It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
On the subject of PIP and "people taking the piss" I coincidentally received this in my weekly Citizens Advice news update:
Successful initial claim rate drops for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - In response to a written question, Stephen Timms has revealed statistics that show that the success of PIP claims has fallen from 70% in 2016 to 55% in 2024. These statistics relate to initial decisions made on new PIP claims. In contrast, tribunal statistics show that 7 in 10 PIP decisions are changed, in favour of the claimant, at the appeal stage.
What I don't know is what proportion of rejected claims are taken to appeal.
I am all for a fair and substantial safety net.
I am no clinician but I don't understand why ADHD is even included as a medical condition.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Nobody has blamed Nat Zero for the substation blowing up.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Nobody has blamed Nat Zero for the substation blowing up.
Richard Tice has blamed Net Zero for inadequate back-up power supply, a claim some here have repeated.
Nat Zero, on the other hand, is the absence of SNP politicians.
As this is one of the periodic former leaders in the betting thread, do we think Sunak is now rather less keen on California and may have a political future of some manner?
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
But we can absolutely blame poor planning, that a critical piece of infrastructure is out of action for at least a day because of a single fire means it has been poorly planned. Anything that important can't have a single critical point of failure. If this wasn't terrorists or Russians the next one will be because they'll all be looking for other critical infrastructure that has these single points of failure.
The only exception would be if it's something so wildly unlikely, or so prohibitively expensive to prevent, that they consciously put it in the do-nothing box. Would be interesting to see their risk-matrix.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
Depends.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Ha ha your last point is spot on. Every piece of regulation has its origin in something bad happening that was attributed to the regulation not being in place.
On the subject of PIP and "people taking the piss" I coincidentally received this in my weekly Citizens Advice news update:
Successful initial claim rate drops for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - In response to a written question, Stephen Timms has revealed statistics that show that the success of PIP claims has fallen from 70% in 2016 to 55% in 2024. These statistics relate to initial decisions made on new PIP claims. In contrast, tribunal statistics show that 7 in 10 PIP decisions are changed, in favour of the claimant, at the appeal stage.
What I don't know is what proportion of rejected claims are taken to appeal.
I am all for a fair and substantial safety net.
I am no clinician but I don't understand why ADHD is even included as a medical condition.
How do you feel about depression, or schizophrenia or a host of other mental conditions?
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
Depends.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
Cost of airport being down, frequency of outages, level of consequences, cost of backups.
On the subject of PIP and "people taking the piss" I coincidentally received this in my weekly Citizens Advice news update:
Successful initial claim rate drops for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - In response to a written question, Stephen Timms has revealed statistics that show that the success of PIP claims has fallen from 70% in 2016 to 55% in 2024. These statistics relate to initial decisions made on new PIP claims. In contrast, tribunal statistics show that 7 in 10 PIP decisions are changed, in favour of the claimant, at the appeal stage.
What I don't know is what proportion of rejected claims are taken to appeal.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Regulation doesn't really come into it. Planning for resilience is pretty standard for all large organisations, for obvious reasons. It just seems that in this case it hasn't been done very well.
All I've done is extrapolate from publicly available information, and asked a couple of questions which the usual news sites don't seem to have thought about. (Though per BBC, "questions are now being asked" abut backup power.)
As this is one of the periodic former leaders in the betting thread, do we think Sunak is now rather less keen on California and may have a political future of some manner?
Already has a sinecure in Stanford. Imagine he'll see out this term and move to virtual pastures.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
But we can absolutely blame poor planning, that a critical piece of infrastructure is out of action for at least a day because of a single fire means it has been poorly planned. Anything that important can't have a single critical point of failure. If this wasn't terrorists or Russians the next one will be because they'll all be looking for other critical infrastructure that has these single points of failure.
The only exception would be if it's something so wildly unlikely, or so prohibitively expensive to prevent, that they consciously put it in the do-nothing box. Would be interesting to see their risk-matrix.
Yes, a single point of failure that's highly unlikely or needs multiple failures to feed into it may be an acceptable risk. This doesn't fit into that category, it's not as though substations are particularly secure (though maybe they should be?) or fire/bomb proof. In fact it being an electrical substation is suggest that fire is probably pretty high up the risk factors so depending on it totally seems completely insane. Not having an immediate backup system also just strikes me as completely lazy/incompetent from Heathrow management.
Apparently (my dad is telling me this), Richard Tice has claimed that Heathrow has ditched diesel back up generators in the name of net zero. A quick Google finds this from 2022:
Stand-by generators currently operate using diesel as they need an independent power source to maintain resilient operations. They are used predominantly as back-up power for airfield ground lighting. We are investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria for such a safety critical airport asset.
That suggests that any back up generators wouldn't be for the whole airport, so perhaps Heathrow is vulnerable to a single point of failure.
That said, Heathrow having a net zero plan is quite funny.
I went to see Kyoto (the play) the other day. About the negotiating of the Kyoto Agreement. Some great performances and the play illustrates the delay and obfuscating tactics of those opposed to any limit on, or reduction of carbon emissions. There is a great passage about the hypocrisy of the carbon trading scam.
During the interval, there were two young people, a boy and a girl, sitting next to me and they were chattering about this and that. In particular, the boy was telling the girl about his impressive travel plans. He was going to go on a tour of the US and South America, fly here, then there, then come back via somewhere else, and this compared to his equally impressive travels this year (Iceland, then Amsterdam).
I turned to them and asked them, as representative of "youngsters" (we all laughed - they were young lawyers), what they thought about the play's subject matter and they both voiced enthusiastic approval.
