The fact that she is legally detained means that the problem is serious enough for medical experts to believe she is a danger to herself or others. It does not mean she has given permission for all her legal rights to privacy to be taken away from her and neither has the law done that. Yet that is what our media seems to believe.

As someone who worked in the field of mental health for nearly twenty years I got fed up of reading derogatory comments about people with mental health problems. How would you like the idea of press photographers jostling up against you taking photos of you when you are feeling and looking at your worst?

Britney is someone who has sold herself on her good looks for a lot of years. She will now be looking in a mirror and see her sunken eyes and her face looking all creased - how do you think she feels about that? And everywhere she turns there is yet another camera flashing in her face!

Why do people going through what could  possibly be the part of their life so far have to be attacked and criticised in the press?  Does it really matter whether she brought it upon herself by abusing drugs and alcohol?

The fact is that this a person who went through some major stresses shooting to fame and fortune at an age when she no experience of how to cope with the changes pushed on her by record companies, managers, TV producers and newspapers trying to come up with some new scandal. Did anyone go looking for stories that would give her praise?

When people say that statements made by evangelical Christians about our God are offensive to people of other faiths and/or no faith. Locally our city council have stopped refering officially to the Christmas holiday period and renamed it "Winter Festival" so as not to offend some people.

The fact that many of the lights strung up across the high street showed wise men on camels and or a star over a manager in Bethlehem was officially not connected with any Christian festival concerning a birth of a young baby. Those fancy lights were to commemorate a winter time festival that just happens by sheer co-incidence to occur at Christmas-time.

Have our city officials gone mad? Or is it another way of throwing out the baby Jesus in favour of being able to be totally commercial and encourage us to do nothing connected with our church beliefs and just spend, spend, spend in the big department stores?

A short time ago there was a debate about our Equality Acts which outlawed any discrimination against other people in particular races, genders and disabled people. Quite right too in my view but where do you draw the line? Recently there was discussion started by our national politicians that a new Act would bring the various different Acts of Parliament (laws) together into one overall Law covering all groups.

However the new Act was to be broader and introduce a new offence which would outlaw discussions which hit at a particular groups of people. Nothing wrong in that one might think! But what would it mean in our church meetings would we have to censor the bits of the Bible we could use and miss out those chunks that said that some practices were wrong. For example I can imagine the immediate outcry that would come as soon as any Church minister said that homosexual practices was not in line with God’s will. Will that lead to Christians in our so called "Christian country" being sent to prison for reading the Bible aloud?

Our Christian beliefs are based on biblical truths written over several thousand years ago (they were first written about in The Old Testament thousands of years before the birth of Jesus) would be made illegal if we speak about them. So we would be able to speak about some of the ten commandments for example we could say thou shalt not steal or kill but what about some of the others about worshipping only the one true God.

If we do not speak out and defend our faith now will the right to believe statements set out in our Bible be taken away from us one by one.

If we do not do something to protect our beliefs today will there be anyone left to support us when our society totally collapses and the "thought police" come after us tomorrow.
 

Apparently in the next few days they are launching a new campaign to make employees aware of the problem with DVDs and other educational tools to make staff think about the issue and help stamp it out. 

Reading that report made me want to cry and laugh at the same time.

My mind went back ten years and writing my chapter for the book Whistleblowing in the Social Services on the subject of "Acquiescence in Wrongdoing" ISBN 0 340 65245 4. I had included an extract from a survey done by the Audit Commission (a government body charged with auditing what is happening in our public bodies) that had been published four years earlier (in 1994) showing we were losing about 6 million pounds (approx 12 million dollars) a year. This did not include the laptops etc that walked out in the arms of employees and visitors and never returned. If the Audit commission had said we had a serious problem in 1994 why it take 14 years for our government to take action? 

(Oh I remember now.  Some of our government ministers are currently under investigation for financial mistakes in the election campaigns so they need to deflect the newspaper headlines.  Or is this just me being too cynical?)

That same report also said the commission had surveyed the Heads of Internal Audits in the various health boards and one of every five of them had said they feared they would lose their job if they reported all the weaknesses in the system that they knew about to the NHS Board of Directors. The very people employed to protect our finances against fraud were afraid to speak out. What is our country coming to? Sorry what has our country already come to?

In 1995 Mike Probert Lewis from the Institute of Internal Auditors wrote "Blowing the whistle is the short way to put yourself on the long term unemployment register".

I know I did it!

We need people to stand up and be counted when it comes to fraud and theft. Nowadays someone who is putting in false mileage claims etc is referred to as "fiddling their expenses" and most people would turn a blind eye to it. Yet if we call it by its true name THEFT we would stand accused of not just turning a blind eye but "aiding and abetting in a serious crime".