LONDON, January 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- 'Go Faster Girl' KURT GEIGER LONDON Spring Summer 13 is about ditching formality for flexible materials and the indulgent pleasure of effortless elegance for the girl on the go. Kurt Geiger London introduces a different league of wedges, petite...
Reported by PR Newswire 22 hours ago.
↧
In The Mile-a-Minute Life of a Fashionista, Kurt Geiger Introduces the Everything but the Dress SS13 Collection
↧
Plymouth girl asked me for sex, says Devonport Park rape accused
This is Plymouth --A MAN accused of raping a drunken schoolgirl in a park has told a court she asked him for sex.
Craig Goldstone, 28, said the girl was not "paralytic" as she had told the jury earlier in the trial.
Goldstone admitted lying to police in interview when he initially claimed he had not met the girl in Devonport Park.
The father-of-four said he did not want his girlfriend to know he had sex with a stranger.
Goldstone denies raping the girl on July 5 last year.
And he told the court it was due to his Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder that he escaped through an unlocked door when left alone at Charles Cross police station.
Goldstone was agitated on the witness stand, crying at times, fidgeting and swivelling on his chair.
Judge Graham Cottle also told him to mind his language because he kept swearing.
Goldstone said he was walking his dog in Devonport Park on that Thursday evening when he met two girls drinking from a large bottle of cider.
He said the younger girl started playing with his Staffordshire bull terrier.
Goldstone said the older girl left and the teenager asked him for sex as they sat on the grass.
He added they had sex and afterwards he walked her to the edge of the park and left.
The jury had earlier heard from the girl that she was "paralytic" and "half-asleep" when she was dragged into bushes and raped.
Goldstone said she was "five or six" on a scale of drunkenness from one to ten.
He added: "I am not a violent man. If I had dragged her into bushes, my dog would have bitten me."
Goldstone admitted lying to the police in interview when he repeatedly claimed he had not met the girl. He said: "I did not want my missus to find out. I have been with my missus for nine years."
Goldstone admitted he hid from police under a bed at the nearby Salvation Army hostel where he was staying. He said he was worried they would find his drugs.
Goldstone was asked by his barrister Ali Rafati why he had left Charles Cross police station on the morning of Saturday July 7.
The court has heard he walked out of an unlocked door while waiting to take part in a video identification parade.
He added: "That was my ADHD. I think it was this lady here (officer in the case DC Yvette Rundle), she said wait here and she has gone into a room, there is a door there and a voice said 'go' and that is what I have done.
"If I have a chance to run and my head is telling me, then I am going. I am sorry I went."
Judge Cottle is due to sum up the case today and the jury is expected to retire to consider its verdict. Reported by This is 10 hours ago.
↧
↧
Indecent assault in changing room at Felsted Preparatory School
This is Essex --
POLICE are hunting a pervert who walked into a girls' changing room at a top independent school and indecently assaulted a young pupil.
The girl was threatened with violence when the man approached her at Felsted Preparatory School, which educates students up to 13-years-old, shortly before 11am last Tuesday morning.
She managed to escape his advances and alerted a teacher, but the man escaped into the grounds of the private school, which charges up to £26,000-a-year.
Head teacher Jenny Burrett said that the girl and her family were currently receiving support from the school.
"I can confirm that an incident did take place at the school which is currently being investigated by the police," she said.
"Since the incident occurred, our focus has understandably been on the welfare of the individual involved and providing support to her and her family," she added.
Security at the 449-year-old school has since been tightened and parents at both the junior and senior school, which teaches children up to A-level, have been kept abreast of current developments.
Ms Burrett said: "In response to advice from the police, we have communicated with the pupils, parents and staff of Felsted Preparatory School and Felsted School with regard to the importance of personal security and have re-emphasised the school's security policies and procedures.
"We obviously have increased vigilance around the site and will continue to keep parents updated with the progress of the police investigation."
Subsequently, detectives have released an e-fit image of the man they would like to question in response to the assault.
Senior Investigating Officer, DCI Simon Werrett said: "This man's description is very detailed and distinctive in several ways. I am sure someone will recognise him from this e-fit.
"If you know this man then please contact my detectives. Also, if you were in the area of the school between 10.30 and 11.30am on Tuesday morning and saw a man matching the physical or clothing description given, please contact us."
The man is described as white, with crooked teeth, aged 30, about 5ft 10ins tall, with short, gelled-up brown hair.
At the time, he was wearing jeans, a blue hoodie with white tassels, and trainers.
Anyone with information in connection with this assault is urged to contact detectives at Shrub End on 101 or e-mail SOIT@essex.pnn.police.uk Reported by This is 9 hours ago.
POLICE are hunting a pervert who walked into a girls' changing room at a top independent school and indecently assaulted a young pupil.
The girl was threatened with violence when the man approached her at Felsted Preparatory School, which educates students up to 13-years-old, shortly before 11am last Tuesday morning.
She managed to escape his advances and alerted a teacher, but the man escaped into the grounds of the private school, which charges up to £26,000-a-year.
Head teacher Jenny Burrett said that the girl and her family were currently receiving support from the school.
"I can confirm that an incident did take place at the school which is currently being investigated by the police," she said.
"Since the incident occurred, our focus has understandably been on the welfare of the individual involved and providing support to her and her family," she added.
Security at the 449-year-old school has since been tightened and parents at both the junior and senior school, which teaches children up to A-level, have been kept abreast of current developments.
Ms Burrett said: "In response to advice from the police, we have communicated with the pupils, parents and staff of Felsted Preparatory School and Felsted School with regard to the importance of personal security and have re-emphasised the school's security policies and procedures.
"We obviously have increased vigilance around the site and will continue to keep parents updated with the progress of the police investigation."
Subsequently, detectives have released an e-fit image of the man they would like to question in response to the assault.
Senior Investigating Officer, DCI Simon Werrett said: "This man's description is very detailed and distinctive in several ways. I am sure someone will recognise him from this e-fit.
"If you know this man then please contact my detectives. Also, if you were in the area of the school between 10.30 and 11.30am on Tuesday morning and saw a man matching the physical or clothing description given, please contact us."
The man is described as white, with crooked teeth, aged 30, about 5ft 10ins tall, with short, gelled-up brown hair.
At the time, he was wearing jeans, a blue hoodie with white tassels, and trainers.
Anyone with information in connection with this assault is urged to contact detectives at Shrub End on 101 or e-mail SOIT@essex.pnn.police.uk Reported by This is 9 hours ago.
↧
DAD ACCUSED OF BABY'S MURDER
This is Bristol --
A 24-YEAR-old has been charged with murdering his three-month-old daughter.
William Stephens, of Fonthill Road, Southmead, appeared at Bristol Crown Court via video link yesterday.
He is accused of killing Paris Vince-Stephens, his child with Danahj Vince.
Last Friday evening, an ambulance was called to Fane Close, Henbury, to reports of a baby girl with a serious head injury.
Paramedics informed Avon and Somerset police, who started an investigation straight away into how the injuries may have been caused.
Paris was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital, where she was treated over the weekend, but despite doctors' efforts passed away early on Monday morning.
Stephens was charged with murder and appeared at Bristol Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, where his case was sent to the crown court.
Then yesterday he appeared via video link from HMP Bristol at the higher court on Small Street in a brief, closed hearing under the Bail Act, heard by the Recorder of Bristol, Judge Neil Ford QC. Stephens was remanded in custody pending a preliminary hearing back at the crown court on February 7.
Paris' distraught mother Miss Vince has posted a picture of her beloved baby on her Facebook page, with the message "R.I.P sweetheart".
In one post, she wrote: "She is and she was my gawjus baby miss her so much its unreal."
She added in another comment that she "can't understand" what has happened.
When The Post went to Fane Close last night, two bunches of flowers had been left outside the block of flats Paris and her mum are believed to have lived in.
Avon and Somerset police spokesman Martin Dunscombe said: "On the evening of Friday, January 11, a girl aged three months was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital with a serious head injury.
"Unfortunately the girl died in hospital early on Monday morning.
"When the girl was admitted we immediately began an investigation to establish how the injury was sustained. As a result of our inquiries, William Stephens, 24, from Bristol, was arrested and has been charged with murder."
Stephens has not yet entered a plea to the charge. Reported by This is 18 hours ago.
A 24-YEAR-old has been charged with murdering his three-month-old daughter.
William Stephens, of Fonthill Road, Southmead, appeared at Bristol Crown Court via video link yesterday.
He is accused of killing Paris Vince-Stephens, his child with Danahj Vince.
Last Friday evening, an ambulance was called to Fane Close, Henbury, to reports of a baby girl with a serious head injury.
Paramedics informed Avon and Somerset police, who started an investigation straight away into how the injuries may have been caused.
Paris was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital, where she was treated over the weekend, but despite doctors' efforts passed away early on Monday morning.
Stephens was charged with murder and appeared at Bristol Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, where his case was sent to the crown court.
Then yesterday he appeared via video link from HMP Bristol at the higher court on Small Street in a brief, closed hearing under the Bail Act, heard by the Recorder of Bristol, Judge Neil Ford QC. Stephens was remanded in custody pending a preliminary hearing back at the crown court on February 7.
Paris' distraught mother Miss Vince has posted a picture of her beloved baby on her Facebook page, with the message "R.I.P sweetheart".
In one post, she wrote: "She is and she was my gawjus baby miss her so much its unreal."
She added in another comment that she "can't understand" what has happened.
When The Post went to Fane Close last night, two bunches of flowers had been left outside the block of flats Paris and her mum are believed to have lived in.
Avon and Somerset police spokesman Martin Dunscombe said: "On the evening of Friday, January 11, a girl aged three months was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital with a serious head injury.
"Unfortunately the girl died in hospital early on Monday morning.
"When the girl was admitted we immediately began an investigation to establish how the injury was sustained. As a result of our inquiries, William Stephens, 24, from Bristol, was arrested and has been charged with murder."
Stephens has not yet entered a plea to the charge. Reported by This is 18 hours ago.
↧
Predator led girl, 10, into bushes as she went to buy pet food
This is Hull and East Riding --
A MAN snatched a child off the street – leading her into bushes to attack her – as she walked to the shops to buy food for her pet rabbit.
Peter Carroll, 52, grabbed the girl, placed a hand on her shoulder and took her into the bushes after claiming he knew her parents.
Her screams alerted holidaymakers, who tried to catch Carroll as the 10-year-old girl escaped his clutches.
Distraught, she still went to the shop to buy the pet food before returning home to tell her parents about her ordeal.
Police eventually spotted Carroll on CCTV in Bridlington town centre.
Now, Carroll, of Batley, has been convicted of kidnapping, intent to commit a sex act and incitement during the attack in Hilderthorpe Road after a jury took just 20 minutes to return unanimous guilty verdicts.
The girl told Hull Crown Court: "I was going to get some rabbit food for my mum.
"He told me to follow him because he knew my dad. I'd never seen him before. He just put his arm around me and said 'follow me'.
"It was disgusting, I just ran away. "I said, 'Leave me alone'.
"I went home and fed my rabbit and then I told my mum. I was really scared and shocked."
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told police the abductor was bald, had a beard and was wearing a distinctive green T-shirt on.
He was still wearing the T-shirt when he was caught, sitting on a bench around an hour after the abduction in July.
He claimed the girl followed him along a footpath near the train station.
Adjourning the case for reports, Judge Simon Jack told Carroll he wanted to assess the risk he poses to children.
