Category: news

Qantas jets have been hit by two separate engine problems in as many days

The Australian airline, Qantas, has said it has found “slight anomalies” on three Airbus A380 engines and is keeping its fleet of six passenger jets grounded for further checks.

Chief executive Alan Joyce said there “was oil where oil shouldn’t be on the engines” of two of the super-jumbos.

Qantas was “trying to check what the cause of that would be”, he added.

A similar engine broke apart in flight on Thursday, forcing a Qantas A380 to make an emergency landing in Singapore.

After the incident – the first since the aircraft came into service in 2007 – the airline began checking their Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines.

On Monday, Mr Joyce said engineers had found oil in three engines, which was unusual given that they were only two years’ old.

“These are new engines on new aircraft and they shouldn’t have these issues at this stage, so it’s given us indication of an area for us to focus into,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“We are keeping an open mind on it but… We think it could have been a materials issue on the engine, or a design issue.”

Mr Joyce said he hoped to have the A380s back in the air soon.

“We still believe with the progress we are making – this is days not weeks – but we will take as long as it needs to in order that we are absolutely comfortable the aircraft is safe to fly,” he added.

In an unrelated incident on Friday, a Qantas Boeing 747 – also equipped with Rolls-Royce engines – was forced to return to Singapore with an engine problem after taking off.

Mr Joyce said it was “not a safety issue” and that there were no plans to ground the airline’s fleet of 747s.

Rolls-Royce, the British firm which makes the engines for the Qantas planes, saw its share price fall by nearly 5% on Friday.

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

A mild rise in manufacturing output was noted in the latest PMI report

The Scottish economic recovery remained on hold last month, according to the latest survey of business managers.

Economic activity was described as “broadly static” during October in the Bank of Scotland Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) report.

The rate of new business declined for the first time in nine months, despite firms adding to their workforces.

But business and financial services saw their strongest expansion in five months.

Donald MacRae, chief economist at Bank of Scotland, said the expansion in business and financial services was very welcome.

He added: “Scottish firms continued to add to their workforces during October, although the rate of job creation remained weak.

“The Scottish economy has slowed but has not gone into reverse.”

The report showed activity in the services sector fell for the second month in a row, which was attributed to a decline in travel, tourism and leisure.

A mild rise in manufacturing output was noted after a slight fall in September’s report.

The marginal decline in the Scottish economy contrasts with the trend seen across the UK as a whole, where a mild acceleration of growth was recorded.

Cost inflation was at its highest in five months with companies blaming rising raw material and fuel costs for the hike, while the increase in the national minimum wage pushed up staffing costs.

Responding to the data, a spokesman for Finance Secretary John Swinney said that although there were positive indications, it was clear that Scotland’s recovery remained fragile.

The PMI report, compiled by Markit for Bank of Scotland, is based on data from purchasing executives in about 600 private manufacturing and service sector companies.

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

Room in a psychiatric hospital

In the 1980s, Emma Henderson saw her sister move from the mental hospital she had lived in for 35 years to a small home in the community.

She saw Clare thrive and grow in independence, but the question “What if?” has always haunted her.

What if Clare had had a different kind of life? What if she had had the language to communicate her hopes and desires? And what if she had been born now, when people with similar disabilities face a very different future?

The question proved the inspiration for the Oxford graduate’s first novel, weaving together themes of medicine, love and loss set against a backdrop of social change.

Clare was the inspiration for the book’s main character, Grace, a severely-disabled child who finds love against the odds in a care home.

“I do have memories of going to visit her,” says former teacher Emma, who now lives in London.

“But what I think I’ve done in the book is not only elaborate them, falsify them if you like, but I think I’ve done quite a lot of time-slipping with my memories.”

Clare was born in 1946 with various physical and mental handicaps for which she was never given a formal diagnosis.

After being left partly paralysed by polio, she was deemed “ineducable”, and at the age of 11 went to live in a mental hospital.

Emma says there was no taboo about talking of her sister, but she grew up with a “sense of confusion” about how to explain Clare to her friends.

“I didn’t have any language to describe my sister to the rest of the world,” she explains. “There were lots of words used, and I did ask, and I did get answers, but they didn’t add up to very much.

