SARAH VINE: A knighthood for Sadiq Khan when London is such a mess devalues the entire system. Why do we hand out honours to a bunch of self-satisfied sycophants?
What a relief it must have been for the King to discover that Sir Sadiq Khan, knighted by the monarch in the New Year's honours, was well satisfied with his experience at the Palace last week.
NHS patients battling Alzheimer's WON'T be offered 'miracle' drugs as health watchdog rules they are 'too expensive to justify'
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has refused the 'miracle' drugs lecanemab and donanemab for use on the NHS as they are too expensive to justify.
Secrets of the keyless car thieves: As an epidemic sweeps Britain, real-life criminals show Channel 4 crew how quick - and easy - it is to steal a £24,000 SUV from a suburban drive just like yours in only 20 seconds
In a brazen display of criminality, a pair of masked car thieves are demonstrating to a TV film crew the ease and speed with which they can steal luxury cars.
The secrets to beating the 8am scramble for GP appointments by the people who really know - the receptionists! And at least one of them is VERY surprising...
Manning the phone lines to surgeries, GP receptionists have long borne the brunt of patients' growing frustration with the primary care system.
Helen Hunt, 61, flaunts bikini body in Italy after revealing she skips Botox, plastic surgery and diets
The 61-year-old actress was holidaying in Taormina, Sicily - the setting of season two of The White Lotus - alongside her boyfriend of three years Jeffrey Nordling.
Woman, 75, in £600k house furious after next-door neighbour demolishes home 'without permission' making her life a 'nightmare'
The row has kicked off in the peaceful village of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, where Doreen Beacom has lived for 25 years in her semi-detached house
Bella Hadid shows off her cowgirl skills with boyfriend as she ditches world of fashion for new Texas life
Bella Hadid has has officially entered cowgirl era and put her horsemanship to the test this weekend in Fort Worth, Texas .
Vigilante Brits: Homeowners who took the law into their own hands... and why some were jailed for it
Many will be familiar with the old adage 'an Englishman's home is his castle' - but what happens when homeowners feel they are coming under attack?
Seven BBC women alerted bosses over Wynne Evans' conduct... So why did he tell TV's Cat and Ben: 'There have been no complaints about me. Ever'
The Mail on Sunday can disclose that BBC Wales staff raised the seven separate grievances between July 2023 and August 2024
Stacey Solomon, 34, and eldest son Zachary, 17, enjoy a wholesome trip to Paris after clashing on the family's reality show
The singer, 35, has enjoyed a busy week of jet-setting after flying away on a plush business trips to Lake Como, Italy , earlier this week.
Gemma Collins 'calls in police and beefs up security' as terrified star is sent 'abusive and menacing' letter to her home
Gemma Collins has been left 'terrified' and called in police after she received an 'abusive and menacing' letter at her home.
Suicide-risk young daughter was refused NHS mental-health counselling because she goes to private school, mother claims
Because the youngster was being bullied at a state school, her despairing parents had only just moved her to a private school. Pictured: File photo
Wealthy families desperate to fill shelves so they appear well-read are snapping up books by the metre
Bookshelves are being filled with envy-inspiring collections - which will never be read by their owners. Lauren Giles (right) says a stocked case has become a symbol of a 'luxury lifestyle'.
'I'm on the plane safely': British man's heartbreaking final words to family moments before Air India crash - as tributes are paid to victims of disaster
Ramesh Patel's grieving family have revealed the heartbreaking final words they received from him moments before he was killed in the Ahmedabad air disaster.
Fantasist who invented claims of a VIP paedophile ring at Westminster set to have jail term cut by three years in Labour's sentencing review
The serial liar (pictured) triggered an investigation in 2014 into allegations of child sexual abuse and murder involving politicians, generals and senior figures in the intelligence services.
Lando Norris swatted away Nico Rosberg's 'mentality' comments that went down like a lead balloon at McLaren but the Sky pundit is correct, writes JONATHAN McEVOY - and failure to beat Oscar Piastri this year may threaten to undermine his career
Heading into the Canadian GP- and speaking before he qualified a distant seventh - he is guarded and, deep down, would rather be undisturbed as he watches the US Open golf on his phone.
QUENTIN LETTS: Let Dad know you love him (even if he does blow his nose loudly, obsesses about stacking the dishwasher in a certain way, and wears awful holiday shorts)
This Father's Day, if you have given or received a card, what does it depict? A foaming tankard? A sports car, wheel barrow, tie, rugby ball? Pictured: A young Quentin Letts with his father Richard
'Ghost' Students are Enrolling in US Colleges Just to Steal Financial Aid
Last week America's financial aid program announced that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid programs."
Or, as the Associated Press suggests: Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud. "In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real..."
Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy "ghost students" — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check... Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits.
And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity... "The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program," the department said in its guidance to colleges.
An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports... Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time...
Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes' pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.
Fortune found one community college that "wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students," according to the school's president.
The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts... At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. "It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system," said Burris.
The scheme has also proved incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...
Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges... In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.
Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. "One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rory McIlroy makes brutally-honest admission he wants to 'get out of here' amid US Open nightmare in Oakmont
RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Rory McIlroy has admitted his only remaining ambitions for this US Open are a quick final round and even quicker getaway.
How a snap of your dog on your desk can reduce anger and calm an office spat
Having a picture of your pooch on your desk may be enough to reduce anger - and even violence - in the workplace by one third, scientists have found.