Dwjvk

"Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?"

So declared millionaire George Osborne to last year's Tory conference.

Not, of course, that the Chancellor gives a damn for the shift worker any more than the unemployed, pensioners, sick or disabled.

Osborne was playing to a cynical Con-Dem media tune of divide and rule designed to dampen opposition to their multibillion-pound welfare cuts.

It is a tactic inspired by notorious spin doctor Lynton Crosby, whose "wedge" strategy to demean the jobless and migrants helped Australia's vicious Liberals rule for 11 years.

This weekend the tragic story of Stephanie Bottrill, 53, exposes the hideous reality of Tory policy, and the blood-drenched bankruptcy of the spin.

She was one of those who slept in the dark hours of the early morning as shift workers left home. She received housing benefits.

----

She could not work because of the debilitating auto-immune system condition myasthenia gravis. She required constant medication.

Hers was a meagre existence on a Solihull estate. At least she had her family nearby, and a garden to tend at her home of 18 years. At least, that was, until the Con-Dems' bedroom tax bombshell.

Her son Steven and daughter Laura had moved from her three-bedroom home to start lives of their own.

Stephanie received an impossible ultimatum - find £80 a month if you want to stay in your house.

The council hadn't yet been able to find her a home, but she had already packed up her belongings into cardboard boxes in anticipation of the day the bailiffs came knocking.

She spent her last days on Earth living in confusion and anguish. She didn't eat.

Stephanie's final words to her son Steven were written on simple notepaper in blue ballpoint pen.

"Don't blame yourself for me ending my life. It's my life. The only people to blame are the government. No-one else."

She walked quietly to the nearby motorway and stepped out in front of oncoming traffic.

----

Three days earlier Stephanie had phoned her son, a hard-working HGV driver, to say she could no longer cope.

Her suicide on the M6 is an unspeakable tragedy of the kind that the Star and campaigners across Britain have long warned.

Faced with these warnings senior Tories, comfortable in their opulent lifestyles and blinded by hate, have pooh-poohed as they plough on with their media-assisted assault on supposed benefits "scroungers."

The same papers who have acted as cheerleaders in the vilification of all welfare claimants now cry crocodile tears at the fruits of their labour.

In a decent society Stephanie's death, over a £1,040-a-year bill, would put a halt to this wrecking-ball attack on ordinary people. In a decent society it would never have happened in the first place.

But for the shameless, shameful scumbags in power, Stephanie was just another worthless scrounger.

Her suicide must be a wake-up call to all those who believe in a better Britain, and to all those who have been bewitched by Tory slander.

Let her name serve as a watchword of resistance to end this era of free-market depravity and fear.

is it ok to batter your bird if they have attacked you first? your thoughts please ( northerners in particular could help me here)

after watching these pathetic moron footballers roll around on the floor and cry when they get touched reminding me of girls, i was amazed to hear about the rugby league player who played on after suffering a horrific injury in which his right testicle was ruptured. even when he was eventually substituted he spent the rest of the match watching and hoping to come back on, only after the game did he go to hospital where the testicle was removed.

now if that doesnt put you off football i dont know what will, so i say all real men should move to supporting real mans sports like rugby boxing rowing etc

leave the football for the little girls, when noone is watching anymore then i doubt people will want to pay fat northern thickos like rooney 200 grand a week, while the rest of the country lives in poverty

Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement that his Likud party will run a joint campaign alongside the Yisrael Beitenu outfit of his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in January's election indicates the trajectory of Israeli politics.

Netanyahu believes that the Likud Beitenu coalition would "strengthen the government, it will strengthen the prime minister and it will strengthen the country."

Lieberman has repeatedly demanded the "removal" of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he calls an "obstacle to peace."

This is because Abbas has petitioned the United Nations directly for international recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in response to decades of refusal by successive Israeli governments to take seriously the question of a two-state solution.

Israeli leaders demand bilateral talks "without conditions," which means no freeze on Tel Aviv's colonisation of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem.

Abbas's position among Palestinians has slipped in response to his erstwhile subservience to US rules concerning the peace process, which lay down immediate Palestinian acquiescence to Israel's demands while deferring consideration of key issues such as the status of Jerusalem and eventual state borders to the final stage of negotiations.

----

These demands include the notion that Palestinians recognise Israel as a "democratic Jewish state," which would institutionalise the current reality of 20 per cent of the state's citizens being at best second-class citizens.

Separation and demonisation of Israel's Arab citizens and Palestinians in the occupied territories has already created an apartheid-style situation, with acutely racist public attitudes to match it.

Lieberman has succeeded in taking his party from a fringe group to Israel's third largest on the strength of demands that Arab members of the Knesset should be executed for speaking to Hamas and that members of the Arab minority should have to swear an oath of allegiance to Israel, specifically as a Jewish state.

These racially discriminatory attitudes are now widely replicated among Israel's Jewish majority, as shown by a Yisraela Goldblum Fund inquiry carried out by pollsters Dialog.

A third of respondents would deny Arab citizens the right to vote, two-thirds would ban West Bank Palestinians from voting if Israel annexes it, three-quarters support Jews-only roads, about half would deport the 20 per cent Arab minority and, perhaps most surprising, over half recognise and accept Israel as an apartheid state.

----

Add to this a previous poll by Israel Democracy Index which revealed in May that 52 per cent backed Interior Minister Eli Yishai's slur that Africans, 60,000 of whom have fled war zones to seek sanctuary in Israel, are "a cancer on the body" of the country.

That is the background to last week's European Parliament decision, opposed by Labour and Plaid Cymru MEPs, to support an upgrade to EU-Israel trade in the sphere of pharmaceuticals.

It coincided with an appalling speech by David Cameron at a United Jewish Israel Appeal dinner in which he claimed support for Israel is in the DNA of people in Britain.

He lectured President Abbas that "there is no path to statehood except through talks with Israel," ignoring Tel Aviv's systematic frustration of this goal.

His speech could have been taken from any Establishment politician's offering on South Africa in the 1970s as the apartheid state lashed out against its own citizens and neighbouring countries.

Cameron's apology for apartheid will in time be as discredited and unmemorable as those uttered by his hero Margaret Thatcher and other reactionaries.

a police constable amassed a collection of 649 rare birds eggsby stealing from nests, often while on duty for suffolk police, a court has heard.

MICHAEL UPSON , 52, travelled across the uk to collect eggs, but most were taken from areas near his home in HALESWORTH, norwichhaving the eggs in his possession, magistrates court has heard.

UPSON admitted having the eggs in his possesion, contrary to the wildlife and countryside act 1981.

UPSON who has since conveniently retired on full massive police pension (at 52!!!!!) is due to be sentenced on thursday.

how do you all feeel about this grotesque piece of sewerage stealing eggs from endangered rare birds, whilst on duty and being paid very very well for his crimes, also enjoying a huge pension aged 52 ahhhhh who says crime doesnt pay????

a police constable amassed a collection of 649 rare birds eggsby stealing from nests, often while on duty for suffolk police, a court has heard.

MICHAEL UPSON , 52, travelled across the uk to collect eggs, but most were taken from areas near his home in HALESWORTH, norwichhaving the eggs in his possession, magistrates court has heard.

UPSON admitted having the eggs in his possesion, contrary to the wildlife and countryside act 1981.

UPSON who has since conveniently retired on full massive police pension (at 52!!!!!) is due to be sentenced on thursday.

how do you all feeel about this grotesque piece of sewerage stealing eggs from endangered rare birds, whilst on duty and being paid very very well for his crimes, also enjoying a huge pension aged 52 ahhhhh who says crime doesnt pay????