Emma Henderson’s novel has been nominated for a book prize

“Physically handicapped, mentally defective, was one of the phrases and I did sometimes say that, but the look on my friends’ faces, aged 10 or 11, with that rolling off my tongue was just perplexed.

“So it was a problem – for even if there was the will to talk about it, there weren’t the words, somehow.”

Emma says that once Clare left the children’s wards, she was able to work in the hospital, which she seemed to enjoy and found sociable.

“My sister did come home, but not very often, partly just because of the logistics of it in those days.

“And when my parents went to see her, if I went with them, we would, as she got older, increasingly go out with her shopping or for a picnic, that sort of thing.”

Clare spent 35 years in the hospital, until the winds of change ushered in the era of care in the community.

“She didn’t leave the hospital until it was due for closure – so everybody had to leave. It was an enormous problem,” says the author.

“Just what to do with all these people, especially the ones who were getting on a bit – finding provision for them was very difficult in the new system.

“The responsibility fell back on the local authorities so my sister was found somewhere to live in Hounslow, which is where she originally came from, and where my mother still lives.”

“And of course I can’t speak for anyone else, but for her it appeared to be a very happy solution.

“For the last few years of her life, she appeared to blossom.”

Emma, 52, has written of her guilt and anger “at the fate that dealt such unfair cards”. After Clare’s death in 1997, she was compelled to write a novel inventing a story that explored the “What if?” question.

“The book is a tribute to the aspects of my sister’s character that I remember with great affection,” she says.

Emma Henderson’s novel Grace Williams Says It Loud has been shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for literature with a medical theme. The winning book will be announced on the evening of 9 November 2010 at: www.wellcomebookprize.org

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

Former NHS executives and health ministers will give evidence

A public inquiry into the scandal-hit Stafford Hospital is due to open later, years after campaigners first demanded an open hearing.

A 2009 report condemned conditions at the hospital, said to have caused hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

The last government ordered a private investigation, but refused a wider public inquiry.

But in June the coalition government said the families of those who died deserved to know what went wrong.

The problems at Stafford Hospital – run by the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust – were first exposed by the NHS regulator in March 2009.

The Healthcare Commission said there had been hundreds more deaths than there should have been between 2005 and 2008.

Catalogue of failings

It listed a catalogue of failings, including cases where untrained A&E receptionists had assessed emergency cases.

The Labour government then launched several investigations.

These included an independent inquiry, led by Robert Francis QC. However, this was held in private and did not have the power to compel witnesses to give evidence.

When it reported in February it said the trust had been driven by targets and cost-cutting.

Managers had been focused on winning elite foundation trust status during the problem years.

But campaigners said the failings went far wider than the hospital itself, and that the broader NHS and regulators should have realised there were problems and stepped in.

They demanded a full public inquiry with stronger legal powers.

In June, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced that Robert Francis would continue the work he had already done on investigating the hospital by leading just such an inquiry.

Mr Lansley said this would focus on how the culture in the NHS had allowed the failings to happen.

He said the families of patients who suffered at the hospital deserved to know that.

The inquiry will consider more than a million pages of evidence and will hear from dozens of witnesses.

Hoping for answers

Campaigners are hoping they will now get some of the answers they have been seeking for years.

They want to hear from the chief executive who was in charge at the time, as well as senior managers from the NHS in Staffordshire and Whitehall, and former health ministers.

Julie Bailey, who set up the campaign group Cure the NHS, said it was an important day for her.

“It means such a lot to us,” she said. “I hope this will lead to a big culture change in the NHS. We deserve to know why it was allowed to happen, and whether it could happen anywhere else.”

Stafford Hospital has been working hard to improve patient care over the last 18 months.

The new chief executive, Anthony Sumara, said they had taken on 140 more nurses, improved training, and changed procedures in the areas which had problems.

He welcomed the public inquiry and hoped it would help improve confidence in the hospital.

“It’s desperately important for the NHS in general that we get some answers,” he said.

He worries that the impending reorganisation of the NHS and a tougher financial climate could provide the ingredients for similar problems to be repeated.

“We need to make sure we don’t take our eye off the ball again,” he warned.

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 technique allows the viability of embroys to be tested without damaging them

A new screening technique to test embryos could dramatically increase the chances of having a baby from IVF.