Carroll has been ordered to sign the sex offenders register and will return to court for sentencing next month.
Detective Constable Steve Bowley said: "It is quite rare in our area for this to happen. He was quite sophisticated the way he met the girl, he spoke to her, befriended her and took her away.
"I can only praise the girl's bravery for running away.
"I wouldn't like to think what could have happened if she hadn't." Reported by This is 16 hours ago.
A MAN snatched a child off the street – leading her into bushes to attack her – as she walked to the shops to buy food for her pet rabbit.
Peter Carroll, 52, grabbed the girl, placed a hand on her shoulder and took her into the bushes after claiming he knew her parents.
Her screams alerted holidaymakers, who tried to catch Carroll as the 10-year-old girl escaped his clutches.
Distraught, she still went to the shop to buy the pet food before returning home to tell her parents about her ordeal.
Police eventually spotted Carroll on CCTV in Bridlington town centre.
Now, Carroll, of Batley, has been convicted of kidnapping, intent to commit a sex act and incitement during the attack in Hilderthorpe Road after a jury took just 20 minutes to return unanimous guilty verdicts.
The girl told Hull Crown Court: "I was going to get some rabbit food for my mum.
"He told me to follow him because he knew my dad. I'd never seen him before. He just put his arm around me and said 'follow me'.
"It was disgusting, I just ran away. "I said, 'Leave me alone'.
"I went home and fed my rabbit and then I told my mum. I was really scared and shocked."
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told police the abductor was bald, had a beard and was wearing a distinctive green T-shirt on.
He was still wearing the T-shirt when he was caught, sitting on a bench around an hour after the abduction in July.
He claimed the girl followed him along a footpath near the train station.
Adjourning the case for reports, Judge Simon Jack told Carroll he wanted to assess the risk he poses to children.
Carroll has been ordered to sign the sex offenders register and will return to court for sentencing next month.
Detective Constable Steve Bowley said: "It is quite rare in our area for this to happen. He was quite sophisticated the way he met the girl, he spoke to her, befriended her and took her away.
"I can only praise the girl's bravery for running away.
"I wouldn't like to think what could have happened if she hadn't." Reported by This is 16 hours ago.
↧
↧
Dad William Stephens accused of murdering baby daughter Paris
This is Bristol --
A 24-YEAR-old has been charged with murdering his three-month-old daughter.
William Stephens, of Fonthill Road, Southmead, appeared at Bristol Crown Court via video link yesterday.
He is accused of killing Paris Vince-Stephens, his child with Danahj Vince.
Last Friday evening, an ambulance was called to Fane Close, Henbury, to reports of a baby girl with a serious head injury.
Paramedics informed Avon and Somerset police, who started an investigation straight away into how the injuries may have been caused.
Paris was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital, where she was treated over the weekend, but despite doctors' efforts passed away early on Monday morning.
Stephens was charged with murder and appeared at Bristol Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, where his case was sent to the crown court.
Then yesterday he appeared via video link from HMP Bristol at the higher court on Small Street in a brief, closed hearing under the Bail Act, heard by the Recorder of Bristol, Judge Neil Ford QC. Stephens was remanded in custody pending a preliminary hearing back at the crown court on February 7.
Paris' distraught mother Miss Vince has posted a picture of her beloved baby on her Facebook page, with the message "R.I.P sweetheart".
In one post, she wrote: "She is and she was my gawjus baby miss her so much its unreal."
She added in another comment that she "can't understand" what has happened.
When The Post went to Fane Close last night, two bunches of flowers had been left outside the block of flats Paris and her mum are believed to have lived in.
Avon and Somerset police spokesman Martin Dunscombe said: "On the evening of Friday, January 11, a girl aged three months was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital with a serious head injury.
"Unfortunately the girl died in hospital early on Monday morning.
"When the girl was admitted we immediately began an investigation to establish how the injury was sustained. As a result of our inquiries, William Stephens, 24, from Bristol, was arrested and has been charged with murder."
Stephens has not yet entered a plea to the charge. Reported by This is 16 hours ago.
A 24-YEAR-old has been charged with murdering his three-month-old daughter.
William Stephens, of Fonthill Road, Southmead, appeared at Bristol Crown Court via video link yesterday.
He is accused of killing Paris Vince-Stephens, his child with Danahj Vince.
Last Friday evening, an ambulance was called to Fane Close, Henbury, to reports of a baby girl with a serious head injury.
Paramedics informed Avon and Somerset police, who started an investigation straight away into how the injuries may have been caused.
Paris was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital, where she was treated over the weekend, but despite doctors' efforts passed away early on Monday morning.
Stephens was charged with murder and appeared at Bristol Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, where his case was sent to the crown court.
Then yesterday he appeared via video link from HMP Bristol at the higher court on Small Street in a brief, closed hearing under the Bail Act, heard by the Recorder of Bristol, Judge Neil Ford QC. Stephens was remanded in custody pending a preliminary hearing back at the crown court on February 7.
Paris' distraught mother Miss Vince has posted a picture of her beloved baby on her Facebook page, with the message "R.I.P sweetheart".
In one post, she wrote: "She is and she was my gawjus baby miss her so much its unreal."
She added in another comment that she "can't understand" what has happened.
When The Post went to Fane Close last night, two bunches of flowers had been left outside the block of flats Paris and her mum are believed to have lived in.
Avon and Somerset police spokesman Martin Dunscombe said: "On the evening of Friday, January 11, a girl aged three months was taken to Bristol Children's Hospital with a serious head injury.
"Unfortunately the girl died in hospital early on Monday morning.
"When the girl was admitted we immediately began an investigation to establish how the injury was sustained. As a result of our inquiries, William Stephens, 24, from Bristol, was arrested and has been charged with murder."
Stephens has not yet entered a plea to the charge. Reported by This is 16 hours ago.
↧
Vol-au-vent is a pleasant surprise
This is Surrey --Café Rouge, High Street, Dorking
T he sun was setting over the Surrey hills and there was a distinct chill in the air. After many days of mild weather, the cold was particularly noticeable.
It dawned on me that little by little, the dark and depressing days of December were now behind us and daylight was extending by about two minutes each day.
It was late afternoon as I motored into Dorking, finding a parking space in the municipal car park next to Sainsbury's. I pulled my coat to, wrapped a scarf around my neck and headed into town. Shopkeepers were preparing to close for the day but the Original Factory Shop, which occupies the former Woolworths store, was still brightly lit with the doors open.
Passing Woodcock's, the chemists, I looked up and wondered what had happened to those huge old apothecary's bottles that were such a distinctive feature of the High Street. They used to be in the front window every time I passed.
I glanced inside the White Horse Hotel and saw the tables neatly laid out for evening meals – wine glasses placed beside cutlery.
After a short spell of window shopping, and with pangs of hunger nagging, it was time for tea – or even something a little more substantial.
Most of the cafés I passed in the High Street were now shut for the day but I was pleased to see that one restaurant, Café Rouge, was open, so stepped inside.
I hesitated as to where to sit before deciding to take a place in the corner by the window. It is always nice to peer out at life outside when you are in the warm, sipping a hot beverage.
On the next table was a young family.
One of the children had finished her drink but continued sucking on the straw until there was a noise like the last of the bath water going down the plug hole.
Another child was fiddling with the little pods of sugar in a bowl.
"Don't do that, darling. Other people want to have them with their tea," came the gentle reprimand from dad.
I perused the menu, brought to the table by a most helpful waiter, and ran my finger down the list.
It was now gone 5pm so I would be able to choose two dishes from the set evening menu.
I picked a ham and Gruyère cheese vol-au-vent and a latte to start with and a chopped steak burger and fries to follow.
I could have picked from the "quick bites" menu which offered dishes such as croque monsieur with French fries (£7.95) for the weary shopper.
Also available on this list was croque madame with fries (£8.75); chicken baguette (£8.95); steak baguette (£9.75); and cheese soufflé.
"Look over there at that doggie. What is it?" the dad, nearby, asked his little daughter.
"A poodle," the toddler whispered back.
The vol-au-vent was brought to the table and I was surprised that it took the form of a triangular puff pastry. I thought the vol-au-vent was usually a pastry cup with the filling poured into the central well. The snack was neatly laid out on a plate of leaves.
I enjoyed the filling but I was busy reading some leaflets so by the time I tucked in it was only lukewarm and I was glad when the burger and fries arrived.
"What's that?" asked the young girl, pointing.
"It's a brownie," explained mum.
The girl turned to dad and asked him: "Do you need a napkin? It will go everywhere!"
I was impressed. She must have been copying the advice mum dispenses at home.
I returned to the menu and concluded that the sweets menu offered what could be considered as an afternoon tea, if accompanied by coffee or tea to drink. There were chocolate and banana crêpes (£5.50); apple tartes (£5.50); ice creams (£4.25); and one that caught my eye – almond and apricot pudding with cream.
I stared up at the walls and windows of this cosy, softly-lit restaurant. French words such as champagne, spiritueux, vins rouge, baguettes and salon de thé were artistically written on the glass and plasterwork.
I gave in and ordered the almond and apricot pudding, which helped to prolong my visit in the soporific environment.
A middle-aged couple arrived and sat close by and chatted.
"He weighed 13½ stone but he still looked quite trim."
A couple of foreign customers came in out of the cold and also took a window seat.
In the background ambient music played gently. A saxophone piece sent me dreamily into another world.
"It's two years since I handed in my notice but financially I'm all right," said a lady on a table a few yards away.
My eyes began to close. Wouldn't it be nice if they did bed and breakfast here? It would be tempting to dive onto a bed and go into a deep sleep.
But no. It was time to settle the bill and head off into the rush hour on the A25. What a shame! Reported by This is 14 hours ago.
↧
Zero Dark Thirty: the US election vehicle that came off the rails | J Hoberman
Billed as a Barack Obama election fillip, Kathryn Bigelow's tale of the hunt for Bin Laden quickly became political dynamite
When the Obama re-election machine began gearing up last winter, its presumed winning formula had the brevity of a high-concept Hollywood pitch: "General Motors is alive, Osama bin Laden is dead."
The mantra's first part received an unexpected iteration during half-time at the Super Bowl when, in an ad promoting the US car industry, no less an icon than Clint Eastwood![ext]()
told the huge TV audience that Detroit had weathered the Great Recession and was coming back. (Apparently unaware he'd been cast as Obama's surrogate, the star would make amends by grotesquely lecturing the president during the Republican convention![ext]()
.) Meanwhile, the mantra's second part was also in the works, in the form of Kathryn Bigelow![ext]()
's big-budget thriller about Bin Laden's assassination; not yet named Zero Dark Thirty, the film was scheduled to open on 12 October 2012, three and a half weeks before election day.
The story broke in July 2011, when Vanity Fair![ext]()
announced online that Bigelow's forthcoming movie would be Obama's "October surprise". The timing was perfect. Even as Navy Seals found and killed the al-Qaida leader in his Abbottabad safe house on 2 May, Bigelow and the journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal were planning a movie on Bin Laden – or rather on how he had managed to elude capture for nearly a decade. They immediately began revising, with regards to the new situation.
The Sunday following the Vanity Fair piece, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd![ext]()
tartly noted that Bigelow and Boal had extracted "top-level access to the most classified mission in history" from an administration even more paranoid than its predecessor with regards to leaks: "It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president's image to Hollywood." Republican politicians quickly got the message. Representative Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives committee on homeland security, called for an investigation into the White House role in facilitating Bigelow's movie – a probe naturally put off until the political season. King's committee began leaking documents in late May 2012, including an email from Michael Vickers, an undersecretary of defence for intelligence interviewed by Bigelow and Boal, explaining that he helped the film-makers at the behest of secretary of defence and former CIA director Leon Panetta.
