David Askew collapsed and died after decade of attacks

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Jenny Booth

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A 64-year-old man with learning difficulties was “tormented to death” after being bullied by yobs for more than a decade, neighbours claimed today.

Police had been warned David Askew was being targeted before he was found dead at his home in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, last night, locals said. One neighbour said he had been “tormented to dea...

Greece brought to a halt by austerity protest strike

Philip Pangalos in Athens

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Much of Greece ground to a halt today as public and private sector unions called another general strike in opposition to tough government austerity measures and proposed pension reforms aimed at restoring fiscal order for the battered economy.

Traffic stopped moving around the centre of Athens with streets closed off as an estimated 20,000 demonstrators h...

Nokia patents the first self-charging phone The phone manufacturer's concept would harness the energy created as a person moves around, through the use of piezoelectric crystals

Murad Ahmed, Technology Reporter

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You’re at work, on holiday, or halfway through a vital conversation about last night’s television. Suddenly, you realise the phone’s battery is about to run out. It’s a very modern disaster, but one that could soon be at an end.

Nokia, the mobil...

Cardinal Schonborn says celibacy partly to blame for clerical sex abuse

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Richard Owen in Rome

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A cardinal seen as a future candidate for the papacy has broken a Vatican taboo by raising the possibility that priestly celibacy is among the causes of the sex abuse scandal sweeping the Roman Catholic Church.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna and a protégé of Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in his archd...

HSBC admits huge scale of Swiss data theft

Emily Ford

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An estimated 24,000 clients of HSBC Private Bank in Switzerland had personal details stolen in a data theft three years ago, a far higher number than originally thought and "highly likely" to include British customers, the bank acknowledged today.

HSBC initially sought to downplay the extent of the crime when reports broke last December of the theft of information on individual account-holders, saying it believed that the ...

Confusion over fate of kidnapped British boy Sahil Saeed

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Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

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There was confusion today over the whereabouts of Sahil Saeed, the five-year-old British boy who was kidnapped from his family's home in Pakistan, with conflicting reports from local officials over whether he had been found.

The confusion began when Rana Sanaullah, the Law Minister of Punjab Province, told a private Pakistani televisio...

System failed family of ‘the British Fritzl’

Andrew Norfolk

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A father who repeatedly raped his two daughters and made them pregnant 18 times during a tyrannical 35-year campaign of physical and sexual abuse escaped detection because of a litany of failings by care professionals, a report revealed yesterday.

Agencies involved with the family failed to confront the man even though they strongly suspected for many years that he was the father of the girls’ seven babie...

David Beckham shows true colours with anti-Glazer scarf

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James Ducker, Northern Football Correspondent

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David Beckham cemented his hero status among Manchester United supporters last night by donning a green-and-gold scarf after Wayne Rooney produced another virtuoso performance to help to book his team’s place in the Champions League quarter-finals.

Rooney scored twice to take his tally of goals for the season to 30 as Unit...

We can bear £2bn-a-year cost of building high-speed rail network, says Adonis

Philip Pank, Transport Correspondent

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The building of a high-speed rail network linking London, Birmingham and the great conurbations of the North, to be outlined in Parliament today, would cost at least £2 billion a year for more than a decade, The Times has learnt.

The blueprint for the fastest railway in Europe is already being opposed by Conservatives and environmental groups. But the...

Telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim Helu is world’s richest man

Alexandra Frean, US Business Correspondent

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The Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim Helú has been named the world’s richest man, with a net worth of $53.5 billion (£36 billion), the first time since 1994 that the No 1 spot has been held by a non-US citizen.

The annual billionaires list published by Forbes magazine shows that the number of billionaires increased from 79...

Judges fear prisons will burst under new rules

Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

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Britain’s leading criminal judges warn that a shake-up of sentencing guidelines could push prison overcrowding to crisis levels.

They fear that the Sentencing Council, which comes into force next month with the aim of bringing more consistency to courts, will not curb judges’ use of custody, as hoped, but actually increase it.

The Council of Circuit Judges, which represen...

Irrepressible Wayne Rooney fires Manchester United into last eight Manchester United 4 AC Milan 0 (7-2 on agg)

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Oliver Kay, Football Correspondent

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If there was one thing that seemed to matter almost as much as victory for Manchester United’s supporters last night, it was that the job got done quickly.

Only then could attention move on to other objectives: the preservation of Wayne Rooney, the adulation of David Beckham and ...

David Cameron tells Titchmarsh he's going to unleash his wife on voters

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Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor

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David Cameron put his wife to the front of the Conservatives’ election campaign as he acknowledged that he had to work harder to overcome voters’ cynicism.

The Tory leader used his appearance on the Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV yesterday to reveal that Samantha Cameron had asked to take a prominent role in ...

Crippling walkouts loom as BA talks break down

Times Online

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Talks aimed at averting strikes by British Airways cabin crew ended without agreement tonight, dashing hopes of a breakthrough in a long running row over pay, jobs and working conditions.

Marathon talks between officials from Unite and the airline finished this evening, raising the prospect of crippling walkouts by thousands of employees.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, who had been chairing the talks, said...