The test allows for any chromosomal abnormalities, the biggest cause of early pregnancy loss, to be picked up in embryos before they are reimplanted.

The UK-based researchers expect the technique to double or triple current IVF success rates.

Trials of the technique are being lead by fertility specialists at CARE Fertility in Manchester.

Three British women in their late 30s are due to give birth in late December after using the pioneering technique.

Chromosomal abnormalities are the biggest cause of early pregnancy loss, responsible for 70% of pregnancies not carrying on to term.

Those kinds of abnormalities are a significant cause of pregnancy failures in all pregnancies including those in IVF.

Now this new technique allows the viability of embroys to be tested without damaging them.

CARE director Simon Fishel told Claudia Hammond from the BBC’s Health Check that the test allows for significant improvement on current methods.

So now they can reimplant embryos that will go on to achieve a successful, sustainable pregnancy.

“Before we would look down a microscope and see five, six, maybe 10 embryos knowing that half are chromosomally abnormal but there’s no way of testing it.

“We now we have an objective test that is related to the health of the pregnancy,” he told the BBC.

In IVF the embryo reaches a stage called the blastocyst at day five.

This is a day or so before it would normally implant in the womb and when it is reimplanted in IVF.

“At this stage, the embryo has two parts,” said Mr Fishel. “A tiny ball of cells which will become the baby and an outer layer of cells that becomes the placenta.

“At this stage we can do a tiny biopsy of those placental cells. So we don’t even touch the cells that are going to become the baby itself.

“We can then can analyse all the chromosomes that would tell us about the cells that make the baby at the latest time before it goes back into the womb.

“This information seems to make a massive difference up to a doubling or tripling of pregnancy rates. And more importantly the implantation rates.

“In other words, each embryo is much more efficient at implanting and maintaining that pregnancy,” Mr Fishel told the BBC.

“Currently IVF success rates are related entirely to the woman’s age. So at the moment a woman of 40 who had a 10% chance of pregnancy will probably be as high as 30% so that’s trebling that pregnancy rate.

“If she was 30, we may be getting her pregnancy rates up from 30 or 40% to doubling that to even maybe as high as 70 or 80%. It’s making a stupendous difference.

“We will see a paradigm shift in what we’re doing in IVF I believe in the coming years, due to work that’s now maturing in the next 6 to 12 months.”

You can hear more about the research on Health Check on the BBC World Service.

Or listen to the programme later on the BBC iPlayer.

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

The Chinese artist behind the sunflower seeds exhibition in the Tate Modern says he is under house arrest in Beijing to stop him attending a party at his art studio in Shanghai.

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

The Catholic cathedral in central Baghdad has opened its doors again

A week after the worst single disaster to afflict Iraq’s Christians in modern times, the Catholic cathedral in central Baghdad where the killing took place was back in business.

With its windows still smashed and walls scarred and pocked by blasts and bullets, the building had been quickly cleaned up in time for a service at exactly the same hour as the killers struck a week earlier.

As the cathedral was being readied for its first service since the attack, a senior Iraqi cleric in London, Archbishop Athanasios Dawood, called on Iraqi Christians to flee the country because it was so dangerous.

“If we stay, they will kill us,” he told the BBC after addressing a congregation of Iraqi Orthodox Christians at a service in London.

“Which is better, to flee or to stay? To be killed or to be alive? But when I say ‘leave’, my heart is injured inside.”

But in Baghdad itself, both Church leaders and Christian politicians seemed unanimous in urging their communities to stay.

The Syriac Catholic Bishop of Baghdad, Ignatius Metti Metok, says he lost half his normal congregation in last week’s attack on his Cathedral of Our Lady of Deliverance, immediately adjacent to his diocesan headquarters.

Bishop Metti Metok says he cannot force his congregation to stay on

“My people say to me, ‘You want us to stay after what’s happened? It could happen again, and who’s going to protect us?'” he said.

“We tell them, the Church is against emigration, we have to stay here, whatever the sacrifices, to bear witness to our faith. But people are human, and we can’t stop them leaving.”

Christian politicians have been infuriated by suggestions that their community should leave, and that Western countries should open their gates to an exodus from Iraq.

