Category: news

Alliance Boots employs 115,000 internationally – selling drugs, cosmetics and health care products

The drug company Alliance Boots is dissolving one of its two final-salary pension schemes.

It is instead paying an insurance company, the Pension Insurance Corporation, to take on responsibility for paying the pensions.

The scheme being dissolved is that of Alliance Unichem, the company that merged with Boots in 2006 to form Alliance Boots.

The company said the deal would “ensure long term security” for the members.

Its aim is to relieve the employer of any potential rise in the cost of paying for its employees’ pensions, either because of poor investment returns in the future or because of unexpected increases in life expectancy.

A spokeswoman for Alliance Boots refused to say how many people would be affected or how much it was paying to put its plan into effect.

However the Alliance Unichem scheme is thought to have about 3,000 members with liabilities of about £300m.

“Alliance Boots has provided additional funding to enable this to take place,” it said in a statement.

“The trustees have written to all members to explain the insurance arrangements, including the subsequent issue of individual insurance policies.

“Members’ benefits are otherwise unaffected and when all have been secured, the Alliance Unichem UK scheme trust will be dissolved,” the statement added.

Both this scheme, which closed to new joiners in 2002, and the larger Boots scheme, were closed to future accrual on 1 July this year.

All staff are now offered membership of a defined contribution scheme instead, whereby the size of the pension is entirely based on market values, rather than being linked to the size of your salary.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Cloud forest now forms a damp oasis on Ascension’s highest peak

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin’s best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical “cloud forest”.

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonisation of Mars.

The tiny tropical island of Ascension is not easy to find. It is incredibly remote, located 1,600km (1,000 miles) from the coast of Africa and 2,250km (1,400 miles) from South America.

Its existence depends entirely on what geologists call the mid-Atlantic ridge. This is a chain of underwater volcanoes formed as the ocean is wrenched apart.

Ascension is one of a number of volcanic islands in the South Atlantic

However, because Ascension occupies a “hot spot” on the ridge, its volcano is especially active. A million years ago, molten magma explosively burst above the waves.

A new island was born.

Back in 1836, the young Charles Darwin was coming to the end of his five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no naturalist had gone before.

Aboard HMS Beagle, he called in at Ascension. En route from another remote volcanic island, St Helena, Darwin wasn’t expecting much.

“We know we live on a rock, but the poor people of Ascension live on a cinder,” the residents of St Helena had joked before his departure.

But arriving on Ascension put an unexpected spring in Darwin’s step.

Professor David Catling of the University of Washington, Seattle, is retracing Darwin’s travels for a new book. He told the BBC: “Awaiting Darwin on Ascension was a letter from his Cambridge mentor, John Henslow.

“Darwin’s voyage of discovery had already caused a huge sensation in London,” he explained.

“Henslow assured him that on his return, he would take his place among the great men of science.”

At this fantastic news, Darwin bounded forth in ecstasy, the sound of his geological hammer ringing from hill to hill.

Everywhere, bright red volcanic cones and rugged black lava signalled the violent forces that had wrought the island.

Yet, thinks Professor Catling, amid this wild desolation, Darwin began to hatch a plot.

Out of the ashes of the volcano, he would create a green oasis – a “Little England”.

Darwin’s great buddy was Joseph Hooker, the intrepid botanist and explorer.

Only a few years after Darwin’s return, Hooker was off on his own adventures, an ambitious slingshot around Antarctica aboard HMS Erebus and Terror. Mirroring Darwin’s voyage, Hooker called in on Ascension on the way home in 1843.

Ascension was a strategic base for the Royal Navy. Originally set up to keep a watchful eye on the exiled emperor Napoleon on nearby St Helena, it was a thriving waystation at the time of Hooker’s visit.

However, the big problem that impeded further expansion of this imperial outpost was the supply of fresh water.

In his twenties, Charles Darwin explored the world aboard HMS Beagle

Ascension was an arid island, buffeted by dry trade winds from southern Africa. Devoid of trees at the time of Darwin and Hooker’s visits, the little rain that did fall quickly evaporated away.

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens – where Hooker’s father was director – shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The “cinder” would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

Back in England, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution were busily uprooting the Garden of Eden.

But on a green hill far away, a new “island Eden” was being created.

