Mr Heyes, 20, of Bray Road, Speke, Liverpool, denies manslaughter.
John McDermott QC, prosecuting, said Mr Heyes, who also has a 16-month old son, was left alone with his newborn after Ms Pike, 32, went out to collect her giro.
A 63-year-old woman has been convicted of assault after using rolled up church papers to hit a teenager she suspected of damaging a village sign.
A sheriff was condemned yesterday for jailing a vigilante who stormed into a drug dealer's home and threatened to kill him before flushing a stash of heroin down the toilet. Peter Drummond, 26, took the law into his own hands after his brother-in-law became addicted to the drug.Once he might have been commended and awarded £50 from public funds. Now he's in jail. Sheriff Robert McCreadie is a greater threat to his country than any number of smack dealers.
He went to the home of John Nellies and berated him for causing misery to families before flushing five bags of heroin down the toilet, Perth Sheriff Court was told.
Drummond, who was reported to the police by one of Nellies' customers, shook his head in disbelief as he was jailed for two months by Sheriff Robert McCreadie.
Ms Bates told the court: "He (Drummond] continued to shout and swear and threatened to kill Nellies if he continued to supply heroin to members of his family. He recovered five bags of heroin from the living room and flushed it down the toilet in order to prevent other persons from obtaining it."
Steve Lafferty, Drummond's solicitor, appealed to the court to have his punishment limited to a fine due to the "quite unusual" circumstances of the case.
He said that Drummond, who admitted a number of previous convictions, had no other criminal charges pending.
But Sheriff McCreadie ignored the plea and told Drummond he should have contacted the police. "You can't take matters into your own hands the way you did," he said.
A man sprayed a mixture of urine and faeces in two supermarkets, a pub and a bookshop in Gloucestershire, a jury at Bristol Crown Court has heard. Sahnoun Daifallah, 42, of Bibury Road, Gloucester, is alleged to have caused damage estimated at £700,000 last May.Nice chap. Seemed to target alcohol, pubs (and barmaids) and frozen chips. What could his motivation be ? There's more that the BBC don't see fit to report, including that the bookshop attack concentrated on the children's section, and the chap's nationality (Algerian).
Mr Daifallah pleaded not guilty to four charges of contaminating goods and two of damaging property. He also denied possession of material to contaminate goods and possession of an offensive weapon.
On searching the house they found messages scrawled all over the walls with what the prosecution say are fantasies about biological weapons.
One message said: "The ants get out to every direction to get food, then they bring it back to Tesco and Asda. If you poison those then you kill the ants."
Police also found a camcorder bag containing sachets of excrement each labelled with the name of a city or town – Bristol, Cheltenham, Birmingham, Worcester, Cardiff and Gloucester. Bottles containing faeces and urine were also found in his kitchen and car.
Daifallah told police that someone else had written the messages on his walls and said that he used the spray for his garden.
Mr Dent also revealed that Daifallah had been questioned by police about four incidents in February last year when brown liquid was sprayed in the toilets and around the tables of four pubs in Stroud.
Amazingly they weren't prosecuted for anything else and no DNA samples were taken.Two shop-owners were today fined for selling chocolate cake - which had been sprinkled with human faeces. A horrified customer ate the foul-smelling gateaux but noticed that it didn't taste or smell "quite right" and handed the cake to public health scientists.
The analysts soon established that the sweet treat was covered in faeces and legal proceedings against the shop owners were started. Shop owners Saeed Hasmi, 25, and Jan Yadgari, 23, were fined £1,500 for selling food unfit for human consumption.
The pair - who ran the Italiano Pizzeria in Roath, Cardiff - admitted the charge but did not say how the chocolate cake was contaminated.
The takeaway is a favourite with late-night revellers and students living around the takeaway close to Cardiff University.
Whistle-blower Graham Milne of Lloyds TSB came to the view that the Circular illegally misled policy-holders. He was duly suspended and, one year later, fired – sound familiar ?The only thing I would add is that it appears the SW policyholders were due to take a hit on the company's Guaranteed Annuity liabilities come what may, whether they stayed mutual or not. But Milne is correct that the exposure should have been fully explained in the demutualisation documents. If that's not a material fact I don't know what is.
