News round-up: Tory councils start new wave of care privatisation

Councils poised to hand running of care and education to private firms
Local services face a new wave of privatisation across England as a Conservative council leads moves to put contracts worth billions of pounds out to private tender.

Read this story in The Times

Pay deal means more jobs cuts
Local government staff were warned of more job cuts last night, after council chiefs were told to pay £94 million to help to end a long pay dispute.

Read this story in The Times

Growth in violence against women feared as recession hits
A government booklet offering advice to women on how to deal with recession-related domestic violence and discrimination from employers will be issued today, reflecting concern that women are to be worst hit by the economic crisis.

Read this story in The Guardian

Website to allow public to see local criminals
Members of the public will soon be able to type their postcode into a criminal justice website and find out who the convicted criminals are in their neighbourhood, the home secretary indicated yesterday.

Read this story in The Guardian

EU fights huge increase in web child abuse
The number of child sex abuse websites in Europe has soared and the violence shown has become more extreme, the European commission and Europol, the European police agency, warned yesterday.

Read this story in The Guardian

The numbers game
Penny Newman, the new chief executive of Jamie Olivers Fifteen, tells Annie Kelly that profit should not be a dirty word for social enterprises and explains why such businesses may be best-placed to weather the recession

Read this story in The Guardian

Mercy mission
A Manchester institution to help the poor is still as necessary now as it was at its inception 140 years ago

Read this story in The Guardian

Foster rapist bosses refuse to quit
Officials in charge of sending a known sex offender to live with an unsuspecting foster family — whose children he then attacked — refused to quit last night.

Read this story in The Sun

Doctors are giving elderly patients prescriptions which are not required
Millions of healthy older people are being prescribed pills that they don’t need, claims a top doctor.

Read this story in The Daily Mail