Category: Business

A man has been charged with murder after a pregnant woman was found dead inside a burning van in Wales earlier this month.

The body of Samantha Natalie Phythian, known as Sammi, was discovered in the van on Gas Works Lane in Prestatyn on 4 October.

At an inquest into her death this week, John Gittins, senior coroner for North Wales East and Central, said the 35-year-old was pronounced dead at 11.30pm and was identified through her DNA, WalesOnline reports.

Home Office consultant pathologist Dr Brian Rodgers said Sammi’s provisional cause of death is ‘inhalation of smoke and fire gases’.

Thomas Matthew Hammond Bell, 38, has been charged with murder. He is set to enter a formal plea on 27 November, with a provisional trial date scheduled for April next year.

North Wales police confirmed that a second man, 47, has been arrested.

Detective Chief Inspector Zoie Dunkerley stated: “Our investigations into this incident are moving at pace, and we are currently exploring every avenue of information open to us.

“I would like to thank those members of the community who have already contacted us, and ask that anyone else who has any information, however small to contact us via our live webchat or on 101 quoting reference number 26000816112.”

Dunkerley added: “My thoughts are with Sammi’s family and friends. I would also urge the community to be careful of commenting anything which would add to the family’s distress or interfere with the ongoing active legal proceedings.”

In a tribute, Sammi’s family described her as a ‘much-loved mum, daughter, sister, auntie and friend’.

The family said: “Samantha, who everyone knows as Sammi, will be remembered for the special place she held in the hearts of everyone who knew and loved her.

“Her tragic and untimely death has left her family and friends devastated, struggling to come to terms with the loss of someone who meant so much to so many.

“No family should ever have to endure the pain of losing a loved one in such circumstances.

“While her life has been cruelly cut short, the memories she created, the love she gave and the lives she touched will never be forgotten.

“She will forever be cherished by those who loved her, and she will be deeply missed.

“As a family, we would like to ask people to be mindful and respectful of rumours circulating over social media platforms at this devastating time.”

Records have revealed the eyewatering salaries that OpenAI’s UK staff are paid and I promise you, it’s going to have you rushing off to polish up your CV.

It’s no secret that AI is big business these days, with Anthropic, the company behind Claude, valued at a whopping $965 billion back in May (£728bn), and OpenAI seeking a $1.4 trillion (around £1tn) valuation just last month.

With such massive numbers, it probably comes as little surprise that the team working at such companies are impressively compensated.

And now accounts have been revealed that show just how generously staff are paid.

Last year’s acounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster, showed that there were 110 staff members who split £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company.

Doing a quick bit of maths, that means the average salary was £2,318,181 last year.

See? I told you, you’d want to go and sort your CV out.

For a bit of context, the Office of National Statistics found that the median annual earnings for full-time employees in the UK was £39,039.

So using this average salary, you’d need to work 58 years to match the average salary of a UK-based OpenAI worker.

However, according to the Guardian, there’s reportedly a large discrepancy between the AI company’s lowest and highest earners.

The largest pay packets are dished out to researchers who help to build OpenAI’s models, including Astra.

It’s also important to note that the figures are from 2025 when there was a bit of a talent war amongst AI companies to land themselves the best and brightest staff.

Other companies in the space, such as Meta, were reportedly offering multi-year salary packages that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

When approached by the Guardian, OpenAI declined to comment on its salaries.

Meanwhile, last month, it was revealed that OpenAI was offering up very generous compensation packages as it builds out its robotics efforts.

The company had more than two dozen robotics jobs listed on its careers page in September, across various areas, including software, hardware and data collection.

And these new roles came with some top-notch salaries, with publicly available information showing that the base wages ran from a way-above-average $177,000 (£133,600) to a frankly-staggering $500,000 (£377,400) a year, before equity.

The roles on offer included a lab tech tasked with helping to ‘develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems’ and actuator design engineers who are responsible for building the various parts of bots that help them move.

The highest-paid listing, as reported by Business Insider, was for a role for a ‘machine learning engineer’ who would be working on distributed data systems, infrastructure for processing, and moving huge amounts of robotics training data across computers.

Now, while that might all sound like an awful lot to get your head around, it does come with a salary of a half a million dollars per year.

Anyone else wishing they’d paid more attention in their IT classes?

Half of the public say under no circumstances they would go to war for the UK, according to a new poll.

48 percent of voters said they would not join the army, despite the ongoing threat from the likes of Russia, China and Iran.

Ipsos said the figure is unchanged from last year’s poll, as 36 percent, this year, said there were circumstances in which they would fight, up one percent from previous.

