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Some debt management companies have been holding on to clients’ cash rather than paying it to creditors, the BBC has found.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Lawnmower racing gnomes, Obama’s car The Beast getting stuck and a ticket to the baby opera. It’s the week’s weird and wonderful video stories in Newsbeat’s Odd Box with Dominic Byrne.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Carrington – a sculptor, artist and writer – was known for her haunting, dreamlike works Sculptor Leonora Carrington, considered one of the last of the original surrealist artists, has died at the age of 94, Mexican officials have said.
British-born Carrington arrived in Mexico after she escaped from a mental hospital and fled Nazi Europe.
She settled in the country, becoming a national treasure, and creating works of art that depicted mythical worlds.
As well as sculptures, she wrote articles, novels, essays and poems exhibited around the world.
“She was the last great living surrealist,” her friend, poet Homero Aridjis said. “She was a living legend.”
She was famed for haunting, dreamlike works focusing on strange ritual-like scenes with birds, cats, unicorn-like creatures and other animals.
Life of drama
She died on Wednesday after suffering from a respiratory illness, Mexico’s National Council for Culture and Arts said.
Ms Carrington’s life was full of dramatic twists and turns.
Born in Lancashire, England, into an aristocratic industrial family in 1917 she took up painting at a young age.
“These were some of the images that sprang from a mind obsessed with portraying a reality that transcends what can be seen”
Mexico National Arts Council
At 20 she moved to Paris, falling in love with Surrealist painter Max Ernst, who was 26 years older than her.
He introduced her to major figures within the movement including Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and the founder of the group, Andre Breton.
She held her first surrealist painting exhibits in 1938 in both Paris and Amsterdam.
After Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France in 1939 she fell into a deep depression and was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Santander, Spain.
She managed to escape and, in Lisbon, she married the Mexican poet and journalist Renato Leduc.
In 1942 , they travelled to Mexico where she settled permanently, befriending painter Frida Kahlo and future Nobel laureate Octavio Paz.
She married her second husband, the Hungarian-born writer-photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, in 1946 and had two children.
“She created mythical worlds in which magical beings and animals occupy the main stage, in which cobras merge with goats and blind crows become trees,” the National Arts Council wrote.
“These were some of the images that sprang from a mind obsessed with portraying a reality that transcends what can be seen.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Iris Robinson attended a state banquet for the Queen with her husband, Peter A report on Castlereagh Council’s role in awarding a contract to Iris Robinson’s teenage lover is to be given to councillors later.
Consultants, Deloitte, carried out the independent investigation into the award of the lease of The Lock Keeper’s Inn to Kirk McCambley.
It was set up to examine if the council suffered any financial loss in awarding the catering contract to Mr McCambley.
The report is on the agenda for a council meeting at 1900 BST.
It is not clear if the findings will be made public.
The report also examined if officers and councillors complied with local government legislation and investigated if any impropriety took place.
Last week, Mrs Robinson, the wife of first minister Peter Robinson, made her first public appearance in more than a year.
She attended a state banquet for the Queen at Dublin Castle.
Mrs Robinson resigned as an MP, MLA and councillor, amid controversy surrounding a BBC NI Spotlight programme in January 2010.
The programme said she acted illegally over money deals connected to a business being run by Mr McCambley with whom she was having an affair.
In March 2011, the Public Prosecution Service said that “following careful consideration of all the available evidence, a decision has been taken not to prosecute in this case”.
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Hinchingbrooke hospital staff will remain employed by the NHS In his first major speech on the NHS on Thursday, Nick Clegg made the case for competition where it could improve services for patients.
One NHS hospital is due to have its management taken over by a social enterprise after a competative tendering process, an approach that could be tried with other struggling hospitals, as health correspondent Branwen Jeffreys reports.
Hinchingbrooke hospital, near Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire, will be run by Circle on a 10-year contract expected to be finalised soon.
Health unions say such takeovers open up the NHS to another form of competition.
It will be the first time a “social enterprise” has taken over the management of an NHS trust in this kind of deal. NHS managers say Circle will have to meet health service standards and pay off the hospital’s debt.
The contract awarded to Circle is a fresh approach for NHS hospitals struggling to make their finances work. Under the deal, the hospital buildings will remain in public ownership and the staff will continue to be employed by the NHS.