Just before he was fired, the FSA responded to his claims, dismissing them - doubtless to the satisfaction of Lloyds TSB. The FSA Managing Director responsible was Carol Sergeant, a personal appointee of Gordon Brown’s – sound familiar ?
Just as Milne was being fired, guess what happened to Sergeant ? One month after she dismissed Milne’s complaint, she was hired as Chief Risk Director at … Lloyds TSB ! Six months later, for good measure, she was awarded the CBE: and then made a Trustee of the charity Public Concern at Work (motto: Making Whistle-Blowing Work). After all, she’d been responsible for launching the FSA’s whistle-blower policy !!
I am not making this up.
Got it in one - in some cases more of a devil's compact (eg Murdoch's services to dumbing down/pornification and the Tory Party) than a tacit deal. And it started, remember, in the 80s. Thatcher lost the culture war as completely as she won the economic one - although I'm never quite sure that she even realised the existence of the culture war.It's almost as if a tacit deal was done.
"You can have political correctness, multiculturalism, gay rights and the abolition of corporal punishment in schools if we can have deregulation, tax loopholes, offshoring and outsourcing."
He's right and all. In the 70s there was snow on the tops all through summer, and in the winter snow stayed for weeks in the Highlands and Borders. The skiing was reliable and a lot of people learned there. The Reo Stakis group developed Aviemore (admittedly with some pretty cruddy architecture) as a winter resort, just as winters disappeared - when we first visited as a family in the 90s the ice rink (now closed) had seen better days - as, one felt, had the whole place. We had one half-term week in around 2002 with no snow at all.
Alex Hill, the chief government adviser with the Met Office, told The Scotsman there was no future for skiing in Scotland because climate change would see winters become too warm for regular snowfall. However, although members of the ski industry agreed that climate change was having an impact, they said the industry could survive.
But Mr Hill said: "Put it this way: I won't be investing in the skiing industry. The amount of snow has been decreasing for the last 40 years, and there's no reason why it's going to stop now. Will there be a ski industry in Scotland in 50 years' time? Very unlikely."
Met Office climate predictions, seen by The Scotsman, suggest that, by 2080, the average winter night-time temperature in the Highlands will be 2C, compared with -2C at present.
"I think the best hope now is that the courts refuse to let him reproduce on the grounds that he's a smoker"
"tell me you aren't ashamed at what our country has become when a middle aged muslim woman of Asian descent can be treated like this. She was questioned at length by plain clothes police officers who never once told her who they were or why she was being questioned."I listened to the video, most of which was a moan about how "I love this country but ...", then we got to the facts. She was taking an internal flight, there was a mix-up and her tickets weren't kosher for the flight she was trying to board, so she was taken aside and asked a few questions. No abuse, no threats, no shouting.
The UK’s official statistician weighed into the debate about foreign workers yesterday by highlighting the growing numbers of immigrants getting jobs while the British workforce declines.
On the day that figures showed the number of people unemployed at a 12-year high, the Office for National Statistics chose to reveal that the number of foreign workers increased by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year while the number of British workers fell by 234,000 to 27 million.
Karen Dunnell, the National Statistician, sought to focus public attention on the contrasting fortunes of foreign and British workers as the country slipped into recession. Her intervention came as construction workers took part in wildcat strikes at power stations in Nottinghamshire and Kent, angry about jobs going to foreigners.
I see. The figures aren't the important thing, it's that they were released. Que ? I think FWIW that it's 'deeply unhelpful' to characterise telling the truth as a move in some political game. Obviously that's the way
LORD TRUSCOTT, one of four peers named in the “lords for hire” scandal, has taken at least £70,000 in allowances for overnight accommodation in London while staying at his home in the capital.Truscott, 49, now receives £28,000-a-year tax free by telling House of Lords’ authorities that his main residence is a modest flat in Bath, Somerset.
