
Football player gets 14-month jail sentence for causing death of cyclist in England
A football player from a third-division English club was sentenced to 14 months in prison Thursday for causing the death of a cyclist three years ago, West Yorkshire police said.
Lucas Akins, a forward for League One team Mansfield, was driving a Mercedes when it struck 33-year-old cyclist Adrian Daniel at an intersection near Huddersfield on March 17, 2022. Daniel died 10 days later.
Akins, 36, was sentenced at Leeds Crown Court after having previously admitted causing a death by careless or inconsiderate driving.
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Akins, who played in Mansfield's game on Monday, was also disqualified from driving for a year.
'The club is considering its position with regards to Lucas and will be making no further comment at this stage,' Mansfield said in a statement that also offered 'sincere and deepest condolences to the family of Adrian Daniel'.
Daniel's wife, Savanna, said in a statement after sentencing that 'three years of hell, three years of avoidance and adding further to my trauma has finally come to a close today with Akins' sentencing,' according to the West Yorkshire police announcement.
'Never being allowed to fully live the reality of Adrian's absence,' she continued, 'because of the farce Akins has made of the justice system and the chances offered to him, has finally been put to bed and this man is no more deserving of any further of my time or concern.'
It should have been resolved sooner, she added, which 'makes a mockery of any remorse that Akins offers for his actions.'
Akins has made several appearances for the Grenada national team.
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NDTV
2 hours ago
- NDTV
As Mass Shooting In Austria Kills 10, A Look At Europe's History Of Gun Violence
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MARCH 1996 - BRITAIN: Thomas Hamilton bursts into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shoots dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself. APRIL 2002 - GERMANY: Robert Steinhauser, 19, opens fire in Erfurt after saying he was not going to take a maths test. He kills 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself. SEPTEMBER 2004 - RUSSIA: More than 300 hostages - half of them children - die at School No.1 in the city of Beslan in North Ossetia after it is seized by rebels demanding Chechen independence and an immediate end to the war there. Many of the dead were killed when the school was stormed. NOVEMBER 2007 - FINLAND: Pekka-Eric Auvinen kills six fellow students, the school nurse, the principal and himself with a handgun at the Jokela High School near Helsinki. SEPTEMBER 2008 - FINLAND: Student Matti Saari opens fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself. MARCH 2009 - GERMANY - A 17-year-old gunman kills nine students and three teachers at a school near Stuttgart and another person at a nearby clinic. He is later killed in a shoot-out with police. Two passers-by are also killed, bringing the death toll to 16, including the gunman. JUNE 2010 - BRITAIN: Derrick Bird opens fire on people in towns across the rural county of Cumbria. Twelve people are killed and 11 injured. Bird also kills himself. AUGUST 2010 - SLOVAKIA: A gunman shoots dead six members of a Roma family and another woman in the Slovak capital Bratislava before killing himself. Fourteen more people are wounded. APRIL 2011 - NETHERLANDS: Tristan van der Vlis opens fire in the Ridderhof mall in Alphen aan den Rijn, south of Amsterdam, killing six before turning the gun on himself. JULY 2011 - NORWAY: Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 people when he plants a car bomb that kills eight people at an Oslo government building, then shoots dead 69 more, most of them teenagers, at an island summer camp of the ruling Labour Party's youth wing. NOVEMBER 2015 - FRANCE: Islamist attackers in Paris armed with guns and bombs target the Bataclan music hall, six bars and restaurants, and the perimeter of the Stade de France sports stadium just outside the French capital, killing 130 people - including 90 concertgoers in the Bataclan - and injuring hundreds. JULY 2016 - GERMANY: An 18-year-old German-Iranian man who is obsessed with mass killings kills at least nine people in Munich. MARCH 2023 - GERMANY: A gunman in Hamburg shoots dead six people before killing himself at a Jehovah's Witness worship hall. Eight other people were wounded, including a seven-months pregnant woman, who lost her unborn daughter. MAY 2023 - SERBIA: A 13-year-old boy guns down eight fellow pupils and a security guard in a Belgrade school. Two days later, a gunman kills eight people and wounds 14 others in a village near the Serbian capital. Both suspects are arrested. DECEMBER 2023 - CZECH REPUBLIC - A Czech student shoots dead his father then kills 14 people at his Prague university. The gunman, killed at the scene possibly by one of his own bullets, is also suspected in the killings of another man and his two-month-old daughter who were found shot dead in woods in a village outside Prague, the week before. MARCH 2024 - RUSSIA: Armed men burst into the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow on Friday, killing at least 139 people and wounding 182. Islamic State, the militant group that once sought control over swathes of Iraq and Syria, claims responsibility for the attack. JULY 2024 - CROATIA: A gunman enters a nursing home in northwestern Croatia, shooting dead six people, including his mother, and injuring five others. FEBRUARY 2025 - SWEDEN: A gunman kills 11 people, including himself, at an adult education centre in central Sweden in the country's deadliest mass shooting. JUNE 2025 - AUSTRIA: A lone gunman enters a secondary school in the southern city of Graz and opens fire, killing at least nine people. The attacker also dies, police said.


Time of India
8 hours ago
- Time of India
Mental health matters
Piali Banerjee teaches English in the International Baccalaureate programme at a private high school in Mumbai. She has authored three books for children, all of which take an innovative and personal look at history. She has also had a stint in journalism at The Times of India and Mumbai Mirror, where she focussed on writing features that looked at people and issues with empathy and humour. At present she is having a great time trying to instil a love for learning and literature among teenagers. Although she is a teacher by profession, she firmly believes that she is a student at heart. LESS ... MORE We all remember those Physical Training (or Painful Training, as we fondly called our PT classes) in school. All those laps around the ground, while still trying to keep the lungs functioning; those bends and twists and stretches that got our collective knickers in a twist. Oh yes, our schools sure know how to keep their students physically fit and healthy. It's just that most often our system falters when it comes to keeping students mentally fit and healthy. And that is probably needed more urgently. Most students find their own rhythm to keep physically fit as they grow up, badgered in varying degrees by mothers, peers, society aunties (functioning in a society where 'fat' is a politically incorrect word) and that slinky anonymous body called social media. But, to deal with all of the above, students need to be mentally fit too. Yes, students do talk of 'mean' teachers, but very few discuss their 'cruel' peers at the dining table. And I am deliberately differentiating 'meanness' from 'cruelty'. As a teacher, one has seen this cruelty up close and personal. One has seen a youngster's backpack being held up for inspection in a class full of students by a sneering peer, with the words, 'Hey, does anyone want to see what a fake Adidas bag looks like?' I call them 'words', but they are actually shrapnel that leave the target shredded and bleeding. Yet these wounds are never discussed at the dining table. These wounds are not seen by parents or teachers or school counsellors. These wounds are dealt with alone, processed through lonely tears. One has seen students being mocked at for acne, so much so that those being mocked pretend to sleep in class, so that they don't have to sit up and present their flawed face to their peers. One has seen students being trolled on social media by an entire batch, for their skin colour or their unwaxed legs or for reading Dostoevsky. (The last one is not a made-up scenario, one has seen it happen.) But these students don't breathe a word of this either to their parents or to the school counsellor. In fact, most kids do not want to be seen entering that socially branded door of a counsellor. They try to cope by isolating themselves. Some kids cope by turning on their peers, often violently. In which case the school ends up having to punish the victim of mockery, rather than the mockers. In rare, very rare, cases, has one seen a child systematically neutralise their tormentors through words and body language alone. It has been done, with the said victim topping every class; discussing every writer, (Dostoevsky or otherwise) that she wished to, with her teachers; and stretching out her unwaxed legs with a defiant smile. But this salvo must have taken extraordinary effort and courage – which the rest of us mortals often cannot muster up. So where is the average kid to go? More important, to whom can the average kid go? Since lecturing has never worked with teenagers, practical workshops are, perhaps, a way forward. These workshops can be conducted by teachers or guest experts. Empathy games, or even just a social circle time where pertinent questions are discussed, may help to at least open up those Pandora's boxes which are otherwise kept tightly sealed. Questions like: How does social media affect our ability to feel empathy? Is there an experience where you wished someone actually understood how you felt? Or even the simplistic: What would you say to a classmate who was feeling sad? It's surprising how much baggage emerges in these sessions. A school that I taught at once, came up with an idea to provide emotional support to its students. All teachers were allotted a dozen students, whose mental wellbeing was his or her responsibility – creating a warm bond with these students, checking in on them regularly, providing an empathetic ear, just letting them know that they had a solid support person at school. It was an experiment that worked very well in some groups, moderately well in others and failed to take off in some groups. Yet, it is an idea that is worth a try. The point is to keep dialogue always open. The point is to let kids know that they always have at least one person to go to, in times of emotional stress. P.S: Any more ideas on how we can achieve this? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.


