Whilst "free at the point of use" is a fundamental value of the NHS one West London hospital is bucking up its ideas about treating foreign patients who are not entitled to free healthcare on the NHS by employing a "stablize and discharge" policy. At West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth, ineligible patients are admitted and seen by 3 consultants who determine when their condition has stabilised. At that point, the patient is given......

Here’s what we’ve learned whilst you’ve been resolving to train for the marathon next year: Draconian new litter laws for motorists are to be piloted in London. The London Cycling Campaign are worried by a delay in new safety legislation for HGVs. Now BA pisses off all the other airlines by delaying the move of its long-haul operations to T5 until later on this year. Freud’s naked London civil servant is set to fetch......

The Intelligent Transport Society (now there’s a silly title for an organisation if ever we heard one) has anointed TfL ‘clever clogs of the year’ for its iBus system. East London could become a new Amsterdam. Um, that’s in terms of usable waterways, of course. 7/7/5 film is to debut at Cannes An restaurant worker in Tooting has broken both legs whilst fleeing from immigration officers. That really is awfully bad luck. Watch out......

The Holiday season is in full swing in NYC, with holiday lights in Brooklyn, a giant snow globe in Bryan Park and Chanukah specials for ham. One citizen decided to go vigilante on annoying car alarms, a murder suspect used a fake Asian accent on the stand and a video of a man being beaten up by teenage girls on a subway shocked the city. And we interviewed soon-to-be-leaving-Gawker editor Choire Sicha, who said,......

Recently we've been doing some research on Scotland, and while we haven’t come to any firm conclusions on the West Lothian question, it has prompted us to wonder – would London be better off as an independent country? We’d keep more of our tax money to begin with. It’s been estimated that London subsidises the rest of the UK to the tune of £13 billion a year – so that’s Crossrail paid for by......

It may be 40 years since the Abortion Act legalised terminations but a BBC Radio 5 Live investigation suggests that modern day "back street abortions" are easily found in London. Thankfully, we're not talking struck off doctors and knitting needles but Chinese herbal remedies from shops in Dalston and illegally obtained abortion drugs: an undercover investigator was able to get their hands on 14 abortion pills for £30 from an entirely unqualified bloke in......

Here’s what we’ve learned this weekend: Today is Remembrance Sunday which actually falls on 11th November - Armistice Day. The Queen and other Royals attended the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall last night. The Ceremony of Remembrance and Cenotaph Parade take place on Whitehall from 10.30am with Two Minute Silence at 11:00am. There was some pomp, circumstance and kids with strawberries on their heads at the Lord Mayor's Show yesterday. The......

The statisticians are at it again. Trying to connect A-B but, just for fun, popping into every shop along the way. Sketching trends with a pencil as there is insufficient data to ink them in. Reading significance into very little. Missing the point. A new survey by the University of East London has produced a map portraying religious segregation in the capital, which concludes that religion is a bigger dividing factor in the city than......

New figures released yesterday show, well, they show that London is pretty much doing what it always does: changing. Quite how is not entirely apparent. The newspapers managed to get some headline footage out of the statistics – the Daily Mail even ran a story about the UK population across the whole of the front page. And of course, there is some stuff to report. Most significantly, shedsful of Londoners are upping camp and shipping......

We are the people who live in London. Some of us are born here and some of us will die here. Some of us have been here forever and some came here yesterday. Some of us will stay forever, like it or not. We have been those people for nearly 2000 years and our consciousness has shaped our environment from our gardens to Parliament, from our market stalls to the London Eye. The way......

Hackney mum admits killing her children. Traffic wardens must do more to ticket and clamp offenders, claim councils. Meanwhile, Mr Panayiotou pleads guilty to driving in an unfit state. Charlton ripe for takeover? Prince, or "The foreman, principally known as artist", or whatever he was called, is set for 21 London concerts and lots of Bible studies. Image 'The Umbrella and the Protestor' courtesy of Orhan via the Londonist flickr group. Thousands packed Trafalgar......

This week, a trip down Whitechapel Road, courtesy of reader Konstantin Binder. His images show the Pavilion theatre and music hall around 100 years ago and - in the modern image - the gaping maw where once it stood. The Pavilion stood at 193 Whitechapel Road from 1894, replacing two previous Pavilions on the same site that both succumbed to fire. Its heyday was in the early 20th Century, when it was so popular......