Hinchingbrooke has a debt of around £40m on an annual turnover of £90m. Circle will have the power to make changes, including hiring and firing staff. It will be paid NHS prices to meet NHS standards.
The social enterprise will have to repay the hospital’s debts through finding cost savings. Only then can it make any profit, leaving some to privately describe the challenge as a tall order.
Dr Stephen Dunn, from the East of England Strategic Health Authority, says the choice of Circle was not ideological. NHS trusts were also invited to bid to take over the hospital in the efforts to avoid it closing.
He said the final decision was pragmatic: “We wanted the best deal for patients, the public and the taxpayer. I think it will be a model for the future; the NHS faces major challenges in terms of efficiency. ”
Circle’s flagship hospital in Bath The process of putting the managment of Hinchingbrooke out to tender was mainly conducted under the last government. Under the coalition’s plans for the NHS in England, all hospital trusts will have to meet strict financial standards by 2014 or find another solution. That could involve being taken over by another NHS Foundation Trust, or the approach being tried in Hinchingbrooke.
Circle describes itself as a social enterprise which is co-owned by its clinicians. Ali Parsa, the chief executive, is a former Goldman Sachs banker turned healthcare entrepreneur. Already Circle is treating more than 100,000 NHS patients a year at a treatment centre in Nottingham.
“It should be doctors and nurses that run hospitals”
Ali Parsa Circle
Its flagship hospital is just outside Bath, where it competes with local NHS trusts for routine surgery. Designed by award-winning architects, its lobby feels more like a smart hotel than a hospital. Unlike an NHS hospital there are no emergency services, but Mr Parsa insists they are up to the challenge of running a full district hospital.
It is likely they will cut management costs substantially at the NHS trust in Huntingdon, as Circle plans to divide the hospital into units led by senior doctors and nurses. Mr Parsa described their core philosophy.
“We believe that it should be doctors and nurses – healthcare professionals – that run hospitals. We don’t think they should be slaves of the state. We think they should run services for the benefit of their patients.”
Every patient treated by Circle is asked what needs to be improved. The company says it aims to make changes within three months of a problem being identified. Acheiving that in a bigger hospital could be harder.
“Circle will learn everything it can, then move in to compete with the NHS ”
Karen Jennings Unison
Karen Jennings, assistant general secretary of Unison, told me the union was prepared to work with Circle at Hinchingbrooke, but was wary of this approach being tried elsewhere in the NHS.
“The long-term consequences are another matter. Circle will learn everything it can about running a district general hospital and it will then move in to compete with the NHS.”
It is not clear how many in the local community share those concerns. In 2006, when Hinchingbrooke hospital’s future looked much less certain, many people joined a campaign to safeguard its future, turning out for marches and rallies. The campaign was supported by David Cameron, as then Opposition leader.
Now that campaign has dwindled. Local patients, and many in the NHS, will be watching Hinchingbrooke carefully to see if this is a model which can work.
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Foreign Office urges Britons to leave Yemen as fighting escalates between government troops and tribal forces.
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One NHS hospital is about to experience a new kind of management, run by a social enterprise, an approach that could be tried with other struggling hospitals.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
World 100m record holder Usain Bolt marks his return to the track after a near 10-month absence with victory at the Diamond League meeting in Rome.
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Ratko Mladic appeared in a Belgrade court in a baseball cap, looking frail Ratko Mladic is appearing in a Serbian court within hours of his arrest in the north of the country after 16 years on the run.
Authorities are seeking to extradite the former Bosnian Serb army chief to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Officials say he is likely to appeal against his extradition, and the process could take up to seven days.
He faces genocide charges over the killing of about 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
Following the arrest of Radovan Karadzic in 2008, Gen Mladic became the most prominent Bosnian war crimes suspect at large.
Serbia had been under intense international pressure to arrest him and send him to the UN International Criminal Tribunal to the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Serbian TV showed footage of Mr Mladic wearing a baseball cap and walking slowly as he appeared in court in Belgrade.
It is hard to overstate the importance of this arrest here in Serbia. Many people feel the destiny of their country was held hostage by Ratko Mladic. Their hopes of joining the EU were ruled out by Brussels while Mladic was at large.
