Category: news

A man is missing after falling from a boat off the Antrim coast.

The coastguard was contacted at about 1645 BST on Saturday after a ferry spotted a rib-type boat off the coast, at Ballycastle.

An air and sea search is currently underway in the area.

It is believed the man fell overboard while travelling from Rathlin to Ballycastle.

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Scottish photographer witnesses birth of South Sudan

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Politicians should hold cross-party talks on reforming the care system for the elderly in England, charities say.

The 26 charities, including Age UK and the Alzheimer’s Society, say political leaders “must not let reform fall off the table for another generation”.

In a letter to the Sunday Telegraph they call for a “timetable for reform”.

The Dilnot review of the funding of social care – due to be published on Monday – is expected to recommend a cap on how much people are required to pay.

The charities wrote: “We cannot stick our heads in the sand and ignore the stark demographic reality of a rapidly ageing population and people with disabilities and long-term conditions living longer.

“Our political leaders must take this opportunity. Otherwise the terrible stories of the last months, of neglect and abuse of the most vulnerable, will only grow worse.”

BBC correspondent Phil Lavelle says it is a huge political issue, with an estimated 20,000 people having to sell their homes every year to pay for care.

Andrew Dilnot, chairman of the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, has told the BBC: “If a cap were put in place we could take away the fear that people would lose everything that they had built up and in particular people seem reasonably anxious that they might lose all the value of their house.

“They still have to pay something but much less than if they end up with high care needs as it is at the moment.”

Labour leader Ed Miliband has previously offered to engage in cross-party talks, promising to enter with an “open mind”.

A quarter of people aged over 65 can expect a bill of more than £50,000 for their care, and one in 10 pays more than £100,000.

The cap could cost the Treasury between £2bn and £3bn – the same as the cuts to public sector pensions.

At the moment, the support provided by councils is means-tested so that anyone with assets of more than £23,250 has to pay for all the cost of their care.

It means thousands of people a year are forced to sell their homes when they go into a care home.

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A Cornish company has received interest from around the world for its novelty wedding vending machine.

Autowed is an 8ft (2.4m) tall pink machine compared by the makers to “a parking meter mixed up with a Cadillac”.

But it has caught the imagination of people around the world after a video was posted on the internet.

Requests for machines have come from as away as Russia and Brazil, says Falmouth-based inventor Concept Shed.

For £1 it plays a specially composed intro version of the wedding march and asks customers to select their type of union. Bride and groom have the option of pressing one on a keyboard for “I do” and two for “Escape”.

Purchasers get a wedding receipt and two plastic rings in an egg-shaped plastic capsule.

Previous inventions by the Cornwall firm include an animatronic Frankenstein.

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Absent parents should make their child maintenance payments directly from their salaries or bank accounts, a committee of MPs has recommended.

They found the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission cost 50p for every £1 it collected and had failed to collect £3.8bn in payments due.

The Work and Pensions Committee called on the government to make the child support system more efficient.

The commission replaced the much-criticised Child Support Agency.

The committee found that many separated parents did not receive regular maintenance for their children and in some cases did not get payments at all.

Officials can take money directly from those who fall behind but the committee said direct payments from bank accounts or salaries should be required in all cases.

The government has said it wants to encourage separated parents to come to their own voluntary arrangements.

But its plans to charge a fee and call in officials to collect the payments of couples who cannot reach such an agreement were criticised by the MPs.

They also said the new agency still had operational weaknesses.

Committee chairman Anne Begg said the current system could easily be improved.

She told the BBC: “There are many non-resident parents who already set up a mechanism, usually direct debit, to make sure their children get the money that they’re entitled to.

“What we want to see is this widened so that everyone has an obligation to make sure there is some payment in process which is regular.”

A Department for Work and Pensions spokeswoman acknowledged the agency was not working well enough for children and said the government would give its full response in due course.

Last month, Prime Minister David Cameron said absent fathers should be “stigmatised” by society in the same way as drink-drivers.

However, he was criticised by charity Gingerbread which said government proposals to charge people in need of state help to obtain child maintenance payments would make life harder for single parents.

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England pace bowler Stuart Broad is fined 50% of his match fee after showing ‘serious dissent’ to umpire Billy Bowden in Friday’s one-day international against Sri Lanka.

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Some 500,000 children in England may be at risk of developing life-threatening liver disease because they are overweight, a health adviser has said.

Professor Martin Lombard, England’s National Clinical Director for Liver Disease, says the four to 14-year-olds could develop “fatty liver disease”.

Too much fat in liver cells stops the liver from working properly, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke.

It can also lead to diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver later in life.

Cirrhosis – scarring of the liver – is commonly associated with alcohol abuse, but it can also be caused by obesity.

Professor Lombard bases his projections on figures from the National Child Measurement Programme.

