IVF Treatment For Older Women On The NHS

By Thomas Moore, Health and Science Correspondent

Women aged 40 to 42 will be allowed one cycle of IVF so long as it is their first attempt, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) says.

Previously Nice only recommended treatment up to the age of 39.

Lesbian couples will also qualify for IVF, as long as they have a diagnosed infertility problem.

People with infectious diseases, such as HIV, or a physical disability that prevents them from having intercourse will also be eligible.

Nice chief executive Sir Andrew Dillon said recent advances in fertility treatment had prompted a review of existing NHS guidelines.

He said: "It is because of these new advances that we have been able to update our guidelines on fertility, ensuring the right support, care and treatment is available to those who will benefit the most."

Same-sex couples have welcomed the change to NHS rules.

Lesbian author Kiki Archer and her civil partner Nicki have two children through private fertility treatment.

She told Sky News the guidelines meant all couples could have children, regardless of income.

"Whenever same-sex couples have children it is carefully thought through," she said.

"This opens another door. It's another option for those families who can't afford fertility clinics."

But there are concerns that the NHS will refuse to implement the guidelines.

It currently funds around 25,000 IVF attempts a year, each costing £3,000.

And a survey in 2011 revealed a postcode lottery, with only a quarter of NHS areas funding the full number of cycles recommended by the existing guidelines.

Dr Sue Avery of the British Fertility Society said: "There is a huge variation in the provision of treatment.

"There are some areas where couples can access three cycles as recommended by Nice. But in other areas couples may get one and some there is no funding at all."

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Brit Awards: Stars Set For Music's Big Night

The stars of UK music are preparing to battle it out at tonight's annual Brit Awards, the industry's showpiece event.

Three acts have each achieved a trio of nominations in 2013 - Mumford & Sons, Alt-J and Emeli Sande.

The same three acts also square off in the prestigious best album category, traditionally the last award of the night.

Alt-J have already won the Mercury Prize for their debut record An Awesome Wave, while folk-rockers Mumford & Sons recently picked up album of the year at the Grammys.

However, 25-year-old Emeli Sande is also a strong contender.

It's been a fantastic year for the Scot - performing at the Olympics and seeing her album, Our Version of Events, selling the most in the UK during 2012.

Elsewhere, boy-band One Direction fly the pop flag among a host of guitar bands in the best British group category, up against the likes of The xx and Muse.

There's also a posthumous nomination for Amy Winehouse in the female solo artist category.

James Corden says a repeat of last year's Adele incident is unlikely

Muse are set to open the ceremony - held at London's 02 arena - with Justin Timberlake, One Direction, Taylor Swift and Robbie Williams also among the performers.

Speculation over the health of host James Corden has also been cleared up, with the actor and comedian saying he is over a bout of tonsillitis.

He told Chris Evans this morning he was feeling better, but Evans also told his radio listeners he was on standby as Corden's understudy.

Corden, 34, is hosting the event for the fourth time.

There was controversy at last year's ceremony when he was forced to cut short Adele's acceptance speech for best album.

Corden admitted he was "annoyed" by the incident but told Evans it was unlikely such a thing would happen again.

He said: "We've put things in place this year which mean that would never happen - I hope."

This year's Brit Awards statuettes has been designed by artist Damien Hirst and are covered with a multicoloured spot design, similar to many of his canvases.

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HMV To Close 37 More Stores With 464 Jobs Cut

Is Your Local HMV Being Axed?

Updated: 12:15pm UK, Wednesday 20 February 2013

The latest 37 HMV stores identified for closure are:

Ashford, Basildon, Bolton, Cheltenham, East Kilbride, Enfield, Folkestone, Glasgow Argyle, Gloucester, Grimsby, Hatfield Galleria, Heathrow T5 Departure Level, Heathrow Terminal 1, Heathrow Terminal 3, Heathrow Terminal 4, Hemel Hempstead, High Wycombe, Isle of Wight, Lancaster, Leadenhall, Mansfield, Middlesbrough, Newbury, Newcastle Silverlink, Newport, Nuneaton, Redditch, Salisbury, Scarborough, Southport, Stafford, Staines, Stockport, Swindon, Taunton, Torquay, Woking.