I then said I couldn't help but overhear them talking about flying all over the world, to which the male responded "well obviously I'm a vegan on account of the planet, and..." and then blathered on, quite embarrassed.
I assured them that they didn't need to explain themselves to me and we settled down to watch the second half of the play.
But that is the reality of life and net zero and whatnot. People don't want to reduce their own activities while encouraging others to cut back theirs.
He said he was vegan for that reason, so he was willing to reduce some of his own activities.
Why not look at people in the round? I admit I like to travel, although to date it has mostly been short haul. And I eat a lot of meat. However I drive very little (my 15 year old Megane has done about 72000 miles), often travel by train and rarely use the tumble dryer, in fact Octopus has recently given me some money back and allowed me to reduce my monthly payments to £64.
I am not sure what proportion of carbon outputs are due to aviation but I bet it is very little compared with other sources, which will be easier to reduce. Access to cheap aviation gives many people a lot of benefits. So I am not sure it should be a priority
I suspect aviation use is a skewed distribution, with a small set of people who fly a lot, but many more who take onoy a couple of flights a year (and of course globally many many who don't fly at all because they can't afford to). So knocking some of that frequent flyer business travel on the head would be where I would start. (Also apparently flight is twice as energy efficient per passenger kilometre as it was in 1990, so it's not been impossible to reduce its carbon emissions. Better engines, bigger planes, fewer empty seats.)
I have always thought that flight tax should be a proportion of the price of the flight, so those of us going to Thailand in steerage will pay a lot less than the people in Business
From 1 April
Economy £94, Business £224, Private £673
Not quite proportionate but solidly in that direction.
Proportionate to price wouldn't make much sense. Why should the people taking the usually expensive last couple of seats on an almost full flight pay more tax?
Resilience – besides having a spare, unused facility ready to leap into action, the other possibility is to have two facilities each operating at 50 per cent, such that one can absorb the full load if the other goes down.
Of course, eventually some idiot will come along and scrap the spare capacity, as in the NHS.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
Depends.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
Turnover is around £10m per day for the airport itself. The revenue cost of one day's outage for the airlines that fly there is going to be many times that. Not to mention their customers. (Power is just now reported back on for the airport, FWIW).
I'd guess the extra investment for battery systems large enough to provide a few hours backup power would pay for itself quite easily, as it's only a few million pounds. And you could probably recoup some of that investment from power arbitrage.
BBC reporting that they do have UPS, but "not enough capacity" to run the whole airport.
Apparently (my dad is telling me this), Richard Tice has claimed that Heathrow has ditched diesel back up generators in the name of net zero. A quick Google finds this from 2022:
Stand-by generators currently operate using diesel as they need an independent power source to maintain resilient operations. They are used predominantly as back-up power for airfield ground lighting. We are investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria for such a safety critical airport asset.
That suggests that any back up generators wouldn't be for the whole airport, so perhaps Heathrow is vulnerable to a single point of failure.
That said, Heathrow having a net zero plan is quite funny.
I went to see Kyoto (the play) the other day. About the negotiating of the Kyoto Agreement. Some great performances and the play illustrates the delay and obfuscating tactics of those opposed to any limit on, or reduction of carbon emissions. There is a great passage about the hypocrisy of the carbon trading scam.
During the interval, there were two young people, a boy and a girl, sitting next to me and they were chattering about this and that. In particular, the boy was telling the girl about his impressive travel plans. He was going to go on a tour of the US and South America, fly here, then there, then come back via somewhere else, and this compared to his equally impressive travels this year (Iceland, then Amsterdam).
I turned to them and asked them, as representative of "youngsters" (we all laughed - they were young lawyers), what they thought about the play's subject matter and they both voiced enthusiastic approval.
I then said I couldn't help but overhear them talking about flying all over the world, to which the male responded "well obviously I'm a vegan on account of the planet, and..." and then blathered on, quite embarrassed.
I assured them that they didn't need to explain themselves to me and we settled down to watch the second half of the play.
But that is the reality of life and net zero and whatnot. People don't want to reduce their own activities while encouraging others to cut back theirs.
He said he was vegan for that reason, so he was willing to reduce some of his own activities.
Why not look at people in the round? I admit I like to travel, although to date it has mostly been short haul. And I eat a lot of meat. However I drive very little (my 15 year old Megane has done about 72000 miles), often travel by train and rarely use the tumble dryer, in fact Octopus has recently given me some money back and allowed me to reduce my monthly payments to £64.
I am not sure what proportion of carbon outputs are due to aviation but I bet it is very little compared with other sources, which will be easier to reduce. Access to cheap aviation gives many people a lot of benefits. So I am not sure it should be a priority
Apparently (my dad is telling me this), Richard Tice has claimed that Heathrow has ditched diesel back up generators in the name of net zero. A quick Google finds this from 2022:
Stand-by generators currently operate using diesel as they need an independent power source to maintain resilient operations. They are used predominantly as back-up power for airfield ground lighting. We are investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria for such a safety critical airport asset.
That suggests that any back up generators wouldn't be for the whole airport, so perhaps Heathrow is vulnerable to a single point of failure.
That said, Heathrow having a net zero plan is quite funny.
I went to see Kyoto (the play) the other day. About the negotiating of the Kyoto Agreement. Some great performances and the play illustrates the delay and obfuscating tactics of those opposed to any limit on, or reduction of carbon emissions. There is a great passage about the hypocrisy of the carbon trading scam.