By the time the conservative organisation Judicial Watch![ext]()
released material documenting Bigelow and Boal's interviews with CIA deputy director Michael Morell, the movie's opening had been pushed back. The Obama campaign had to make do with the cheesy TV film Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden![ext]()
, produced by Obama supporter Harvey Weinstein and broadcast on the National Geographic Channel two days before the election.
Zero Dark Thirty was now a November surprise. The movie began press screening three weeks after the president's re-election and, rather than appearing as an Obama victory lap, became notorious well before its mid-December opening for scenes of waterboarding and other forms of torture – seemingly designed to inspire audience complicity, or disgust, or some queasy combination of the two.
Scarcely less gripping (or more overtly political) than the previous Bigelow-Boal collaboration, The Hurt Locker![ext]()
, Zero Dark Thirty opens by announcing itself as "based on first-hand accounts of actual events" and then, with the screen still dark, plays the real sounds of 9/11 – genuine panic and death in the World Trade Centre, urgent declarations of love mixed with desperate calls for help.
"I'm gonna die … I'm burning up," a woman tells a 911 operator. Silence, followed by the operator's, "Oh my God," and a shock cut two years later to a CIA black site in Afghanistan where the film's protagonist, Maya (Jessica Chastain![ext]()
), a young CIA agent newly arrived from Washington DC, is confronted with graphic instances of "enhanced interrogation". Maya is apparently unfazed. "Washington says she's a killer," the station chief remarks. Be that as it may, the girl – as she is at times disparagingly known – has no life apart from the CIA and no interest apart from hunting down Bin Laden. (Neither does the movie – the eight-year-long war in Iraq, which was the subject of The Hurt Locker – is conspicuous by its absence.)
Glamorously lit and made-up throughout, Maya is a striking figure – cousin to such other action heroes as the girl with the dragon tattoo![ext]()
, the teenage protagonist of The Hunger Games![ext]()
and Gina "Crush" Carano, the professional wrestler who starred in Steven Soderbergh![ext]()
's Haywire![ext]()
. She's as obsessed and unerring as Carrie Mathison, the violently moody CIA agent in Homeland![ext]()
(supposedly Obama's favourite TV show). Carrie, however, has a libido; Maya's is subsumed in the tenacity of her hunt for the Great White Whale.
Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld![ext]()
's wisdom, one CIA operative jokes: "We don't know what we don't know." But Maya does know. Moreover, as single-minded as she is, she readily speaks truth to power; as tough as Dirty Harry![ext]()
, she threatens her superior with a congressional committee if he doesn't follow one of her leads, and after one agency scheme goes awry she vows to "smoke everybody involved in this op" and then kill Bin Laden.
As stylised as Maya seems, the film-makers claim authenticity. "I don't want to play fast and loose with history," Boal told the New York Times![ext]()
. Maya inevitably reminds many of Bigelow but she is based on a CIA agent, well-known to journalists, who has appeared under various names in other accounts of the hunt for Bin Laden. According to the Washington Post, which had little difficulty in tracking her down, the proto Maya (passed over for a promotion that many of her colleagues thought she deserved), has made no secret of her bitterness.
As with John Wayne![ext]()
in The Searchers![ext]()
, Maya's mission is personal: "A lot of my friends have died trying to do this – I believe I was spared so I could finish the job." In the film's signature line, she says to the CIA director (James Gandolfini![ext]()
) that, with regards to Bin Laden's Abbottabad hideaway, "I'm the motherfucker who found this place … Sir." Given her absolute certainty, Maya is assigned to brief the Seals. Looking like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun![ext]()
with her leather jacket and aviator shades, she's finally one of the guys.
Boal has called Zero Dark Thirty a political Rorschach test. He isn't alone in doing so. Many liberals have praised it even while, as one did, characterising it as "fascist". A week after the New York Film Critics Circle gave the movie its top award, a liberal political commentator wrote: "I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love [the film, which is] a far, far cry from the rousing piece of pro-Obama propaganda that some conservatives feared it would be."
Mocking the consternation among progressives, a conservative film reviewer at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post agreed: Zero Dark Thirty is, he wrote, "a clear vindication for the Bush administration's view of the war on terror" that "subtly presents President Obama and by extension the entire Democratic establishment and its supporters in the media as hindering the effort to find Bin Laden by politicising harsh interrogation techniques". Besides, the movie was not a Rorschach test.
Call it a screen for projection. Terrifically edited, Zero Dark Thirty is a procedural aimed directly at the hippocampus. The day it opened in the US, three senators – senate select committee on intelligence chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain – released a letter of protest to Sony Pictures's CEO, citing their committee's 6,000-page classified report on interrogation tactics and calling on him "to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative".
A few days later, McCain appeared on CNN to point out that when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water-boarded, he gave false information: "Torture does not work. It is hateful. It is harmful, incredibly harmful to the United States of America." Soon after, acting CIA director Michael Morell moved to distance his agency from the movie: "CIA interacted with the film-makers through our office of public affairs but, as is true with any entertainment project with which we interact, we do not control the final product"; Zero Dark Thirty "takes significant artistic licence, while portraying itself as being historically accurate". (His statement did not placate the senate intelligence committee, which is currently investigating the possibility that CIA personnel not only provided the film-makers with classified information, but planted the notion that, pace McCain, torture did work.)
According to the senate and the CIA then, so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were not crucial in finding Bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty doesn't exactly say that they were, only that this "enhanced interrogation" served to soften up some prisoners and put the fear of God into others. There are other factors. A section pointedly titled "Human Error" sees a long-misplaced file surface with an extremely productive lead. Bribery also works. But mainly, the movie establishes a primal rhythm in which instances of terror (in Saudi Arabia, London and Pakistan) are intercut with scenes of interrogation. The causal link is suggested – as Eisenstein![ext]()
used montage to fabricate a Cossack slashing a woman's face in Battleship Potemkin![ext]()
– yet the only unambiguous evidence Zero Dark Thirty gives is that torture existed.
An hour into the film, the newly elected Obama makes his only appearance, on a TV set watched by Maya and her colleagues: "I've said repeatedly that America does not torture." The CIA agents are blank-faced and mute. Imagine their feelings as you like. Is the president calling them (or us) un-American?
Zero Dark Thirty is not the only current movie to celebrate the CIA. Ben Affleck's Argo![ext]()
recounts the 1979 operation in which the agency smuggled US embassy personnel out of revolutionary Iran disguised as a location-scouting movie crew. Nor is it the lone political movie Hollywood released in late 2012. The election year brought portraits of the two presidents who might legitimately be called America's greatest: Franklin D Roosevelt![ext]()
was impersonated by Bill Murray in the light-hearted Hyde Park on Hudson![ext]()
and Daniel Day-Lewis![ext]()
portrayed Abraham Lincoln to more formidable effect in Steven Spielberg's film![ext]()
, about to open here.
Like Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln was anticipated as a movie that would naturally reflect well on the current president and, indeed, on the eve of the Zero Dark Thirty opening and at the behest of senate majority leader Harry Reid, Spielberg hosted a special screening for a bipartisan senate audience. Zero Dark Thirty was repudiated, Lincoln embraced. The Oscar wars heated up. The Hollywood Reporter found that "negative talk is escalating", along with whispering campaigns: Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture, Lincoln distorts history. Perhaps so. Still, by putting an essentially positive spin on a bloody tragedy, Lincoln provides a history lesson with a happy ending. Zero Dark Thirty, whose chances at winning best picture seem to be nil, is the exact reverse – a success story with intimations of monumental failure. (Meanwhile, Argo – a movie in which movie magic is put to heroic use – emerged from its Golden Globes victory as an exciting feelgood, industry-flattering Oscar alternative.)
Whereas Obama and his commanders followed the mission to kill Obama in real time, Zero Dark Thirty presents Maya as its author and sole witness. She is the first to get the good news, the only American to greet the returning Seals, the person who unzips the body-bag and IDs the corpse. Maya is so important that she flies home alone in the empty bay of a cargo plane. Once again, she is blank and then, raison d'etre extinguished, she cries.
Is Maya, like Ishmael, the lone survivor left clinging to the flotsam of the Pequod? Is she condemned, like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, to "wander forever between the winds"? What did it cost the girl (or Obama) or America to kill Bin Laden? Zero Dark Thirty slakes a thirst for vengeance and leaves an aftertaste of gall.
• Zero Dark Thirty opens in cinemas on 25 January. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
When the Obama re-election machine began gearing up last winter, its presumed winning formula had the brevity of a high-concept Hollywood pitch: "General Motors is alive, Osama bin Laden is dead."
The mantra's first part received an unexpected iteration during half-time at the Super Bowl when, in an ad promoting the US car industry, no less an icon than Clint Eastwood
told the huge TV audience that Detroit had weathered the Great Recession and was coming back. (Apparently unaware he'd been cast as Obama's surrogate, the star would make amends by grotesquely lecturing the president during the Republican convention.) Meanwhile, the mantra's second part was also in the works, in the form of Kathryn Bigelow's big-budget thriller about Bin Laden's assassination; not yet named Zero Dark Thirty, the film was scheduled to open on 12 October 2012, three and a half weeks before election day.The story broke in July 2011, when Vanity Fair
announced online that Bigelow's forthcoming movie would be Obama's "October surprise". The timing was perfect. Even as Navy Seals found and killed the al-Qaida leader in his Abbottabad safe house on 2 May, Bigelow and the journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal were planning a movie on Bin Laden – or rather on how he had managed to elude capture for nearly a decade. They immediately began revising, with regards to the new situation.The Sunday following the Vanity Fair piece, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
tartly noted that Bigelow and Boal had extracted "top-level access to the most classified mission in history" from an administration even more paranoid than its predecessor with regards to leaks: "It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president's image to Hollywood." Republican politicians quickly got the message. Representative Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives committee on homeland security, called for an investigation into the White House role in facilitating Bigelow's movie – a probe naturally put off until the political season. King's committee began leaking documents in late May 2012, including an email from Michael Vickers, an undersecretary of defence for intelligence interviewed by Bigelow and Boal, explaining that he helped the film-makers at the behest of secretary of defence and former CIA director Leon Panetta.By the time the conservative organisation Judicial Watch
released material documenting Bigelow and Boal's interviews with CIA deputy director Michael Morell, the movie's opening had been pushed back. The Obama campaign had to make do with the cheesy TV film Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden, produced by Obama supporter Harvey Weinstein and broadcast on the National Geographic Channel two days before the election.Zero Dark Thirty was now a November surprise. The movie began press screening three weeks after the president's re-election and, rather than appearing as an Obama victory lap, became notorious well before its mid-December opening for scenes of waterboarding and other forms of torture – seemingly designed to inspire audience complicity, or disgust, or some queasy combination of the two.
