| Man joined officer in kidnap plot A man is found guilty of plotting with a police constable to kidnap a bank manager from his home. bbc.co.uk |
Court reporters found wanting Kenneth Roy questions the skills of the journalists covering the perjury trial of Tommy Sheridan. He recalls his days as a young Glasgow court reporter when "journalists were taught the same inviolable rule about court reporting. You reported what you heard straight and without embellishment."Now, in an assessment of competing reports, he detects differences in supposedly verbatim reports of a 12-word sentence, citing examples from the Daily Record and The Herald and the Daily Telegraph.He writes: "Isn't it pretty astonishing that three journalists should independently have heard different versions of the same brief testimony?"He also takes The Sun to task for carrying a splash heading that paraphrased the quote from a witness without bothering with quotation marks.Having questioned accuracy, he then turns to fairness, and finds The Scotsman wanting by reporting that a series of "damning allegations" were made against Sheridan.Roy points out that this is "the paper's own opinion of these allegations." And, as he "stared disbelievingly" at the use of the adjective he recalled one of his former editors telling him: "We don't comment on the evidence... Our job is to report the facts."He warns that as long as the reporting the trial "remains as excitable as it is at the moment, there is always a risk that two trials will be taking place in Glasgow this autumn – one arranged by the Crown Office, the other by the Greek chorus of the Scottish media."Incidentally, yesterday it was announced in court that Sheridan had sacked his senior lawyers and will conduct his own defence from now on.He and his wife, Gail, are accused of lying on oath during his libel case against the News of the World in 2006. He was awarded £200,000 by the jury. The perjury trial will resume on Thursday.Sources: Scottish Review/The GuardianMedia lawThe ScotsmanThe SunDaily RecordScotlandNewspapersRoy Greensladeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Cat bin woman Mary Bale fined £250 Mary Bale pleads guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to tabby she dropped in a bin, as judge accepts she has faced 'vilification'One inexplicable moment of cruelty when Mary Bale seized a cat and dropped it into a wheelie bin was punished with a modest £250 fine today. But the 45-year-old former bank worker may pay the price for her impulsive act for the rest of her life.The "cat bin woman" from Coventry became reviled around the world, receiving abusive phone calls and death threats from as far afield as Australia, after what she described as a "split second of misjudgment" – which was captured on CCTV and uploaded to YouTube.Thousands of people signed Facebook pages claiming "Mary Bale is worse than Hitler" and calling for the "Death Penalty for Mary Bale" as she attracted newspaper headlines from "It's a fur cop" to "Miaow could she?"The question of why a middle-aged, respectable, apparently cat-loving woman would behave in such a way was not exactly answered in Coventry magistrates court today. But the court heard how Bale was stressed and worried about her ill father, whom she would visit in hospital every day, regularly pausing on her walk home to stroke the four-year-old tabby cat called Lola.On the evening of 21 August, rather than just fondle the cat, she glanced around twice, opened the lid of a nearby green bin and put the cat inside before walking off briskly to her home three streets away.The cat was trapped for 15 hours until her owners, Stephanie Andrews-Mann, 24, and husband Darryl, 26, found her the following morning. When they played back footage from a CCTV camera installed to deter vandals outside their home, they discovered the evidence and posted a clip lasting one minute 27 seconds on the internet, appealing for people to help identify the woman.Confronted by the tabloid press, Bale at first claimed she "suddenly thought it would be funny" to put the cat in the bin. Later, requiring police protection after threats against her, she apologised and called her actions "completely out of character".Nick Sutton, for the RSPCA, told the court it was obvious that her actions were deliberate. "She plainly looked to see if anyone was watching, which means she was clearly aware of the moral position she was in at that time," he said.Bale's solicitor, David Murray, said she had "very little recollection" of the incident. "The court will of course be concerned as to why this matter happened. Mary Bale has asked herself the same questions for the last two months, hourly," he said."The cat was often on the wall seeking attention and she would stroke it. She cannot explain why her behaviour changed on this occasion."Later, in a statement, he added: "Despite a lengthy period of soul-searching, she cannot still explain her behaviour but she wishes to repeat her apology to the owners of Lola and bitterly regrets her actions."Bale, who appeared close to tears in court and admitted a charge of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal, was spared the maximum penalty of six months in prison or a £20,000 fine as the district judge Caroline Goulborn acknowledged the "vilification" she had suffered.The judge also accepted that Bale was in a "stressful situation" at the time, but said that was "no excuse for what you did"."It clearly was an irrational and impulsive act that you could not explain and in interview you said that you were mortified. I accept that your remorse is genuine," the judge said. "The media interest in this case has resulted in you being vilified in some quarters and I have taken that