| Can gym fix it? The community project aiming to entice the young away from gangs bbc.co.uk |
Tulips in the rain win £1,000 prize With their ragged petals and bent stems, these tulips might not look their best, but the luminescent colour and use of light has won the country's top competition for garden photography. telegraph.co.uk |
NHS budget rise will feel like cut, says thinktank Health service gets 0.1% real-terms spending increase but experts describe it as 'bare minimum'The National Health Service got its promised real terms rise in spending but at 0.1% a year experts said it was "the bare minimum ministers could get away with".Funding will rise by £10bn to £114bn over the next four years – the equivalent of a 0.1%-a-year rise in real terms. In recent years, health spending has gone up by more than 4% in real terms and this is the first time there has been such a period of such small rises.The austerity measures saw the coalition government scrap pledges made by the previous Labour government, including expanding free prescription entitlements for people with long-term conditions. One-to-one nursing for cancer patients and the promise that patients will only wait a week for cancer test results will also "not be taken forward at this stage".Before the election, David Cameron and the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, promised a £200m-a-year fund for cancer drugs. The review said the fund would be "up to" £200m a year but no final decisions have been published. A source close to the health secretary said that the fund's size would depend on "demand".Labour said the government had broken promises on cancer care, identified as a key voter concern, especially as during the election the Conservatives accused Labour of "scaremongering" on the issue.John Healey, shadow health secretary, said: "Whenever we've highlighted the Tory threat to cancer services, Andrew Lansley was quick to accuse Labour of scaremongering, before saying how a Tory government would ensure the capacity to treat cancer patients sooner. Now, ministers are not only axing our plans for improvements in cancer care but abandoning their own promises on the NHS budget, letting patients down even further."Economists say the ageing population, lifestyle problems and the cost of drugs mean at least 3% is needed just to stand still – far greater sums than those made available by the chancellor. Even with the new money, spending on investments such as buildings would drop by 17%.John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund health thinktank, said the money was "the bare minimum to meet the coalition's pledge. It is the width of the proverbial cigarette paper."The Department of Health said: "In the light of today's settlement, we will be seeking to publish our consultation on the cancer drugs fund as soon as possible. This will set out in detail the levels of funding and how we anticipate the fund will operate, but we plan to make £200m available each year of the spending review."Appleby said pay pressures were building up in the NHS. He pointed out that there has been a two-year pay freeze for all staff on more than £21,000 and that by the end of the spending period GPs will have in effect faced a four-year pay freeze and NHS consultants a three-year one. "There will be real issues here for the NHS."Many in the health service say the public has to accept that the NHS will be cutting deeper despite the cash. Peter Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing, welcomed "the commitment to a real-terms increase in NHS funding. However, the reality is that this small increase, at a time of soaring demand and the rising costs of health care, will still feel like a cut."Unions said the NHS was being put under great strain by demands to find £20bn of savings while spending £3bn on an expensive reorganisation that it sees as a prelude to privatisation. Karen Reay of Unite, which has 100,000 members in the NHS, said: "There are two easy alternative strategies to ringfence the NHS: stop the expensive reorganisation and privatisation heralded in the white paper."The NHS budget has also had £1bn taken from it to fund social care in a bid to prevent people entering hospital unnecessarily or blocking beds when they could be discharged into residential care.Nigel Edwards, acting chief executive of the NHS Confederation, an independent umbrella body for organisations within the NHS, said the settlement "is as good as the NHS could have hoped for under the circumstances ... we have to be realistic as almost every other department is taking a big cut."NHSHealthSpending review 2010Tax and spendingRandeep Rameshguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
What's behind the all-powerful 'i'? The UK has a new national newspaper, which its creators have called i. So what is it about the letter that has made it so popular? bbc.co.uk |
The power and the gory Welcome to the Northerner, guardian.co.uk's weekly digest of the best of the northern pressIt is the time of year when the wise keep a wary ear cocked for ghosts, demons and other things that go bump in the night, but this week one man surpassed all terrible imaginings with a real tale of inconceivable horror. Paul Irwin, a father of two from Heaton, Newcastle, told his local paper of the day when he peered into the abyss and his "world collapsed".Readers of a nervous disposition should look away now, as I link to the Chronicle story that recounts how the 33-year-old edged into a branch of the Tyneside-based bakery chain Greggs only to find he was … unable to purchase a ham and pease pudding stottie. Fortunately, like even the most vivid sweat-soaked nightmare, this parlous commercial deficiency was destined to come to an end. Irwin contacted Greggs with his spine-chilling tale and managed to persuade the company to restore the traditional local sandwich to its shelves. "It just wasn't right that they weren't stocking them," the youth worker explained in the Chronicle. "I'm a Geordie born and bred and it is part of our heritage. "When I realised Greggs no longer sold ham and pease pudding stotties I thought: 'Is this what it has come to?' My whole world collapsed. It is as synonymous with Newcastle as the football team or Newcastle Brown Ale. It wasn't so much that I love the stottie, although I do, it was that I thought Greggs had forgotten its roots."After a year's absence, the stottie has returned to 52 Greggs shops in the north-east, the company confirmed.