Scarcely less gripping (or more overtly political) than the previous Bigelow-Boal collaboration, The Hurt Locker
, Zero Dark Thirty opens by announcing itself as "based on first-hand accounts of actual events" and then, with the screen still dark, plays the real sounds of 9/11 – genuine panic and death in the World Trade Centre, urgent declarations of love mixed with desperate calls for help."I'm gonna die … I'm burning up," a woman tells a 911 operator. Silence, followed by the operator's, "Oh my God," and a shock cut two years later to a CIA black site in Afghanistan where the film's protagonist, Maya (Jessica Chastain
), a young CIA agent newly arrived from Washington DC, is confronted with graphic instances of "enhanced interrogation". Maya is apparently unfazed. "Washington says she's a killer," the station chief remarks. Be that as it may, the girl – as she is at times disparagingly known – has no life apart from the CIA and no interest apart from hunting down Bin Laden. (Neither does the movie – the eight-year-long war in Iraq, which was the subject of The Hurt Locker – is conspicuous by its absence.)Glamorously lit and made-up throughout, Maya is a striking figure – cousin to such other action heroes as the girl with the dragon tattoo
, the teenage protagonist of The Hunger Games and Gina "Crush" Carano, the professional wrestler who starred in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire. She's as obsessed and unerring as Carrie Mathison, the violently moody CIA agent in Homeland (supposedly Obama's favourite TV show). Carrie, however, has a libido; Maya's is subsumed in the tenacity of her hunt for the Great White Whale.Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld
's wisdom, one CIA operative jokes: "We don't know what we don't know." But Maya does know. Moreover, as single-minded as she is, she readily speaks truth to power; as tough as Dirty Harry, she threatens her superior with a congressional committee if he doesn't follow one of her leads, and after one agency scheme goes awry she vows to "smoke everybody involved in this op" and then kill Bin Laden.As stylised as Maya seems, the film-makers claim authenticity. "I don't want to play fast and loose with history," Boal told the New York Times
. Maya inevitably reminds many of Bigelow but she is based on a CIA agent, well-known to journalists, who has appeared under various names in other accounts of the hunt for Bin Laden. According to the Washington Post, which had little difficulty in tracking her down, the proto Maya (passed over for a promotion that many of her colleagues thought she deserved), has made no secret of her bitterness.As with John Wayne
in The Searchers, Maya's mission is personal: "A lot of my friends have died trying to do this – I believe I was spared so I could finish the job." In the film's signature line, she says to the CIA director (James Gandolfini) that, with regards to Bin Laden's Abbottabad hideaway, "I'm the motherfucker who found this place … Sir." Given her absolute certainty, Maya is assigned to brief the Seals. Looking like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun with her leather jacket and aviator shades, she's finally one of the guys.Boal has called Zero Dark Thirty a political Rorschach test. He isn't alone in doing so. Many liberals have praised it even while, as one did, characterising it as "fascist". A week after the New York Film Critics Circle gave the movie its top award, a liberal political commentator wrote: "I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love [the film, which is] a far, far cry from the rousing piece of pro-Obama propaganda that some conservatives feared it would be."
Mocking the consternation among progressives, a conservative film reviewer at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post agreed: Zero Dark Thirty is, he wrote, "a clear vindication for the Bush administration's view of the war on terror" that "subtly presents President Obama and by extension the entire Democratic establishment and its supporters in the media as hindering the effort to find Bin Laden by politicising harsh interrogation techniques". Besides, the movie was not a Rorschach test.
Call it a screen for projection. Terrifically edited, Zero Dark Thirty is a procedural aimed directly at the hippocampus. The day it opened in the US, three senators – senate select committee on intelligence chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain – released a letter of protest to Sony Pictures's CEO, citing their committee's 6,000-page classified report on interrogation tactics and calling on him "to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative".
A few days later, McCain appeared on CNN to point out that when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water-boarded, he gave false information: "Torture does not work. It is hateful. It is harmful, incredibly harmful to the United States of America." Soon after, acting CIA director Michael Morell moved to distance his agency from the movie: "CIA interacted with the film-makers through our office of public affairs but, as is true with any entertainment project with which we interact, we do not control the final product"; Zero Dark Thirty "takes significant artistic licence, while portraying itself as being historically accurate". (His statement did not placate the senate intelligence committee, which is currently investigating the possibility that CIA personnel not only provided the film-makers with classified information, but planted the notion that, pace McCain, torture did work.)
According to the senate and the CIA then, so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were not crucial in finding Bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty doesn't exactly say that they were, only that this "enhanced interrogation" served to soften up some prisoners and put the fear of God into others. There are other factors. A section pointedly titled "Human Error" sees a long-misplaced file surface with an extremely productive lead. Bribery also works. But mainly, the movie establishes a primal rhythm in which instances of terror (in Saudi Arabia, London and Pakistan) are intercut with scenes of interrogation. The causal link is suggested – as Eisenstein
used montage to fabricate a Cossack slashing a woman's face in Battleship Potemkin– yet the only unambiguous evidence Zero Dark Thirty gives is that torture existed.An hour into the film, the newly elected Obama makes his only appearance, on a TV set watched by Maya and her colleagues: "I've said repeatedly that America does not torture." The CIA agents are blank-faced and mute. Imagine their feelings as you like. Is the president calling them (or us) un-American?
Zero Dark Thirty is not the only current movie to celebrate the CIA. Ben Affleck's Argo
recounts the 1979 operation in which the agency smuggled US embassy personnel out of revolutionary Iran disguised as a location-scouting movie crew. Nor is it the lone political movie Hollywood released in late 2012. The election year brought portraits of the two presidents who might legitimately be called America's greatest: Franklin D Roosevelt was impersonated by Bill Murray in the light-hearted Hyde Park on Hudson and Daniel Day-Lewis portrayed Abraham Lincoln to more formidable effect in Steven Spielberg's film, about to open here.Like Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln was anticipated as a movie that would naturally reflect well on the current president and, indeed, on the eve of the Zero Dark Thirty opening and at the behest of senate majority leader Harry Reid, Spielberg hosted a special screening for a bipartisan senate audience. Zero Dark Thirty was repudiated, Lincoln embraced. The Oscar wars heated up. The Hollywood Reporter found that "negative talk is escalating", along with whispering campaigns: Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture, Lincoln distorts history. Perhaps so. Still, by putting an essentially positive spin on a bloody tragedy, Lincoln provides a history lesson with a happy ending. Zero Dark Thirty, whose chances at winning best picture seem to be nil, is the exact reverse – a success story with intimations of monumental failure. (Meanwhile, Argo – a movie in which movie magic is put to heroic use – emerged from its Golden Globes victory as an exciting feelgood, industry-flattering Oscar alternative.)
Whereas Obama and his commanders followed the mission to kill Obama in real time, Zero Dark Thirty presents Maya as its author and sole witness. She is the first to get the good news, the only American to greet the returning Seals, the person who unzips the body-bag and IDs the corpse. Maya is so important that she flies home alone in the empty bay of a cargo plane. Once again, she is blank and then, raison d'etre extinguished, she cries.
Is Maya, like Ishmael, the lone survivor left clinging to the flotsam of the Pequod? Is she condemned, like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, to "wander forever between the winds"? What did it cost the girl (or Obama) or America to kill Bin Laden? Zero Dark Thirty slakes a thirst for vengeance and leaves an aftertaste of gall.
• Zero Dark Thirty opens in cinemas on 25 January. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
↧
'An absolute nightmare': Girl kidnapped by sex attacker Peter Carroll praised for her bravery (video)
This is Hull and East Riding --
THE mother of a ten-year-old girl kidnapped by a sex attacker has praised her daughter for escaping his clutches.
Peter Carroll, 52, grabbed the child as she went to the shop to buy rabbit food.
He pretended he knew her parents before he placed his hand on her shoulder and guided her into bushes, where he tried to indecently assault her.
The girl screamed and ran away. She was able to give a detailed description of him, which led to Carroll's arrest an hour later.
The mum-of-two, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said: "Never in our wildest dreams did we expect this to happen to us.
"It has been an absolute nightmare.
"If she had not screamed and run away, I dread to think what could have happened.
"We feel really lucky. It could have been a whole different situation.
"This could have been a murder inquiry and she may never have been found.
"I'm just so thankful she is at home and safe with us."
The woman had allowed her daughter to go to the supermarket to buy rabbit food on her own to give her some freedom.
Carroll had been prowling the area looking for a child. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has released CCTV footage to the Mail showing Carroll searching for a child.
The girl's mother said: "She asked to go to the shop and we thought that as she was leaving primary school soon we would give her a little bit of freedom.
"I'm very overprotective usually and now I'm worse.
"This has changed her. She is shy and scared to talk to adults. She will not walk past where it happened.
"I'm just really proud of her – she has been amazing throughout this ordeal."
The terrified child went to Tesco in Bridlington after the attack and got the pet food before returning home in tears to tell her parents what had happened.
They immediately drove her back to the street with the police to try to trace Carroll, who was eventually spotted on CCTV in the resort's town centre.
The girl told the police her abductor was bald, with a beard and was wearing a distinctive green T-shirt.
Carroll, who matched the description, was caught nearby sitting on a bench just over an hour after snatching the little girl on July 29 last year in Hilderthorpe Road, Bridlington.
Carroll, of Batley, has been convicted of kidnapping, committing an offence with intent to cause a sex act and inciting a child to commit sex acts.
A jury at Hull Crown Court returned unanimous verdicts after just 20 minutes.
Judge Simon Jack told Carroll he wanted reports on him to assess the risk he poses to children.
He has been ordered to sign the sex offenders register and is due to be sentenced next month.
Prosecutor Sara Hill-Summerlin said: "This was a prime example of a speedy reaction by the police, early advice by the CPS and co-operation between police and the CPS to bring Peter Carroll to justice swiftly.
"This was clearly very frightening for the victim and I wholeheartedly commend her for her bravery in coming forward and her family for supporting her in seeking the justice she deserved." Reported by This is 16 hours ago.
THE mother of a ten-year-old girl kidnapped by a sex attacker has praised her daughter for escaping his clutches.
Peter Carroll, 52, grabbed the child as she went to the shop to buy rabbit food.
He pretended he knew her parents before he placed his hand on her shoulder and guided her into bushes, where he tried to indecently assault her.
The girl screamed and ran away. She was able to give a detailed description of him, which led to Carroll's arrest an hour later.
The mum-of-two, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said: "Never in our wildest dreams did we expect this to happen to us.
"It has been an absolute nightmare.
"If she had not screamed and run away, I dread to think what could have happened.
"We feel really lucky. It could have been a whole different situation.
"This could have been a murder inquiry and she may never have been found.
"I'm just so thankful she is at home and safe with us."
The woman had allowed her daughter to go to the supermarket to buy rabbit food on her own to give her some freedom.
Carroll had been prowling the area looking for a child. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has released CCTV footage to the Mail showing Carroll searching for a child.
The girl's mother said: "She asked to go to the shop and we thought that as she was leaving primary school soon we would give her a little bit of freedom.
"I'm very overprotective usually and now I'm worse.
"This has changed her. She is shy and scared to talk to adults. She will not walk past where it happened.
"I'm just really proud of her – she has been amazing throughout this ordeal."
The terrified child went to Tesco in Bridlington after the attack and got the pet food before returning home in tears to tell her parents what had happened.
They immediately drove her back to the street with the police to try to trace Carroll, who was eventually spotted on CCTV in the resort's town centre.
The girl told the police her abductor was bald, with a beard and was wearing a distinctive green T-shirt.
Carroll, who matched the description, was caught nearby sitting on a bench just over an hour after snatching the little girl on July 29 last year in Hilderthorpe Road, Bridlington.
Carroll, of Batley, has been convicted of kidnapping, committing an offence with intent to cause a sex act and inciting a child to commit sex acts.
A jury at Hull Crown Court returned unanimous verdicts after just 20 minutes.