Yet could Darwin’s secret garden have more far-reaching consequences?

Dr Dave Wilkinson is an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written extensively about Ascension Island’s strange ecosystem.

He first visited Ascension in 2003.

“I remember thinking, this is really weird,” he told the BBC.

“There were all kinds of plants that don’t belong together in nature, growing side by side. I only later found out about Darwin, Hooker and everything that had happened,” he said.

Darwin’s artificial forest captures moisture from clouds that drift over Ascension’s peaks

Dr Wilkinson describes the vegetation of “Green Mountain” – as the highest peak is now known – as a “cloud forest”. The trees capture sea mist, creating a damp oasis amid the aridity.

However, this is a forest with a difference. It is totally artificial.

Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades.

Dr Wilkinson exclaimed: “This is really exciting!”

“What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error.”

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world’s first experiment in “terra-forming”. They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it “find its own way”.

However, to date, scientists have been deaf to the parable of Ascension Island.

“It’s a terrible waste that no-one is studying it,” remarked Wilkinson at the end of the interview.

Ascension Island’s secret is safe for years to come, it seems.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Ed Miliband has said it is time for Labour to “move on” from Tony Blair – as the former PM warns against rejecting New Labour reforms.

Tony Blair on his choice for the next Labour leader

Mr Miliband told the BBC he was the best placed candidate to “turn the page” and said the party should not “live in the past”.

His brother David has won the Labour-supporting Mirror’s backing – as ballot papers are sent out to party members.

Mr Blair has not backed a candidate but is believed to favour David Miliband.

Asked whom he would back by the BBC’s Andrew Marr, in an interview to be screened later, Mr Blair said: “It may be fairly obvious, and I’m not saying it isn’t.”

But he said, whoever was elected, “even if it’s Diane [Abbott] they will have my 100% support”.

In an interview with the BBC, Ed Miliband said both Mr Blair and Gordon Brown had been “fantastic servants for our party and our country”, but it was time to “move on from the New Labour establishment”.

He said the party had lost five million votes since its 1997 general election landside, and Labour had to have the “courage to change” in order to win back power.

Mr Blair suggested in his memoirs, published on Wednesday, that Labour had lost the 2010 election because it had backed away from further New Labour reforms and told the BBC it had to stay at the “cutting edge for the future in public services”.

But Ed Miliband dismissed the idea that the party has to embrace New Labour ideals if it was to win the next election: “I really think we’ve got to move on from the politicians of a previous generation. We honour the contribution that they have made to our country and our party, but we don’t live in the past. It’s only by moving on that Labour can reconnect with people.”

Voting in the contest to succeed Gordon Brown is now open to Labour Party members, and members of affiliated trade unions and socialist societies. The winner will be announced on September 25.

While acknowledging that Ed had been the “big surprise” of the leadership campaign, the Daily Mirror has decided to back his brother David.

The paper highlights the former foreign secretary’s experience at the highest level of government, and says the Tories “really fear” him.

‘Warm comradely contest’

Both brothers have said they would be prepared to serve under the other.

David insisted that the election campaign had been “a warm, comradely contest, a fraternal contest and… a contest that I think will bring credit to the Labour Party and will certainly not come in the way of our family.”

The brothers are keen to draw a line under a war of words which has broken out between their respective supporters.

Lord Mandelson, who has made little secret of his preference for David, sparked the clashes by warning that the party would be stuck in an “electoral cul-de-sac” if it opted for a “pre-New Labour” agenda.

But Lord Kinnock – a supporter of Ed – hit back by accusing the former business secretary of being “sadly out-of-date” in suggesting there could be no deviation from the strategy which won Tony Blair three terms in office.

Leadership rival Ed Balls warned that the Miliband “soap opera” was in danger of drowning out debate over the party’s future policy agenda.

He insisted it “does not matter a jot” who gets Mr Blair’s support and said his former mentor Gordon Brown was “doing the right thing” in keeping his cards close to his chest.

In his newly published autobiography, Mr Blair’s verdict on Mr Balls was decidedly mixed: “I’ve had some harsh things to say about Ed Balls – I thought he behaved badly at points, and was wrong on policy – but I also thought he was really able, and a talent that any political party should be grateful to have.”

The shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, meanwhile, has also rejected any suggestions that the leadership contest is a two-horse race between the Milibands. He said he was “in a strong third position and gaining ground” on his rivals.

Meanwhile the other leadership contender, backbencher Diane Abbott, has criticised Mr Blair’s remarks about Gordon Brown in the book: “I’m surprised Tony Blair couldn’t have waited a decent interval before putting the knife into Gordon Brown. It’s not helpful to the party at this point.”

Nearly a million people voted in the last contested Labour leadership election, in 1994.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

By Michael Goldfarb

In theory, the summer is over here. We’ve just had August Bank Holiday, the British equivalent of Labor Day, the last official three-day weekend of the summer.

Guaranteed paid vacations don’t take a lot of getting used to, even if the weather is variable

But the little development of flats I live in is still quiet. A majority of folks still seem to be on vacation.

Not me, of course. I may have lived in Britain for 25 years but I’m an American by birth, self-employed, and so after nine days away, I’m back in harness, ready for action.

And as most of my work this week involves organising a lecture tour in the US in the autumn, I am having a productive time. It may be the last week of summer in the land of my birth but almost everybody I need to be in touch with in America is at their desk sounding harassed as ever.

When people speak of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism, what they are usually referring to is the remarkable Anglo-American coincidence that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to office at the same time and shared identical economic philosophies and policy gurus.

Those days are gone and the Anglo-Saxon model is more nostalgia than reality. But even in the headiest days of the Iron Lady and the Gipper, one place where the model didn’t hold was on the issue of paid annual leave.

British workers get generous guarantees of time off, currently 20 days a year. That is one full month of paid leave. Judiciously planned around public holidays, it means this country basically shuts down for most of August and between Christmas and New Year.

It’s not just Britain where good vacation is the norm.

The figures in a 2007 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) are stark. It looked at 21 of the richest countries in the world, and found that only one, the US, does not impose a legal mandate on employers to provide time off.

Obviously, people in America do get paid annual leave, but for most wage earners it is subject to so many different calculations based on seniority and how much you earn, it can only be described as miserly.

In other words, it is a privilege to be earned rather than a normal part of compensation.

Nine days of annual leave is what the average American accrues during the course of a year. So you have to be at your job for 12 months before you begin to get even that amount.

If you figure that folks might take a day or two at Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving, and keep a day or two in the bank for a family emergency, what you’re left with come the good weather is a week of vacation if you’re lucky.

The difference between American attitudes to vacation and those of Britons and others is hard to explain.

I have worked for wages on both sides of the Atlantic and the experience is broadly comparable. Yet no British worker – nor most British employers – would accept such little vacation entitlement.

Holidays as part of compensation are one of the small, subtle things that keep a workplace happy. Happy workers are productive workers in ways that can’t be measured statistically.

Whenever citing Americans’ acceptance of the longer hours they work or their lack of paid leave, the cliche is to say it goes back to the country’s Puritan heritage or the Protestant work ethic.

I disagree. I think it comes from raw fear.

Most Americans are not descended from Puritan stock. The people I have worked with in a variety of jobs – I wasn’t always a journalist – would have liked nothing more than a guarantee of 20 days of paid holiday a year.

But since the heyday of Thatcher and Reagan, they have been increasingly afraid to ask for it directly and way too afraid to come together and demand it as a group.

It is easy enough to get fired in the US, and when people have a job they tend not to want to make waves.

It’s a shame really. In a country where economic insecurity is resulting in a disturbingly aggressive public debate – disturbing, at least, to one American expat – it would probably be a good thing for employers to start paying their workers to take extra chill time.

The benefit to society would be immediate because the thing is, guaranteed paid vacations don’t take a lot of getting used to.

Cambridge (UK): Fine in summer, but miserably damp and cold in winter

For all their pride in working longer hours with no vacation than anyone else, I think Americans could adjust very quickly to having paid down time.

Take the case of a colleague who worked for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The Trib is owned by The New York Times and like most of its minuscule staff, he was on assignment from New York.

We met for lunch while I was in Paris researching a book a couple of years ago, and as we ate he told me he was taking the following week off. It was March, not vacation season, and I asked him why he was taking it then.

He told me he worked under French employment rules and was legally obliged to take his vacation allocation. He said he couldn’t use it all up in the summer, as there were too many weeks he had to take.

