Murders England

It was just another shopping trip on just another day: a woman and her young son heading into a butcher shop. She turned away for just a moment. She never again saw her child alive. But the 2-year-old boy has become hauntingly familiar to millions of Britons who have watched security camera film of James Bulger toddling away from his mother and into the hands of two teen-age boys. Two days later, his body was found.

The Supreme Court gave prosecutors an important edge in child abuse cases Wednesday, ruling that doctors, police officers or family members who talk to an abused child may testify in the child's place during a trial. In a second ruling favoring the government, the high court Wednesday made it easier for cities and states to escape the demands of strict court orders aimed at easing prison overcrowding.

A U.S. judge on Monday found that Curtis Howard, an American, may be extradited to Britain to be tried in a case British newspapers have dubbed the "Fatal Attraction" killing. Extradition is not expected soon, however, since several avenues of appeal remain. Howard, 23, is accused of killing Englishwoman Catherine Ayling, 24, with whom he allegedly was romantically obsessed.

Six Irishmen wrongly convicted and jailed 16 years ago in the Irish Republican Army's deadliest attacks in Britain won their freedom in a court hearing Thursday, ending a case that shook faith in Britain's justice system and police. The appeal by the "Birmingham Six" followed the quashing of other convictions in connection with bomb attacks in Britain by the Irish Republican Army.

Vowing that it "will continue to strike whenever and wherever the opportunity arises," the Irish Republican Army on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the car bombing that killed senior British lawmaker Ian Gow and added that the vocal IRA critic was targeted because he was "a close confidant" of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In an apparent sharp escalation of the Irish Republican Army's campaign to bring violence closer to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party, a senior lawmaker who was considered Britain's most strident IRA opponent was killed Monday when a powerful bomb ripped through his car.

The Irish Republican Army on Saturday claimed responsibility for the shooting deaths of two British army men, one in West Germany and the other in England. Gunmen of the group fighting British rule in Northern Ireland killed an army major Saturday outside his home in Dortmund, West Germany, and wounded a police officer afterward during a chase. In the central English town of Lichfield, police hunted for two men who shot and killed a soldier and wounded two others waiting for a train late Friday.

It was pure Cold War intrigue--the mysterious execution on London's Waterloo Bridge of a Bulgarian defector and one-time close friend of the country's Communist leader. It was as dramatic as anything from the pages of a John le Carre novel. Writer and playwright Georgy Markov died from a massive dose of poison--contained either in a bullet or the tip of an umbrella that jabbed into his thigh as the assassin passed him on the bridge crowded with pedestrians.

A man dressed all in black and armed with a shotgun went on a 15-minute shooting spree Sunday in a northeastern coastal town, killing one man and wounding 14 people before being arrested, officials said. Police were questioning the man to determine the motive for his rampage in Monkseaton, about a mile from the Whitley Bay seaside resort and 250 miles northeast of London. The gunman, who was not identified, roamed the streets shooting at anyone he saw, including one person in a car, another on a bicycle, one in a garden and one outside a church, said a spokesman for a local ambulance service.