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Bill to detail major NHS overhaul

The reforms were first set out in a white paper published last summer

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The government is preparing to publish details of the biggest overhaul of the NHS in England in more than 60 years, amid mounting criticism of the changes.

The Health and Social Care Bill, which will be laid before Parliament later, paves the way for GPs to get control of most of the NHS budget by 2013.

Unions warn the plans could undermine the health service, while MPs say they have taken the NHS by “surprise”.

But the government argues the changes will improve care and accountability.

This will be the key message the Department of Health stresses as the bill is unveiled.

After spending the past week defending the plans from attacks by unions, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wants to stress the positives by detailing how he believes they will transform the NHS for the better.

GP view: How patients may benefit

Dr Ken Aswani, a GP in Waltham Forest, on the outskirts of London, is at the forefront of the changes. He is the lead doctor in one of the consortia which is piloting the changes for the government.

“We will be looking to build on what we have been doing in recent years. That means getting services out of hospital and into the community where they are more accessible.”

One example of this that is already up and running is in dermatology care. There are now three clinics linked to GP centres across the borough where nurses, specially-trained GPs and hospital consultants work together to see people with skin problems.

Dr Aswani says: “It is much quicker now and patients do not have to travel as far. Feedback shows they really value this and these changes will allow us to do much more of this sort of thing.”

Speaking ahead of the publication of the draft legislation, he said: “Our ambition is simple – to deliver care for patients which is the best of anywhere in the world on the NHS.”

The reforms were first set out in a white paper published last summer and will lead to a radical overhaul of the health service.

Managers working for primary care trusts (PCTs) are currently responsible for planning and buying local services from hospital care to district nursing, but under the changes consortia of GPs will take on responsibility for this from 2013.

Pilots are already starting and once the process is complete, two tiers of management – PCTs and the 10 regional health authorities – will be scrapped.

The bill has been eagerly awaited by those in the NHS to see just how much power will be devolved to doctors, how they will be held accountable and what safeguards will be put in place.

In the lead up to its publication, fears were voiced by the NHS Confederation that hospitals could go bust as the plans include opening up the NHS to “any willing provider”.

GP view: How patients could suffer

Dr Helena McKeown, a GP based in Wiltshire, describes herself as a sceptic. She believes one danger is that consortia may decide that some of the more marginal services are not a priority for funding. “Patients could see local bunion services go, for example, or orthodontics.”

She also fears local hospitals could be hit as private sector providers look to win more NHS contracts. She gives the example of ophthalmology departments which rely on cataract operations as a vital source of income and an area for eye surgeons to gain experience for more complex work.

“Private firms will want the cataracts as they are less risky and less complex, but the consequence of that is the local hospital department could suffer.

“This could happen all across the hospital. I see it as like that game Jenga – if you pull too many blocks out the whole thing topples down.”

Critics have also questioned whether GPs have the experience and skills to handle such huge budgets – they will have control of about 80% of the budget.

On Tuesday, the Commons health committee criticised the scale and speed of the reforms, saying the NHS had not been able to plan properly.

A host of unions, including the British Medical Association and Royal College of Nursing, have expressed their “extreme concerns” that greater commercial competition in the NHS would end up undermining care.

The government has responded by saying it is all part of a managed transition to devolve decision-marking closer to the patient so services are designed in a better way.

Ministers have also been quick to point out that despite the criticisms from unions, more than 140 groups of GPs have put themselves forward for the pilots, covering more than half the population of England.

The timing of the reforms has also been questioned. While the NHS will be getting small funding rises in the next four years, it is still being asked to making savings – £20bn by 2014.

Peter Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “This reform programme could come off the rails, as people concentrate on saving money rather than delivering quality care.”

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

Call for pre-school intervention

Mr Allen’s report says work needs to be done to improve every child’s “school readiness”

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Early intervention will improve the lives of vulnerable children and help break the cycle of “dysfunction and under-achievement”, a report says.

The government-commissioned report recommends regular assessments of all pre-school children, focusing on their social and emotional development.

Graham Allen’s report also calls for a national parenting programme in the UK.

The Labour MP was asked to assess how children from disadvantaged backgrounds could be given the best start in life.

His report says success or failure in early childhood has “profound economic consequences” and calls for more private money to be channelled into early intervention schemes to help set children on the right path in life.

It also recommends numbering all year groups from birth not just from the start of primary school.

In his report, the Nottingham North MP says decades of late intervention has failed and major social problems have got worse not better.

