Jail For Torture Trio

Three youths who tortured a 14-year-old girl in a car park and filmed the attack on a mobile phone have each been sentenced to four years' detention. The two 14-year-old girls and a 13-year-old boy stripped their victim naked and hit her with stiletto heels during the 45-minute ordeal in January. The boy compared the aftermath of the attack in Edinburgh to a scene from Resident Evil. Judge Lord Malcolm said it had been an attack of "uncontrolled cruelty".

Train Tickets Up

Rail ticket prices will rise by an average of 1.1% next year, but passenger groups and rail unions said train companies were "spinning the figures". There was particular anger that the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) had chosen not to announce how much unregulated fares, which include cheap day returns, were rising. Cheap day returns, for example, will rise considerably with fares on First Great Western services, for example, up 15% in January 2010, while some advance-purchase tickets on Arriva Trains Wales will increase by 9.4%. However, by 'lumping' this with the unregulated fare rise gave an overall - and palatable - figure of 1.1%, allowing ATOC to claim the average rail-fare increase as the lowest since rail privatisation in the mid 1990s.

'More To Do' On Construction Safety

Progress is being made on safety in small construction firms but there is more to do, Health and Safety Minister, Lord McKenzie told European employers at a major health and safety conference in central London. The conference hosted by the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) for senior representatives of the construction trade association members of the European Builders Confederation marked the climax of a European Commission funded project, 'Under Construction II' aimed at improving standards of health and safety in construction SMEs across Europe. Lord McKenzie outlined some of the recent initiatives helping to improve safety and health in Great Britain, including a construction industry forum on pre-qualification schemes and the Health and Safety Executive's asbestos awareness campaign.

Assaults On Medics Falling

The number of assaults on hospital workers in East Yorkshire has dropped for the fourth year running, the NHS has said. Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust said there were 42 instances of violent assaults on staff this year, down from 63 last year. The trust said this was largely down to the work of its security staff.

Commonwealth Games 'Costly'

While over £13m will be raised through commercial activities, the budget for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow is to be increased by £81m, it has been announced. The organising committee for the games said funding for the event would rise to a total of £454m and that the bulk of the extra cash will come from the Scottish government. The city council will provide an additional £9m.

Housing Target 'Will Fail'

New research just launched by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), shows the government is unlikely to meet its target of three million new homes by 2020. In order to reach this number, the government has a target to build 240,000 homes every year – a rate not achieved at any point since the early 1990s. The Housing and Neighbourhoods monitor, produced for the JRF by a team of researchers from Manchester University, Glasgow University and Ulster University, analyses key housing and neighbourhood trends across the UK.

(BMcC/KMcA)