Learn London
The Internet is a great place to find out about London, but I’m still of the opinion that nothing is quite the same as holding a book in your hand. And one of the best collections of books is in Stanfords Long Acre
See 50 Berkeley Square, London’s most haunted house
In case you hadn’t noticed, it will be All Saints Day tomorrow, which make’s this evening All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, the day when the spirits of the dead walk among us. So, what better day to learn about 50 Berkeley Square, which was known in the 1900s as the most haunted house in London. The house was built in 1740, and formerly occupied by Prime Minister George Canning. However, the house soon developed a reputation for apparitions, screams and noises.
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Haunted London recounts many of the ghost stories, which apparently began when resident Mr Myers was due to be married but was jilted at the altar. Myers subsequently moved into a tiny room at the top of the building where he lived alone, only ever leaving his room at night to walk through the house candlelight.
Stories include that of a maidservant sent to make up a room but found collapsed shortly afterwards, muttering to herself “don’t let it touch me”. No one knows what she saw as she died in hospital following day. The maidservant’s master, Captain Kentfield, then decided he would spend the night in the room and headed upstairs. Thiry minutes later, after terrible screams and a gunshot, he was also found dead on the floor, his face twisted in terror.
Other stories include that two sailors who broke into the empty house and stayed in the haunted room, one was found strangled, and the other jumped from the house and was impaled on a wrought iron fence. Sir Robert Warboys also attempted, with the agreement of the landlord, to spend the night in the haunted room with pistol and a special cord to the landlord so he could alert him if he saw anything. When the bell rang the landlord found Warboys dead, with his smoking gun having made a hole in the opposite wall.
Since 1938, the building has been occupied by firm of Maggs Bros, an antiquarian book dealer. For more information, visit http://www.haunted-london.com/50-berkeley-square
Woman Loses Job Due to Error in FBI Criminal Database
A Maryland woman lost her accounting job after a background check performed through the FBI’s criminal database indicated, erroneously, that she was unsuitable for the job, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Eschol Amelia “Amy” Studnitz had been working for Corporate Mailing Services since August 2008 as a senior accountant.
Last July, after CMS won a contract to [...]
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Patients left waiting win right to private care
Cabinet agrees to enforce maximum waiting time of 18 weeks
Patients who wait longer than the target of 18 weeks for NHS treatment are to be given the legal right to get free private healthcare.
The move will place maximum waiting times for treatment on the statute book for the first time and should be rushed into law before the next general election after being agreed by the cabinet earlier this week, the Times reports today.
It will be coupled with a further legal right for cancer patients to receive private treatment if they have not been seen by an NHS specialist within two weeks of referral by their GP.
The measures will be unveiled in next month’s Queen’s speech, the last of the parliament, and are intended as part of a Labour challenge to the Conservatives on the future of the NHS and public services.
Ministers hope the moves will prevent waiting lists rising again as NHS budgets fall in the coming years.
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, who has promised to abolish all NHS targets including those for waiting times, will have to decide whether to repeal the new legal rights if elected to government.
The former health secretary, John Reid, said he was delighted with the new statutory rights for NHS patients. “Now that we have hugely reduced the waiting lists and have dramatically cut the waiting times, this is the next logical step in patient power,” he said.
“It will provide ordinary people with the right and the power to ensure that they get the service that they deserve and that their illness is treated in time.
“And if the standards are not being met they will have the right to have them provided by the medical resources that have always been available to those who are well off or well connected.”
The Conservative’s shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said the plan had “more to do with electioneering than improving the NHS”.
He said: “They claim that these will be legally enforceable new rights, but are Labour really planning to put the lawyer in the operating theatre? Do they trust the doctors to do their job or do they want judges telling surgeons who they should operate on first?
“Putting the 18-week target in legislation will further distort priorities and will lead to many more patients waiting for treatment for 18 weeks even when they could and should have got it sooner.”
Changing Britain’s relationship with Europe
Over dinner for two in Paris last night Angela and Nicolas plotted the future of the new Europe, chatting about whether Tony could be their candidate for president. Threatening to give them both political indigestion though was another Brit – David – the man who ought to be their natural political ally.
The chancellor of Germany and the president of France are infuriated by the behaviour of the man who their diplomats tell them looks set to be Britain’s next prime minister.
Neither Angela Merkel nor Nicola Sarkozy have met David Cameron for more than a year. Both tried and failed to persuade him to change his European policy. It is, though, about to change thanks not to them, but to events.
The Tories promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty will die with their hopes that the Czechs might halt the progress of the treaty into law.
The new Conservative approach to Europe will not be to the liking of those Eurosceptics who believe that only a full-blooded battle with the EU will deliver change.
David Cameron spoke this week of a policy based on “realism not isolationism”. His allies shudder at the memory of John Major’s beef war with Europe. They remember it producing not victory, but messy face-saving compromises.
Their aim, one shadow cabinet minister tells me, is to avoid idle threats “to bring the whole temple crashing down”. Instead, the Tories are working on a list of changes they want to see and a list of changes others want which they can block if a Cameron government doesn’t get its way.
Those who are demanding a referendum to strengthen the government’s hand or to ensure that they do not “sell out” to Europe look set to be disappointed too.
David Cameron’s “cast-iron guarantee” to Sun readers of a Euro referendum expires, I’m told, once there is no further chance of stopping the Lisbon Treaty. In its place comes a different cast-iron guarantee of a new law to force any future government to put any future EU treaty to a popular vote.
Cameron’s aides have noted with relief that both the Sun and the equally Eurosceptic Telegraph seem to have joined what they regard as the realists’ camp.
Senior Tories know that if they are to have any chance of changing Britain’s relationship with the EU, David will need to be able to sit down with Angela and Nicolas. They believe that success will come not through confrontation but patient, tough-minded negotiation.