So he was grabbing some time out of season in England, in Cambridge. American readers won’t know what the weather in that ancient university town is like in late winter, but he was not going to have to pack shorts.

Still he cackled with glee as he bragged on this situation. He seemed so relaxed and happy I let him pick up the tab for lunch.

Anyway, things aren’t likely to be getting better in the US.

The CEPR statistics I mentioned above date back a few years. In the current economic climate, where people are losing their jobs in droves, if they are lucky enough to find new employment they will go to the bottom of the seniority list and have to accrue vacation days from the beginning.

My guess is that the next such analysis will show Americans having less paid holiday than ever.

Michael Goldfarb is a journalist and broadcaster who has lived in London since 1985. Formerly with National Public Radio, he is now the London correspondent of globalpost.com.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Chinese media said the exercises would involve live-fire drills

The Chinese navy has begun artillery exercises in the Yellow Sea, days before the US and South Korea hold similar manoeuvres there.

State media called the drills “annual routine training, mainly involving the shooting of shipboard artillery”.

China opposes the joint US-South Korea exercises, the latest of which begins on 5 September.

Those drills are intended as a show of force to North Korea, following the sinking of a South Korean warship.

The Cheonan went down on 26 March near the inter-Korean border with the loss of 46 lives.

International investigators say a North Korean torpedo sank the ship, but Pyongyang denies any role in the sinking.

The Chinese exercises are taking place off the eastern city of Qingdao, Xinhua news agency said, and are due to run until 4 September.

China also held air exercises over its east coast in August, in what was seen as a response to the joint US-South Korea drills.

Washington and Seoul are engaging in a series of exercises in the wake of the Cheonan incident, some of which are taking place in the Yellow Sea, which lies between the Korean peninsula and China.

The latest drill, which will run until 9 September, “will focus on anti-submarine warfare tactics, including detecting and destroying North Korean submarines”, an unidentified military official told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

China says the drills could destabilise the region and strongly opposes them.

They also come at a time of tension between China and several nations over conflicting territorial claims in regional seas.

In July US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton angered Beijing when she said a peaceful resolution of territorial disputes between China and several South East Asian nations in the South China Sea was a “national interest” of the US.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

What do the five Labour candidates stand for?

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Rivers near Aweil have broken their banks because of the heavy rain

Some 57,000 people have been forced from their homes because of dramatic floods in south-western Sudan over the past month, health officials say.

Heavy rains have left Aweil, the main town of Northern Bahr al-Ghazal province, largely under water.

A BBC correspondent says the floods pose another challenge to the already delayed voter registration.

Southern Sudan is voting on whether to secede from the north in a referendum in January.

The BBC’s Peter Martell in Southern Sudan says the floods add to the woes of a grossly under-developed region still struggling to rebuild itself after the brutal two-decade war with the north.

“The rains are going to continue up until October, so the situation may get worse,” Southern Sudan’s Health Minister Luka Monoja warned.

“A serious situation has developed in Aweil – more than three quarters of the town is flooded and so many houses collapsed.

“We saw that all the people were chased out of their houses, and were now living on the road, because the road is the only area in the town that is raised.”

Our reporter says the southern government and aid agencies have been working to support those displaced, but the challenge is enormous.

The United Nations has already provided some kind of food assistance to almost half the population of the south this year, he says.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes takes a helicopter flight over the West Bank and Israel to understand the geography of the disputed land.

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Mohammad Asif had signed up for a regional Indian film

Pakistani cricketer Mohammad Asif, who is under scrutiny for claims of spot-fixing, has been dropped from an Indian movie, its director has told the BBC.

Kaithapram Damodaran Namboodiri said he had hired Asif for his directorial debut, Mazhavillilinattamvare (Till the edge of the rainbow).

Asif was to play a Pakistani cricketer who comes to a coaching camp in the southern Indian state of Kerala.

The film is about friendship told through the game of cricket, he said.

Mr Namboodiri said he had signed up the bowler two months ago after his son conducted a screen test with the cricketer in London.

“He is a friendly and nice guy. I was shocked to hear about the allegations, so I dropped him from the film,” said Mr Namboodiri.

The director said Asif was supposed to come down to Kerala for a 25-day shooting stint next month.