All too often society is failing to equip young children with the social and emotional skills they need in life, he says.

“If we continue to fail, we will only perpetuate the cycle of wasted potential, low achievement, drink and drug misuse, unintended teenage pregnancy, low work aspirations, anti-social behaviour and lifetimes on benefits, which now typifies millions of lives and is repeated through succeeding generations,” the report warns.

Graham Allen, Labour MP for Nottingham North

“Socially and emotionally capable people are more productive, better educated, tax-paying citizens helping our nation to compete in the global economy, and make fewer demands on public expenditure”

Graham Allen MP and report author

Only early intervention can break the “inter-generational cycle of dysfunction and under-achievement”, it says.

Mr Allen’s report highlights the impact of poor parenting and says too few parents-to-be understand how to build the social and emotional capability of a baby or small child.

All parents need to know how to “recognise and respond to a baby’s cues, attune with infants and stimulate them from the very start, and how to foster empathy”, it says.

The report quotes some American research that shows the early years are the greatest period of growth in the human brain.

This is why, Mr Allen argues, it is important to intervene in the early years, rather than later when the basic architecture, or wiring, of the brain is formed for life.

He highlights the Family Nurse Partnership, which has had a lot of success in the United States, and says it should be available to all vulnerable first-time mothers in the UK.

The programme sees specially trained nurses regularly visiting young, first-time mothers from pregnancy until their child is two, to promote attachment and positive parenting.

Mr Allen also suggests the UK gives the pre-school years – 0 to 5, including pregnancy – the same recognition developmentally as the primary and secondary years of education.

He says this could be partly achieved by numbering all the year groups from birth, not just from the start of primary school which starts with the Reception year.

The prime objective of this should be “to produce high levels of ‘school readiness’ for all children, regardless of income,” he says.

“It is important that everyone with responsibilities for child development, particularly parents, understands how the 0 to 18 health and educational cycle is continuous from birth and does not start on entry to primary school.”

He also calls for regular assessment of pre-school-age children, focusing on social and emotional development “so that they can be put on the path to ‘school readiness'”.

He adds: “Socially and emotionally capable people are more productive, better educated, tax-paying citizens helping our nation to compete in the global economy, and make fewer demands on public expenditure.”

He recommends setting up an independent early intervention foundation to drive early intervention forward, assess policies and attract investment.

“I recommend that the foundation should be led and funded by non-central government sources, including local authorities, ethical and philanthropic trusts, foundations and charities, as well as private investors who have already expressed an interest in this.”

Mr Allen is due to publish a second report before the summer parliamentary recess detailing how private sector money can fund proven early intervention programmes.

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

Cash boost helps bustard project

A project to reintroduce the great bustard to the UK is given a £1.8m boost from the European Union.

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

Arabs push settlement resolution

The Jewish settlement of Gilo, on the outskirts of Jerusalem (16 January 2010)

The Israelis accuse the Palestinians of using the issue of settlements to avoid negotiations

Arab nations have formally submitted a resolution to the UN Security Council condemning Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

They did so despite objections from the US, which many expect would veto the resolution if it was brought to a vote.

The Palestinians say they are turning to the Security Council because US attempts to get a settlement building freeze have so far failed.

They pulled out of direct talks with Israel over the issue in October.

Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

The resolution condemns Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian Territories, and says it is an obstacle to achieving peace.

The BBC’s Barbara Plett, at the UN’s headquarters in New York, says that much of the language has been used before by the UN, and even by the current administration of US President Barack Obama, which made a settlement freeze a focus of its attempt to resurrect Israel-Palestinian negotiations.

Israeli settlements on occupied landMore than 430,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, alongside 2.5 million Palestinians20,000 settlers live in the Golan HeightsSettlements and the area they take up cover 40% of the West BankThere are about 100 settlements not authorised by the Israeli government in the West BankAn Israeli settlement in close-up In the shadow of an Israeli settlement

That failed, so the Arabs turned to the Security Council despite US objections, our correspondent says.

The US traditionally protects Israel against criticism at the UN and does not want to be forced to veto a resolution based on what was its own policy, she adds.

Attempts to bring it on side will continue before any vote.

Diplomats say options include modifying the language of the resolution, or perhaps convincing the Palestinians to abandon the effort in exchange for American proposals more acceptable to them.

Our correspondents say that aside from the US, there is considerable support at the UN for the move. Three of the resolution’s co-sponsors are members of the Security Council.

The Palestinians say they are trying to galvanise international pressure on Israel to stop settlement construction so that talks can resume.

