Latest news with #Handsowrth
BBC News
09-07-2025
- BBC News
Handsworth Post Office victim to return to family business
A postmistress who lost her Post Office branch after being wrongly accused of stealing money plans to return to her family business next Gill ran the Wattville Road Post Office in Handsworth in Birmingham and was one of hundreds to be accused or convicted of theft and fraud because of a faulty computer system, branch was started by her father in 1976 and then handed down to her and she said: "My father always wanted us to get it back somehow."Yesterday a report was released, looking at the impact on victims, as well as the fairness and speed of the compensation process. The report said the scandal had a "disastrous" impact on those said at least 59 people contemplated suicide at various points, of whom 10 attempted to take their own lives, and more than 13 people may have killed themselves due to the Post Office has apologised unreservedly for what it called a "shameful period" in its Gill said she had considered suicide herself and it was "saddening" to hear how so many others had been said when the allegations first emerged of money going missing from her Post Office, there was an assumption in the local community that she was guilty."Everybody started talking about it, everybody said you did it," she said."People just automatically believed what was said."To try to balance the books and stay out of jail, she said she ended up missing card and mortgage payments and her parents had to sell a property to keep her inquiry, led by Sir Wyn Williams, criticised the speed of compensation, saying that for many claimants it had not been delivered "promptly".Ms Gill, one of those still waiting for her compensation, said: "I just want it finished."Now, she said the local community was "behind me 100%" and wanted her to get her Post Office back."I've watched these people in there for the last 15 years," she said."My father always wanted us to get it back somehow and next year will be 50 years of us having the business, and that's one thing I wanted to do for him and his memory." Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Independent
20-06-2025
- The Independent
Driver being followed by police before fatal crash told passengers ‘to run'
A driver who was being followed by police told his passengers to 'jump out the car and run' seconds before he crashed into a tree and suffered fatal injuries, an inquest has heard. Muhammad Qasim, 29, was captured speaking on an 18-second video taken by backseat passenger Mohammed Ibrahim moments before he failed to negotiate a bend in the road on Island Road, Handsworth, in the early hours of October 2 2023, and crashed his BMW into the central reservation. Mr Qasim died in hospital later the same day after suffering a 'catastrophic' head injury. The police officer who was following Mr Qasim's car before the crash has denied he was in a pursuit, saying he was not pursuit-trained and was following the vehicle so intelligence checks could be carried out after he saw the BMW going 'easily double' the 30mph speed limit on Church Lane. PC Paul Withers told an inquest into Mr Qasim's death at Birmingham Coroners Court on Thursday that he did not know if the BMW driver was aware he was following him as he did not have his blue lights on and the manner of Mr Qasim's driving had not changed throughout the interaction. On Friday, Mr Ibrahim, who was severely injured in the crash but survived, told the court that Mr Qasim had been aware the police car was following him and that he had increased his speed as he drove 'loops' around Island Road. A video clip recorded by Mr Ibrahim before the fatal crash was shown to the jury, at the beginning of which Mr Qasim could be heard telling his passengers: 'Jump out of the car and run.' Mr Ibrahim could be heard telling him to 'chill', which he said was him trying to tell the driver to slow down, with Mr Qasim telling him to 'shut up'. The backseat passenger said he did not see Mr Qasim drinking alcohol or smoking after he was picked up by him at about 1am on October 2, although the inquest heard the driver was one and a half times over the drink-drive limit and had recently smoked cannabis. In a statement, front seat passenger Ria Garcha, who had been picked up by Mr Qasim at about 6.30pm on October 1, said the pair had been 'drinking a lot' together and that he had empty vodka bottles in his car that he wanted to get rid of. She said he was 'driving kind of mad' and that both she and Mr Ibrahim, whom she had never met before Mr Qasim had picked him up in the Alum Rock area, had told him to slow down. She said: 'Sometimes he was listening to us, sometimes not. When we first saw the police, the boy (Mr Ibrahim) said, 'oh there's the police' and he put his foot down and went faster. 'I was telling him to slow down, they weren't coming. They were telling me to shut up. I couldn't see any lights or sirens behind us. 'A couple of minutes later the boy said the police were there again. 'We were doing loops around this part of (Island Road). The boy said they were chasing us … I said if they were chasing us, they'd be behind us and I couldn't see them. 'When I did see them, they didn't have their lights or sirens on. I said, 'they're not coming for us'. The boy in the back started filming, he was saying it was a police chase. 'Qasim said he wanted to pull over and run and told us to be ready. He drove really fast. 'It seemed like he couldn't hear anything, he was zoned out. He crashed into the tree and he went flying.' Mr Ibrahim told the court he could not remember much of the incident, but said he had started filming before the crash because, earlier in the day, he had been stopped and searched by police. He said: 'I didn't want the same thing to repeat again. I can record what's happening … it would show my side of the story in case the police stopped us.' Speaking of Mr Qasim's behaviour before the crash, he said: 'Firstly, he was calm, he wanted to make sure the police weren't following but then he changed his reaction when he realised the police were chasing him … he started telling me to shut up.' He added: 'When the police kept looping behind him, he was trying to get away from them.' The inquest continues.