Hamish Mundell, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said there were questions about ‘Britain’s willingness to fight and make sacrifices’, but added the Ipsos poll did not suggest the country would be unable to mobilise in the event of WW3.

“I think the most important thing to take away from this polling is that we should be careful about confusing what people say they would do in peacetime with how they might actually behave in a national emergency,” he told the Press Association.

Mundell thinks the army won’t be overly concerned by the poll because their main concern is being able to train and prepare people for war, not getting extra people to sign up.

He added: “I can’t see the number of people willing to fight decreasing if the UK started suffering at the hands of a foreign power during a conflict.”

In the male category, more people said they would fight than would not, with 48 percent saying there were circumstances in which they would go to war, while 40 percent saying they would not be willing to do so.

The majority of women and people aged 35-54 said they would not fight, the poll found.

Although Mundell said the figures were ‘hardly surprising’, he said it was ‘disheartening that we don’t seem to have any form of leadership from the Government on a pathway to Britain’s 3.5 percent Nato commitment’.

Last year, the UK and other Nato allies agreed to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on ‘core defence’ by 2035 under pressure from Donald Trump to increase military spending.

Mundell added: “I am sceptical that we need another national conversation before we can make those decisions.

“We need political leaders to explain the threats facing the country, set out what needs to be done and just go and do it, even where that might prove contentious.”

The Ipsos poll surveyed 1,090 British adults between 29 September and 1 October.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “In an increasingly dangerous world, we are stepping up to protect the UK.

“There has never been a more important time to join defence and with more people now joining the armed forces than leaving, that reflects the growing confidence in the opportunities and benefits that service life offers.

“This Government is determined to build on that progress.

“A career in the armed forces provides incredible opportunities for people from all backgrounds to develop their skills, fulfil their potential and come together in the shared defence of our nation.”

The mother of a 10-year-old girl who poured nail polish remover in her eyes says she can’t wait for a blanket ban on social media for under-16s to come into effect.

Rebecca Soal said she was horrified to discover her 10-year-old daughter, Phoebe, had wiped the solvent across her lips before putting several drops in each eye after seeing an influencer ‘hack’ on social media.

“This stupid video said it’s a good alternative to eye drops,” Rebecca, from Caerphilly, Wales, said.

“She went into the bathroom, grabbed my nail varnish remover, tapped it on a cotton bud and wiped it all over her lips.

“Then she dropped [some] drops in each eye.”

The stay-at-home mum revealed that she only became aware that Phoebe had done so after smelling nail varnish remover while taking her younger daughter upstairs to bed.

“I got that gut feeling, I went to my daughter, and it clicked. It was frightening,” the mum said. “Her lips and eyes were red.”

Rebecca went on to explain that it took a while for Phoebe to admit that she’d used the nail polish remover after seeing videos online, adding: “They use water in the videos to gain likes, they’re joking, but kids take it literally.

“We’ve seen a lot of similar videos and it’s absolutely disgusting.”

“You don’t expect kids to take part in trends.”

Petrified that her daughter had permanently damaged her eyesight, Rebecca rushed her daughter to the hospital, where doctors flushed each eye with a litre of saline water in order to ensure all of the chemicals were washed out.

While the nail polish remover was acetone-free, meaning that Phoebe avoided causing serious permanent damage to her eyes, the family do not know how her vision will be affected in the long term.

“We’re waiting for a specialist appointment for her eyes,” Rebecca explained. “So we don’t have the full picture at the moment.”

Phoebe also suffered a chemical burn to her lips, which the family are treating with Vaseline to make sure it doesn’t crack.

“Doctors said she was really lucky,” she added.

Rebecca has since banned her children from social media, stating that the family were now going to be a lot more ‘vigilant’ when it comes to monitoring their online activity.

She is also in full support of the UK’s upcoming social media ban, which will effectively lock anyone under the age of 16 out of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok.

Announced back in June, the Labour government hoped the move, which mirrors a similar social media ban in Australia, will kickstart a ‘cultural shift’ and allow children to grow up offline.

“It’s just scary. We can’t wait for this government ban because it’s not safe to do anything anymore,” she said.

“They go on YouTube to watch their favourite Roblox videos, you don’t expect kids to take part in trends,” she continued.

“All my children now are on a ban, we can’t take any more risks.”

When approached about the videos, YouTube said it was investigating how the clips made it onto the platform. A quick search on the video-sharing platform returned no results for nail polish remover hacks.

“Be more vigilant with your children,” Rebecca added. “I know you trust your children, but do you trust them enough not to be influenced?

“I’m hoping she understands what she has done now.”