The high-profile stabbing came just days after 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen was murdered in Lee, south-east London.

Also over the weekend two teenagers, aged 15 and 16, were stabbed in Holloway, north London, and last week barrister Mark Saunders was shot dead by police in Chelsea, west London, after he started shooting out of his home.

London's newly-appointed Deputy Mayor for Young People, Ray Lewis, described the problem of crime in the capital as a "rising onslaught".

"I think we need to ask ourselves why we are where we are in the first place," he told the BBC's Newsnight.

"Because this isn't a blow-out, this is a slow leak.

"This has been an increasing and steadily rising onslaught of lawlessness and abandoned behaviour for a number of years."

For the Bill Clinton event, the criteria were something else entirely.

The part that bothered me was the section in the lower right-hand corner: The box read: "Yes! I will vote for Hillary on May 6th!" with a place for a signature and a date.

We all looked at the paper. Someone asked, "If you don't sign this box, can you still get in?" The volunteer at first said we had to sign it. Then, there was uncertainty.

The UN is demanding an investigation into how the Israeli military killed one of its Palestinian school teachers by blasting open the front door of her Gaza home with explosives in the presence of three of her children.

Wafer Shaker al Daghma, 34, a teacher at a local UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) elementary school, was killed last Wednesday as she stood preparing to open the wooden door of her home to the troops. According to UNRWA and relatives who found her body, the military used an explosive device on the door which blew most of her head from her body. They then confined the traumatised children – aged from two to 13 – for five hours while the body lay outside the door of the room where they were held.

The controversial deal orchestrated by the Federal Reserve that pushed Bear Stearns into the hands of JPMorgan Chase, at the height of the sub-prime crisis, will turn into billions of dollars in gains for for JPMorgan Chase.