Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron believes that legalizing all drugs, not just marijuana, is the only way to eliminate drug-related violence.

Miron argued during an appearance Monday on CNN, “Prohibition … hasn’t prevented kids from getting access to heroin, including very, very cheap heroin. … At the same time, we’re getting all the ancillary costs of drug prohibition, such as the violence in Mexico that spills over into the United States.”

“Some people will misuse drugs even if it’s legal,” Miron acknowledged, “but the magnitude of negative things would be vastly reduced.”

Five people have been arrested in connection with a suspected plot to use explosives made from fireworks to disrupt the G20 summit.

The three men, aged 25, 19 and 16, and two women, both 20, all live in Plymouth and the surrounding area. They are political activists unaffiliated to any terrorist organisation, and were arrested at addresses in Plymouth. They are being held under terrorism legislation. The explosive devices were made from simple fireworks, police said.

Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

Photographs, names and video ­footage of people attending protests are ­routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an “intelligence system”. The ­Metropolitan police, which has ­pioneered surveillance at demonstrations and advises other forces on the tactic, stores details of protesters on Crimint, the general database used daily by all police staff to catalogue criminal intelligence. It lists campaigners by name, allowing police to search which demonstrations or political meetings individuals have attended.

The House of Lords report on Britain’s surveillance society is a devastating analysis of the systems that have been installed by the authoritarian Labour government and the controlling forces emerging in local government. There is no question now that Britain’s free society is under threat, and it is time for the public and opposition parties to declare an end to this regime of intrusion.

Deepening economic strife in the US could lead to civil unrest and violence that would require military intervention, warns a new report from the US Army War College.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” writes Nathan Freier, a 20-year Army veteran and visiting professor at the college.