The 27-year-old had been set for a “major part” in the film, which is to be made in the Malayalam language, spoken in Kerala.

“He was to play a Pakistani cricketer who comes down to India to hold a coaching camp for Indian players,” said Mr Namboodiri.

The director added he had initially contacted former Pakistan captain Wasim Akram to play the role, but he had declined.

He said he was now seeking a replacement for Asif: “I have the names of two or three Pakistani cricketers in my mind.”

Asif, along with team mates Salman Butt, Mohammad Amir and Kamran Akmal, have all been questioned by police over claims of spot fixing during Pakistan’s ongoing tour of England, although wicketkeeper Akmal is no longer under investigation.

Asif is one of the top Pakistani fast bowlers with over 150 wickets in Test and one day international games.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The new Wall Street film is out in the UK and US on 24 September

Michael Douglas faces “an eight-week struggle” against throat cancer, he has told talk show host David Letterman.

The Wall Street actor said a biopsy had revealed he had “stage four cancer”, which, he said, was “intense and so they’ve had to go at it”.

Douglas, who was diagnosed three weeks ago, said on Letterman’s Late Show that he had finished the first week of two months’ radiation and chemotherapy.

He said he remains hopeful and has an 80% or better chance of recovery.

The cancer remained above the neck which meant “expectations are good”, he said.

“I would hate to say, but right now, it looks like it should be 80% and, with certain hospitals and everything, it does improve.”

Douglas said he had a series of tests in the early summer after complaining of a sore throat, but they revealed nothing.

After a summer break, the actor – who has two young children with wife Catherine Zeta Jones – had a biopsy which revealed advanced cancer.

He said he felt frustrated doctors had not found anything earlier “because I was on it early in the summer and started complaining about something, but they couldn’t see it then”.

Last week, lawyers for Douglas and his ex-wife, Diandra Douglas, clashed in court over her demand for half of his earnings from the forthcoming Wall Street film.

In their 2000 divorce settlement, she was granted a share in proceeds from the actor’s work while they were together.

As a result, she wants earnings from the new movie because he reprises the role of Gordon Gekko from the 1987 original.

A New York judge has not set a date for a ruling in the case.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Murkowski was seeking a third term as senator

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has abandoned her bid for re-election, after accepting defeat in the Republican party primary ahead of this November’s mid-term elections.

She had trailed Joe Miller, supported by Sarah Palin and conservative Tea Party movement, by about 1,668 votes, since the primary a week ago.

Absentee ballots had closed the gap slightly, but it became clear that Ms Murkowski would not overtake her unknown challenger.

She is the seventh incumbent to fail to win a nomination for the mid-terms, a trend fuelled by the grass-roots activism of the Tea Party.

A few votes have still to be tallied, but the result is clear

“I don’t see a scenario where the primary will turn out in my favour,” she said, even though some votes are still to be counted.

“And for that reason, and for the good of the state of Alaska … I am now conceding the race for the Republican nomination.”

Mr Miller will face Democrat Scott McAdams, a former commercial fisherman and mayor of the small town of Sitka, in November’.

Joe Miller had received the endorsement of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who lauded the Gulf War veteran as a “man of the people”.

Campaign funding from the Tea Party movement had helped pay for his advertising in the run-up to last week’s vote.

Mr Miller, who has little political experience, had portrayed Ms Murkowski, who has been a senator for eight years, as a liberal in thrall to federal control in Washington.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Hurricane Earl is heading for the US east coast after causing power cuts and heavy rain across the eastern Caribbean.

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President Obama has addressed the American people to announce the end to the US combat mission in Iraq

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The technology will only work between HD enabled phones on the Orange network

Mobile firm Orange has become the first UK network to use a technology that offers higher quality voice calls.

High Definition (HD) voice claims to reduce background noise and the “hisses and crackles” often heard on a normal mobile call.

The technology, known as, Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) has been adopted as an international standard for 3G mobile networks.

Other networks are expected to follow Orange soon, experts said.

“It is relatively easy for an operator to introduce – it’s just a software upgrade… in a base station,” said William Webb, head of research and development at the UK regulator Ofcom.

Other countries already have networks using the technology – known colloquially as HD Voice – including Moldova and Germany.

