UK under Fire, Riots
Flames are leaping from shops and cars in and plumes of thick black smoke are billowing across roads.
United Kingdom is under fire. But what's really happening there?
Youths smashed their way into stores and torched cars in central England on Tuesday, police said, as Britain's worst riots for decades entered a fourth night.
Although riots flared overnight in some English cities and towns, but London was Tuesday mostly calm as thousands of police deployed on its streets following three nights of rioting and looting in the British capital.
The English capital was mostly quiet after a huge boost in police numbers on Tuesday evening which saw 16,000 officers on the streets, compared to the 6,000 out on Monday night.
The violence began on Saturday in the ethnically-mixed North London district of Tottenham, following a protest against the shooting of 29-year-old man two days earlier.
Mark Duggan was killed by armed officers in Ferry Lane in Tottenham, North London, on Thursday after they stopped the minicab he was in to carry out an arrest as part of a pre-planned operation.
Copycat riots broke out in other flashpoint areas on Sunday, and by Monday night they had spread across the city, from the wealthy districts of Notting Hill and Clapham, to inner-city Peckham and Hackney, and suburban Croydon and Ealing.
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is due to host another meeting of the government's meeting of the government's crisis committee, COBRA, to address the violence on Wednesday.
Cameron, who returned early from a holiday in Tuscany to deal with the crisis, told reporters: "This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated. People should be in no doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain's streets."
Showing the world London's ugly side, the unrest poses a new challenge to Cameron as Britain's economy struggles to grow while his government slashes public spending and raises taxes to cut a yawning budget deficit - moves that some commentators say have aggravated the plight of young people in inner cities.
Source : News Agencies
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