Written By Unknown on Minggu, 15 Maret 2015 | 20.14
A Northampton bus station dubbed "the mouth of hell" has been demolished.
The Greyfriars bus station was built in 1976, an example of brutalist architecture, and was so despised that the Lonely Planet guide once described it as "infamously ugly".
It was costing taxpayers £500,000 in repairs each year and the council claimed it would cost almost £30m to renovate it. So the three-storey building, which included a car park and offices, had been left to deteriorate.
A new bus station opened last year and so Northampton Borough Council decided the old one should go, in an event streamed live to more than 1,300 people in order to discourage them from risking their safety at the scene.
The council set up an exclusion zone and evacuated 414 homes near the four-acre town centre site as a precaution.
Video:Power Station Demolition On Webcam
David Macintosh, leader of the council, said, despite the building's ugliness, residents had expressed some sadness leading up to its demolition.
He said: "It's funny because, in the last couple of months, people have said, 'we will miss it'.
"It's not very well-liked, and is now redundant. 'The mouth of hell' sums it up perfectly."
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The bus station also featured on a Channel 4 series called Demolition in 2005, when it was voted third favourite out of 12 buildings that should be demolished.
It was during this programme that the "mouth of hell" moniker was coined by broadcaster Kevin McCloud.
Chancellor George Osborne is expected to extend pension freedoms to some five million people who have already purchased an annuity.
The change - due to be announced in Wednesday's Budget - will remove limits on buying and selling existing annuities.
The reform lets people cash in their annuity without incurring heavy tax penalties.
It also allows pensioners the same access to their retirement funds as the Chancellor announced last year for people who have yet to take their pensions.
Under those changes, from 6 April people can cash in their pension savings when they retire, rather than purchase an annuity.
Video:The Sky News Budget Rap Battle
With just weeks to go before the General Election, the announcement is expected to be popular with elderly voters.
The Chancellor is also reportedly considering cutting inheritance tax in a move which could allow millions to pass on their homes to their children tax free.
The Sunday Express reports that Mr Osborne is considering raising the death tax threshold from £325,000 to £1m, or abolishing the tax for a main family home.
The reform will either be announced in the Budget or as part of the Conservative manifesto, according to the newspaper.
Mr Osborne is expected to say on Wednesday that his Budget will deliver "a truly national recovery".
Video:60-Second Economist: The Budget
The Chancellor will outline measures to invest in industries around Britain, not just in London and the South East.
The measures are expected to include increased support for regional technology clusters and investment in the chemical sector in the North East.
Writing in The Sun On Sunday, Mr Osborne said: "We mustn't go back to the bad old days of just relying on the City of London for growth.
"New analysis shows that if all parts of England outside London and the South East grew at the national average then the UK economy as a whole could be an extra £90bn bigger by 2030.
"And it can be done. Between 2010 and 2013 Yorkshire and the Humber alone created more jobs than the whole of France, and in the South West over the last year someone has got a new job every 10 minutes."
End of life care should be made available free of charge, MPs have concluded.
A report by the Health Select Committee found that acute and community care for people reaching the end of their lives varies around the UK and has called for long-term sustainable funding for hospices.
Report author Dr Sarah Wollaston MP said: "There are unacceptable levels of variation in the care that people receive and this needs to be addressed so that high quality end of life care is available to everyone regardless of their age, medical condition or where they live.
"We must make sure that specialist palliative care expertise is accessible within hospitals and community settings as well as within our hospices."
In patient Vera Clark, 87, is currently being treated for lung and heart problems at the highly rated Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted, Herts.
Video:Terminal Patients Denied Last Wish
Her son Brian, who visits her every day, told Sky News: "We do feel lucky that she is where she is, it makes such a difference knowing she is in the right place."
Hospice director Dr Ros Taylor, who is also national director of Hospice UK, explained that some patients still get lost within the NHS system.
