Mr Justice Coleridge has ruled that Baby P’s mother Tracey Connelly and her boyfriend Steven Barker should be named so that the public should not lose faith in the criminal justice system.

Such was the notoriety of the case, he ruled, that “for the public to be prohibited from learning the identity of the defendants may give rise to considerable public disquiet.”

Their identities had been circulating on the Internet for some time but officially naming Baby P’s tormentors makes them much more open to reprisals, both in prison and outside, when their sentences expire. The mother was jailed for five years and the boyfriend for 12.

The pair may well have to be given police protection and new identities when they leave prison, all at public expense, as happened with the killers of James Bulger.

What did we gain from knowing the names of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in that case, asks Roger Smith, director of law reform group Justice, in the Guardian on Tuesday. ”What does it help me to know if her name is Smith or Jones,” he says of Baby P’s mother.

Do you believe any useful purpose has been served in naming her or her boyfriend?   

To the surprise of many, not least the newspapers and TV channels that were telling us right up until Wednesday afternoon that his release was imminent, Ronnie Biggs has been refused parole.

Reason — a bad attitude. 

The 79-year-old Great Train Robber may be physically frail but is clearly unwilling to show the required amount of remorse that would get him out of jail and could now spend the rest of his days behind bars.

All the other 11 members of the gang that held up the Glasgow to London night mail, coshed the driver and made off with 2.6 million pounds served just a third of their sentences. Biggs wasn’t even on the train on that notorious night in 1963. He was down on the embankment.

His son Michael says Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s decision is devastating, his lawyer calls the decision to keep Biggs in jail “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Yet the original crime was audacious and huge. Biggs’ cheeky hop over the walls of Wandsworth prison and his subsequent two-fingers to justice from the safety of Brazil clearly rankled with the British establishment. If he had been released, he would probably have become a magnet for old lags all over the country, as far as his physical condition allowed.

Do you think he should have been allowed parole?

Paul McCartney has been ordered to pay his estranged wife Heather Mills 24.3 million pounds after their public and highly acrimonious divorce settlement.

She said: “we are very, very pleased.” The ex-Beatle declined to comment.

High Court judge Mr Justice Bennett made his ruling at the end of the couple’s four-year marriage, a union that produced a daughter, Beatrice. It is one of the biggest divorce settlements in Britain, but not THE biggest.

Do you think it is fair?