The Israelis accuse them of using the issue to avoid negotiations.

Whatever the case, the initiative starkly illustrates the level of Palestinian frustration and the failure of the US government’s Middle East policy, our correspondent adds.

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

First make, then give

By Jamie Robertson

One Water is one example of social entrepreneurs at work

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Making and giving money are generally considered to be two separate operations.

First you make your cash. Then, if you’re of a philanthropic bent, you give some of it, maybe a lot of it, away.

But how about combining the two, taking the entrepreneurial spirit and harnessing it to do good?

One Water was an idea dreamt up by a bunch of friends in a pub, with the aim of creating a business that sold bottled water and gave away all its profits to water projects in Africa.

Duncan Goose, whose background is in advertising, is managing director.

He explained: “Actually there is not very much you can do to market water in a bottle. It’s water, it’s in a bottle. You can change the cap, alter the label, but not much else.

“But if you make the aim of the business a project like providing water for people in Africa, then you can use that to sell the bottle.”

And it works. It competes head to head with Evian and Perrier, while the profits primarily go towards PlayPumps.

This is an ingenious concept that hitches up a playground roundabout to a pump and a borehole and uses children playing on it to pump water up to a storage tank.

One Water claims to have helped a million people in Africa get safe clean drinking water.

Now it’s branching out into One Vitamin Enhanced Water, One Condoms, One Toilet Tissue and One Handwash, as well as African microfinance projects.

There are other similar stories. Pants To Poverty is an ethical underwear brand championing environmentally friendly clothing production to support Indian cotton farmers.

“I think it’s good to separate profit and not-for-profit organisations. Having this middle ground isn’t useful”

Prof Aneel Karnani Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Bikeworks, in the heart of London’s economically deprived East End, takes on the homeless and long-term jobless and teaches them to service and sell bicycles.

It’s hard to measure the number of social entrepreneurs, but in the UK, social enterprises legally categorised as Community Interest Companies number almost 4,500.

But there are many more that would call themselves social enterprises, with a vast range of structures.

Some are tightly run businesses which, after costs, push all profits into their own charitable operations.

Others make money from running community projects, often for local authorities. Others have charitable sidelines and yet more are charities that have simply become more business-minded.

For instance, the UK charity Mencap, which campaigns for people with learning difficulties, gets only 10% of its resources from fund-raising. Much of the rest has to come from commercial operations.

For some, this confusion is a problem. Professor Aneel Karnani from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, says there should be a clear split between a real business and a philanthropic organisation.

“Companies should do well, citizens should do good,” he says. “I think it’s good to separate profit and not-for-profit organisations.

Pants To Poverty have an eye-catching way of supporting Indian farmers

“Having this middle ground isn’t useful. It opens up questions of governance: who is going to have the final say, the investor, the manager or the donor?”

Also, if you cannot categorise and define a social enterprise, it’s hard for government to help them or in any way regulate them. What targets do they have to reach if, for instance, they are to receive tax incentives?

And yet social enterprises continue to attract not just the young and idealistic, but seasoned investors.

HCT, which runs bus operations in Hackney and Yorkshire in the UK, ploughs some 30% of its profits into community transport projects for the elderly and disabled.

It found itself growing at some 20% a year, but a year ago it needed capital to buy a new fleet of buses. It simply could not offer the kind of return conventional investors demanded.

Managing director Dai Powell found a “social loan” instead. “The investor gets a social return as well as a financial return,” he says.

“We set an annual target with the investors, as regards what we hope to achieve in terms of social impact, and that is monitored with quarterly presentations.

“If we don’t meet the social targets, we can, in theory, default on the loan.”

The loan came from venture capital group Bridges Community Ventures. Its executive director, Antony Ross, has an orthodox background in venture capital, an industry that demands high returns, as well as fast growth for its investors.

But when he helped set up Bridges, he was selling those investors something very different, as he explains.

“Investors are very attracted by the idea that they can put their money into a social enterprise, the enterprise can grow and with its growth you have the resources to repay those funds – and then those investors can use those funds to support another social enterprise.”

The potential investors here are often high-net-worth business people with an eye to philanthropy, and treating it as a business is very appealing. However, Prof Karnani thinks the blending of the two is misleading.

“What we are really talking about here are enterprises that don’t earn the full return that a competitive market requires, so they get subsidised capital in some form,” he says.

“The investors are willing to take a lower return. That’s equivalent to saying the investor is making a donation to that business.

