News round up: Ivan Lewis ‘faces sack’ for ‘supertax’ call

Ivan Lewis ‘faces sack after speaking up for middle classes’

Health minister Ivan Lewis is being threatened with the sack after urging Gordon Brown to impose a ‘supertax’ on high earners.

Senior ministers are understood to have been infuriated by the suggestion, the latest in a series of provocative interventions by the Blairite minister.

Read more on this story in The Daily Mail

Britain accused of turning a blind eye to child sex tourism

British paedophiles are gaining access to children abroad because foreign orphanages and schools cannot conduct UK criminal record checks, a report warned yesterday.

The study said the government had “turned a blind eye” to child sex offenders who travel or work abroad, placing thousands of children at risk, with “repeat offenders travelling from country to country and flagrantly avoiding the stringent sex offender mechanisms in the UK”.
Read more on this story in The Guardian

Economic slump puts 300,000 jobs on the line

Up to 300,000 workers will lose their jobs by 2011, pushing the number of people out of work close to 2 million, a leading business group says today.

The British Chambers of Commerce, which becomes the first business group to forecast that Britain would fall into recession, predicts that the economic slump will force unemployment to soar by between 250,000 and 300,000 in the next two to three years, adding that total unemployment of more than 2 million could not be ruled out.
Read more on this story in The Times

Abortion does not harm mental health, says study

Women do not put their mental health at risk by having an abortion, according to an authoritative study that will undermine the campaign to tighten the UK’s abortion laws.

A comprehensive review of research by the American Psychological Association (APA), one of the world’s most influential mental health bodies, found no evidence that the majority of abortions cause psychiatric problems.
Read more on this story in The Times

Nice chief blames primary care trusts for postcode lottery

Andrew Dillon, chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, warned primary care trusts they needed to be more consistent when deciding whether to pay for drugs the watchdog rules are too expensive for the NHS.

His claims are bound to anger patients, who blame Nice for denying them potentially lifesaving drugs because they are not “cost effective”.

Read more on this story in The Daily Telegraph

 

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