More than 300 artists and cultural workers write open letter to Home venue over cancellation of Voices of Resilience event

More than 300 cultural workers, theatre and film artists, including Maxine Peake and Asif Kapadia , have called for a Manchester arts venue to reinstate an event celebrating Palestinian voices.

Home Manchester last week cancelled the Voices of Resilience evening , scheduled for 22 April, citing “recent publicity” and safety concerns for audiences and artists.

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MPF is a progressive punk festival that plays to a younger crowd. It promotes startup/DIY bands led by women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people by putting them on the same stage as more established acts

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Former Manchester United star says his near 30-year silence on subject has been his revenge on the press

It was one of the most baffling utterances ever made by a footballer.

When Eric Cantona said at a 1995 press conference: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea,” everyone was left scratching their heads.

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Two Israeli brothers, who were at Nova Music Festival, say they were detained by Border Force at Manchester airport

The Home Office is investigating allegations that two Israeli survivors of the 7 October Hamas terror attacks were subjected to antisemitic comments by a Border Force officer upon their arrival at Manchester airport.

The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester & Region (JRC) has claimed the two men, brothers who had survived the Hamas assault on the Nova music festival in Re’im , were told by one officer after being detained that they had to “make sure that you are not going to do what you are doing in Gaza over here” as they were released.

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Dan Barker, who only took up the post three months ago, says he’s delighted to join the new home of conservatism

The Conservative candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral election has defected to Richard Tice’s rightwing Reform UK party.

Dan Barker was selected only three months ago as the Tory candidate to challenge the incumbent mayor Labour’s Andy Burnham in May’s elections.

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Exclusive: Police accused of suppressing free speech as Musa Khawaja, who is of Palestinian heritage, banned from city centre

Police have been accused of suppressing legitimate protest after a woman was arrested for chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and given bail conditions banning her from Manchester city centre or from being in a group of more than three people.

Musa Khawaja, 26, from Lancashire, was arrested for the chant outside the offices of BNY Mellon in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, during a demonstration against the bank’s investment of more than £10m in the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems .

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It was a time when the pill was unavailable and homosexuality was illegal. As Shelagh Delaney’s sparky story of a Salford single mother and her pregnant teenage daughter returns, can it really speak to our era?

It was after her very first trip to the theatre that 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey , hammered out on a borrowed typewriter after deciding she could do better than the play she had seen on a date at Manchester’s Opera House. Sixty-six years later, and 13 years after her death from breast cancer , her sparky debut is being staged half a mile away at the Royal Exchange, still a trading post for cotton during Delaney’s teenage years.

Almost nothing is left of Delaney’s soot-stained, seedy Salford. The docks of the script are now home to the BBC at Media City, with gleaming high-rises packed full of international students replacing the tumbledown terraces where a promiscuous mother, Helen, abandons her teenage daughter, Jo, in a grimy bedsit.

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Stage and screen actor best known for playing the bombastic butcher Fred Elliott in Coronation Street

John Savident, who has aged 86, was a skilled, colourful, sometimes broad but always memorable actor who played one of TV’s best loved soap opera characters – the bombastic but lovable butcher Fred Elliott in the ITV series Coronation Street – for more than a decade.

Fred, who first appeared in 1994 and became a regular two years later, was soon a favourite with viewers, thanks in part to the enjoyably imitable repetitive vocal tic that Savident invested him with: “Ashley, I say, Ashley,” he would utter when addressing his young nephew (later revealed to be his son), Ashley Peacock (Steven Arnold).

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Star player with QPR admired for his breathtaking speed whose wild exploits made him a tabloid favourite in the 1970s

It was once said of Stan Bowles that he had spent all his money on betting, booze and women, to which he responded, “Well, at least I didn’t waste it.” Bowles, who has died aged 75, was a goalscoring midfielder of breathtaking speed and touch, a down-to-earth street genius with long flowing hair – he could win a game with one move.

His golden years, in the mid-1970s, were spent at Queens Park Rangers , when a familiar sight outside the Loftus Road ground were the badges on sale bearing the legend, “Stan Bowles and his amazing dancing feet”. Another familiar sight was Bowles, in his kit, 20 minutes before kick-off, in the betting shop up the road. Soon after the match he could be spotted in one of the pubs close to the stadium.

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