Crime

Patrick Spencer was seen on camera coming up behind two women and putting his arms around them at the private members’ club during a night out in August 2023, less than a year before he was elected to the seat of Central Suffolk and North Ipswich.

Spencer, 38, was accused of “cupping” the breasts of both women, who he did not know, before “fist pumping” towards his friends nearby.

During his police interview, Spencer apologised for grabbing hold of the two women – from behind – and conceded it was “not acceptable in this day and age”. At his trial at Southwark crown court, Spencer insisted that he had not touched the breasts of one of the women, while contact with the other woman had been unintentional.
…
Spencer is the son of Michael Spencer, a billionaire donor to the Conservative party. He told the court he had drunk red wine with his father at lunch, beers at Twickenham while watching an England rugby match, and drank wine and negroni cocktails at the members’ club.

Umm, well, I dunno.

Drunk slobbering over titties in a club is, well, yes, sexual, we can call it an assault, but “sexual assault”? According to the wimmins, yes. But what’s a crime runs into the wall of what society as a whole considers to be a crime. Drunks slobbering over titties might be something considered to be one of those things best met by a punch to the mouth. Or ejection, say. And the people who decide this are the jury. Or even, just one of those things.

No wonder they want juryless trials, right? How can you impose your vision upon society if there’s a roadblock of the commonplace wisdom?

My own view tends toward much of life being best managed by us, the people, rather than by the law. Which is rather Burkean, Hayekian, even, and it’s easy to mock that view too. So it’s open season on titties then, is it? For drunks you say? At which point I’m left mumbling well, but, yes, that is the best way large parts of life should be managed. By us in the right here and now.

Pfft.

Don’t clubs have steps people can be thrashed upon these days?

How a convicted fraudster became Andy Burnham’s right-hand woman

If every reference to George Cottrell is “th convicted moneylaunderer” or watever it is they’re using then and therefore:

Louise Haigh, the convicted fraudster.

Always, every reference.

A 26-year-old man arrested on suspicion of murdering Ann Widdecombe has been released.

The man was arrested on Friday but is no longer part of the investigation, Devon and Cornwall Police said on Saturday morning.

Prosecutors said Netflix initially paid Rinsch about $44m for “White Horse” in 2018 and 2019, then provided another $11m in 2020 after he said he needed more money to wrap up production.

But instead of putting that money toward the show, Rinsch steered the cash to a personal account and made a series of failed investments, losing approximately half the $11m in a couple of months, according to prosecutors and witnesses’ testimony.

They said he put the remaining funds into the cryptocurrency market, netting some profit, which Rinsch deposited into his own bank account.

Then came the lavish purchases, prosecutors said, with Rinsch buying five Rolls-Royces, a red Ferrari, $652,000 worth of watches and clothes, and the pricey mattresses, plus another $295,000 on luxury bedding and linens. In addition, he used some of the money to pay off about $1.8m in credit card bills, prosecutors said.

Seriously, that’s some spending:

household goods, including $638,000 on two mattresses.

He’s not even a soon to be ex-wife.

Sheesh.

Scotland Yard has identified more than 4,000 grooming gang cases that may need to be reinvestigated, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Metropolitan Police has been carrying out a major audit of group-based sexual abuse in London dating back to 2010, amid concern victims have been denied justice.
More than 12,000 alleged incidents were reported to the Met during the period being examined, and the review has found a third of them may need to be reopened.
The revelation comes despite Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, previously claiming there was “no indication” grooming gangs were operating in the capital.

But Sadiq assured us that etc etc.

I particularly dislike that particular politician. For no other reason that he is particularly a politician. Everything is about what boosts his power, his position, his post. Possibly that’s all unfair of me but it is what it is.

A man has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail after being convicted of assaulting two female police officers and a member of the public at a Starbucks in Manchester airport.

Doesn’t really seem enough, does it?

No, not to punish this individual, that’s not the point. Rather, to dissuade from belting coppers.

Cook said she was left “traumatised” by the attack, during which she was “terrified” and suffered “excruciating” pain. Amaaz’s punches, she said, had “such power behind them that I thought I was being attacked by three to four people”.

There is also the thought that perhaps we should go back to recruiting from the second row forwards classes. Would have been a bit different if it was Wade Dooley, no?

A man who fled to Pakistan before he was found guilty of raping vulnerable girls as young as 12 has been jailed for 27 years in his absence.
Amar Ilyas, 41, who used the nickname Killer, “remorselessly terrorised” girls in Sheffield, biting one victim and using a gun and threats of gang rape to coerce others he abused almost 20 years ago, detectives have said.
Jailing Ilyas in his absence on Monday,

So we have an extradition treaty then? One that works?

