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News in brief

The Somerset County Gazette has teamed up with police to offer a £500 reward to track down a knifeman who stabbed a Taunton newsagent.
Posters have gone up in the town with details of the crime.


An NCTJ distance learning course, which normally costs £275, has sold for £70 on Internet auction site eBay.
It enabled the lucky bidder to cover the whole NCTJ syllabus and prepare for the preliminary exams at the end of it.


Journalist and mental health campaigner John Hooper has died, aged 72, after suffering with cancer.
He was a district reporter at the Tewkesbury office of the Gloucestershire Echo between 1948 and 1957. He had previously served in the Dutch merchant navy and also worked as a reporter in Canada.


The Western Daily Press has paid tribute to the 66 British soldiers who have lost their lives during the recent Iraq war and the peacekeeping duties which followed.
Details of all 66, including photos of them, were published in its pages as the paper urged that they should never be forgotten.


A former Cheshire journalist who is now a police press officer is one of 42 budding authors to be shortlisted in the BBC’s End of Story competition.
Chris Wood, who used to work at the Northwich Guardian, was one of six contestants chosen for writing the climax to a story started by horror writer Shaun Hutson.


More than £20,000 has been donated to help refugees in Sudan by readers of the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle.
The paper teamed up with humanitarian organisation Unicef and donations have been rising steadily since the appeal launch, according to editor Paul Robertson, who said: “We had to do something to help.”


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