News round up: Rapist may have killed after fleeing hospital

Rapist may have killed after fleeing hospital

A convicted rapist was allowed to walk out of a secure hospital unit because his carers were not authorised to stop him physically, a court was told yesterday.

After escaping from King’s College Hospital, London, in February, Terrence O’Keefe, 39, went missing for almost nine weeks, during which time he is feared to have murdered a pensioner.

Read more on this story in The Times

New mothers being left to fend for themselves

Thousands of new mothers are being denied the support of community health visitors to help them to look after their babies, according to a survey.

A poll of more than 6,000 British mothers by Netmums.com, the parenting website, found that six out of ten felt they had not seen their health visitor enough during the first year of their child’s life. Louise Silverton, deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said that the quality of postnatal support for mothers was “extremely patchy in different areas around the country”.

A separate survey of health workers by Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, found that one in four health visitors feared that “another Victoria Climbié” could happen in their NHS trust, referring to the girl, 8, tortured to death in 2000 by her great-aunt and her boyfriend.
Read more on this story in The Times

Sex pamphlet for six-year-olds horrifies lobby

The country’s biggest sexual health charity, fpa, has published a sex education pamphlet for six-year-olds to encourage earlier discussion of the facts of life.

The 12-page comic-style booklet, which will be distributed to schools, asks children to identify the physical differences between boys and girls and name their body parts properly.

One puzzle asks children to draw a line from the words “vagina” and “testicles” to the correct areas of a picture of a naked girl and boy.
Read more on this story in The Times

40 pupils excluded in Academy 360 discipline crackdown

Forty pupils at a city academy that opened only two weeks ago have been suspended.

The £20 million school, named Academy 360, was created by the merger of Sunderland’s Pennywell Secondary and Quarry View Primary. Staff have been taking a strict approach to enforcing regulations governing the wearing of uniforms and banning students from leaving the premises at breaktimes.
Read more on this story in The Times

Police scour social websites to tackle brutality and boasts of young criminals

Social networking websites such as Bebo, YouTube and MySpace have been identified by police as having a big influence over gang culture and youth violence.

Teenage gang members across Britain are using online forums to bait each other and to brag about their use of knives, guns and drugs.

Read more on this story in The Times

Winter to bring ‘avalanche’ of job losses as unemployment hits highest level for a decade

A grim cocktail of rising unemployment, plunging job vacancies and below-inflation pay rises have been signalled in official figures.

Workers were warned to brace themselves for an ‘avalanche of job losses’ in what is the worst deterioration in the labour market for at least a decade.

Read more on this story in The Daily Mail

Call to give local people power to block licensing applications

People could be given the power to object to alcohol licensing applications on public health grounds under a radical plan from a commission charged with improving public health in the most sickly city in the UK.

The Health is Wealth commission proposes the introduction of community licensing forums as part of a 12-point plan to end Liverpool’s reign at the top of the country’s ill-health league.