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How long to reign over us? Our headteacher called us all into the school hall one day and said she had something very grave to announce. King George VI had died. The whole nation was placed in mourning. Most people felt a high degree of reverence towards the monarchy, and as a mark of respect people didn't go out in the evenings.

Blowing the horn for refugees SOME 80 campaigners protested outside Dover Young Offenders Institution on Monday of last week. This was the day it was taken over by the Immigration Service to become Dover Removals Centre.

New Labour is having problems getting its campaign for the 2 May local elections up and running. "Going knocking on doors for the Labour Party is not a popular activity at the moment," said one Labour MP.

HOSPITAL BOSSES in South Durham crumbled in the face of a threatened three-day strike by medical secretaries last week. Bosses gave in to the women workers' demand for regrading. Workers accepted the deal at a mass meeting on Friday of last week. This is the second NHS trust to back down.

THERE IS a very simple reason why Arabs and Jews have been unable to live in peace together for the past 100 years, and it is summed up in the phrase "the Iron Wall". The Iron Wall is the title of Professor Avi Shlaim's exhaustive and brilliant history of Zionism. Jabotinsky, a right wing Zionist leader and fan of the Italian fascist Mussolini, coined the phrase in the 1920s.

WORKERS AGAIN halted flights out of Manchester airport on Friday of last week when they began a 24-hour strike over pay and conditions. This was the latest in a series of strikes by 350 security workers at the airport against plans to introduce new security contracts that cut workers' wages and conditions.

Yasser Arafat's story mirrors that of the Palestinian people. He was born in 1929 into a middle class Palestinian family and spent his early years in Jerusalem which, like the rest of Palestine, was then under British rule. Jews and Arabs had long lived in Palestine, but tensions were increasing as the Zionist movement, which wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine, grew in strength.

A NATIONAL lobby of parliament by around 1,000 post workers was scheduled to take place this week. It came as heated arguments split the union's leadership over the response to the Post Office's announcement of mass job losses. The CWU union's top leaders support a deal to accept up to 30,000 job cuts as long as they are "voluntary".

LEADERS ACROSS the Middle East are terrified that Israel's war on the Palestinians will provoke wide scale revolt. Representatives from Egypt and Jordan have pleaded with Bush to help them quell unrest by appearing to check Sharon's excesses. Anne Adams has just visited Egypt. She says the Arab rulers are right to be fearful of the pro-Palestinian movement.

"WE ASKED them nicely for a living wage and they replied with a big stick. We've got to take that stick off them and beat them with it." That's how young journalists on the newspapers in Greater Manchester owned by the Guardian Media Group described their decision to hold three two-day strikes over pay and derecognition.

EVERYONE IS wondering what will happen next in Argentina. It is a country where everybody is talking politics. Fifteen weeks ago a popular uprising overthrew the president, De la Rua. His successor was forced from office a week later. Since then the country has been run by a coalition of the two traditionally powerful parties, the Peronists and the Radicals. The coalition is presided over by the Peronist Duhalde. But this has not brought stability. Argentina has been hit by an economic crisis not experienced by any industrial country since the 1930s.

Domestics and porters at Glasgow Royal Infirmary won a swift and important victory on Tuesday of last week over the multinational company Sodexho. Some 120 workers, members of the Unison union, walked out in a mass unofficial protest.