He uses the allowance to maintain a £700,000 flat he owns in Mayfair, central London, with his Russian wife, Svetlana. He bought the property in Bath months after becoming eligible to claim the allowance.
Lord Paul of Marylebone, the billionaire steel magnate and Labour donor who is nondomiciled, is one of a number of other peers who take advantage of the perk.
THE financier who has been appointed to protect taxpayers’ money in Britain’s bailed-out banks is a former trustee of a secretive Liechtenstein bank accused of facilitating massive tax evasion.
Glen Moreno, who chairs the powerful body that oversees the government’s £37 billion shareholding in the banks, was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during a nine-year association with Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank based in the tax haven.
The disclosures are an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who last week criticised offshore tax havens and called for international action to stamp out tax evasion.
What with James Crosby, Gordon seems to be an expert at hiring foxes as poultry management consultants. But it's this that really bothers me :
Thus far UK electoral fraud has been confined to Ulster Republicans and other minority communities with a tradition of same, although I wouldn't put it past some well-meaning liberal types to lose a few boxes of BNP votes and think they were protecting democracy - after all, we've all been taught what happened in Germany. The worst the Labour leadership (as opposed to their local party machines) have done is to turn a blind eye. This would be different, and a very worrrying sign for our democracy. I hope and pray that Mr Cock-up is responsible here - but it's not good that we can even entertain the idea of Scottish Labour taking the Mugabe route to electoral success. Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable. It isn't now.The SNP has demanded an inquiry after it emerged that a record of everyone who voted in last year's contest in Glenrothes has gone missing.
All of the major parties, including Labour on election night itself, had predicted that the Nationalists would win the seat, which borders Gordon's Brown's constituency.
Instead Lindsay Roy, Labour's candidate, swept to victory and dealt a stunning blow to Alex Salmond, the First Minister and SNP leader, who had confidently predicted victory.
The result was a huge fillip to the Prime Minister, who broke with convention and risked his political credibility by joining the campaign trail with his wife, Sarah.
Reality trumps satire yet again.
Police are launching patrols in the south Wales valleys during the Rugby World Cup to allow them to respond quickly to domestic violence.
There's a double argument why über-bankers should not be paid even a farthing of performance-related remuneration - and this argument can be extrapolated from no less august a source than the recent magisterial speech by Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority.It's that almost every senior banker trousered bonuses over the previous few years on the basis of profits that turn out to be a chimera, an illusion, unreal.
The point - which is implicit in Turner's analysis - is that banks' wholesale banking and treasury operations booked as profit both capital gain and income from assets that have subsequently turned out to be poisonous.
Much of this capital gain never crystallised, it was not converted into cash. Yet bonuses - in the form of hard cash and shares - were paid out on the basis of this nebulous capital gain.
"Given that most of the banks would be bust without taxpayer guarantees I don't know why they don't just wind them up in a controlled manner, transferring assets and liabilities to the state, before beginning the process of building a case against their boards, freezing their assets and attempting to claw back their bonuses, property and pension funds - on the basis of the effectively fraudulent accounts, based on flawed asset evaluations, which have showed such huge profits over the last ten years."
The depression certainly did see a collapse in global trade and capital flows, and a descent into protectionist tariffs and laws. But a fair reading of the evidence suggests these were more the result of the global downturn than the cause.
According to Peter Temin, a distinguished economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exports were 7% of American GDP in 1929. They fell by 1.5 percentage points in the next two years.
Given the fall in world demand in those years, not all of that fall can be attributed to other countries' retaliation against the US tariffs. And even if it were - overall, GNP over the same period fell by 15%.
So, on any reasonable assumptions, Temin says "the fall in export demand can only be a small part of the story." And, as he points out, even that loss in foreign demand from the tariff would have been partly offset by the fact that the tariff diverted demand from foreign to home-made goods.
His conclusion? "Any net contractionary effect of the tariff was small."
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Even the greatest fans of free trade would admit that the benefits of lower tariffs - or costs of higher ones - are fairly small beer when compared to the kind of collapse in incomes and employment we saw during the depression.