“Rather than mixing the two, the bus company could run as a profit-making company, the shareholder [could] get a proper return and then decide to put the money into a community project. I don’t see why the two should be confused.”

And yet social entrepreneurs show no sign of being confused themselves, while their ranks appear to be swelling – however you define them.

Most would argue that definition is not a problem, so long as they can, in some way, make a good living for themselves – and a better life for others.

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

Hunt to outline ‘local TV’ plans

Jeremy Hunt will promise a “voice” for communities

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Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is to invite companies to run local TV stations and make the proposed new services a reality.

Addressing broadcasting executives at the Oxford Media Convention, he is due to say the initial schemes will be focused on “10 to 12” major cities.

He will ask firms to register an interest by 1 March.

Licences for local – rather than regional – television services are to be handed out before the end of 2012.

Mr Hunt has long championed the concept of US-style local television, where many cities, rather than wider regions, have their own local news and entertainment coverage.

In a speech to the convention, he will say: “To make this vision a reality I am today inviting existing and new media providers to come forward with suggestions as to how this network channel – or local TV ‘spine’ – could work.

“It is crazy that a city like Sheffield, for example, does not have its own television station like it would have in most other developed countries”

Jeremy Hunt Culture Secretary

“For consumers what this will mean is a new channel dedicated to the provision of local news and content. One that will sit alongside other public service broadcasters, offering a new voice for local communities, with local perspectives that are directly relevant to them.

“We will not be prescriptive. We will wait for the necessary technical assessment to be completed and we will listen to the commercially viable proposals that come forward.

“Our goal is to be able to award the relevant licences by the end of 2012, and for local TV to be up and running soon after.”

A panel set up to examine the idea said local television channels might start by broadcasting in only 10 to 12 areas, adding that it would take “significant effort” to make the plan a success.

In an interview at last year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, Mr Hunt described the UK media as “chronically over-centralised”.

He said: “It is crazy that a city like Sheffield, for example, does not have its own television station like it would have in most other developed countries.”

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

‘Ask not what your country..’

John F Kennedy delivers his inaugural speech

The poetic “ask not” quotation is among the speech’s most memorable lines

President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.

Like other great communicators – including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then – he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.

He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address such a hit.

Watch JFK’s speech

Choose highlights and read Max Atkinson’s commentary

Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the heart of all great speaking for more than 2,000 years. Most important among these are:

Contrasts: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”Three-part lists: “Where the strong are just, and the weak secure and the peace preserved”Combinations of contrasts and lists (by contrasting a third item with the first two): “Not because the communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right”

If the rhetorical structure of sentences is one set of building blocks in the language of public speaking, another involves simple “poetic” devices such as:

Alliteration: “Let us go forth to lead the land we love”Imagery: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”

In general, the more use of these a speaker makes, the more applause they will get and the more likely it is that they will be recognised as a brilliant orator.

Power of the spoken word

“Kennedy’s inaugural address reflected his core beliefs and life experience. He was a war veteran -a combat hero. He had read the great speeches of the ages, and believed in the power of words. He thought that a democracy thrives only when citizens contribute their talents to the common good, and that it is up to leaders to inspire citizens to acts of sacrifice. And when he exhorted Americans to ‘Ask not, what your country can do for you,’ he appealed to their noblest instincts, voicing a message that Americans were eager to hear. He lifted the spirits of his listeners, even as he confronted the grim reality of the nuclear age.”

Source: John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

But great communicators differ as to which of these techniques they use most.

Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, stand out as masters of anecdote and story-telling, which didn’t feature at all in JFK’s inaugural. Mr Obama also favours three-part lists, of which there were 29 in his 10-minute election victory speech in Chicago.

Kennedy, however, used very few in his inaugural address. For him, contrasts were the preferred weapon, coming as they did at a rate of about one every 39 seconds in this particular speech. Some were applauded and some have survived among the best-remembered lines.

He began with three consecutive contrasts:

“We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom””Symbolizing an end as well as a beginning””Signifying renewal as well as change”

From the 20 or so he used, other widely quoted contrasts, all of which were applauded, include:

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich””Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate””My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”

The speech also bristled with imagery, starting with a stark warning about the way the world has changed because “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

People of the developing world were “struggling to break the bonds of mass misery.”

Ronald Reagan was a master of anecdote

JFK vowed to “assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty” and that “this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

He sought to “begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity”, hoped that “a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion” and issued a “call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.”