I asked President Tadic if it was a coincidence that he was arrested while the EU was considering Serbia’s bid to join the bloc. He said the country had never calculated its search for Mladic – it was always determined to catch him.
There is still an ultra-nationalist fringe here who see Mladic as a hero – they say he only ever defended Serb interests. But the new, emerging generation in Serbia seem to be tired of the past and its wars – they want to leave that behind and move forward to the future.
President Boris Tadic said his arrest on Thursday brought Serbia and the region closer to reconciliation, and opened the doors to European Union membership.
Mr Tadic rejected criticism that Serbia had been reluctant to seize Gen Mladic.
“We have been co-operating with the Hague tribunal fully from the beginning of the mandate of this government,” he said.
A spokeswoman for families of Srebrenica victims, Hajra Catic, told AFP news agency: “After 16 years of waiting, for us, the victims’ families, this is a relief.”
Gen Mladic, 69, was seized in the province of Vojvodina in the early hours of Thursday, Serbian Justice Minister Slobodan Homan told the BBC.
Serbian security sources told AFP news agency that three special units had descended on a house in the village of Lazarevo, about 80km (50 miles) north of Belgrade.
The house was owned by a relative of Gen Mladic and had been under surveillance for the past two weeks, one of the sources added.
Footage said to show Ratko Mladic’s home for the last 10 years has emerged
Gen Mladic was reportedly using the assumed name Milorad Komodic.
Serbian media say did not resist arrest, and was not in disguise – unlike Mr Karadzic, who had a long beard and a ponytail when he was captured in Belgrade three years ago.
Gen Mladic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1995 for genocide over the killings that July at Srebrenica – the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II – and other alleged crimes.
Having lived freely in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, he disappeared after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.
In a message from his UN cell in the Hague, Mr Karadzic said he was sorry Gen Mladic has been arrested.
The wartime Bosnian Serb leader added that he wanted to work with him “to bring out the truth” about the Bosnian war, in a message relayed to the Associated Press news agency by his lawyer.
The arrest was hailed internationally.
UN war crimes chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz thanked the Serbian authorities for “meeting their obligations towards the tribunal and towards justice”.
US President Barack Obama said the US looked forward to an “expeditious transfer to The Hague”.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague called the arrest a “historic moment”.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said it was “a very courageous decision by the Serbian presidency”.
Footage said to show Ratko Mladic’s home for the last 10 years has emerged
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The NHS changes affect only England The BBC has learned that Conservative MPs are organising to oppose changes that Nick Clegg wants to make to the government health overhaul in England.
One MP, Nick de Bois, who sits on the parliamentary committee looking at the NHS Bill, has set out a series of “red lines” from which he says his fellow Tories should not retreat.
Some of them appear to clash directly with proposals from the deputy PM.
The NHS Bill is currently on hold while ministers consider objections to it.
In an e-mail sent to all Conservative MPs and obtained by the BBC, Mr de Bois says there has been talk of “concerning change” to the NHS Bill from “our coalition partners” – the Lib Dems.
He says critics of the bill have so far “made their voices the loudest”, and calls on his fellow Tories to set out their own red lines – “the principles on which we will not budge”.
He says those should include:
The declaration that any qualified provider, including private companies and charities, should be able to provide care. Mr de Bois said: “Government should do nothing that stands in their way”, but Mr Clegg said earlier on Thursday there would be “no sudden, top-down opening up of all NHS services to any qualified provider”A clear date – April 2013 – “when statutory responsibility must transfer from the top-down bureaucracy to GP consortia”. Mr de Bois said this was “a very reasonable period of time”, but Mr Clegg said there should be “no arbitrary deadline”The requirement for all GPs to take on these new responsibilities, right across England. Mr de Bois said “there must be no two-tier NHS”, but Mr Clegg said this change should be introduced in a “planned, phased way”
Mr De Bois asks Tory MPs to share their views and adds: “I am determined that we reclaim the debate over the future of the National Health Service from those who seek to use the bill as a political tool.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Mr Sarkozy defended Nato intervention to support rebels fighting Col Gaddafi in Libya French President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi to step down as “all options are open”.