AMR-WB is what is known as a speech codec; software that compresses a voice signal to maximise the amount of bandwidth on a network.

“There is a commercial incentive to squash the data as much as possible,” said Mr Webb. “But you can’t go too far. The trick is to find the balance point, the sweet spot.”

He said there had been a lot of experimentation over the years with voice codecs, including the introduction of a so-called “half-rate codec”, which squeezed the same data into half the bandwidth.

“Operators tried to use it but quickly discovered that consumers didn’t like it and switched back,” he said.

Speech codecs work by modelling the waveform of the incoming voice.

Rather than transmitting the whole waveform, algorithms look for consecutive sections that are similar. If two sections of the wavelength are alike, the redundant information is stripped out, allowing the signal to be compressed.

The AMR-WB codec also does this but to a wider range of speech frequencies that today’s codecs, allowing higher quality calls.

“We are using exactly the same bandwidth on the network,” said Andrew Warner, head of voice and messaging protocols at Orange.

“We are squeezing more speech information into the same channel.”

This is important as any additional need for bandwidth would reduce the network’s ability to cope with the ever increasing data demands of people browsing the web on their phones.

In addition to compression technology, AMR-WB is “intelligent” and varies the amount of data it pumps into the network depending on the complexity of the speech pattern.

“If the speech is quite complex it may use a higher data rate, if it is more simple it drops down,” said Mr Webb.

Orange has already run trials of the technology in the south west of England and now plans to roll it out across the country.

Mr Warner said that many manufacturers were already developing handsets to work with HD voice, including Nokia and Samsung.

The technology will only initially work on the Orange 3G network between HD-enabled handsets.

“You won’t experience it when you’re calling a landline or a mobile phone that has not been optimised to work with HD voice,” said Mr Warner.

Orange, owned by France Telecom, recently merged with T-mobile in the UK. The company – known as Everything Everywhere – has 30 million customers.

The two firms have not merged their networks so T-Mobile customers will not initially be able to use the service.

The launch of HD voice comes amidst reports from Orange customers of regular network outages.

Some have speculated that the faults are the result of upgrades to the network or attempts to merge with T-Mobile.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

It is the degree of choice for the Westminster elite, claiming six cabinet members and three Labour leadership contenders among its alumni. Why does Oxford’s politics, philosophy and economics course dominate public life?

In the corridors of power, at the very highest reaches of government, a form of educational freemasonry holds sway.

It has nothing to do with Eton College, nor even the Bullingdon Club – both far more commonly-cited lightning rods for resentments about class, privilege and the fast track to power.

Instead, the surest ticket to the top – for Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem politicians alike – is surely a degree in politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford.

No fewer than six members of the cabinet, including the prime minister, foreign secretary and chief secretary to the treasury, are Oxford PPE graduates, as are an additional two ministers who attend their meetings.

Labour, for all its egalitarian rhetoric, can hardly claim an advantage. As ballot papers go out to the party’s members for the leadership contest, three of the contenders for that crown – David and Ed Miliband, plus Ed Balls – are alumni, as are such big names from Gordon Brown’s government as Lord Mandelson, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly and James Purnell.

Indeed, in the present House of Commons there are believed to be some 35 Oxford PPE-ers, compared with 20 Old Etonians.

It is a tradition that stretches back decades. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Shirley Williams, Edwina Currie, Barbara Castle – all left their mark on politics in different ways, but all started out with an Oxford PPE.

That Oxbridge graduates in general make up a disproportionate number of the nation’s elite is, of course, hardly news, as is the fact that UK politicians of all parties are drawn from a narrow educational base compared with the rest of society.

But what is it about this one course in particular that it holds such an apparently indomitable grip on the highest echelons of power?

A degree defined by breadth rather than depth seems tailor-made for the Westminster system and its regular reshuffles, in which front-line politicians can be running the prison service one day and attempting to steer the economy the next while aspiring to the grand diplomacy of the Foreign Office.

The very title of the course itself conjures up an image of each student as some kind of civic ubermensch, a combination of Machiavelli, Mary Wollstonecraft and David Ricardo.

The politician’s view

David Heathcoat Amory, former Foreign Office minister and MP for Wells from 1983 to 2010

“I got into Oxford to read sciences, but I changed after a year. I liked the mix between the academic and the practical.

