By Marcus Hunt Peer-to-peer lending is a highly innovative means of businesses acquiring capital; crowdsourcing loans from dozens of small investors is a way for both parties to secure better interest rates by cutting out the cumbersome middle-men at the banks. From humble beginnings, sites like Zopa, Ratesetter and Funding Circle have now facilitated loans of over £1 billion to small and medium-sized British businesses. However, I think that there is good reason to believe that over the medium-term the...

By Pieter Cranenbroek Watching David Cameron in Europe is a bit like watching a kid make a stain on his shirt and rub it, making it bigger and bigger. The British prime minister has been rubbing his European leaders up the wrong way for a while, but his diplomacy has gone from bad to worse in recent weeks. His disillusioned performance in the Juncker episode means that Cameron has struck out in Europe. Less than a month ago, Cameron was...

By Indy Hack @IndyHack July 6th will mark the 79th birthday of the most iconic religious figure in current popular culture, a figure most often associated with peace, tolerance, non-violence and religious harmony, none other than Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Behind the carefully crafted and stage managed image of the world's most popular Buddhist monk lies a story of religious persecution and political oppression inflicted on the Tibetan people, not by the Chinese, but by the Dalai Lama...

By Joe Mellor Deputy Editor Last week a group of MPs and peers have called for an overhaul of the way the rental industry is run to provide better protection for families who do not own their own home. Well until that is sorted out (don’t hold your breath) www.rentalraters.com are the TripAdvisor of the rental market, to alert you to dodgy landlords. It is an on-line community that praises the best and (literally) rubbishes the worst. We have compiled...

By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor  “Everything you can imagine is real” said Pablo Picasso, a concept which contemporary auteur Danny Passarella has embraced. He has just unveiled his first ever art exhibition, Fantasy Scenes, in The Gallery at Forge & Co this summer. While Danny is noted for his Passarella Death Squad project spanning fashion and music, his Fantasy Scenes show consists of science fiction-esque images that evoke the wonder of adolescence. These ‘Fantasy Scenes’ themselves are ten hyper-real coastal...

By Jack Peat  In an information economy where our personal data is wilfully publicised, recorded and used for political and corporate gain, the question of whether we are living the prophesied dystopian theories of Nineteen Eighty-Four is more poignant than ever. George Orwell’s timeless work paints a frightening picture of official deception, secret surveillance and manipulation of history by a totalitarian, authoritarian state. A world where language is a heretic tool that be controlled and used. Words with negative meanings...

  By Jo Walker, Senior Press Officer, Beating Bowel Cancer We all spend a fair bit of time on the loo over our lifetimes but tend to avoid talking about any problems we might have there, which can lead to life- threatening illnesses going unchecked. Londoner, Stephen Browne, was a healthy 45-year-old when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2012. Each year 41,600 people in the UK get diagnosed with bowel cancer – that’s someone every 15 minutes. Early...

  By David de Winter - Sports Writer Saturday sees the start of the 101st edition of the world’s most famous bicycle race, the eponymous Tour de France. And where does this three week lycra-clad epic begin? Paris? Non. Some chic, picturesque village in the south of France? Absolutement non. The Alps or Pyrenees? Of course not. Yorkshire? Mais oui. Quite why the organisers of a French race have decided to hold ‘le grand départ’ in England is beyond me...

  By Luca Foschi You do not fix history with a drone. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is the slow collapse of a century-long geopolitical partition drawn up in a secret document by United Kingdom and France, in one of their last acts as imperial powers. In May 1916 diplomats Mark Sykes and François Gorges Picot signed an agreement that reshaped the Near East, previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire who were siding with Austria-Hungary and Germany during the First...