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The London borough of Barking and Dagenham has the unenviable ranking in a new study - and residents and traders have said they are not surprised.

Official data last week showed government debt is just below £3trillion - a milestone it looks set to hit in the coming months - having been £350bn at the turn of the century.

United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent teased on Sunday that the country will take the 'single greatest financial offensive' against Iran, ahead of a scheduled news conference on Monday.

Chang'e 7 didn’t meet unspecified ‘launch requirements’

Tara Dexter (pictured) bought a smallholding in Sidlesham, West Sussex, while mourning the death of her veteran partner, Gary.

Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira leeched off the kindness of the couple by convincing them to care for her, and lying to explain her grown-up appearance.

Despite an addiction to trying to fix what is not broken, the BBC begin each and every MOTD by celebrating how long this staple of Saturday nights has been on our screens.

It survived testing and the boss signed off, so who was really to blame?

With their arrival on British shores raising innumerable eyebrows, the source said that they will look to work out a mutually beneficial relationship with their family.

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.

Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.

If anyone can back me up on this, it's our submitter, Jared B:

I am a teacher by profession, and worked for a year at an ed-tech company founded by a mechanical engineering professor, Harry. Harry had spent a great deal of time in the 90's developing a C interpreter (yes, you read that right). 30 years later, he remained convinced that his interpreter was the technology of the future, and had founded a company that offered math and computer science curriculum to K-12 students based on C programming.

Originally, he had written a textbook that introduced students to programming using a locally-installed version of his interpreter and custom IDE. A little vain, but no serious problems. As Chromebooks grew popular in schools, he had developed a web IDE where students could write and run C code.

But Harry could never give fully give up on the Windows IDE for his C interpreter. So, he included in the web version a "Run Locally" button for those school computers still running Windows. It worked like so: installing the interpreter and IDE locally would also install a daemon that activated on startup and ran a websocket server. This server had an endpoint which accepted as a parameter a string of C code. It would then pass this C code to the locally-installed interpreter to run.

As you might suspect, there was no authentication whatsoever on this local websocket server. Knowing the form of the protocol, ANY domain could connect to localhost:12345/execute_c_program and send arbitrary code to run (of course, Harry prided himself on the completeness of his C implementation, including execv() and the like). Trick a user into visiting a malicious website, and you automatically had RCE on their computer.

Adding insult to injury, I discovered that the server was bound to 0.0.0.0 so that if you had Harry's software (/malware) installed, any computer on the same network as you could send you arbitrary C code to execute without question.

These vulnerabilities had existed for several years before I joined the company. In all that time, Harry had never hired anybody but his own grad students as software developers, and none of them had noticed the problem. By that time, the software was installed on thousands of school-owned computers throughout the state.

I documented and demonstrated the vulnerabilities to Harry. He did release a new version of the software addressing the issues and citing "security improvements" in the release notes, but there was never a communication to school/district IT leaders to describe the importance of updating. I suspect that Harry should be in serious legal trouble for potentially compromising data related to schools and minors, but I've since moved on and dropped the subject.

During the year I spent at the company (not in any sense as a dev, mind you, but as a lowly curriculum writer), I also discovered and reported a cookie-stealing exploit that would have compromised student and teacher data, as well as a code injection on another of Harry's websites (he decided to demonstrate that his C interpreter could work as a web server via a page where a user could type a math expression, which was then eval()ed server-side without any sanitation). The latter vulnerability gave me remote access, where I discovered thousands of transaction records that included credit card information stored in the clear.

Harry's company is still in business to this day, and has recently been ranked in TIME's list of top American ed-tech companies. Oh, and the office router's admin page still had the default Google-able username and password, but that one's a freebie.

I knew someone like this once, only they were stuck on ColdFusion long after everyone else stopped caring about it. However, I don't think they went on to endanger an entire state's educational system, only to be lauded as a visionary leader. Can't say for sure, though.

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I became captivated by dancing at the age of seven. I still remember watching the Italian version of Come Dancing on TV. Seeing the couples twirl around… I wanted to be on the floor with them.

Lifestyling is the little-understood strategy of derisking pensions that many people with invested pots will be defaulted into in the decade before retirement age.

The authority was asked for a full list of the 100 'things done' and evidence of it being completed

When they're not complaining or bickering they're spending all your money or sleeping all day: holidaying with teens is not for the faint-hearted.

UK-based fitness and women's health expert Kate Rowe-Ham, now 50, embarked on Dry January in 2021 after her father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer mid-Covid.

Sally White spent her life trying her hardest not to smile. Every time she grinned or laughed, she became painfully aware of the one facial feature she felt marked her out from other people...

It's one of the 10 of the least friendly places

A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI: Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship... If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even more pronounced. In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released. This is in line with other studies that have shown that large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI. AI-authored text is not evenly spread across the web. When ChatGPT was first released, the kinds of linguistic patterns that can signal AI authorship appeared at similar rates across the main top-level web domains (.com, .org, .edu and .gov). But in samples from 2026, around one-in-ten pages with a .com domain show signs of AI authorship — about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%). They even identified specific ways online text has changed, "comparing the internet of today to a snapshot from 2023." Em dashes appear twice as often Oxford commas increased 63%. Words used more frequently by AI (like "delve," "interplay" or "testament") have more than doubled in usage. "Negative parallelism" comparisons ("it's not just X, it's Y") have nearly tripled.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Let's Get Loud hitmaker, 57, was pictured leaving a bungalow in West Hollywood after grabbing lunch with her longtime manager Benny Medina.

Amy Donohue has been left with a $30,000 medical bill, with the devastated bride launching a GoFundMe to help raise the money to bring her friend and guest back to Australia.