World

If you’re worried about your energy bills, you’ll find little comfort in a report by the Daily Express today which says that gas and electricity wholesale prices have dropped to their lowest level in nearly a decade, sparking calls for suppliers to cut bills by 10 per cent. Prices have averaged at nine-year lows over the first quarter of this year, according to industry analysts at the ICIS Power Index. Comparison website uSwitch seized on the figures to call on suppliers to reduce standard tariffs by a further 10 per cent. Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at uSwitch.com, said the numbers showed that consumers have ‘yet again’ been ‘short-changed by token gesture price cuts’. UK

House prices increased more than £20,000 in the year to March to a new record high as annual UK house price inflation returned to double-digit growth for the first time in almost two years, according to the latest Halifax house price index. Buyers chasing a low stock of homes for sale sent prices rising by £21,587 or 10.1 per cent in the three months to March, compared to the same period a year ago. The average price is now £214,811, Halifax said. This is the biggest annual jump since July 2014 and the second biggest since the run-up to the financial crash in September 2007. Research by Skipton Building Society has revealed that

The 11 million documents leaked from Panama lawyers Mossack Fonseca tell us much that we know already. It’s hardly news that the Central American state is a popular destination for those who dislike paying tax. But to obsess about this aspect of the story, as so many did this week, would be to miss the most striking discovery, which is just how many politicians and government officials have been using Panama to disguise their extraordinary wealth. Few were under any illusions about Vladimir Putin being a good and faithful public servant, yet it comes as a surprise that he appears to have a personal fortune that would have made the

Let me make this perfectly clear: I have never asked Mossack Fonseca of Panama to set up a company for me in the British Virgin Islands or anywhere else. At least I don’t think I have: I mean, who reads the small print of all that boring paperwork from wealth managers and accountants these days? Among 11 million leaked Mossack Fonseca documents, we will probably all find our own names somewhere, plus those of Elvis and Lord Lucan. Even so — and leaving aside, for today, the morality of offshore tax structures — we can admire the breadth of the Panamanian law firm’s client list, stretching as it reportedly does

Iceland’s Prime Minister has become the first politician to step down over the Panama Papers leak. Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson has today resigned following allegations his family invested millions of pounds in an offshore firm. The Icelandic PM’s position had looked increasingly untenable since the story emerged yesterday. After the revelations in the Panama Papers, crowds surrounded the Parliament in Reykjavik calling for Gunnlaugsson – who has been the country’s leader since 2013 – to step down. And in a country which is particularly sensitive to allegations of financial shadiness following the 2008 financial crash, it seemed obvious that this was going to go only one way. The writing was clearly on the wall for

Thrilling news arrives from Turkey, where it is being reported that a government body has issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how bloody marvellous it is to become an Islamic martyr. ‘I really want to be a martyr, daddy,’ one child asks its idiotic parent. Well you can be, daddy replies, if you want it enough. The book goes on to say: ‘May God bless our martyrs, may their graves be full with holy light, (as well as detonated body parts).’ Well ok, it didn’t say the bit in brackets – that was my helpful addition. The book was got up by the Diyanet, the Turkish Presidency

It’s the gift that keeps on giving. According to the latest figures from the city watchdog, the number of complaints over Payment Protection Insurance is still rising, more than a decade after talk of a mis-selling scandal began. The Financial Conduct Authority’s complaints data reveals that PPI complaints rose by by 6 per cent between July and December of 2015. In that six month period, 932,000 customers contacted their provider about the controversial insurance product which has cost banks billions of pounds in compensation. The regulator said that £22.9 billion has been paid out to customers since 2011 – the year a high court ruling made it possible to claim compensation

You might expect that the murder of Christians would excite particular horror in countries of Christian heritage. Yet almost the opposite seems to be true. Even amid the current slew of Islamist barbarities, the killing of 72 people, 29 of them children, on Easter Day in Lahore, stands out. So does the assault in Yemen in which nuns were murdered and a priest was kidnapped and then, apparently, crucified on Good Friday. But the coverage tends to downplay such stories — there has been much less about Lahore than Brussels, though more than twice as many died — or at least their religious element. The BBC correspondent in Lahore, Shahzheb

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered. Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon. Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’. Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made. They would be asking why he had done it and investigating

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of

In Cuba, they are shouting: ‘¡Viva Obama! Viva Fidel!’ What a slogan. The FT headline ignorantly described this as a ‘Nixon in China’ moment: implying that Obama had previously been opposed to Castro’s Cuba. The US President is expected to come to Britain next month to order us to stay in the EU. Let us strew his way with palms. Let all of us — workers, peasants and soldiers — shout with one voice ‘¡Viva Obama! Viva Jean-Claude Juncker!’ This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article can be found here. 

Here’s a sobering fact for you: yesterday in Brussels, Isis sympathisers killed five times as many civilians in one hour as British airstrikes have killed or injured Isis fighters in Syria since December. At the last count, in late February, British airstrikes over Syria had killed or hurt just seven Isis fighters in three months. Seven. Not even 10; seven. In Brussels, a small gang of Isis fanboys killed 35 civilians. British airstrikes in Syria were launched to great fanfare in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris in November. Hillary Benn was widely hailed for his Commons speech in which he said, ‘What we know about fascists is that they need to