New lifeline offers escape for victims of loan sharks
Not long ago, Tracey Laming, a 32-year-old single mother from Park Hill, Sheffield, hid behind her sofa with her two children when the loan sharks knocked on her door. No...
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Life offers a fresh start to fiery youngsters
As an energetic 13-year-old, Callum liked to keep himself occupied, playing football, cycling - and deliberately lighting fires. Just 4ft tall and pencil thin, he is alre...
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Brazil votes on deadly obsession with guns
About 120 million Brazilians go to the polls tomorrow to vote in a referendum on the sale of guns in a country which has the second highest rate of gun deaths in the worl...
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Are consumers living on borrowed time?
As if to underline the urgency of the Bank of England's first cut in interest rates for two years last week, Britain's lenders have issued a string of warnings that their...
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Savers losing interest
It's not proving to be a very good week for savers. On Monday, ING Direct cut 0.25% of its saving rates, today Northern Rock reduces rates on two of its accounts, and tom...
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Industry is under the cosh, says CBI
Britain's manufacturers are shedding jobs at the rate of 7,000 a month as weak order books and the sharpest rise in costs for a decade put a squeeze on profits, the CBI s...
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True or false? Howard's claims right on tax, but not on health
Not really. Official statistics express truancy by the percentage of half-days missed, a figure that has remained broadly static at 0.7% since 1995. The only hint of an i...
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Must credit unions charge more?
A controversial report this week tells Britain's struggling credit union movement it needs to "revolutionise" itself. But the chief recommendation - doubling the interest...
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What credit unions could do for you
So what do you get by joining your local or workplace credit union? We asked three unions in Derry, Telford and Glasgow. And we found big differences in rates paid to sav...
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47,000 fall into bankruptcy
Almost 50,000 people were forced into bankruptcy last year as successive rises in interest rates added to debt burdens and pushed insolvency numbers to a record high.
F...
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Banking 
