"It is a fact that 70 per cent of the money we spend is on pay and so we can't afford not to make savings on our pay costs," Tony Waite, director of finance for the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, tells the Pontefract & Castleford Express.

New hospitals are being built at Pontefract and Pinderfields under a £311m PFI scheme and there are, as Unison branch secretary Mike Griffiths says, going to be severe cutbacks in staff numbers to pay for it.

A Pricewaterhouse-Coopers report released under the Freedom of Information Act predicts the Trust is likely to struggle to maintain financial balance, recoup its £63.4m deficit or repay any loans until 2012-13.

It suggests a number of savings options including centralising accident and emergency services at Pinderfields and moving children's services to create a children's hospital on one site.(cont)

The responses to the withdrawal of proposals to site and develop a sports stadium in Thornes Park have been mixed. Some are jubilant that the Park has been saved; others are angry at the loss of an amenity that would have benefited them above other ratepayers.

My own view was set out in previous local elections, when I said that the Park was not the proper place for this type of stadium, and that there were (and are) other, better sites to develop.

It seems we have been side-tracked by a Labour preference for easy financial deals, which have now turned sour.The money markets are in disarray, easy borrowing is no longer an option (and rightly so.)(cont)

"Normally we would all be complaining about the rain - now every time the heavens open all we can see are kilowatts of electricity falling out of the sky," says one of the founders of community hydro scheme, Settle Hydro.

Similar small-scale projects, including one at Kirkthorpe Weir, have been or are being considered around the country as a way of providing revenue and reducing carbon emissions.

Settle community groups have set themselves up as an "industrial and provident society" to build and operate a 50kw plant on the town's weir that will generate 184,000kwh of green, renewable electricity a year, enough to power around 50 houses.(cont)

Criticism of the set of economic attitudes that is failing the world, condemning it to insecurity and inequality, can be found across the political spectrum. In its mildest paternalist conservative form, it is a recognition that the laissez faire approach has undermined society, and that the attempt to impose it around the world has made it a more dangerous place.

More liberal critics have attacked the practices of the big corporations, low pay and appalling working conditions, the sacrificing of safety to profit in the production of everything from cars unfit for the road to heart valves that explode and kill their unfortunate recipients, and called for solidarity, as well as for more intervention and regulation.

While greens have pointed to the damage done to planet and people in the pursuit of economic growth, argued for more local economies, taxation of the making of money from money, reform of the banking system, and a citizens income. There is clearly an alternative to the chaos and violence unleashed on the world by the economics of the Washington Consensus.(cont)

Government spin doctors and the nuclear industry have been working overtime to repackage nuclear power as a green solution to climate change. They want to build new nuclear power stations, but they know we won't want them if we know the reality - nuclear power is dirty and dangerous and not the answer to climate change.

Even if we doubled the amount of nuclear power in the UK there would only be an 8% reduction in greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is neither carbon emission free nor would new power stations come on stream for at least ten years.

The use of nuclear power threatens the environment and people's health. No safe solution has yet been devised to store its carcinogenic toxic radioactive waste, some of which is dangerous for thousands of years. It also leaves us vulnerable to the possibility of nuclear accidents or even terrorist attack.(cont)

Green Party members are now voting for the party's first Leader and Deputy Leader.

The election will run until Friday 5th September, when hustings will be held at the Green Party's autumn conference in London. The final ballot papers will be collected and counted that evening.

The announcement of the result will take place on Saturday 6th September, and will be followed by the new Leader's first speech to the party.(cont)

The Green Party is an environmental party. It sees a world in environmental crisis, and especially climate change, as the major political issue facing us all today. The environment is not just another issue to be added to ordinary politics - humans are part of the environment, if it goes down the pan, we all go with it.

But the Green Party is not only an environmental party. It sees the main cause of environmental crisis as being the way businesses and governments treat everything on the planet (including human beings) as things to be exploited for profit.

All Green Party policies mean major changes in politics and economics. Anything less won't do. Piecemeal reforms may make things better for some people in some areas (often the richest people in the richest countries) It is far too easy for businesses to move themselves around the world where labour is cheaper and regulations on workers' rights and pollution are weakest.(cont)

It's coming up to a year now since Sophie Lancaster was kicked to death and her boyfriend beaten into a coma just for being different.

Sophie was a goth killed for being a goth. Last August at the age of 20, she and her boyfriend Robert Maltby were set upon one Friday night as they walked through the park in their home town of Bacup, Lancashire.

They were stopped and momentarily engaged in converstaion by a group of teenagers before a vicious kick from nowhere felled Robert. Sophie tried to stop them raining more kicks and punches by cradling him in her arms.(cont)