Category: news

A British security consultant kidnapped six days ago by armed gunmen in Somalia has been released, the charity Save the Children says.

The Zimbabwean-born man was seized in the town of Adado last Thursday.

A local colleague seized with him was freed the next day.

A ransom was paid, according to local elders quoted by the AFP news agency, who were involved in negotiating the man’s release.

Save the Children said that the man was now heading to a place to safety.

Mr Barnard had gone to the area to see if it was safe enough for Save the Children to set up a new base to help malnourished and sick children, along with their families.

But on Thursday evening, a group of masked gunmen stormed the building used as a staff residence.

High walls and a heavy steel gate reportedly forced the kidnappers to climb in through a window before they fled with their hostages into an area said to be controlled by the hardline Islamist group al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaeda.

Adado, which is near the Ethiopian border, is also closely linked to pirate groups who routinely take ships and crew hostage and demand hefty ransoms.

Until now, Adado had been seen as a relatively stable part of Somalia, with aid groups considering relocating there after being forced out of more volatile regions.

Several foreigners have been kidnapped in Somalia in recent years.

Most have been freed unhurt after a ransom has been paid.

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

Mr Fahy speaks on workforce issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers

Police and council chiefs have told of their concern over the extent of cuts in the government’s Spending Review.

Chief Constable Peter Fahy, of Greater Manchester Police, said a 4% per year cut to police funding would result in fewer officers on England’s streets.

Council budgets will also be cut by 7.1% annually, with thousands of public sector job losses expected.

Chancellor George Osborne said the four year £81bn cuts were guided by “fairness, reform and growth”.

Mr Fahy, who speaks on workforce issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said the cuts to policing were broadly in line with expectations but he said there was “no question” there would be fewer officers on the streets.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has previously warned it was preparing to cut 3,100 jobs.

‘Decade of sobriety’

Elsewhere, union bosses in Cornwall said public sector cuts, which will see the loss of 500,000 posts nationwide, would be particularly bad for the area.

Cornwall Council, the county’s unitary authority, has already announced that about 2,000 jobs from a staff of approximately 10,000 would go as a result of spending cuts.

Stuart Roden, from public sector union Unison, said: “If you live in Birmingham or London, there’s another local authority next door. You can maybe get on a bus and go up the road and find yourself another job.

“You just can’t do that in Cornwall.”

Doncaster Council, which employs about 5,200 people, announced plans for 800 redundancies within the next five months, as it seeks to make £80m in budget cuts over four years.

The posts, which represent more than a sixth of the workforce, will go by the end of March 2011, the authority said.

Unison described the move as “devastating” and warned compulsory redundancies could spark strike action.

And BBC West Midlands’ Political Correspondent Patrick Burns said the Midlands faced a “decade of sobriety”.

“The Midlands has some of the highest concentrations of public sector workers in the country,” he said.

“The public spending cuts announced today inevitably mean tens of thousands of jobs in our region will be lost over the next four years.”

‘Cleggzilla’

There has been strong reaction against the cuts.

A coffin and hearse were driven through the streets of Dorchester, Dorset in protest at the level of public service cuts.

About 100 campaigners took part in the procession dressed in black and carrying banners, saying it marked “the final nail in the coffin” for Dorset public services.

Protests also took place in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, where deputy prime minister and Sheffield Hallam MP Nick Clegg was dubbed “Cleggzilla” by protesters outside Sheffield town hall.

A special BBC News season examining the approaching cuts to public sector spending

The Spending Review: Making It Clear

Transport for London has been told to reduce its budget by £2bn over four years, but sources have told the BBC bus and Tube services would largely be protected.

In the East, motorists in Kent are set to face increased charges for the Dartford Crossing as a result of the Spending Review.

Although subject to consultation, prices are expected to increase from £1.50 to £2.00 in 2011, then to £2.50 in 2012.

Transport Secretary Phillip Hammond confirmed a £1.4bn upgrade to the A14 would not go ahead.

The road, which is the main east to west cross-country route, connects Northamptonshire and Leicestershire to Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

However some projects have been given the green light.

These include a plan to transform a nine-mile stretch of the A11 in Norfolk and Suffolk into a dual carriageway.

The £134m project has been mooted for decades and was due to go ahead following a public inquiry, although was at risk of being scrapped because it had not been signed off by the Department for Transport.

Also to go ahead are a £500m investment for the Tyne and Wear Metro system and Tees Valley bus network, the redevelopment of Birmingham New Street railway station and the Mersey Gateway project, which will see a second Mersey crossing.

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

Despite the disruption to transport services, the strikers continue to attract popular support

French workers are set to continue their protests against planned pension reforms with a seventh day of walkouts.

Transport workers said they would continue their rolling strike on Wednesday, although some improvement to rail services is expected.

