In the 12 months before September 2004 there were 82 firearms incidents reported

In the 12 months before September 2004, there were 82 firearms incidents reported and 136 in 2002-04.. The first major British exhibition outside London of Charles Saatchi’s art collection is to be staged in Leeds next year. Highlights of The Triumph of Painting show, which has drawn large crowds despite mixed reviews to his gallery on London’s South Bank, will open at the Leeds City Art Gallery in January and run until March.
The move was a condition of a sponsorship deal between the Saatchi Gallery and Walker Morris, a Leeds-based law firm, which is supporting the third instalment of the show and a previously unplanned fourth round.After attracting more than 360,000 visitors since opening in London in January, the show has been just extended to a six-part series running to next April.It profiles painting, a genre Charles Saatchi said had been seen as “pitifully uncool and bourgeois” for the past 20 years but was now enjoying a revival.The loan was welcomed by civic leaders in Leeds. John Proctor, the city council’s executive board member for leisure, said: “This is a fantastic coup by Walker Morris and one that will be a significant boost to the city’s national and international image.”Until now, British art-lovers have had the opportunity to see the Saatchi collection only at his own gallery or, once, in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy. This later transferred to New York where there was a row over a dung-encrusted painting of the Madonna by Chris Ofili.The deal to take works outside the capital is a new venture for the advertising millionaire.Nigel Walsh, curator of exhibitions for Leeds Museums and Galleries, said he was delighted “The Saatchi Gallery has been very accommodating,” he said.

“The show isn’t selected yet, but we’ll be able to have a selection from all six parts so we might be showing things that haven’t been seen [in London] yet.”He expected it would attract audiences from across the North to the Leeds gallery which usually receives around 250,000 visitors a year. It would have been very difficult for the gallery to raise the funds to mount such shows, he said, adding that it would be exciting to see the purchases of a major collector.Charles Saatchi has admitted that he never thought the show would be a success. “It’s good that the public are responding to painting so keenly,” he said.. Three-year-old Lucy Wilkinson watched the images of soldiers in flames jumping out of an armoured vehicle in Basra this week, well aware that her father is off to what she calls “Waq” in 10 days’ time.

She turned to her mother, Joanne, 32, and said confidently: “I think Fireman Sam will come and put him out.”

For Joanne, it is less easy to be sanguine about her husband’s return to a country that remains a war zone: “I started crying,” she said: “because I was imagining my husband on fire jumping out of the vehicle. If someone took Sky News off for the next six months I would be really grateful. ”

Sergeant Andrew Wilkinson, 32, of the Royal Horse Artillery, is among 6,000 men of the 7th Armoured Brigade about to take over in Iraq. In 10 days’ time the first of the famous Desert Rats will return to the city and surrounding area they liberated or invaded, depending on your point of view. Behind them they will leave, in the words of one officer, 3,000 mothers, not to mention other wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends and families. In the next few weeks the coaches will pull up at their base in Germany and the wives, they insist, will not cry as they watch them drive away. They will return to the privacy of their cars and sob for 10 minutes before ” pulling themselves together”.

Many believe the Desert Rats’ turn has come around again too soon. But these women know that, when you are an army wife, the army comes first. “I don’t think soldiers should be out there but they have a job to do and I support him,” said one of the wives yesterday. Aware that after weeks of intense training most of their husbands are already a world away, they opt not to air their own fears.

Some have had “surreal and slightly hysterical” conversations about death; some have ignored the topic “What good will it do if I cry and scream and threaten It is not going to make any difference. He still needs to go,” said Claudia Percival, 38, wife of a major in the Royal Signals, and mother of Tara, aged six, and Ben, two. “Tara will say I don’t want daddy to go and she will start crying That is the most difficult thing,” she explained. Aware that many of the women can be lonely and overwhelmed by coping 24 hours a day on their own, an extensive welfare package has been put together. Under the orders of Brigadier Patrick Marriott, who learnt how tough it was for families as a young officer in charge of welfare, a 100-page Op Home Rat advice guide has been published, which they hope will be adopted across the Army.