The Youth Panorama

She's won international acclaim for her portrayal of Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey. However, actress Michelle Dockery admits she is getting fed-up of people expecting her to have a posh accent in real-life. The 31-year-old grew up in a working class home in Romford, Essex, but speaks in cut-glass English for her portrayal of the widowed Lady Mary. Back for more: Downton Abbey and Allen Leech pose in a photoshoot for Radio Times magazine Out of widow's black: Michelle will spent a lot of Series 4 dressed in mourning for her character's husband Matthew Speaking to the new issue of the Radio Times: ' I'm an actress. That's my job yet people are surprised when I don't sound like Lady Mary. ' It's old news, me and my accent, but it always seems to make headlines.' Fans of Michelle may well have read about her upbringing as the daughter of a home care assistant mother and van driver father, who later became a surveyor. More than ju...

Transport Minister Norman Baker said drivers should be hit with big increases in parking charges Transport Minister Norman Baker said drivers should be hit with big increases in parking charges Cars should be banished from town centres, a Liberal Democrat minister has claimed. Transport Minister Norman Baker said drivers should be hit with big increases in parking charges so they are ‘disincentivised’ from parking near high street shops. He renewed the Lib Dems’ war on motorists at a fringe meeting at his party’s conference in Glasgow. Mr Baker admitted that higher parking charges could ‘damage town centres’ but he then claimed that pushing people onto public transport and bicycles would help revive the high street. He told the meeting hosted by the CentreForum think tank: ‘I was in Southern Germany for a holiday a few years ago. 'I forget which town it was, but there were no cars in the centre at all. ‘The place was heaving with people spending money - and every single s...

Yesterday, Vince Cable delivered a speech at the Liberal Party Conference which for sheer bile was without precedent in modern times. No Cabinet minister has ever attacked the Government of which he is part in such vitriolic terms. The wonder is that the dyspeptic Business Secretary should wish to remain a member of a Government dominated by a Tory party that he asserted has ‘reverted to type as the nasty party’, and which, according to him, practises ‘ugly’ policies based on the calculation that ‘fear trumps hope’.  Mr Cable has regularly used Lib Dem conferences to lash the ‘hated’ Tories. But this speech went much further than the usual crowd-pleasing rant. It was a despicable assault on colleagues and on the Coalition’s record, delivered in tones of insufferable moral superiority. Yesterday, Vince Cable delivered a speech which for sheer bile was without precedent in modern times. No Cabinet minister has ever attacked the Government of which he is part in such...

Gunman: According to NBC Washington, this man Aaron Alexis, 34, from Fort Worth, Texas is the Navy Yard shooter. A background check has revealed that this is the police mugshot for Alexis who was arrested but not charged for firing a gun in his apartment in 2010 The Washington Navy Yard gunman who killed 12 today has previously claimed to be suffering from PTSD after helping rescue efforts in New York following the 9/11 terror attacks. Gunman Aaron Alexis was shot dead by responding officers after he opened fire inside a Navy facility around 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Since he was identified as the shooter, reports have revealed that it was not the first time he was involved in a shooting. In 2004, he was arrested in Seattle for shooting the tires of a construction worker's car during what he later called an anger-fueled 'blackout.' 'He said that he didn’t remember pulling the trigger of his firearm until about one hour later,' according to the Sea...