Monday, July 02, 2007

NHS Capital Spending in England cut by a third, but not in Scotland or Wales

In one of Gordon Brown's last acts as chancellor he has cut the hospital building program in England by one third whilst leaving that in Scotland and Wales alone.

Is that fair?

It does explain why there are huge and increasing problems in the NHS, in part caused by Dr John Reid's appalling time as Secretary of State for Health making a mess of Doctors pay.

They even want to downgrade our local hospital the Princess Royal and sell off some of the land, in what is a fairly new state of the art hospital to move patients to an overcrowded and for many in central Sussex difficult to get to hospital in Brighton.

Ridiculous.

The FT has this.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess this can be called racism by the goverment so can we contact a rather busy police and tell them or are the goverment beyond the reach of the police.

Anonymous said...

O/T, Sorry Benedict, just had to do it. The national blog silence on this subject is deafening!

Detonating hundreds of simultaneous explosions through cell phone and Internet

There is extreme concern among security services in the United States, Europe, the Far East and Israel, after the source of 350 multiple attacks in Bangladesh on Aug. 17, 2005, was traced to Tripoli, Lebanon

French counter-terror experts leading an international inquiry into the attacks discovered that a facility, set up there by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s late Iraq commander, had developed the new design which works through Internet messengers like Skype or MSN.

Network-connected mobile phones can remotely detonate over the Internet simultaneous explosions hundreds of miles apart, anywhere on the world. US forces located and killed Zarqawi on June 7, 2006.

This system, is more complex than any used by al Qaeda before. A year ago, some 350 explosions in quick succession in 36 districts hit government facilities and hotels in Dhaka and 16 other Bangladeshi towns. One person was killed and 115 people injured.

The French team was led to Tripoli by a tip-off that al Qaeda operative Kaci Warab, seen at Bangladesh’s international Zia airport shortly after the multiple blasts and followed since, had turned up in the north Lebanese city. The materials found at the al Qaeda lab there were removed to forensic facilities in Paris and produced the following picture:

For its Bangladesh operation, al Qaeda had prepared 350 cell phones. Communications software was installed in each, together with a simple interface program designed in the Tripoli lab. Loaded onto the master computer in Tripoli linked to global Internet was the readily available Skype or MSN software. The cell phones were given 350 different usernames – or rather the same one with a different numeral, e.g. Tom1, Tom2, and so forth up to Tom350. The program was relayed to the mobile phones which then transmitted the operational signal to detonate the explosives.

The Bangladesh method would be hard to apply in the United States, Europe or Israel. Anti-terror security measures are more stringent there and would make it difficult to plant 350 hidden bombs without some being detected. On the other hand, setting off 20 or even 10 simultaneous explosions would have a disastrous effect if the bombs were planted, say, on express trains in different countries. So far, this has not happened, but it is possible that Al Qaeda’s hi-tech experts are working on improvements to the system, such as adapting it to satellite phone.

CityUnslicker said...

Hopefully all thsi sort of behaviour will put us on a path to an English parliament asap.

Benedict White said...

Erik, *cough* many thanks for the update, but there is a reason why I don't discuss terrorist methods in detail. I could explain with a few examples, but I'd be breaking my own rules.

City Unslicker, I am surprised this story is not making big waves.