“We are not saying that Gaddafi needs to be exiled. He must leave power and the quicker he does it, the greater his choice,” Mr Sarkozy told journalists.
He is hosting a meeting of leaders from the G8 group of wealthy nations in the northern French resort of Deauville.
The Arab uprisings, internet regulation and future of nuclear power are all being debated at the two-day summit.
The global economy and climate change are also being discussed at the gathering for the leaders of the US, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.
Thousands of police have been deployed as part of a huge security operation and checkpoints have been erected on all roads leading to Deauville.
Mr Sarkozy defended Nato’s intervention in Libya when he spoke to journalists on Thursday evening, saying “had we not stepped in [the rebel stronghold of] Benghazi would have been wiped off the map”.
He thanked Russia for not blocking the UN resolution authorising force despite Moscow’s misgivings, and said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev understood that “the blame lies with Col Gaddafi” and he had said so “frankly and unambiguously”.
Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy greeted the leaders’ spouses in a dress that showed off her pregnancy He said the later Col Gaddafi stood down, “the shorter the list of his possible destinations”.
If Col Gaddafi stepped down and withdrew his forces quickly, President Sarkozy said, “all options are open”.
“Then we’ll look at what the name should be on the plane ticket and even what class he should travel,” he joked.
In other remarks, Mr Sarkozy said:
The violence used to crush pro-democracy protests in Syria was unacceptable and would be the subject of further talks at the summitNew rules on trade and the environment were needed to recognise emerging nations. Mr Sarkozy insisted France had supported a drive to give developing nations a greater voice in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) despite Paris’s backing for another European to go at its helmThere should be a new push for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and Europe and Russia should play a critical role along with the US in forging it
Correspondents say recent events such as uprisings in the Arab world and Japan’s nuclear crisis have given the G8 a new sense of purpose.
Interim prime ministers from Tunisia and Egypt – where long-time leaders were overthrown this year – and the head of the Arab League will also be at Deauville for talks on a massive aid plan to help their transition to democracy.
“He [Obama] has no longer set out to impose America’s brand of democracy in troubled corners of the world”
As the summit opened, the French and Russian leaders met to agree the sale of four French-built Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia at a cost of at least 400m euros each (£350m; $565m).
Leaders debated ways of improving global nuclear safety after the breakdown of Japan’s Fukushima power plant following March’s earthquake and tsunami, with Mr Sarkozy insisting that “when it comes to nuclear matters, safety must prevail over cost – that we all agreed on”.
His wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who is hosting the leaders’ spouses, greeted them in a white dress that showed off her pregnancy.
US President Barack Obama, who headed to the meeting after a state visit to the UK, is holding a series of one-on-one meetings with leaders including President Sarkozy and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
He has already met Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for discussions over the two countries’ long-running row over US plans to create a missile defence shield in central and eastern Europe.
President Obama told reporters that the two men were committed to finding an approach that met the security needs of both countries, while Mr Medvedev said the two could work together towards a resolution, but it was unlikely to come in the near future.
BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall, in Deauville, says that despite President Obama’s appeal in London on Wednesday for democratic unity and leadership, there may well be friction at the summit.
She adds that Russia’s president has opposed air strikes on Libya from the start, though he may offer to mediate in that conflict.
Africa will also be represented at the summit, as it has been since 2003. Newly elected leaders from Ivory Coast, Niger and Guinea are expected to participate in sessions about promoting democracy.
A shift in global influence to emerging powers such as India and China, who are not in the G8, has led to the bloc’s relevance being questioned.
But speaking in London on Wednesday, President Obama rejected arguments that the rise of superpowers like China and India spelled the demise of American and European influence in the world.
After the summit ends on Friday afternoon, President Obama is scheduled to travel to Poland, the last stop on a four-country tour of Europe that began on Monday in Ireland.
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Almost 200 foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year Seven Nato troops have been killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said.
The incident is the deadliest single attack suffered by foreign troops in a month. Isaf did not identify the nationalities of those killed.
Earlier, a Nato helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan, killing one soldier, officials said.
Almost 200 foreign troops have been killed in the country so far this year.
Meanwhile, Nato-led forces say they have pushed back Taliban fighters in a district in the eastern province of Nuristan.
Local officials said up to 500 insurgents seized the district of Doab on Wednesday.
