Author: BBC

More than 80 Warm Welcome spaces have opened up across Surrey, allowing people to have a free hot drink and socialise with others during the colder months.Community centres, church halls, and most of Surrey’s libraries are among the venues being used for the Surrey County Council (SCC) initiative, which is now running for the fourth year. Residents can access these spaces, which aim to support those who are affected by cost of living pressures, between Saturday and the end of March. Councillor Mark Nuti, cabinet member for health, wellbeing and public health, said the aim was to “ensure that nobody…

The government is facing questions over whether the system at the heart of its plans for digital ID can be trusted to keep people’s personal data secure.Digital ID will be made available to all UK citizens and legal residents but will only be mandatory for employment, under the government’s proposals.Full details of how the system will work have yet to be announced but Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has insisted it “will have security at its core”.It will be based on two government-built systems – Gov.uk One Login and Gov.uk Wallet.One Login is a single account for accessing public services…

BBC​​I’m bald, and that bothered me for a long time. ​​It bothered me that I was bothered. But just one swipe down my Instagram feed reveals I’m not the only man who is self-conscious about his hair.I’m greeted with videos and posts offering me hair transplants, regrowth tablets, thickening sprays, powders that fill gaps, and hair systems (once known as wigs or toupees).These products promise to restore my “lost confidence” and stop my lack of hair from “holding back” my life.But does the wealth of treatment options on offer mean attitudes towards hair loss have shifted? Is what was once…

If you moved house in the last five years, you could have unclaimed credit sitting in your old gas and electricity accounts.Around £240m is sitting in closed energy accounts which can be returned to customers, according to the regulator Ofgem and suppliers.Ofgem said there were 1.9 million closed accounts with credit in them. Most people may only be owed a few pounds, but some could claim back more than £100.Energy UK, which represents suppliers, said people should check letters and emails and contact their old suppliers if they think they have outstanding credit.More than 90% of closed account balances are…

Chris BaraniukTechnology ReporterAFP via Getty ImagesDiesel locomotives are being replaced with electric modelsEvery day, thousands of passengers heading south west on trains leaving Aldershot station pass a cluster of solar panels nestled by the tracks. Few, if any, may notice the installation. But the train they are on is drawing power from it.”On a sunny afternoon, if you are catching a train through Aldershot, a little bit of the energy for that train will come from those solar panels,” says Leo Murray, co-founder and chief executive of Riding Sunbeams, a start-up aiming to use renewable energy resources for rail electrification…

The UK’s winter flu season has begun five weeks earlier than usual, health officials are warning.The UK Health Security Agency said cases were rising quickly among children and young people – and warned the virus would soon start to spread across older age groups.The organisation urged people eligible for the flu vaccine to come forward to get protected.But they said it was too early to say how difficult and serious this year’s flu season would be.One of the concerns is that the flu season could peak before the majority of the vulnerable groups have got immunised – the vaccination campaign…

Getty ImagesChancellor Rachel Reeves is widely expected to announce some tax rises in the Budget on 26 November. This is despite Labour’s pledge before the 2024 election that it would not increase income tax, National Insurance (NI) or VAT for working people. In more recent comments, Reeves has instead talked about “keeping their taxes as low as possible”.It is not clear exactly what tax/NI changes Reeves might announce in the Budget, but these are the current rules and rates. What is National Insurance and what does it pay for?The government uses National Insurance to pay benefits and help fund the…

Imran Rahman-Jones,technology reporter and Lily Jamali,North America technology correspondentGetty ImagesMicrosoft said the Azure outage was due to “DNS issues”Websites for Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft returned to service late on Wednesday after experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites around the world over several hours.Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365 saw delays with Outlook among other services, but by 21:00GMT, many websites that went down were once again accessible after the company restored a prior update.The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the…

Phil Shepka,Cambridgeshire political reporter and Katy PrickettOrthopaedic AcademyKuldeep Stohr was investigated in relation to 700 planned and 100 emergency operations”A series of missed opportunities” have been revealed by a review of a surgeon who is being investigated over hundreds of surgeries involving children carried at an NHS hospital. Kuldeep Stohr was suspended by Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge earlier this year, amid concerns over surgeries that were “below the expected standard”.A “pivotal missed opportunity” came when the hospital trust failed to act upon recommendations made by an external reviewer into her work in 2016, the report said.Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation…

The Home Office has failed to meet the challenge of “crises” it has faced over several years and is “not yet fit for purpose”, the home secretary has told the BBC. Shabana Mahmood acknowledged that the department, which she was put in charge of last month, had “a range of problems” including procuring contracts and holding on to senior staff but said that she was “determined to deliver”. Mahmood was talking to the BBC while overseeing a police operation on a high street in south London aimed at tackling migrants working illegally in the UK. She said a crackdown was…