Regarding the above story, one can't help wondering how many non-workless people have zero hour contracts or whether the increased social housing costs have simply meant more people living in the same household together?

Agency: So I got this offer to work for a company (where the location was supposed to be in Birmingham but ended up in their other office in North Yorkshire), considered it and then accepted it. On Friday, I notified all the other agencies I was in the job seeking process with, including this agency where I'd had a telephone interview for a job and had a real interview scheduled for this week. Got 3 phonecalls on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning from the agent for the last role trying to pressure me into revoking my agreement to work for $newCo or at least going to the actual interview whether I was going to take the job or not. After that had my phone screen calls from unknown numbers.

Syria: Normally I'm in favour of intervening with some reservations. I accept that we had a good reason to go into Afghanistan, and think that driving all over Iraq was simply something that should have happened in Gulf War I, and was simply long overdue, and I care whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction about as much as I care which direction the Belgrano was facing when it got torpedoed. I accept with Iraq and Afghanistan we made mistakes, but it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. But with Syria I really can't see what the end objective is and can't see any point whatsoever. None of the combatants appear to be in favour of democracy or "Western values" (and my opinion of those has become increasingly jaded), and quite honestly I think the West was wrong to encourage a civil war in Syria that has no end in sight.