Judge Simon Jack told Carroll he wanted reports on him to assess the risk he poses to children.
He has been ordered to sign the sex offenders register and is due to be sentenced next month.
Prosecutor Sara Hill-Summerlin said: "This was a prime example of a speedy reaction by the police, early advice by the CPS and co-operation between police and the CPS to bring Peter Carroll to justice swiftly.
"This was clearly very frightening for the victim and I wholeheartedly commend her for her bravery in coming forward and her family for supporting her in seeking the justice she deserved." Reported by This is 16 hours ago.
↧
↧
Seventh person in court over incident at Moghul Durbar restaurant in Leicester
This is Leicestershire -- Police have charged a seventh person in connection with the disorder at the Moghul Durbar restaurant in Leicester.
The 26-year-old man has been charged with conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
He is due to appear at Leicester Magistrates' Court this morning.
He was arrested on Wednesday following an incident which happened at about 9pm on Monday, January 14.
A large group of people smashed the windows of the Moghul Durbar in East Park Road, Spinney Hills.
Once members of the group were inside the restaurant, a number of people were assaulted and others were injured.
A total of six people attended the Leicester Royal Infirmary for treatment to both minor and serious injuries.
The latest charge comes after six men were charged yesterday in connection with the incident.
Surjit Pandher (date of birth, November 18, 1984), Gurmukh Singh Cheema (June 13, 1987), Ranjit Singh (April 13, 1991), Sundeep Singh Sangha (April 16, 1987), Rajveer Sangha (May 1, 1988), and Ranvir Singh (April 13, 1991), appeared at Leicester Magistrates' Court, and afterwards were remanded into custody.
They all face a charge of conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
Police said local officers were continuing to work with community leaders and people living and working in the East Park Road to offer reassurance.
They are urging people not to listen to rumours or get involved in speculation, but to report any concerns to the police.
Police added that officers investigating a separate incident, in which concerns for the welfare of a young girl were raised, are continuing to speak with the girl and her family.
Additional resources have been added to the investigation, said police, and officers are "actively carrying out thorough and detailed inquiries, along with in depth intelligence gathering, which will all form part of the lengthy investigation". Reported by This is 9 hours ago.
The 26-year-old man has been charged with conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
He is due to appear at Leicester Magistrates' Court this morning.
He was arrested on Wednesday following an incident which happened at about 9pm on Monday, January 14.
A large group of people smashed the windows of the Moghul Durbar in East Park Road, Spinney Hills.
Once members of the group were inside the restaurant, a number of people were assaulted and others were injured.
A total of six people attended the Leicester Royal Infirmary for treatment to both minor and serious injuries.
The latest charge comes after six men were charged yesterday in connection with the incident.
Surjit Pandher (date of birth, November 18, 1984), Gurmukh Singh Cheema (June 13, 1987), Ranjit Singh (April 13, 1991), Sundeep Singh Sangha (April 16, 1987), Rajveer Sangha (May 1, 1988), and Ranvir Singh (April 13, 1991), appeared at Leicester Magistrates' Court, and afterwards were remanded into custody.
They all face a charge of conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
Police said local officers were continuing to work with community leaders and people living and working in the East Park Road to offer reassurance.
They are urging people not to listen to rumours or get involved in speculation, but to report any concerns to the police.
Police added that officers investigating a separate incident, in which concerns for the welfare of a young girl were raised, are continuing to speak with the girl and her family.
Additional resources have been added to the investigation, said police, and officers are "actively carrying out thorough and detailed inquiries, along with in depth intelligence gathering, which will all form part of the lengthy investigation". Reported by This is 9 hours ago.
↧
Tracey Thorn: the shy torch singer now turns to prose
As one half of Everything But the Girl, she spoke to lovelorn, idealistic students. Now her new memoir reveals a fine writer attuned to the vagaries of family life as much as fame
For those who live elsewhere, Hull might well mean John Prescott or, perhaps, the docks. To others, of a more melancholy bent, the city means the poet Philip Larkin, who worked at the university library for many years. And perhaps, depending on their age, it might also mean Tracey Thorn![ext]()
, the soulful songwriter and singer who studied English at the campus and also expressed herself in an austere verse style.
Thorn, who has come back to solo music-making in the last few years, has written a memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, published next month, and has recently found a new audience – both for her songs and for her beguiling Twitter comments![ext]()
. "Tracey was born knowing her own mind," Ben Watt, her musician husband, told the Observer this weekend. "I think she is half wallflower and half freedom fighter."
Whether chronicling her domestic thoughts or battling against wrongs, Thorn is fully engaged with the world. On 2 January, she told her 35,000 followers that she was listening to Watt singing Pretty Woman in their kitchen and wondering if he was going "to attempt the growl" that Roy Orbison trademarked![ext]()
. "Readers, I can confirm that he did," she updated. Her 2010 album, Love and Its Opposite![ext]()
, received critical acclaim and was what she described as "a record about the person I am now and the people around me… about real life after 40."
At the height of the success of Everything But the Girl, the duo she formed in Hull with Watt, their music vibrated with student disillusionment and thwarted love. While Larkin had described Hull's "fishy smelling/ pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum/ tattoo shops, consulates, grim head-scarved wives", Watt and Thorn's songs spoke to a whole generation of undergraduates, with their plaintive talk of the harm "done by just two minutes spent on the phone".
The couple had named their band after a sign outside a furniture shop in Hull that suggested it would supply all customers bedroom needs, except the love interest. In 1984, when their first album, Eden, came out, EBTG hit the big time on the tide of new jazz that swept the music industry. As svelte singers, such as Sade, adopted sophisticated poses at the top of the charts, Thorn's voice penetrated the fashion of the day to communicate with delicate young souls.
Her solo songs today are just as poignant, but her subjects have changed as she has approached her middle age as the mother of teenagers. Larkin's famously bleak injunction – "don't have any kids yourself"– now finds a compassionate echo in Thorn's song Oh, the Divorces!![ext]()
about the misery she has observed among couples with children who are splitting up.
"And each time I hear who's to part
I examine my heart
See how it stands
Wonder if it's still in safe hands."
"That is a heartrending song," says Guardian music writer Alexis Petridis. "There is a particularly well-observed line about watching 'the afternoon handovers by the swings'." Petridis is a fan of Thorn's writing style in the new memoir too. "She is able to view the world in a way that is unflashy and never showy and she captures a real sense of the changing eras. There is an ongoing 80s music revival at the moment, but, as with anything curated, it leaves lots of things out. Tracey gives a much better picture."
Thorn's book will take readers back to the rollicking post-punk days of indie music, whether or not they lived through it themselves. Her musical story begins when, as a teenager growing up in Hertfordshire, she managed to get a record deal with the nascent Cherry Red label and so was introduced to the music industry from what Rough Trade Records' Geoff Travis recalls as the distinctly unglamorous end.
"Tracey was always a pleasure to work with," he told the Observer this weekend, adding that she was prepared to knuckle down and help during her days in her first band, Marine Girls![ext]()
.
"One day she came into Rough Trade with a cake she had baked for Dan Treacy of the Television Personalities![ext]()
for his birthday and then she was put to work for the rest of the afternoon, sending out records or doing something like that." Later, through the offices of the A&R man Mike Alway, Travis signed both Thorn and Watt to the Blanco y Negro label. "I just love her voice," Travis explains. "It is a really underrated instrument, transmitting soul and a three-dimensional woman still sadly too rare in our musical landscape."
Thorn's husband also remembers the first time he heard her sing. "It was Mike Alway who played me a record. 'I have this band you can listen to, the Marine Girls,' he said, and I heard Tracey's voice on it straight away, although it was quite concealed because she was not the lead singer."
Watt also remembers Alway making an apt comparison. "He said hearing her voice was a bit like going out to Hackney Marshes to watch some weekend footballers and then suddenly realising you are watching Pele play." In 1981, Watt went to see Thorn perform. "I still hadn't met her then but I was a fan," he said.
The couple finally met in Hull as students. He was, she often suggests, posher than her and yet also more relaxed because he came from an arty, musical background. The two bonded over their record collections. But they also developed each other's tastes. While she liked the punky strains of Orange Juice or the Undertones, Watt was a fan of the wilder shores of pop and rock and of musicians such as Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart.
At first, Thorn has recalled, she mistook her future husband for an academic aesthete. Then she worked out that he had chosen his course of study entirely on the basis of finding the subjects that involved the least reading. Her feelings for Watt were only briefly threatened, it seems, by her sudden musical infatuation with Morrissey. Alway had played her the Smiths' first single, Hand in Glove![ext]()
, in the summer of 1983, but it was Travis, who came up to Hull with an early copy of the Smiths' debut album, who sealed the deal.
Thorn has admitted that a period of obsessive imitation followed, before eventually, after she had managed to establish a matey correspondence with Morrissey, she and Watt developed their own sound, moving away from the jazz influences of their first album.
By the launch of the Labour party-supporting Red Wedge movement in November 1985, the duo were firmly positioned on the left wing of the music industry, appearing at a succession of fundraising gigs and rallies.
Observer writer Sean O'Hagan, then working for the NME, accompanied the couple on a tour of Moscow following an invitation based on their political credentials. His cover story for the journal was illustrated with an image of Thorn and Watt as communist icons of the people. He says now: "Tracey was great. I expected someone very earnest because of EBTG's reputation – a group students in bedsits loved – and general right-on reputation, but she was great fun. Liked a good party and a proper late night."
EBTG's successful albums Idlewild![ext]()
and The Language of Life![ext]()
should have marked the middle phase of the band's career, but sadly, by the mid-1990s, Thorn and Watt had to stop touring and recording for several years after Watt was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition, Churg-Strauss syndrome![ext]()
.
In 1995, a remix of the band's song Missing![ext]()
, taken from their eighth album, Amplified Heart, the previous year, prompted a rerelease, which saw the track become a bestseller around the world.
Then, while Thorn developed a collaboration with the Bristol band Massive Attack, Watt moved towards dance music production.
The couple now rarely play together, although Watt did play guitar and sing vocals on a track released by Thorn in 2011. This weekend, he said he has watched the resurgence of his wife's influence with some pride.
"It is hard to speak about someone when you have been together for 30 years, but what I would say of the success of the last couple of years, and with Twitter and the book too, is they have unveiled a side to her that people didn't know existed. People might have thought she was a distant figure with that lovely voice, but a very human side of her has been able to come over."
Watt describes Thorn as "gentle and courteous and aware of other people's feelings", but he admits that even now he sometimes finds her quite scary "when she has got a point to make".
The new book, he feels, is witty, but is marked by her peculiar style of "fierce humility". It is the heat that burns behind her songs and, Watt clearly believes, it has also fuelled their long relationship. "I think one of the reasons we have stayed together so long is that we are still slightly intimidated by each other," he said. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.
