Armed police stopped two young girls aged 15 and nine in Birmingham last week.
The police claimed the eldest of the sisters fitted the description of an armed robber.
In fact she was on her way to collect her GCSE results from her nearby school.
Their mother, a youth worker, said, “This is the sort of thing which starts riots."
niño: Child Calling for a ban on the EDL march has its attractions. But there is a question about who is being asked to impose a ban, and what consequences a ban might have beyond the resolution of an immediate situation. It is increasingly clear that the coalition government is doing its best to punish protesters of all stripes. Students who protested against fee rises last year were subjected to kettling and charged by mounted police, while many are still being dragged through the courts on serious counts; 30 UK Uncut protesters are still being "symbolically" prosecuted for peacefully occupying Fortnum & Mason on 26 March; and anyone who attended the 30 June strike would have been aware of police "snatch and grab" tactics used against anyone they had decided were potential troublemakers.
Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron's behalf. You may know her from Channel 4's The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed "family champions" (FCs), will enter "never-worked" families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into "working" families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. "Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs," says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.
Why does this feel so dodgy? I called Harrison's PR and asked her what will happen if there are no jobs. What then? "Emma believes there are jobs," she replied. "There are hidden jobs." Oh yes, those hidden jobs, buried under trees and lying at the end of rainbows. All the unemployed need is the imagination to see the invisible, and maybe a magic shovel and a friendly elf to hug them on the way to Mordor. So a slab of government policy is being handed to a woman who is in denial about the scale and cause of joblessness. The statistics are nowhere in the Working Families Everywhere material. There are 2.49 million people unemployed today in the UK.
Retailers Asda and Sainsbury's are among businesses that have signed up to a charity initiative that will see senior store and project managers despatched to work in deprived areas such as Tottenham and Lambeth, which were badly hit by this month's riots.
Ten companies, including BT, Dairy Crest and Greggs, have signed up to the pilot scheme run by Business in the Community. So-called "business connectors" will be seconded to communities for at least six months to provide assistance to residents and groups trying to tackle issues such as youth unemployment, educational underachievement and a weak local enterprise culture. Its chief executive Stephen Howard said it was a "crucial time" for businesses to get involved in communities: "I believe healthy back streets create healthy high streets."
Thousands of people from the East End of London and beyond will demonstrate against the racist English Defence League in Tower Hamlets on 3 September – and we believe that antiracists should also have the right to march.
The national demonstration on Saturday 3 September, called by UAF and United East End against the racists and fascists of the EDL is going ahead.
Although home secretary Theresa May has announced a ban on the EDL marching, the racists and fascists will still be allowed a “static” protest in the heart of multicultural, multiracial Tower Hamlets.
This means it is essential that we have the biggest possible antiracist protest on Saturday 3 September.
But UAF is gravely concerned that the ban announced by the home secretary is aimed at all marches – although not static demonstrations – across five London boroughs for a month.
The protest against the EDL will go ahead in any case. But we believe that antiracists should have the right to march and have launched an urgent petition, based on the statement below.
Please sign the petition, and pass on the link – http://is.gd/sept3petition – to everyone you know.
were product of consumerism...
and will hit economy...
says City broker...
Analyst's report points to 'deeply flawed social ethos' and calls for a shift of emphasis 'from material to non-material values'.
The officer, based at Salford, said to Prince Harry: "In 20 years of policing, last Tuesday was the most frightening thing I've ever encountered."
Prince Harry replied: "I think it's fantastic what you guys have done to keep a lid on it. It seems really quiet out there in Salford now."
The 26-year-old royal, who took a day out from helicopter training with the Army Air Corps at Wattisham Airfield in Suffolk to travel to Salford, told the officers: "You all did a fantastic job on the night and it's great to see Manchester and Salford back on its feet.
"As an army officer I really respect the work you guys do and I can't praise your bravery high enough."
Teenage singer Frankie Cocozza set the tone for the show – and possibly the entire format – when he was asked by presenter Dermot O'Leary why he had turned up to the first London audition.
"I don't know ... I just want to be famous," said the 18-year-old from Brighton.
One of the greatest inequalities in our society is the way so many resources go to the elderly, rather than the young...
Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World's disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.
In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was "widely discussed" at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with "the full knowledge and support" of other senior journalists, whom he named.
The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave last month on the aftermath of Goodman's allegations.
Ford Kas are the least likely cars to be stolen because they "have no street cred among thieves", an ex-burglar turned security expert has claimed.
The insurance comparison website Confused.com [Roobin's note: who weren't just spamming national newspapers with press releases in the hope of getting a mention] analysed its insurance data and found that not one of its customers had claimed for the theft of a Ford Ka between 2004 and 2011.
The Toyota Yaris is the number one most stolen car, with approximately one in every 244 models lost to thieves, followed by the the Volkswagen Touareg, with 1 in every 236 stolen. Next came the the Volvo XC90 (1 in 370), the Porsche 911 (1 in 417), and the humble Seat Altea (1 in 435).
In an attempt to "give encouragement and inspiration to the activists of today", Yoko Ono has posted online a 70-minute documentary she made with John Lennon in 1969. Titled Bed Peace, the film – previously available on VHS – documents the couple's second attempt to promote world peace through lying in bed for a week at the height of the Vietnam war.
Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, carried out the “opportunistic” theft at a Lidl supermarket in Brixton as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house.
Robinson threw away the water and ran when he was confronted by police but was arrested and quickly admitted what he had done.
His solicitor told Camberwell Magistrates’ Court had “got caught up in the moment” and was “incredibly ashamed”.
But District Judge Alan Baldwin said the background of “serious public disorder” was an aggravating feature.
Members of Robinson's family in the public gallery gasped with disbelief as the judge told him he would be going to prison.
If this week's eruption is an expression of pure criminality and has nothing to do with police harassment or youth unemployment or rampant inequality or deepening economic crisis, why is it happening now and not a decade ago? The criminal classes, as the Victorians branded those at the margins of society, are always with us, after all. And if it has no connection with Britain's savage social divide and ghettoes of deprivation, why did it kick off in Haringey and not Henley?
There are pockets of our society that are not just broken, but frankly sick...
For me the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing I have spoken about for years: it is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society.
People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences. Well they do have consequences.
We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line.
By day he is a mild-mannered financial adviser from Devon. But at night he dons an outfit that makes him look like a cross between a riot cop and a gladiator to become "the Dark Spartan", roaming the mean streets of...
... the mean streets of Torquay on Friday and Saturday nights trying to keep the good people of the English Riviera safe.
The Dark Spartan – aka 27-year-old Will – is the star of a Channel 4 programme, First Cut: Superheroes of Suburbia. According to the programme, there is a growing band of upstanding citizens such as Will to be found trying to clean up the streets of Britain. As well as the Dark Spartan, there is a former soldier called Ken who operates as "the Shadow" and uses "ninjutsu" techniques and smoke bombs to tackle boy racers in Yeovil, Somerset. In Yorkshire, Keiran, a 17-year-old comic-book obsessive, takes on the persona of "Noir" to target muggers.
The programme does not appear to be a spoof.