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Yahoo
Driver being followed by police before fatal crash told passengers ‘to run'
A driver who was being followed by police told his passengers to 'jump out the car and run' seconds before he crashed into a tree and suffered fatal injuries, an inquest has heard. Muhammad Qasim, 29, was captured speaking on an 18-second video taken by backseat passenger Mohammed Ibrahim moments before he failed to negotiate a bend in the road on Island Road, Handsworth, in the early hours of October 2 2023, and crashed his BMW into the central reservation. Mr Qasim died in hospital later the same day after suffering a 'catastrophic' head injury. The police officer who was following Mr Qasim's car before the crash has denied he was in a pursuit, saying he was not pursuit-trained and was following the vehicle so intelligence checks could be carried out after he saw the BMW going 'easily double' the 30mph speed limit on Church Lane. PC Paul Withers told an inquest into Mr Qasim's death at Birmingham Coroners Court on Thursday that he did not know if the BMW driver was aware he was following him as he did not have his blue lights on and the manner of Mr Qasim's driving had not changed throughout the interaction. On Friday, Mr Ibrahim, who was severely injured in the crash but survived, told the court that Mr Qasim had been aware the police car was following him and that he had increased his speed as he drove 'loops' around Island Road. A video clip recorded by Mr Ibrahim before the fatal crash was shown to the jury, at the beginning of which Mr Qasim could be heard telling his passengers: 'Jump out of the car and run.' Mr Ibrahim could be heard telling him to 'chill', which he said was him trying to tell the driver to slow down, with Mr Qasim telling him to 'shut up'. The backseat passenger said he did not see Mr Qasim drinking alcohol or smoking after he was picked up by him at about 1am on October 2, although the inquest heard the driver was one and a half times over the drink-drive limit and had recently smoked cannabis. In a statement, front seat passenger Ria Garcha, who had been picked up by Mr Qasim at about 6.30pm on October 1, said the pair had been 'drinking a lot' together and that he had empty vodka bottles in his car that he wanted to get rid of. She said he was 'driving kind of mad' and that both she and Mr Ibrahim, whom she had never met before Mr Qasim had picked him up in the Alum Rock area, had told him to slow down. She said: 'Sometimes he was listening to us, sometimes not. When we first saw the police, the boy (Mr Ibrahim) said, 'oh there's the police' and he put his foot down and went faster. 'I was telling him to slow down, they weren't coming. They were telling me to shut up. I couldn't see any lights or sirens behind us. 'A couple of minutes later the boy said the police were there again. 'We were doing loops around this part of (Island Road). The boy said they were chasing us … I said if they were chasing us, they'd be behind us and I couldn't see them. 'When I did see them, they didn't have their lights or sirens on. I said, 'they're not coming for us'. The boy in the back started filming, he was saying it was a police chase. 'Qasim said he wanted to pull over and run and told us to be ready. He drove really fast. 'It seemed like he couldn't hear anything, he was zoned out. He crashed into the tree and he went flying.' Mr Ibrahim told the court he could not remember much of the incident, but said he had started filming before the crash because, earlier in the day, he had been stopped and searched by police. He said: 'I didn't want the same thing to repeat again. I can record what's happening … it would show my side of the story in case the police stopped us.' Speaking of Mr Qasim's behaviour before the crash, he said: 'Firstly, he was calm, he wanted to make sure the police weren't following but then he changed his reaction when he realised the police were chasing him … he started telling me to shut up.' He added: 'When the police kept looping behind him, he was trying to get away from them.' The inquest continues.
