Police reported to have shot two suspects with Government treating incident as act of terrorism
A man believed to be a soldier has been beheaded in an attack on a street outside the Woolwich barracks in London, witnesses report.
Two men were injured after armed police arrived, one of them seriously. Shots were heard but there is no official confirmation of what happened.
Prime Minister David Cameron has described the killing as “truly shocking” and said he had asked the Home Secretary Theresa May to chair a meeting of Cobra, the Government’s emergency committee. According to the BBC she has also requested updates from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, and the head of MI5. The Government is reported to be treating it as a suspected terrorist incident.
Officers were called to John Wilson Street in at around 2.20pm and the immediate area has been cordoned off by police.
Several witnesses described seeing a “beheading” as a man was reportedly...
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Liberty’s AGM debate the HRA and European arrest warrants. They should be subject to serious debate, not party politics
How much longer will Dominic Grieve be with us?
Given the increasing Eurosceptic rhetoric from his Tory colleagues, one sometimes wonders, how long the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, is going to be with us. He was at it once more on Saturday at the AGM of Liberty, the civil rights campaigning organisation.
He does everything he can, he said, to explain the “benefits” of the Human Rights Act (HRA) and ensure that it was understood.
“It is misrepresented frequently”, he added, with “sensational headlines” in the media. He gave as an example the thoroughly misleading claim that the HRA prevented prisoners from being deprived of pornography.
(The attorney was also reminded how the HRA was wrongly blamed for the fatal hit and run accident which led to the death of that 12 year-old Amy Houston. The driver of the car was an Iraqi Kurd and failed asylum seeker. Her father...
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Sale of Hampshire constabulary’s Alpha Park in Eastleigh, which has been empty for five years, is unlikely to recoup costs
Hampshire police bought Alpha Park for £9.6m at the height of the property boom, and has since spent more on its upkeep.
A police force which spent more than £11m on a headquarters it has never used has announced it will sell the site, which has been empty for five years.
Hampshire constabulary will put Alpha Park up for sale because it cannot afford to develop it and is unlikely to recoup the money it paid. The building in Eastleigh was bought in 2008 at the height of the property boom for £9.6m and the force has since spent £1.836m on upkeep, security, business rates and other costs.
The then chief constable, Alex Marshal, who is now head of the College of Policing, was warned in 2010 that the force could not afford the bill to refurbish the site, which could have topped £40m.
The issue was called “expensive and embarrassing” by the local police federation last year,...
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What an insult to all of us! MPs’ demand for a huge pay rise shows the gap between rulers and ruled has never been so wide
By DOMINIC SANDBROOK
‘Unacceptable’: Labour’s John Mann said on the proposed pay rise for MPs: ‘They should throw this proposal in the bin,’ accurately predicting it would ‘just create more bad publicity for MPs’
For most people, times are tough. Summer is fast approaching yet, with food prices rising and energy costs rocketing, many families feel too squeezed to contemplate a holiday.
One small group of lucky winners, however, is laughing all the way to the bank. For according to reports yesterday, Britain’s 650 MPs can soon look forward to a £10,000 pay rise, taking their basic pay to a whopping £75,000 a year.
In return for their pay rise, MPs are expected to accept a small cut in their gold-plated pensions, which are far more generous than most public-sector workers’ arrangements.
To be fair, not all MPs are delighted with the news.
‘They should throw this proposal in...
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Now police place journalists in same bracket as criminals: Officers will be forced to name any friends who work in the media… or face the sack
- Every officer must formally report any friendship with journalist
- Means those in media would be placed in the same bracket
 as criminals
Police officers must declare if they are friends with journalists under draconian new guidelines published yesterday.
As a result, every officer in England and Wales must formally report any friendship outside his workplace with a journalist.
And if they fail to do so and are judged to have concealed the relationship, they could now face dismissal for gross misconduct.
This effectively means that people working in media organisations would be placed in the same bracket as criminals.
The decision will alarm Government ministers and censorship campaigners, who fear police forces are shutting their doors to scrutiny.
Frontline police representatives have already warned that ambitious police...
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 The Panorama programme uses never before broadcast footage of the Hillsborough disaster (Video here)
Crucial evidence from the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster, which was undermined at the original inquest, was true, BBC Panorama has found.
An off-duty police officer has always maintained he tried to treat a dying boy after the time at which the coroner said no-one could have survived.
His account cast doubt on medical evidence that supporters could not have survived beyond 15:15 on that day.
Panorama’s analysis of unbroadcast TV footage shows his account was true.
Ninety-six football fans died after they were crushed to death on 15 April 1989 during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium.
The inquest at the time resulted in verdicts of accidental death but, in December last year, the High Court quashed those verdicts and ordered fresh inquests to take place early next year.
The TV footage seen by Panorama calls into question...
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The Met “gagged” the Leveson Inquiry from revealing intelligence that a very senior former police officer passed on sensitive information to the News of the World, the Standard reveals today.
The force claimed a “public interest immunity certificate” to ban the disclosure of a report that alleged the officer was obtaining highly confidential information on decisions taken by Lord Blair when he was Commissioner.
The classified document, which the Met withheld from the Leveson Inquiry until after it could have been usefully raised in the public hearings, suggested the officer — who is not named for legal reasons —passed the leak on to the tabloid for money.
When it was finally passed to the inquiry, Scotland Yard claimed “public interest immunity” which prevented Lord Justice Leveson from referring to it in public or considering it for the conclusions in his landmark report into inappropriate relationships between the press...
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Serious concerns have been raised about the mental well-being of custody sergeants after a national study revealed that working conditions are forcing many to consider quitting the Police Service.
A study covering half of all 2,000 custody sergeants in England and Wales found that factors including the pressures of peak times, inability to take breaks and a lack of communication with senior managers were making life intolerable in the worst cases.
Crucially, just over 60 per cent were exhibiting the worrying signs of high emotional exhaustion – or burnout. Of these, four out of ten were considering throwing in the towel on their police career and nearly a quarter were looking for a new role within the service.
The survey, which was conducted by Dr Jonathan Houdmont of Nottingham University, also found that the problem had been steadily worsening over the last two decades.
The academic announced his results at the recent Police Federation of England and Wales conference and is now planning on...
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Almost 5,000 retired police officers who have been re-employed by their old force are receiving both a pension and a salary paid by the taxpayer, figures have revealed.
 The officers are ‘double dipping’ into the public purse by receiving both a generous monthly pension and a salary from their new job, with one force having more than one in five of all civilian staff jobs carried out by former warranted officers.
Critics said the arrangements showed officers could retire too early, but the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, said forces benefited from the set-up because their new staff were already highly experienced.
As police officers can retire after 30 years’ service, it means many are still in their 50s when they retire.
But many decide to remain in work and even return to their old forces, despite generous final-salary pension arrangements.
The officers are part of a growing number of public sector workers who have retired as early as 50 with gold-plated index-linked pensions,...
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Richard Branson and Martin Sorrell among signatories to a letter to ‘The Independent’ that takes aim at Eurosceptics.
Some of Britain’s most successful and eminent business leaders have accused Eurosceptic MPs of putting “politics before economics” and abandoning the national interest in their calls for Britain to leave the European Union.
In a letter to The Independent, the group issues a trenchant riposte to politicians who have argued that Britain’s economic interest would be better served outside the EU. They also call for David Cameron to “strengthen and deepen” the European single market to boost Britain’s economy by £110bn. The letter, which is signed by senior figures including the current and next presidents of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) as well as the chairmen of BT, Deloitte, Lloyds and Centrica, is the first co-ordinated response from the business community to increasing anti-European political...
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