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Government 'warned' over NHS cuts, leaked letter shows
The letter warned that the NHS could face a significant budget shortfall Continue reading the main story Related storiesNHS job cuts 'may endanger lives'Ministers press on with NHS plansNHS 'tested to limit by savings' The Department of Health was warned by advisers that the NHS could face a budget shortfall of up to £10bn a year unless it delivers greater efficiency.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, the Independent Challenge Group also said savings for England as projected might not be achievable.
The DH said the issues in the letter dating from September had been addressed in the Spending Review.
Labour said it suggested the health secretary headed a "rogue department". 'Greater savings'
The letter, sent to Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander, questioned whether efficiency savings from quality, innovation, productivity and prevention (QIPP) would be achieved.
It also raised concerns about the cost of the switchover to the government's flagship policy of GP commissioning.
The letter said: "Taken together, the NHS could therefore face a significant budget shortfall by the end of the SP [spending] period. "The NHS typically deals with such shortfalls by limiting treatments, leading to increased waiting times.
"The government will be faced with a choice between dealing with the fallout from increased waiting times or increasing the DH's budget, perhaps by as much as £10bn per year.
"To avoid this unpalatable trade-off, the DH settlement needs to build in much greater non-QIPP efficiency savings from the outset."
'Massive distraction'
Shadow health secretary John Healey said the letter highlighted the risks in plans to reorganise the NHS based on GP commissioning.
He said: "This Treasury document is extra evidence that the high-risk, high-cost reorganisation [Health Secretary] Andrew Lansley is forcing on the NHS is a massive distraction from improving patient care and making the sound efficiency savings Labour previously planned.
"It also confirms concerns that the health secretary is running a rogue department and operating in isolation from his ministerial colleagues.
"For the sake of patients and the future of healthcare, David Cameron himself needs to get a grip on his government's NHS plans."
The Department of Health said the issues raised in the letter were not relevant any more.
A spokesman said: "This letter was part of the process of independent challenge in the Spending Review.
"The work has now concluded and the letter is therefore out of date - it has been overtaken by publication of the response to the white paper consultation and primary care trust allocations for next year.
"As a result of the government's decision to protect the NHS it will receive increased resources next year - an extra £2.7bn."
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Crackdown on UK benefit cheats who live abroad
The government says "abroad fraud" cost the taxpayer £66m last year Continue reading the main story Related storiesBenefit fraud measures outlinedCameron defends credit check plan A crackdown has been launched by the government on UK benefit cheats who live abroad.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has joined forces with overseas counterparts to target the countries where the most cases take place.
The DWP said the highest instances of fraud was recorded by people living in Spain, Pakistan, the US and Bangladesh.
Scams include people not declaring they have moved abroad or claiming for relatives who have died.
Others examples were of people working while abroad, having unreported assets such as property, savings or even yachts, or exaggerating a level of disability.
Claimants are told to notify the DWP if they go abroad as it could affect entitlement to benefits.
UK fraud investigators work with overseas organisations such as land registries, as well as the Foreign Office and British banks, to track down the cheats.
'Lining pockets'
Welfare reform minister Lord Freud said "abroad fraud" cost the taxpayer about £66m last year.
He said the rate of fraud was rising as more people chose to live overseas: "We are on an uphill curve."
He said the money "should be going to the people who need it most and not lining the pockets of criminals s
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'Probe allegations against ex-chief justice Balakrishnan'
Kochi: Retired Supreme Court justice V.R. Krishna Iyer Monday demanded a probe into the various allegations of corruption against former chief justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan, currently the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission.
Speaking to the media at his home near here, Iyer said that he was happy when Balakrishnan became the first Dalit to be appointed chief justice, but the situation had changed now.
"Now with all the allegations that have surfaced by way of a news report which appeared the other day about his son-in-law and also the issues of a judge writing to him on the (sacked communications minister) Raja issue regarding (senior Supreme Court judge) Justice (H.L.) Gokhale, I myself feel ashamed that I was a judge," said Iyer.