"There isn't the confidence of nurses and young doctors in hospital to have those conversations to recognise that somebody might be towards the end of their life, so the planning doesn't happen and people die waiting to leave hospital," she said.
Jeremy Clarkson is filling his days getting into a different kind of stew - as a friend revealed he phoned BBC bosses to apologise for his notorious "fracas" to avoid a formal bureaucratic inquiry.
The presenter, who has joked about his ham-fisted, "Keith Floydish" foray into Vietnamese food, called Danny Cohen, director of television at the corporation, even though Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon had not made a complaint.
It is understood Clarkson, 54, hoped this would draw a line under the matter - "not least for the sake of the hundreds of people standing by to carry on with the rest of the show," according to his friend AA Gill.
"It was Jeremy who handed himself in. He ... explained he had lost his rag after a difficult and tiring day," the food critic wrote in The Sunday Times.
Gill praised his "mate" as a hard-working broadcaster who had earned the BBC "hundreds of millions" and slammed Mr Cohen's investigation into the row as "preposterous and ponderous".
He said: "Jeremy reported the incident. It was over the absence of hot food at the end of a long and frustrating day with the prospect of another early start in the morning.
Video:Family: We Saw Clarkson's Abuse
"The producer, Oisin Tymon, had not made a complaint. Jeremy called Danny Cohen, the director of BBC television, directly and explained he had lost his rag.
"Cohen had a choice: to do the right thing or the bureaucratic thing, but at the BBC no good intention goes unquestioned."
He added: "People work long hours with a great deal of stress, and small things - almost invariably food - are tetchy trip-wires.
"Whatever did happen, in mitigation to Jeremy, nobody works harder or under more stress than he."
Mr Cohen suspended Clarkson and cancelled the next three episodes of the BBC2 programme after reportedly hearing that Clarkson threw a punch at Mr Tymon.
He also announced an inquiry into the incident, due to begin on Monday.
It will be led by Ken MacQuarrie, the head of BBC Scotland, who carried out the investigation into Newsnight's false expose of Lord McAlpine.
Video:Is Clarkson Finished With The BBC?
Writing in The Sunday Times, Clarkson described himself as a "not very interesting fat man" and joked about retirement while he awaits the disciplinary hearing.
"We read often about active and busy people who die the day after they retire because they simply can't cope with the concept of relaxation," he said.
"So as I seem to have a bit of time on my hands at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to take up some kind of hobby.
"I began by watching daytime television, and soon felt myself starting to slip away. So I turned over to the news and it was all about a not very interesting fat man who had been suspended from his not very important job.
"But watching the fat man made me hungry and that's when the penny dropped: I'd take up cooking."
He added: "I decided to get ambitious and cook the most delicious thing I've eaten in my life: a pho ... a Vietnamese noodle soup that contains about 128 ingredients."
However, after tucking into wine while waiting for the beef broth to cook and adding chillies "that sat on the Scoville scale just above lava" he went to bed "hungry, drunk and with an ulcerated, gangrenous mouth".
Video:Clarkson's Fate 'For BBC To Decide'
Following his comments on Saturday that the time may have come for him to leave Top Gear, was he hinting at a possible new career as a restaurant critic?
"My new hobby is called 'going out to restaurants and letting people who know what they're doing cook my food," he wrote at the end of his column.
The BBC investigation will try to establish what happened on the night of 4 March at the Simonstone Hall hotel in Hawes, North Yorkshire, after Clarkson was told the chef had stopped serving hot food.
It will also take into account Clarkson's other controversies of the past two years, and could take weeks until his fate is decided.
The delay already appears to have irked fellow Top Gear presenter James May, who tweeted on Saturday: "So; it's been a week, and still no answer. How exactly do you pronounce 'fracas'?"
Nearly one million people have signed a petition calling for Clarkson to be reinstated, but not everyone at the BBC wants him back.
