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ITV News
20-05-2025
- Politics
- ITV News
Words of Olivia Pratt-Korbel's mother read out in Parliament in emotional speech by MP
The words of Olivia Pratt-Korbel's heartbroken mother have been spoken in Parliament by an MP, as measures to compel criminals to appear in the dock for sentencing were brought to the Commons. In an emotional contribution, Anneliese Midgley read out Cheryl Korbel's victim's statement, which her nine-year-old daughter's killer 'refused to hear' in court. Thomas Cashman, the gunman who killed Olivia as he chased a drug dealer who had tried to run into her home in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, did not appear to hear his life sentence in April 2023. As Ms Korbel watched tearfully from the gallery, the Labour MP for Knowsley praised her for her campaigning on Olivia's law. Under the legislation, judges will be given the power to sentence offenders for up to two more years in prison for avoiding justice. For offenders who already face lengthy imprisonment or whole life orders, judges could also impose a range of prison punishments on offenders such as confinement to their cells and being stripped of privileges such as extra gym time. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer promised to carry on the pledge to change the law, first made by his predecessor Rishi Sunak, when he met with Ms Korbel in January this year. The measures are part of the Victims and Courts Bill, which had its second reading in the Commons on Tuesday. Speaking during the debate, Ms Midgley said: 'Today I speak to one part of this Bill that will require convicted offenders to attend their sentence hearings and provide consequences where they refuse. It's known as Olivia's law. 'Olivia Pratt-Korbel was nine years old when she was murdered in her own home, by a stranger with a gun. The murderer, Thomas Cashman fired a bullet through the door of Olivia's home, which passed through the wrist of my constituent, Cheryl Korbel, Olivia's mother, before hitting Olivia in the chest and ending her life. 'Cheryl and her cousin Antonia are with us in the chamber today. 'To lose a child to murder in your own home while trying to protect them is a burden no parent should ever be asked to bear. But under our current justice system, convicted criminals can opt-out of attending their own sentencing. 'That's what Olivia's murderer did. Cashman remained in his cell, refusing to face the court, to hear Cheryl's words, to look her in the eye. It was the act of a coward. That injustice must end. 'Nothing in this world can bring Olivia back, but instead of collapsing under this weight, Cheryl fought back. She and her family have campaigned so no other family would suffer the same. 'Olivia's law is her work, it's Olivia's legacy, it's Cheryl's legacy. 'Today I will read out Cheryl's victim impact statement. These are the words the murderer, the coward Thomas Cashman refused to hear. I want the words of Cheryl Korbel committed to this House, so they will be on record in this place forever. 'Let her words ring out in this chamber, like they should have done in Cashman's ears that day.' In her victim statement, Ms Korbel described Olivia as 'the light of our lives, our beautiful, sassy, chatty girl who never ran out of energy'. Ms Korbel had also said: 'My worst nightmare was being separated from Liv and not being with her when she needed me the most, I was the first person to hold my baby girl, and as her mum, I should have been the last. 'I cannot get my head around how Cashman continued to shoot after hearing the terrifying screams, the utter devastation he has caused, he doesn't care, how could he? 'His actions have left the biggest hole in our lives that can never be filled. That man set out to do a job and he didn't care about anyone else or who got in the way. He certainly couldn't own it either.' Concluding her speech, Ms Midgley said: 'Let Cheryl's words be heard. Let them be honoured. Let Olivia's law pass, and make sure that no victim's voice is ever shut out of justice again.'