He was referring to a news report aired on a TV channel Sunday about the huge wealth that his son-in-law P.V. Srinijin, a Congress leader and a lawyer by profession, had allegedly acquired in the past three years.
"All the reports that have surfaced about his son-in-law, his daughter and relatives have to be inquired into," he said, adding that Balakrishnan should be probed by a three-judge panel.
He also demanded the setting up of an appointments and performance commission for judges.
Iyer was the law and irrigation minister in the world’s first elected Communist government in 1957 led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in Kerala.
He was appointed a
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Foreign students to keep work rights after U-turn by MinistersBy Jack Doyle
Universities minister David Willetts believes that tens of thousands of foreign workers should be allowed to work in Britain
Tens of thousands of foreign students are to keep their right to work in Britain following a government climbdown. Ministers had wanted to scrap a rule that allows students to look for a job here in the two years after they graduate.
But yesterday David Willetts said doing so would undermine the competitiveness of universities trying to lure foreign students. The universities minister says he will consider tightening up the rules as an alternative to axing the scheme known as the post-study work route.
The apparent reversal raises fears for the job prospects of recent British graduates, 18 per cent – or 80,000 – of whom are out of work. Last year 38,000 foreign students took up their working rights, and brought with them 8,000 family members. Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank, said: ‘The present post-study work route is one of the most generous in the world.
‘It allows foreign graduates of about 600 institutions to stay on for two years looking for work whatever the class of their degree. These are not by any means the brightest and the best. They are undesirable competition with recent British graduates who face 20 per cent unemployment – not to speak of the debts they need to pay off.
‘It would be utterly indefensible to continue this absurd scheme. Universities sh
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Year Ender: Top scams of 2010
There are no dearth of scams in India every year and 2010 was no exception. But what made it different this year was the mind numbing number of zeroes attached to some of them and the audacity with which they where pulled off. If in 2G the amount of money the nation lost could not be counted with all your ten fingers, the Adarsh scam though limited in scope shocked everyone because it was done in the name of Kargil widows.
The 2G scam Estimated loss: Rs 1,76,700 crore
Unfortunately, year 2010 would be remembered as the year in which corporate India lost its sheen in a myriad of scandals involving unholy nexus between business honchos, politicians and the media. 2G spectrum scam showed us how government officials undercharged cellphone companies for spectrum allocation licenses their by causing huge losses to the exchequer.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology was paid Rs 10772 crores by nine companies for the allocated spectrum, on a first-come first-serve basis but many of them resold it to make huge profits. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India pegged money lost at Rs 1,76,700 crore.
A huge disparity of around $39 billion was found.
Details began to emerge as the Income Tax department was investigating Nira Radia, a political lobbyist running a PR firm. The Nira Radia tapes, recorded by IT sleuths and somehow leaked into media outlets involved telephone conversations between
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Intellectuals appeal for Sen's release, expeditious hearing
New Delhi: Expressing shock over awarding of life sentence to rights activist Binayak Sen on charges of sedition, over 80 intellectuals including Noam Chomsky today demanded that his appeal be heard 'expeditiously' with 'enlightened reason' and sought his immediate release on bail. They claimed that Sen never resorted to violence or incited anyone else to do so. On the contrary, as a doctor and a human rights activist he stood up in defence of the rights of downtrodden, said a statement signed by Romila Thapar, Prabhat Patnaik, Ashok Mitra and Mushirul Hasan among others. 'Yet he has been handed down this sentence whose savagery is unbelievable,' it said.
Sen, Naxal ideologue Narayan Sanyal and Kolkata businessman Piyush Guha were sentenced to life imprisonment last Friday for colluding with Maoists to establish a network of fight the state. 58-year-old Sen, a paediatrician by training and vice-president of People's Union of Civil Liberties, had been accused of acting as courier for Sanyal, who was in jail, by carrying his messages and letters to the underground Maoists. The intellectuals said, 'Such an action on the part of the State in the name of preserving the Constitutional order will only serve to undermine that Constitutional order itself. 'It will inevitably raise the thought in the minds of many that an order within which the activities of a person like Dr Sen can be held to be seditious is not worthdefending,' the statement said.
