At a Downing Street summit yesterday, Tony Blair urged local health managers to bite the bullet and eliminate deficits estimated at more than £600m that have led to the announcement of about 7,000 job losses.. The Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett has cemented her reputation as “the minister for air miles” by flying more than 100,000 miles and helping to create more than 100 tons of harmful carbon emissions. Fresh turkeys went into stores on Monday and sales were double that of the first day last year.Sainsbury’s expect to sell 25m Easter eggs.Waitrose expects record sales of fish over the weekend, including cod, haddock and New Forest barramundi. A total of 35,000 packs of Mr Kipling Simnel Cake Slices have already sold out This year is also the busiest ever for turkeys. The AA will have extra patrols on the roads.FOODTesco expects to sell 1.8m Easter eggs, 7.5 million packets of hot cross buns and 10,000 Simnel cakes. An accident and sickness only policy, for £600 a month, would cost £13.50 with no exclusion period from Paymentcare.. Last year’s winner, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, came in second in 2006.Restaurant editor Joe Warwick pushed the changes through when he took over the reins at the magazine late last year, having realised the awards had become something far more grown-up than initially envisaged.

Hull have named the Australian, Peter Sharp, as their new coach in succession to John Kear. The average wage of a Premiership footballer is, The Independent reveals today, £676,000 and justifying the salaries of modern players can feel like a hopeless task, especially when the letters flood in from teachers, nurses and university lecturers who would struggle to afford the deposit on a Blackburn Rovers’ striker’s double garage, never mind the house he lives in. There can be little comfort to a key worker unable to afford a house in the south-east of England – let alone a mansion with a bath shaped like the European Cup. The next he was marking time in the Stoke-on-Trent hotel that has become his home from home. “We have the best squad we have had for many years but of course we do need that squad to be fully fit when we go to Germany,” Clemence said.”If it is fully fit and the better players in that squad are in top form, and we have the one thing we’ve not had in the last two tournaments – a little bit of luck – then we have an excellent chance of going a long way.”* Sir Bobby Robson, 73, is recovering after a fall while skiing which caused him rib and lung damage. FLIGHTS

A record 2.3 million people will fly abroad this weekend, with Spain, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands being the most popular destinations.
Over 600,000 passengers will travel with the low-cost airline easyJet – a 20 per cent increase on the average April weekend.Favourite budget breaks are Alicante, Barcelona and Nice.AIRPORTSToday will be the busiest day for UK airports, with 500,000 passengers leaving from Heathrow;262,000 leaving from Gatwick;172,350 from Stansted;60,000 from Luton;12,000 from Southampton;51,000 from Glasgow;56,800 from Edinburgh;17,800 from Aberdeen;26,000 from Belfast;110,000 from Manchester;37,500 from Newcastle;14,000 from Leeds Bradford;45,000 from Birmingham;and 26,000 from Nottingham East Midlands.TRAINS80,000 will take the Channel tunnel to escape the UK.Today and Easter Monday afternoon will be the busiest times on the railway, with the busiest destinations being: London, the West Country, the south coast and Scotland.Virgin trains expect a 30 per cent increase in passengers, with London to Glasgow being the busiest route.Expect trains to be emptier at 8am, with no commuters, and busier by 10 am, the Association of Train Operating Companies said.ROADS18 million motorists will be on the roads over the weekend, with the number of drivers up 25 per cent by lunchtime today, according to the AA.Black routes: expect heavy delays on the M25 around London; the M1 northbound; the M4 westbound; the M6 through the West Midlands and north of Manchester/Liverpool; the M5 northbound in the Midlands and southbound around Bristol.Delays where major roadworks are continuing:M60 in Greater Manchester between junctions 5 and 8;M6 in Staffordshire between junctions 15 and 16;M1 in Hertfordshire where works are continuing between Junctions 6A and 10 and the M4 in south Gloucestershire, at Junction 20, the Almondsbury Interchange.The Highways Agency said that it had lifted 53 miles of roadworks at 27 locations over Easter, but to expect delays at the Dartford tunnel, where one tunnel will be closed overnight for maintenance.80,000 breakdowns are expected over the holiday period.

England are 4-0 down in the seven-match series and Flintoff was due to miss Sunday’s abandoned game in Guwahati. In the worst-case assessment, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations led to the extinction of 40 per cent of species in some of the hotspots – a potential loss of some 56,000 endemic plants and 3,700 endemic vertebrate species.Hotspots under threat* Tropical Andes of South America: Home to the threatened Andean flamingo, yellow-eared parrot and spectacled bear, this is one of the richest and most diverse regions in the world with 450 endemic amphibians at risk of extinction.* Cape floristic region of South Africa: The only hotspot with an entire floral kingdom It holds five of South Africa’s 12 endemic plant families. Grammar taught as no more than a necessary function may produce children who can pass exams (as our deadening literature courses do now), but reading for pleasure, offered as a gateway into the world of books, will produce confident, articulate children with the ability to think and learn for themselves. I used the loan to buy some shares, which themselves provided collateral for the loan. The 25 hotspots included in the study cover just 1 per cent of the global landmass yet they account for some 44 per cent of the plants and 35 per cent of the world’s vertebrate animals.”Climate change is one of the most serious threats to the planet’s biodiversity. We now have strong scientific evidence that global warming will result in catastrophic species loss across the planet,” Dr Malcolm said.As temperatures rise due to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, many species will be forced into extinction, the study found.Mountain animals and plants that need cool temperatures will for instance not be able to migrate to higher altitudes and moisture-loving species will be unable to evolve the drought resistance in the relatively short time needed to survive climate change.The study, published yesterday in the journal Conservation Biology, predicts that many unique habitats will be lost as climate change brings about rapid changes to the environment.”We project the eventual loss of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of hotspot endemic plant and vertebrate species under a climate associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations,” the study says.The wildlife havens that could be worst affected include the Cape floristic region of South Africa, the natural landscape of southwest Australia, the tropical Andes and the Atlantic forests of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.”Although some hotspots appear to be unusually vulnerable to global warming … Most policies allow homebuyers to protect their monthly mortgage payments, plus an additional percentage for essential household bills.For example, covering £900 of mortgage payments through accident, sickness and unemployment cover would cost £26.25 from Moneysupermarket.