Residents protest outside the National Shooting Sports Foundation in Newtown, Connecticut March 28, 2013 after receiving robocalls from the NRA, trying to enlist them in efforts to defeat new statewide gun control proposals.
Credit: Reuters/ Michelle McLoughlin
Sweeping government changes to parts of the UK's welfare system have started coming into effect.
They include a reduction of benefit for social housing tenants of working age with spare bedrooms.
Ministers say the changes - which also affect council tax benefits - will make the system fairer as well as saving the country money.
Some churches, charities and campaign groups as well as the Labour Party have criticised the changes as unjust.
The biggest shake-up of the welfare system for 60 years will see low income households in many local authority areas in England begin paying council tax for the first time.
'Original aims'Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Chancellor George Osborne and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said they were "just restoring the original principles of the welfare state: that those who can work must work, and a life on benefits must not be more attractive than working".
They also said that "what we're doing this coming week is making welfare fairer, helping to create jobs, and making sure you can keep more of what you earn".
Pensions minister Steve Webb said the new measures are aimed at striking a balance.
"It's bringing people together - some of whom are prepared to trade down so that they don't have the spare room but some of whom are in desperate need and you're not even hearing the voice of those people in this debate," he said.
"These are people - a quarter of a million in Britain, in cramped, overcrowded accommodation - desperate for a family home and there aren't enough homes and we've got to make better use of the houses we've got."
But shadow employment minister Stephen Timms said the changes will not work.
"The big problem with the bedroom tax is that people cannot get out of it," he said.
"There are not the smaller places for people to move to. They are just going to be hit with a big penalty and there's nothing they can do."
Four churches joined forces to criticise the government's plans as unjust - they fear that society's most vulnerable will be disproportionately hit.
That criticism, timed to coincide with the Easter period, has come from the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, and the Church of Scotland.
Benefit changesBBC local government correspondent Mike Sergeant said that while the fiercest argument has been about benefit cuts for social housing tenants with spare bedrooms, some of the other changes will affect many more people.
It has been estimated that two million low income households will pay more, as a result of changes to council tax benefit.
And from this April, most working age benefits will increase by just one per cent - less than the likely rise in the cost of living.
An overall limit of £500 a week on claims is beginning in four London boroughs, and will come into force across England, Scotland and Wales over the coming months.
But government plans to test a new Universal Credit - which combines several benefits into one payment - have been delayed.
Three out of four pilot areas in the north west of England will not now start using the system until July.
KAUFMAN, Texas — The fatal shooting of a north Texas district attorney and his wife, just two months after an assistant district attorney was gunned down near the local courthouse, could have a chilling effect on recruiting future prosecutors, officials said.
"I've always reassured them you really don't have to fear retaliation," Heath Harris, first assistant district attorney in Dallas, said of new recruits. But now, he said, "I definitely think people will think twice about becoming a prosecutor."
In Dallas and across Texas, authorities were beefing up security for courthouses and prosecutors. The district attorney for Harris County, which includes Houston, was being trailed along with his family by a 24-hour security team at the sheriff's suggestion.
"Until we know exactly what happened in Kaufman County, we'll remain cautious," spokeswoman Sara Marie Kinney said.
Kaufman County Dist. Atty. Michael McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were found dead at their home near Forney, about 20 miles east of Dallas, at 6:45 p.m. Saturday by friends who had been trying to reach them, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Kaufman County was still mourning Assistant Dist. Atty. Mark Hasse, 57, who was fatally shot Jan. 31 as he headed to work at the county courthouse.
Hasse was shot on the day he was publicly credited for assisting with the successful prosecution of members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a white supremacist prison gang.
Federal law enforcement officials said Monday that while "it certainly looks like" the shootings are related, there was no ballistics match.
The first shooting appeared to have been well planned and more professionally executed, and the second was faster and possibly less organized, said the officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the investigation.
"They were in a hurry to get out," one official said.
Authorities added that they were looking for links with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, noting that Kaufman County prosecutors were part of a statewide effort to convict various gang members.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry took the possible connection to organized crime seriously.
"This is a clear concern to individuals who are in public life, particularly those who deal with some very mean and vicious individuals, whether they're white supremacy groups or whether they're the drug cartels that we have," Perry told reporters.
"This looks like an attack on the criminal justice system and the rule of law," said Scott Burns, director of the National District Attorneys Assn. "While each story and each murder is tragic, it is a very rare thing for a prosecutor to be murdered in the line of duty — very rare. And it is unprecedented for two in the same county to be murdered in a two-month period. It is simply unheard of."
Just 13 prosecutors have been killed while in office in the past century, Burns said.
Glenn McGovern, a senior investigator at the Santa Clara County district attorney's office in California, said multiple killings of officials in one jurisdiction is the kind of thing that would happen in Italy or Colombia in the 1980s, or in Mexico today — not in Texas. McGovern is working on a book about targeted attacks on law enforcement officials.
McGovern said there had been 15 targeted attacks in the United States on attorneys, judges and police in the first few years of the 2010s — a number that had risen compared with previous decades.
"Revenge is the predominant motive," McGovern said, "followed by efforts to derail a case."