The 66 stores already earmarked for closure were:

Ashton-under-Lyne, Ballymena, Barnsley, Bayswater, Belfast Boucher Road, Belfast Forestside, Bexleyheath, Birkenhead, Birmingham Fort, Blackburn, Boston, Bournemouth Castlepoint, Bracknell, Burton-upon-Trent, Camberley, Chesterfield, Coleraine, Craigavon, Croydon Centrale, Derry, Dumfries, Durham, Edinburgh Fort, Edinburgh Gyle Centre, Edinburgh Ocean, Edinburgh Princes Street, Edinburgh St James, Falkirk, Fulham, Glasgow – Fort, Glasgow – Silverburn, Glasgow Braehead, Huddersfield, Kirkcaldy, Leamington Spa, Leeds White Rose, Lisburn, Loughborough, Luton, Manchester 90, Moorgate, Newry, Newtonabbey, Orpington, Rochdale, Scunthorpe, South Shields, Speke Park, St Albans, St Helens, Stockton-on-Tees, Tamworth, Teesside, Telford, Trocadero, Wakefield, Walsall, Walton-on-Thames, Wandsworth, Warrington, Watford, Wellingborough, Wigan, Wood Green, Workington, Wrexham.

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Councils Told To Curb Staff's £50k Salaries

Councils have been told to "get a grip" on pay after new figures showed more than 28,000 local government staff earn at least £50,000 a year.

The TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA), which campaigns for lower taxes, said this cost almost £1.9bn in 2012.

Local government minister Brandon Lewis said many councils are failing to make "sensible savings" which would allow them to protect services or fund a council tax freeze.

However, councils insisted their pay figures compared favourably with other sectors and stressed the need for "good managers".

The TPA said 28,754 employees at councils were paid more than £50,000 figure, down 3,991 on the previous year - a saving of £279m.

But the group claimed the fall was partly due to the large number of redundancy payments made in 2010/11, which temporarily increased remuneration bills.

Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis said the findings showed local authorities still had "massive scope" to cut costs to protect frontline services.

"For too long the senior local government pay bill has spiralled up and up and taxpayers have been left footing the bill," he said.

"Whilst I commend those councils taking action, there are still many others failing to get a grip on costs.

"This report exposes the fact that town halls still have massive scope to make sensible savings to protect important frontline services and freeze council tax."

TPA chief executive Matthew Sinclair said: "Taxpayers are still paying far too much for bloated bureaucracies that have been established in too many town halls over the last decade."

"Councillors need to insist that their local authority does more to find savings and cut back on staff costs that residents cannot afford."

The Local Government Association, which represents councils, said the fall in the pay bill was "good news" and defended the current level.

"Middle and senior managers make up around 1% of the total local government workforce, which compares favourably with practices elsewhere in the public and private sectors," a spokesman said.

"Councils provide more than 700 local services, from fixing the roads and collecting the bins to caring for the elderly and safeguarding children. We need good managers to make sure those jobs are done well."

The LGA also challenged the claim that the fall was due to the number of redundancy payments in 2010/11, arguing that redundancy costs were probably higher in 2011/12.

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Jimmy Savile: Ex-Policeman 'Acted For Star'

A former police inspector has been accused of acting on behalf of Jimmy Savile by contacting officers before an interview.

The officer was from the West Yorkshire force, which has referred him to the police watchdog, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

He is accused of contacting Surrey Police before they questioned Savile over alleged sexual offences in 2009.

The IPCC said: "The referral follows a direction from the IPCC to record and refer the conduct of the former inspector, identified in a Surrey Police report as 'Inspector 5'.

The watchdog also said it has asked seven forces including West Yorkshire to review whether there are more conduct issues that should be referred to the watchdog over the Savile investigation.

The other six forces are Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and the Metropolitan police.

The IPCC said: "They have been asked to re-look at all information relating to the late Jimmy Savile. The IPCC has asked that each force provides the relevant documents and, if they decide not to record or refer any matters, the rationale for not doing so."

This follows a review by the IPCC of reports by Scotland Yard and the NSPCC, the Crown Prosecution Service and Surrey Police as well as information given by forces in West Yorkshire and Sussex.

The watchdog also looked at details given by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, which is preparing a report for the Home Secretary on what the police knew about Savile.

Prosecutors and police have already been criticised for missing the chance to bring the disgraced entertainer to court over the allegations before he died in 2011.

Last month, police revealed the "vast" extent of alleged sexual abuse by Savile - saying his crimes spanning more than 50 years were probably unprecedented in the UK.

The late TV presenter's suspected victims included 28 children aged under 10, including 10 boys aged as young as eight.

A further 63 were girls aged between 13 and 16 and nearly three-quarters of his victims were under 18.

Some 214 criminal offences have been recorded across 28 police forces and 34 rapes have been reported.

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Marine Le Pen To Speak At Cambridge Union

France's Front National leader Marine Le Pen will later address Cambridge University's prestigious Student Union.

The daughter of Jean Marie Le Pen, who took over the party leadership from her father in 2011, will address students at the debating society on Tuesday afternoon.

Her appearance has sparked controversy, with anti-fascist group Unite Against Fascism organising a demonstration in protest.

