Alex Higgins was the most dazzling player snooker has ever seen, but he never learned to play the celebrity game. After he’d won the world championship for the second time in 1982, the media and the sports establishment wanted to confer on him the glamour that was now deemed his entitlement.
Last weekend saw thousands of trade union activists, students, workers and their families arrive in Tolpuddle, Dorset to celebrate and remember the Tolpuddle Martyrs fight over 175 years ago.
Four nights of rioting in Northern Ireland saw much media talk of "men of violence" orchestrating trouble.
"I would like to have, erm, a psychiatrist, psychologist, have a word with me regularly, on a regular basis… Why don’t we just have a psychiatrist sit me down and say: ‘Right, OK, I want to see you regularly, then we can move towards where your areas of fault are’."
Millions of people who rent their homes from councils, housing associations or private landlords depend on housing benefit or Local Housing Allowance (LHA) to keep a roof over their heads. Now the government plans to attack these benefits.
Cuts in housing benefit set out in the Budget will make the poorest pay for the housing crisis. Unaffordable housing costs are the problem not the level of housing benefit. We calls on the Coalition Government to withdraw these proposals and increase the supply of council and other secure affordable rented homes.
The tory justice secretary Kenneth Clarke last week sent right wing politicians into fits of rage with his plans to reduce the prison population.
The British media took the opportunity to take us back to the Cold War era when the US arrested 11 Russian spies last week.
An article written in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper last weekend pushed the idea that ethnicity and crime are linked.
Multinational oil companies have recently been found responsible for an entirely preventable disaster. But this wasn’t BP polluting the Mexican Gulf, it was the Buncefield oil depot explosion on the outskirts of London in 2005.
If David Cameron seriously believed that slaughtering unarmed civilians is wrong, he would cancel the imminent deployment of the Parachute Regiment to Afghanistan, where in the past year, around 2,000 civilians have been killed by US and British troops.
Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla – an atrocity which saw nine unarmed aid workers killed – occurred during the lecturers’ UCU annual conference.