During the interval, there were two young people, a boy and a girl, sitting next to me and they were chattering about this and that. In particular, the boy was telling the girl about his impressive travel plans. He was going to go on a tour of the US and South America, fly here, then there, then come back via somewhere else, and this compared to his equally impressive travels this year (Iceland, then Amsterdam).
I turned to them and asked them, as representative of "youngsters" (we all laughed - they were young lawyers), what they thought about the play's subject matter and they both voiced enthusiastic approval.
I then said I couldn't help but overhear them talking about flying all over the world, to which the male responded "well obviously I'm a vegan on account of the planet, and..." and then blathered on, quite embarrassed.
I assured them that they didn't need to explain themselves to me and we settled down to watch the second half of the play.
But that is the reality of life and net zero and whatnot. People don't want to reduce their own activities while encouraging others to cut back theirs.
He said he was vegan for that reason, so he was willing to reduce some of his own activities.
Why not look at people in the round? I admit I like to travel, although to date it has mostly been short haul. And I eat a lot of meat. However I drive very little (my 15 year old Megane has done about 72000 miles), often travel by train and rarely use the tumble dryer, in fact Octopus has recently given me some money back and allowed me to reduce my monthly payments to £64.
I am not sure what proportion of carbon outputs are due to aviation but I bet it is very little compared with other sources, which will be easier to reduce. Access to cheap aviation gives many people a lot of benefits. So I am not sure it should be a priority
Multiple factors - demographics, an aging population driving less, young people having more options especially in cities and not learning to drive, train travel increasing, more tram systems.
I think we do about 4k per year. Short trips ferrying kids to activities, a weekly trip to Sainsburys and a few times a year long drives up north or to Cornwall on holiday or seeing family. No commuting or school run.
Actually I checked and it is 67000. Assumed I would be low due to only having a 4 mile commute and rarely doing long trips in the car, I had a 500 mile round trip to North Wales last weekend and it has been over a year since I did anything comparable (Cornwall at New Year, I would normally get the train but at that time of year prices were high and there were too many engineering works. Pity as the weather was shit and the brakes went wrong so I had two unpleasant drives)
So if most people drive so little, why are people so obsessed with their cars? All these people spending a fuckton on new SUVs, I would have thought to make the expenditure worthwhile you must have to virtually live in the car. Or have we just become lazy and everyone walks half a mile to the newsagents?
On the subject of PIP and "people taking the piss" I coincidentally received this in my weekly Citizens Advice news update:
Successful initial claim rate drops for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - In response to a written question, Stephen Timms has revealed statistics that show that the success of PIP claims has fallen from 70% in 2016 to 55% in 2024. These statistics relate to initial decisions made on new PIP claims. In contrast, tribunal statistics show that 7 in 10 PIP decisions are changed, in favour of the claimant, at the appeal stage.
What I don't know is what proportion of rejected claims are taken to appeal.
So, I'd guess the "7 in 10" appeals success is the 130,000 reaching appeals, and 90000 success. So, just 6% of the 1.5m refused claims.
@Benpointer Do you work for Citizens Advice? I used to in the 90s/early 00s, and it felt quite unusual for a claimant of these types of benefits to be young. Is that something that's becoming more expected now? Or does the increase still feel unusual?
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Nobody has blamed Nat Zero for the substation blowing up.
Scots Nat Zero?
Oy! - we export 13.9 TWh annualy to England, most of it renewable.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
Depends.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
Turnover is around £10m per day for the airport itself. The revenue cost of one day's outage for the airlines that fly there is going to be many times that. Not to mention their customers. (Power is just now reported back on for the airport, FWIW).
I'd guess the extra investment for battery systems large enough to provide a few hours backup power would pay for itself quite easily, as it's only a few million pounds. And you could probably recoup some of that investment from power arbitrage.
BBC reporting that they do have UPS, but "not enough capacity" to run the whole airport.
And this is the issue, there's a complete lack of contingency planning here from Heathrow management. It doesn't require them to have a week's worth of battery backup. Even if they had enough battery backup to run for 6-8 hours it would allow for planes to be properly rerouted and flights to be replanned. That it just cut off immediately is completely ridiculous and heads need to roll at Heathrow and whoever thought it was a good idea to have such a critical piece of infrastructure to rely on a single source of power.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Ha ha your last point is spot on. Every piece of regulation has its origin in something bad happening that was attributed to the regulation not being in place.
The National Grid network is built to withstand one or two faults/outages not causing a loss of supply however shutting down a whole substation to let the firefighters in counts as more than two! In this case the distribution network should be able to pick up the loss of supply by switching so that its substations are fed from a different National Grid substation. This takes time but you would expect it to be all done in a few hours. That there still is a problem suggests to me that the distribution network is such that it isn't possible to transfer all the demand fed from North Hyde to other National Grid supply points. IMHO they may have saved some money in assuming you wouldn't ever lose the entire North Hyde substation so didn't plan their network for that. As for Heathrow they may or may not have back up power but I would be suprised if they had back up power that covered more than their emergency lighting and equipment. It is expensive to maintain and they are a private company probably with an expectation that the distribution company would be able to supply even under fault conditions. What intrigues me is why the transformer fire was not extinguished by its own fire deluge system. Once a fire is detected it should be put out in minutes by effectively flooding the transformer with high pressure water. I wonder whether one was installed here or if it malfunctioned.
