Woman accused of illegal abortion cleared by jury
A woman accused of having an illegal abortion has been cleared by a jury.Nicola Packer, 45, cried as she was acquitted of "unlawfully administering to herself a poison or other noxious thing" with the "intent to procure a miscarriage".Her trial at Isleworth Crown Court heard she took abortion medicine at home during the second coronavirus lockdown, in November 2020, when she was about 26 weeks pregnant. Ms Packer later took the dead baby to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in a backpack.The legal limit for taking medication at home to terminate a pregnancy is 10 weeks, while the outer limit for any abortion in England, Scotland and Wales is 24 weeks, apart from in certain circumstances.
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The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
High Court hears company linked to Baroness Michelle Mone must pay back £121m for ‘faulty' PPE
A company linked to Tory peer Michelle Mone should pay back more than £121 million for breaching a Government contract for 25 million surgical gowns during the coronavirus pandemic, the High Court has heard. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is suing PPE Medpro for allegedly breaching a deal for the gowns, with lawyers for the Government telling the court they were 'faulty' because they were not sterile. The company, a consortium led by Baroness Mone's husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, was awarded Government contracts by the former Conservative administration to supply PPE during the pandemic, after she recommended it to ministers. Both have denied wrongdoing. The Government is seeking to recover the costs of the contract, as well as the costs of transporting and storing the items, which amount to an additional £8,648,691. PPE Medpro said it 'categorically denies' breaching the contract, and its lawyers claimed the company has been 'singled out for unfair treatment'. Opening the trial on Wednesday, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said: 'This case is simply about whether 25 million surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro were faulty. 'It is, in short, a technical case about detailed legal and industry standards that apply to sterile gowns.' Mr Stanley said in written submissions the 'initial contact with Medpro came through Baroness Mone', with discussions about the contract then going through one of the company's directors, Anthony Page. Baroness Mone remained 'active throughout' the negotiations, Mr Stanley said, with the peer stating Mr Barrowman had 'years of experience in manufacturing, procurement and management of supply chains'. But he told the court Baroness Mone's communications were 'not part of this case', which was 'simply about compliance'. He said: 'The department does not allege anything improper happened, and we are not concerned with any profits made by anybody.' In court documents from May this year, the DHSC said the gowns were delivered to the UK in 72 lots between August and October 2020, with £121,999,219.20 paid to PPE Medpro between July and August that year. The department rejected the gowns in December 2020 and told the company it would have to repay the money, but this has not happened and the gowns remain in storage, unable to be used. In written submissions for trial, Mr Stanley said 99.9999% of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract, equating to one in a million being unusable. The DHSC claims the contract also specified PPE Medpro had to sterilise the gowns using a 'validated process', attested by CE marking, which indicates a product has met certain medical standards. He said 'none of those things happened', with no validated sterilisation process being followed, and the gowns supplied with invalid CE marking. He continued that 140 gowns were later tested for sterility, with 103 failing. He said: 'Whatever was done to sterilise the gowns had not achieved its purpose, because more than one in a million of them was contaminated when delivered. 'On that basis, DHSC was entitled to reject the gowns, or is entitled to damages, which amount to the full price and storage costs.' In his written submissions, Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, said the 'only plausible reason' for the gowns becoming contaminated was due to 'the transport and storage conditions or events to which the gowns were subject', after they had been delivered to the DHSC. He added the testing did not happen until several months after the gowns were rejected, and the samples selected were not 'representative of the whole population', meaning 'no proper conclusions may be drawn'. He said the DHSC's claim was 'contrived and opportunistic' and PPE Medpro had been 'made the 'fall guy' for a catalogue of failures and errors' by the department. He said: 'It has perhaps been singled out because of the high profiles of those said to be associated with PPE Medpro, and/or because it is perceived to be a supplier with financial resources behind it. 'In reality, an archetypal case of 'buyer's remorse', where DHSC simply seeks to get out of a bargain it wished it never entered into, left, as it is, with over £8 billion of purchased and unused PPE as a result of an untrammelled and uncontrolled buying spree with taxpayers' money.' He also said there was a 'delicious irony' that Baroness Mone was mentioned in the DHSC's written submissions, when she had 'zero relevance to the contractual issues in this case'. Neither Baroness Mone nor Mr Barrowman is due to give evidence in the trial, and Baroness Mone did not attend the first day of the hearing on Wednesday. A PPE Medpro spokesperson said the company 'categorically denies breaching its obligations' and will 'robustly defend' the claim. The trial before Mrs Justice Cockerill is due to last five weeks, with a judgment expected in writing at a later date.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Flight 149: Hostage of War review – a tale so staggering you couldn't write it
