Britain’s top share index rose on Wednesday, boosted by a rise in insurer Prudential after it announced a special dividend with results that beat expectations. Prudential rose 2.9 percent, the top FTSE 100 riser, after its profit was lifted by strong performances at its British, U.S. and Asian life businesses. “Overall Prudential remains in good shape and … has allayed Read More

There are few things more frustrating than a slow-loading web page. For companies, what’s even worse is what comes after: users abandoning their site in droves. Amazon, for example, estimates that every 100-millisecond delay cuts its profits by 1 percent. To help combat this problem, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University have developed Read More

Number 10 has conceded that its plans to relax Sunday trading laws are dead in the water, after David Cameron suffered his first House of Commons defeat since the election at the hands of his own Conservative MPs. The government’s attempt to let shops trade for longer than six hours each Sunday was voted down after 26 Tory backbenchers teamed Read More

ritain’s Queen Elizabeth visits the National Memorial to the Few in Folkestone, southern England March 26, 2015 in Folkestone, England. REUTERS/CHRIS JACKSON/POOL Buckingham Palace said it had launched an official complaint with Britain’s press watchdog on Wednesday over a newspaper report that Queen Elizabeth backs a British exit from the European Union, saying the monarch remains politically neutral. Under the Read More

Damaging cyberattacks on a global scale continue to surface every day. Some nations are better prepared than others to deal with online threats from criminals, terrorists and rogue nations. Data-mining experts from the University of Maryland and Virginia Tech recently co-authored a book that ranked the vulnerability of 44 nations to cyberattacks. Lead author V.S. Subrahmanian discussed this research on Read More

No matter where you are in the world, I’d bet good money that any parent you meet would tell you the same thing: Raising their child is the most important job they’ll ever have. Bringing a human being into the world and guiding him or her safely into adulthood is both an awesome privilege and a weighty responsibility – and Read More

The watches are making exams a ‘nightmare to administer’, according to one deputy head Smartwatches that allow pupils and students to cheat in exams are being openly sold on Amazon. An advert for one such watch, which has 4GB of memory, was offered on the website for £44.95. “This watch is specifically designed for cheating in exams with a special Read More

Guardian understands quartet from Retail Acquisitions Limited shared £3m days after buying struggling department store chain BHS could implement job cuts as part of effort to turn company fortunes around. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA More than a third of an £8.4m loan taken out of BHS by its new owners in March last year went to four directors who were part Read More

If you had a nickel for every time you went on a diet … Or, scratch that, if you actually lost a pound every time you went on a diet, well, you’d have no reason to diet! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, diets tend to cause more frustration than actual weight loss. And the reasons are way simpler than Read More

Teachers conduct lessons in subjects outside their field in many schools Getty Teachers should have their student loan debts written off after spending 10 years in the classroom, as part of a package to help solve the recruitment crisis in schools, head teachers have declared. The idea is one of a series of measures being put forward by the Association Read More