The BBC's in-house magazine, Ariel, published a letter from a receptionist at BBC Oxford that reflects the mood of some staff.
Video:Is Clarkson Finished With The BBC?
Pat Noel argued "there are only so many warnings the BBC can give one person. There is a lot of great talent in the BBC; let's not make one man a god."
Last month, the BBC approved its new bullying and harassment grievance policy, agreed with unions, and some are seeing allegations that Clarkson threw a punch at a producer as a test case.
Luke Crawley, assistant general secretary of the broadcast and workers' union Bectu, told The Observer: "If it turns out that the allegations are true, then the BBC must take a very firm line.
"Otherwise it seems to be open season for star presenters taking a pop at staff. This is a pretty serious test case."
Former Tory cabinet minister Ken Clarke has said he would be "fiercely opposed" to any post-election deal with UKIP - dismissing the party as "just angry protest".
The veteran MP's withering comments came as UKIP leader Nigel Farage outlined his demands for propping up a minority Conservative government after the poll in May.
His terms would include holding an EU referendum this year.
Mr Clarke told Sky News' Murnaghan programme: "I would be fiercely opposed to anybody doing any deal with a hardline right-wing nationalist party that wants to blame foreigners and Brussels for all our problems.
"It would be an extraordinary thing to do to enter into an agreement with a party that is just angry protest.
Video:Farage: Repeal Discrimination Laws
"I understand angry protest but it is not a party that any of the serious governing parties should enter into deals with."
Prime Minister David Cameron has promised the British people a vote on whether to leave Brussels by the end of 2017 if he remains in Downing Street after the General Election.
But Mr Clarke, who is pro-European, said he agreed with the UKIP leader - at least on the timing of a referendum.
He said: "If we have a referendum, I would quite like it to be done early.
Video:UKIP Buoyed By New Opinion Poll
"We have achieved most of the things that David Cameron set out in his Bloomberg speech when he announced his desire to have a referendum and I think having this neurotic debate with occasional interventions from Mr Farage for the first two years of the next parliament is a nonsense that no government, whoever is elected, would really seriously want to put up with."
Mr Farage's demand for a 2015 referendum on EU membership was made in a four-point ultimatum published in an extract from his memoirs in the Sunday Telegraph.
He said he would ban EU citizens from voting in it unless they also held a British passport, even though this would see his German wife Kirsten unable to take part and could also lead to a legal challenge.
However, the UKIP parliamentary candidate for South Thanet says that his party will not enter a formal coalition with the Tories and he is not interested in a "ministerial car".
Video:'UKIP Vote Risks Labour Government'
Mr Farage says his deal "would be very precise and simple".
He says: "I would look to do a deal where we would back key votes for them - such as the Budget - but in return for very specific criteria on an EU referendum.
"I want a full and fair referendum to be held in 2015 to allow Britons to vote on being in or out of the European Union. There would be no wiggle room for 're-negotiation' somewhere down the line'."
Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 14 Maret 2015 | 20.14
Allegations of sex abuse within the institutions meant to protect vulnerable children are "only the tip of the iceberg", Theresa May has claimed.
The Home Secretary believes such abuse is "woven, covertly, into the fabric of our society" - with survivors claiming the exploitation runs through every level of society like "a stick of Blackpool rock".
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Mrs May added it was a "new beginning" for the independent inquiry into child sex abuse, and conceded the investigation got off to a difficult start.
She wrote: "We already know the trail will lead into our schools and hospitals, our churches, our youth clubs and many other institutions that should have been places of safety but instead became the setting for the most appalling abuse.
"However, what the country doesn't yet appreciate is the true scale of that abuse."
Video:Downing Street Abuse Summit
Mrs May also insisted that the inquiry was a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" that would enable the country to learn lessons for the future by addressing the wrongs of the past.
She wrote: "The victims and survivors who have had the courage to speak out are clear that they have done so for one common reason - to save the next generation of children from the abuse they suffered.
