Author: SKYNEWS

Dozens of people around the world have been arrested after police disrupted a UK-founded website scamming victims on an industrial scale.LabHost, a site set up in 2021, tricked as many as 70,000 UK victims, obtaining 480,000 card numbers and 64,000 PINs worldwide, the Metropolitan Police said. It was created by a criminal network and enabled more than 2,000 users to set up phishing websites designed to steal personal information such as email addresses, passwords and bank details.Criminal subscribers could log on and choose from existing sites or request bespoke pages replicating those of trusted brands such as banks, healthcare agencies…

Samantha Davis, the wife of Star Wars and Harry Potter actor Warwick Davis, has died aged 53.Samantha co-founded the dwarfism charity Little People UK and featured in the final Harry Potter film, alongside Warwick. Warwick announced the news in a statement shared to the BBC, revealing she had died on 24 March.”Her passing has left a huge hole in our lives as a family. I miss her hugs.”She was a unique character, always seeing the sunny side of life she had a wicked sense of humour and always laughed at my bad jokes.” He added that she was his “most…

The price of everyday things – mainly food – is now rising at the lowest level since 2021.   Official data shows inflation eased last month to 3.2% – down from 3.4% – but the fall was slightly less than economists expected.On the Daily, Niall Paterson looks at what’s going on with inflation and what it might mean for interest rates with Sky’s economics and data editor Ed Conway – who’s in the US looking at the situation there. They also discuss how the UK could be importing inflation from America.Plus, Niall talks to Russ Mould, investment director at finance firm AJ Bell, about…

It’s not quite a Mission Accomplished moment – the equivalent of that day in 2003 when George W Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and prematurely declared the Iraq war was over.But Jeremy Hunt’s declaration in our interview in Washington DC that he had achieved a “soft landing” in the economy certainly has a whiff of wishful thinking about it. Economists spend much of their time dreaming that, following a crisis, or a set of crises, they will be able to engineer a slow glidepath, ensuring there is no painful economic catastrophe. Yet it rarely actually happens.Money latest: Tourist tax…

Almost one million private renters in England have been handed no-fault evictions since the Conservative government promised to abolish them, new data has shown.Research carried out by YouGov on behalf of homelessness charity Shelter – and shared exclusively with Sky News – showed that since April 2019 a total of 943,000 people had been given Section 21 notices, which is the equivalent of more than 500 renters every day. Politics live:Sunak and Starmer trade jibes in ‘very personal’ PMQsThe figures also showed unwanted moves were costing private renters in England £550m a year, with 830,000 people having to move in…

Metallica frontman James Hetfield has shared details of his latest tattoo – featuring the ashes of the late Motorhead rocker Lemmy.Hetfield posted a picture on Metallica’s Instagram account, showing a new Aces Of Spades inking on his right middle finger in reference to Motorhead’s biggest hit. The singer and guitarist told the band’s 11 million followers the tattoo is “a salute to my friend and inspiration Mr Lemmy Kilmister”, adding: “Without him, there would be NO Metallica.”He went on to say: “Black ink mixed with a pinch of his cremation ashes that were so graciously given to me. So now,…

The government has agreed to have an independent IT expert review of a Post Office software system predating Horizon, amid claims dozens more sub-postmasters may have been wrongly convicted.The Capture software was rolled out across branches in the 1990s, years before the notorious Horizon system was introduced. Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake has met with a former sub-postmaster and a lawyer representing 35 people who believe they were wrongly accused of stealing.It was agreed between MPs and the Post Office minister that an independent IT expert would assess evidence claiming to “prove” Capture software was prone to glitches. Image: The…

The Only Way Is Essex stars Joey Essex and James Argent have been forced to hitchhike after becoming stranded in Dubai floods sparked by record rainfall.Essex, 33, said the pair had “decided to hitchhike after hours of trying to get back home” in an Instagram story posted on Tuesday evening. In uploaded videos, the reality TV stars are seen standing and walking barefoot in ankle-deep water after what the state-run WAM news agency called a “historic weather event” in which more rain fell than in any other weather event since records began in 1949. Image: Joey Essex. Pic: Instagram/Joey Essex…

The Co-operative Bank will this week move a step closer to regaining its mutual status when it announces that it has struck a £780m deal to be bought by the Coventry Building Society.Sky News has learnt that the two organisations are expected to announce as early as Thursday morning that they have reached agreement on the terms of a transaction. Insiders said the cash price to be paid by the Coventry would be close to £800m.Their statement will mean that a combination of the two financial services businesses is increasingly probable, more than a decade after the Co-operative Bank first…

The technology behind ChatGPT scored better at assessing eye problems and providing advice than non-specialist doctors, a new study has found.A study led by the University of Cambridge has found that GPT-4, the large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI, performed nearly as well as specialist eye doctors in a written multiple-choice test. The AI model, which is known for generating text based on the vast amount of data it is trained on, was tested against doctors at different stages of their careers, including junior doctors without a specialism, as well as trainee and expert eye doctors.Each group was presented…