News round-up: ‘Heroin clinics would help few addicts’

Heroin clinics would help few addicts, says agency head

Only a “very small proportion” of the 160,000 heroin addicts in treatment would benefit from a scheme providing them with the drug in supervised clinics, the head of the government’s drug treatment service said today.

Paul Hayes, of the National Treatment Agency, said three government-funded clinical trials had produced encouraging results, but involved only chronic long-term addicts who had failed to respond to other treatments.

Read more on this in The Guardian

UK economy ‘lurching back to the 1970s’, warns think-tank

Britain is facing the tightest squeeze in public spending since the 1970s, after leaked Treasury documents showed a major deterioration in the nation’s public finances, the Institute for Fiscal Studies will warn tomorrow.

In a blow to Gordon Brown days after he relaunched his premiership by finally admitting that spending would have to be cut, the IFS will confirm Tory warnings that the last budget in April failed to reveal the depth of the public finance crisis.

Read more on this story in The Guardian

Scotland’s frontline workers hit hardest by jobless rise

Teachers have borne the brunt of job cuts in the Scottish public sector, while the number of civil servants continues to rise, new unemployment figures reveal.

The Scottish government’s latest unemployment statistics show that there has been a sharp increase in the number of jobless, with the heaviest cuts falling on frontline services in local government — principally teachers and social services.
Read more on this story in The Times

Internet gambling ‘can be 10 times more addictive than other forms’

Researchers discovered that while only 0.5 per cent of people who gambled offline could be considered to have a problem, five per cent of those who used the internet were addicted.

It also found that internet gamblers were more likely to be single, male, young and to drink and smoke more than they should.

Read more on this in The Telegraph

Flat pest Mary, 98, is facing eviction

Neighbour from hell Mary Plaisted is to be kicked out of her council home – at 98.

Grey-haired Mary, who walks with sticks, is thought to be the oldest in Britain to be evicted for anti-social behaviour.

Read more on this in The Sun

Attorney General ‘hired illegal immigrant’

A member of the Attorney General’s staff has been sacked amid allegations she was an illegal immigrant.

The woman, Loloahi Tapui, from Tonga, worked as a cleaner at Baroness Scotland’s family home in west London. Lady Scotland’s office said Ms Tapui had been dismissed after being made aware the Daily Mail was about to make her status public.

Read more on this in The Independent