Apparently (my dad is telling me this), Richard Tice has claimed that Heathrow has ditched diesel back up generators in the name of net zero. A quick Google finds this from 2022:
Stand-by generators currently operate using diesel as they need an independent power source to maintain resilient operations. They are used predominantly as back-up power for airfield ground lighting. We are investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria for such a safety critical airport asset.
That suggests that any back up generators wouldn't be for the whole airport, so perhaps Heathrow is vulnerable to a single point of failure.
That said, Heathrow having a net zero plan is quite funny.
I went to see Kyoto (the play) the other day. About the negotiating of the Kyoto Agreement. Some great performances and the play illustrates the delay and obfuscating tactics of those opposed to any limit on, or reduction of carbon emissions. There is a great passage about the hypocrisy of the carbon trading scam.
During the interval, there were two young people, a boy and a girl, sitting next to me and they were chattering about this and that. In particular, the boy was telling the girl about his impressive travel plans. He was going to go on a tour of the US and South America, fly here, then there, then come back via somewhere else, and this compared to his equally impressive travels this year (Iceland, then Amsterdam).
I turned to them and asked them, as representative of "youngsters" (we all laughed - they were young lawyers), what they thought about the play's subject matter and they both voiced enthusiastic approval.
I then said I couldn't help but overhear them talking about flying all over the world, to which the male responded "well obviously I'm a vegan on account of the planet, and..." and then blathered on, quite embarrassed.
I assured them that they didn't need to explain themselves to me and we settled down to watch the second half of the play.
But that is the reality of life and net zero and whatnot. People don't want to reduce their own activities while encouraging others to cut back theirs.
He said he was vegan for that reason, so he was willing to reduce some of his own activities.
Why not look at people in the round? I admit I like to travel, although to date it has mostly been short haul. And I eat a lot of meat. However I drive very little (my 15 year old Megane has done about 72000 miles), often travel by train and rarely use the tumble dryer, in fact Octopus has recently given me some money back and allowed me to reduce my monthly payments to £64.
I am not sure what proportion of carbon outputs are due to aviation but I bet it is very little compared with other sources, which will be easier to reduce. Access to cheap aviation gives many people a lot of benefits. So I am not sure it should be a priority
Apparently (my dad is telling me this), Richard Tice has claimed that Heathrow has ditched diesel back up generators in the name of net zero. A quick Google finds this from 2022:
Stand-by generators currently operate using diesel as they need an independent power source to maintain resilient operations. They are used predominantly as back-up power for airfield ground lighting. We are investigating renewable-based alternatives that can still meet the stringent performance criteria for such a safety critical airport asset.
That suggests that any back up generators wouldn't be for the whole airport, so perhaps Heathrow is vulnerable to a single point of failure.
That said, Heathrow having a net zero plan is quite funny.
I went to see Kyoto (the play) the other day. About the negotiating of the Kyoto Agreement. Some great performances and the play illustrates the delay and obfuscating tactics of those opposed to any limit on, or reduction of carbon emissions. There is a great passage about the hypocrisy of the carbon trading scam.
During the interval, there were two young people, a boy and a girl, sitting next to me and they were chattering about this and that. In particular, the boy was telling the girl about his impressive travel plans. He was going to go on a tour of the US and South America, fly here, then there, then come back via somewhere else, and this compared to his equally impressive travels this year (Iceland, then Amsterdam).
I turned to them and asked them, as representative of "youngsters" (we all laughed - they were young lawyers), what they thought about the play's subject matter and they both voiced enthusiastic approval.
I then said I couldn't help but overhear them talking about flying all over the world, to which the male responded "well obviously I'm a vegan on account of the planet, and..." and then blathered on, quite embarrassed.
I assured them that they didn't need to explain themselves to me and we settled down to watch the second half of the play.
But that is the reality of life and net zero and whatnot. People don't want to reduce their own activities while encouraging others to cut back theirs.
He said he was vegan for that reason, so he was willing to reduce some of his own activities.
Why not look at people in the round? I admit I like to travel, although to date it has mostly been short haul. And I eat a lot of meat. However I drive very little (my 15 year old Megane has done about 72000 miles), often travel by train and rarely use the tumble dryer, in fact Octopus has recently given me some money back and allowed me to reduce my monthly payments to £64.
I am not sure what proportion of carbon outputs are due to aviation but I bet it is very little compared with other sources, which will be easier to reduce. Access to cheap aviation gives many people a lot of benefits. So I am not sure it should be a priority
Multiple factors - demographics, an aging population driving less, young people having more options especially in cities and not learning to drive, train travel increasing, more tram systems.
I think we do about 4k per year. Short trips ferrying kids to activities, a weekly trip to Sainsburys and a few times a year long drives up north or to Cornwall on holiday or seeing family. No commuting or school run.
Actually I checked and it is 67000. Assumed I would be low due to only having a 4 mile commute and rarely doing long trips in the car, I had a 500 mile round trip to North Wales last weekend and it has been over a year since I did anything comparable (Cornwall at New Year, I would normally get the train but at that time of year prices were high and there were too many engineering works. Pity as the weather was shit and the brakes went wrong so I had two unpleasant drives)
So if most people drive so little, why are people so obsessed with their cars? All these people spending a fuckton on new SUVs, I would have thought to make the expenditure worthwhile you must have to virtually live in the car. Or have we just become lazy and everyone walks half a mile to the newsagents?
Yeah it's weird. Our car is useful but I have as much interest in it as I do in the washing machine.