If it were a work of fiction, the story of Flight 149 would probably be deemed too horrifying – or too unbelievable – for television. Indeed, as a documentary interspersed with dramatic reconstructions, at points it is almost unbearable to watch. But it is a crucial piece of work: a one-off film that goes deep into a bizarre and increasingly hideous ordeal to ask how and why it happened. On 2 August 1990, a British Airways plane carrying nearly 400 passengers and crew from London to Kuala Lumpur touched down for a scheduled stopover in Kuwait. Those on board knew nothing of the unfolding Iraqi invasion of the country and the brutality Saddam Hussein was inflicting on his neighbours (this would, of course, soon lead to the Gulf war). British Airways maintains that it, too, was unaware of what was taking place, while the British government said it didn't know what was happening until after the plane had landed. Later, it would emerge that it had, in fact, received information before the plane had reached the terminal, but that it wasn't shared with the airline. Staggeringly, many of those on board would spend the next four months in the country, human shields in an unfurling international conflict, with no clear route home. Charlie Kristiansson, a former BA steward, recalls the place looking 'like the gates of hell had opened', as bombs began to explode around them. Initially, the passengers were put up in a plush hotel – a cocoon of sorts, he says. But as time went on, they were dispatched to various squalid locations, including a bungalow where the walls were smothered in excrement. The goal of Jenny Ash's documentary – much like the multi-Bafta-winning Mr Bates Vs the Post Office – is as much to entertain as to shine a light on what may be a colossal miscarriage of justice. Many of the interviewees here don't simply address a faceless producer behind a camera – they sit face to face with lawyers from the human rights firm McCue Jury & Partners. Last year, these testimonies were used to construct a class-action lawsuit against BA and the government. The government could have diverted Flight 149, but – for reasons that remain unclear – didn't. Stephen Davis, an investigative journalist who reported on the story for the Independent on Sunday at the time, has helped to illuminate what else may have been going on. Namely, allegations that the flight was used to aid a British intelligence operation. There are interviews here with Margaret Thatcher's former foreign affairs private secretary Charles Powell and the former US diplomat Barbara Bodine. These are bolstered by archive material that transports viewers back to the chaos unfolding on news bulletins and even Teletext. But the real heft comes from the survivors' stories, which sit side by side with reconstructions that feel hazy and incredibly unnerving and which mirror the subjects' dissociation. Jennifer Chappell, then 12, recalls seeing the lyrics of the Guns N' Roses song Paradise City on the walls of the military compound where she and her family were held. The moment is recreated by a young actor (Orla Taylor), who lies on a bed in the foetal position singing along to Axl Rose ('Oh, won't you please take me home?'). Elsewhere, Kristiansson flinches as he relives the savage sexual assault he was subjected to by an Iraqi soldier, as we are drawn, flashback-like, into the kind of stark tower block where it happened. Barry Manners, separated from his partner, Anthony Yong, in excruciating circumstances, recalls the places he would go in his brain to escape the horror of being locked in a dark room at the site of a dam, not knowing whether it was night or day. Viewers see the couple as they would have been in another life, listening to jazz on a beach in Thailand. Yong died not long after returning to the UK, his already poor health exacerbated by the nightmare of it all. Unsurprisingly, the passengers of Flight 149 think about what happened every day. Chappell has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder and has attempted to kill herself. The nearest we get to a happy ending is when Deborah Saloom, an American passenger, recounts her reunion with her husband, known as B George, whom she feared she would never see again (women and children were let out of the country before the men). Stress is engraved into the faces of practically every person we see on screen. Then head of security at Kuwait airport, Mohammad Al-Dossari, says the BA passengers were 'used like chess pieces'. Now, what they desperately want to know is what the people moving those pieces were thinking. Or, as Manners puts it: 'Why the fuck was I in this situation in the first place?' Even if we don't get all the answers, this is a truly excellent place to start. Flight 149: Hostage of War aired on Sky Documentaries and is available on Now In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Public will pay price for police funding squeeze, say chiefs