“For me, the most useful thing was the philosophy. It turned me into a sceptic and changed my thinking for ever.

“We should be pleased that our leaders are well educated.

“I think it’s something we should celebrate – there are worse alumni to be governed by.”

But Observer columnist Nick Cohen, an Oxford PPE graduate, says he now regrets switching to this “silly degree” from history while an undergraduate.

He notes that, while the influence of the École Nationale d’Administration on producing public servants is a regular subject of regular controversy in France, the scope of Oxford’s PPE department receives relatively little scrutiny.

“It’s a degree for generalists, and British society has always loved generalists,” he says. “But I think we’d certainly benefit from more scientists and engineers at the top.

“It’s far easier to condemn Eton or the failure of the comprehensive system. But I went to Oxford, Christopher Hitchens went to Oxford, Ian Hislop went to Oxford – who are the people who are going to eviscerate the phenomenon?”

Indeed, journalists are almost as well-represented as statesmen and women among well-known PPE alumni, not least at the BBC. Political editor Nick Robinson, economics editor Stephanie Flanders and the Today programme’s Evan Davis are all graduates (full disclosure: the present author studied politics at Edinburgh).

Nonetheless, few would deny that competition for a PPE place is fierce, and that the course itself imposes a rigorous workload.

Students typically must endure two tutorials a week, in which they present a paper and are grilled on it intensively – such sessions having a ratio of just one or two undergraduates for each academic.

The student’s view

Tabassum Rasheed, 19, has just completed the second year of her PPE degree at Oxford.

“I can see why so many people who want to get into politics do this course. It teaches you how to argue properly, especially through philosophy options such as rhetoric.

“The tutorials really sharpen up your thinking – you’re arguing your point of view with the person who wrote the books you’re studying.

“You can do what you want with it, too – personally I dropped the economics after second year and specialised in political theory, the politics of the middle east and so on. But I have friends who specialise in social policy, others in economics.

“I wouldn’t say it’s dominated by people who want to be politicians. I’d like to travel and work for something like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, and a lot of PPEs go into the City or do law conversions.”

Professor Iain McLean, who taught the course from 1978 to 1991 and counts Nick Robinson among his former charges, says the breadth of the subject matter covered and the fact that students are constantly challenged to justify themselves prevents any danger of “group think”.

“It’s fundamental to the teaching method to be Socratic – it’s our job to ask questions and encourage analytical thinking,” he says.

“It was designed to be deliberately broad. Because it’s interdisciplinary, we can speak across subject boundaries.”

Indeed, PPE’s introduction in the 1920 – initially under the title “modern greats” – was designed to offer an alternative to classics for scholars hoping to enter the civil service.

From their second year onwards students are offered a greater degree of specialisation and the opportunity to focus their interests.

The journalist Toby Young, who read PPE at Brasenose College two years ahead of David Cameron, is a defender of the course and believes it offers a firm intellectual grounding for would-be leaders across the political spectrum.

“Among the 10 people reading PPE at the same time as me at Brasenose, you had everything from Monday Club fascists to revolutionary Marxists, plus every shade of opinion in between,” he says.

“But when I went on to study at post-graduate level at Harvard, everybody was a liberal. One of the hallmarks of PPE graduates is that they are quite independently minded.”

But the question remains: why does this course in particular dominate cabinet tables, rather than similar programmes at Cambridge – or, for that matter, the PPE degrees offered by the universities of Durham, Lancaster and York?

Geoffrey Evans, a fellow in politics and a senior tutor at Nuffield College, Oxford, acknowledges that the course’s reputation for producing top-rank politicians is self-perpetuating, with the “the elite frog pond of Oxford” proving a strong lure for students with the means and wit to get through the door in the first place.

“They are pretty bright too, it is fair to say – though they will in the main have had advantageous circumstances in which to cultivate that brightness,” he adds. “And ambitious – many no doubt see such positions as a natural outcome of their social and educational opportunities, and the circles in which they mix will in general hold lofty expectations as to what constitutes a suitable occupational outcome.

“All in all, it’s how the class system works.”

Maybe so. Either way, the political battles of the future seem at least as likely to be fought first in the Oxford quads where PPE is taught as the playing fields of Eton.

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