The Home Office is to review UK extradition agreements with other countries, including the controversial and some say unbalanced agreement with the United States.

According to reports, the review will include the Extradition Act 2003 which implemented into law the UK-United States extradition treaty. It will also consider the European Arrest Warrant, which was used for 50% more arrests last year.

The review fulfils the pledge made in the coalition's program for government to review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed.

The former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has told the BBC that the agreement with the US was forged very much in the shadow of the September 11 2001 attacks. He also regrets some of its features:

The problem, campaigners say, is that whereas the U.S. extradition agreement may have been designed with suspected terrorists in mind, in fact it has been used to extradite many who have nothing to do with terrorism, such as Gary McKinnon. It is also accused of being unbalanced in favour of the US.

Constant ID checks in supermarkets and off-licences are infantilising young adults, a report by a civil liberties group claims.

The survey by the Manifesto Club suggests that cashiers' over-zealous questioning of customers in their 20s is penalising thousands of innocent people and forcing them to carry their passports all the time.

The study, 28¾: How Constant Age Checks Are Infantilising Adults, is published as the coalition government is considering increasing to £20,000 the maximum penalty for those illegally serving underage drinkers .

The most annoyed constituency is people in their late 20s, who are being frequently ID checked, particularly by supermarkets, the report says.

Campaigns under the slogans of Think 21 and Think 25 have led to confusion about the correct age limit for consuming alcohol, resulting in some checkout staff refusing to sell products to those who are under 25 but over 18, the Manifesto Club maintains: People are being refused alcohol when shopping with younger siblings or children – including one woman who was prevented from buying a bottle of wine, because her 23-year old daughter and 22-year-old friend could not provide ID.

The Manifesto Club describes its aim as campaigning against the hyper-regulation of everyday life. Its director, Josie Appleton, added: 'Producing your passport should not be a routine part of the checkout procedure. There is little point in the government abolishing ID cards while backing policies that mean we have to show ID whenever we go shopping. People in their 20s and 30s should be free to go to the supermarket or off-licence without being constantly challenged.

Britain slavishly implements foreign extradition requests while other countries are protecting their citizens with opt-outs.

Anger at Britain's gold-plating of the controversial European Arrest Warrant is growing after it emerged that other EU countries have secured significant safeguards for their citizens that are not available to British nationals.

More than 1,000 people in Britain last year were seized by police on the orders of European prosecutors, a 51% rise in 12 months.

Many are accused of trivial crimes overseas such as possessing cannabis or leaving petrol stations without paying. No evidence need be presented in British courts of the alleged offence and judges have few powers to resist the person's extradition.

Those affected can spend long periods in jail here and abroad for crimes which might not even be prosecuted in this country. They can also be seized for offences which are not even crimes in Britain.

The Sunday Telegraph has established that many other European countries have given themselves opt-outs or conditions to protect their citizens.

Holland will not extradite Dutch nationals under the EAW unless the accusing state agrees that they can serve any prison sentence in a Dutch jail. The Belgians have opt-outs so that the warrant does not cover abortion. France appears reluctant to extradite its own nationals under the EAW and has stated in the past that they will not be extradited.

Europe's largest country, Germany, has imposed a proportionality rule stating that only those accused of serious crimes can be seized under a warrant. The definition of serious is not given, but it would exclude large numbers of the trivial charges dealt with by the British extradition courts.

Karen Todner, one of Britain's leading extradition lawyers, said: It is typical of us not to have given ourselves proper protection. British judges apply the EAW treaty to the letter and these massive injustices come about because the Government hasn't thought this through. There are a lot of quite simple things we could do now to mitigate the harm done to British citizens, which could be done quite quickly through a simple administrative decision.

Jago Russell, the chief executive of Fair Trials International, said: The human impact of an extradition is crazy. In its forthcoming review of extradition law, Britain needs to learn lessons from the likes of Germany, which have put much-needed safeguards in place to protect their citizens.

My role in this, what has become a farce, is relatively minor. My photographs were part of a jigsaw that probably shed little light on events. But due to my minor involvement, the decision made by the CPS has angered me more than it perhaps would have otherwise. I always understood that it was going to be difficult to charge PC Horwood with manslaughter but I did not expect that he would be charged with nothing. I am not naive to the power and interests of authority, and you could almost imagine the high-level phone calls being made to handicap the proceedings made against PC Horwood. A conviction against Horwood would have had huge consequences on the role and actions of the police in England, working against their interests and current practice. It is obvious that we are not all equal under the law. Imagine if Tomlinson had been a banker making his way home, or if a protestor had attacked a police officer immediately before his death?

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A British man who put on 31kg was denied entry to the UK and forced to spend three months from Amsterdam because he looked different from his passport photograph.

Derrick Agyemen was returning home to Britain after spending a weekend with friends in August 2006 when border control officers stopped him, Fox News reports.

They said his fuller lips and ears did not match his passport photograph — which was taken nine years ago.

Agyemen said he looked different because he put on 31kg. He stayed in Amsterdam for three months before he was allowed back home.

I cry when I think about what happened with me, Agyemen said.

He is now considering another round of legal action after losing an appeal in Britain's High Court over his treatment.

Medway Council's Environment Enforcement team have forbidden anyone to place a for sale sign on their own car and park it outside their own house, on their street.

As the Kent Chronicle explains:

Trainee plumber Pete Dolling stuck no more than a sheet of paper inside his windscreen advertising his R-reg Ford Escort outside his mum's house in Hempstead.

Soon after, he got a notice slapped on the window from the council's Environment Enforcement Team telling him he had to get their permission to sell his car and then shift it within week four weeks, or risk having it forcibly removed.

The notice said: The vehicle to which this notice is attached is being offered for sale without consent from Medway Council.

The notice demanded Pete wrote to the council to prove ownership of the car, that he was not a trader and that it was not causing a nuisance where it was parked, otherwise it would be removed and he would be charged for the cost.

That's right, Pete should have written to the council to ask if he could sell his car. But since when did councils have any sort of jurisdiction over the sale of private property?

If they really wanted to establish he wasn't a trader (although - as a commenter on the Kent website points out - in order to be done as a trader he would have to be advertising in two or more motor vehicles parked within 500 metres of each other) then they could simply leave a note asking him to call and confirm.

But no, they would rather threaten, demand foreknowledge, and finally give a time limit before they send one of their jobsworths round to tow his car.

Pupils at the Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive School in Medway have been running up to smokers in the street, shouting ciggy busters and snatching their cigarettes from them. And filming themselves doing it for later upload to YouTube.

Here's a quote from the teacher responsible, an Italian media artist named Margherita Gramegna. From a write-up in the Medway Messenger:

I was scared about doing something so crazy on the street - I mean you can get arrested.

I knew we could not really go and film in public and attack people in that way and take goods off of them, so we devised a cunning plan.

We planted some people and we started with them. People were watching and following us and at the end we tried with some other people.

And here's a quote from the write-up at This is Kent: Kent police in Medway were made aware of the planned filming, prior to the event taking place.

And didn't stop it!?

This is a remarkable and quite disgraceful story. Law-abiding people in Kent are being robbed on the street, with the tacit approval of the local constabulary. The mob action is part of an ongoing scheme from the school and is going to continue in September.

Shame on you, Kent Police. Shame on you, the school!