He later updated that line in a further interview on LBC, saying: “There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.” Asked whether it was a “catastrophic accident”, Miliband said: “The conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid and certainly, that’s what he said to me.” More to add shortly no doubt…
UPDATE: London Fire Brigade take a different tack to Miliband – a senior fire officer wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire in a press conference which began around 11:00 a.m. Meanwhile The Times reports counter-terror police are part of the investigation.
He shouldn't have said something categorical when it isn't known what caused the fire. Rather than phrases like "there are no indications of foul play", they should just say that the investigation is ongoing.
Unless there really are no indications of foul play.
Given Russia has previous, that's where the suspicion would lie, and it makes sense that they would double and triple check causes, and involve counter-terrorism - but it's still possible that the first indications are that it was an accident/failure.
If they're 95% sure, then suggesting that we are investigating/don't know, creates arguably an even bigger vacuum for the numpties who want to exploit this kind of incident.
Surely you don't know there are *no* indications of foul play until you have investigated. There are also no indications it was accidental. And as it is major infrastructure then the possibility of sabotage should be considered (hence anti-terrorism police). Why is it too difficult to say "we don't know, and may not for some time"? Of course electrical installations catch fire from time to time, but then again they can always be the victim of enemy action.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
He later updated that line in a further interview on LBC, saying: “There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.” Asked whether it was a “catastrophic accident”, Miliband said: “The conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid and certainly, that’s what he said to me.” More to add shortly no doubt…
UPDATE: London Fire Brigade take a different tack to Miliband – a senior fire officer wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire in a press conference which began around 11:00 a.m. Meanwhile The Times reports counter-terror police are part of the investigation.
Yesterday was the warmest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 21.3 degrees at nearby Northolt. Not that hot in itself but significantly warmer than the previous day. Whether that could be relevant I don't know.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
Depends.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
Turnover is around £10m per day for the airport itself. The revenue cost of one day's outage for the airlines that fly there is going to be many times that. Not to mention their customers. (Power is just now reported back on for the airport, FWIW).
I'd guess the extra investment for battery systems large enough to provide a few hours backup power would pay for itself quite easily, as it's only a few million pounds. And you could probably recoup some of that investment from power arbitrage.
BBC reporting that they do have UPS, but "not enough capacity" to run the whole airport.
That's what I said below: they'll certainly have back-up generators and the like for critical systems such as ATC and comms. It may not be enough for non-critical systems, such as check-in, baggage, maintenance etc. Basically, they'll power the stuff that stops the planes from falling out of the sky, and allows ones on final approach to land.
But the main point is that they should not have lost power from the national grid.
It'll be interesting to read what the reports say about how the system was supposed to work, regardless of the root cause of the failure.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
Depends.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
Turnover is around £10m per day for the airport itself. The revenue cost of one day's outage for the airlines that fly there is going to be many times that. Not to mention their customers. (Power is just now reported back on for the airport, FWIW).
I'd guess the extra investment for battery systems large enough to provide a few hours backup power would pay for itself quite easily, as it's only a few million pounds. And you could probably recoup some of that investment from power arbitrage.
BBC reporting that they do have UPS, but "not enough capacity" to run the whole airport.
And this is the issue, there's a complete lack of contingency planning here from Heathrow management. It doesn't require them to have a week's worth of battery backup. Even if they had enough battery backup to run for 6-8 hours it would allow for planes to be properly rerouted and flights to be replanned. That it just cut off immediately is completely ridiculous and heads need to roll at Heathrow and whoever thought it was a good idea to have such a critical piece of infrastructure to rely on a single source of power.
They advertise themselves as "Britain's most valuable port", which is possibly true on terms of cargo values. I expect they (or their insurers) are going to end up paying out sufficient compensation to strongly incentivise them to install adequate backup.
On the subject of PIP and "people taking the piss" I coincidentally received this in my weekly Citizens Advice news update:
Successful initial claim rate drops for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - In response to a written question, Stephen Timms has revealed statistics that show that the success of PIP claims has fallen from 70% in 2016 to 55% in 2024. These statistics relate to initial decisions made on new PIP claims. In contrast, tribunal statistics show that 7 in 10 PIP decisions are changed, in favour of the claimant, at the appeal stage.
What I don't know is what proportion of rejected claims are taken to appeal.
I am all for a fair and substantial safety net.
I am no clinician but I don't understand why ADHD is even included as a medical condition.
How do you feel about depression, or schizophrenia or a host of other mental conditions?
As noted I am no psychologist or psychiatrist and the conditions you quote have long been considered neurological illness. I'll go along with that. The stats speak for themselves when ADHD diagnosis is more or less confined to those under 40.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Ha ha your last point is spot on. Every piece of regulation has its origin in something bad happening that was attributed to the regulation not being in place.
The National Grid network is built to withstand one or two faults/outages not causing a loss of supply however shutting down a whole substation to let the firefighters in counts as more than two! In this case the distribution network should be able to pick up the loss of supply by switching so that its substations are fed from a different National Grid substation. This takes time but you would expect it to be all done in a few hours. That there still is a problem suggests to me that the distribution network is such that it isn't possible to transfer all the demand fed from North Hyde to other National Grid supply points. IMHO they may have saved some money in assuming you wouldn't ever lose the entire North Hyde substation so didn't plan their network for that. As for Heathrow they may or may not have back up power but I would be suprised if they had back up power that covered more than their emergency lighting and equipment. It is expensive to maintain and they are a private company probably with an expectation that the distribution company would be able to supply even under fault conditions. What intrigues me is why the transformer fire was not extinguished by its own fire deluge system. Once a fire is detected it should be put out in minutes by effectively flooding the transformer with high pressure water. I wonder whether one was installed here or if it malfunctioned.