"That is what this inquiry is for. Where there has been a failure to protect children from abuse, we will expose it and we will learn from it."
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Justice Lowell Goddard is chairing the four-person panel, which was established in the wake of several child sex abuse scandals.
They include the crimes committed by disgraced TV star Jimmy Savile, the abuse of vulnerable girls in towns and cities nationwide, and growing fears that an alleged paedophile ring was operating in the heart of Westminster.
Nigel Farage has claimed "incompetence and negligence" by NHS doctors almost killed him when he was suffering from testicular cancer.
The UKIP leader criticised the "over-stretched" system's record for diagnosing ailments quickly and accurately - and urged voters to take private healthcare if they can afford it.
He wrote in his memoirs: "In the NHS, the system is so battered and poorly run that unless you are really lucky, you will fall through the cracks."
After falling unwell in 1986, NHS medics thought that pain and swelling in the politician's left testicle was an infection, and he was given antibiotics.
Mr Farage was only informed that he actually had a tumour after beginning private treatment, and he has since told of being "terrified" at the prospect that secondary tumours had emerged in his stomach and lungs.
Despite the misdiagnosis, the 51-year-old conceded that the National Health Service has saved his life twice, and praised it for being "astonishingly good" at emergency critical care.
Pre-empting a backlash from his rivals, Mr Farage added: "I've seen the best and worst of the NHS. I am better qualified to criticise and defend our health care system than most politicians."
Mr Farage also revealed that he could choose to be registered as disabled if he wished, after other incidents - including a plane crash and a car accident - "left him with the body of a 70-year-old".
He added: "Having nearly died three times has made me a much bigger risk-taker. When you think your life is about to be taken away and you are given it back, you just want to get on and do things.
"There's no time to waste: children to bring up, elections to win, pheasants to pluck, wine to drink."
The UKIP leader's intimate description of his three brushes with death was made in his new book The Purple Revolution, which is being serialised in The Daily Telegraph.
Jeremy Clarkson has hinted he may be ready to leave Top Gear after being suspended over a bust-up with a producer.
Writing in his column for the Sun newspaper he appeared to refer to himself as a "dinosaur", explaining that "the day must come when you have to wave goodbye to the big monsters".
He wrote: "Nature made a mistake when it invented the dinosaur. It was too big, too violent ...
"All the dinosaurs died and now, years later, no-one mourns their passing.
"These big, imposing creatures have no place in a world which has moved on."
Video:Family: We Saw Clarkson's Abuse
Clarkson, 54, has been suspended over a row in which he allegedly tried to hit a producer, named in reports as Oisin Tymon.
A petition calling for Clarkson to be reinstated has reached more than 840,000 signatures.
But the controversial presenter wrote: "You can start as many campaigns as you like and call on the support of politicians from all sides, but the day must come when you have to wave goodbye to the big monsters, and move on.
"We lose one animal and get another. The world turns."
He goes on to say: "As you may have heard, I've been suspended by the BBC following a fracas at a North Yorkshire hotel.
Video:'I'm Off To The Job Centre'
"I don't intend to dwell here on what happened then or what will happen in the future. I'm sure you're as fed up with the story as I am.
"One of the things which has cheered me is how many people have expressed support in the last few days. I'm touched and grateful."
Clarkson is being summoned to appear before a BBC disciplinary panel that will decide his fate.
The panel will be chaired by Ken MacQuarrie, the head of BBC Scotland who conducted the investigation into Newsnight's false expose of Lord McAlpine.
The corporation has not revealed when or where the hearing will take place.
Video:Clarkson Is TV's Kevin Pietersen
:: Read Sky News' interview with a family who say Clarkson launched into an expletive-ridden rant at the producer.
According to reports, he lashed out because he was unable to order a steak at the Simonstone Hall Hotel near Hawes, North Yorkshire, where the production team were staying.
