ON SUNDAY 7 September about 400 people attended a demilitarisation rally held at Forkhill British Army Barracks in South Armagh. The rally was lead by a large group of youths carrying posters and dressed in white boiler suits - highlighting local fears regarding radiation and micro-wave emissions, emanating from sophisticated surveillance equipment used locally by the British Army. Free article

MANU CHAO and Basque musician Fermin Muguruza played a great gig in Dublin on 20 August last. However, both musicians decided to cancel their gigs in the Spanish State after some politicians from the governing party in Spain, the conservative and post-Francoist Popular Party, together with an association in support of the victims of ETA attacks, claimed Fermin Muguruza was a Basque separatism supporter and militant in the now illegal party Batasuna. Free article

AN HISTORIC EVENT to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1983 H Block escape is to be held in the Holiday Inn in Letterkenny, County Donegal, on Friday night 19 September. Free article

AGRICULTURE MINISTER Joe Walsh leads the Dublin Government delegation at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks, which began in Cancun, Mexico yesterday. With him are, no doubt, the lobby documents from Irish employers and farming groups. Employers want more deregulation and access to markets, while farming groups want no more cuts in the amount of agricultural subsidies they receive. Free article

THE ACTIVITIES OF the PSNI's Special Branch are once again under the spotlight, after it emerged in court that a counselling psychiatrist was blacklisted because Special Branch passed on false information about her. Free article

SECTARIANISM isn't experienced in the soundbite of distinct events. For the northern nationalist, the current pogrom against Catholic families living in a mixed area of North Belfast, the failure of the PSNI to protect them, the continuing wrangle within the Ulster Unionist Party and the imposition of the new International Monitoring Body are all aspects of the same reality. Free article

A CATHOLIC MAN was left for dead after being struck on the head with a hatchet by a gang of Shankill Road loyalists, as he walked home along Carrick Hill in the early hours of Sunday morning 7 September. Free article

SINN FÉIN is calling on Kildare Council to revoke an invitation sent to Lisburn Council to participate in a sporting event in October because of the council's policy of discrimination against the representatives of the Nationalist community in the borough. Free article

"AN ASSAULT on the weakest and most vulnerable in society'' was how Sinn Féin's Seán Crowe described a Dublin Government decision to cut childcare assistance for people on the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme (VTOS), just days before the courses were due to start. Free article

THE QUALITY HOTEL recently converted all their coffee and tea orders to Fair Trade (FT( brands, effectively paving the way for Clonakilty to be declared as Ireland's First Official Fair Trade Town. Free article