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A new production of the 1960s anti-war musical Hair has come to London after taking New York’s Broadway by storm.

Over three quarters of cabin crew earn less than £20,000 a year (less than the average London wage).Many rely on tax credits or second jobs to survive.Cabin crew wages fell by over 4 percent in real terms between 2001 and 2008.BA cabin crew earn more than some crew at other airlines. It is right to fight to level wages up, not down.Cabin crew saved a man’s life in New York last week by applying emergency medical treatment. BA wants to put scabs on planes with only a few days’ training which will risk lives.

Edie Falco, known to most of us as Carmela in the Sopranos, plays New York nurse Jackie Peyton – a woman attempting to juggle work, relationships and children, and who is constantly finding herself at risk of dropping one of the balls.

On 24 November 1909, over 20,000 garment workers walked out of hundreds of workshops in New York. This strike has become known as the "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand".

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) rips through the heart of two of New York's finest boroughs.

The media have been gloating about the plight of the left in the wake of the German federal elections a fortnight ago. "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of socialism’s slow collapse", announced the New York Times last week.

Letters

While New York at the end of the 1960s was a city electrified by political dissent, riots and cultural fusion, many second generation Peurto Ricans, like Bobby Marin, were busy combining an impromptu version of baseball with street corner crooning.

In an out of court settlement oil multinational Shell has paid £9.5 million to the family of Nigerian author and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The family had taken the company to court in New York, accusing it of complicity in the execution of Saro-Wiwa in 1995.

About 40 years ago, an ageing relative gave me a leaflet from 1925. Under the heading "Lenin Lives!" it urged us to "come en masse" to New York’s Madison Square Garden for a Sunday afternoon event.

The ageing and ill Nathan Zuckerman, the acclaimed US writer Philip Roth’s alter-ego, returns to New York in November 2004, just before George Bush’s re-election.

Mad Men is a fascinating look at the changing social and cultural face of the US in the 1960s through the prism of an advertising agency in New York.