'Reckless' behaviour at Plymouth harbour 'risking lives'
The activity can lead to cold water shock, being swept away by strong currents and injury due to lower-than-expected water depths.The committee said 20 people had died from tombstoning since 2004 and a further 70 were injured. The youngest person injured was 12, they added, while the oldest was 45.
"Don't jump into the unknown," the committee spokesperson warned.Kim Downer, interim CEO of Plymouth Waterfront Partnership, said a small minority of people were damaging visitors' impressions of the waterfront through anti-social and dangerous behaviour.She said business had also been impacted, adding: "No one should have to feel unsafe in their workplace [because of people who were] determined to cause trouble."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
2 minutes ago
- The Independent
Phillips hits out at Farage over children's safety online
Jess Phillips has joined criticism of Reform UK's pledge to repeal the Online Safety Act, suggesting such a move would empower 'modern-day Jimmy Saviles'. Ms Phillips, the Home Office minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, appeared to accuse Nigel Farage of being more concerned about 'clicks for his monetised social media accounts' than children's safety online. She backed her colleague Peter Kyle after his row with the Reform UK leader last week. The Technology Secretary said Mr Farage was putting himself on the side of 'extreme pornographers' and people like Savile by opposing the law. Under rules that came into effect on July 25 as part of the act, online platforms such as social media sites and search engines must take steps to prevent children from accessing harmful content such as pornography or material that encourages suicide. Mr Farage has said the legislation threatens freedom of speech and open debate. Writing in The Times, Ms Phillips said: 'Farage said it's the biggest threat to freedom of speech in our lifetimes. 'My colleague Peter Kyle said he was siding with modern-day Jimmy Saviles preying on children online.' She said she would like to speak to Mr Farage about 'one of those modern-day Saviles, Alexander McCartney'. McCartney, who posed as a teenage girl to befriend young females from across the globe on Snapchat and other platforms before blackmailing them, 'just needed a computer' to reach his targets, Ms Phillips wrote. Believed to be one of the world's most prolific online offenders, McCartney abused at least 70 children online and drove one girl to suicide. Ms Phillips said the Online Safety Act exists to try to provide a 'basic minimum of protection, and make it harder for paedophiles to prey on children at will'. She said police have told her that paedophile networks use 'normal websites where their parents assume they're safe' to coerce and blackmail young people. 'Perhaps Nigel Farage doesn't worry about that — there's no political advantage in it, and no clicks for his monetised social media accounts. But I do. 'I worry about what it means now and what it will mean when boys reared on a diet of ultraviolent online child abuse are adult men having children of their own. I can't ignore that, neither can Peter Kyle, and, most importantly, nor can millions of parents across the country. 'I defy Nigel Farage to tell me what any of that has to do with free speech. 'I defy him to meet even one parent who has lost a daughter to suicide because she was being blackmailed online and tell them that is just the price of civil liberties. Maybe he'd feel differently after that kind of meeting, or maybe he wouldn't care.' Her comments echo those of Mr Kyle, who said last week: 'Make no mistake about it, if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today, he'd be perpetrating his crimes online. And Nigel Farage is saying that he's on their side.' Mr Farage demanded an apology from the Technology Secretary, who refused to withdraw the remarks.
