“I’m a bit scatty with things like this,” Gemma admits when talking about her finances. It was not scattiness that meant she struggled to make ends meet when taking home £399.69 a month for working 18 hours a week as a cashier at Betfred. Even with tax credits and child benefit topping up her meagre…

Krystian Szemiczek and Lucia Morawska have been a couple since last year, but originally got together in 1995. Lucia, who was born in Poland but grew up in the UK, would go to Poland for summer holidays to see her grandmother, and met Krystian through a friend. She was 14; he was 16. After Lucia…

Saudi Arabia has said two of its oil tankers have been damaged in mysterious “sabotage attacks” in the Gulf, as the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, held emergency talks with his European counterparts about mounting tensions in the region. The United Arab Emirates said on Sunday that four commercial vessels had been sabotaged near…

A freelance journalist is vowing to protect his source after San Francisco police raided his home and office while keeping him handcuffed for several hours as part of a criminal investigation. Bryan Carmody told the Los Angeles Times officers banged on his door on Friday and confiscated dozens of personal items, including notebooks and his…

Nothing titillates the Icelandic bondage and dominance-themed band Hatari more than a glaring contradiction. Click Here: On stage, the group, whose name means “Hater”, present a fascist-inspired dystopia of blood-splattered whippings. In person, they are softly spoken and occasionally cheerfully optimistic. They have slammed Eurovision in Israel – which is the subject of boycott calls…

The chief executive of Uber has urged employees to ignore “pessimistic voices” after shares in the company slumped again on their second day of trading since Friday’s disappointing stock market debut. With Wall Street in a fragile state after the re-emergence of trade tension between the US and China, Uber’s stock market value fell below…

Two more bodies have been found during investigations into the deaths of three people discovered in a Bavarian hotel room who had been killed by crossbow bolts. Two women were found dead at a flat in Wittingen, northern Germany, belonging to one of three people who died at a hotel 400 miles away in Passau,…

Several female members of an alleged New York sex cult, including the actor Allison Mack, became dangerously thin after following near-starvation diets at the direction of the group’s leader, a 12-year veteran of the group testified in court on Monday. Film-maker Mark Vicente is a key prosecution witness at the criminal trial of Keith Raniere,…

Dundee University took tens of thousands of pounds from a blind Nigerian PhD student in return for what it promised him would be “state of the art” disabled facilities if he came to the UK with his young family to complete his studies. Instead, Bamidele Chika Agbakuribe, who is totally blind, claims the university gave…

Rising inequality in Britain risks putting the country on the same path as the US to become one of the most unequal nations on earth, according to a Nobel-prize winning economist. Sir Angus Deaton is leading a landmark review of inequality in the UK amid fears that the country is at a tipping point due…