‘For the past ten years I’ve been a police response officer. A colleague, summing up our lives, recently wrote: “Last week I was hit, spat at and punched. There wasn't one day that I ate my lunch. I held a man's hand who had just lost his wife. I took a child from his father who was wielding a knife. I pulled a girl who was mentally ill off a bridge. I locked up a worker who had nicked from the till. I persuaded a battered woman finally to speak - after seeing her every day, week after week. This is our job and we are all proud to do it.” We are proud. And that’s why we work earlies, lates and night shifts. But I want to challenge a policy that puts the public and the police at risk. It’s called “single crewing” and it means that officers like me are sent out on jobs alone and face being attacked. Our team of 24 will have three double-crewed cars during most shifts: the rest of us will be on our own. That’s why I’ve started a petition calling on Amber Rudd to stop this.’

There are reports of a change of tone between the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin; however, at present the prospect of a Northern Ireland executive and assembly being re-established remains elusive. The secretary of state has warned that Northern Ireland is on a glide path to the British government stepping in. While ‘stepping in’ remains vague enough to hold off direct rule by British ministers for now, options are running out. Further rounds of budgets will need to be signed off, and key decisions around health, education and capital investment cannot be postponed indefinitely. It is nearly nine months since the executive was brought down.

Rachel's daughter was raped by a boy at her school. He was arrested, bailed, and put back into lessons, alongside his victim, the following day. ‘A rape victim is already in a terrible place, but to be expected to be back in the same space as the rapist is terrible,’ Rachel said. The Government is writing interim guidelines for schools to prevent such things happening, but campaigners say it is taking too long. Rachel said that the school seemed to have no policy in place, and dealt with the situation ‘extremely badly’. She had to instigate a meeting and, despite her efforts, they did not prioritise her daughter's needs but were keen to protect her assailant’s rights to education. Over 5,500 sex crimes in UK schools were reported in the last three years, including nearly 4,000 physical assaults and 600+ rapes. See

Catalonia's drive to separate from Spain is rekindling dreams of independence in ethnic pockets across the Balkans - a dangerous ambition in a region where nationalist violence claimed tens of thousands of lives in the 1990s. Among ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia and the Serbs of Republika Srpska, in the wake of the ‘banned’ Catalan referendum, separatist leaders are asking the same question: ‘Why don't we do the same?’ On the election day, graffiti of Catalan flags appeared several towns in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, along with the claim that ‘Vojvodina = Catalonia’. Meanwhile, in the southern Bosnian town of Mostar, a giant banner appeared near the cathedral showing the flags of Catalonia and Herceg-Bosna, the self-styled Croat entity, reading ‘Good luck. We are the next.’ Local media are saying, ‘The fact that one region (Kosovo) managed to secure independence has emboldened many like-minded leaders in the region’.