For those who live elsewhere, Hull might well mean John Prescott or, perhaps, the docks. To others, of a more melancholy bent, the city means the poet Philip Larkin, who worked at the university library for many years. And perhaps, depending on their age, it might also mean Tracey Thorn
, the soulful songwriter and singer who studied English at the campus and also expressed herself in an austere verse style.Thorn, who has come back to solo music-making in the last few years, has written a memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, published next month, and has recently found a new audience – both for her songs and for her beguiling Twitter comments
. "Tracey was born knowing her own mind," Ben Watt, her musician husband, told the Observer this weekend. "I think she is half wallflower and half freedom fighter."Whether chronicling her domestic thoughts or battling against wrongs, Thorn is fully engaged with the world. On 2 January, she told her 35,000 followers that she was listening to Watt singing Pretty Woman in their kitchen and wondering if he was going "to attempt the growl" that Roy Orbison trademarked
. "Readers, I can confirm that he did," she updated. Her 2010 album, Love and Its Opposite, received critical acclaim and was what she described as "a record about the person I am now and the people around me… about real life after 40."At the height of the success of Everything But the Girl, the duo she formed in Hull with Watt, their music vibrated with student disillusionment and thwarted love. While Larkin had described Hull's "fishy smelling/ pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum/ tattoo shops, consulates, grim head-scarved wives", Watt and Thorn's songs spoke to a whole generation of undergraduates, with their plaintive talk of the harm "done by just two minutes spent on the phone".
The couple had named their band after a sign outside a furniture shop in Hull that suggested it would supply all customers bedroom needs, except the love interest. In 1984, when their first album, Eden, came out, EBTG hit the big time on the tide of new jazz that swept the music industry. As svelte singers, such as Sade, adopted sophisticated poses at the top of the charts, Thorn's voice penetrated the fashion of the day to communicate with delicate young souls.
Her solo songs today are just as poignant, but her subjects have changed as she has approached her middle age as the mother of teenagers. Larkin's famously bleak injunction – "don't have any kids yourself"– now finds a compassionate echo in Thorn's song Oh, the Divorces!
about the misery she has observed among couples with children who are splitting up."And each time I hear who's to part
I examine my heart
See how it stands
Wonder if it's still in safe hands."
"That is a heartrending song," says Guardian music writer Alexis Petridis. "There is a particularly well-observed line about watching 'the afternoon handovers by the swings'." Petridis is a fan of Thorn's writing style in the new memoir too. "She is able to view the world in a way that is unflashy and never showy and she captures a real sense of the changing eras. There is an ongoing 80s music revival at the moment, but, as with anything curated, it leaves lots of things out. Tracey gives a much better picture."
Thorn's book will take readers back to the rollicking post-punk days of indie music, whether or not they lived through it themselves. Her musical story begins when, as a teenager growing up in Hertfordshire, she managed to get a record deal with the nascent Cherry Red label and so was introduced to the music industry from what Rough Trade Records' Geoff Travis recalls as the distinctly unglamorous end.
"Tracey was always a pleasure to work with," he told the Observer this weekend, adding that she was prepared to knuckle down and help during her days in her first band, Marine Girls
."One day she came into Rough Trade with a cake she had baked for Dan Treacy of the Television Personalities
for his birthday and then she was put to work for the rest of the afternoon, sending out records or doing something like that." Later, through the offices of the A&R man Mike Alway, Travis signed both Thorn and Watt to the Blanco y Negro label. "I just love her voice," Travis explains. "It is a really underrated instrument, transmitting soul and a three-dimensional woman still sadly too rare in our musical landscape."Thorn's husband also remembers the first time he heard her sing. "It was Mike Alway who played me a record. 'I have this band you can listen to, the Marine Girls,' he said, and I heard Tracey's voice on it straight away, although it was quite concealed because she was not the lead singer."
Watt also remembers Alway making an apt comparison. "He said hearing her voice was a bit like going out to Hackney Marshes to watch some weekend footballers and then suddenly realising you are watching Pele play." In 1981, Watt went to see Thorn perform. "I still hadn't met her then but I was a fan," he said.
The couple finally met in Hull as students. He was, she often suggests, posher than her and yet also more relaxed because he came from an arty, musical background. The two bonded over their record collections. But they also developed each other's tastes. While she liked the punky strains of Orange Juice or the Undertones, Watt was a fan of the wilder shores of pop and rock and of musicians such as Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart.
At first, Thorn has recalled, she mistook her future husband for an academic aesthete. Then she worked out that he had chosen his course of study entirely on the basis of finding the subjects that involved the least reading. Her feelings for Watt were only briefly threatened, it seems, by her sudden musical infatuation with Morrissey. Alway had played her the Smiths' first single, Hand in Glove
, in the summer of 1983, but it was Travis, who came up to Hull with an early copy of the Smiths' debut album, who sealed the deal.Thorn has admitted that a period of obsessive imitation followed, before eventually, after she had managed to establish a matey correspondence with Morrissey, she and Watt developed their own sound, moving away from the jazz influences of their first album.
By the launch of the Labour party-supporting Red Wedge movement in November 1985, the duo were firmly positioned on the left wing of the music industry, appearing at a succession of fundraising gigs and rallies.
Observer writer Sean O'Hagan, then working for the NME, accompanied the couple on a tour of Moscow following an invitation based on their political credentials. His cover story for the journal was illustrated with an image of Thorn and Watt as communist icons of the people. He says now: "Tracey was great. I expected someone very earnest because of EBTG's reputation – a group students in bedsits loved – and general right-on reputation, but she was great fun. Liked a good party and a proper late night."
EBTG's successful albums Idlewild
and The Language of Life should have marked the middle phase of the band's career, but sadly, by the mid-1990s, Thorn and Watt had to stop touring and recording for several years after Watt was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition, Churg-Strauss syndrome.In 1995, a remix of the band's song Missing
, taken from their eighth album, Amplified Heart, the previous year, prompted a rerelease, which saw the track become a bestseller around the world.Then, while Thorn developed a collaboration with the Bristol band Massive Attack, Watt moved towards dance music production.
The couple now rarely play together, although Watt did play guitar and sing vocals on a track released by Thorn in 2011. This weekend, he said he has watched the resurgence of his wife's influence with some pride.
"It is hard to speak about someone when you have been together for 30 years, but what I would say of the success of the last couple of years, and with Twitter and the book too, is they have unveiled a side to her that people didn't know existed. People might have thought she was a distant figure with that lovely voice, but a very human side of her has been able to come over."
Watt describes Thorn as "gentle and courteous and aware of other people's feelings", but he admits that even now he sometimes finds her quite scary "when she has got a point to make".
The new book, he feels, is witty, but is marked by her peculiar style of "fierce humility". It is the heat that burns behind her songs and, Watt clearly believes, it has also fuelled their long relationship. "I think one of the reasons we have stayed together so long is that we are still slightly intimidated by each other," he said. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.
↧
Police in Leicester still interviewing five men in connection with alleged sexual assault of 16-year-old girl
This is Leicestershire -- Police are continuing to interview five men in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The men, aged 20, 22, 25, 27 and 39, were arrested yesterday morning. A 15-year-old youth arrested at the same time has been released on bail, pending further inquiries. A spokeperson for Leicestershire Police said: "Specialist detectives have been working on the inquiry since the girl's family raised concerns. "Her welfare is a key priority for us and we will continue to work with her, at a pace she is comfortable with, in order to support her through this process. "These kinds of investigations are extremely complex and Leicestershire Police are determined to ensure that we are thorough with all our inquiries. "Every piece of information and evidence needs to be looked at in detail and this means it could well be a lengthy investigation."
Reported by This is 9 hours ago.
↧
Five men arrested in Leicester over alleged assault of girl
This is Leicestershire --
Five men arrested by police investigating the alleged sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl were being interviewed by officers last night.
The men, aged 20, 22, 25, 27 and 39, were arrested on Saturday morning at different addresses in Leicester after, police said, "the investigation moved into the enforcement stage".
A 15-year-old youth arrested at the same time as the men has been released on bail, pending further inquiries.
Police said the investigation was launched after the girl's family raised concerns about her welfare.
They added that officers had been working with the victim since then, which resulted in the arrests on Saturday morning.
Detective Chief Inspector Andy Sharp said: "We continue to work very closely with the victim and her family. She is being supported through the whole process by specialist officers.
"These kinds of investigations are extremely complex and it's important we are thorough with all our inquiries.
"Every piece of information or evidence needs to be looked at in detail and this means it could well be a lengthy investigation.
"The victim and her welfare is a key priority for us," said the officer.
"We will continue to work with her, at a pace she is comfortable with, in order to support her through this process."
The force said officers were continuing to "link in with residents and community leaders, who are supportive of the police investigations".
Officers are providing the community with daily updates and reassurance around various rumours and speculation, the force added.
Anyone with any information about the incident is asked to contact police on 101. Alternatively, people can call Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. Reported by This is 17 hours ago.
Five men arrested by police investigating the alleged sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl were being interviewed by officers last night.
The men, aged 20, 22, 25, 27 and 39, were arrested on Saturday morning at different addresses in Leicester after, police said, "the investigation moved into the enforcement stage".
A 15-year-old youth arrested at the same time as the men has been released on bail, pending further inquiries.
Police said the investigation was launched after the girl's family raised concerns about her welfare.
They added that officers had been working with the victim since then, which resulted in the arrests on Saturday morning.
Detective Chief Inspector Andy Sharp said: "We continue to work very closely with the victim and her family. She is being supported through the whole process by specialist officers.
"These kinds of investigations are extremely complex and it's important we are thorough with all our inquiries.
"Every piece of information or evidence needs to be looked at in detail and this means it could well be a lengthy investigation.
"The victim and her welfare is a key priority for us," said the officer.
"We will continue to work with her, at a pace she is comfortable with, in order to support her through this process."
The force said officers were continuing to "link in with residents and community leaders, who are supportive of the police investigations".
Officers are providing the community with daily updates and reassurance around various rumours and speculation, the force added.
Anyone with any information about the incident is asked to contact police on 101. Alternatively, people can call Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. Reported by This is 17 hours ago.
↧
↧
Police given more time to quiz five men in connection with alleged sex assault of 16-year-old girl
This is Leicestershire --
Police have been given more time to question five men arrested in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl.
They were granted an extension by magistrates yesterday evening giving them an extra 36 hours before they have to either charge the men or release them on bail.
The men, aged 20, 22, 25, 27 and 39 were arrested on Saturday morning.
A 15-year-old youth arrested at the same time has been released on bail pending further inquiries.The investigation was launched after the girl's family raised concerns about her welfare. Specialist officers have been working with the victim. Reported by This is 15 hours ago.
Police have been given more time to question five men arrested in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl.
They were granted an extension by magistrates yesterday evening giving them an extra 36 hours before they have to either charge the men or release them on bail.
The men, aged 20, 22, 25, 27 and 39 were arrested on Saturday morning.
A 15-year-old youth arrested at the same time has been released on bail pending further inquiries.The investigation was launched after the girl's family raised concerns about her welfare. Specialist officers have been working with the victim. Reported by This is 15 hours ago.
↧
Lazio defender lowered into well to rescue seven-year-old girl
• Granddaughter of head of Polish FA fell into well in Rome
• Luciano Zauri was lowered into well on a rope
Italian media have reported that the Lazio defender Luciano Zauri rescued the granddaughter of Poland's Football Association president Zbigniew Boniek from a well she fell into at a restaurant in Rome.
The seven-year-old girl fell into the 4 metre deep well on Sunday when the beam covering it gave in as she was taking a look in the mirror at the bathroom of a restaurant near Ponte Milvio.
La Repubblica reported on Monday that Zauri, who also was in the restaurant, was lowered into the well on a rope and pulled the child up to safety.
The girl was taken to hospital with minor bruises. Her parents are the former Italian tennis player Vincenzo Santopadre and Karolina Boniek, the daughter of Poland's former football great, who played for Juventus and Roma. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
• Luciano Zauri was lowered into well on a rope
Italian media have reported that the Lazio defender Luciano Zauri rescued the granddaughter of Poland's Football Association president Zbigniew Boniek from a well she fell into at a restaurant in Rome.