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
‘A billionaire will pay a lot of money to shoot a recreated being': historian Sadiah Qureshi on extinction and empire
Would you bring an extinct species back to life if you could? If so, which species would you pick? Prof Sadiah Qureshi has taken to asking her friends, students and complete strangers this question because, she says, their answers reveal a lot about how we understand extinction. Some choose a dinosaur, others pick a species like the dodo, killed off by humans. Almost no one chooses a plant or insect. The very idea of de-extinction, Qureshi says, raises profound questions about the meaning of extinction and how we treat life, whether living, endangered, dead or extinct. How, she asks, did human beings come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever? This is the subject of her new book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, which traces the entanglements of race, empire and colonialism to better understand extinction. 'Every time we save a way of being or mourn the passing of a natural kind, whether a species or otherwise, we make decisions rooted in our emotional attachments, or our perceptions of that natural kind's value – whether commercial, aesthetic, or ecological,' she writes. Extinction is not simply a scientific puzzle, Qureshi argues – it is political and philosophical. Qureshi grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, and was taught by her father to respect all living beings – a conviction that underpins the book and that we keep coming back to during our conversation, which takes place as we perch on one of the large rocks that line the garden of the Natural History Museum in London. Qureshi studied natural sciences at Cambridge – a place she initially hated as an undergraduate, she says, feeling she was among the 'most entrenched, ossified forms of whiteness'. She also didn't enjoy her subject: she didn't like lab work, her experiments often went wrong, and she realised quickly that she wasn't going to be a research scientist. She decided to study the history and philosophy of science, found her people and stayed at the university for her PhD. Now based at the University of Manchester she is, she thinks, the first woman of Pakistani heritage in the country to become a history professor. Before seeing me, Qureshi squeezed in a visit to Hope, the famous whale skeleton suspended over the museum's main hall. 'As Hope hovers above the museum's visitors', she writes in Vanished, 'she shows what is possible when we forgo valuing species for their economic significance and instead consider them as ways of being worthy of life'. Whales, pushed nearly to extinction by the profitable commercial whaling industry, were brought back from this cliff edge thanks to mass campaigning. But we don't care for all life this way. The Earth is going through a sixth mass extinction of wildlife, with more than 500 species of land animals found by scientists in 2020 to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In the previous five mass extinction periods, rates of loss were higher than normal, with at least 75% of species going extinct over a geologically short period of time. These extinctions were unavoidable, caused by rapid and significant changes in the climate, among other factors, and driven by natural processes. But the current crisis is an unnatural extinction that human beings have produced through an economy focused on resource extraction, intensive land use and pollution, among other things. Yet many of our stories about extinction focus less on the political nature of the issue and more on heroic scientists discovering lost species and formulating new theories about why they went extinct, she explains in the book. In Vanished, which is both highly readable and academically rigorous, she gives us a new story. According to Qureshi, animal extinction should not be treated as a separate historical development from human extermination, as it often is. Long before social Darwinism's theory of natural selection, colonialists across North America predicted that Indigenous peoples were going extinct and that this was evidence of God's natural law, leaving the spoils of the land for white Europeans. Such reasoning rationalised genocide and persecution because, the argument went, as empires expanded, these peoples would die out anyway. 'That's a very, very different justification for imperialism than saying 'we want resources', [though] obviously, all of those things are linked,' she says. These arguments about extinction helped produce the exceptional violence of settler colonialism, Qureshi says, and they are relevant for thinking about species loss today. 'Who we think are worthy subjects of conservation [is] deeply rooted in past political projects,' she says. The very concept of the national park, for example, was at least partly related to the expectation that Indigenous peoples would soon be extinct. Campaigners imagined the parks as pristine, unpeopled wildernesses. Yosemite, the first US national park, established in 1864, was home to Miwok groups, but their villages were razed and former inhabitants starved or frozen. They were depicted as 'historic ghosts', Qureshi writes, not the 'presently dispossessed'. Too often, conservation efforts write Indigenous people out of the story once again, she argues. And while de-extinction, bringing a species back to life, might sound exciting, for Qureshi it's a form of avoidance that doesn't require we change our current relationships with the natural world. It would be awe-inspiring if the woolly mammoth roamed the earth in the not-so-distant future (which is the aim of one biotech company), but it is never going to come back as it was. It would be 'a new form of life that is genetically engineered and would be intellectual property', Qureshi says. 'What kind of life will that being be able to lead? … And, you know, at some point, some billionaire is going to pay a lot of money to shoot one of these recreated beings.' Science alone doesn't offer the way forward, she argues. It isn't inherently objective, even though that's how it's regularly imagined, especially now, in what Qureshi calls 'a moment of resurging biological tyranny' – referencing the biological essentialism of the fight over trans rights and the re-emergence of eugenics. But she acknowledges that scientific research must be defended when it is under attack, as it is now, because it can still provide us with valuable knowledge. 'Historians and philosophers and sociologists of science have long interrogated attempts to seek authority in science,' she explains. 'That doesn't mean to say that there's not some material reality out there, but … the way that we engage with that world is culturally and historically specific.' We need to respect, not try to control, nature, she argues. For Qureshi, rewilding is one option, as are smaller-scale changes, such as nurturing gardens to make them as welcoming as possible to insects. 'If you really, deeply care about the people around you, about life around you, you will treat it differently to the way than we're doing,' she says, 'and get away from the exploitative ways of living in the modern world that are damaging to the planet … Paying attention to the life around us and recalibrating how we value that life is just as powerful as having more scientific research'.
