News in Brief

The Department of Health has declined to comment directly on newspaper reports that the Government is planning to re-introduce free eye tests and dental checks for pensioners. Free tests for all were scrapped in 1989. Ministers are reported to be considering the concession, to offset proposals to ask more-affluent pensioners to pay prescription charges for the first time. A Department of Health spokesman said he was not aware of any new development in ministers' thinking. He said a comprehensive review was continuing, and nothing was being ruled in or out.

The Government is to review an asylum request from a young Indian stowaway who survived 10 hours of freezing temperatures inside the wheelbay of a jumbo jet in an odyssey that killed his brother. Pardeep Saini, 23, arrived in London in October aboard a British Airways Boeing from Delhi. Officials initially had turned down his request for asylum, but the Secretary of State for Immigration, Mike O'Brien, said he would look at the matter again. However he told the BBC that he would "need an awful lot of convincing to allow him to stay".