The seven-year-old girl fell into the 4 metre deep well on Sunday when the beam covering it gave in as she was taking a look in the mirror at the bathroom of a restaurant near Ponte Milvio.
La Repubblica reported on Monday that Zauri, who also was in the restaurant, was lowered into the well on a rope and pulled the child up to safety.
The girl was taken to hospital with minor bruises. Her parents are the former Italian tennis player Vincenzo Santopadre and Karolina Boniek, the daughter of Poland's former football great, who played for Juventus and Roma. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
↧
Oxford child sex abuse ring witness tells court: I did not have a choice
First witness gives evidence in trial of nine men accused of multiple rapes and extreme sexual abuse against children
A young woman has told a court that as a girl of 14 she was taken to empty flats and guest houses in Oxford by a group of men so "other men" could have sex with her.
The first witness in a child sex abuse trial described being groomed by the men after running away from her children's home, saying that the men were "nice" at first before they became "demanding" and "threatening".
The young woman, who is now 21 and was identified to the court as Girl B, described meeting three defendants, Kamar Jamil, whom she knew as "K Dog", Akhtar Dogar and Anjum Dogar, whom she knew as "Jammy", and another man called Khan who is not in the dock, when she was 14.
Speaking at the trial of nine men who stand accused of multiple rapes and extreme sexual abuse against children as young as 11![ext]()
, the Old Bailey heard that the girl would repeatedly run away from her children's home with another 14-year-old, who is also giving evidence in the trial, to meet up with a group of men in Oxford.
Looking pale but composed, she described being ferried around a number of guest houses, private premises, parks and graveyards between July and mid-September in 2006 where she was coerced into having sex with the men.
The Dogar brothers both told the young woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, they had guns so she would be scared for her life, she told the court. Sometimes the men "would invite others as well", she said. She told the court that at first she told the men she was 16, but then told them she was 14, adding that she was "small".
On one occasion she was driven to a flat by Jamil in his seven-seater "family" car. She was given alcohol. After a while a "very fat and ugly" man in his late 30s arrived. She told the court: "K Dog said I had to go with the men in the bedroom so he could talk to me,", adding: "Obviously I knew what they wanted … I knew he was there to have sex with me."
When she refused he became threatening. "He said I was wasting that guy's time and that I should go to the bedroom with him." He grabbed her and pulled her into the room. The waiting man pushed her onto the bed, pulled her trousers down and raped her. "I was struggling for a while beforehand but then I just gave up," she said.
She described an occasion soon after meeting the four men, when Jamil and Khan drove the girls to a deserted field outside the city and plied them with vodka and Red Bull, . Her friend, Girl A, had "normal" and oral sex with K Dog in the back of the car, she said.
After they had finished, he told Girl B to get in the back of the car.
"I felt like I had to and I didn't have a choice," she told the court.
When she told Jamil, who was 21 at the time, that she didn't want to give him oral sex, he forced her to.
Afterwards, he also "had sex with her", she added. Asked how, she said: "He just took my trousers off and had sex." She felt she couldn't stop him doing what he wanted her to do. Asked why, she added: "Because I didn't have a choice and I felt like I couldn't say no to him."
The girl said she had met the men though Girl A, who lived at the same children's home near Oxford. The girls would repeatedly run away from the home, between July and mid September 2006. They would run away, dressed as though they were "going clubbing" about three times a week, and "stay in Oxford for a week, two weeks at a time", she said.
Kamar Jamil, 27, Akhtar Dogar, 32, Anjum Dogar, 30, Assad Hussain, 32, Mohammed Karrar, 38 , Bassam Karrar, 26, Mohammed Hussain, 24, Zeeshan Ahmed, 27, and Bilal Ahmed, 26, face 51 counts including rape, forcing a child into prostitution and trafficking.
The court has heard how the nine men targeted young girls from vulnerable and chaotic backgrounds, and over a period of eight years made their lives a "living hell", subjecting them to extreme physical and sexual violence, selling some victims for prostitution in Oxford and trafficking others around the country. The men deny the charges against them.
The trial continues. Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.
A young woman has told a court that as a girl of 14 she was taken to empty flats and guest houses in Oxford by a group of men so "other men" could have sex with her.
The first witness in a child sex abuse trial described being groomed by the men after running away from her children's home, saying that the men were "nice" at first before they became "demanding" and "threatening".
The young woman, who is now 21 and was identified to the court as Girl B, described meeting three defendants, Kamar Jamil, whom she knew as "K Dog", Akhtar Dogar and Anjum Dogar, whom she knew as "Jammy", and another man called Khan who is not in the dock, when she was 14.
Speaking at the trial of nine men who stand accused of multiple rapes and extreme sexual abuse against children as young as 11
, the Old Bailey heard that the girl would repeatedly run away from her children's home with another 14-year-old, who is also giving evidence in the trial, to meet up with a group of men in Oxford.Looking pale but composed, she described being ferried around a number of guest houses, private premises, parks and graveyards between July and mid-September in 2006 where she was coerced into having sex with the men.
The Dogar brothers both told the young woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, they had guns so she would be scared for her life, she told the court. Sometimes the men "would invite others as well", she said. She told the court that at first she told the men she was 16, but then told them she was 14, adding that she was "small".
On one occasion she was driven to a flat by Jamil in his seven-seater "family" car. She was given alcohol. After a while a "very fat and ugly" man in his late 30s arrived. She told the court: "K Dog said I had to go with the men in the bedroom so he could talk to me,", adding: "Obviously I knew what they wanted … I knew he was there to have sex with me."
When she refused he became threatening. "He said I was wasting that guy's time and that I should go to the bedroom with him." He grabbed her and pulled her into the room. The waiting man pushed her onto the bed, pulled her trousers down and raped her. "I was struggling for a while beforehand but then I just gave up," she said.
She described an occasion soon after meeting the four men, when Jamil and Khan drove the girls to a deserted field outside the city and plied them with vodka and Red Bull, . Her friend, Girl A, had "normal" and oral sex with K Dog in the back of the car, she said.
After they had finished, he told Girl B to get in the back of the car.
"I felt like I had to and I didn't have a choice," she told the court.
When she told Jamil, who was 21 at the time, that she didn't want to give him oral sex, he forced her to.
Afterwards, he also "had sex with her", she added. Asked how, she said: "He just took my trousers off and had sex." She felt she couldn't stop him doing what he wanted her to do. Asked why, she added: "Because I didn't have a choice and I felt like I couldn't say no to him."
The girl said she had met the men though Girl A, who lived at the same children's home near Oxford. The girls would repeatedly run away from the home, between July and mid September 2006. They would run away, dressed as though they were "going clubbing" about three times a week, and "stay in Oxford for a week, two weeks at a time", she said.
Kamar Jamil, 27, Akhtar Dogar, 32, Anjum Dogar, 30, Assad Hussain, 32, Mohammed Karrar, 38 , Bassam Karrar, 26, Mohammed Hussain, 24, Zeeshan Ahmed, 27, and Bilal Ahmed, 26, face 51 counts including rape, forcing a child into prostitution and trafficking.
The court has heard how the nine men targeted young girls from vulnerable and chaotic backgrounds, and over a period of eight years made their lives a "living hell", subjecting them to extreme physical and sexual violence, selling some victims for prostitution in Oxford and trafficking others around the country. The men deny the charges against them.
The trial continues. Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.
↧
Rape trial jury fails to reach a verdict
This is Plymouth --A JURY has failed to reach a verdict in the trial of a man accused of raping a drunken schoolgirl in a park.
The panel sitting at Plymouth Crown Court could not agree whether Craig Goldstone, aged 28, had sexually assaulted the teenager.
Judge Graham Cottle discharged the jury of eight women and four men after almost eight hours of deliberation.
He asked the foreman whether they would reach a majority decision after the week-long trial if given more time.
The foreman said they would not and several other jurors shook their heads.
Goldstone had denied raping the girl in Devonport Park on July 5 last year.
Joss Ticehurst, for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked for a week to review the case.
He said the alleged victim would be consulted before any decision would be made about asking for a retrial.
Goldstone, of no fixed address, remains to be sentenced after admitting escaping from lawful custody after his arrest.
The jury heard he slipped out of Charles Cross Police Station through an unlocked door after being left on his own.
Judge Cottle remanded Goldstone in custody until Monday next week.
The jury had heard the teenager claim she had been drinking cider with a friend in the park on that Thursday night.
She claimed she had met a man who was walking his dog and her friend had left.
The girl then said she was dragged into bushes and raped while "paralytic" and "half-asleep" because of the drink.
Goldstone told the jury in evidence that the girl was not as drunk as she claimed and they had consensual sex.
The jury heard that he had been arrested early the next morning and was held in custody until Saturday July 7.
Goldstone said he was left alone by an officer in a waiting room before a video identification parade at Charles Cross police station. He said he walked out through an open door wearing flip-flops and a paper suit.
Goldstone claimed it was his Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder which gave him the urge to escape.
The jury was told Goldstone was at large until that evening when he was found hiding under a bed at a house in Plymouth. Reported by This is 22 hours ago.
↧
↧
Female genital mutilation: 'I want to help other girls'
A 17-year-old asylum seeker tells how a Somalian supermodel inspired her to speak out against the female genital mutilation she was subjected to as a child
When Khadija was 10 years old, she begged her mother to be circumcised. "All my friends have had it done and I don't want to be the odd one out," she pleaded.
"My mum never gave a reason why she kept saying no, but once I'd had it done I understood why she was reluctant," says Khadija. She was 11 and still living in war-torn Somalia when her mother gave in and Khadija underwent female genital mutilation (FGM).
In a terrible way, the war may have helped. "After a girl has been cut, they get stitched up and then things are opened up again on her wedding day. I didn't have the worst kind done because, with that one, they have to tie your legs together afterwards to help the wounds heal and make the flesh come back together. I needed to be able to use my legs as we had to run away because of the war."
However, the "less invasive" version that Khadija, now 17, underwent was excruciatingly painful. Using an assumed name to keep her identity private, she describes the traumatic event played out as her mother stroked her hair. "Faridad" (good girl), said an old woman who appeared holding in her hand a broken razor blade. She bent over me, then an explosion of pain erupted. It felt like I was being skinned alive with the breath driven out of my body. The hot, searing pain forced a scream from my throat, my legs coiling into a spring that made the grip of the two women tighten even more. Most of the women who carry out the initiation are not well educated and sometimes end up cutting a vein, causing the girl to bleed to death."
Although she now shudders at the thought of what was done to her and her friends, she believed it was just something girls had to go through before they could join the "circumcision club".
She changed her mind about FGM after she fled Somalia two years ago and claimed asylum in the UK. She arrived with her aunt and the pair were sent to Yorkshire by the Home Office, which is providing them with support until their asylum claim is determined. Khadija started school and assumed that, as in Somalia, female circumcision was the norm for girls in the UK. But after asking one of her friends if she had been cut and receiving a blank stare she began to realise that not only had none of her friends been circumcised but most girls of her age did not even know that this practice existed.
"In Somalia, it's taboo to go against female circumcision. But when I came to England I started to realise that the kind of tradition we were abiding by is not the path that human beings should follow," she says.
Supported by her teachers, first at her secondary school and now at her sixth-form college, she is speaking out to her fellow students about the horrors of FGM, as well as using articles such as this and Facebook to raise awareness.
