A man will appear in court in Sydney today charged with the murder of Brian Hagland, the Briton attacked by two men near Bondi Beach 10 days ago. Police charged him after he walked into the police station in the Sydney suburb of Bondi Beach yesterday afternoon.
He arrived at the police station dressed in a dark suit and tie, accompanied by his mother and his solicitor.The 22-year-old man wept and hugged his mother before entering the police station. Last week, three days after the attack, the man, who lives in the inner-Sydney suburb of Rushcutters Bay, about three miles from Bondi, also visited the police station with his solicitor, Leigh Johnson, but no charges were laid then.Mr Hagland, 28, was beaten to death in the early hours of 7 September as he walked along a street with his British girlfriend, Connie Casey, 25, after her farewell party at the Australian Trade Commission, where she worked. After the couple’s working holiday in Australia, they had planned to become engaged in Tahiti before returning to Britain, where Mr Hagland had been due to resume his job as a Post Office driver in London.

Ms Johnson said after her client’s arrest: “He maintains his innocence It was at most a scuffle between two drunk men. He didn’t kill anyone.” Police also interviewed another man, aged 23, but had laid no charges against him late last night.Detectives have rejected reports that Mr Hagland might have died as a result of injuries sustained when he and his assailants fell against a slow-moving bus. They said that a second post-mortem examination confirmed that he died from head and internal injuries.His family is understood to be planning a funeral when his body, accompanied by Ms Casey, returns to Britain.Residents of Bondi Beach held a public meeting on Sunday to protest about the increasing violence at weekends in what had been one of Sydney’s most peaceful areas. Police have increased patrols there since Mr Hagland’s death.. A potential deal under which National Health Service hospitals could promote the sale of private health insurance by Norwich Union Healthcare, Britain’s third-biggest private medical insurer, was thrown in doubt yesterday by the Department of Health. “NHS trusts should not align themselves with a single insurer,” a departmental spokesman said “Or promote their goods and services on hospital premises.

The last thing we want is a big Norwich Union sign saying ‘join here’. That would not be acceptable.”
There was, however, nothing to prevent trusts working with a range of insurers, he added, but not in a way which would put patients under pressure to take out private cover.The prospect of NHS hospitals actively promoting private medical insurance has been attacked by the health workers’ union Unison and was criticised yesterday by Chris Smith, Labour’s health spokesman.NHS hospitals “should quite simply not be involved” in promoting private health insurance, he said. “Whether it is one insurer or many, there will inevitably be pressure on patients to opt for insurance. It flies in the face of everything the NHS stands for and must be stopped immediately.”The DoH’s view – a matter almost certainly of guidance to NHS trusts, rather than any statutory bar on them agreeing to promote a particular product – may also lead to Norwich Union and other insurers going cold on the deal.Tim Baker, Norwich Union’s commercial director, said the company would not be looking for exclusivity in the sense that NHS pay-bed units and private wings would treat only patients covered by the company. But, he added, “a degree of marketing exclusivity for a period would be needed to make it work”.With trusts actively promoting Norwich Union’s Trust Care policy – which provides cover only in NHS pay beds – local markets could be developed and more patients might over come the “guilt” some feel about private insurance if they knew the profits from their treatment was supporting their local NHS hospital, he said.The NHS Trust Federation is looking for tie-ups with private insurers to offset the effect of Bupa, Britain’s biggest health insurer, developing a policy which excludes patients from treatment in NHS pay beds – a move the federation says could cost trusts pounds 50m in lost revenue over the next four years.Industry analysts believe Bupa’s move is a defensive one, attempting to raise occupancy in its own 29 hospitals and those of other private operators who have been losing market share to NHS pay beds..

Thousands of haemophiliac patients are being denied a purer, artificial form of the clotting agent Factor VIII, because their health authorities will fund only a cheaper version which carries a higher risk of viral infection. The tragedy of 1,200 haemophiliacs infected with HIV from contaminated Factor VIII used in the early 1980s, and around 3000 – out of a total of 5,000 haemophiliacs in the UK – infected with Hepatitis C to date, has failed to move either the Department of Health, which has rejected central funding for the genetically-engineered recombinant version, or the majority of health authorities.
Doctors are largely unaminous in their view that recombinant Factor VIII, is preferable on clinical grounds to plasma-derived Factor VIII, made from treated human blood, for all haemophiliacs but especially for children.The UK Haemophilac Centre Directors’ Organisation will this week publish guidelines recommending that the recombinant form should be used for everybody, pointing out that it is cheaper here than in the the rest of Europe.The UK’s use of recombinant is between 4-10 per cent of all Factor VIII given, compared with 50 per cent in Germany.However, recombinant Factor VIII costs 52p per unit compared with 20- 28p per unit for plasma-derived product, and if a health authority refuses to pay for it, then a doctor has little choice but to prescribe the less safe product. The inquiry panel included experts in housing and social services and representatives of the police, the church and business.Andreas Whittam Smith, chairman of the inquiry and founder editor of The Independent, said an estimated 1 in 30 young people aged between 16 and 25 were homeless, a growing number in rural areas, and described it as “a very large and despairing proportion”.”The young homeless are actually getting younger and the proportion of young homeless who are women is also rising,” he said. The problem affected young people from all backgrounds, even the most privileged.
The independent study, commissioned by 10 charities including Barnardos, Shelter and Char, highlighted the number of homeless young people being driven to drug and alcohol addiction, prostitution and petty crime at the basest level of survival. He said the decision to add VAT to the recombinant product was deplorable.A spokesman for the Department said last night that it was a matter for purchasers and providers to come to an agreement on how to treat patients.Health, section 2. The number of young homeless people in Britain has risen to “a despairing” 250,000, with a marked increase in teenage girls leaving home with nowhere to go, a report revealed yesterday.

The result of the first attempt to quantify how many young people are on the streets, in squats or bed-and-breakfasts or on friends’ floors, it said the problem was far greater than charities had feared. Two viruses, Hepatitis A and parvo-virus, are resistant to all sterilisation techniques in use, and there is also the danger posed by viruses yet to be identified.Following inquiries by The Independent this week, the Royal Free Hospital in London announced that all haemophiliac children in its care will now receive the recombinant form because it is the “preferred method of treatment” and that health authorities would be expected to “co-operate”.But Dr Paul Giangrande, director of the Oxford Haemophilia Centre, the largest in the country, says that the situation nationally is serious for both haemophiliac adults and children.Dr Giangrande has managed to persuade health authorities to pay for recombinant Factor VIII for all boys under 10 in his care since April 1995, except for one.Swindon Health Authority is reluctant to fund it, he said, and so plasma- derived product is administered to a child in its care instead.Graham Barker, director of services at the Haemophilia Society, said that health ministers had so far ignored medical advice and pressure from the Society to make recombinant Factor VIII universally available to haemophiliacs. The image of an emotional Adams splashed across the papers was followed yesterday by an announcement that the Football Association is to conduct random breathalyser tests on every player in the professional game.As moral panics go, it is hardly new. Barely three months have passed since the same papers reported a “binge” by England players on the flight from Hong Kong. When three of the squad were spotted in a night-club after the draw with Switzerland, The Sun’s headline screamed: “England aces back on the booze.Paul Gascoigne, inevitably the centre of the Hong Kong accusations, made his point after scoring against Scotland. Lying on the Wembley turf, he allowed the England team to shower him with Lucozade, a self-mocking re- creation of the Tequila-fuelled “dentist’s chair” episode in the Far East.Gazza’s indignation might have attracted greater sympathy had he not previously been involved in incidents in nightspots where he sought refreshment with his friend “Five Bellies”.