He warns that up to 60,000 10 year olds “could be at risk” of having excessive fat in the liver while they are children, leading to serious health problems when they get older.

When looking at a broader age range, children aged four to 14, the figures are even more stark, with Professor Lombard estimating that 500,000 are potentially at risk.

While the rate of increase in childhood obesity seems to be flattening out, the total number of overweight children is still very high.

Government figures for child obesity in England in the school year 2009/10 showed that nearly a fifth of children in reception class (aged four) were obese or overweight.

Among Year 6 children (10 to 11-year-olds) the figure was one in three.

Professor Lombard warns that “non-alcoholic fatty liver disease” could be a silent killer among this generation of children.

“The unfortunate problem with liver disease is you don’t get any symptoms at all until it’s at an advanced stage. So you get cirrhosis and then you have complications that arise from that cirrhosis which can be very serious.

“So it’s not until that late stage that you get any symptoms at all.

“Parents should be concerned about children who are overweight as they will be at risk of developing fatty liver.

“If they don’t become more active and lose the weight as they go on, then they become overweight adults and have a range of other risk factors as well.”

Sarah Matthews, spokesperson of the British Liver Trust, said: “Children’s livers are being cultivated for disease by a poor diet and lack of exercise.

“Even though alcohol is regarded as the key cause of liver disease in the UK, weight-related liver damage is set to become a huge public health problem where, if the projections hold true, obesity could overtake alcohol as the biggest single driver of cirrhosis in the future.

“Too much alcohol and fatty foods, coupled with a lack of symptoms, means that liver disease is becoming difficult to ignore and is already costing the NHS millions each year.

“The number of people affected by liver disease and the health costs are set to soar, particularly with the growing number of young people who are overweight and obese.”

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An ExxonMobil pipeline in the US state of Montana has ruptured, leaking hundreds of barrels of crude oil into the Yellowstone River, officials say.

The company said the pipe had been shut down and the segment where the leak happened had been isolated.

Nearby residents were evacuated, but later allowed to return to their homes.

The accident happened downstream from the famed Yellowstone national park, a major tourist attraction in the US.

Clean-up crews have been deployed to tackle the spill, which was detected early on Saturday.

ExxonMobil spokeswoman Pam Malek told AP news agency an estimated 750 to 1,000 barrels of oil had leaked from the pipe for about a half-hour before it was shut down.

“We recognise the seriousness of this incident and are working hard to address it,” the company said in a statement.

“Our principal focus is on protecting the safety and health of the public and our employees,” it added.

It is unclear how far the slick will travel, but Duane Winslow, the county’s director of disaster and emergency services, said it was dissipating as it moved downstream.

“We’re just kind of waiting for it to move on down while Exxon is trying to figure out how to corral this monster,” Mr Winslow said.

There are fears that fish will suffer because of the accident.

“If fish get oil on them, if they break the surface and get oil on them, it tends to plug up their gills and it often is fatal,” said Bob Gobson, of the Billings Fish, Wildlife and Parks Program.

Exxon promised a full investigation into the spill, which occurred in a 12-inch pipeline, running from Silvertip to Billings, downstream from Yellowstone National Park.

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Broadcaster Sky has apologised to customers after its pay-per-view coverage of a world title boxing fight was hit by technical problems.

It said there was an “issue” with late phone and online bookings amid “unprecedented demand” to watch British boxer David Haye take on Wladimir Klitschko.

The glitch meant many fans were unable to order the £14.95 pay-per-view fight.

Haye lost on points to Klitschko, and blamed the loss on a broken toe.

During the fight, Sky’s Twitter feed urged those experiencing problems to “please find your nearest pub”.

Viewers were still able to purchase by using their remote controls, as there were no issues with that method, Sky said.

A statement on the Sky website after the fight said: “We are sorry to have disappointed any viewers who were unable to order Haye vs Klitschko tonight. Sky had an issue during the evening with new telephone and online bookings for the fight.

“We had encouraged early booking over three weeks leading up to the fight, through a range of media including on-air promos and press advertising.

“However, we experienced unprecedented demand on the night and whilst early telephone and online purchases worked there were issues with late bookings through these routes on Saturday.”

Sky is replaying the fight at no charge to customers at 0900 BST, 1300 BST and 1900 BST on Sunday.

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The US presidential campaign is already upon us, and my advice for anyone hoping to make full sense of its reporting would be to invest in a glossary of American sporting terms. In Iowa and New Hampshire, candidates are already swinging for the fences, trying to make it to first base, and even throwing the occasional Hail Mary pass.