Telegraph
04-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Boy, 3, starved by vegans was failed by officials ‘afraid of being branded racist'
London-born Tai, a medical genetics graduate who also used the first name Tai-Zamarai, and former shop worker Naiyahmi shunned mainstream society and left Abiyah's body buried at their property in Handsworth, Birmingham, when they were evicted in March 2022. A two-month trial at Coventry Crown Court heard the couple had 'invented' a belief system featuring aspects of Igbo culture that Tai, who grew up in both Nigeria and Peckham in south-east London, adapted to form a legal system he called 'slick law'. The court heard that they lived off the generosity of others, occupying at one point a shipping container and a caravan in the Somerset area. A review into his family's contact with authorities has found there was a lack of curiosity about how his parents' culture and lifestyle might have affected his wellbeing, warning that 'the safeguarding of children being impacted by harmful cultural practice is paramount'. The review, published by Birmingham Safeguarding Children Partnership (BSCP) suggested that a culture of fear of being branded racist and discriminatory had contributed to the failure. It warned that while navigating race, ethnicity, culture and beliefs 'can be challenging' for those working in child safeguarding, there is a need for them to be 'confident to ask questions about different cultures and belief systems without fear of being perceived as discriminatory'. Kevin Ball, the report author, added: 'If any family engages in cultural practices which are harmful to children, this must not be overlooked, and the safeguarding of children being impacted by harmful cultural practice is paramount.' The review, published on Wednesday, noted that Abiyah 'was only ever seen by a small number of professionals during his lifetime, and for a limited time only'. According to records, he was seen by a health visitor in April 2016 shortly after his birth, and the following month for a check-up. There was some contact with a local authority social worker in London in 2018 and four visits to a children's centre in Birmingham, but the review said: 'Records of these contacts and interactions are very limited, reinforcing that there was very little insight into [Abiyah's] existence, health or welfare.' Police visited their home in Handsworth in February 2018 but the review stated that no details were recorded about Abiyah, with his presence 'almost invisible on a review of records'. 'No curiosity' from health visitors Elsewhere, the review noted 'no exploration or curiosity' from the health visiting service, run by Birmingham Community Health Care NHS Foundation Trust, about Abiyah's mother's desire for a home birth with no medical intervention. At a safeguarding meeting in March 2020, health visitor records noted that Abiyah had not been seen by them since his six-week assessment, with appointments at the one and two-year marks since his birth not attended. He had also not received any routine immunisations. While a follow-up inquiry was planned it failed to materialise and the review stated that may have been caused by the Covid lockdown which began that year. The various authorities coming into contact with the child's family showed a 'general lack of knowledge or assessment of the parents' belief systems', leading to an 'insufficient understanding about the impact on his care', the review said. It also said his parents' behaviour 'often distracted or diverted professional attention' away from his safety and welfare. The review stated: 'Parental resistance of advice, support or authority ultimately resulted in [Abiyah] becoming invisible and lost from professional view.' The report included reflections that while social workers had been aware of the family's culture and parents' beliefs and lifestyle, they appeared not to have considered 'with detailed curiosity' the impact on Abiyah's safety and wellbeing, 'such as if indeed his overall needs were being met'. Abiyah's mother opted to take part in the review, stating she believed she was 'doing the right thing at the time' for her son based on her cultural beliefs but that she now wished she had done more research about diet and healthcare. She said it was 'hard to accept that my approach did not lead to the best outcomes for my child and that it took the court process to take me out of that bubble'. Among its recommendations, the review said workforce guidance should be looked at to ensure it 'supports effective assessment and intervention which safeguards those children that become hidden from professional sight and/or when parents choose to live an alternative, or more off-grid lifestyle'. Case raises 'very serious questions' Annie Hudson, chairman of the child safeguarding practice review panel, said the case raised 'very serious questions' about local and national safeguarding systems. She added: 'The local child safeguarding review published today highlights important learning, including about how Abiyah became invisible and lost from the view and oversight of professionals. It evidences strongly the paramount importance of understanding what life is like for children, and not being distracted or diverted away by parental behaviour when considering children's safety and welfare. 'It is important to respect parents' faith and beliefs. However, as this review highlights, professionals must always be mindful of whether their views about parents, including their faith, race and culture, is inhibiting their capacity to be questioning and act together in a timely way to safeguard and protect children.' James Thomas and Sue Harrison, co-chairmen of the BSCP said: 'Protecting children out of professional sight is a real challenge, given the limits of statutory powers to ensure all children are regularly seen. Our partnership has made this one of our top strategic priorities to ensure that we do everything we possibly can to identify risk to those children who are out of sight.' Abiyah's parents were arrested in Somerset on Dec 9, 2022, leading to the discovery of their son's body five days later. Tai was sentenced to 24 years and six months and his wife was ordered to serve 19 years and six months in prison after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice, causing or allowing the death of a child, and child neglect.
