Student Loans Company figures show 10% jump in a year as individuals increase borrowing to meet cost of living
Students in England are finishing their degrees with government loans averaging £53,000, a jump of 10% in a year, as they increase their borrowing to meet the rising cost of living.
The Student Loans Company (SLC) has released figures showing individual loan balances were £5,000 higher in 2024-25 than a year earlier, when the average in England was £48,270.
Continue reading...In phone call, Paetongtarn Shinawatra discusses border dispute with former Cambodian leader and calls him ‘uncle’
Thailand’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, apologised after a leaked phone conversation with former Cambodian leader Hun Sen prompted public anger and threatened the collapse of her government.
In the leaked call, Paetongtarn – daughter of the populist former leader Thaksin Shinawatra – discusses an ongoing border dispute with Hun Sen, who is known to be a friend of her family.
Continue reading...Anahita, a Tehran resident in her 30s, tells of fleeing the city, surging inflation and her hopes for regime change
The greatest impact of this war is fear and anxiety. We don’t know whether this situation will last for weeks, months or even years. Our lives have been thrown off routine, I spend most of my time just reading the news. I’m constantly afraid that a missile might hit my home, my city or the homes of my relatives and friends in other places.
I get the news from X and Instagram because we don’t have any reliable news networks and broadcasts that are not censored by the regime. We follow the updates through videos shared by people from different parts of the country on social media. The internet in Iran has become very slow and it was completely down yesterday [Wednesday].
Continue reading...Items ranged from video cameras and guitars to taxidermy deer heads, props from Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive – and the director’s personal coffee machine
Personal effects belonging to the film-maker David Lynch, who died in January, have fetched more than $4m at auction in Los Angeles, with the highest bid of $195,000 going to scripts for his unrealised film project Ronnie Rocket.
Wednesday’s auction of almost 450 items included props from Lynch’s films, personal items such as video cameras and music equipment, his director’s chair, two taxidermy deer heads, his 35mm print of his debut feature Eraserhead – and his beloved La Marzocco GS/3 home espresso machine, which fetched $45,500 and presumably produces a damn fine cup of coffee.
Continue reading...Operators of trial insist age assurance ‘can be done’ but preliminary report finds age verification tools ‘not guaranteed to be effective’
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Technology to check a person’s age and ban under 16s from using social media is not “guaranteed to be effective” and face-scanning tools have given incorrect results, concede the operators of a Australian government trial of the scheme.
The tools being trialled – some involving artificial intelligence analysing voices and faces – would be improved through verification of identity documents or connection to digital wallets, those running the scheme have suggested.
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Continue reading...Baseball team says Ice agents were denied permission to access parking lots but agency claims agents ‘were never there’
The Los Angeles Dodgers said on Thursday they denied US immigration enforcement agents access to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium earlier in the day.
“This morning, ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lots,” the baseball team said in a post on X.
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