Last week, Department for Transport (DfT) officials said train companies may have broken the law by letting staff members who were not legally trained bring prosecutions against alleged fare-evaders.
Only qualified lawyers, such as solicitors and barristers, are legally allowed to conduct criminal prosecutions, but for decades, train fare evasion prosecutions were brought by non-lawyers.
Did the Blairites strengthen the trade union privileges of the Bar or something?
More chronic shoplifters and thieves are walking free than ever before, analysis by The Telegraph has revealed.
Nearly six in 10 prolific thieves – defined as having at least 15 previous convictions – avoided prison last year, the highest proportion since Ministry of Justice (MoJ) records began more than a decade ago.
Just 41.3 per cent received a custodial sentence, down from 46.4 per cent the previous year.
15 previous and no custodial this time?
Dang, I’d expect a custodial for the 16th conviction for pissing behind the post box. Clearly I’m out of touch with justice and equity then…..
The public has a duty to stand up to shoplifters rather than relying solely on police officers, a policing chief has said.
Matthew Barber, the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley, said it was wrong to think that tackling thieves was just a job for police.
He said: “If you’re not even going to challenge people, you’re not going to try and stop them, then people will get away with it. That’s not just about policing. That’s a bigger problem with society, people who [don’t do anything] – you’re part of the problem.”
In a sense he’s right of course. Policing society is something done by society.
In another, not so much. For once we’ve got the fat is beautiful girl sat on the scrote to keep ‘im there, what then? Plod going to come and take him away?
Actor Gary Busey pleads guilty to sexual offence at horror convention
We’re trying people at horror conventions?
Thousands of pro-Palestinian supporters are planning to flout terror laws in a co-ordinated attempt to overwhelm the police, The Telegraph can reveal.
Campaigners have hatched a plot for Left-wing activists and members of the Muslim community to attend a demonstration on Saturday declaring support for Palestine Action, the recently banned terror group.
To do so would be an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. More than 200 people have been arrested for expressing support for the group since July 5.
Last week, one of the co-founders of Palestine Action won the right to challenge the legality of the ban. Now, campaigners plan to confront the criminal justice system en masse to test whether the law can be enforced if thousands of protesters descend on London.
I think it’s a complete tossery of a cause but sure, they can do this. It’s as with tax evasion – that people will, en masse, ignore the law means there’s a limit to what the law can be.
What the police reaction is going to be is going to be interesting…..
A teenage waitress was convicted for failing to insure a car she was given as a surprise 18th birthday gift.
The teenager, from Poole in Dorset, said her family bought the Fiat for her, but mistakenly did not insure it immediately.
The DVLA charged her with keeping an uninsured vehicle and brought a criminal prosecution over the unpaid bill.
The teenager was convicted under the Single Justice Procedure (SJP), in which a volunteer magistrate sits alone behind closed doors with an on-call legal adviser to pass judgment on as many as 100 cases a day.
So, trivial idiocy, oppressed by a fast tack legal system that etc etc pg 94. Except:
The teenager was given a 12-month conditional discharge instead of a fine. She must also pay a £20 court fee.
Sounds about right to me. An offence was committed. Now everyone knows, is contrite and all that.
British man linked to ‘one of London’s most dangerous crime gangs’ arrested
Ed? Two Tier? The enforcer for the up and coming fighters, Onan Jones? HypnoBoob™ has gone physical?
Spanish police find pistols, ammunition and a silencer after suspect crashed car near Marbella
Ah, nothing so fun. One for BiS to tell us about….
The music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs is asking a judge to free him on a $50m bond while he awaits sentencing in October after a jury found him not guilty of the most serious federal charges he faced earlier this month.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Combs’s lawyer argued that conditions at the Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn were dangerous, noting that others convicted of similar prostitution-related offenses were typically released before sentencing.
“Sean Combs should not be in jail for this conduct,” Marc Agnifilo said. “In fact, he may be the only person currently in a United States jail for being any sort of john, and certainly the only person in jail for hiring adult male escorts for him and his girlfriend.”
A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Manhattan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Prosecutors have previously insisted he remains a flight risk.
Combs, 55, faces up to a decade in prison on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution for flying people around the country, including his girlfriends and male sex workers, for sexual encounters. A conviction on racketeering conspiracy or sex trafficking could have put one of hip-hop’s celebrated figures in prison for life.
Immediately after Combs was acquitted on 2 July, Agnifilo had asked that he be released on bond.
But Judge Arun Subramanian denied it, saying Combs at the time had not met the burden of showing by clear and convincing evidence a “lack of danger to any person or the community”.
Max sentence of 10 years, yes, but the idea that he’ll get that…..time served perhaps?
And that burden of proof there, rather a reversal, no? He’s got to prove he’s safe?
It’s as if, you know, someone’s got it in for him?
Rotherham police sexually abused us too, say five grooming victims
Victim claims serving officer threatened to hand her back to her abusers if she did not comply
No, we do not know the names, backgrounds, of those it is claimed did this. Well, we do one, for he’s dead and so named.
On the other hand every single one of us is wholly certain we know the cultural – racial – background of those it is claimed did this. Which is a problem, isn’t it?
A Romanian mother who stole perfume and cosmetics in a £120,000 shoplifting spree at Boots has been jailed for 32 months.
Bianca Mirica, 20, admitted 30 charges of theft from branches of the high street chemist across London between December 2023 and May last year as part of an organised gang of female thieves.
Mirica has three previous convictions for similar offences dating back to her arrival in the UK five years ago, Southwark Crown Court heard.
She stole almost £17,000 worth of items in one thieving expedition at Boots in Hornchurch, east London, on March 7 last year. On another occasion she made off with 10 Yves Saint Laurent concealers, totalling £300.
She previously admitted to 30 counts of theft relating to goods worth £119,318 stolen from Boots at locations across London including Islington, the West End, Kensington, Harrow and Haringey.
Mirica, who has three children, appeared on a video-link from HMP Bronzefield with her month-old baby in her arms. She was assisted throughout the hearing by a Romanian interpreter at the jail.
The last four letters of that nationality description might be unnecessary.
On the other hand, jailing people for hurty words not so much:
An elite team of police officers is to monitor social media for anti-migrant sentiment amid fears of summer riots.
Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest.
The division, assembled by the Home Office, will aim to “maximise social media intelligence” gathering after police forces were criticised over their response to last year’s riots.
Which of the two do we think the modern British police are going to do?
That it’s even feasible to wonder shows how far British policing has fallen, no?
Len McCluskey, who was the Unite general secretary for a decade, also attended football matches with the firm’s representatives, who paid for the tickets.
An investigation ordered by Sharon Graham, Mr McCluskey’s successor, found the Labour-affiliated union was overcharged for the construction of the hotel in Birmingham by at least £30m. It spent almost £100m on the hotel and conference centre after costs ballooned over the course of its construction.
Clearly something was horrendously wrong with that hotel contract. But are they going to go all the way in finding out what? Or just a bit of surface investigating, these things happen etc?
The issues defy quick solutions. The police department’s East Side patrol division is just four blocks away, though police Maj. Chris Young said that even an “overwhelming presence” of officers in recent months didn’t significantly decrease incidents. Young, the patrol division’s commander, links the rise in crime to fallout from the pandemic, rising inflation and a shortage of police officers following racial injustice protests in 2020.
Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a “$250 million mistake” — people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away.
That allows them to hop on the local bus system — free since the pandemic — and head back to the same location, Young said.
“We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,” he said. “A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.”
No, the solution is simple. Jail the lumpen.
Additional 800 children to be tested for STIs as police investigate accused Melbourne childcare paedophile Joshua Dale Brown
Literally.
The health department has not publicly stated the infections the children will be screened for. However, in information provided to affected parents and seen by Guardian Australia, they have recommended testing for chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis for some children or chlamydia and gonorrhoea for others.
Given that kids at different places – he worked at different places at different times – are to be tested for different diseases then it would appear that he’s known to have had varied different diseases at different times.
For the beleaguered staff of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, one new casualty brought into the emergency department last week posed a particular challenge.
He had been wounded moments earlier in the southern Gaza city while fighting in a battle between rival armed gangs over hundreds of valuable sacks of flours stripped from aid convoys and, within an hour of his arrival, men with assault rifles had invaded the hospital. They roughed up medical staff, smashed equipment and set fire to vehicles. Other armed men soon arrived and automatic gunfire reverberated around the sprawling hospital compound, already battered by successive Israeli strikes close by or on its buildings.
There was worse to come. Soon, another force joined the shooting, dispatched by the interior ministry in Gaza, long a bastion of Hamas, to restore order. There was now a new gun battle, which ended only when the opposing gunmen from the two duelling gangs fled. Overhead, throughout the fighting, Israeli drones flew by.
No doubt the BBC will report all of that as Israelis firing into crowds trying to gain access to aid.
More than a million Medicare recipients had their personal information stolen and used by the defendants to file for billions of dollars in claims from Medicare and its supplemental insurers, prosecutors said in the filing.
The claims were filed through medical equipment providers that the group had purchased, but no equipment was ever sent out for the payments.
Medicare paid “approximately $41 million as a result of the fraudulent submissions” and supplemental insurers are estimated to have paid out $900m more between 2022 and 2024, prosecutors wrote.
Buy the equipment company (cheap, I presume), nick the individual IDs off the internet, then start (not) shipping and (really) charging for the equipment. I assume home based stuff, ortho beds, that sort of stuff?
Now that’s clever.
The law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict after appeals are exhausted.
In reality, however, most inmates are left on tenterhooks in solitary confinement for years – and sometimes decades – causing severe consequences for their mental health.
There is widespread criticism of the system and the government’s lack of transparency over the practice. Inmates are often informed of their impending death at the last minute, typically in the early morning before it happens.
I don’t take that to be fun nor, really, fair. That the days of our lives are numbered is true, even more so for someone under a death sentence. But only being told at 7 am that today’s the day, at 8……well, would tend to make that 6 am to 7 am period a little jumpy every day, no?
In the hours leading up to Dua Lipa’s first headline show at Wembley stadium the stifling heat was as striking as the colours. Fans resplendent in costumes inspired by their idol milled around the concourse, and groups of women took selfies, jigging with excitement.
But among the jollity, specialist Met Officers interspersed in the crowd were on the hunt for something different: “We’re here to spot predatory men.”
A grave in Drayton Bassett was reported to be suffering revolving turbulence.
Seven men who groomed vulnerable girls in Rochdale guilty of multiple sex offences
Jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts for 50 offences committed by the men between 2001 and 2006
…
Seven men who groomed two vulnerable teenage girls in Rochdale and treated them as “sex slaves” have been found guilty of multiple sex offences.A long-running trial in Manchester heard that the men subjected the girls to years of misery and expected them to have sex with them “whenever and wherever they wanted”.
“The men” etc.
So satisfying those who would shriek of racism.
Three of the abusers, Mohammed Zahid, 64, Mushtaq Ahmed, 67, and Kasir Bashir, 50 – all born in Pakistan – were stallholders at Rochdale’s indoor market.
Zahid, a father of three who was known as Boss or Bossman, gave free underwear from his lingerie stall to both girls, as well as money, alcohol and food and in return expected them to have regular sex with him and his friends.
Zahid was jailed for five years in 2016 as part of an earlier grooming gang case. He was found guilty of sexual assault of a child after he engaged in sexual activity in 2006 with a 15-year-old girl who he met when she visited his stall to buy tights for school.
Bashir did not attend the 2025 trial and jurors were ordered not to speculate why. It can be revealed that he absconded while on bail before the trial began.
It can also be reported that co-defendants Mohammed Shahzad, 44, Naheem Akram, 48, and Nisar Hussain, 41, had their bail revoked and were remanded in custody in January before the jury was sworn in.
Police received intelligence that the three Rochdale-born taxi drivers were planning to leave the UK and had paid a deposit for their transport, the court heard.
All three denied the accusation but the judge Jonathan Seely said the court was not prepared to take the risk that they too would abscond.
A seventh defendant, Pakistani-born Roheez Khan, 39, was also convicted in a previous Rochdale grooming trial. In 2013 he was one of five men convicted of sexually exploiting a “profoundly vulnerable” 15-year-old girl in 2008 and 2009. He was jailed for six-and-a-half years for engaging in sexual activity with a child and witness intimidation.
They do get there though. Along with the picture caption:
Top row, left to right: Mohammed Zahid, Roheez Khan, Mohammed Shahzad, Kasir Bashir. Bottom row, left to right: Naheem Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed, Nisar Hussain. Composite: Greater Manchester police
No, this is better than it used to be. Back a decade the only clue you’d have as to who was The G publishing a list of the names of those convicted.
Youths wearing balaclavas targeted the sports facility in Larne, Co Antrim, a seaside town 20 miles east of Ballymena where disorder was triggered by the alleged attempted rape of a schoolgirl at the hands of two Romanian-speaking teenagers.
A previous description of them was as Romanian.
D’ye think it will change again to Romany perhaps? I have a suspicion it might…..