Lord Ashcroft, the former deputy Tory chairman, has attacked the Government's plans to cap the tax relief on charitable donations as "profoundly un-Conservative".

Education Secretary Michael Gove today said a report into the torture of two young boys was "insufficient" and showed the current system of serious case reviews is "failing".

Two-thirds of young British Asians believe families should live according to the concept of “honour”, a new poll suggests.

A police report says a Florida couple locked an extremely malnourished boy inside a closet as punishment for stealing food they were withholding from him.

Women and children could die as a result of the Government’s legal aid cuts, warns a former attorney general, who will today make a last-ditch attempt to overturn the changes in the House of Lords.

From Molesworth to Adrian Mole, English literature is crammed with memorable schoolboy narrators. In his fifth novel, Christopher Wakling takes us back even further, acting as ventriloquist to the kindergarten classes with a horribly plausible journey into the mind of a six-year-old boy. Billy Wright, the book's pint-sized narrator, isn't on the special needs spectrum, nor is he intentionally difficult. It's just the "electricity" he feels "fizzing" in his arms and legs that compels him to tip back on chairs and slam into walls. One weekday morning, this same energy causes him to slip out from under his father's grasp and make a dash across a busy main road. Billy's father, already irritated after an incident in a coffee shop, pulls down his son's trousers and smacks him across the buttocks "very, very, very hard". As in Christos Tsiolkas's novel, The Slap, the ensuing drama is less about politically incorrect parenting than how a family copes with the fall-out of a very public violation.

Two senior Indian politicians were forced to resign after they were caught watching a pornographic film during a session of their state assembly.

Aquestion was raised in i last week: "Should we let our children roam free?" That question needs to be rephrased. It should be "How can we not?"

Sarah Ferguson went to Turkey to film cruelty to orphans. Now she's been asked back – to jail

Matilda Battersby reports on an innovative scheme to help locate runaway teenagers

The Catholic church in the Netherlands was blamed yesterday for the systematic and widespread of abuse of up to 20,000 children and adolescents in its homes and institutions, in a damning independent report which castigated the clergy for failing to deal with the problem or help the victims.

The number of people convicted of sex offences on children under 16 in England and Wales has increased by nearly 60% in six years, it was reported today.

The mother of a four-year-old girl left home alone was questioned by police under caution today after she returned to Britain.

Police, Ofsted and children's services have launched a joint investigation into the welfare of children at two privately owned nurseries.