The Sun
3 minutes ago
- The Sun
Met police is axing anti-terror attack dogs in an attempt to cut costs
SCOTLAND Yard is getting rid of its elite anti-terror attack dogs in an attempt to cut costs. The Belgian Malinois are trained to attack a target even if they stop fleeing. 2 Used in the Counter Terrorist Specialist Firearms Officer unit, they have helped to detain a large number of suspects without the need for officers to fire weapons. In 2018, the unit had four operational Malinois. Training and housing the dogs can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. They cannot live with handlers and are kennelled at their London HQ. Officials said the 'tough decision' to axe the Conflict Management Dogs would help to patch up a £260million hole in its finances. But sources argue the dogs are a less lethal option than using firearms because since they have been used, the CTSFO unit has not had one fatal shooting. Malinois can be trained to be parachuted from helicopters and are used by Special Forces including the SAS. "We continue to have a sizeable dog unit with multiple capabilities.' 2
The Guardian
3 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? review – one of the most meticulous documentaries in years
When three times more babies than expected die on a neonatal ward and one nurse is on duty during those deaths, it's got to be pretty much an open-and-shut case, hasn't it? Especially when breathing tubes have been clearly deliberately dislodged by someone from their tiny bodies and blood tests show spikes in insulin that can only be explained by the stuff being injected. And if you find someone who has written notes to herself about her guilt, then the way forward is clear. Lock the perpetrator up. Throw away the key. Such was the initial and still persisting narrative in the case of Lucy Letby, the neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester hospital in Cheshire who became, in tabloid parlance, 'Britain's worst child serial killer', when she was convicted in 2023 of seven murders and seven attempted murders of the infants in her care. Since then, there has been growing disquiet about the quality of the evidence against her and the reliability of her conviction. Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt sets itself the formidable task of forcing passion and sentiment aside and unpacking the science and statistics around the most contended pieces of evidence so that, perhaps, facts – buried, missed, distorted or otherwise – can be examined by a newly informed mass audience. In its marshalling and explanation of complicated medical and mathematical issues, it succeeds brilliantly, covering more ground more meticulously in an hour than any documentary I've seen in recent years, and perhaps ever. It also – and this is possibly an even greater and more precious rarity – trusts its audience emotionally. It acknowledges but does not linger on the terrible suffering of the bereaved parents. If you cannot see that we all appreciate that their pain was and remains fathomless, the makers' message seems to be that the fault lies with you and we will carry on with our stated objective meantime. It's a confidence that I wish all documentaries could show. Via a proliferating army of world experts on an array of issues brought up by the case, the alternative narrative is carefully put together. First there are questions asked and answered. Why was there a spike in mortality rates around the time Letby arrived? It is argued that she arrived at a time when the hospital was suddenly required to take in much sicker babies than it had before, babies it was hardly equipped to cope with. How do we explain that Letby was on duty every time a baby died or collapsed? The claim is made that she wasn't – that the infamous shift chart that the prosecution used did not explain how its data was compiled and in fact showed only the fatalities and deteriorations during which she was present. If you compile a chart showing the proportion of all those that occurred on the ward during her period of employment, the correlation – and damnation – disappears. What, then, of the dislodged tubes? As a witness for the prosecution, paediatric doctor Ravi Jayaram asserted that infants that age could not dislodge them themselves. This is simply not true, say experts including Dr Richard Taylor, a specialist in neonatal care with 30 years' experience. 'We've all seen it.' We hear that, on the stand, Dr Jayaram also stated that he saw Letby standing by doing nothing and raising no alarm as one baby's oxygen levels dropped dangerously. However, we're told that an email he wrote, which has been discovered since, suggests that he was present precisely because she had called him. On we are taken, step by step, through alternative explanations for the insulin results, the Post-it notes on which Letby apparently confessed her guilt, and the rest of the circumstantial evidence amassed by the prosecution. Just one witness was called in Letby's defence at trial – a hospital plumber, to testify to sewage issues and therefore possible hygiene problems on the ward. We also hear that the prosecution's main witness, Dr Dewi Evans, has since changed his mind on how one of the babies Letby was convicted of killing died. And we are invited to consider how all of this should be weighted against Letby's apparent lack of motive and, more implicitly, the extreme rarity of young, female serial killers of children. The makers do not dwell on why Letby's team put forward such a minimal defence, though I'm sure further and broader analyses will come in time, probably encompassing such factors as the trust we place in ministering angels and the fury we feel when it appears to have been betrayed, as well as the general public's relative ignorance of science and how to compute data. But, by the end of this considered, brilliantly cogent hour you cannot help but feel that at the very least Letby's conviction is unsafe. The final scenes are of her (new) lawyer Mark McDonald delivering an application to have her case re-examined to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. But this can only be granted if new evidence has come to light – and, technically, everything he has submitted was available to her original defence at the time. The question of what constitutes justice continues. Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX.