Officer numbers will have to be cut as the public 'pay the price' for the lack of funding for policing in the spending review, police chiefs said. Sir Keir Starmer's pledge to restore neighbourhood policing is 'some way off' they said, after Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced that police funding would increase by £2.1 billion between 2026 and 2029 — an average real-terms increase of 1.7 per cent. The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) said this would leave a shortfall of £1.2 billion and lead to forces 'cutting headcount to balance the books'. The Police Federation said the public would 'pay the price', while the Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) accused the government of a 'shameful abandonment of the police service'. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is understood to be planning to review police funding in the autumn, when she will pressure the chancellor for extra money to meet Labour's pledge to recruit 13,000 police officers. Police chiefs said that without extra funding, the money would have to be found through rises in council tax or cuts to other policing services. Gavin Stephens, the NPCC chairman, said the funding rise would 'cover little more than annual inflationary pay increases' and that progress on the prime minister's key missions, such as halving violence against women and cutting knife crime, would be slower. Sir Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said police numbers would fall, adding: 'I remain concerned that this spending review could result in insufficient funding for the Met and fewer police officers.' Starmer's promise to recruit 13,000 neighbourhood police officers was one of Labour's flagship policies in last year's general election. Paul Sanford, chairman of the NPCC's finance co-ordination committee, said: 'While we are looking at a 1.7 per cent increase, once pay is accounted for, once our non-pay pressures are accounted for, we think it will be incredibly difficult for the commitment to deliver the additional 13,000 neighbourhood police officers within this funding envelope. 'We've made some progress. We have a good 3,000 already recruited but based on this settlement, that does look a real challenge for us … Certainly we are going to be some way off unless some significant levers are going to be pulled. Any further progress towards the 13,000 without new money would only come from making savings in our budgets.' Sanford said it was impossible to predict what the neighbourhood policing shortfall would be. Labour's initial announcement said the 13,000 officers would comprise 4,000 police community service officers, 3,000 special constables, 3,000 existing officers and 3,000 new police constables. Stephens added that 'the size and shape of the police workforce will inevitably have to change'. He said: 'The amount falls far short of what is required to fund the government's ambitions and maintain our existing workforce. This is against a backdrop of increasing crime rates, with new and escalating threats from organised crime and hostile states, and more offenders being managed in the community as a result of an overstretched criminal justice system.' Sanford said the overhaul of sentencing laws, which will scrap short prison sentences and release some prisoners after they have served just a third of their sentence, would pile further pressure on police budgets. Additional investment in the Probation Service to monitor offenders would take time to phase in, he said, leaving police to deal with the consequences of more criminals on the streets. 'There isn't any additional money to deal with that. This will increase the workload of police officers.' Tiff Lynch, acting national chairwoman of the Police Federation, accused the chancellor of failing to listen to police officers or the home secretary. She said: 'This spending review should have been a turning point after 15 years of austerity that has left policing, and police officers, broken. Instead, the cuts will continue — and it's the public who will pay the price. 'As rank-and-file officers kit up for night duty this evening, they'll do so knowing exactly where they stand in the government's priorities. It is beyond insulting for cabinet ministers to call on police to 'do their bit' when officers are overworked, underpaid and under threat like never before. 'They are facing blades and bricks, managing mental health crises, while battling to protect their own, and carrying the weight of trauma and financial stress home with them every day.' Nick Smart, president of the PSA, said it was a 'shameful abandonment of the police service' and warned that the government was failing in its first duty of keeping public safe. He said: 'Today's funding announcement is a huge blow to the police service, which has once again been placed at the bottom of the government's list of priorities. It is the first duty of government to keep its citizens safe, yet today we see no evidence of a commitment to doing this. 'Many of the government's election pledges centred around a commitment to 'safer streets', promising the public that it would meet ambitious targets such as halving knife crime. Yet the lack of investment announced today means we will continue to struggle to deliver the basics, to maintain officer numbers, cover inflationary costs, cover pay awards and function as we are, let alone move forward on new public safety and transformation initiatives.'