The McLellands were killed less than two weeks after Colorado's prison chief was fatally shot at his front door. Police suspect an ex-convict who fled to north Texas, where he died in a gunfight with law enforcement officers. Colorado officials are investigating whether the cases could be connected.
When Kaufman County sheriff's investigators responded to the McLellands' suburban home Saturday, they found cartridge casings inside near the two bodies, which both had multiple gunshot wounds, according to the affidavit. The spent casings indicate the assailant used an assault-type weapon, federal law enforcement officials said.
The 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and popular drama Call the Midwife are among six programmes vying to take the Radio Times audience title at this year's Bafta Television Awards.
They will compete against US drama series Homeland and The Great British Bake Off in a public vote.
Also nominated are Strictly Come Dancing and Game of Thrones.
Previous winners of the award include comedy game show, Celebrity Juice and Channel 4 sitcom, The Inbetweeners.
"It's a shortlist which perfectly captures a simply sensational television year," said Ben Preston, Editor of the Radio Times.
"From Danny Boyle's Olympic Opening night extravaganza to a vintage Strictly and a monster hit like Call The Midwife, there's something for everyone.
"This is a shortlist to savour and squabble over - and now it is up to the viewers to decide the winner," he said.
Amanda Berry, chief executive of Bafta, said the shortlist - selected by a panel of 19 media journalists - "reflects the increasing diversity of tastes among British viewers".
"Each one of the programmes has captured our attention, and it will be fascinating to see which one is the public's favourite when we reveal the winner," she added.
Members of the public will be able to vote for their favourite programme of 2012 from 21:00 BST on Tuesday until midnight on Thursday, 9 May.
The awards ceremony, hosted by Graham Norton, will be held at the Royal Festival Hall, on London's South Bank, on Sunday 12 May and broadcast on BBC One.
Evan Ebel, the prime suspect in the shooting death of Colorado prison chief Tom Clements, was released from prison four years early because of a clerical error, court officials said today.
Ebel, 28, was released from a Colorado jail in January.
In 2008, he agreed to a plea deal after assaulting a prison guard at Fremont Correctional Facility. He was supposed to complete a sentence of up to four additional years in prison for that assault, to be served after he completed the eight-year sentence he had been serving since 2005.
"The judge announced a sentence of four years in the Department of Corrections but did not state it was consecutive because it was already required by the terms of the plea agreement," Walter Blair, the judicial district administrator for Colorado's 11th Judicial District, and Chief Judge Charles Barton said in a written statement.
AP Photo/Colorado Department of Corrections
"Because the judge did not expressly state that the sentence was consecutive, the court judicial assistant did not include that term in the [court order] that went to the Department of Corrections," the statement said.
When prisons officials believed that Ebel had finished his court-ordered sentence, they released him on Jan 28.
Ebel was on parole from Colorado prisons and was not legally allowed to purchase a weapon. He is believed to have used a gun to kill Clements on March 19 at Clements' Colorado home. He is also believed to be involved in the death of a Domino's delivery man, Nathan Leon, in Denver.
Ebel was then pulled over by Texas authorities two days later and engaged in a high-speed chase and gun battle with them. He was shot and died later at a hospital.
"The court regrets this oversight and extends condolences to the families of Mr. Nathan Leon and Mr. Tom Clements," said the statement signed by Blair and Barton.
Law enforcement sources told ABC News on March 28 that they were investigating whether Clements' death was orchestrated by members of Ebel's white supremacist prison gang, 211 Crew. They were still trying to determine whether others were involved in Clements' death.
In 2005, Ebel slipped out of his handcuffs while being transferred from a cell and punched a prison guard in the nose, The Associated Press reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The UK has avoided a triple dip recession, business group the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) has said.
It believes a strong performance by Britain's service industries during the first three months of the year has kept the economy growing.
The weakness of the pound has also given exports a boost, it said.
The BCC's survey of more than 7,000 firms also showed improvements in the manufacturing sector, although employment had weakened.
David Kern, BCC chief economist, said the results suggested the economy continued to grow in the first three months of 2013.
"The survey reinforces our assessment that recent gross domestic product (GDP) figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have exaggerated the weakness of the UK economy and the volatility in output," he said.
"If an announcement of negative growth in the first quarter is misleadingly described as a triple-dip recession, confidence will again be damaged unnecessarily."
Official GDP figures for the first quarter do not come out until later this month.
However, the Office for National Statistics has already provided figures for the service industry that showed growth of 0.8% for the first quarter.
If that can offset performance by manufacturers and construction, Britain may have avoided going into another technical recession.
John Longworth, director general of the BCC, said its figures suggest a "long and tortuous road to recovery".
"These results provide a glimpse of the as-yet-distant sunlit uplands of recovery.
"Businesses up and down the country are working hard to drive the economy, create jobs and export, but they cannot accelerate this process alone," Mr Longworth said.
A woman and a girl have suffered suspected carbon monoxide poisoning on a boat on Lake Windermere in Cumbria.
North West Ambulance Service said the pair were found on a boat by the jetty near Glebe Road, Bowness, just after 16:00 BST.
They went into cardiac arrest and were taken by air ambulance to the Royal Lancaster Infirmary.
A spokesman said the condition of the woman, aged about 30 and the girl, aged about 10, was unknown.
A man was also taken to hospital suffering from suspected smoke inhalation, the spokesman added.
