Dutch soccer legend Edgar Davids is confident that South Africa can make a good job of hosting the World Cup, and that the Rainbow nation will benefit from the continent’s first staging of football’s showpiece tournament.

Pete Carroll Likes to Compete, But Will He Be Successful in the NFL?

The health of the air quality is in the balance according to a new report.

Recent tragedy puts mommy blogging in the social media cross hairs

Steve Ells, founder and CEO of Chipotle restaurants, wants you to know something that most fast food companies try desperately to hide…

Yes, men and women are different, but did you know they get different illnesses when traveling?

But the appearance of mentally disturbed patients on the streets, particularly at Christmas in the capital, may reinforce public pressure for action.. Earlier attempts to allay the public’s fears about mentally ill patients in the community led to the introduction of statutory supervision orders by the former Secretary of State for Health, Virginia Bottomley, which was launched in the wake of a number of tragedies including the fatal stabbing of Jonathan Zito by a schizophrenic, Christopher Clunis, and the mauling of another schizophrenic who climbed into a lion’s cage.Mr Malone said the Government was determined to see the programme fully implemented in all districts as a matter of urgency. Mr Dorrell is hoping that below-standard health authorities will be improved by clarifying the rights of mentally ill patients and the duties of the authorities.The Government’s record on mental illness has been put in the spotlight by several high-profile cases, such as the recent stabbing of a GP in his surgery when he went to the aid of a fellow doctor threatened by a patient. The picture is that a majority are doing quite well but there are a small number who are not living up to their duties.”Stephen Dorrell, the Secretary of State for Health, is expected to announce an initiative to answer growing public unease, but ministers are still under pressure to call a halt to care in the community. The volume of calls from the consumer market is very high.” But at least the volume coming from those confusing footpedals and mice should be smaller..

COLIN BROWN

Chief Political Correspondent
Disturbing evidence has emerged that the Government’s policy of care in the community for the mentally ill is failing in some areas, despite ministerial warnings to health authorities to tighten up their procedures.A new survey of authorities shows that in some areas too few resources are being targeted at the severely mentally ill, and that the response to the Government’s programme for treating patients has been uneven.Details have been revealed in answers to a letter sent in August by Gerry Malone, the health minister, to all chairmen of National Health Service trust hospitals and health authorities, expressing concern that the response to the Government’s care-programme approach remained “patchy” four years after its introduction.The Department of Health is still studying the response, but a senior ministerial source said: “We have given a commitment to publish the response. “But the problem is that the more that you extend the facility, the more people call. But setting it up so that the various components work to best effect is difficult, and has been known to defeat experts, let alone novices, who may find abstruse error messages such as “This program has been terminated because it attempted to perform an illegal operation” more than a little perplexing.Compaq, which has never before offered telephone support on Boxing Day, expected thousands of calls — “about the same as a normal work day,” according to Ms Sorkin. “Let’s be honest, we’re not expecting many questions about [the financial spreadsheet] Excel.” His staff of 18 will answer phones from 10am until 5pm.A “multimedia” computer, capable of playing CD-ROMs and with full-colour screens, sound and a (handheld) mouse, costs about pounds 1,500. “We have consciously tried to bring the technical level of instructions down. In fact, we have won some Plain English Awards for them.”"We’re expecting the vast majority to be about Windows95 and how to configure games to run with it,” said Microsoft’s Steve Caulfield as the lines opened.

In the week before Christmas, Dixons was expecting to sell more than 10,000 PCs, and mail-order companies have reported excellent business.”I think part of the problem is that the computer industry loves buzzwords, but the average person can’t follow what they mean,” said Sue Sorkin, a product manager at Compaq. It just seems so unfair that people should be discriminated against and punished after death, simply because they weren’t married.”The irony is that these pension schemes are prepared to recognise non- marriage for the purpose of withdrawing pension benefits from a widow or widower if they begin to cohabit with another partner.”I feel both angry and hopeless because the only reason our family is not getting what it is entitled to is essentially on moral grounds.”. CHARLES ARTHUR

Science Correspondent
The voice on the end of the telephone was patient but perplexed: “I’ve got the foot pedal working, but it doesn’t seem to be very sensitive.”Foot pedal? Was the caller describing an electric organ? Fortunately, the person taking the call on the support desk for a computer maker realised that the “foot pedal” was in fact a computer mouse, the handheld device used to move a pointer around the screen.Similar confused calls are expected throughout this week as computer- makers open their support lines to provide help to the thousands of people who bought personal computers as Christmas presents this year and spent Christmas Day and yesterday trying to understand the manuals.Compaq, along with other makers such as Dell, IBM, and Apple Computer is offering telephone help to home computer users today and for the rest of the week.Microsoft, which makes the best-selling Windows95 operating system, and which will be on about 90 per cent of new computers sold this Christmas, expects up to 1,000 calls today.The anticipation stems from the fact that retailers have been forecasting record sales of PCs into the home this year. We are obviously far worse off financially than when Dorothy was alive, because our income was halved.”But it is not really a question of the money. Although her children will receive a small pension until they become adults, the additional amount payable to a married spouse is not payable to Mr Gerber.”I don’t know how much I might have received – the process of grieving means you are not functioning very well. She died last summer, leaving Paul to bring up Adam and Lauren on his own.”Pensions were an issue we never addressed and in any event, in the last few months, Dorothy was so ill we didn’t even consider what might happen if she died.”For many years, Dorothy had contributed to a local authority pension scheme.

