News round up: Child database ‘will never be fully secure’

Send fewer to jail, Straw urges courts
Jack Straw, the justice secretary, last night made an urgent appeal to magistrates to send fewer people to jail as the prison population in England and Wales soared past 82,000 to an all-time high.
Read more on this story in The Guardian today

Single women’s overtime burden
Single women in their 30s are bearing the brunt of Britain’s long hours culture and are much more likely to put in unpaid overtime than men or working mothers, findings by the TUC show.
Read more on this story in The Guardian today

Boys are twice as likely to be killed on the roads as girls
Boys are twice as likely to be killed on the roads as girls, according to a Government study that has prompted calls for compulsory road safety training for young males.
Read more on this story in The Times today

Doctors urge steps to curb alcohol ‘epidemic’
Ministers have failed to address Britain’s drinking “epidemic” and are working too closely with the alcohol industry, according to leading doctors who on Thursday called for much tougher measures to curb the sale of cheap alcohol.
Read more on this story in The Financial Times today

Child database ‘will never be fully secure’
Ministers faced calls to scrap a controversial database containing the personal details of every child in England yesterday after warnings that it would never be completely secure.
An independent report called for tighter security to be put in place for the £224?million ContactPoint system, which is due to be introduced later this year.
Read more on this story in The Telegraph today

Boy, 12, placed on sex offender’s register after raping younger boy before he’d let him play on trampoline
A 12-year-old boy has been convicted of raping a younger boy as payment for him being allowed to play on a trampoline.
A jury at Bradford Crown Court heard a boy aged five was forced to perform a sex act on the older boy, in return for being allowed to play on the trampoline in a garden in Bradford, West Yorkshire in August last year.
Read more on this story in The Daily Mail today