Council staff in Harrow, north London, must feel like maniacal puppeteers in the Theatre of Irony that is the Benefits Claim Office. And if they are the puppeteers, those claiming benefits fraudulently are soon to be their Pinocchios. “Lie detectors will be used to help root out benefit cheats, Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has said. So-called "voice-risk analysis software" will be used by council staff to help identify suspect claims. It can......

It was only a couple of weekends ago that we first mentioned So London magazine, but it's already crashed and burned: So London, the upmarket weekly magazine targeting the affluent in the capital, has ceased publication after just two issues. The magazine launched with a fanfare this month, stating that it would deliver its readers with shameless luxury, but that promise has proven to be short-lived. We never got around to reading it -......

If Mr. T had a jibba jabbering British equivalent, what might he do if he and his trusty sidekicks were busted and broken apart? Terry Adams, leader of the notorious Adams crime family (aka the ‘A Team’), might be able to tell us – from prison. On Friday, Adams was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to seven years in the clink. At the height of their power, in the late 1980s, they were......

London is the 6th politest and the least punctual city in the UK. Illegal immigrants are helping boost congregation numbers at Roman Catholic churches. A schoolboy has been shot dead in South London. A city lawyer has died in the Tate Modern. And finally it seems that five pubs are closing a week in London Photo taken from Orhan's photostream.......

Crazy story in The Independent today: A former British National Party election candidate who stockpiled explosive chemicals for use in an anticipated civil war in Britain boasted that he would shoot Tony Blair... Police raided the home of Robert Cottage, who held "strong views on immigration", and found 21 types of chemicals which could create explosives when mixed together, along with a 300-page computer document called the "Anarchy Cookbook", which detailed how to make......

Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic Airways has announced a new London-U.S. route to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to begin on 23 April, 2007. This will help open up Virgin to the midwest and heartland of the U.S. It will also be a convenient hub for travel to and from Canada and the north and northwest of the USA. Currently the only direct flights to Canada Virgin provides stop at Ottawa and Quebec, leaving the western......

100 known troublemakers have already been arrested ahead of this weekend's Notting Hill Carnival. Not only that but metal detectors will be in full force at tube stations on the day. Just remember not to call it shit. An influx of immigrants into Britain has pushed the UK population above 60 million for the first time ever. Pluto is finally stripped of it's planetary status after fierce arguments at the International Astronomical Union yesterday.......

The choicest cuts from our sister sites around the globe. Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers. Bostonist sees Boston and Somerville each whip out......

A worrying link has been made between the London and Madrid bombings by European security services - namely, that the perpetrators in both cases were not international al-Qaida terrorists, but home-grown radicals, who used the internet to plan their attacks. When both bombings occurred, the media was immediately up in arms, claiming that al-Qaida was responsible, when in fact, in the case of the London bombings, all but one of the bombers were British-born.......

Clarke Remains Defiant After Lords Defeat Home Secretary Charles Clarke has vowed to battle on with his proposed ID cards legislation after it was defeated in the Lords last night. Their Lordships, many of whom come from a law background, feel that making the cards compulsary, is an infringement of people's human rights, and as such, is beyond the power of Government. They duly voted 227 to 166 against the proposal last night. Whether......

An interesting press release pinged into our inbox 'tother day regarding Fear And Loathing In Crouch End (Today 2.15pm Radio 4), a Radio 4 Afternoon Play about the latest chi-chi must-have accessory: Eastern European au pairs. From the press release: Eighteen year-old Estonian student Monika Kass is just one of the 200,000 East Europeans who arrived in the UK this year. It’s her first visit abroad – and soon she’s on a head-on collision......

It's so easy to drift through life accepting the status quo (not the kind appearing in Coronation Street and beating up Les Battersby, silly, the other things-as-they-are-now kind) and never bothering to think about who takes care of the little details. Who picks up the discarded copies of Metro after the morning rush hour? Who cuts the grass in the communal garden? When you arrive at your desk at 9am - give or take......

According to a rather fascinating report on BBC News, "a new form of accent is replacing the traditional Cockney in some parts of the East End". White youths have picked up words from their Bangladeshi neighbours, meaning you're more likely to hear someone say their new "creps" are "nang" than their new "trainers" are "good". This is bad news for the Daily Hell Mail, who will doubtless run an editorial on how "waves of......

Apart from a short fad in the 1970s, for most of the past 100 years the crime of choice for the petty thief has been burglary. But the increase in the general level of house security has forced Jimmy Window-Jammer to diversify, and street robbery has become more popular. With the nights drawing in, overground railway stations in south-east London (the land the underground map forgot) have become a popular location for the streetwise mugger.......