********************While Greggs was busy trying to soothe its customers' most primal fears, other retailers were going out of their way to put the willies up potential patrons. A party shop called Bubbles and Bows, in the Old Swan district of Liverpool, attracted complaints, the Liverpool Echo reported, with a gruesome Halloween window display. The eye-catching work featured three bleeding corpses hanging from their feet – one of them afflicted by a sawn-open head – alongside jars of eyeballs and severed heads. You suspect it would be enough to put even the proudest Geordie off their stottie. Cathy Fayal, 43, who runs the shop, and has made such hair-raising set-pieces a speciality over the past few years, was unrepentant, despite protests that the display had "gone too far"."Every year we do the display and every year we get complaints," she told the Echo's Gary Stewart."I admit this year is probably the worst we've done but we're competing against the big supermarkets and if it gets people looking in our window it's worth it."She added: "We had a letter from the local councillor last year and we had the police phone up as well but they said there was nothing they could do about it." *********************Confronted with tasteless Halloween excess, some councillors would not have a leg to stand on. Harrogate borough council leader, Mike Gardner, for example, failed to set the bar for this year's fancy dress particularly high. Gardner was deselected by the Conservative party, the Yorkshire Post reported, and faces a difficult political future after pictures emerged on Facebook of him attending a birthday party dressed as Adolf Hitler."I don't dress up as a Nazi normally. This was an exception. I am not a Nazi and I don't behave like that," he said, comfortingly.Highlighting his unerring political instincts, he confirmed he had checked with the party organiser to see whether his outfit would be acceptable.********************The Liverpool Echo managed to balance these blood-curdling stories and once again prove its pre-eminence among local newspapers in the field of photographic baby features with its pre-Halloween collection of Little Horrors. How cute.********************Are we all feeling a bit mushy now? In that case it's time to spring upon you these two touching tales of love. The story of Tony Holland's secret 1,500-mile bus trip, told previously by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner's Sam Casey, touches not only upon the power of love, but quite possibly also the love of power. For the 66-year-old lollipop man undertook a 28-hour pilgrimage in order to see his wife, Sue, win gold at the World Masters powerlifting championship.Sue, a 58-year-old schoolteacher from Ravensthorpe won the 90kg class of the over-50s section for the ninth year in a row in Pilsen, Czech Republic. Her husband had been unable to see any of her previous victories in far-flung countries, but managed to sneak into the event without his wife's knowledge after finding out he could make the journey to eastern Europe from Dewsbury, by bus.He told the Examiner: "I didn't want her to be put off – I thought if she sees me she will think something is the matter. It's her thing, her glory, I just wanted to be there, in my Union Jack shorts, cap and shirt, to see her do it. So I just got myself a seat behind a pillar, where I could peer out." His devotion is surely admirable; his dress sense less so.Many a man has made rash promises in the heat of passion, poured forth with protestations of steadfastness, only to retreat hastily once commitment reared its head. But never let it be said that Christopher Brooker is a fellow who will not put his money where his mouth is.The Durham University student has, as the Northern Echo's Gavin Engelbrecht reports, made the ultimate pledge, the most romantic of gestures, placing a £100 bet that he and his girlfriend, Hannah Grayson, will stay together until they graduate. He told the Echo: "We were sitting on the sofa one afternoon talking about how it was especially difficult for students to make commitments with time spent studying and with extra-curricular activities."I decided there and then to make a gesture of commitment and went to the bookies. I never told Hannah about it at first and got in touch with special bets expert Joe Crilly to finalise the details with him. I then told Hannah, because I would not have been able to do it without her."It was unclear what evidence of togetherness William Hill will require before paying Brooker his anticipated £600 winnings in June 2012.The woman on whom Brooker has gambled so handsomely, fellow philosophy scholar Grayson, was suitably touched, describing the wager as "a really lovely gesture".In case there was room for doubt, the aforementioned betting expert, Crilly, spelled out the enormity of the act: "Being a student, Mr Brooker has had very little time to juggle studying, playing tennis, sleeping and having a girlfriend, and so his commitments were stretched. Christopher has taken the ultimate student sacrifice, spending the equivalent of seven cases of beer on a long-term commitment to his girlfriend."********************Few northerners of recent vintage have been able to attack the grand public gesture with quite as much gusto as Tony Wilson, and even death has failed to diminish his ability to make an impression. The late lamented TV presenter and music impresario's headstone was finally unveiled this week, the Manchester Evening News pointed out, three years after he lost his battle with cancer. Designed by Factory Records designer Peter Saville, the 1.5m x 0.91m [5ft x 3ft] granite tablet is supposed to look like the monolith from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey."Anthony H Wilson. Broadcaster. Cultural Catalyst. 1950-2007," the inscription reads. The MEN's pictures suggest the memorial accurately reflects the man, or at least the media persona he created for himself – magnificent, unabashed, thought-provoking, but with a hint of folly.Robert Clark recommendsPhil Collins at the Cornerhouse, ManchesterCollins's video installations take a wryly humorous yet always empathetic look at those who suffer from political repression and media misrepresentation around the world. Influenced by astute cultural outsiders ranging from Genet to Morrissey, Collins's videos at their best are poignant with a disarming pathos. Even his 2006 Turner Prize exhibition treated victims of TV reality shows with a degree of social sensitivity. Here the artist presents Marxism Today, an installation following the uncertain fortunes of Marxist-Leninist teachers from the former communist East Germany. The format might be typically simple, yet the implied social commentary resonates.Phil Collins at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, until 28 NovemberRegional & local newspapersNewspapers & magazinesNewspapersRetail industryHalloweenIan J Griffithsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |