The Transporter Bridge & Olympic torch June 2012

This  landmark bridge which is celebrating its 100th birthday is to host the Olympic torch during its two-day journey through Teesside.
Middlesbrough's 225ft (69m) high Transporter Bridge - a symbol of the area's industrial heritage - will host the flame on 18 June, Locog has said.
At around 06:30 BST, the torch will travel across the bridge, through Middlesbrough and then head to Redcar.
After a trip along the Esplanade the flame will be carried to Marske.
Throughout the morning crowds will welcome it on its journey through Saltburn, Brotton, Loftus, Hinderwell, and finally on to Whitby.
Thousands of torchbearers have been recruited for the flame's 70-day journey across the UK before the opening ceremony in London.

Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma at The Manchester Museum until 18th November

Alan Turing – 1951 - National Portrait Gallery

June 23, 2012, is the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth in London. During his relatively brief life, Turing made a unique impact on the history of computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability.
2012 will be a celebration of Turing’s life and scientific impact, with a number of major events taking place throughout the year. Most of these will be linked to places with special significance in Turing’s life, such as Cambridge, Manchester and Bletchley Park.


Alan Turing may be most famous for cracking the Nazi's Enigma code during the Second World War but in this centenary year of his birth, an exhibition at Manchester Museum has chosen to explore his lesser-known, final work.
In the early 1950s Turing started an exploration into morphogenesis, the study of how living things develop their shape and structure from simple balls of cells.

World Refugee Day – 20th June 2012

“Refugees are ordinary people, too, except that through no fault of their own, they find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. As such, they are often required to dig deep into their own inner sources of strength…”
“It takes courage to be a refugee. Courage not to give up hope and to make the most of the hand that has been dealt. Courage to start a new life against daunting odds, eventually to become contributing and enriching members of society once more.”


Comedian Mark Thomas and Tendai, a refugee from Zimbabwe, taking the time to find out about each other's lives Photograph: Jenny Matthews/Refugee Action

More Springwatch! - UK

Photo by rdspalm
Juvenile Wren
Tory Island, County Donegal


Kingfisher

Climate Change

First place ‘Coat Star', by Mikhail Zlatkovsky, Russia


Second place: 'Butterflies', by Constantin Ciosu, Romania


'Crushed', by Ilya Katz, Israel

Our NHS is not safe in this Government’s hands

Serco's headquarters in Truro, Cornwall. Photograph: Jim Wileman

Staff and patients of the Cornwall out-of-hours GP service have raised fresh concerns about the level of care being provided by the privatised contractor Serco. They allege that only one GP was on duty from midnight to 8am for the whole county the night of 29 May.
They have also revealed that a switch to a new automated system to deal with patients' calls, in which call handlers following a computer-generated script replace medically trained nurses, led to queues of 40-plus waiting three hours and more for advice over the weekend of 26-27 May.

When Serco was awarded the £6.4m a year contract for out-of-hours GP services last October, one condition was that it introduce a new automated telephone response system that replaces trained nurses with non-medical call handlers to assess initial calls.

This NHS Pathways system has been promoted by the Department of Health as a more efficient and cost-effective way to dealing  with patients contacting out of hours and emergency services.
The Cornwall NHS service was previously run, not for profit, for £7.5m a year by a co-operative of local GPs and trained nurses to assess initial calls.