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Words of heartbroken mother read out in Parliament in emotional speech by MP
The words of Olivia Pratt-Korbel's heartbroken mother have been spoken in Parliament by an MP, as measures to compel criminals to appear in the dock for sentencing were brought to the Commons. In an emotional contribution, Anneliese Midgley read out Cheryl Korbel's victim's statement, which her nine-year-old daughter's killer 'refused to hear' in court. Thomas Cashman, the gunman who killed Olivia as he chased a drug dealer who had tried to run into her home in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, did not appear to hear his life sentence in April 2023. As Ms Korbel watched tearfully from the gallery, the Labour MP for Knowsley praised her for her campaigning on Olivia's law. Under the legislation, judges will be given the power to sentence offenders for up to two more years in prison for avoiding justice. For offenders who already face lengthy imprisonment or whole life orders, judges could also impose a range of prison punishments on offenders such as confinement to their cells and being stripped of privileges such as extra gym time. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer promised to carry on the pledge to change the law, first made by his predecessor Rishi Sunak, when he met with Ms Korbel in January this year. The measures are part of the Victims and Courts Bill, which had its second reading in the Commons on Tuesday. Speaking during the debate, Ms Midgley said: 'Today I speak to one part of this Bill that will require convicted offenders to attend their sentence hearings and provide consequences where they refuse. It's known as Olivia's law. 'Olivia Pratt-Korbel was nine years old when she was murdered in her own home, by a stranger with a gun. The murderer, Thomas Cashman fired a bullet through the door of Olivia's home, which passed through the wrist of my constituent, Cheryl Korbel, Olivia's mother, before hitting Olivia in the chest and ending her life. 'Cheryl and her cousin Antonia are with us in the chamber today. 'To lose a child to murder in your own home while trying to protect them is a burden no parent should ever be asked to bear. But under our current justice system, convicted criminals can opt-out of attending their own sentencing. 'That's what Olivia's murderer did. Cashman remained in his cell, refusing to face the court, to hear Cheryl's words, to look her in the eye. It was the act of a coward. That injustice must end. 'Nothing in this world can bring Olivia back, but instead of collapsing under this weight, Cheryl fought back. She and her family have campaigned so no other family would suffer the same. 'Olivia's law is her work, it's Olivia's legacy, it's Cheryl's legacy. 'Today I will read out Cheryl's victim impact statement. These are the words the murderer, the coward Thomas Cashman refused to hear. I want the words of Cheryl Korbel committed to this House, so they will be on record in this place forever. 'Let her words ring out in this chamber, like they should have done in Cashman's ears that day.' In her victim statement, Ms Korbel described Olivia as 'the light of our lives, our beautiful, sassy, chatty girl who never ran out of energy'. Ms Korbel had also said: 'My worst nightmare was being separated from Liv and not being with her when she needed me the most, I was the first person to hold my baby girl, and as her mum, I should have been the last. 'I cannot get my head around how Cashman continued to shoot after hearing the terrifying screams, the utter devastation he has caused, he doesn't care, how could he? 'His actions have left the biggest hole in our lives that can never be filled. That man set out to do a job and he didn't care about anyone else or who got in the way. He certainly couldn't own it either.' Concluding her speech, Ms Midgley said: 'Let Cheryl's words be heard. Let them be honoured. Let Olivia's law pass, and make sure that no victim's voice is ever shut out of justice again.'
Telegraph
14-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The iron rule that kept us ahead of China is dead
One of the engines of modern technological progress has just keeled over and died, and the implications are enormous. Moore's law was not a law of physics but an observation, originally made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, that computer power increased exponentially – doubling every two years. Enormous cathedrals of innovation were built on top of that gift, transforming society. 'If there was ever a creator of wealth on a fantastic scale, ever a changer of custom and social values, ever a determinant of where our culture is headed and why, it's Moore's law,' wrote Robert X Cringely, a famous tech columnist, in 2001. Now the futurists who have taken abundance for granted are about to get a rude shock. Rather than fantasising about infinite growth, we will have to get creative to live within the hard constraints imposed by physics, two professors at Penn wrote last month. 'Technology will cease to trickle down,' they wrote. Moore's law gave the industry a 'free' gift in the sense that a doubling of power didn't impose significant external costs. It also allowed microprocessors to go into new places, since next year's chip would take up half the size of last year's chip – so all kinds of new products could now be created. For example, the noise cancellation in your earbuds is thanks to tiny but very powerful chips. Vast data centres have been built relatively cheaply. And even more importantly for GDP, old industrial processes could be thrown away and replaced by better methods. Capitalism has excelled at production: at making sure the chips are cheap and abundant. But doubts about its longevity began to surface at the turn of the century, which was when Cringely wrote his panegyric. The late Moore himself predicted in 2015 that it would be over in a decade. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, has been reading the liturgy since 2022. Now his company's latest processor roadmap proves Moore's law is 'dead and buried … deep in the ground', wrote industry site The Register last month. The laws of physics, which are very much real laws, are the cause of death. Today's iPhone has 19bn transistors on an integrated circuit the size of a fingernail, which means those transistors and circuit lines are now very close together, narrower than a strand of human DNA. There are still some tricks chipmakers can do, which involve new packaging and design: chiplets, for example, or 3D stacking. But it's time to face a new world. Neil Thompson, director of future technology at MIT, examined a period when Moore's law had a hiccup 20 years ago, and concluded that it had an impact on firms' productivity. The future will have less abundant and less democratic dispersement of chips, two Penn University computing professors Ben Lee and André DeHon concluded last month. So what do we do now? Well, we don't have a choice – we have to get smarter. For much of the past few decades, what Moore's law has given, badly written software has taken away. The software industry became very lazy during the golden years. It could write sloppy code and get away with it. Take Microsoft's Windows 11, which now offers half the battery life on the same hardware as a free Linux alternative, which is just as capable. The engineering arts of tuning and optimising became lost in the age of abundance. When some of the chip industry's best brains, including Butler Lampson, one of the architects of modern computing at Xerox Parc, outlined what we needed in a post-Moore world in a 2020 paper, top of the list was better software. Engineers must now be poets again, not wafflers. Artificial intelligence lives in its own bubble world. Here, the models run on specialised and very expensive graphics chips alongside the computer chips. The bet is that a flood of irresistible new services, for which businesses will pay, will justify the astronomical return on investment needed. We shall see, but Microsoft has already begun to abandon some data centre projects, according to reports. But look closer at the AI mania and some lessons can already be learned. The West had a 'Sputnik moment' with the release of DeepSeek, a large-language model from an unknown team in China that runs on a fraction of the resources US models need. The reality was that, deprived of abundant hardware resources, the team had made clever design decisions. Their decisions and those techniques would be familiar to a first-year computer science student. The Chinese remembered what we'd forgotten. Firms caught up in the AI mania are more likely to make things worse, allowing generative AI to write code even more bloated than humans write, creating further costs for themselves and consumers in the future. AI doesn't optimise or debug code adequately. 'Companies looking to deal with the increasing cost of computing power can start by prioritising education and up-to-date training for their programmers', MIT's computer science and AI lab CSAIL advises. So we're not in an AI arms race, it turns out, but an optimisation race. Who can rewrite the software more elegantly? Can we out-DeepSeek the Chinese? We'll see if the software industry is up to the task or whether it has become so bloated, it's too fat to get out of bed.
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- The Guardian
Pilot of domestic abuse experts helping in 999 call rooms begins in England
Domestic abuse specialists embedded in control rooms receiving 999 emergency calls will help 'create force-wide cultural change', said Jess Phillips as the first phase of 'Raneem's law' was rolled out across England. The new law is named in memory of Raneem Oudeh, who was killed alongside her mother, Khaola Saleem, in Solihull by Oudeh's ex-husband, whom she had reported to the police at least seven times, as well as making four 999 calls on the night she was murdered. An inquest found police failings 'materially contributed' to their deaths. The new policy, which will involve domestic abuse specialists working in 999 control rooms to give feedback on responses to emergency calls, is being piloted in five police forces, and could be rolled out across the whole of England and Wales by the end of the year. The pilot is taking place in the Northumbria, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Humberside forces, as well as in the West Midlands, where police handled Oudeh's case. Speaking at the launch event at the West Midlands police central operations hub, Nour Norris, Oudeh's aunt and Saleem's sister, who has been campaigning for change on their behalf, said: 'I felt really overwhelmed because this is where it really took place for my niece. It's quite emotional being here. 'But this will save people's lives; it's as simple as that. There is no underestimating this at all. We can't do anything to bring them back. But their legacy, Raneem's legacy, will live for ever. She wasn't heard when she was alive. But through every victim, she will be heard.' Norris previously said police showed a 'dismissive attitude and a lack of understanding about domestic violence' in their dealings with Oudeh, including telling her to deal with the problem herself. At the launch, she praised the force for 'transforming their failure into something that is hopefully going to be positive'. Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, and the MP for Birmingham Yardley, said she was 'haunted' by Oudeh's story. 'I live constantly with the feeling that I just wish that she'd called me,' she said. 'I wish that I could say that what we are doing here would have changed the outcome for Raneem, but I don't know. But the haunting of that and the activism of Nour will keep us trying.' She said having the specialists in control rooms would create 'a better service for victims'. 'You can already sense a cultural shift in the team, even just the language they use to speak to people,' she said. 'I think this has the opportunity to create force-wide cultural change that's really needed.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Domestic abuse specialists from local charities will sit at desks alongside call handlers, listening in live to 999 calls and also giving feedback on recordings of calls, providing training to staff and signposting to tailored support. Supt Jack Hadley, the deputy head of force contact at West Midlands police, said: 'I think this is a very early step to something that could transform how we deal with domestic abuse victims. 'We've never had a third party come in and see this part of our business before. So it is unique. It's very transparent, very open and laying ourselves bare, if you like, for the charities to come and use their expertise to help us.' The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: 'Every 30 seconds, someone calls the police about domestic abuse – over 100 people every hour seeking urgent help. 'That's why we are determined to overhaul the police emergency response to domestic abuse, making sure that victims get the specialist support and protection they need. That must be Raneem and Khaola's legacy.'
