his response to the London Bridge terror attack, added his most recent intervention should see a planned state visi...

    US President Donald Trump, in an unprecedented public attack on America’s closest security ally, sharply rebuked British Prime Theresa May on Twitter after Britain criticised him for retweeting British far-right anti-Islam videos. Theresa don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine,’ Trump tweeted, sparking further outrage in Britain that has seen several major Islamist militant attacks on its streets. Trump’s unrepentant response was a reaction to May’s spokesman who on Wednesday criticised his retweets of anti-Islam videos originally posted by a leader of a British far-right fringe group. It is wrong for the president to have done this,’ the spokesman said. Trump sparked crit...