Impressive though the rhetoric and imagery may have been, what really made the speech memorable was that it was the first inaugural address by a US president to follow the first rule of speech-preparation: analyse your audience – or, to be more precise at a time when mass access to television was in its infancy, analyse your audiences.

The Gettysburg great

Lincoln’s short Gettysburg address had caught JFK’s eye. Here is a sample of the speech:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”

In the most famous fictional speech of all time, Mark Antony had shown sensitivity to his different audiences in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by asking his “Friends, Romans, countrymen” to lend him their ears. But Kennedy had many more audiences in mind than those who happened to be in Washington that day.

His countrymen certainly weren’t left out, appearing as they did in the opening and towards the end with his most famous contrast of all: “Ask not…” But he knew, perhaps better than any previous US president, that local Americans were no longer the only audience that mattered. The age of a truly global mass media had dawned, which meant that what he said would be seen, heard or reported everywhere in the world.

At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy also had a foreign policy agenda that he wanted to be heard everywhere in the world. So the different segments of the speech were specifically targeted at a series of different audiences:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill””To those new nations whom we welcome to the ranks of the free””To those in the huts and villages of half the globe””To our sister republics south of the border””To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations””Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary”

The following day, there was nothing on the front pages of two leading US newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington Post to suggest that the countrymen in his audience had been particularly impressed by the speech – neither of them referred to any of the lines above that have become so famous.

The fact that so much of the speech is still remembered around the world 50 years later is a measure of Kennedy’s success in knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how best to say it and, perhaps most important of all, to whom he should say it.

Dr Max Atkinson is the author of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public Speaking and Presentation and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy

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

Mallya: Sport teams ‘not a hobby’

Vijay Mallya at the launch of Force India in 2007

Mr Mallya is hoping for some podium finishes from Force India this year

Indian billionaire entrepreneur Vijay Mallya has said he does not consider his Formula One and Indian Premier League teams to be costly pastimes.

As well as his drinks and airline companies, he also owns the F1 team Force India and the IPL team Royal Challengers Bangalore.

“It is certainly not a hobby,” he says, seeing F1 and IPL as major businesses.

Mr Mallya has been in the UK to hand over a case of whisky from Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Antarctic expedition.

It will be analysed at the Mackinlay distillery in the Scottish Highlands, which is now owned by Mr Mallya’s Whyte & Mackay company.

“F1 and cricket are part and parcel of our business tools for promotion, and are sports in which, not only I am interested, but in which India is hugely interested,” he says.

“You can’t say that [sport team ownership] takes the focus away from the businesses that produce the cash.”

Mr Mallya is chairman of the United Breweries Group and Kingfisher Airlines, with the carrier named after the brewer’s main beer brand, Kingfisher.

And he is convinced that his sports teams are providing value for money.

“F1 is perhaps the most technically competitive sport in the world ”

Vijay Mallay Chairman, United Brweries Group

“Why do you think I paid $112m (£70m) for the Royal Challengers cricket team?” he says.

And he points out that Sahara Group, which recently bought the Grosvenor House Hotel, had to pay $370m last year to secure the new Pune franchise for IPL4 this year.

“It is certainly not a hobby. There is a huge value proposition because we get to share in all the television revenues, and all other forms of income generated by the Indian Premier League, and there is a very sound economic model there,” he told BBC Scotland.

And he dismisses fears that the upward trajectory in IPL revenues is leading to a bubble that could burst.

Royal Challengers Bangalore player Virat Kohli

Mr Mallya paid $112m for the Royal Challengers Bangalore

“In India… cricket is almost like a religion. You then have the young demographic, new consumers coming into my industry, who are going to turn 21, coming of legal drinking age.

“The same people are going to watch cricket, are going to enter the consumer sector of India, and advertisers are going to look at that ever-increasing consumer sector.

“They are going to spend more on TV revenues, and a large part – 80% – of Indian TV revenues probably goes into cricket.

“So this is no bubble, this is very sustainable.”

“I am proud that the Force India F1 team. From the end of 2007, when I bought the team, to today it has come a long way”

Vijay Mallya

This year’s IPL season gets under way on 8 April, a month after the F1 season begins.

The Force India team came into being in October 2007 when a consortium led by Mr Mallya and Michiel Mol bought the Spyker F1 team for 88m euros (£74m; $118m).

And Mr Mallya, whose Kingfisher beer brand is the team’s main sponsor, is under no illusions about the challenge facing his team during the 2011 season.

“F1 is perhaps the most technically competitive sport in the world. You are no longer fighting for half a second, you are fighting for one-hundredth of a second,” he says.