To repeat, I'm not endorsing protectionism, or a policy of "national self-sufficiency" (though intriguingly for his modern admirers, that's what Keynes supported in 1933).
You know the end of the game is in sight when one of the major players feels they have to play what they believe to be their trump.Peter Mandelson is a past master of the politics of xenophilia; his warning against 'the politics of xenophobia' taking hold in the spontaneous direct action now being taken by British workers is his bunker moment. He has nothing left to fall back on, no more aces to play, other than to repeat his government's casual slanders of his fellow British citizens.
Mr Timms referred to the problems in the world economy, the conflict in the Middle East and more immediate problems such as last weekend’s stabbing of Stephen Lewis when leaving a church hall party in his own constituency in East London.Thyere's no doubt about the new voice and new confidence. What I'm not sure about is from whence cometh this voice's strength. Is it the cohesion which put so many hundreds of thousands on the streets, to denounce wars in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, that has earned the respect of New Labour ? Or is it a series of riots, four suicide bombings and a large number of wannabes ? What think you ? What are our rulers more likely to take notice of ?
Mr Timms said: “It would be easy to lapse in the face of challenges of that magnitude into cynicism or even despair – to conclude that nothing can be done by politicians effectively to resolve these enormous challenges.
“But it is the calling of politicians to figure out how to tackle them, to identify solutions and to work to implement them.”
He said the religious groups of Britain were crucial to this process and singled out the Muslim community for particular praise. “Muslims in Britain have helped faith gain a new voice and a new confidence,” he said.
A Christian nurse from Weston-super-Mare has been suspended for offering to pray for a patient's recovery. Community nurse Caroline Petrie, 45, says she asked an elderly woman patient during a home visit if she wanted her to say a prayer for her.
The patient complained to the health trust about Mrs Petrie who follows the Baptist faith. She was suspended, without pay, on 17 December and will find out the outcome of her disciplinary meeting next week.
Twenty five per cent of the 430 population of Long Lartin top security jail in Worcestershire are now Muslim, according to an inspection report by Dame Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons.
Prisoners told Dame Anne during her inspection that offenders at the jail are converting to Islam because they want the protection of belonging to a big Muslim group. One inmate quoted in the report said:”Yes, there is a gang culture here which is becoming an issue. A lot of people are becoming Muslim just because it a bigger group."
Another inmate warned that all violence in the jail was gang related and that Long Lartin was in danger of turning into an American-style prison. He said: "If you are not in a gang, you’re in trouble. People are converting to Islam for protection.”
Our rulers are afraid that unless they are nice to Muslim inmates, when they come out some will set off bombs. But be fair. They're afraid of the other prisoners, too.The number of Muslim prisoners in jails doubled in the eleven years to 2007 to reach 8,864 - 11 per cent of the total prison population. Muslim prisoners make up one third of the population of Whitemoor, 15 per cent of Full Sutton top security prison in Yorkshire and 20 per cent of Belmarsh jail.
In today’s report, Dame Anne said the jail’s security department was monitoriting the difficulties of gang activity, potential extremism and radicalisation of inmates in a balanced way. She said staff had been left to balance as best they could the need to engage with and ensure proper treatment for Muslim prisoners and the need to monitor and prevent radicalisation.
“There needs to be a national strategy to equip staff better to engage and support Muslim prisoners,” she said. There is no multi-faith room at the jail and this has resulted in Friday prayers being held in three separate locations.
A survey found that the proportion of prisoners who believed their faith was respected had fallen significantly and only 48 per cent of Muslim respondents said they were respected by staff, compared with a 67 per cent response from non Muslims.
“Given the sensitivities surrounding Muslim prisoners, including the perceived risk of radicalisation, staff required training and advice on how to engage Muslim prisoners better,” the inspection report said.
A growing number of prisoners serving long sentences who have “nothing to lose” is a threat to the control and stability of the jail system, the prisons watchdog warns.
