Rashid & Barton: Depraved Hearts

Husnain Rashid, 32, of Nelson has just been sent to prison for a long time. He was encouraging and inciting fellow Islamic nut-jobs to kill little Prince George, offering them details of his primary school. He also used his nefarious online forums to suggest that people injected tubs of supermarket ice cream with poison and shared his thoughts about which football stadia would be most suitable to attack. When the police arrested him at his home, he demonstrated the cowardice at the heart of every terrorist by pretending to faint.

Chief Superintendent Will Chatterton, from Counter Terrorism Policing North West, remarked "He will no longer be able to spread hate and encourage senseless harm and killing. Today the world is just that little bit safer." Well done to the police for apprehending this monster.

Also convicted was David Barton, 64, a successful Southport care home owner. He conned at least four million out of his elderly residents, buying luxury cars and property. So loyal a customer was he, that Ferrari took him out to Italy to test-drive its latest models. His Honour Judge Everett said he was a "despicably greedy man. I am quite sure the person you care for most is yourself, not even your family, with an insatiable appetite for fancy cars and building your property empire. I am struggling to remember anyone as dishonest [and] as morally bankrupt...".

Very different men, commiting very different offences. Yet they both preyed on, or sought to prey, on the weak. Still people will insist that humans are fundamentally good. These two crooks sum up our species' depraved propensity for evil.

Mark 7: 21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.