Paddy Wivell's film about the Hasidic Jewish community of Stamford Hill began by indulging an outsider's prejudice. What would most viewers' working assumptions be, after all? A world of arcane religious prescription, with every detail of life dictated by ancient texts? So... no establishing shot of beaver-hatted Hasids in a London street but a close-up of a book of rules, one from which no detail of life appeared too negligible to be excluded: "Finger and toenails should not be cut on the same day," read the text, "nor should the nails and the hair be cut on Rosh Chodesh, even when it occurs on a Friday." An additional note, which I think was supposed to be optional, said that sequential cutting of the fingernails was avoided by some and offered a mnemonic for the correct order in which to do your clipping (I'm not making this up for comic effect). But then, just as your scorn was peaking, it was undercut by a winningly human detail. "I bite my nails, I don't cut them," admitted Gaby, who spends large parts of his days devotedly studying such absurdities. "It's disgusting," confirmed his chuckling wife, Tikwah, "He bites his nails." Which inevitably raised a question. What's the rule about that? It seemed implausible that it wouldn't be covered somewhere since – as Gaby explained – "everything is controlled... for instance... excuse my English... you're not allowed to fart with tefillin on your head." One would love to know the circumstances in which a relieving gust is regarded as entirely kosher, but Gaby didn't elaborate.

A knifeman who stabbed to death a promising teenage footballer as he tried to help his friends was jailed for life today with a minimum term of 19 years.

Gagging of NHS doctors

On the night that Obama was elected as President of the United States, I was reminded of the end of Sam Selvon's novel, The Lonely Londoners. Moses, one of the first wave of post-Windrush Jamaicans in London, is standing on the banks of the Thames, wondering "if he should save up his money and go back home". "Under the kiff-kaff laughter," he muses, "behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, the summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leave you standing in the same spot. As if a forlorn shadow of doom fall on all the spades in the country."

With his dark-blue uniform, earpiece and walkie-talkie, Nochem Perlberger could pass for a police officer as he patrols the leafy streets of London’s Stamford Hill neighbourhood. Like an officer of the law, he responds to emergency calls, visits crime scenes and pursues suspects.

Ministers today urged schools to adopt basic hygiene measures to help curb the spread of swine flu prior to an expected second wave of the virus this autumn.