Page 65 - Stephen Wright News Today

Victims of the VIP paedophile scandal accused Priti Patel of shirking her responsibility as Home Secretary last night after she dismissed growing calls for a fresh inquiry. Miss Patel was under pressure to act after six of her predecessors said confidence in the police had been seriously damaged by Scotland Yards investigation into false claims by fantasist Nick of a Westminster paedophile ring. They called for a new investigation into the Metropolitan Polices disastrous Operation Midland probe...

This was the Met’s George Floyd moment. Pictures of police officers pinning a young woman to the ground during a peaceful protest have been beamed round the world on TV and social media. No one died, fortunately, but I defy anybody to look at those disgusting images without being overwhelmed by a stomach-churning sense of revulsion. What the hell were they thinking? Who authorised this heavy-handed brutality? Does the Commissioner of the Met really think this is a legitimate way for her subor...

Covid outbreaks in Swindon Covid rate rise concern Its so sad to see Swindon right at the top of Covid-19 infection rates in the West country again, and this after several weeks when we were doing better. Its rather concerning the narrative is going back to mentioning complacency in the population as the reason for these higher rates without giving any evidence as to why that conclusion has been reached. If specific behaviours are to blame what are they and what needs to be done to stamp them...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand--Infant formula firm a2 Milk Company Ltd. lowered its full-year earnings forecast for a third time since September as the pandemic continued to slow sales via Chinese... | March 3, 2021

By What a glorious time it is to be an American woman novelist! Oprah Winfrey has only to say a writer’s name—so far, most of her book-club choices have been novels by women—and hundreds of thousands stampede the bookstores in search of the lucky author’s work. Most books are bought by women, who tend to read novels by female authors. One of our two living Nobel laureate novelists is an African-American woman. Women edit major ...

Daniel Elkind Rereads James Chapman’s TV-War Novel GLASS (pray the electrons back to sand) February 18, 2021 Thirty years ago, as “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C+C Music Factory topped the American charts and Silence of the Lambs took Home Alone’s spot at the top of the box office, a U.S.-led coalition of 35 nations launched its defense of Kuwait—an operation codenamed Desert Shield to hammer home the message. This act of liberation, and the campaign known as Dese...

Now that John Humphrys has called it a day, I’ll never get the chance to be quizzed by him on Mastermind. Pity. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve wondered what my specialist subject would be. Motown B-sides of the 1960s, maybe. The lyrics of Warren Zevon. Minder, 1979-1994. The inside story of the great Transport and General Workers’ Union ballot rigging scandal, 1985. As chairman of the Useless Information Society, a distinguished position I inherited from the late Keith Wate...

How we like to mock the credulity of Americans. Especially when that credulity manifests itself in paranoiac conspiracy theories. The latest, reported with amazement across the world, is QAnon, a social media-fuelled campaign, which claims the U.S. has been controlled by elite members of a paedophile gang with a penchant for the sex-trafficking of children. Many of its believers were among those who last month stormed the Capitol — most spectacularly in the form of Jacob Chansley, known to so...

Not so long ago, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick lambasted TV dramas such as Line Of Duty for painting a wholly inaccurate picture of today’s police ‘service’. After meeting one of the show’s stars, Vicky McClure, Dick decided to watch a couple of episodes. ‘I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is in 2018/19,’ she said. ‘It’s so far from that. The standards and the professionalism are so high.’ Ho...

A NATIONAL effort to recruit 20,000 additional police officers by 2023 is being supported by the University of Cumbria and a special public sector partnership. University of Cumbria and three other institutions with top tier police education expertise formed the Police Education Consortium to deliver policing apprenticeships and DHEPs to new recruits joining three forces across south east England – Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire. From day one and based in their force area, recruits receiv...