The agenda's set..
Good afternoon..We've just had our morning meeting and here's the stories we'll be looking at today.
Murder investigation
A massive man-hunt is underway in Eastern England after the bodies of five prostitutes have been found in the space of a few weeks. Three of the women have been identified, and police fear the two bodies that were found on Tuesday afternoon, could be the killers fourth and fifth victims.
As Anna said in her earlier post, it's a huge talking point here in the UK. All the newspapers are leading with the story with pages of analysis and comment.
"He kills them, stores them and dumps them in the dark" is how The Sun describes the methods of the man it calls The Suffolk Ripper. It says detectives believe the killer is disposing of his victims' bodies in "a very organised way, almost certainly under cover of darkness".
The Times says the murderer is "killing at a rate unheard of in modern British history" ...The Daily Mirror's front page has a photograph of Paula Clennell -- whose body was found on Tuesday - posing with her three young daughters. The newspaper describes her as the victim of "a Killing Machine" in the grip of a "blood frenzy".
In The Independent, Deborah Orr says the Government's policies to drive prostitutes off the streets are "making things easier for the killer". She says women are propelled into the "darkest and least policed places", and discouraged from reporting assaults or people they regard as dangerous.
However, Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph blames the "pervasiveness" of drugs and "the cancer they create". He says ministers should enforce the laws on drugs use in an "exemplary way", and "if that means nice middle class people going to jail, so much the better."
A third perspective comes from Jill Parkin, writing in The Daily Mail; she says the "moral nihilism" of a society which treats sex as a commodity is linked to the killings, "as surely as the heroin needle is".
Today we hope to hear lots of voices out of the town affected by this spate of murders, if you live there, how is it making you feel? Is there a real sense of fear in the community now? Do get in touch.
Botswana
We're also going to be talking about , who are waiting to find out if a court will rule that they were moved illegally from their traditional homelands when the Botswanan government rehoused them four years ago.
One of the judges hearing the case has decided that the San people largely failed to show that the authorities acted wrongfully; the findings of the other judges have yet to be delivered.
The government say the bushmen do not belong to the Kalahari any more, because their lifestyle has changed, and their presence interferes with conservation.
It's been seen as a wider test case of whether governments around the world can legally move people from their tribal and ancestral lands.
Should they be allowed to return to their ancestral homes? Or have western activists who are campaigning for the bushmen to return home, romanticised their plight..?
As always get in touch on any of these subjects and email us if there's something you think we should be looking at.
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