| Man is jailed for Facebook murder A man is jailed for life for murdering his ex-wife after she taunted him on Facebook about paying child support. bbc.co.uk |
Ten charged after English Defence League protest Leicestershire police make 17 arrests in force's biggest operation in 25 years, involving more than 2,000 officersTen people were charged with public order and other offences today over clashes with police after the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism held protests in Leicester yesterday.Leicestershire police mounted its biggest operation in 25 years to try to keep the peace between the two violently opposed groups, and made 17 arrests during the day. More than 2,000 officers from 13 different forces were involved in policing approximately 1,000 EDL supporters and 700 people from the UAF.At the EDL's static demonstration in Leicester's Humberstone Gate East, police wearing riot gear worked with dog handlers to control the crowd, which threw bricks and coins.Supporters had arrived by the coachload since the early morning and were allowed to gather in four police-monitored pubs ahead of the protests in Hotel Street. Many wore EDL-branded hooded tops and some chanted "EDL, EDL''. Others carried banners bearing slogans such as "Sharia laws will destroy Britain and all our British values".The home secretary, Theresa May, had authorised a blanket ban on marches in the city earlier in the week, but the groups were permitted to hold static demonstrations from 2pm to 3.30pm.Violence was largely kept at bay, but at one stage a policeman was put into an ambulance on a stretcher; he is believed to have left hospital after treatment.Police said six people were held for public order offences, and others on suspicion of assaulting a police officer, possessing an offensive weapon and possessing a controlled substance.Nine of those charged were released on bail and will appear in court on 19 November. A 37-year-old man of no fixed abode, arrested for possession of a controlled substance and possession of an offensive weapon, was remanded into custody to appear in court tomorrow.A 44-year-old man from Leicester arrested on suspicion of actual bodily harm remained in custody today.In today's Observer, Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, warned that the EDL were a bigger threat than the BNP, bringing together a "dangerous cocktail of football hooligans, far-right activists and pub racists" in towns and cities across the UK.He wrote: "It also poses the biggest danger to community cohesion in Britain today. Its provocative marches, 'flash demos' and pickets are designed to whip up divisions between communities and provoke a violent reaction from young British Muslims."English Defence LeagueThe far rightAlexandra Toppingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Man arrested in farm murder probe A 40-year-old Kent man is arrested on suspicion of murdering businessman Julian Gardner at his East Sussex farm. bbc.co.uk |
Foreign aid from the UK is vital to millions of people | Claire Melamed The critics would have us believe international aid is squandered on propping up corrupt regimes – don't listen to themWhere reasoned arguments fail, a good cliche will always serve. So we hear from the rightwing press and their commentators of choice that the UK aid budget, protected in the spending review this week, is to be "lavished" on "fat-cats" and corrupt governments. Apparently Conservative MPs are outraged and David Cameron is being heckled at public meetings up and down the land.What is sometimes called the "aid industry" has proved rather weak at defending its case in the face of these attacks. The argument often ends up as a battle over statistics – numbers of children being educated in Africa being cited on one side, numbers of pensioners going without heating on the other. But this isn't really the point.There is a case to answer. We are increasing aid to spend on children in other countries while cutting child benefit at home. A lot of aid does go straight to governments – though far from the 95% claimed by one commentator this week – some of which fall short of the standards we'd expect in the UK. And despite years of aid many people in many countries are still very poor. So why should we do it?In the end it's a moral choice. What kind of people do we want to be? Do we, as a rich country, want to spend a tiny proportion of our wealth on saving and improving lives in poor countries? There are enough good news stories about aid successes out there to prove that we can, if we want to, and the coalition's answer to that question this week was a definite yes.The reasons to give aid are pretty simple. So why shouldn't we? The first line of attack is to dodge the moral case, but instead argue that aid is given badly. Aid is wasted on corruption. Aid goes to the wrong countries, like India with its space programme. Aid is spent on fat cats in Whitehall. Of course, no one knows those arguments better than aid professionals themselves, and there's a constant process of improving how aid is delivered. The UK government does cut aid budgets to some governments if they don't need it any more – the China programme was cut just this week. And it is constantly adjusting and refining the ways that aid is given and the way it is monitored.But to make the jump from this technical discussion to questioning the case for aid is lunacy. In any area of public spending, there's a constant debate on how it's spent – think of the years of successive reorganisations in the NHS, or the debates now about welfare spending. Just as we wouldn't throw out the whole NHS every time we wanted to reform the system, neither does one mistake in the aid budget mean the whole idea is redundant.A second line of attack is to argue that the apparent clarity of the moral case for aid actually blinds people to the reality that aid is actively damaging to poor countries – it stifles their economies and lets corrupt governments off the hook. This is testable, and many academics have spent lifetimes doing just that. The answer, perhaps slightly disappointingly to both sides, is that in most cases aid just doesn't have that kind of impact. Aid isn't going to be the reason why an economy grows, or it doesn't, or whether a corrupt government survives or not. What aid can do is help people to survive in the meantime and, if done well, push good things along a little faster than they would otherwise happen. To blame aid for poverty and corruption, which is the implication of some fringes of the aid brigade, is just wrong.But in most cases the aid critics are actually countering the moral case of the aid lobby with their own moral retort – we shouldn't give aid because we should spend all our money on our own population and not send it overseas, however much good it might do. This is ultimately unanswerable. But the public has made its choice. Opinion polls show again and again that people in this country actually do care about poverty overseas and want to do something. The real job is to make our aid spending live up to their expectations, and do our best not to get distracted by the wilder accusations of people who would prefer that we just didn't care so much.• Claire Melamed is head of the growth and equity programme at the Overseas Development InstituteAidSpending review 2010Tax and spendingClaire Melamedguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Tests show students died in double suicide, despite parents’ protests Two students found dead in a Scottish hotel perished in a double suicide according to post-mortem tests, The Times has learnt. timesonline.co.uk |