"There are thousands of girls living in the UK who have undergone FGM. Much more needs to be done to raise awareness about this and prevent it happening to more girls," she says. "I want to help other girls who might be at risk of FGM by condemning it as much as I can."
Last month, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution![ext]()
banning the practice of FGM. Between 100 million and 140 million women and girls are affected worldwide, with an estimated three million girls at risk each year and 8,000 girls a day undergoing the procedure. FGM is common in 28 countries in Africa as well as in Yemen, Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia and among certain ethnic groups in South America. Girls in diaspora communities are also at risk of being subjected to FGM.
In the UK,![ext]()
the Crown Prosecution Service has announced plans to crack down![ext]()
on those who compel young girls to undergo FGM. It has been a criminal offence for 30 years but there has never been a successful prosecution. About 24,000 girls under the age of 15 in the UK are thought to be at risk of FGM. Another 66,000 have already suffered it.
Most do not want to speak about such a personal event. Yet Khadija, while researching inspirational Somalians for a school assignment, came across the supermodel Waris Dirie, who has tirelessly campaigned against FGM and has written an international bestseller about her own experience of this practice. The book was made into a film, called Desert Flower. "Waris Dirie inspired me to speak up at my school against FGM. My dream would be to meet her," she says.
One of Khadija's GCSE teachers is hugely impressed by her decision to raise awareness about FGM. "She hasn't seen her parents for years – she was kidnapped by a terrorist group in Somalia. She did a full set of GCSEs after just two years in the British education system and she lives with the worry that she might be detained and deported at any point. What she's doing is phenomenal," he says.
Although Khadija doesn't know what has happened to her parents, she hopes they will approve of her stance. "My father often used to say, 'When you have an education you carry the whole world in your hands'," she says. "If I was still in Somalia I wouldn't even think of speaking up about these things because my life would be at risk. But now that I'm in a free country, where people can be open, I want to try to help girls who could lose their lives from FGM. Girls who don't have a choice about whether or not they are cut." Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.
When Khadija was 10 years old, she begged her mother to be circumcised. "All my friends have had it done and I don't want to be the odd one out," she pleaded.
"My mum never gave a reason why she kept saying no, but once I'd had it done I understood why she was reluctant," says Khadija. She was 11 and still living in war-torn Somalia when her mother gave in and Khadija underwent female genital mutilation (FGM).
In a terrible way, the war may have helped. "After a girl has been cut, they get stitched up and then things are opened up again on her wedding day. I didn't have the worst kind done because, with that one, they have to tie your legs together afterwards to help the wounds heal and make the flesh come back together. I needed to be able to use my legs as we had to run away because of the war."
However, the "less invasive" version that Khadija, now 17, underwent was excruciatingly painful. Using an assumed name to keep her identity private, she describes the traumatic event played out as her mother stroked her hair. "Faridad" (good girl), said an old woman who appeared holding in her hand a broken razor blade. She bent over me, then an explosion of pain erupted. It felt like I was being skinned alive with the breath driven out of my body. The hot, searing pain forced a scream from my throat, my legs coiling into a spring that made the grip of the two women tighten even more. Most of the women who carry out the initiation are not well educated and sometimes end up cutting a vein, causing the girl to bleed to death."
Although she now shudders at the thought of what was done to her and her friends, she believed it was just something girls had to go through before they could join the "circumcision club".
She changed her mind about FGM after she fled Somalia two years ago and claimed asylum in the UK. She arrived with her aunt and the pair were sent to Yorkshire by the Home Office, which is providing them with support until their asylum claim is determined. Khadija started school and assumed that, as in Somalia, female circumcision was the norm for girls in the UK. But after asking one of her friends if she had been cut and receiving a blank stare she began to realise that not only had none of her friends been circumcised but most girls of her age did not even know that this practice existed.
"In Somalia, it's taboo to go against female circumcision. But when I came to England I started to realise that the kind of tradition we were abiding by is not the path that human beings should follow," she says.
Supported by her teachers, first at her secondary school and now at her sixth-form college, she is speaking out to her fellow students about the horrors of FGM, as well as using articles such as this and Facebook to raise awareness.
"There are thousands of girls living in the UK who have undergone FGM. Much more needs to be done to raise awareness about this and prevent it happening to more girls," she says. "I want to help other girls who might be at risk of FGM by condemning it as much as I can."
Last month, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution
banning the practice of FGM. Between 100 million and 140 million women and girls are affected worldwide, with an estimated three million girls at risk each year and 8,000 girls a day undergoing the procedure. FGM is common in 28 countries in Africa as well as in Yemen, Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia and among certain ethnic groups in South America. Girls in diaspora communities are also at risk of being subjected to FGM.In the UK,
the Crown Prosecution Service has announced plans to crack down on those who compel young girls to undergo FGM. It has been a criminal offence for 30 years but there has never been a successful prosecution. About 24,000 girls under the age of 15 in the UK are thought to be at risk of FGM. Another 66,000 have already suffered it.Most do not want to speak about such a personal event. Yet Khadija, while researching inspirational Somalians for a school assignment, came across the supermodel Waris Dirie, who has tirelessly campaigned against FGM and has written an international bestseller about her own experience of this practice. The book was made into a film, called Desert Flower. "Waris Dirie inspired me to speak up at my school against FGM. My dream would be to meet her," she says.
One of Khadija's GCSE teachers is hugely impressed by her decision to raise awareness about FGM. "She hasn't seen her parents for years – she was kidnapped by a terrorist group in Somalia. She did a full set of GCSEs after just two years in the British education system and she lives with the worry that she might be detained and deported at any point. What she's doing is phenomenal," he says.
Although Khadija doesn't know what has happened to her parents, she hopes they will approve of her stance. "My father often used to say, 'When you have an education you carry the whole world in your hands'," she says. "If I was still in Somalia I wouldn't even think of speaking up about these things because my life would be at risk. But now that I'm in a free country, where people can be open, I want to try to help girls who could lose their lives from FGM. Girls who don't have a choice about whether or not they are cut." Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.
↧
Rape jury fails to reach verdict in trial of man accused of park attack
This is Plymouth --A JURY has failed to reach a verdict in the trial of a man accused of raping a drunken schoolgirl in a park.
The panel sitting at Plymouth Crown Court could not agree whether Craig Goldstone, aged 28, had sexually assaulted the teenager.
Judge Graham Cottle discharged the jury of eight women and four men after almost eight hours of deliberation.
He asked the foreman whether they would reach a majority decision after the week-long trial if given more time.
The foreman said they would not and several other jurors shook their heads.
Goldstone had denied raping the girl in Devonport Park on July 5 last year.
Joss Ticehurst, for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked for a week to review the case.
He said the alleged victim would be consulted before any decision would be made about asking for a retrial.
Goldstone, of no fixed address, remains to be sentenced after admitting escaping from lawful custody after his arrest.
The jury heard he slipped out of Charles Cross Police Station through an unlocked door after being left on his own.
Judge Cottle remanded Goldstone in custody until Monday next week.
The jury had heard the teenager claim she had been drinking cider with a friend in the park on that Thursday night.
She claimed she had met a man who was walking his dog and her friend had left.
The girl then said she was dragged into bushes and raped while "paralytic" and "half-asleep" because of the drink.
Goldstone told the jury in evidence that the girl was not as drunk as she claimed and they had consensual sex.
The jury heard that he had been arrested early the next morning and was held in custody until Saturday July 7.
Goldstone said he was left alone by an officer in a waiting room before a video identification parade at Charles Cross police station. He said he walked out through an open door wearing flip-flops and a paper suit.
Goldstone claimed it was his Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder which gave him the urge to escape.
The jury was told Goldstone was at large until that evening when he was found hiding under a bed at a house in Plymouth. Reported by This is 20 hours ago.
↧
Paedophile Phillip Morton convicted after he documented abuse in autobiography
This is Grimsby --
PAEDOPHILE Phillip Morton was convicted of an indecent assault of a 15-year-old girl after documenting the abuse in his autobiography.
Police officers discovered the book, entitled The Loves And Heartaches Of My Life by Phillip Morton, along with more than 17,000 indecent images of children at his home in Immingham.
Morton, 56, of Princess Street, admitted 14 offences of possession of images and two offences of indecent assault on the 15-year-old between 1994 and 1995.
He was locked up for a total of five years and placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life.
Police executed a search warrant at his home in February and found the extensive collection which had been accumulated over many years.
Grimsby Crown Court heard that in fact there were 1.9 million images on a series of hard drives uncovered by police.
However, prosecutor Mark Kendall said, due to limited police manpower resources, it was not possible to say how many were indecent.
Of the more than 17,000 indecent images that were discovered, around 100 were of the most offensive category.
Mr Kendall said many of the images had been encrypted and software had been used to disguise his searches and access to indecent websites.
He added that chapter six of Morton's life story gave details of the relationship with the teenage girl, revealing Morton had given the girl gifts of earrings and a walkie-talkie so they could talk at night.
In it Morton wrote: "I found myself falling for her. I spent a lot of time with her."
He told how she stayed with him and slept in his bed.
In interview with police he told officers parts of the book had been made up and claimed the girl had said she was 16 years old.
He said he ended their relationship.
But officers traced the woman who gave details of the indecent assaults and told how she had viewed him as "a father figure".
For Morton, Richard Butters said his client's collection were for his own gratification and 80 per cent of them were of the lowest category of indecency.
He added his client was in poor health and "a medical time bomb", due to heart attacks in 2002 and 2005. Sentencing Morton, Judge Mark Bury said: "You were in a position of trust. You have breached that trust in an appalling way.
"There was an organisation and sophistication (in the collection) which was amassed over a number of years." Reported by This is 19 hours ago.
PAEDOPHILE Phillip Morton was convicted of an indecent assault of a 15-year-old girl after documenting the abuse in his autobiography.
Police officers discovered the book, entitled The Loves And Heartaches Of My Life by Phillip Morton, along with more than 17,000 indecent images of children at his home in Immingham.
Morton, 56, of Princess Street, admitted 14 offences of possession of images and two offences of indecent assault on the 15-year-old between 1994 and 1995.
He was locked up for a total of five years and placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life.
Police executed a search warrant at his home in February and found the extensive collection which had been accumulated over many years.
Grimsby Crown Court heard that in fact there were 1.9 million images on a series of hard drives uncovered by police.
However, prosecutor Mark Kendall said, due to limited police manpower resources, it was not possible to say how many were indecent.
Of the more than 17,000 indecent images that were discovered, around 100 were of the most offensive category.
Mr Kendall said many of the images had been encrypted and software had been used to disguise his searches and access to indecent websites.
He added that chapter six of Morton's life story gave details of the relationship with the teenage girl, revealing Morton had given the girl gifts of earrings and a walkie-talkie so they could talk at night.
In it Morton wrote: "I found myself falling for her. I spent a lot of time with her."
He told how she stayed with him and slept in his bed.
In interview with police he told officers parts of the book had been made up and claimed the girl had said she was 16 years old.
He said he ended their relationship.
But officers traced the woman who gave details of the indecent assaults and told how she had viewed him as "a father figure".
For Morton, Richard Butters said his client's collection were for his own gratification and 80 per cent of them were of the lowest category of indecency.
He added his client was in poor health and "a medical time bomb", due to heart attacks in 2002 and 2005. Sentencing Morton, Judge Mark Bury said: "You were in a position of trust. You have breached that trust in an appalling way.
"There was an organisation and sophistication (in the collection) which was amassed over a number of years." Reported by This is 19 hours ago.
↧