Dame Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, also said that there was a growing use of force to control the most pressurised jails in England and Wales. She highlighted a rise in the number of prison disturbances and increasingly fractious jails as warning signs of the strain being faced in the overcrowded prison system.
One in seven of the 82,000 prisoners in England and Wales is now serving an indefinite sentence for public protection or a life term, the inspector’s annual report reveals.
Dame Anne said that the disturbances in jails have been contained so far but she identified “real risks” of a loss of control in the future. She said that too many of the most volatile prisons, including top security jails holding an increasingly challenging mix of very serious offenders and those establishments holding young men, had not been judged safe in inspections.
Well, think about it. 900-odd homicides p.a. in England and Wales - even with some three-years-for-torturing-someone-to-death sentences you'll be adding maybe five hundred killers each year for ten years or so each, although they're also being released at the other end. Murder is still a crime with a relatively high clear-up rate. One in seven is about 12,000 bad boys of which maybe half will be killers and the other half rapists, failed killers and perhaps combinations of the two. Of course in the days of the death penalty you'd have a lower murder count and fewer murderers in the cells.
It was once pretty hard to get drugs into jail - in the days when you spoke to your beloved through a wire grille. Now you can sit her on your lap, put your tongue in her mouth and hand where you like - in a crowded visiting room with maybe half a dozen guards on high chairs watching over a room with forty or fifty people in it. I get the impression there's more stuff coming in via the staff, too. After all, a stoned jail is a quiescent jail - they hope. The balance of power in prisons has been shifting from jailer to inmate for forty years.
Dame Anne said that the prison system was having to cope with more prisoners serving longer sentences, more gang activities on the wings and concerns about drugs. “There have always been groups engaged in criminal endeavours both inside and outside prisons. There is some evidence of more organisation,” she said. She added: “The presence of drugs is also a key factor because that can create an economy in prison and create bullying.”
The Muslim population in Britain has grown by more than 500,000 to 2.4 million in just four years, according to official research collated for The Times.
The population multiplied 10 times faster than the rest of society, the research by the Office for National Statistics reveals. In the same period the number of Christians in the country fell by more than 2 million.
Experts said that the increase was attributable to immigration, a higher birthrate and conversions to Islam during the period of 2004-2008, when the data was gathered. They said that it also suggested a growing willingness among believers to describe themselves as Muslims because the western reaction to war and terrorism had strengthened their sense of identity.
Muslim leaders have welcomed the growing population of their communities ...
There are more than 42.6 million Christians in Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics, whose figures were obtained through the quarterly Labour Force Survey of around 53,000 homes. But while the biggest Christian population is among over-70s bracket, for Muslims it is the under-4s ...
Ceri Peach, Professor of Social Geography at Manchester University, said that the rapid growth of the Muslim population posed challenges for society. “The groups with the strongest belief in the family and cohesion are those such as the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. They have got extremely strong family values but it goes together with the sort of honour society and other kinds of attributes which people object to,” he said. “So you are dealing with a pretty complex situation.”
The total number of Muslims in Great Britain:
2004: 1,870,000
2005: 2,017,000
2006: 2,142,000
2007: 2,327,000
2008: 2,422,000
Source: Labour Force Survey
Couples who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.
The British population, now 61m, will pass 70m by 2028, the Office for National Statistics says. The fertility rate for women born outside Britain is estimated to be 2.5, compared with 1.7 for those born here. The global population of 6.7 billion is expected to rise to 9.2 billion by 2050.I wonder where she got the stats for mothers born outside the UK ? Anyone been through the last couple of years ONS Population Trends stats , the ones that come out in December ? I confess I haven't read through them, just noted the headline figures on births to foreign-born mothers. The ONS have already estimated fertility by ethnicity - and the figures chime neatly with the list of boroughs with the highest fertility rates. I look forward to Mr Porritt telling the good people of Bradford, Darwen and Newham why they really ought to be aborting more babies. Like his ideal baby, he'll be lucky to get out alive.
At the hospital, when they discovered on the scan that Down’s syndrome was a possibility, they very kindly offered to kill him for us.
