Top stories from the UK

Superbug damages

Hospitals Rose Gibb, a former NHS trust chief executive, was awarded £190,000 damages after three Court of Appeal judges ruled she had been made a scapegoat for Britain’s worst hospital superbug outbreak. Gibb, 50, was forced out of her £150,000-a-year post with Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in Kent after almost 1,200 patients contracted Clostridium difficile, which contributed to at least 90 deaths. The judges criticised the now “accepted expedient” in Britain to single out senior officials for “public sacrifice” whenever a scandal breaks.

However, relatives of those who died were outraged and branded the settlement “disgraceful”. “She was indirectly responsible for those deaths,” said Cheryl Baker, the television presenter, whose mother-in-law, Doreen Ford, 77, died at Maidstone hospital during the 2008 outbreak. “It was because of her that the cleaning wasn’t done properly.”

Winner of the BP portrait award 2010, British artist Daphne Todd. (Ben Stansall)

Dead good art

Gallery An artist’s painting of her dead 100-year-old mother has gone on show at the National Portrait Gallery after winning the £25,000 BP Portrait Award. Daphne Todd, 63, painted the “devotional study” of her mother, Annie Mary Todd, in a refrigerated room at a funeral parlour in April last year. She said that in some ways painting Last Portrait of Mother was easier than other portraits she had done.

“She kept still,” said Todd, pictured below with the painting. “I was just aware that I didn’t have much time. Usually with a commission you have coffee breaks but I worked solidly for three days. I thought I ought to stop when she began to change colour but the undertaker said he would have been happy for me to do another day.” Todd’s mother gave permission for the study before she died.

Smoked out

Pregnancy A health watchdog called for the breath-testing of all pregnant women to check whether they are smokers. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) recommended that carbon monoxide tests take place at the first antenatal appointment so mothers could be made aware that smoking damages their babies.

Mike Kelly, of Nice, said: “This isn’t to penalise them but will be a useful way to show women that both smoking and passive smoking can lead to them having high levels of carbon monoxide in their systems.” Midwives were less than enthusiastic about the proposal. Sue Macdonald, of the Royal College of Midwives, said health workers should focus on being supportive “rather than making women feel guilty”.

TV presenter Christine Bleakley has moved to ITV (Ian West)

Bleakley jumps

TV Christine Bleakley, presenter of BBC1’s The One Show, has defected to ITV after weeks of speculation that she would follow her former co-presenter Adrian Chiles to the rival network.

The bubbly Bleakley, 31, shot to prominence after joining the The One Show for what now looks like a bargain salary — £100,000 a year. After her co-presenter Chiles left the BBC for ITV earlier this year, the BBC offered to remodel the show around Bleakley, pictured above, and raise her salary to £450,000 a year. That proved no match for a reported £1.5m a year offer from ITV to join Chiles on the sofa of a new breakfast show.

A BBC spokesman said it had made it clear to Bleakley that the BBC would not enter a bidding war. BBC executives are loath to be seen to be overpaying their stars as the government imposes public spending cuts.

England scrape in

Football After two disappointing performances in the group stages of the World Cup in South Africa, the England football team reclaimed the love of a disgruntled nation by winning their final game 1-0, against Slovenia. The team had avoided the shame — unlike the 2006 finalists, France and Italy — of failing to progress to the knock-out stages.

Jermain Defoe scored the winning goal and after the final whistle the England manager, Fabio Capello, cast off his customary cool to hug anyone within range. Finishing second to the USA in the group, however, had its price. England discovered their next game would be against Germany — kick-off is 3pm today.

Cannabis for MS

Medicine The first medical treatment made from cannabis has been licensed in Britain to combat the stiffness and spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis. Sativex can be sprayed under the tongue up to 12 times a day and is made from plants grown at a secret location in southern England by the biotech company GW Pharmaceuticals. The firm has seen a 60% rise in shares in the past six months in anticipation of the drug being approved.

Britain is the first country to give the drug full regulatory approval and the government claims the spray cannot be abused. Sativex users will not be able to get high since the levels of the active ingredient THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) are much lower than when cannabis is smoked. “We welcome the benefits [the drug] can bring but we want to see it made available to anyone who needs it,” said a spokesman for the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Free to cook

Crime A serial burglar, Nathan Bradford, 22, was spared jail after a glowing reference from the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s trainee scheme. Bradford was only a few months into the project run by Oliver’s Fifteen Foundation when he was spotted loading up a BMW with five laptops, two digital cameras and two flatscreen TVs after breaking into two flats. However, Judge Daniel Worsley told Blackfriars crown court in London that he would take the “merciful course” after he received the positive reference.

Bradford was one of 18 young people chosen out of 400 applicants for Oliver’s project for disadvantaged young people. He was sentenced to a year in jail, suspended for two years, and 100 hours of “community payback”. In April, a Fifteen trainee was jailed over a £1m jewellery heist and another was jailed last October for sexual assault.

Ace competitors

Tennis After three days and 183 games, the American tennis player John Isner finally beat Nicolas Mahut 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68 in a first-round match on Court 18 at Wimbledon. In their epic battle lasting 11 hours and five minutes, each man served more than 100 aces and the final set took eight hours and 11 minutes.

“It’s something Nic and I will share forever,” said Isner afterwards. Mahut, from France, called it “the greatest match ever at the greatest place for tennis” and graciously added that his opponent had deserved to win.

Gong for ghosts

Books The writer Neil Gaiman won the Cilip Carnegie medal for children’s fiction on Thursday. The prize was awarded for his novel The Graveyard Book, a story about an orphan brought up by ghosts.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Front Row, the writer confessed he wasn’t sure Graveyard was a children’s book. He said his publisher, Bloomsbury, “wiggled” its way around the issue by publishing two different editions, one for the children’s department and the other for adult fiction.

Gaiman was, however, pleased with the company he found himself in. “For my seventh birthday I was given a boxed set of the Narnia books by CS Lewis,” he said. “The last of them, The Last Battle, had the words ‘Winner of the Carnegie medal’ on it. I did not know what the Carnegie medal was, but I knew it was something important. And if the Narnia books had won it, then it had to be the most important literary award there ever was.”