The international security mission disputes the account given by local leaders. “At no point was the district centre overrun, the Taliban were never in control,” said Isaf spokesman Maj Tim James.
Afghan and Nato troops arrived in the district on Wednesday afternoon and carried out a number of air strikes, he said.
“The area remains calm with Afghan and Nato troops very much in control,” added Maj James.
It is very hard to confirm Nato’s claims or how far their control extends in the district. The provincial governor says nearly 30 insurgents were killed on Wednesday – but questions remain over the whereabouts of hundreds of others.
The BBC’s Bilal Sarwary in Kabul says the mountainous area has many hiding places.
Our correspondent says local officials in Nuristan have been warning for more than a year that the government and Nato should do more to counter the militant threat in the area.
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At least 24 people have been killed after a suicide bomber in a car struck government buildings in Pakistan’s volatile north-west.
The bomb went off near several buildings and shops in Hangu, close to Pakistan’s tribal areas, causing considerable damage.
The district’s police offices are also in the area and officers are among the casualties, police say.
On Monday militants attacked a naval base in Karachi, killing 16 people.
“The death toll can rise further, as many among the 45 wounded people are in serious condition,” Fazal Naeem, a police spokesman in Hangu, told Reuters.
Another police official, Latif Khan, said the blast had left a deep crater.
“The buildings housing the police station… were partially damaged but at least 15 shops, including a tea house and a restaurant are completely razed,” he said.
The buildings also contain Hangu district courts, police said.
Witnesses said the blast was so powerful that they feared people were trapped in the rubble.
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Indigenous communities have suffered some of the worst violence The remains of around 10,000 people who disappeared during Colombia’s armed internal conflict have now been identified.
The Colombian interior minister, German Vargas Lleras, made the announcement at a news conference in Bogota.
Among the dead are kidnap victims buried in unmarked mass graves.
Family members will soon be able to lay their relatives to rest and will be entitled to claim government compensation.
A total of 438 families have been told immediately that their relatives have been found. The rest will be informed in the days and weeks to come.
They will be entitled to claim up to $10,000 (£6,000) in compensation from the government.
The identified remains are from the past two decades of Colombia’s 50-year internal conflict.
For more than 40 years, Colombia has seen fighting and violence by guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug gangs, and the security forces.
A spokeswoman from the Colombian interior ministry told the BBC that forensic scientists had used advanced finger-printing technology to find the missing people.
The experts are still trying to identify a further 10,000 remains, but their advanced state of decomposition makes it a slow task.
Analysts says the government of President Juan Manuel Santos is currently trying to heal old wounds from the country’s bitter conflict.
On Tuesday, the Senate approved a law to compensate victims of the country’s long-running civil conflict and return land to millions of displaced people.
One of the aims is to return land to up to four million people forced from their homes by rebels, paramilitaries and traffickers.
For more than 40 years, Colombia has seen fighting and violence by guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug gangs, and the security forces.
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The Arab Spring has seen governments fall in Tunisia and Egypt The UK is to give £110m to support political and economic development in North Africa and the Middle East, the BBC has learned.
The money is a significant increase on the £5m of funds announced for the Arab Partnership Initiative in February by the foreign secretary.
It will come out of the existing Department for International Development budget.
PM David Cameron said progress in the region was good for Britain too.
The money will be spent over the next four years to improve political participation, the rule of law, anti-corruption measures, youth employability and the development of the private sector.
It constitutes the UK’s contribution to calls for the G8 group of leading industrialised nations to do all they can to encourage the so-called Arab Spring.
Speaking at the G8 summit in France, the prime minister said: “What I’d say to everybody about the issue of overseas aid and the money that will be pledged at this summit is that there is a real case for saying, ‘If we can secure greater democracy and freedom in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, that is good for us back at home.’
“That will mean less extremism, it will mean more peace and prosperity, and it will mean there won’t be the pressures of immigration that we might otherwise face to our own country.”
The wave of uprisings in the Arab world began in Tunisia in January and lead to the fall of the government there, and subsequently in Egypt.
There have also been pro-democracy demonstrations in countries including Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, and the supression of a similar movement in Libya has led to the intervention of Nato to protect civilians.
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