Are the changes in ownership any kind of factor in effectiveness of planning ?
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Nobody has blamed Nat Zero for the substation blowing up.
Richard Tice has blamed Net Zero for inadequate back-up power supply, a claim some here have repeated.
Nat Zero, on the other hand, is the absence of SNP politicians.
Our progress toward Nat Zero is sadly behind schedule.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
He later updated that line in a further interview on LBC, saying: “There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.” Asked whether it was a “catastrophic accident”, Miliband said: “The conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid and certainly, that’s what he said to me.” More to add shortly no doubt…
UPDATE: London Fire Brigade take a different tack to Miliband – a senior fire officer wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire in a press conference which began around 11:00 a.m. Meanwhile The Times reports counter-terror police are part of the investigation.
He shouldn't have said something categorical when it isn't known what caused the fire. Rather than phrases like "there are no indications of foul play", they should just say that the investigation is ongoing.
Unless there really are no indications of foul play.
Given Russia has previous, that's where the suspicion would lie, and it makes sense that they would double and triple check causes, and involve counter-terrorism - but it's still possible that the first indications are that it was an accident/failure.
If they're 95% sure, then suggesting that we are investigating/don't know, creates arguably an even bigger vacuum for the numpties who want to exploit this kind of incident.
Surely you don't know there are *no* indications of foul play until you have investigated. There are also no indications it was accidental. And as it is major infrastructure then the possibility of sabotage should be considered (hence anti-terrorism police). Why is it too difficult to say "we don't know, and may not for some time"? Of course electrical installations catch fire from time to time, but then again they can always be the victim of enemy action.
"No indications" isn't the same as saying it isn't foul play. It's saying that nothing they've seen in the early investigations would indicate foul play. As I said, they may have a good idea of why it happened, but in the circumstances it would make sense to triple check.
Jonny Diamond on WATO blaming the Government for a failure in contingency planning. Apparently throughout 14 years of Conservative Governments, Heathrow remained secure. The last failure was in 2010 when Gordon Brown's mobile nearly brought down a BA 777.
It is reassuring that after 14 years as the mouthpiece of Government the BBC are now calling Government to book.
In David Beth’s thesis about impending civil war in the UK he notes the vulnerability of critical infrastructure
And that, if you really wanted to sow chaos in the UK, - from whatever angle - that’s what you’d aim for. He might mention substations explicitly
Its not civil war. It is possibly a targeted attack by a foreign power. Nothing civil about it. Playing into the meme of "civil war" does the Russian subversives work for them, so stop being a fool and amplifying this rubbish. This is very similar to the attacks in France at the time of the Olympic games. Whether we choose to admit Russian involvement is an open question, because it would be a casus belli under most international law. On the other hand, we are not constrained if we catch the culprits- this is one of those "wanted dead or alive" cases.
In David Beth’s thesis about impending civil war in the UK he notes the vulnerability of critical infrastructure
And that, if you really wanted to sow chaos in the UK, - from whatever angle - that’s what you’d aim for. He might mention substations explicitly
Its not civil war. It is possibly a targeted attack by a foreign power. Nothing civil about it. Playing into the meme of "civil war" does the Russian subversives work for them, so stop being a fool and amplifying this rubbish.
He later updated that line in a further interview on LBC, saying: “There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.” Asked whether it was a “catastrophic accident”, Miliband said: “The conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid and certainly, that’s what he said to me.” More to add shortly no doubt…
UPDATE: London Fire Brigade take a different tack to Miliband – a senior fire officer wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire in a press conference which began around 11:00 a.m. Meanwhile The Times reports counter-terror police are part of the investigation.
He shouldn't have said something categorical when it isn't known what caused the fire. Rather than phrases like "there are no indications of foul play", they should just say that the investigation is ongoing.
Unless there really are no indications of foul play.
Given Russia has previous, that's where the suspicion would lie, and it makes sense that they would double and triple check causes, and involve counter-terrorism - but it's still possible that the first indications are that it was an accident/failure.
If they're 95% sure, then suggesting that we are investigating/don't know, creates arguably an even bigger vacuum for the numpties who want to exploit this kind of incident.
Surely you don't know there are *no* indications of foul play until you have investigated. There are also no indications it was accidental. And as it is major infrastructure then the possibility of sabotage should be considered (hence anti-terrorism police). Why is it too difficult to say "we don't know, and may not for some time"? Of course electrical installations catch fire from time to time, but then again they can always be the victim of enemy action.
"No indications" isn't the same as saying it isn't foul play. It's saying that nothing they've seen in the early investigations would indicate foul play. As I said, they may have a good idea of why it happened, but in the circumstances it would make sense to triple check.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
"means that other potential causes may have been missed": but, as you repeatedly refuse to engage with, other potential causes were extensively investigated and were taken to be the correct answer for several months by the hospital trust. They were also put forth by the defence at trial. The idea that everyone was just "concentrating on a possible suspect" (i.e., Letby) is something you have made up in your head.
In David Beth’s thesis about impending civil war in the UK he notes the vulnerability of critical infrastructure
And that, if you really wanted to sow chaos in the UK, - from whatever angle - that’s what you’d aim for. He might mention substations explicitly
Its not civil war. It is possibly a targeted attack by a foreign power. Nothing civil about it. Playing into the meme of "civil war" does the Russian subversives work for them, so stop being a fool and amplifying this rubbish. This is very similar to the attacks in France at the time of the Olympic games. Whether we choose to admit Russian involvement is an open question, because it would be a casus belli under most international law. On the other hand, we are not constrained if we catch the culprits- this is one of those "wanted dead or alive" cases.
