Coming up, tensions in a border town over illegal immigrants and a rising crime rate.

NPR: Gay Marriage Amendment Fails in U.S. Senate

Consumers worry about their jobs, their pensions, their government's incompetence, public debts, private debts, rising crime, a falling birth rate, their children's education and their parents' health care.

ECONOMIST: Japan��s economy

The main reason is the rising crime rate and the state's apparent inability to bring it under control against a background of rising poverty.

ECONOMIST: An unofficial death penalty

Perhaps worse, there was a fatalism, cultivated assiduously by those opposed to public spending on ideological principle, that this was the natural order of things, that somehow there was a 'British disease' which meant we were culturally destined to have second-rate education and health and rising crime.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Politics | Full text: Blair on public services