Man charged with attempted murder of police officer
A man has been charged with attempted murder after a police officer was hit by a vehicle in East Lothian.
Andrew Yorkston, 34, is alleged to have struck the officer with the car on Haddington High Street at about 15:55 on Tuesday.
The officer was taken to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh for treatment, but was later released.
Yorkston made no plea to a number of charges including attempted murder and road traffic offences during an initial appearance at Edinburgh Sheriff Court and was remanded in custody.
Man arrested after vehicle hits police officer
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41 minutes ago
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Shops found to be flouting single-use vape ban
Nearly two weeks on from a ban on the sale of single-use disposable vapes in the UK, many shops have been found still to be openly selling the illicit items. Almost half of the 21 stores which an undercover BBC reporter visited in cities in Yorkshire continued to sell the vapes as though there had been no law change. Single-use vapes, in their bright-coloured packaging and variety of fruity flavours, had been a "key driver behind the alarming rise in youth vaping", the previous government had said as it first set its sights on a ban. The Labour administration followed through, with the disposables officially banned from sale from 1 June this year - the aim being to protect children's health and reduce damage to the environment. Since the introduction of the ban, anybody selling the illicit items risks a £200 fine, with repeat offenders facing the prospect of jail. But our undercover investigation has revealed that while some shop owners in Sheffield, Bradford, York and Leeds have been found to be following the new rules, others are turning a blind eye. In some shops we visited in Yorkshire, the colourful packaging of single-use vapes was still very much visible on the shelves. Shopkeepers in those premises seemed happy to offer them to customers, and many were even selling them at a reduced price. One shopkeeper I spoke to told me he knew he was breaking the law by selling the single-use disposable vapes, but he added that he wanted to sell his remaining stock at a discount. "It's banned," he said, pointing at the stack of vapes in his shop window. "I'm not allowed to sell them. I'm finishing. I don't have a lot, so I'm just trying to [get rid of them]." This was despite the ban on such vapes having been announced in October last year. That gave stores more than seven months to get rid of the disposable vapes they still had in stockrooms and on the shelves before the ban came into force in June. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said before the ban that vape usage in England had grown by more than 400% between 2012 and 2023, with about 9% of people now buying and using the products. Single-use disposable vapes helped get children hooked on nicotine and blighted high streets with waste, according to the government. "It's why we've taken tough action and banned them," a Defra spokesperson said. Flouting that ban, another shopkeeper asked me if I wanted a "good deal" and offered to sell me an armful of the illicit vapes for £20, showing me a pick-and-mix of fruity flavours in the store's glass cabinet. However, as part of our investigation in cities across Yorkshire to find out where such vapes were still being sold, we also visited traders regulated by North Yorkshire Council's Trading Standards team. Both shop workers approached by our undercover reporter there refused to sell the now-illegal items. Councillor Greg White, North Yorkshire Council's executive member for environment, said it was "disappointing" to see shops in other parts of Yorkshire were still prepared to break the law. "There's been plenty of time to prepare and to try to get people to move from disposable vapes to reusable ones, and that would have been good for their business," he explained. A Defra spokesperson said: "Rogue traders will face serious penalties, up to and including criminal prosecution." Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North. Why are disposable vapes being banned and how harmful is vaping? 'I don't know what we'll do' - Vapers panic-buy ahead of disposables ban Disposable vapes ban unlikely to reduce appeal, says campaigner Disposable vape ban begins - but will it have an impact? Disposable vapes to be banned from June
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These touts made millions - and claimed staff at big ticketing firms helped
When a judge dismissed an appeal by prolific ticket tout Peter Hunter and his husband and accomplice David Smith against their landmark conviction for fraud, he sounded an alarm. The evidence, he said in a 2021 judgement, suggested the possibility of "connivance and collusion" between ticketing companies and touts, who buy up tickets for live events in bulk and sell them to the public at inflated prices. A different judge sentencing another group of ticket touts for fraud, including the self-styled "Ticket Queen" Maria Chenery-Woods, last year raised similar concerns and suggested the possibility some ticketing sites had been "complicit" in the touts making "substantial profits" by reselling tickets. Hunter fraudulently traded tickets between 2010 and 2017, Chenery-Woods between 2012 and 2017. They both used all of the four big UK ticket resale sites: StubHub, Viagogo and the Ticketmaster-owned GetMeIn! and Seatwave. For years, fans had battled touts to get the tickets they wanted and to avoid heavy mark-ups on resale sites. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster had publicly insisted that it was trying to combat ticket touting, which can be illegal in some circumstances. The company - one of the UK's biggest ticket sellers - was in a unique position until 2018, as a ticketing website which also owned two major resale platforms. Although Ticketmaster was not involved or represented in either of these court cases, the judges' comments about the industry suggested that the full story may not yet have been told. We wanted to investigate what was going on before the company shut its resale sites in 2018. We spoke to former and current ticketing staff, who enjoyed working for Ticketmaster but in some cases were concerned that fans might have been short-changed. We also spoke to promoters, venue managers and consultants, and combed through court transcripts. What we heard was that ticket touts had inside help with their business buying and selling tickets from the ticketing platforms they used: Former staff at resale sites which Ticketmaster used to own told us they worked closely with touts, and court documents at Chenery-Woods' trial revealed two staff at those companies bought tickets for touts Touts trading huge volumes of tickets were offered financial "incentives" by resale sites, Hunter alleged during his trial Email evidence in court suggested one tout was offered a meeting with a top Ticketmaster lawyer to "brainstorm" ways the company could help them Other former Ticketmaster employees told us they were asked to develop software to help touts sell tickets in bulk on resale sites Ticketmaster said in a statement that the allegations refer to "companies that were dissolved in 2018 and alleged events from over a decade ago, which have no relevance to today's ticketing landscape". "Revisiting outdated claims about long-defunct businesses only serves to confuse and mislead the public," the company said. It added that Ticketmaster has "no involvement in the uncapped resale market" now and said: "We have always been committed to fair and secure ticketing." Hunter and Chenery-Woods were not the kind of touts who stand outside a venue discreetly asking passers-by to buy or sell tickets. These two turned their spare rooms into registered, tax-paying companies and made millions from trading tickets online, the courts found. Mike Andrews, who leads National Trading Standards' e-crimes unit and was involved in the investigation into Hunter and the Ticket Queen, told the BBC how he joined the early morning raid on the anonymous townhouse in a tree-lined north London street where Hunter ran his operation. Upstairs was a room filled with PCs, whirring away, buying and selling tickets. "It was obviously an operation that ran pretty much 24/7," Mr Andrews said. They also found rolls of tickets in seat-number order for events such as Lady Gaga concerts and the Harry Potter play, and multiple credit cards. Reselling tickets for profit for live performances in the UK is not illegal. But Hunter and Chenery-Woods were convicted of using fraudulent practices to get around restrictions - such as limits on the number of tickets an individual can buy. They pretended to be lots of different people, using lots of different credit cards, when they bought the tickets from companies such as Ticketmaster, See Tickets or AXS - which are known as primary ticketing websites. The Ticket Queen used the details of family members, including a dead relative, to buy tickets, as well as using the names and addresses of dozens of people in and around the town of Diss, Norfolk where her business operated. To sell the tickets, the touts used resale sites, which are known as the secondary ticketing websites. Touts were "working hand-in-hand with resale platforms", Mr Andrews told us. A former staffer at Ticketmaster-owned Seatwave, who asked to remain anonymous, told us touts were "VIPs" on the resale site. "They were doing a lot of business for us. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions." Some staff at Seatwave had a cosy relationship with touts, according to the former employee, who said he would take Paul Douglas - the Ticket Queen's former brother-in-law, also convicted of fraud - out for a pint when he visited London. Resale sites make their money from fees paid by buyers and commission from the sellers - court papers show these could be as much as 25% of the resale price. Prosecutors calculated that Hunter's company received sales revenue of £26.4m over about seven-and-a-half years. Based on their typical commission, the UK's four main resale sites could have received £8.8m between them from Hunter's sales alone. Touts who consistently delivered large volumes of tickets to customers were offered discounts by resale platforms, industry sources told us. During the case where he was convicted of fraud, Peter Hunter alleged that GetMeIn! - another Ticketmaster-owned company - offered him "incentives" for selling in bulk, such as £4,000 cashback if he hit sales of £550,000 over a three-month period. Multiple sources told us that some touts also sourced tickets directly through relationships with promoters and venues, but sales at Hunter's level were far beyond what any regular customer could acquire legitimately from primary ticketing websites. Even though the primary ticketing companies were victims of the fraud - as their purchase limits were breached by the use of false identities - Mr Andrews said none of the primary ticketing companies "directly supported" the prosecutions. Another former employee who worked in Ticketmaster's resale technical team, who also wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC his team would work closely with touts, developing software that helped them sell tickets in the secondary market. "You have to build a relationship with them, they're like a customer basically," he said. The team would show touts products and ask for feedback, including if they made selling tickets easier for them and often showing them multiple versions, he said. We have been told that resale sites would liaise with big sellers, like Hunter. In court, Hunter alleged a senior boss at GetMeIn! would help him by passing on information from Ticketmaster's legal department such as "government reports maybe from select committees" and ringing him weekly to tip him off about forthcoming sales before the public learned about them. This senior employee had described in emails how he added a "new privilege" to the accounts of "top brokers" - the resale sites' term for touts - which would allow them to automatically "drip feed" large inventories of tickets on to the site. Other emails were read in court as evidence from Peter Hunter's defence team, suggesting that the senior GetMeIn! boss offered to help stop Hunter's tickets being cancelled by Ticketmaster when he had fallen foul of a purchase limit. The court heard that the senior employee had written: "I think Ticketmaster are looking at cancelling primary bookings that have exceeded the ticket limit. However, if I flag them as GMI [GetMeIn!], I should be able to save them." Hunter's defence alleged the correspondence showed the GetMeIn! boss knew the tout had multiple Ticketmaster accounts which he used to buy more tickets than the site's restrictions allowed. Using multiple names and identities to buy more tickets than the limit allowed was one of the reasons Hunter was jailed for fraud. In the trial of the Ticket Queen, the prosecution said this same GetMeIn! boss and a colleague had both been "complicit or at least indifferent" in her use of a false name on the resale site to conceal the fact that the account belonged to a tout. The court heard that Maria Chenery-Woods had emailed the two men asking to change her account name from "Ticket Queen" to "Elsie Marshall" in February 2017. In both court cases, the prosecution questioned why it was necessary for the accused to pretend to be other people to buy tickets if, as the defendants alleged, Ticketmaster knew what they were doing. The links with touts such as Hunter went right to the highest levels of Ticketmaster's group of companies, according to emails read out in court as evidence. They record the same senior GetMeIn! boss proposing a meeting between Hunter and Selina Emeny, the company's top legal representative and a director of Live Nation Ltd, an arm of Ticketmaster's parent company. The proposed meeting in 2015 was intended to "address any worries" Hunter might have about a change in the law around ticket resale and "brainstorm what more can be done by our legal team to help UK brokers". Ms Emeny is currently listed as an active director of 50 companies on Companies House, all related to Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster maintained that its resale platforms, GetMeIn! and Seatwave, operated as "separate entities", in the words of then chairman Chris Edmonds at a 2016 House of Commons select committee hearing. But both Mr Edmonds and Ms Emeny were directors of Ticketmaster UK Ltd and the holding company which owned Seatwave. Ms Emeny was also a director and secretary of GetMeIn! and at one time, all three companies operated out of the same open-plan office in central London. David Brown, who worked in Ticketmaster's technology teams between 2011 and 2017, also told the BBC the companies had close enough links that they could have found out who was buying tickets in bulk and putting them up for resale on Ticketmaster's other platforms. He said Ticketmaster and its resale sites used "a lot of the same infrastructure" and it would have been easy to "link everything together". "You're not building completely separate databases," he said. He said it meant Ticketmaster could have connected the accounts and credit cards originally purchasing tickets with those selling in bulk on resale sales, and stop them reselling. "We should be able to pull enough data to say there's something not right about this, this isn't just members of the public selling tickets. If they wanted to really tackle the problem, they had all the tools in one place to do that," he said. Christoph Homann, who was the then resale managing director of Ticketmaster/GetMeIn!, said in 2014 to a group of MPs that "they are able to cross-reference" some tickets on GetMeIn! "against Ticketmaster's records" to report suspected frauds. The employee in Ticketmaster's resale technology team who developed software to help touts also told the BBC that there was a senior executive who had "oversight" over elements of the primary selling and resale side of the operation. That person could easily have accessed an internal list of top-selling brokers, the employee said. He said the executive "would definitely ask that question, ask for that information. I can't believe that wouldn't be seen by him". Mr Edmonds, Ticketmaster's chairman in 2016, had told Parliament that the company did not have "visibility" over how the sellers on its resale platforms acquired those tickets - but these accounts suggest Ticketmaster could have found out if they were buying them on their own website. We also asked the other two large resale ticketing platforms, Viagogo and Stubhub about their relationships with large sellers, including account managers and inventory management software. Viagogo told us such facilities are "standard industry practice", but it "takes its responsibilities under the law very seriously". It said it had a business relationship with Hunter, Smith and two of the Ticket Queen's accomplices "before they were found to be guilty of any fraudulent activity". "Bad actors go against what we stand for and Viagogo is in full support of the legal action taken against them," the company said. StubHub International told the BBC, it is "fully compliant with UK regulations and provides industry-leading consumer protections." It added: "As a marketplace we provide a safe, trusted and transparent platform for the buying and selling of tickets, and enforce strict measures to protect consumers against fraud." Some employees of companies then owned by Ticketmaster were occasionally paid by touts to buy tickets on their behalf, the prosecution told the court in the Ticket Queen trial. The prosecution added the Ticket Queen's accomplices paid two GetMeIn! employees out of a separate bank account from the usual company one. According to a Skype message read in court, one accomplice said: "It will be best as it won't show a GMI employee being paid by TQ Tickets." One of her buyers was an employee at GetMeIn! who received £8,500 in less than a year from this sideline, the prosecution said. Our research found this employee's day job