Canadian adultery website Ashley Madison, credited with helping to break up thousands of marriages, is having problems with its plans to go public in a European country, where its operators believe there is a “more relaxed attitude to infidelity” than in North American or Asian markets.

Reportedly however our City brokers are “queasy” about associating themselves or their clients with something many view as immoral and sordid, an arguably hypocritical view given the enthusiasm for profits from gambling, tobacco, alcohol, bent banking and weapons that kill people. Continue reading →

An elderly widow spent her life savings and a trust fund of £100,000 sending increasing amounts of “administration fees” to fraudsters who told her, by letters and telephone calls, that she had won cash prizes in a lottery.

The extent of the frauds came to light after Vicki Westwood, 81, died four months ago and her son was going through her bank accounts at her house near Stourbridge, Worcestershire. Here he found that she was actually overdrawn by several thousand pounds, and also found thousands of letters sent over a six year period from scam companies telling her of her “instant win” and the fees she would need to send to claim it. Continue reading →

Clothing brand Dolce and Gabbana are facing calls for Macy’s and Debenhams to stop stocking their products. (Ethical Consumer)

The boycott call, and a petition signed by 43,000 people came after the brand’s founders made it clear in an interview in an Italian newspaper that they opposed same-sex marriages and gay parents, despite marketing to gay consumers.

In the interview Dolce said that “You are born to a mother and father, or at least that’s how it should be”, and went on to attack IVF and surrogate parents, saying “I call children of chemistry synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalogue” points agreed with by Gabbana who added “The family is not a fad”.

Campaigners have accused D&G of hypocrisy, bigotry and homophobia, and have urged the couple to “put labels on clothes, not children”.

Clothes for overweight and underweight people should be banned from most stores, to make people feel uncomfortable about their size when they can’t find anything to fit them.

This is the view of R+B pop singer Jamelia Niela Davis, 34, expressed on ITV show Loose Women, who said that extreme size clothes for the obese and the very thin should only be available in specialist shops, to “shame” people into doing something about their size. (Suppose they can’t?)

The singer’s ill-conceived comments drew criticism for muddled thinking from some women who pointed out that she had joined the SelfieEsteem programme, which encourages women to be confident about their looks. This drew the response from Ms Davis, who likes to describe herself as “brutally honest”, that she was “misunderstood”.

The marketing manager of the Royal China restaurant group has been pilloried in the press for illegally importing shark’s fin to make soup, not on the menu, for his rich Chinese customers.

Jason Chan boasted to reporters how he had a team of people bringing the shark’s fins through customs in suitcases “so that they are not confiscated”. In fact an investigation by Trading Standards found that they were being illegally posted from Hong Kong, and officers confiscated and destroyed them.

Consumption of the expensive, gloopy and relatively tasteless dish, usually served at banquets, has dropped significantly as more, particularly younger diners realise the cruelty involved – the fins are simply hacked off the living fish and the mutilated shark, unable to swim, defend itself or feed, thrown back in the sea, often taking up to a week to die. Rejection by celebrities, such as actor Jackie Chan has also played a part in the demise.

A recent trip to our local ASDA found their bar-coding and till-reading working in their favour.

Expensive convenience packs of washed and bagged salad leaves were marked on the shelf at £1.00, yet the tills were reading the bar-codes as £1.50 and charging customers accordingly.

Fortunately we only bought a few items, so picked up the error. However we doubt that busy shoppers picking up the week’s supply would clock every price on the shelf and check it against the receipt.

Curiously, or perhaps not, we’ve never known these supermarket errors work in the customer’s favour…

Interesting to read in Association News that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) the official organ of the British Medical Association (BMA) has been giving its 150,000+ doctor readers a voucher for a healthy £60 off cases of wine.

Of course this should in no way be taken as an indication that the BMAs support for minimum pricing on alcohol to reduce the disastrous effect of over-indulgence and alcohol-related illness on the population and the NHS is anything other than 100% sincere. Nor that it should conjure up among the cynical an image of our top medics wagging a disapproving finger at us with one hand and swigging from a bottle of discounted vino, bought with their BMJ voucher, with the other.

Oh no. And we’ll certainly drink to that.