Land Rover has confirmed 1,300 job losses at its Solihull plant - as the company enjoys the biggest sales boom in its 58 year-history.

The cuts result from Land Rover's decision to switch production of its Freelander model to Merseyside.

The company said it was confident the job losses at the 4x4 specialist's Lode Lane factory would be achieved through voluntary redundancies.

It has been known that about 1,000 jobs would be lost since July 2003 when Land Rover announced the replacement for the existing Freelander would be built alongside the Jaguar X Type at parent group Ford's giant Halewood plant - formerly the home of the Ford Escort - on the outskirts of Liverpool.

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The #35 million refurbishment of Birmingham Town Hall has hit fresh financial difficulties.

City council officials have ordered "vigorous" cost control measures after a #1 million contingency fund to deal with unexpected problems arising from restoration work was all but swallowed up in under a year.

Mid-way through a 104-week construction period, the council has been faced with decaying roof timbers, difficulty in installing double glazing without damaging acoustics, the discovery of asbestos and flooding of the basement.

Rita McLean, acting assistant director of museums and heritage, insisted construction work was going well and the town hall would re-open as planned in October 2007.

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On every birthday, Christmas and Mother's Day, Margaret Nwabuko still receives a card bearing the name of her murdered son Joseph.

Two years after he was gunned down by an armed raider in Birmingham city centre, his brother Johnson still feels compelled to add his name to the cards.

"He's not here but he would have wanted to send a card to her," he said. "I have to do it."

West Midlands Police are still no further forward in tracking down the armed gang which robbed a Securicor delivery vehicle at the Nationwide Building Society in the Bullring at about 11.20pm on February 9, 2004.

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The University of Warwick has refuted suggestions that its admissions policy has a "racial bias" against people from ethnic backgrounds.

The Coventry-based university is one of a number being looked at by the Commission for Racial Equality in the light of recent Government statistics on student make-up.

The figures show Warwick - one of 19 elite universities including Oxford and Cambridge that are part of the Russell Group - has a below average intake of black and Asian undergraduates.

Ethnic minorities constitute 13.5 per cent of the student population, compared to a national average of 15.3 per cent for universities in England.

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One of Birmingham's bleakest radial roads could be turned into a "green corridor" with the planting of hundreds of trees over the next 25 years.

The idea for the A38 as it runs northwards from the city centre is being proposed by one of the consortia bidding for a #2.2 billion highways PFI contract to manage Birmingham's road network.

Atkins EDF Energy Consortium has commissioned a study to see how best to mark the A38 route, which links Birmingham with the National Forest in Leicestershire.

The proposal follows a critical council scrutiny committee report last week, which disclosed that more than 1,000 trees a year are disappearing from the city's streets - many of them the victim of disease or axed because they are deemed to be dangerous.

See Wednesday's Birmingham Post for more on these stories