Mrs Le Pen, 44, who has been an MEP since 2004, is due to speak about the future of the European Union and French politics.

She has been billed as the leader of the third largest political party in France after taking 17.8% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election last year.

Marine Le Pen campaigning during last year's presidential election

The Union said: "Whether you agree with her politics or not, this event represents one of the very few opportunities a British audience has had to directly engage with Mme Le Pen."

It described her as a long-standing MEP who has become a powerful figure on the European right, who has also been named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

The appearance has provoked added controversy because it comes in the same week that the English Defence League, a far-right pressure group, is marching through Cambridge.

A spokesman for the Cambridge Union Society said: "The Cambridge Union has a 200-year history of promoting the art of debating and free speech and this event is fundamentally in keeping with that tradition."

Other speakers at the Union this month include Downton Abbey actor Hugh Bonneville, ex-England football manager Fabio Capello and the illusionist David Blaine.

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Coronavirus Patient Dies In Birmingham

A patient who was being treated for a Sars-like coronavirus at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham has died.

The man, who was already undergoing treatment for a "long-term complex unrelated health condition" before contracting the so-called novel coronavirus, passed away on Sunday morning in the hospital's critical care unit, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust said.

He is the sixth person to die from the illness worldwide.

The victim had problems with his immune system and is believed to have contracted the coronavirus from a relative who is being treated for the condition in a Manchester hospital. It was the first case of human-to-human transition of the virus in the UK.

He was one of three people in the same family with the virus, which appeared to have been caught by one of the family members during a recent visit to the Middle East and Pakistan.

Sky News Health Correspondent Thomas Moore described coronavirus as "a family of viruses - at one end it is a relatively mild disease which causes the common cold, but it also causes diseases such as Sars, which is that really nasty respiratory disease that broke out in the Far East a few years back."

"This seems to be much the same kind of serious lung disease, with breathing difficulties, fever and so on," he said.

Moore warned that doctors were "concerned".

He added: "At the moment its origins seem to be largely in the Arabian peninsular and surrounding countries but the fact that it has come back to the UK and spread not only to the man who has died but also another relative in the family, who is in a mild condition and being treated at home with antibiotics and being told not to see other people, (is concerning)."

The Health Protection Agency has said the UK population in general is not at risk from the virus at the moment.

A total of 12 cases of the virus have so far been reported to the World Health Organisation with five previous fatalities - three in Saudi Arabia and two in Jordan.

In 2003 Sars killed about 800 people worldwide.

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Energy Bills 'Set To Rise' Ofgem Warns

Will The Lights Go Off For Britain?

Updated: 1:05pm UK, Tuesday 19 February 2013

With the head of Ofgem issuing a warning about Britain's future energy reserve capacity, Datamonitor's director of energy and utilities research and analysis, Neil Atkinson, gives Sky News an industry insider's view of the coming decade:

Today, Ofgem's chief executive Alistair Buchanan repeated warnings that the UK faces a power supply capacity crunch. His message was first delivered to City analysts in July 2012 and it is stark: within three years the spare capacity margin for UK power generation capacity will fall from today's comfortable 14% to a distinctly uncomfortable 5%.

How worried should we be about this and if this looming capacity crunch is to be avoided how much will it cost us all?

In the next few weeks, according to Mr Buchanan, about 10% of the UK's current capacity shuts down as older coal and oil-fired plants reach the end of their lives. (The EU Large Combustion Plant Directive mandates the closure of these plants after they reach 20,000 hours of operation.)

Datamonitor Energy forecasts that by 2020, UK residential power demand will be 4% higher than it is today with other increases expected in power used in the commercial sector and in transport - more hybrid and electric cars - outweighing lower demand from industry.

In that time frame there will be nothing like enough improvement in energy efficiency via initiatives (like the Green Deal) and the Government's hopes for new nuclear capacity are looking more and more doomed as time goes by.

In practice, the lights will stay on in the UK. Tighter capacity doesn't mean we will all be using candles. It just means that if several extreme events happen at once the lights could go out, but even if they did industrial customers would be cut off first to spare households.

The UK would need prolonged severe winter conditions (that is, like in 1963) alongside an interruption to supplies from somewhere such as Norway or the unavailability of liquefied natural gas supplies for there to be power cut offs to households.

However, what is unavoidable is that for the foreseeable future the UK will need to use more gas and this means higher prices.

Mr Buchanan is right to point out that other parts of the world are competing for tighter gas supplies and prices in Asia are far higher, by some 60%, than here in Europe. Also, the almost complete lack of action on developing the Britain's own supply of shale gas means that UK consumers will see no help from that quarter in the next five years at least. In comparision, US natural gas prices are one-third of their level five years ago.

Still, it could be worse - households in 12 EU countries pay far more for their electricity than here in the UK.