We shared all household responsibilities, paid our bills together, and agreed that we did not want the extra complications of marriage,” says Paul, who works for the National Society for the Protection of Children.About two years ago, Dorothy, a social worker in West Glamorgan, was diagnosed as suffering from lymphoma, a form of cancer. All I have are some wonderful memories of Gary and a beautiful son.”But the way we have been treated is like all the time we spent together and the love we shared was for nothing.”Despite living together for 10 years, Paul Gerber and his partner, Dorothy Garson, made a conscious decision not to marry. They stuck by their decision even after the birth of their son, Adam, now aged seven, and a five-year-old daughter, Lauren.”We had always operated together as a family and as partners. Instead, he goes to a child minder.”It is immoral that people can be left with nothing because of a piece of paper. Gary had been a serving police officer for 19 years and always paid into his pension scheme.”Had we been married I would have been entitled to a pension of about pounds 12,000 a year.”Ironically, we were due to marry but we had been forced to postpone the wedding because I was ill at the time.

If your personal information winds up in a stranger’s records, it might be hard for you to reclaim it

Management has drawn up an agreement with the non-TUC Association of Professional Ambulance Personnel, despite its having fewer Northumbria members.. The letter did not arrive until 22 March as the bank had sent it to the address on the share certificates despite the Ratcliffes’ new address being pencilled in.A NatWest spokesman said the bank decided to accept PEP trades up to 11 March because it could not guarantee that share certificates received after that would complete the procedure on time.’We understand that Mrs Ratcliffe was disappointed,’ he went on. In Hockenheim last year, for example, all agreed to have a maximum of 10 people working in the pit lane. Within hours, a CBS corporate damage control operation was in full swing.

Prices for new and converted properties will range from pounds 75,000 for an apartment to pounds 200,000 for a four-bedroom house.Larger bases, such as Chatham Dockyard on the Medway, have the potential to become self-sufficient settlements: English Partnership and Countryside Properties are working together to create a new village there of 1,700 homes.But the MoD is facing a big challenge at the former Woolwich Arsenal, in south-east London. Bell, who was in his country’s squad for the 1982 and 1990 tournaments without being selected, has quit the team. I trust the error I now believe I have made will not jeopardise Mark’s future.’ The British Judo Association is conducting its own inquiry.. But I do think it’s sad that the Church hasn’t felt enough confidence in itself to be able to say, ‘Stay in there, explore your ideas.

The American-owned investment management group decided to vote in favour of the refinancing when it realised on Friday that it had insufficient support among other preference shareholders to block the proposals.With most proxy votes now in, WPP’s investors have indicated ‘overwhelming support for the reconstruction’, according to Rupert Faure Walker of Samuel Montagu, WPP’s merchant bankers. For that, I respect him more than the real aristocrats who talk about food all the time and know nothing about it.”It’s such an unexpected defence of somebody. This is no bland overview: Page often worries away at apparently minute misinterpretations of evidence with all the doggedness one might expect from a Cambridge lecturer in medieval English literature. It would damage the position of the SDLP and would serve to encourage still more extremists in the republican movement.’To abandon the articles as a unilateral peace offering would be short-sighted and counter-productive,’ he insisted. Wales still sees itself as a Celtic land – the land of the Britons – dominated by its English neighbour ever since the medieval conquest.

So over the whole decade, there have been two massive moves – from direct tax towards indirect tax, and simultaneously from allowances towards lower tax rates.Has this left us with a better tax system? Some may argue that both these shifts are good for ‘incentives’. New Zealand .233

Australia. Delegates said they did not believe, despite clear statements to the contrary, that ‘Rome’ really wanted to hold fresh elections.
Mr Bossi launched his new dual strategy in an attempt to jolt the movement out of the morass into which it was threatening to sink after a series of judicial investigations against him and other leaders, a scandal over illicit donations and setbacks in the recent municipal elections. The island is only 20 miles from Patara where Santa Claus is believed to have been born in the third century.The layout of the complex with its processional way, dominated by churches and tombs, is typical of what one would expect to find at a saint’s shrine of this period. Many cakes, breads and puddings enjoy equally isolated favour, such as sticky ginger-flavoured parkin in Yorkshire; Banbury cake (a pastry turnover filled with spicy dried fruit); Selkirk Bannocks; saffron cakes in Cornwall (yellow colouring will not do, only real saffron, the world’s most expensive spice); bara brith (the fruity Welsh tea loaf); rich, luscious Wiltshire lardy cakes; and Grasmere ginger cakes.Sometimes a dish is kept alive almost against its own will, such as Norfolk Knobs and Dorset Knobs, left-over bread dough which old-time bakers mixed with a little butter and sugar, and put in the dying embers of the oven to dry out.

City officials going through with fence at Phil Shao Memorial Skate Park to keep out BMX-ers

Fernando Alonso says the reaction from his fellow drivers to Formula One’s controversial new rules after the opening Grand Prix of the season was “hot-headed.”