Student leaders have also called for more protests ahead of a senate vote on the retirement age later this week.

On Tuesday, at least 1.1 million people took to the streets across France.

The interior ministry put the figure at 1.1 million across the country, although the CGT union said the number was 3.5 million.

The street protests on Tuesday were comparable with the previous week’s national day of action, although police and unions gave widely differing numbers.

In Paris, the unions estimated that 330,000 demonstrators had taken to the streets but police put the number at 60,000.

Strikes have hit transport and education, 4,000 petrol stations have run dry and police have clashed with protesters in several cities.

President Nicolas Sarkozy appealed for calm but insisted he would press ahead with plans to raise the retirement age.

The day of action was being seen as a last attempt to mobilise protesters before the Senate’s final vote on the government’s pension reforms, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday.

The vote is now to take place later this week.

The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt in Paris says that union leaders have to decide how to keep up pressure on the government.

Although public support for their protests remain strong, workers are losing pay.

The planned increases in the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67 are widely unpopular in France. But the unions are wary about public reaction to long queues at petrol stations, our correspondent says.

Fuel supplies

The scale of disruption has begun to affect large parts of society, with a blockade of France’s 12 oil refineries hitting fuel supplies hard.

Energy Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told MPs that just under 4,000 petrol stations out of a total of 13,000 were awaiting supplies.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced plans to end the shortages within four or five days, by asking the main oil companies to share their reserves to replenish stocks at petrol stations around the country.

Trains on the Paris Metro were heavily crowded as only about half the services were running and national rail operator SNCF said as many as three-quarters of its fast regional trains had been cancelled.

Education was also affected: the education ministry said 379 secondary schools were either blockaded by pupils or had suffered some disruption, the highest number since the protests began at the start of September.

In some areas, schools became a focus for violence. Outside a secondary school in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, youths threw stones at police who responded with tear gas.

For the second day running, cars were overturned and set alight in Lyon. There were also disturbances in Mulhouse and Montbeliard in eastern France.

Presidential ratings

Despite the widespread disruption, the strikers continue to attract popular support with one opinion poll suggesting that 71% of those surveyed back the industrial action.

President Sarkozy’s poll ratings appear to have dropped even further as he tries to tackle the wave of protests.

One poll for BVA conducted on 15 and 16 October suggested his approval rating was down to 30%, the lowest for three years.

The number of French with either a negative or very negative opinion of their president rose five points from September to 69%.

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Chancellor George Osborne is due to outline the Spending Review at lunchtime

Billions of pounds in public spending could be cut in Wales when details of the UK coalition government’s Spending Review are announced later.

The Welsh Assembly Government will learn by how much its budget will be cut, and the impact on benefits in Wales will also become clear.

And there could also be updates on S4C’s future and the electrification of the London to Swansea railway.

The coalition is making £83bn in cuts to UK public spending over four years.

The UK government wants to eliminate the country’s £109bn structural deficit by 2014-15.

However, the Labour Party has said such cuts will risk the UK’s economic recovery and has instead proposed halving the deficit in the same time period.

The assembly government has said the Spending Review is “profoundly important” for Wales and “undoubtedly the most important since devolution”.

First Minister Carwyn Jones, together with the leaders of devolved governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland, has said the proposed cuts are “too fast and too deep” and will “have a significant and lasting impact on the economy”.

The Spending Review will make clear how much money the Welsh government will have to spend in the coming years. Under the Barnett formula, any decrease in public expenditure in England on matters that are devolved will be reflected in how much money Wales will get.

UK Government departments are in line to have their budgets cut by an average of 25%, while some departments are reported to have to make cuts of as much as 40%.

A spokesman for Wales’s finance minister Jane Hutt said: “As previously announced, we have made prudent assumptions in starting to prepare next year’s draft budget, but it would be inappropriate to speculate on any impact the UK Government’s Review may have on public services in Wales.”

The assembly government has been planning for overall cuts to its budget of 3% a year in revenue funding and 10% in capital funding.

If those planning assumptions are correct, it would mean the Welsh Assembly budget will be £2.8bn a year less in real terms in 2013/14 compared to 2010/11.

The effect on areas such as health, transport and education which are devolved to the Welsh Assembly Government, will not be known until mid-November when the budget is set.

However, First Minister Carwyn Jones has pledged that cuts in education spending in Wales will be 1% less per year than cuts in other departments. The Welsh Assembly Government has also said it will protect universal benefits, such as free prescriptions and concessionary bus fares.

Cuts to the welfare system as a whole in the UK will also have a big impact in Wales because of the higher levels of benefits claimants compared to many other areas of the UK, explained Professor Brian Morgan, from the Cardiff Management School at the Universty of Wales Institute, Cardiff.

He said radical change in the relationship between people and public services in Wales was needed.