Judge Hampton contrasted this with the “cowardice” shown by the defendant, who fled to a different continent to avoid justice while he was on bail.

Perhaps bail should not have been offered? Flight risk and all that?

The brothers were arrested as part of the NCA’s Operation Stovewood, which is the investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, although this offending mainly took place in nearby Sheffield.

Police suspect Peter Murrell used a six-figure loan to the SNP to “launder” the proceeds of his embezzlement spree, The Telegraph can disclose.
Officers who investigated the party’s finances are understood to believe that the £107,620 loan in June 2021 was an attempt by the then-chief executive of the SNP to disguise its stolen origins.
The SNP had repaid almost half of the money to Murrell by October of that year, meaning the funds going back into his account were washed “clean”.
It is understood that police also believe that the loan was an attempt by Murrell to “throw people off the scent” by appearing to help the party’s finances.

What, actually, is the allegation? That he took out a loan, gave the money to hte SNP, then they repaid it?

Or that he claimed there was a loan when there was not and the repayments then covered his thieving?

The Telegraph was told that it was common practice among embezzlers to put money back into the organisations they were stealing from to “throw people off the trail”.
Police sources alleged that Murrell was engaged in a “form of laundering”, using the £107,620 loan to “put money back in” to the SNP that he had previously stolen.
Electoral Commission records of the loan say that no interest was charged by Mr Murrell. A total of £47,620 was repaid to him in two instalments in August and October 2021.
The remaining £60,000 is still outstanding and is now not expected to be repaid by the party, given his embezzlement conviction.

Hmm.

You knew what her view was going to be, right?

This is a legacy of a much wider erosion of the ways in which we can come together as a collective around things that aren’t just about competitions with other races for the prize of most subjugated. A rapacious individualisation is the legacy of the smashing of places to gather, where people could once identify material concerns (rather than race hallucinations) and collectively bargain for their delivery. The trade union movement is weakened, labour itself is changing into something more precarious and atomised. Deindustrialisation wrecked working-class systems and the halo of social and cultural life around them. Austerity undermined the ability to commune in free spaces and mix socially, in youth clubs, in family support centres, and drove people indoors and on to their phones and into a state of hermetic siege.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of scarcity of all sorts. Not just cost of living crises, but more stressed housing, healthcare and state schooling, which intensify that state of siege. This is not to suggest that actual racism, pure and uncomplicated, is not a factor, but that its activation into something violent and aggressive is more easily achieved in such conditions. The correctives to these conditions are hampered by the long march of modernity and by governments, both Labour and Conservative, that have resigned themselves to the inevitability of austerity. And with that has come a failure to articulate a new class politics, one in which people no longer array themselves in terms of work or industry, but would recognise themselves as being on the sharp end of a capital- and asset-owning class that privatises, gouges and exploits. However, that dynamic is never identified. Appealing to vague groups such as “working people” isn’t going to cut it.

Rampant individualism and neoliberal, capitalist, austerity. ‘S obvious, innit?

And, of course, she assumes that the cold, pure, rage, is about the murder itself. Which, well, no, it ain’t. Murders happen, they’re vile and appalling when they happen and that’s that. We all know they happen. What has got people going is that the victim was left to drown in his own blood as the one who’d cried waaacism was comforted by the police. The fucking police! Which is, to the average man and woman in the street, something to rage about.

Just not getting it in the slightest.

Survivors of abuse perpetrated by the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed are calling for a full trafficking investigation to be launched, arguing that without it the “true scale” of the billionaire’s alleged network would remain hidden.

What we used to call the White Slave Trade. Innocent lovelies drugged and kidnapped to wake up in a foreign brothel where they are raped forevermore.

Lawyers representing the Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors group said 421 people had come forward about abuse that allegedly took place at the luxury department store in central London, as well as the Ritz hotel in Paris, Fulham FC and other places owned by Fayed.

The Met is investigating 155 victims who have contacted the force directly, 21 of whom came forward before Fayed’s death. However, NOA has argued the Met should focus primarily on trafficking to ensure a wider international network of people who enabled the abuse were also investigated.

Sexual abuse – which shouldn’t happen, agreed – is not really the same thing now, is it?

Scotland Yard has been captured by the “woke mind virus” and no longer treats citizens equally under the law, a veteran police officer has claimed.
Rick Prior, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said the force had prioritised equalising outcomes among different ethnic groups over ensuring equality of opportunity for more than a decade.

The question now is, what do we do about it?

Which is a problem. Cultures are notoriously difficult to change. It’s taken them these decades to get to this point, where the idea of equity not equality dominates. So, how do we shift it back?

A Virginia man who was having an affair with the family’s Brazilian au pair was sentenced on Friday to life in prison without parole for the murder of his wife and a man who was lured to the couple’s home as a fall guy.

Brendan Banfield, a former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) law enforcement officer, claimed he shot Joseph Ryan after he came across Ryan attacking his wife on the morning of 24 February 2023. But prosecutors said Brendan Banfield and au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães set Ryan up in a scheme to kill Christine Banfield, a pediatric intensive care nurse.

The au pair was in on the plot and has also been jailed.

It’s just one of those things that has always occurred to me. Being the second wife of a man who murdered his first seems like a pretty high risk occupation. Presumably increased when you have a kid and then there’s another au pair…..

Police footage showing Nowak’s final few minutes of life have been shared across the world. The 18-year-old was arrested and handcuffed as he lay dying from stab wounds, while his murderer, Vickrum Digwa, who had stabbed him five times, lied to police that he had been racially abused.

Sort of thing that should be reported perhaps. Give a glimpse, an insight, in the country?

He wrote on X: “This horrific murder is a metaphor for what the West is experiencing: the native is treated as a suspect, while the immigrant perpetrator is shielded by the religion of anti-racism, which paralyses government officials and police officers. This time, there will be no kneeling. Europeans, in their own homeland, are not allowed to do so.”

You can grasp why someone might say that, no?

Europe’s far right exploit

Oh, this is exploitation is it? I assume exploitation now means drawing the politically incorrect conclusion from events?

Policing could be driven back to the 1960s by false claims officers are biased against white people, the leader of Britain’s black officers has said.

Ch Insp Andy George, president of the National Black Police Association,

The non-existence of the National White Police Association rather makes the point for us, no?

Starmer urges calm as far right seeks to exploit Henry Nowak murder

People getting pissed at the police fuck up here is not “exploit”. Telling people that they are exploiting is only going to increase the righteous anger of course. Because all that sonorous “do not exploit!” shite is just going to get people even more hopping mad as they shout that they’re not exploiting when they insist something went wrong here.

Her disappearance had been linked to a string of missing person cases involving US scientists, which have fuelled internet conspiracy theories.
At least 10 scientists connected to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace research are thought to have disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances in recent years, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to launch a probe in April.

How many nuclear and aerospace people does the US have?

From which we can then try to see whether 10 is higher or lower than the suicide/murder rate we’d expect in the general population. At which point we can try to decide whether this in fact a general problewm or not? Obviously, each death is a specific problem, but….

Been frightening the horses, see?

Gay people to be jailed in Ghana

Oh, oh, I see. You mean gay people who are in Ghana will be jailed, not that gay people will be……British equines not alleviated then.

For more than two years, John “Jay” Morris, a Louisiana state senator, helped pave the way for Meta to build one of the world’s largest datacenters, called Hyperion, in Richland Parish.

The Republican attorney lobbied a utility regulator for a key approval. He cosponsored two bills that enabled the land deal between Meta and the state. And he voted “yea” on two additional bills that provided the trillion-dollar tech company with tax breaks worth an estimated $3.3bn.

Now, a Floodlight investigation has found that while Morris used his political position to advance the project, he and his business partners were buying and selling the land around it over the past 15 months.

Now, let me explain to you how Louisiana state politics works……

France is facing a child abuse scandal as ‘monitors’ at dozens of state nursery and primary schools are investigated for violence, sexual assault and rape.

Paris police are examining more than 100 allegations of mistreatment, physical violence and rape of children as young as three by school monitors during lunch breaks, nap times and after-school activities, prosecutors have confirmed.

“We have investigations under way in 84 preschools, about 20 primary schools and about 10 daycare centres,” said Paris’s top prosecutor, Laure Beccuau. Lawyers said the investigations included the alleged rape of children as young as three and four years old.

Those who wish to diddle kiddies will go wherre there are kiddies to diddle.

As ever with these things, is this something widespread and real coming to light or have we some social mania? A reasonable guess here is it’s the first…..

Seven men have been accused of being part of a grooming gang and charged with rape and child sexual abuse offences, police said.

The Afghan nationals were charged as part of an investigation into group-based child sexual exploitation in Norwich, Norfolk police said. The men are accused of sexual offences committed between August 2023 and May 2025.

Police said five of the men had entered the country via a small boat, one concealed in a lorry and the seventh attempted to enter the UK clandestinely via Portsmouth ferry port.

That’s a change, no?