The Sun and Daily Mirror said the hotel's chef had gone home by the time they arrived and they were only offered cold meat platters, although Clarkson had ordered a £21.95 steak.
The papers quoted a source who claimed Clarkson blamed Mr Tymon for not arranging hot food and said there had been a "scuffle".
A bronze statue of the Indian civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi has been unveiled in central London.
Prime Minister David Cameron said the sculpture is a "magnificent tribute" to one of the "most towering figures" in history.
The privately-funded work by Philip Jackson, who has made statues of the Queen Mother and the Bomber Command memorial, shows Mr Gandhi dressed in a shawl and traditional dhoti skirt, with his hands clasped.
It is inspired by photographs of him at 10 Downing Street during a visit in 1931.
Mahatma Gandhi during a visit to London in 1931
The statue was unveiled in Parliament Square by Indian finance minister Shri Arun Jaitley in a ceremony that included a personal tribute from Mr Gandhi's grandson, the former governor of West Bengal, Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi.
A band played Indian classical music on sitars, Indian flags adorned the square, and schoolchildren stood in the crowd to watch.
Video:Gandhi 'An Inspiration To Millions'
The PM said: "This statue is a magnificent tribute to one of the most towering figures in the history of world politics and by putting Mahatma Gandhi in this famous square we are giving him an eternal home in our country.
"Many of his teachings remain as potent today as when he first made them.
"'The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others' and 'be the change that you want to see in the world' remain timeless, profound and inspiring words of wisdom."
The ceremony is part of events in Britain to mark the 100th anniversary of Mr Gandhi's return to India from South Africa to start the nation's struggle for independence, which was eventually gained in 1947.
The statue was announced in July by Chancellor George Osborne and former foreign secretary William Hague during a visit to the site of Mr Gandhi's assassination in New Delhi.
The Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust has raised £1m of donations in six months for the project, including £100,000 from billionaire Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal.
Ed Miliband has unveiled Labour's pledges for the General Election, covering the economy, the NHS, immigration and tuition fees.
The Labour leader said the choice for voters is not simply between parties and leaders, but between different visions of the country.
The party's five pledges are:
:: Economy - Labour claims it will balance the books and cut the deficit every year.
:: Living standards - Boosted by Mr Miliband's pledge to freeze energy bills until 2017.
:: NHS - Labour says it will recruit 20,000 more nurses and 8,000 more GPs.
:: Immigration - People who come to the UK will not be able to claim benefits for at least two years.
:: Young people - Tuition fees cut to £6,000, more apprenticeships and smaller class sizes for primary school children.
Speaking to delegates in Birmingham, he said: "Today I urge the British people to choose optimism, to choose a country for the many, to choose the good of all, to choose hope - and to recognise that when working people succeed, nothing can stop us as a country."
Mr Miliband claimed "the Tory experiment" over the past five years had failed, and suggested that working people were £1,600 worse off because of David Cameron's Government.
Video:Ed Miliband's Pledge Card
He added: "We know what their plans mean - it means education cut, the NHS undermined, it means social care devastated, our infrastructure crumbling. Britain cannot afford to take that risk."
To applause from supporters, Mr Miliband also criticised the Prime Minister's decision not to participate in some of the upcoming TV election debates.
It is not the first time Labour has unveiled a pledge card. Tony Blair and John Prescott did so successfully in 1997, winning a landslide general election victory.
But the pledges were very different in 1997. First was cutting class sizes, second was quicker punishment for young offenders, third was cutting NHS waiting lists, while getting under-25s off benefits and no rise in income tax made up the other two.
Responding to Mr Miliband's speech, Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps said: "The real choice at this election is between the stability and strong leadership of David Cameron and the Conservatives working to a long-term economic plan, securing a better future for Britain.
"Or Ed Miliband carried into Downing Street in the pocket of Alex Salmond and the SNP - meaning more borrowing, more debt, higher taxes and weaker defences."