Noting
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First women-only call centre opens in Saudi Arabia
Jeddah:Saudi women, who are prohibited by society from living or working independently without written permission from a male guardian, will now be part of a first-of-its-kind 'women-only' call centre in the country. Kanoo Travel, one of the leading travel management companies in the Middle East, said 20 female employees have undergone telephone operation training as the company started a 'ladies-only' call centre, Xinhua quoted Arab News as saying.
'Kanoo Travel is also one of the first travel companies in the country to introduce exclusive ladies centres,' said Ali Abdullah Kanoo, the company's director.
The call centre has earned praise from the company's clients. Saudi females - who make up to nine million of the kingdom's 18.5 million people - are subject to a guardian system which prohibits any woman from driving, travelling or living independently without written permission from a male guardian who could be either her husband, father or brother.
Over the years, working as a teacher in girls-only schools was the only job sanctioned for Saudi women, but recently there has been a growing number of Saudi professional women and female doctors.
'Saudi Arabia is a very important market. Over the past few years, our business has grown tremendously in the country,' said another company official, Othman Al-Ghamdi.
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Google splashes $2 bn on New York office
New York : Internet powerhouse Google is muscling in on New York. The web search giant confirmed Wednesday that it had bought one of the most prestigious office buildings in Manhattan.
No price was given for the property at 111 Eighth Avenue, but the Los Angeles Times put the price at $2 billion.
The company said that more than 2,000 Googlers would work in the 18-storey building, which fills an entire city block and has some 280,000 square metres of office space. Google said that current tenants, who include Current Armani Exchange, Barnes & Noble, Nike, WebMD, Sprint, and Lifetime Networks, would stay in their offices.
A statement by one of the sellers, Taconic Investment Partners, said the deal 'is reported to be the largest single-asset sales in the entire US in 2010 and the largest-ever acquisition by a tenant-user'.
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New security features to make online banking safer
Berlin: Fraudsters keep on finding ways to steal money from accounts online. But banks are also stepping up their security measures to protect online money transfers.
Online banking was first introduced to the world 30 years ago in Germany, when the Verbraucherbank AG bank set up a system to allow customers to transfer money from computer screens.
Even back then, money transfers could not be completed without a pre-assigned transaction number in combination with a PIN (personal identification number). The principle is largely the same today.
But transaction numbers that are printed and distributed might be seeing their last days, because online thieves keep finding ways to get a hold of these numbers.
Banks have tried to get around this problem by requiring customers pick specific numbers from a list for each transaction, even predetermining a random order to be used from the list, in the vain hopes that will foil thieves.
But none of that has proved a guarantee against thieves. That inability has cost thousands of euros from innocent customers.
Germany's federal police logged about 2,900 cases of phishing in 2009, in which thieves used online trickery to steal transaction numbers. That number is expected to have doubled for 2010.
Thus, the printed lists are becoming a thing of the past. 'The current system with paper lists is ending and will be shut down, at the latest, by mid 2011,' sa
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Constipation more likely in kids avoiding green diets
London : Children who avoid greens in their diet are 13 times more likely to be constipated, says a new study.
The research also found that drinking less than two glasses of water daily increases the risk significantly.
Constipation is an often painful condition when bowel movements are infrequent or hard to pass and can lead to more serious bowel obstructions, reports the Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Moon Fai Chan at the National University of Singapore and Yuk Ling Chan from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University studied the dietary habits of 383 primary school children in Hong Kong, according to the Daily Mail.
The team found that seven percent of the eight to 10-year-olds had 'functional constipation' - which is constipation without a physical or psychological cause.
Those who did not like fruits or vegetables were 13 times more likely to struggle in the toilets while children who did not drink enough water were eight times more at risk.
Chan said: 'A number of studies have suggested that functional constipation is getting worse among children.'
'It is estimated that functional constipation accounts for 95 percent of cases of constipation affecting children once they pass infancy.
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