“It has become a lot more competitive so it is very difficult to move up the ladder quickly.

“I am sure we will make history ourselves when we unlock the marvels of these unique 100-year-old time capsules”

Vijay MallyaScots reclaim Shackleton’s whisky

“I am proud that the Force India F1 team. From the end of 2007, when I bought the team, to today it has come a long way.”

Indian Grand Prix

He said that although the team was scoring points regularly, it should aim for some podium finishes in 2011.

“I’d love to be on the podium in the inaugural Indian Grand Prix,” he adds, referring to the race at Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, on 30 October.

Meanwhile, he says Force India is poised to name its driving team for 2011 “in the next few days”.

“There are some legal loose ends to be tied up,” 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.

Tunisia leaders quit ruling party

A protester faces up to a policeman in Tunis, 18 January 2011

There were angry scenes on the streets of several cities on Tuesday

Tunisia’s interim president and prime minister have quit the ruling RCD party, amid anger over the make-up of a day-old government, state TV has said.

PM Mohammed Ghannouchi has been criticised for giving major government ministries to RCD figures.

He says all members of the national unity government have “clean hands”.

Four ministers have already stepped down and protests have spread over the inclusion of several veterans of Tunisia’s disgraced former regime.

Interim President Foued Mebazaa was speaker of the country’s parliament until President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali was forced from power on 14 January.

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, who unveiled a national unity government just 24 hours ago but has seen renewed street protests throughout Tuesday, is a veteran RCD figure who has been prime minister since 1999.

The resignation announcement was made on Tunisian state TV.

The twin resignations came one day after Mr Ghannouchi, in announcing the new government, pledged to separate the organs of state and political parties, the TAP network said.

“The people are asking for freedoms and this new government is not. They are the ones who oppressed the people for 22 years”

Ines Mawdud StudentIn pictures: New Tunisia protests

The AFP news agency also quoted TAP as saying that the RCD (Constitutional Democratic Rally) had expelled former President Ben Ali from its ranks.

Earlier, three ministers from an opposition party, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), stepped down from the new administration.

Officials from the movement said the trio, junior transport minister Anouar Ben Gueddour and two other ministers, Abdeljelil Bedoui and Houssine Dimassi, were resigning in protest at the continued presence of RCD figures in the administration.

Later, Mr Ghannouchi’s choice as health minister, Mustafa ben Jaafar of the Union of Freedom and Labour, refused to take up his position, a senior party official said.

On the streets of Tunis and several other cities angry demonstrators called for those members of the RCD still in power to step aside, and were strongly critical of Mr Ghannouchi.

“I am afraid that our revolution will be stolen from me and my people. The people are asking for freedoms and this new government is not. They are the ones who oppressed the people for 22 years,” Ines Mawdud, a 22-year-old student, told the Associated Press.

TUNISIAN CABINETMohammed Ghannouchi stays on as prime minister. A Ben Ali ally, he has been in the job since 1999, keeping his post throughout the unrestInterior Minister Ahmed Friaa, appointed by Mr Ben Ali to mollify demonstrators, retains postForeign Minister Kamal Morjane retains postNajib Chebbi, founder of opposition Progressive Democratic Party, named as development ministerAhmed Ibrahim, leader of opposition Ettajdid party, named minister of higher educationMustafa ben Jaafar, leader of opposition Union of Freedom and Labour, named health minister but refused to take officeSlim Amamou, prominent blogger who was arrested during protests, becomes secretary of state for youth and sportTunisia: Key players Q&A: Tunisia crisis

Despite the resignations and the street protests, a number of ministers were sworn in on Tuesday in official ceremonies in Tunis.

Opposition figure Najib Chebbi, founder of the opposition Progressive Democratic Party, took up his position as development minister.

Prominent blogger Slim Amamou, who was briefly jailed by President Ben Ali’s police, was also sworn in as minister for youth and sports.

Earlier, Prime Minister Ghannouchi defended the inclusion of members of the old regime in his new government.

He said they had “clean hands” and had always acted “to preserve the international interest”.

He repeated pledges made on Monday of a new “era of freedom”, which would see political parties free to operate and a free press.

Free and fair elections would be held within six months, he said, controlled by an independent election commission and monitored by international observers.

Unrest in Tunisia grew over several weeks, with widespread protests over high unemployment and high food prices pitching demonstrators against Tunisia’s police and military.

President Ben Ali was forced into exile last Friday.

On Monday the government admitted 78 people had died in street clashes.

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