into account also."Bale was fined £250 but was also ordered to pay a victim surcharge and costs, a total of £1,436.04. The RSPCA called it "a very fair decision".Banned from keeping or owning animals for the next five years, Bale may find her infamy takes as long to fade. After a period signed off work for depression, she has now resigned from her job, unable to face her colleagues again.Bale's father died last Thursday and, according to her solicitor, she now simply wants to help her bereaved mother. She is unlikely to be left alone to do so, and any support may be as unwelcome as the hatred. As she fled a scrum of photographers outside court, an onlooker shouted: "I love you cat lady. Cat lady you are my hero."Animal welfareCrimePatrick Barkhamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Police want 'spy' cameras removed All surveillance cameras put up in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham should be removed, the chief constable of West Midlands Police says. bbc.co.uk |
Tower Hamlets: what next for Labour? The borough's Labour group meets this evening in the serious and unusual setting of Committee Room 18 in the House of Commons. A message accompanying the agenda emailed to those invited says, "We are hoping to have Jim Fitzpatrick, Rushnara Ali and John Biggs in attendance." These people are, of course, the borough's two MPs and its London Assembly member. It could be quite an occasion. The main topic of discussion, needless to say, will be how to respond to the election of Lutfur Rahman as executive mayor of Tower Hamlets. Already, Labour members who wish to declare all out war on him are darkly hinting that some colleagues will be prepared to support him, especially if they are offered places in his cabinet. The name of housing expert Marc Francis is invariably mentioned in this context. Francis hosted the Rahman victory party that followed his short-lived period as Labour's candidate and is known to have been unhappy about Rahman's deselection by Labour's National Executive Committee. The Rahman camp is saying that their man is eager to re-build bridges and bring talented Labour people into his administration, which will probably comprise a deputy mayor plus eight others. It points out that most of the eight Labour Councillors - five women and three men, incidentally - who openly supported him do not have a great deal of experience in local government. Rahman's overture is that he wishes to implement the policy programme Labour had agreed and hopes the party's seasoned elected representatives will assist him in this work. Labour in London has firmly denied reports that its general secretary Ken Clark has warned any who do that they will face expulsion, though it's hard to imagine in these fraught circumstances how the Labour group could function effectively as a unit with some of its members working in the Rahman administration and others devoted to its destruction. Something will have to give. And if Rahman does indeed seek to implement the same policies as Helal Abbas would have done, opposing them will require a lot of ingenuity. They've surely got to have more to offer than anger and allegations about unsavoury connections. There clearly are splits within the local party and disquiet about the handling of the candidate selection process. There's also, I'm told, a bit of tension between the NEC and the London regional party. On Friday I spoke to a key member of the vanquished Helal Abbas campaign, who acknowledged that the defeat had been a "disaster" and said there would be a "serious postmortem," focussing on, among other things, the way the candidate was picked, why the turnout was so (for Labour) fatally low and the failure of the campaign to mobilise either a majority of the politically-active Bangladeshi community which comprises one third of the Tower Hamlets population or enough of its other natural supporters despite a headline theme of "uniting the East End." Significantly, this source said it would be a mistake to "blame it all on Ken and Ken," meaning Mssrs Livingstone and Clark for their respective roles. He said he hoped Livingstone would "pay a heavy price" for accompanying Rahman on the campaign trail but added "he didn't cost us 10,000 votes." He also said he though Clark had stuck to the right principles in his stewardship of the selection process and admitted that Rahman had "turned our attacks on him against us brilliantly." The source also disputed the view that John Biggs, who came second in the candidate ballot, should have been imposed instead of Abbas, who came third, and was passed over on the grounds that a white candidate could not win, saying "it was about seniority." I wouldn't like to be in Labour shoes. If the majority of the Tower Hamlets group refuses to co-operate with Rahman at all it will shut itself out of the running of Tower Hamlets for at least four years, risk looking petty and even shouldering some of the blame should his mayoralty prove as inefficient as some fear. If it chooses to kiss and make up, people will ask what it is doing making friends with a man it so recently vilified as a willing collaborator with sinister extremist infiltrators. It's hard to imagine a tidy ending. There is, though, one thing that Labour's NEC must surely do if it hopes to repair the damage done to its support in Tower Hamlets among Bangladeshi voters. Abbas's allegations against Rahman should be thoroughly investigated by someone quite separate from the Labour Party and the results made public, no matter how uncomfortable they are for the party. Without that, no postmortem will be complete.LondonLondon politicsLocal governmentLocal politicsDave Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |