Two more inquests open for jailed surgeon Ian Paterson's patients
The inquests will include determining whether any of the former patients had so-called cleavage-sparing mastectomies from Paterson, where some breast tissue was retained.A previous additional inquest into the death of Christine Gould, a kitchen assistant from Solihull, was closed after the inquest concluded that she was not operated on by Paterson and died of natural causes.Paterson is known to have treated thousands of patients at hospitals in the West Midlands.
On Tuesday, the inquest heard that Mrs Ingham was born in Leeds and was a chartered accountant, before she died of metastatic breast cancer at home in Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, on 20 March 2022. Mrs Tatlow, a retired secretary from Solihull who had been widowed, died in a hospice in Birmingham on 28 July 2002 of carcinomatosis and carcinoma of the right breast.Mrs Ingham's husband and a family member for Mrs Tatlow were present for the inquest openings via video-link.After Judge Foster opened and adjourned the inquests into Mrs Ingham and Mrs Tatlow, the coroner returned to the inquest of Elaine Morris.
Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
30 minutes ago
- The Independent
Aristocrat Constance Marten launches bid to overturn conviction for killing baby while on the run
Aristocrat Constance Marten has launched a bid to overturn her conviction for killing her newborn daughter while on the run from police. Baby Victoria perished in a 'thin and flimsy' tent after Marten and her partner Mark Gordon, a convicted rapist, took her off-grid to stop the infant from being taken into care. The parents are facing years in jail after they were both convicted of gross negligence manslaughter in a retrial this summer. In a separate trial last year, the couple were also found guilty of concealing their daughter's birth, child cruelty and perverting the course of justice by hiding her body in a rubbish-filled plastic shopping bag. An appeal bid following their first trial was previously rejected. However Marten, 38, has now lodged a fresh application at the Court of Appeal seeking permission to appeal her manslaughter conviction, according to court officials. Over the course of the two drawn-out trials, it emerged the couple had carefully concealed Marten's pregnancy with Victoria – their fifth child – before going on the run to stop her from being taken into care. Their first four children had been removed by a family court – a decision which the parents claimed was a miscarriage of justice driven by a 'corrupt' social services system. She gave birth in secret in a holiday cottage before they frantically travelled the country with the baby hidden inside Marten's coat – at first by road and later in taxis paid for with cash from her trust fund – after their car caught fire on the M61. They decided to settle 'off-grid' in the South Downs with little more than some sleeping bags and a cheap tent amid a nationwide manhunt after police found the remains of a placenta in their burnt-out car. But Victoria died after Marten fell asleep with her zipped inside her jacket as they sheltered in the tent in January 2023. After the unanimous guilty verdict for manslaughter was read out in July, Marten, wearing a blue top and dark trousers, later shouted 'it's a scam' from the dock. Gordon, 51, has previously served 22 years in a Florida prison for raping a woman armed with a knife and hedge clippers in a 1989 home invasion when he was 14 years old. A further charge against Gordon for failing to comply with his sex offender notification requirements while on the run was this week dropped by prosecutors. Prosecutor Joel Smith KC told the Old Bailey that in light of his recent conviction for manslaughter, the Crown Prosecution Service took the view that it was no longer in the public interest to pursue the charge. Gordon, who appeared by video-link from Belmarsh prison unrepresented by a lawyer, seemed uncertain when asked to enter a plea. Judge Mark Lucraft KC told him: 'If you plead not guilty that will bring proceedings to an end.' Gordon then responded: 'Of course, not guilty.' Mr Smith then offered no evidence and invited Judge Lucraft to formally acquit Gordon. The parents are due to be sentenced on 15 September.
The Independent
30 minutes ago
- The Independent
‘Motor neurone disease robbed me of my voice – now I can finally speak again thanks to AI and an old videotape'
A woman who lost the ability to speak after she developed motor neurone disease (MND) 25 years ago has finally regained her voice with the help of AI and an old videotape. Sarah Ezekiel was left unable to talk or use her hands due to the neurological condition that affects the brain and spinal cord, just months after becoming a mum for the second time in 2000, aged just 34. Her children Aviva and Eric had only ever heard her speak through a machine, which had an emotionless, robotic tone. Now, two decades later, her voice has been recreated using artificial intelligence from an eight-second snippet of her real voice taken from a scratchy VHS tape. 'After such a long time, I couldn't really remember my voice. When I first heard it again, I felt like crying. It's a kind of miracle,' she told the BBC, using eye-gaze technology which allows her to type by tracking her eye movements across a screen. Ms Ezekiel got her AI voice when Bristol-based assistive technology company, Smartbox, asked for an hour's worth of audio to recreate it. But because she had lost her ability to speak before the creation of smartphones, all she had was a mumbled eight-second clip of her speaking on a videotape. However, the clip was just enough. Simon Poole from Smartbox recalled his heart sinking when he received the short clip. But he played around with it and looped it through the latest AI-voice technology that uses thousands of voices. It was able to fill in the gaps and predict where a voice, like Ms Ezekiel's, might go with its intonation. Ms Ezekiel was a Londoner who had worked as a personal assistant. She was married with a toddler and expecting her second child when her speech started to slow and she started to feel weakness in her left arm. She was diagnosed with MND - a degenerative condition which causes muscle weakness, with about 1,000 people diagnosed in the UK every year. The condition can be life-shortening, and according to the NHS, most of those affected will lose the ability to speak. Her marriage ended soon after her diagnosis, leaving her to rely on 24-hour care for her and her children. The mother of two battled feelings of isolation because she was unable to communicate. Eventually, after five years of living with the condition, she was able to use eye-gaze technology to type and speak with a synthetic voice, like the physicist Stephen Hawking. But with the help of AI, she now has her accent back - which she said is better than sounding like a robot. Ms Ezekiel joked: 'I was very posh and people didn't know I was [really a] cockney with a slight lisp.' Her son Eric said his mother's new AI voice has made the family closer as she can now express emotions and show when she is happy, sad or angry. Her daughter Aviva explained that hearing her mother's voice was 'amazing' and said she can now feel who she is as a person. "Mum isn't just a disabled person in the corner with a robot that doesn't relate to her,' she said.
The Independent
30 minutes ago
- The Independent
Men, you've really got to hand it to the porn-blockers…
Poor old Pornhub. The UK's most visited pornography site is having a barren August and not just because its (mostly male) users are on holiday with the family. Following the introduction of new age verification rules, as part of the Online Safety Act – which requires users to prove how old they are by entering credit card details or using their bank account, mobile phone contract or facial recognition – traffic to Pornhub has almost halved. In the fortnight between July 24 (the day before the new legislation came in) and August 8, visitors to the site fell by 47 per cent, according to data experts Similarweb. Other adult sites have also reported drops in UK traffic. OnlyFans is apparently down 10 per cent, but that could be down to having banned Bonnie Blue. No word yet on whether the amount of laundry being done in the middle of the night has fallen, too. Let me be the first to say a tentative woohoo. I previously wrote in these pages how, ahead of the age verification kicking in, online forums had been flooded with men (and 73 per cent of UK porn users are male) angry that the trifling matter of keeping children safe was getting in the way of their unrestricted pleasure. Now? It seems possible that at least some of those chaps have cut themselves off. Sounds painful. If the side effect of protecting society's most vulnerable – the average age that children are thought to first view explicit porn in this country is just 13 – is that some men have had their own online habit broken? That's surely something to celebrate. University College London academics might say it can take between 18 to 255 days to form a new habit, but I bet their study didn't take into account the prospect of having to put your real details into a porn site and the potential for data leaks. I've interviewed porn-addicted men, who told me about the mindless scrolling, almost numb to what they were seeing, searching for ever darker material to get a kick. They wanted to stop but felt unable to tear themselves away – maybe the thought of having to enter their long card number was the breaker some have been waiting for. Not unlike (indulge me) my friend whose unstoppable M&S fashion habit was cut off by the cyberattack the retailer experienced this summer and which denied her access to its website for several weeks. Look, I'm not naive. I do realise that a lot of Pornhub's users will now be using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), which disguise the location of their IP address and were the most downloaded thing on the UK Apple App Store in the days after the new rules came in. That makes data on UK visits to porn sites hard to pin down. Nor do we know exactly which users have stopped scrolling. Is it those accessing the most violent pornography day after day? Or the more casual viewer who doesn't rely on porn enough to bother going through age checks – easier just to knock it on the head. Still, I can't help wondering whether these men might not come to thank the likes of Baroness Kidron, who campaigned tirelessly to get this legislation passed. She's likened it to making children 'climb out of the window', rather than just giving them unrestricted access. If a few men are also reluctant to shimmy down the drainpipe? That's surely progress, however angry they might be.
