And to touch back on things in Britain,

we find the Home Secretary admitting that it's not quite as safe as she'd claimed:
Jacqui Smith suffered a barrage of criticism yesterday after admitting she would not feel safe walking the streets after dark.

Opposition MPs said the Home Secretary had made an "admission of failure" to the millions of shift-workers who have no option but to brave the threat of violence.

Aides of Miss Smith compounded her gaffe with a desperate attempt to undo the damage by claiming she had recently popped out in the evening to "buy a kebab in Peckham".

In fact, she has round-the-clock police protection.

Kind of like our "You don't need to be armed, just call the police. And ignore the security people who keep my fat ass safe." politicians and celebrities.

She also states She insisted individuals were much less likely to be a victim of crime since Labour came to power, but admitted it was a "big job" to persuade them that towns and cities had not become more dangerous. However, if you look at a response article here, you find this:
The rest of us, of course, who don't enjoy our own personalised police officer, have to play Russian roulette with the risk of being robbed or attacked every time we venture out alone.

Yet the Government's insulting response is to parrot the mantra that crime is going down.

The Home Secretary was at it again when she claimed people were now safer than they had been ten years ago, and that the main problem was to convince them that crime was diminishing.

In other words, the problem was not crime but the fear of crime that was exaggerated out of all proportion.

If this is so, why then does Ms Smith herself feel unsafe when on the streets alone after dark?

The fact is that citizen Smith is right while Home Secretary Smith is wrong. As was revealed yesterday, violent crime by children and teenagers has gone up by a third in only three years, while offences in general by this group have gone up by more than 20 per cent.

And so on. I think it was about two years ago the then-head of the Metropolitan Police made a big speech about how an area had improved so much that 'people don't have to lock their doors'. And was then loudly called a liar and a fool by the people who actually lived there, who would have answered the door with a shotgun if they'd been allowed to own one.

Last week, for example, three teenagers were convicted of the murder of Garry Newlove, who was kicked to death when he confronted them outside his home.

The gang leader, Adam Swellings, had been freed on bail only hours before the killing, despite a history of increasingly violent behaviour spanning more than two years before Mr Newlove's murder.

Yet even though this included the intimidation of witnesses and an attack on a 16-year- old girl, Swellings was repeatedly bailed only to commit more offences - culminating in the entirely preventable killing of Mr Newlove.

What on earth goes through the minds of magistrates who bail someone with this kind of record?

Madam, I'm afraid it's the same kind of bovine excrement that dwells between the ears of your Home Secretary. And a lot of your other political masters.