Today, demonstrators blocked the street outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change protesting about fuel poverty.

As long as the Government remains committed to greening our power supply and faces up to subsidies for new nuclear capacity, it is hard to see that prices will come down.

This picture would be slightly more palatable if UK households thought their suppliers are doing a good job. But they don't and that's another story.

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Oldham Blast: Man Jailed Over Toddler Death

By Becky Johnson, North of England Correspondent

A man who blew up his house and killed a toddler who lived next door has been jailed for 10 years.

Andrew Partington, 28, admitted the manslaughter of two-year-old Jamie Heaton who died when his house collapsed due to the force of the gas explosion.

The toddler had been watching his favourite programme on TV while his mother, Michelle, was hanging out washing outside their home in Shaw near Oldham.

Guilty: Andrew Partington

It is believed Partington, who lived next door, had cut his own gas pipes following a row with his partner, Tania Williams. Manchester Crown Court heard Partington was often violent towards her and the night before the explosion she had left with their five children and gone to stay with relatives in Rochdale.

The court heard Partington then sent Ms Williams messages from his Blackberry, including one at 11.31pm which read: "Told u next time u live me house go. Whith me u left your kids with no dad no home good bye boom gas pipe cut allredy fild up boom."

Andrew Menary QC told the court there was a "massive explosion" at 11.15am on June 26 last year which was the result of the ignition of gas which had built up over more than 11 hours.

The court heard the explosion "obliterated" Partington's house on Buckley Street and the Heaton's home next door.

Victim: Jamie Heaton

Police who were patrolling nearby saw debris falling from the sky. When they arrived on Buckley Street they said the destruction was like a "scene from a warzone". Jamie Heaton was crushed to death under the weight of falling rubble.

Partington suffered 39% burns in the explosion and spent several weeks in hospital. He also admitted destroying eight homes. The court heard the cost of repairing the damage is likely to total several millions of pounds.

When he was arrested Partington accepted he had been drinking heavily before the explosion and accepted he could have cut the gas pipes but told police his intention would have been to harm himself and no-one else.

The court was told we will never know whether the gas was ignited deliberately or whether it was done accidentally, by the lighting of a cigarette.

Adam Roxborough, defending, said Partington was truly sorry and had written "if he could give his life to bring Jamie back he would".

An aerial view of the devastation caused by the gas blast

Jamie's parents, Kenny and Michelle, were in court to see their former neighbour jailed and wept as the details of what happened were read out.

Speaking ahead of Tuesday's hearing they described their devastation at losing their beloved son, as well as "everything" they owned.

Mrs Heaton said they were "angry that (Partington) could be so selfish" and that now they were trying to focus their lives on their other two children and the charity set up in Jamie's memory, the Jamie's Something Special Memorial Fund.

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PM Condemns Mantel For Calling Kate 'Plastic'

David Cameron has condemned author Hilary Mantel's scathing attack of the Duchess of Cambridge as "completely misguided and completely wrong".

The Prime Minister spoke out during a trip to India after the award-winning novelist claimed Kate appeared to have been "designed by committee".

The double Man Booker Prize winner, who wrote Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, said the royal was like a "doll" with no personality.

Mantel, 60, made the controversial comments and compared Kate to Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana during a lecture to the British Museum.

She said: "It's rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung.

Kate on a visit to a treatment centre in London on Tuesday

"In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.

"These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions ... her only point and purpose being to give birth."

She also described the Duchess as having a "perfect plastic smile" and said her first official portrait, unveiled last month, revealed "her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to b***** off".

The lecture for the London Review of Books was given on February 4, but the full version of her speech will be published in the latest edition of the review on Thursday.

Kate's first official portrait went on display last month

Mantel, author of Thomas Cromwell novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, said Kate was not like Anne Boleyn who was a "power player, a clever and determined woman".

Her controversial comments came as the Duchess showed off her baby bump for the first time in the UK on a visit to a project for women recovering from substance dependence.

The 31-year-old was greeted by well-wishers as she arrived at Hope House, a project run by Action On Addiction of which she is a patron for what was her first solo engagement of 2013.

The charity's boss Nick Barton insisted Kate was an "intelligent" women who he had found to be "engaging" and interested in the organisation's work.

Asked for his reaction to Mantel's attack, he said: "I don't think it's for me to comment on that kind of stuff. I speak of what I know - somebody who wants to help, is helpful and genuinely interested and is intelligent.

"I can only speak (of) what I know. I've met her several times and I found her to be engaging, I found her very natural, I found her actually genuinely interested in the subject.

"You can tell a lot from people's questions and she asks really good questions. They're not routine stuff, they're questions of someone who wants to learn. I find her very easy to deal with."

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