This was on “This Morning”, a chat show that goes out on weekday mornings on ITV1, earlier today (Wednesday): Carol Malone, a tabloid newspaper columnist, gave her judgement on the family of which six children were murdered last Friday in a fire started by pouring petrol through their letterbox. The family had been featured on TV in 2007 when the father, Mick Philpott, had appealed to the local council for a bigger house to accommodate his wife, girlfriend and 14 children. It appeared the girlfriend moved out recently and may have been arrested as a suspect, but reports over the weekend said that a man and a woman had been released without charge.
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Last week the issue of postal voting reform in the UK was in the news again, after a judge who had found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of 
Recently the ME community online had to deal with the sad news of three deaths, including one of its best-known and most loved activists, Emily Collingridge (right). There were also two inquests which reported in the last couple of months, those of Lois Owen who died in 2009 and Victoria Webster who died last year. All had very severe ME and, it appears, died of its complications (the immediate cause of Emily’s death will not be known until the inquest is heard later in the year). A major cause of Emily’s final deterioration was a hospital admission in late 2009, following a period in which her condition had improved somewhat; the environment in the hospital was clearly very unsuited to someone who was highly sensitive to light and sound and needed a low-stimulation environment. A further problem with British hospitals has to do with the medical and nursing professions: the fact that there is a substantial number of people with in it who are uncaring, dismissive or abusive and it has led to many people with chronic illnesses becoming fearful or even phobic of hospitals. This simply should not be the case.
Rachel Cohen Rottenberg recently blogged about the recurrent problem of parents of children with severe disabilities (usually autism) 
Last night, BBC’s Newsnight interviewed Babar Ahmad, the man wanted for extradition to the USA on the grounds of receiving classified information and assisting mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya through his website, Azzam Publications. The BBC actually had to take the government to court to overturn a ban on interviewing Babar Ahmad (indeed, they were not allowing pictures to be taken of him for a long period). They also interviewed the legal attachée from the American embassy in London, Amy Jeffress, and (together) David Bermingham of the NatWest Three, Tory MP Dominic Raab, and Mike O’Brien QC, solicitor general in the Labour government. The programme can be seen 