After the agony of choosing the name and the anxiety of whether your precious new arrival will get on to the right school waiting list, comes – for some at least – the race to register your child’s internet domain name.
Literally one minute after Downing Street released the name of the Tony and Cherie Blair’s newborn, Leo Blair’s domain name was snapped up for a mere £31 by a school teacher from Norwich.In the hope of making a tidy profit, Diana George, a seasoned domain name shopper, registered the Web addresses leoblair and leoblair.co.uk.But so far she has only had one offer – of “a few thousand pounds” from a tabloid newspaper. She turned it down as she “did not want to be associated with them”.Nor is Mr Blair among the bidders – though the experience of seeing his family “cybersquatted” will not be a new one. The domain name tonyblair was registered by a company in Oregon in 1997, and cherieblair was registered by Peter Holt, from Telford, last September.Ms George said: “I just happened to hear the name on the midday news on Saturday, and by 12.01 I had registered it via my son’s e-mail.”I thought of it a few months ago when I heard about the impending arrival I thought it might be of interest to someone. It might make a unique christening present.”Her husband, Peter, added: “Apparently someone in Scotland had the same idea but he was about 20 minutes too late.”The law is unclear on whether famous people have any right to regain their name from websites registered by people unrelated to them: so far there have been no test cases.Ms George said: “If I do sell [the address] I will give half the money to charity.”. More than 2.5 million working parents excluded from the Government’s new parental leave scheme face a two-year wait to learn whether they have won a legal challenge against the Government. More than 2.5 million working parents excluded from the Government’s new parental leave scheme face a two-year wait to learn whether they have won a legal challenge against the Government.
Cherie Booth QC, acting for the TUC, learnt yesterday that the High Court would request clarification from the European Court of Justice. In court last week, Ms Booth said: “Becoming a parent is not just a one-off event, parental leave rights were not a substitute for maternity leave.

The entitlement was not triggered by the specific event of birth, but by the existence of a responsibility to care for a child.”But the Government had said that the law did relate to a specific event, the birth of a child, but did not cover the parents of children born before 15 December last year, the date when the law was introduced.In a written judgment, the judges said they considered Ms Booth’s argument “likely to prevail”. They went on to say that they required a ruling on the meaning of part of the European Parental Leave Directive and Agreement, on which the leave scheme is based.The expetation is that the ruling could take abouty two years and if the TUC’s stance is vindicated could cost British employers £50m.The High Court refused the TUC’s plea for an order permitting excluded parents from taking leave from work even though they might eventually lose the case. But Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr Justice Morison urged the European court to deal with the case as a matter of urgency.They said that if, “as we think”, Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, may have acted unlawfully in the way he introduced the scheme, “the sooner it is made clear the better”.After the ruling the TUC general secretary, John Monks, claimed a “clear moral victory”. He said: “Ministers should now extend parental leave to the nearly three million working parents who have missed out, without the need for a lengthy European court case.”Fighting what looks like a doomed case in the European court simply to delay parental leave for those parents with children born before the December deadline sends all the wrong signals from a Government that says it wants a better work-life balance.”It is sad to see the UK Government take such a ‘family-unfriendly’ position.”A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry said: “It is right that this question should be resolved in European courts This is what we requested.”. William Hague will go for Labour’s Achilles’ heel today by pledging big rises in the state pension including a £10 rise for all couples over 75.

William Hague will go for Labour’s Achilles’ heel today by pledging big rises in the state pension including a £10 rise for all couples over 75.
The Tory leader is adopting a high-risk policy to appeal to the pensioners “insulted” by the Chancellor’s 75p increase in their state pensions, with swingeing £2bn cuts in welfare benefits including the £10 Christmas bonus. The Tories plan to abolish the £90m “new deal” for lone parents aimed at getting them back into work. Free television licences for over-75s, worth £370m, would go.The Christmas bonus costing a total of £120m would be scrapped, as would the “age addition” for over-80s which costs £30m. The Tories would also raid the £600m social fund, which is aimed at giving loans to the poorest people to take £90m for the state pension.The biggest saving would be on the abolition of winter fuel payments to pensioners costing £1.16bn.