“This is our home, we have been together with Muslims for centuries, this is our destiny, and we will stay together,” said Yonadam Kanna, a prominent Christian member of the Iraqi parliament.

“This is almost parallel to what al-Qaeda is doing against us. Al-Qaeda is pushing us out and you are pulling me out. Which is against my interest, against my people, against my country.”

He was particularly angered by what he believed were plans by France to invite 1,000 Iraqi Christians to emigrate there.

“That’s against the interests of the Christians, it incites Muslims against us, and it’s a departure from European values which deal with people as human beings not as Christians or Muslims,” he said.

This Iraqi Christian family is “afraid all the time”

The French embassy is organising on Monday an emergency medical airlift of about 40 wounded people from the church attack and some helpers to accompany them.

But the French ambassador in Baghdad, Boris Boillon, insisted that the evacuation was a purely humanitarian medical affair and that a separate offer of 1,000 visas to Iraqis in general – not just Christians – was part of a European programme dating back to 2008.

“France has a long tradition going back several hundred years of offering sanctuary to people in danger,” he told the BBC.

“But we want Iraq to keep its pluralistic identity, and the presence of the Christians is a part of that identity.”

But there are, nonetheless, fears that further waves of emigration could result from the bloodbath at the church.

More than 40 Christians are believed to have died when security forces stormed the cathedral building where they were being held hostage by gunmen who detonated their explosive belts, causing carnage.

Fadya Issa is about to leave the country with her husband, their two young sons and her sister-in-law Samira, to emigrate to the US.

It is not a spur-of-the-moment decision driven by the church attack, though it has made her glad they are going.

It took them two years of waiting to get their American visas.

None of them has ever been out of the country or flown on a plane before. They know they are going to California to meet up with Samira’s brother but they do not know where. Between them they have about four words of English.

“Of course, it’s sad to leave your homeland, the place you were born and grew up, and all the things you know,” said Fadya.

“But what can we do? Here, you’re afraid all the time. You’re afraid at home, and when you take the kids to school, and when you go to the market. Wherever you go, you’re afraid.”

Since 2003 Iraq’s Christians, who have lived here for nearly 2,000 years, have dwindled in numbers from an estimated 900,000 to about half that number, though there are no statistics.

“Before the change of regime seven years ago, we didn’t have massacres like this,” said Bishop Metti Metok.

“Of course we are worried for the future of our community. However much we encourage them to stay, they ask us, ‘Will you guarantee our lives?'”

He and other Church leaders pointed out that it is not just the Christians who are targeted and suffering.

Two days after the church attack, around 90 people were killed in a rash of bomb explosions in mainly Shia neighbourhoods.

Shia mosques, pilgrimages and funerals, as well as crowded markets and busy streets. have frequently been attacked by bombers.

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

The Ladies in White say the Cuban government has not kept its promise

Opposition activists in Cuba have accused the government of failing to keep its promise to free another 13 jailed dissidents.

President Raul Castro agreed in July to free 52 political prisoners within four months.

Most have been released into exile in Spain, but 13 are still in prison because they refuse to leave Cuba.

Relatives of prominent dissidents, known as the Ladies in White, protested in Havana to demand their release.

The activists said Sunday was the deadline by which all 52 prisoners should have been freed, in accordance with a deal struck between President Castro and the Catholic Church.

“They are deceiving and have played with the Church, the government of Spain, the European Union and with all the international community”, said the Ladies in White leader, Laura Pollan.

“This is proof that their word has no value, and that they cannot be trusted”, she said.

Cuba’s communist government has never publicly discussed a deadline for the releases.

It considers the prisoners to be counter-revolutionary “mercenaries” working for the US.

But it agreed to free them in a deal brokered by the Church and the government of Spain, which said it would receive them.

The government has also released or promised to release another 14 prisoners who were not part of the group of 52, including some who were convicted of violent crimes.

The 52 were imprisoned in 2003 in a crackdown on opposition activists, government critics and commentators.

Their wives, daughters and mothers formed the Ladies in White group to campaign for their release.

Under Cuban law, dissidents can be arrested, tried and jailed for speaking and writing against the government under charges like enemy propaganda, clandestine printing and unlawful association.

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