Although this is a sports-obsessed country, Australian political discourse does not rely on sports analogies to anywhere near the same degree. True, politicians are sometimes accused of playing the man not the ball. Troublesome issues might occasionally be kicked into touch. Government ministers might be bowled a bouncer or a googly during Question Time – although more commonly they are the grateful recipients of friendly long-hops from backbenchers within their own parties.

Overall, however, the language of Australian politics owes more to anatomy than sport. Body parts are an ever present. Bodily functions and medical afflictions have always been fashionable.

Needless to say, the heart is central. John Howard not only became a self-styled “Lazarus with a triple bypass”, but was accused of inflicting serious coronary damage on the country during the republican referendum. Politicians also have to pass the great Australian ticker test. The lack of a strong ticker is seen as a more serious deficiency than spinelessness or the occasional loss of testicular fortitude. That said, the accusation of facelessness is becoming increasingly wounding, as the union leader Paul Howes or Labor powerbroker Bill Shorten might attest.

The phrase “flat-lining”, which obviously indicates a loss of heartbeat, is often used to describe a string of unfavourable polls – which themselves are indicative of a “haemorrhaging” of support. Unpopular policies are often said to be on “life-support”.

As one would expect following a particularly gory phase of federal politics, rarely is there any shortage of blood. Nor testosterone, which seems to occupy the airspace in the backrooms of politics once monopolised by smoke.

This brings us to the nether regions of the body, which Australian politicians have never been embarrassed to probe. In the eyes of Mark Latham, John Howard was an “arse-licker”. Bob Hawke thought that bosses who expected their employees to turn up to work after the America’s Cup triumph were “bums”.

When it comes to the lavatorial, it is tempting to conclude that Labor leaders have won the race to the bottom. But that would overlook Tony Abbott’s two-word summation of anthropological global warming: “Absolute crap”. Summing up a particularly bad day on the campaign trail during the 2007 election, he also simply opined that “shit happens”.

Yet the mind often triumphs over matter. Governments regularly suffer from “collective nervous breakdowns”, while Kevin Rudd was accused of Attention Deficit Disorder because of his tendency to flit from one policy area to the next. Paul Keating, as ever, was more blunt. For him, John Howard was simply “brain-damaged”.

What does all this say about Australian politics? As we have noted many times before, its lingua franca emphasises the franca over the lingua, perhaps more so than in other advanced economies. This is a plain-speaking country, after all. As a consequence, politicians here often owe their reputations to being potty-mouthed rather than being silver-tongued.

I would also argue that alternative metaphorical touchstones do not really work. Outside of South Australia, politics here lacks a dynastic dimension, which rules out much of Greek mythology. From the Adams to the Bushes, US politics is full of Oedipal overtones, and hence mythological references, which is simply not the case here.

Similarly, Shakespeare does not feature so prominently – as it does, say, at Westminster or in Washington – because so few contemporary political figures could genuinely be described as Shakespearian. True, Paul Keating might have had the lean and hungry look of Cassius. Similarly, Peter Costello could plausibly have been cast as the Hamlet of the Howard era. But during last year’s leadership coup I winced whenever Shakespeare was appropriated to describe either Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard because neither of them possesses a sufficiently dramatic persona. Perhaps one could imagine Ms Gillard as a fringe character handed a few meagre lines, but not commanding central stage.

The rowdy and infantile behaviour of Aussie politicians is under especially close scrutiny at the moment, with the New York Times, the Economist and BBC amplifying criticisms that have been regularly voiced by local commentators. The politics here at present does appear boorish and second-rate. But demands for change seem to fall on deaf ears. Canberra politicians seem to like things the way they are: bruising and brutal, for that is the character of the body politic at the arse end of the world.

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The decision to award a £1.5bn rail contract to a German rather than a UK manufacturer had dealt a “body blow” to the sector, Labour has warned.

Shadow business secretary John Denham and shadow transport secretary Maria Eagle have written to PM David Cameron urging him to review the decision.

They said it threatened thousands of jobs at Derby-based Bombardier.

The Department for Transport awarded the contract for 1,200 new carriages for the Thameslink line to Siemens.

The German company is due to construct the trains for the line between Brighton, London and Bedford at Krefeld, in the industrial Rhineland region.

Bombardier’s Litchurch Lane plant in Derby – where about 3,000 people are employed – is the last rolling stock manufacturer in the UK with a 150-year history.

Mr Denham and Ms Eagle wrote: “It is our belief that the loss of the contract could critically damage Britain’s last train manufacturing company.

“It could affect the inward investment that Bombardier makes in its own operations across the UK, and to the many suppliers which rely on it.

“And it raises serious questions about Britain’s ability to be a world-leading base for manufacturing.”

They added: “It is essential that we do all that we can to support our manufacturing businesses. If we do not, British companies will continue to lose out to our global competitors.”

They said a “full independent review” must take place to take into account the effect on the UK economy that the loss of this contract would create.

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