Forty-one per cent said they did not have enough time to fulfil their domestic and professional tasks satisfactorily, while 31 per cent said the Government should help by providing state-sponsored nurseries for working mothers. FAR FROM being the hopeless romantics of fiction, women are a cynical lot who believe that tax breaks are a good reason for getting married. There is no time to build emotional intelligence – it is all focused on the three Rs.”By changing social attitudes to children, many of the risks to their mental health could be reduced. But for those children who succumbed to the pressures and showed signs of failing to progress at school or found it difficult to make friends, early intervention was needed in the form of treatment, counselling, peer support or specific initiatives such as anti-bullying programmes.”A fundamental shift in society is needed to accept that `mental’ health can be a positive as well as a negative state,” Ms McKerrow said..

For primary school children, playing with their peers was an important part of their development, but this is under threat, she said.”Teachers say they have had to cut the playtime of five-year- olds by up to half and drop singing lessons in order to make more time for arithmetic. The pressures on them to achieve are enormous but too little is done to help them to build the resilience they need to cope when things go wrong. “Huge sums [are invested] in our children’s intellectual abilities and there can be no reason for not investing in their mental health and emotional intelligence,” the report says.Although welcoming recent government initiatives on children and the family the report warns that they “still pussyfoot around the fundamental fact that the root cause of so much dysfunction in individuals, in families, in schools, and in society as a whole is poor mental and emotional health.”June McKerrow, director of the foundation, said risk-taking by children was an essential part of growing up, but the over-regimented lives imposed by worried parents had reduced their opportunities to learn from their mistakes.”Children must be able to plan and take control, they must be allowed to try things and be free to experiment so that they develop their own abilities to solve problems.”We know some things will go wrong and others will go right and then they can choose where to place their energies.”Ms McKerrow said many social problems, such as unemployment, were beyond the power of governments to solve and people had to be emotionally prepared to cope with the consequences by extending their personal re-sources and interests.Schools played a key role but there was “huge concern” about the narrowness of the National Curriculum. One in five people aged four to twenty is estimated to suffer from problems, ranging from bed-wetting to anorexia, which significantly disrupt their lives.
The toll of mental ill health has been rising in all developed countries since the Second World War and neglect of children’s emotional needs in the modern world is to blame, according to the report, by the Mental Health Foundation.In a three-year study, The Big Picture, published yesterday, which examined more than 1,000 pieces of evidence, the foundation concludes that children are failing to thrive emotionally, are becoming less resilient and less able to cope with the ups and downs of life.It says children are represented as “evil demons” or as “dolls and angels” but not as humans, and that an adult-centred society treats them as “design- er accessories or pampered pets”. PRESSURES ON children to succeed and mollycoddling by parents who fear for their safety are turning out a young generation that is emotionally illiterate and at an increased risk of mental breakdown, a report claimed yesterday. it may have been their [the group's] fault that the avalanche started.” But Mr Fournier added that it was difficult to tell exactly how avalanches start.A Briton who died in an avalanche in Val-d’Isere, France, on Tuesday was a chalet manager, Mark Wilson..

This operation could cost 50,000 Swiss francs (pounds 22,000) … Mr Brooke-Dean, who would have been 50 today, was with seven others.
He was crushed when a 1,500ft section of an off-piste snowpack slid on to his group. Survivors raised the alarm and four helicopters, seven dogs and a 60-strong team were sent.Yesterday Swiss officials said they were likely to bill Mr Brooke-Dean’s estate for the cost of the operation, because preliminary investigation showed he had contributed to the avalanche by ignoring signs alerting skiers to the dangers of off-piste conditions.Pascal Fournier, of Air Glaciers, which mounted the rescue, said: “In Switzerland it is the person who is rescued or their insurance company that normally pays for the rescue operation. Alan Brooke-Dean, from Dorset, died in Verbier on Monday. SWISS OFFICIALS say they plan to bill the estate of a British skier for pounds 22,000 after blaming him for starting an avalanche in which he died. Home Office officials decided to press ahead with the move to new offices, although the new computer system has not yet been established.John Tincey, of the Immigration Service Union, said the situation was “pretty dire”.New working practices were designed to allow officials in different buildings to view the same files at the same time but depended on computers that had not been installed.Mr Tincey said the time for an asylum application to be processed had grown from eight months to a year. “Things have slowed down to a crawl if not to an actual stop.”One refugee organisation said: “It is an astonishing way for an organisation to operate when they are juggling life and death decisions about who has the right to remain in this country.”The Home Office said the move was causing a “temporary drop in service” but that urgent cases were still being dealt with..

