Round-up

1. A council in the West Midlands has withdrawn its funding for a St George's Day parade after claims it had attracted some "racist elements".

Booga booga!

2. This is a late one, from last November: The angry mother of a man found guilty of first-degree murder in the stabbing death of a bus passenger two years ago and emotional members of his victim's family confronted one another outside an Ottawa courtroom. The then-17-year-old attacker, armed with a butterfly knife, stabbed a 23-year-old once in the heart in September 2006 after attempting to steal an iPod from him as he sat in the last row of a city bus. Tempers flared when the mother and aunt of the convicted man, who are black, complained loudly to reporters about the composition of the 12-member jury, who were all white, suggesting the jurors might not have returned the same verdict if the accused was a white man and the victim was black.

This kind of manipulation, playing the race card in such a callous, cynical way, is corrosive and not far away from evil, and those who engage in it should be rejected and shunned for the pusillanimous cowards they are.