was to source replacement tickets when sellers failed to deliver, as they sometimes did. The resale platforms would sometimes buy tickets from touts to fulfil orders in these circumstances, a SeatWave employee told the BBC. The touts would behave "like the mafia", and raise their prices when they knew the resale platform itself was in the market for tickets, the employee said. Evidence presented in court suggested help for the touts to buy tickets in bulk also came from another well-known company: American Express, which offers its cardholders privileged access to tickets for events through pre-sales. Promoters say sponsors like American Express are important in making events such as Formula One and British Summer Time Hyde Park possible. Peter Hunter told the court he had received a LinkedIn message out of the blue from a representative at the credit card company. The rep was offering "as many additional cards as you wanted" in the form of Platinum business credit cards with an "unlimited spend", according to Hunter. The Amex representative wrote that he was aware of Ticketmaster's purchasing limit of six tickets per day on each credit card and told Hunter "there are ways around this with American Express". The rep also suggested in an email to Peter Hunter that his vice-president at the company was "happy to waive card fees" and that the VP's "initial offer was to waive 15 card fees for £250k spend in the first two months". American Express told the BBC: "When we identify instances of misconduct, we investigate the issues raised and take appropriate steps to address them, including disciplinary action with employees as necessary." Ticketmaster announced the closure of its resale sites, GetMeIn! and Seatwave in 2018, months after Peter Hunter was charged. Now it allows resales through its main site instead and says prices are capped at the ticket's face value. Instead, Ticketmaster is now trying to "capture the value" of the resale market through different tiers of pricing for tickets labelled as "in demand" or "Platinum" tickets, as UK managing director Andrew Parsons told the House of Commons earlier this year. "We think it is absolutely right that artists should be able to price a small amount of the tickets at a higher price to be able to keep overall prices down and capture some of that value away from the secondary market," he said. But ticket touts are still very much active. Minutes after Beyonce's first pre-sale started in February for the UK leg of her Cowboy Carter tour, hundreds of the tickets appeared on resale sites such as Stubhub. Stubhub told us that "speculative listings" are not allowed on its platform and that it "[does] not support the use of bots which operate during sales on the primary market". "Although the primary platforms do say that they have measures in place to try and prevent touts buying large numbers of tickets, it's quite evident that that practice took place then and still takes place now," said Mr Andrews from National Trading Standards. But he said "the current situation is that we're not funded or we haven't got sufficient resources to continue to pursue further touts". If you have information about this story that you would like to share please get in touch. Email ticketinginvestigation@ Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist.
Yahoo
an hour ago
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Friends remember Kaysville Police officer who passed away due to brain cancer
KAYSVILLE, Utah () — The friends and coworkers of the due to brain cancer are remembering him and the dedication he brought to his job. Sergeant Jared Jensen was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer in September 2024, and Kaysville Police Department that he passed away on Tuesday. He was recognized or awarded seven times during his tenure as a police officer, and he survived a near-deadly shooting in the line of duty. PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Kaysville officer passes away after battle with brain cancer spoke with some of Sgt. Jensen's friends and fellow officers, and they shared their memories of him. 'Sergeant Jensen was very passionate about his job,' a fellow Kaysville Police officer told 'He served with so much dedication, integrity, and honor. He definitely left a long-lasting impact on those he served and those he served with.' The officer said that Sgt. Jensen was with Kaysville Police for six years. 'He faced cancer with the same courage he showed time he put the uniform on every single day. He fought long and hard until the very end with this cancer,' the officer said. Sgt. Jensen's best friend, Sergeant Jake Fowers with Clinton City Police, told that they graduated from the academy together in 2012. 'He really loved the youth of the community,' Fowers said. 'He was constantly working with them. He ran the K-9 when he was here at Clinton City, me and him ran them together. He always volunteered to go to the schools to show the kids the dogs, 'cause everybody loves the dogs, so he definitely had an impact. He was a larger-than-life person.' Sgt. Jensen worked with Clinton City Police Department starting in 2012, then with the Sunset Police Department, and as a police academy instructor before joining the Kaysville Police Department. He also was a member of the U.S. Marshal's Service Violent Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team (VFAST). Fowers told that Sgt. Jensen was battling cancer for about 10 months. Jensen had told him that he was having 'weird' headaches, so he was going for a CT scan, and that is when they discovered the mass that turned out to be cancer. Sgt. Jensen is survived by his wife and their two young children. Idaho man self-deports, U.S. citizen family to uproot and follow Friends remember Kaysville Police officer who passed away due to brain cancer 'We just want to know that she's safe' — Mother of missing West Jordan teen speaks out Creamy Smoked Beef Links with Pasta offers serious flavor Declutter your space and life with the help of Junk King Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
