The images of gangs of hoodies smashing up shops and looting made me feel ashamed of my country, but the testosterone-fuelled response of our leaders was equally cringe making.

An 80-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of locking up his two mentally disabled daughters in a small room in an Austrian village for 41 years and beating and sexually abusing them.

John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP who made a name for himself by saying things in Parliament which could not legally be said anywhere else, has been accused of being unfit for public office.

Youth workers in David Cameron's constituency will go on strike today in protest at cuts to their services.

The African National Congress (ANC) yesterday ordered its controversial youth league leader Julius Malema to appear before its disciplinary panel for "bringing the party into disrepute and sowing internal divisions".

A car which plunged off a 100-metre (328ft) cliff killing the man and woman inside is to be removed from the beach today as police begin an investigation.

Devastated by her husband's severe stroke, Aviva Cohen trawled thousands of research papers for treatment options.

David Greig's fizzing urban fairy tale of a teenage girl, her sick Hell's Angel father, his metaphorical motorbike in the hall... and big Agnetha from Trondheim is an imaginative synthesis of Beauty and the Beast, pop songs, heavy metal, and rapid-fire acting. The small cast use a jumbled style of computer games and Avatar-style heroics, with sex and social services thrown in.

Britain's prisons and young offenders' institutions do not have the policies in place to deal with the influx of young gang members who will be locked up in the coming months, according to a damning report given to ministers a year ago.

Our guide to Clearing will help you to pick the right institute and course for you

It's a term which has become familiar. Everyone knows what 'sex addiction' is, and the eye-rolling it tends to provoke is usually because of the celebrities and public figures who have cited it as the cause of their unreasonable sexual behaviour. Think of Russell Brand, David Duchovny. Rob Lowe and Michael Douglas (though he later denied it). Ryan Giggs is said to have agreed to undergo sex addiction therapy. When Tiger Woods was exposed as having multiple affairs, he went straight to therapy, spending 45 days as an in-patient. He reportedly underwent treatment for sex addiction, explaining in his statement to the press that he was "receiving guidance for the issues I'm facing". When the US Senator Anthony Weiner resigned in June after sending explicit photographs of himself to Twitter followers, the internet was abuzz with questions about whether he was a sex addict. When he asked for forgiveness for the "personal mistakes" he'd made to get the sexual highs that led to him losing the career he had fought hard to get, he was heckled, and shouts of "Pervert!" interrupted his speech. An admission of this kind is, it seems, difficult for an audience to take seriously. At the very least, there are raised eyebrows and sniggers; the most common reactions, to celebrities at least, are underpinned with cynicism.

From time to time, a new book arrives which catches its moment in an almost uncanny grip. Set in the middle of the last decade, the latest novel by South London writer Alex Wheatle has an all-too-obvious connection to this week's blazing headlines. At one point, a grieving teenager voices her scorn and fury at the mayhem unleashed by a junior gangster who has shot her boyfriend in error after a nightclub assassination struck the wrong target: "he's probably boasting to his crew right now... He's probably writing about it on his fucking MySpace page... What is wrong with these idiots? Don't they have parents who bring them up right? I bet he's got a pic of him on his site doing some bullshit macho pose. His bredrens are probably saying, yeah, you're a soldier. A fucking soldier! Is that all they live for? To be called a soldier by their wasteman crew?"

A column in yesterday's Independent has caused widespread debate about the reasons behind the violence which has swept the country.