Hindustan Times
12 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
5 chilling details in Raja Raghuvanshi's murder in Meghalaya: What police said about wife Sonam Raghuvanshi
A honeymoon trip to Meghalaya turned into a full-blown murder mystery when an Indore-based businessman, Raja Raghuvanshi, was found dead days after he and his wife went missing. According to the Meghalaya Police, it was Raja's wife, Sonam, who orchestrated the murder and allegedly conspired with her boyfriend, Raj Kushwaha, to do so. A total of five arrests have been made in the case, so far – Sonam Raghuvanshi and four men, including Raj Kushwaha, Akash Rajput, Vishal Singh Chauhan, and Anand Kurmi. While Sonam was arrested from a dhaba in Uttar Pradesh during the early hours of Monday, three out of the four men were arrested from Madhya Pradesh, except Akash Rajput, who was arrested from Uttar Pradesh's Lalitpur. Also read: Meghalaya murder: How one mistake by Sonam, her lover led to their arrest in Raja Raghuvanshi killing It all started after Sonam and Raja Raghuvanshi, who had got married on May 11, went for their honeymoon to Meghalaya. However, on May 23, the couple went missing, prompting a manhunt by local authorities. Days later, on June 2, Raja's body was recovered in a gorge near Weisawdong Falls in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya. A week after the body was recovered, the Meghalaya Police reached a major breakthrough on Monday and made a series of arrests in the case. All the accused are being taken to Meghalaya for investigation. Also read: Meghalaya honeymoon murder: Raj Kushwaha drove people to Raja Raghuvanshi's funeral, says eyewitness It was a local guide in Meghalaya who possibly helped crack the case by giving a major clue to the police. Albert Pde told police on Monday, June 7, that the couple – Sonam and Raja Raghuvanshi – were accompanied by three male tourists on the day they went missing from Meghalaya's Sohra area on May 23. Pde said the three men accompanied the couple as they were climbing up over 3,000 steps from Nongriat to Mawlakhiat around 10am on May 23, and added that Raja was talking to the men in Hindi. "The four men were walking ahead while the woman was behind. The four men were conversing in Hindi, but I could not understand what they were speaking as I know only Khasi and English," Pde told PTI. Also read: What Raj Kushwaha's distraught mother said on Sonam Raghuvanshi affair charge A day after Raja Raghuvanshi's body was found on June 2, the police made another discovery which acted as a major clue into the murder - a bloodstained machete. A raincoat was also recovered two days later, which looked similar to the one used by the couple. The raincoat was found in Mawkma village, which is halfway between Sohrarim and the gorge where Raghuvanshi's body was found. According to a Meghalaya Police officer, 'It was not a machete used in the region. It led to our suspicion that someone from outside the region was involved. We decided to check the call details of the couple.' The police also revealed on Monday that two sharp cut wounds have been found on the front and back of Raja's head, as revealed in his autopsy. The police suspect that the wounds were inflicted by the same machete. Also read: Meghalaya murder: How a couple's first trip to the hills set the stage for a killing According to the police, one of the accused who has been arrested, Raj Kushwaha, is allegedly Sonam's boyfriend and conspired with her to commit the crime. According to an Indore police officer who is aware of the investigation, 'Kushwaha was in contact with the killers for some weeks.' The three killers hired for the murder left for Meghalaya on May 17 and carried a phone provided by Kushwaha, according to the cop. Also, Sonam's call records indicate that she was in touch with Kushwaha while on the honeymoon and shared her last location with him before the couple went missing, according to a Meghalaya Police officer. Sonam's alleged boyfriend Raj Kushwaha reportedly drove a vehicle to transport people to Raja Raghuvanshi's funeral, said an eyewitness. Lakshman Singh Rathore, a man who attended Raja's funeral, told PTI that it was Raj Kushwaha who drove the vehicle arranged by Sonam's family. "When Raja's body arrived here, Sonam's family, whose home is in Govind Nagar Kharcha area, had arranged four-five vehicles for people to attend the funeral. Kushwaha was driving the four-wheeler in which I went, though we did not talk. Only after seeing his photograph in the media post his arrest, I recollected this episode,' PTI quoted him as saying. According to Raja's mother Uma Raghuvanshi, it was Sonam who insisted on the honeymoon. Sonam also allegedly took ₹9 lakh from Raja for the honeymoon and also carried some jewellery, said the mother. When Uma asked her son when they were planning on returning, Raja told her that they had not booked return tickets yet and added that they might return within a week.