BBC News | UK | World Edition

UK Iraq hostage 'killed himself'
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:49:13 -0000
One of the five UK hostages held captive in Iraq has killed himself, a video given to a newspaper claims.
Surgeons could earn pay bonuses
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:28:27 -0000
Surgeons could earn bonuses for operations under plans being considered by the UK's largest hospital trust.
UK 'must check' US torture denial
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:01:29 -0000
The British government should no longer rely on US assurances it does not use torture, a parliamentary report says.
Teenager falls 30ft from window
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:00:22 -0000
A schoolgirl from south London was seriously hurt when she fell 30ft from her hotel window in Venice, according to reports.
Lambeth Conference due to begin
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 02:37:41 -0000
Hundreds of Anglican bishops will attend a special service for the official opening of the Lambeth Conference.
Autism parents 'infection risk'
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:29:32 -0000
Caring for children with problems such as autism or Down's syndrome may weaken parents' immune systems.

The Economist: Britain

Things can only get worse
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
As the economic pain intensifies there will be a political price to payFIVE years ago Mervyn King, the newly appointed governor of the Bank of England, gave warning that the "nice" decade would be followed by something less wholesome. Now starting his second term of office this month, Britain's leading central banker looks more prescient than ever. But even he surely did not expect that the "non-inflationary consistently expansionary" era would turn quite this sour.As the film "Mamma Mia!" evokes nostalgia for the 1970s, more ominous echoes of that stagflationary decade are ringing louder and louder. The economy looks set to slip into a recession as the housing market slides and the banking trauma refuses to end. Yet at the same time inflation is rising inexorably higher. This toxic combination has been described as "stagflation-lite"; the "lite" seems ever less appropriate. ...
The high price of free accounts
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
The competition watchdog's challenge may be more bark than biteAMID the gloom of a faltering economy and a slumping housing market, Britain's banks, with their supervisors in hot pursuit, have been stumbling from one crisis to another. Having written off billions of pounds on the value of exotic credit products, and then tapped shareholders for billions more to rebuild strained balance sheets, banks have been bracing themselves for the next shoe to drop. Most expected it to come in the form of writedowns on bad loans in their traditional banking business. Some analysts reckon these may total as much as GBP19 billion, if defaults rise to levels last seen in the previous downturn in the early 1990s. Yet trouble, as so often happens, has come from an unexpected direction. ...
No IVF please, we?re British
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
Test-tube babies are rare in the country where the first was born"BABY of the century" ran the front-page headline of the Daily Express on July 11th, 1978. The paper promised the story of Lesley Brown, who was barricaded inside Oldham and District General Hospital, near Manchester, waiting to give birth. The world's press was camped outside; the front doors locked and staff forced to sneak in and out via a side entrance. Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, the obstetrician and physiologist who had, nine months before, taken an egg from one of Mrs Brown's ovaries under anaesthetic and fertilised it in vitro with her husband's sperm, were in hiding. It had been, said Time magazine after Mrs Brown was delivered of a daughter on July 25th, "the most awaited birth in perhaps 2,000 years".Thirty years after Louise Brown was born, "test-tube babies" are commonplace. Around the world 3.5m have been born and at least 200,000 more join them each year. Yet infertile people in the country where it all began are among the least likely in the rich world to receive what is now a standard treatment for their condition. Just under 700 attempts at in vitro fertilisation (IVF) are carried out per million Britons each year, one of the lowest rates in Europe. The 11,262 IVF babies born in Britain in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, were just 1.6% of all births, compared with rates of 3-3.5% in the Nordic countries (see chart). ...
More haste, less speed
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
Worries about the new planning system could well turn into protestsAN INSIGHT often credited to Gordon Brown is that voters only notice a political message when it is reduced to a pithy soundbite and repeated endlessly. "Working hard for hard-working families" was a familiar trope during his decade as chancellor of the exchequer, as was the promise of "no return to boom and bust". Nowadays the prime minister is most likely to be heard asserting his willingness, and the Conservative Party's reluctance, to make "tough, long term decisions".In few policy areas does this self-professed capacity to do what is unpopular but necessary seem more apt than in planning, always a fraught issue in a crowded island with a reverence for the countryside. On July 16th, the House of Lords completed its second reading of a controversial government bill designed to speed up approval for infrastructure projects, such as power stations and motorways. Currently, local councils consider most planning applications, and ministers "call in" particularly contentious ones. A prolonged public inquiry often results. The new system will shift decision-making power to an independent Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), relegating the government's role to setting out its vision for different types of infrastructure in a series of national policy statements. ...
Great expectations, no hope
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
A hotly anticipated by-election that may well change nothingTHE east ends of Britain's big cities have a special, mythical place in the national imagination. They are urban frontiers: gritty, sometimes lawless and eventful. History--trade unionism; radicalism; the temperance movement; industrial revolution; immigrant strife and striving--is packed into them as tightly as their inhabitants are, or, in the case of Glasgow, were. In Glasgow's ruined east end, whole roads are vacant and vandalised; grotty pubs and discount stores dominate the grey high streets.The Westminster by-election on July 24th in Glasgow East--one of the most deprived constituencies in Britain, and hitherto one of Labour's safest seats--has been widely billed as another catalytic east-end drama: a pivotal episode in the rise of Scottish nationalism, a prime minister's fall and the confrontation of entrenched social ills. It is likely to disappoint on all three fronts. ...
Summer of discontent
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:29:20 -0000
A new wave of strikes stirs memories of the 1970sFOR the schoolchildren, it was as if the summer holidays had come a few days early. For their parents, though, the strike by school-support staff--dinner ladies, teaching assistants and the like--as well as hundreds of thousands of other local-government workers on July 16th and 17th was less cause for celebration. Besides having to find babysitters or take the day off work, they also had to deal with unemptied bins and closed (or undermanned) town halls. For Labour ministers, it was a worrying portent of further confrontation with the unions that fund the party.Council workers are unhappy with the 2.45% pay rise offered to them by town halls, arguing that, with retail-price inflation at 4.6%, the deal represents a wage cut in real terms. Both sides are appealing to public opinion. The trade unions say that many of the workers in question are poorly paid and often work part-time. The councils retort that any increases above 2.45% would require either higher taxes or cuts in public services. ...

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