He accepted there would be “considerable upheaval” between December and February as computers were upgraded and the directorate moved from Lunar House in Croydon, south London, to new offices nearby.The move has been beset by unforeseen problems, which have hit international business people and asylum-seekers alike.Immigration sources said that in one building alone the staff were struggling to cope with 10,000 unsorted documents and two weeks of unopened post .Julia Onslow-Cole, a partner with the London lawyers Cameron McKenna, and chairman of the International Bar Association’s immigration committee, said the system had become “totally chaotic”.She said: “It’s really absurd to have a situation which is paralysing business applications whilst issuing this rhetoric about trying to get entrepreneurs into the country.”She said clients from America, South Africa and the Middle East had been affected by the delays.Foreign business people who are based in Britain are effectively being marooned here for months while extensions to their residence permits are being reconsidered.In the meantime they are prevented from travelling abroad to important business meetings, she said.The overhaul of the immigration system ran into problems last July, when computer sub-contractors pulled out of the project. It has also undermined plans to cut the backlog of asylum-seekers, which has grown to 65,000, as the number of applications being processed has fallen from 3,000 to 800 a month.The Immigration minister, Mike O’Brien, has ordered an overhaul of the system in an effort to end years of inefficiency. BRITAIN IS losing “tens of millions of pounds” in investment because the Immigration and Nationality Directorate has ground to a halt, it was claimed yesterday. International lawyers said Britain’s immigration process was “worse than a Third World country”, with businessmen and asylum-seekers facing months of delays for visas or residency applications.
The chaotic situation is embarrassing the Government, which has pledged in a White Paper to encourage foreign investment by lowering immigration barriers to entrepreneurs. She explained the appeal like this: “It’s not quite sex, lies and videotape but it’s certainly sex and spies. It’s a fairly potent combination.”Grigory ZinovievSoviet propaganda chief and purported author of letter to British Communist PartyJames Ramsay MacDonaldBritain’s first Labour prime minister, was severely embarrassed by the letterThomas Marlowe`Mail’ editor published letter under headline `Civil War Plot By Socialists’ Masters’Robin CookForeign Secretary ordered the inquiry and sanctioned use of security service files.

His colleagues believed she was his lover.The intelligence services made no efforts to authenticate the document when it arrived from their agent in Riga, but it was distributed to the Foreign Office, Scotland Yard and the War Office with a note: “The authenticity of the document is undoubted.”Ms Bennett said yesterday: “I have my doubts about whether (Morton) thought it was genuine but he treated it as if it was.” Ms Bennett’s report was commissioned by Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, after questions were asked in the Commons last year, prompted by a book by the espionage writer Nigel West.Ms Bennett said the Russians had been surprised that the Zinoviev affair still had so much resonance in Britain today. Another possibility was that J D (Don) Gregory, head of the Foreign Office’s Northern Department, sold a copy to pay debts he had accumulated through currency speculation with an “extravagant” and “capricious” married woman, Aminta Dyne. The Tories certainly capitalised on the affair, raising the possibility that they leaked it to the Mail.Alternatively, the intelligence services may have passed it to the paper themselves. Neither was it likely that Zinoviev wrote the letter, she said.