SOME 200 service users and staff marched in Manchester on Saturday in protest at over £2 million of cuts in Manchester's mental health budget.
BEING TOLD they had to work Sundays was the last straw for journalists at OK! magazine. Last week they decided to form a union chapel. Over half the workforce at OK! joined the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).
SATURDAY SAW dozens of people meet to collect signatures for an open letter against racist attacks on Llanelli mosque (full story on page 2). Mohammed Ashraf collapsed and died within minutes of the attack. The petitioners included Quakers, the Welsh Socialist Alliance and the Anti Nazi League, among others.
THE DUMAN family are continuing their campaign against deportation with a national petition. Mr and Mrs Duman and their children-Mazlum, Nazim, Ali and Inan-are a Kurdish family who came to Britain in 1999.
UP TO 15,000 firefighters marched through London on Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday 50,000 council workers across the capital were to strike. And on Monday almost one million council workers across Britain started voting on strikes. All these fights focus on one issue-the miserable level of pay many public sector workers get.
"On TV the old generals talk of first strike and second strike capability as though they're discussing a family board game. My friends and I discuss Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead bodies choking the river, the living stripped of their skin."
PRIVATE NURSING home owners had the nerve to complain last week that they are being driven out of business. The Registered Nursing Homes Association said that owners were forced to close homes because of government regulations and lack of funding. But many of them have hiked up fees for residents.
ONE IN five callers to the government's NHS Direct phone line have to wait longer than half an hour to speak to a qualified nurse. The government wants to massively expand NHS Direct, including taking non-emergency calls off underfunded ambulance services and all out of hours calls to GPs.
Cut-offs at centre SOME 18,000 jobs have been slashed in call centres across Britain over the last year, according to a new survey. The consultants Mitial say that 200 call centres have shut over the last year due to a programme of rationalisation and mergers. They say the number of jobs in call centres is set to halve over the next five years.
OVER 1.2 billion people in India and Pakistan are living under the shadow of all-out war between the two nuclear-armed states. An outbreak of full scale fighting would be catastrophic. Yet the threat remains, despite attempts at getting talks between the two regimes.
THE NUMBER of pupils expelled from school is rising for the first time in five years. Education secretary Estelle Morris says she is "relaxed" about it. The same Morris claims to be so concerned to keep children in school that she is pleased to see parents of truanting children sent to prison. The hypocrisy is staggering. Government policies are overwhelmingly responsible for both truancy and permanent exclusions (expulsions).
Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the Mirror newspaper, offered 'the sincerest of apologies' to National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill for the lies the paper told during a six-month campaign in 1990. It falsely accused him of corruption during the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85