“I’m not coming back for more borrowing or more taxes”
The words that will haunt Rachel Reeves in the coming months. If we think next week is going to be a bitter pill for her to swallow, the October budget is looking like it could be even worse.
In David Beth’s thesis about impending civil war in the UK he notes the vulnerability of critical infrastructure
And that, if you really wanted to sow chaos in the UK, - from whatever angle - that’s what you’d aim for. He might mention substations explicitly
Its not civil war. It is possibly a targeted attack by a foreign power. Nothing civil about it. Playing into the meme of "civil war" does the Russian subversives work for them, so stop being a fool and amplifying this rubbish. This is very similar to the attacks in France at the time of the Olympic games. Whether we choose to admit Russian involvement is an open question, because it would be a casus belli under most international law. On the other hand, we are not constrained if we catch the culprits- this is one of those "wanted dead or alive" cases.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not. What i object to online are those people presuming innocence seemingly on isolated info and objecting to people happy to presume guilt based on trial and appeal process, essentially waiting to see how it plays out. Saw one comment suggesting libel to call her a serial killer, which is just dumb as even if the conviction is overturned one day it surely wouldn't make calling her it now a problem.
Apologies for absurd typos in recent comments. Think my phone has gone mad from the heat and the steaks
Anyway about those steaks. Last night I had a bad done. A bad, dry, overcooked, under seasoned steak
AND STEAK IS ALL THEY DO
It’s their one dish. They have 3m people and 10m cows. They go on and on about their fucking beef, especially the steaks. Yes ok everything else is hideous - the food is even worse than Brazil or Argentina or Peru - but surely the steaks will be ace, given it’s their solitary gastro product of note and they eat it every fucking day.
He later updated that line in a further interview on LBC, saying: “There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.” Asked whether it was a “catastrophic accident”, Miliband said: “The conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid and certainly, that’s what he said to me.” More to add shortly no doubt…
UPDATE: London Fire Brigade take a different tack to Miliband – a senior fire officer wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire in a press conference which began around 11:00 a.m. Meanwhile The Times reports counter-terror police are part of the investigation.
Yesterday was the warmest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 21.3 degrees at nearby Northolt. Not that hot in itself but significantly warmer than the previous day. Whether that could be relevant I don't know.
Isnt Heathrow usually the highest temperature recorded in a day?
In David Beth’s thesis about impending civil war in the UK he notes the vulnerability of critical infrastructure
And that, if you really wanted to sow chaos in the UK, - from whatever angle - that’s what you’d aim for. He might mention substations explicitly
It's worse than that. We have to consider the possibility that a roaming band of woke Ewoks is responsible.
The same furry insurgents who took down the Galactic Empire with wooden spears and log traps could easily their attention to the UK's transport and energy infrastructure, targeting what they call the capitalist-industrial power grid.
We all know Ewoks have been radicalized by woke ideology after exposure to Earth media. Reports suggest they’ve been protesting deforestation, over-reliance on fossil fuels, and “speciesist” portrayals of primitive cultures in sci-fi films. One alleged manifesto, scrawled in an unknown dialect, shows crude pictographs of X-wing pilots bowing before an Ewok elder.
Completely made up eyewitness accounts are even more disturbing. One maintenance worker reported hearing strange chittering sounds moments before the fire broke out. Another swore they saw a tiny figure in a hood waving a protest sign made from repurposed stormtrooper armor.
This expert warns that if left unchecked, woke militant Ewoks may escalate their attacks—perhaps targeting 5G towers next, or worse, blocking Tube stations with log barricades until Heathrow agrees to run on 100% Ewok-approved renewable energy.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
But we can absolutely blame poor planning, that a critical piece of infrastructure is out of action for at least a day because of a single fire means it has been poorly planned. Anything that important can't have a single critical point of failure. If this wasn't terrorists or Russians the next one will be because they'll all be looking for other critical infrastructure that has these single points of failure.
The only exception would be if it's something so wildly unlikely, or so prohibitively expensive to prevent, that they consciously put it in the do-nothing box. Would be interesting to see their risk-matrix.
In my experience, senior management do worry about reputational risk, even if you can't easily put a value on it. It does sometimes take balls for a Project Manager to ask, explicitly, senior management to sign off on the risk of a complete failure in x circumstance with the aim of getting the answer "no, we are not comfortable, here's some more money" but it can be done.
I suspect here it was most likely cock-up, the backup was covering mechanical failure but nobody thought about a big enough fire in the main unit knocking out the backup too. Or the risk was assessed as extremely low.
And suggests organic growth, as starting from scratch you'd site the backup somewhere else in the first place
“I’m not coming back for more borrowing or more taxes”
The words that will haunt Rachel Reeves in the coming months. If we think next week is going to be a bitter pill for her to swallow, the October budget is looking like it could be even worse.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not. What i object to online are those people presuming innocence seemingly on isolated info and objecting to people happy to presume guilt based on trial and appeal process, essentially waiting to see how it plays out. Saw one comment suggesting libel to call her a serial killer, which is just dumb as even if the conviction is overturned one day it surely wouldn't make calling her it now a problem.
In the eyes of the law she is a serial killer.* I think there are some odd things going on. There is inquiry which is predicated on her guilt (fair enough, she's been convicted) and there seem to be ongoing police enquiries in to the unit.