“What we have done in the past is now unsustainable in the future,” he said.

Prof Morgan, the former chief economist for the Welsh Development Agency, said cuts to the assembly government’s funding would see a return to the kind of spending levels seen in 2006.

He said it was important that any new funding settlement went hand-in-hand with a review of spending efficiencies.

Colin and Kelsey Hughes, on benefits in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, say what the cuts could mean to them

“Over the last 10 years a lot of money in Wales has been spent in areas that have not been very effective.

“We need to look at the effectiveness of universal benefits. The assembly government spends more on free prescriptions, bus passes and car parking at hospitals than it does on the trunk road system in Wales.”

He added: “Universal benefits just make people think governments have unlimited funds.”

There are also fears that cuts in public services will hit Wales disproportionately hard because of a higher proportion of public sector staff in the overall workforce.

According to the Wales Local Government Association (WLGA), 26% of Wales’s working population is employed in public services, compared with the UK average of 21%.

Steve Thomas, chief executive of the WLGA, said that three to four thousand public sector jobs could be lost in Wales over the next two years.

He said: “It’s going to be incredibly tough, even if we are talking in the most optimistic terms.”

He said that he was expecting the Welsh Assembly Government to be told that its revenue grant was being cut by less than 3% but the capital grant would be cut by more than 10%.

“That’s the optimistic view. But it still means a lot of pain for many parts of Wales,” he said.

The WLGA has said local authorities in Wales could be facing a deficit of £600m over the next four years, but councils will have to wait until the end of November to learn what grant they will get from the Welsh Assembly Government.

“Some councils are going to suffer very badly with their settlements, because they are already runing overspends,” said Mr Thomas.

‘Radical reduction’

S4C is hoping to learn what its future funding model will be, although it is understood the BBC will be contributing to the cost of the Welsh language broadcaster.

The channel currently receives £100m from central government, which has already said it would break the inflation link to funding increases at S4C.

That could could lead to cuts of between 20 and 30% to its funding. The channel has warned that a “radical reduction” in its budget would create a “high level of risk to the service and call into question the existence of the institution itself”.

Wales is also waiting to hear about the future of the planned £1.1bn electrification of the line between London and Swansea.

If the scheme is scrapped, it will follow decisions on cost grounds to axe a proposed £14bn defence training academy in the Vale of Glamorgan, to drop plans for a 10-mile barrage across the Severn eastuary to generate renewable electricity and to close the Passport Office in Newport.

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

By 2020 men and women will receive the state pension at 66, not 65

The state pension age will now rise to 66 by 2020 for both men and women, the Chancellor, George Osborne, has said.

The plan brings forward by six years the plan that the previous Labour government had put in place.

Mr Osborne told MPs that the increase from 65 to 66 would be phased in from 2018.

This will also accelerate the existing plan under which women’s pension age would have been equalised with men at age 65, by 2020.

Mr Osborne said the new policy would eventually save the government £5bn a year by the end of the next parliament.

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

Artists launched a campaign against proposed arts cuts in September

Cuts in funding to national museums will be limited to 15% over four years, Chancellor George Osborne has announced as part of his Spending Review.

He said the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) budget would be reduced to £1.1bn by 2014/15.

Administrative costs would be cut by 41%, although free entry to museums and galleries are set to remain.

Mr Osborne also confirmed that the BBC’s licence fee will be frozen for the next six years.

The Corporation will also take on responsibility for funding the World Service, the Welsh language channel, S4C, and the roll-out of broadband to rural areas.

Unveiling his Spending Review in the Commons, Mr Osborne said that 19 quangos – including the UK Film Council – would be abolished or reformed.

“All of this is being done so we can limit four year reductions to 15% in core programmes like our national museums, the frontline funding provided to our arts and Sport England’s Whole Sport plans,” the Chancellor said.

“We will complete the new world-class building extensions for the Tate Gallery and British Museum in London.”

He added: “I can also announce today that in order that our nation’s culture and heritage remains available to all, we will continue to fund free entry to museums and galleries.”

A special BBC News season examining the approaching cuts to public sector spending

The Spending Review: Making It Clear

According to the BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz, the 15% cut in core programmes is a better than expected outcome for the Museum sector, but the Arts Council in England is unlikely to get off so lightly.

A significant amount of arts funding in the UK – around £900m – comes via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

The DCMS directly funds some of the bigger museums and galleries – such as Tate and The British Museum – with other money distributed by organisations such as Arts Council England.

The Arts Council will play a key role in implementing the funding cuts. It gives regular funding to 850 arts organisations worth a total of £350m.

‘Catastrophic’

The Arts Council has previously said that a 30% cut to its budget – if passed on equally – would “mean the loss of many arts organisations – large and small”.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the devolved governments decide how much is spent on the arts.