Price of average UK home passes £300,000 for first time, Halifax says

The average cost of a UK home passed £300,000 for the first time in January, as house prices increased at the fastest rate since November 2024.Data released by Halifax showed that house prices rose 0.7% month on month last month, the fastest rate since a 1.1% increase was recorded in November 2024. On an annual measure, prices grew 1%

Almost a quarter of soup on sale in UK supermarkets has too much salt, study finds

Nearly a quarter of all soup bought in supermarkets contains too much salt, with one brand containing more salt than two McDonald’s cheeseburgers, according to research.Soup has long had a reputation for being a healthy choice for lunch. The analysis of nearly 500 varieties of tinned and chilled soups sold in supermarkets found that 23% contained too much salt.Of the 481 soups Action on Salt and Sugar (AoSS) tested, nearly half (48%) of branded soups and 6% of supermarket own-brand soups still exceeded the government’s voluntary salt target of 0.59g per 100g serving

TikTok could be forced to change app’s ‘addictive design’ by European Commission

TikTok could be forced into changes to make the app less addictive to users after the EU indicated the platform had breached the bloc’s digital safety rules.The EU’s executive arm said in a preliminary ruling that the popular app had infringed the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to its “addictive design”.The European Commission said TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, had not adequately assessed how its design could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of users including children and vulnerable adults.By constantly “rewarding” users with new content, the Chinese-owned platform fuelled constant scrolling and shifted the brains of users into “autopilot mode”, the commission added, which could lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users’ self-control.The preliminary ruling accused TikTok of ignoring indicators of compulsive use, such as the amount of time children spend on the app at night

Deepfake fraud taking place on an industrial scale, study finds

Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts has said.Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit”, including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams.These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership

House of ice on a warming planet: Italy’s turn for the Olympics winter mirage

There will be twists, flips and turns to savour in a Games whose financial and environmental costs nonetheless continue to spiral out of controlPierre de Coubertin never wanted a Winter Olympics. He spent the best part of two decades lobbying, politicking and organising before he finally got the first summer Games up and running in Athens in 1896. Its winter sibling though, well, “the great inferiority of these snow sports …” de Coubertin once wrote, “is that they are completely useless, with no useful application whatsoever.” He allowed ice skating and ice hockey, the two stadium sports, to be part of the roster for the early summer Games, but it was another two decades before he was persuaded to hold a separate winter event.That was in 1924, in Chamonix

My simple message for England: get the ball into Arundell’s hands early against Wales | Ugo Monye

Optimism abounds about England’s Six Nations chances. They go into a tournament considered as one of the genuine favourites for the title for the first time in years and they have the body of work to back that up after 11 consecutive victories. That sort of winning streak leads to greater expectations but these players can walk tall and handle external pressure.I would warn against expecting another 50-point victory against Wales on Saturday, however. The fixture list aligns perfectly for England – if Steve Borthwick were to handpick his side’s schedule then this would probably be it – and while I fully expect them to beat Wales and claim a bonus point, we have to remember that they are never at their best at the start of a campaign