We have issues with things like parole after a conviction where the convicted is actually innocent. To obtain parole they need to admit guilt, but being honest they cannot. What should they do? Lie about doing it so they can get out? Or stick to their story and stay inside?
Apologies for absurd typos in recent comments. Think my phone has gone mad from the heat and the steaks
Anyway about those steaks. Last night I had a bad done. A bad, dry, overcooked, under seasoned steak
AND STEAK IS ALL THEY DO
It’s their one dish. They have 3m people and 10m cows. They go on and on about their fucking beef, especially the steaks. Yes ok everything else is hideous - the food is even worse than Brazil or Argentina or Peru - but surely the steaks will be ace, given it’s their solitary gastro product of note and they eat it every fucking day.
NO. THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THEM
Makes sense to me. If its all they eat why would they produce top quality?
Bread is a staple but the average loaf wont blow your socks off as the best thing since, well, sliced bread.
He later updated that line in a further interview on LBC, saying: “There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.” Asked whether it was a “catastrophic accident”, Miliband said: “The conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid and certainly, that’s what he said to me.” More to add shortly no doubt…
UPDATE: London Fire Brigade take a different tack to Miliband – a senior fire officer wouldn’t comment on the cause of the fire in a press conference which began around 11:00 a.m. Meanwhile The Times reports counter-terror police are part of the investigation.
Yesterday was the warmest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 21.3 degrees at nearby Northolt. Not that hot in itself but significantly warmer than the previous day. Whether that could be relevant I don't know.
Isnt Heathrow usually the highest temperature recorded in a day?
Usually using temperature gauge just downstream of the jet engines, I believe. Typical to be around 1500 deg C, even if only very briefly...
“I’m not coming back for more borrowing or more taxes”
The words that will haunt Rachel Reeves in the coming months. If we think next week is going to be a bitter pill for her to swallow, the October budget is looking like it could be even worse.
Why oh why did she come out with that?
If she really means that, then it implies a replacement Chancellor.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
Too many people have developed a Culture War mindset on this case.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
The chart of baby deaths was not presented at trial as being of every death on the unit during that time.
The prosecution case has been tested in 2 trials and over 4 appeal procedures. How much more testing do you see as being appropriate? The defence team have now done a submission to the the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who are looking at the case again. It's their right to make such a submission and I am glad we have the CCRC as an additional backstop against miscarriages of justice. We await the CCRC's response.
Apologies for absurd typos in recent comments. Think my phone has gone mad from the heat and the steaks
Anyway about those steaks. Last night I had a bad done. A bad, dry, overcooked, under seasoned steak
AND STEAK IS ALL THEY DO
It’s their one dish. They have 3m people and 10m cows. They go on and on about their fucking beef, especially the steaks. Yes ok everything else is hideous - the food is even worse than Brazil or Argentina or Peru - but surely the steaks will be ace, given it’s their solitary gastro product of note and they eat it every fucking day.
NO. THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THEM
Makes sense to me. If its all they eat why would they produce top quality?
Bread is a staple but the average loaf wont blow your socks off as the best thing since, well, sliced bread.
I remember when Britain was at its culinary nadir - mid 70s? - and we started to fuck up…. Fish and chips. Frozen fish, frozen chips
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not. What i object to online are those people presuming innocence seemingly on isolated info and objecting to people happy to presume guilt based on trial and appeal process, essentially waiting to see how it plays out. Saw one comment suggesting libel to call her a serial killer, which is just dumb as even if the conviction is overturned one day it surely wouldn't make calling her it now a problem.
In the eyes of the law she is a serial killer.* I think there are some odd things going on. There is inquiry which is predicated on her guilt (fair enough, she's been convicted) and there seem to be ongoing police enquiries in to the unit.
We have issues with things like parole after a conviction where the convicted is actually innocent. To obtain parole they need to admit guilt, but being honest they cannot. What should they do? Lie about doing it so they can get out? Or stick to their story and stay inside?
(*Until she isn't).
The dilemma around parole and admitting guilt is a conundrum in some situations, but in this case, Letby was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Unless her conviction is overturned, she's not coming out, least not for a very long time.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
We always have to alive to the possibility of miscarriages of justice and test for it, but i do feel it is getting overbroad if bringing in things like suggesting its odd if a killer used multiple methods. Even if its the case that most killers have a particular MO, as a thing itself it is not whiffy since clearly not all killers do. If other arguments/evidence of innocence is stronger fair enough but including that as inherently suspicious seems pretty questionable.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
The chart of baby deaths was not presented at trial as being of every death on the unit during that time.
The prosecution case has been tested in 2 trials and over 4 appeal procedures. How much more testing do you see as being appropriate? The defence team have now done a submission to the the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who are looking at the case again. It's their right to make such a submission and I am glad we have the CCRC as an additional backstop against miscarriages of justice. We await the CCRC's response.
Sally Clarke was convicted of killing two of her kids, and IIRC her conviction was upheld at appeal. It was only at a second appeal, years later, that the conviction was (rightly, IMHO) overturned.
Courts sadly do get things wrong occasionally, and so do appeals courts.
As for how much 'testing' is appropriate: as much as required, as long as there is new or fresh evidence or reasons to believe the conviction is unsafe. What would you limit it to? One appeal? Two?
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
Too many people have developed a Culture War mindset on this case.
Im just surprised not to have seen a movie about it yet.
According to Wikipedia they filmed the murder film In Cold Blood at the location of the murders, no squeamishness there!
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not. What i object to online are those people presuming innocence seemingly on isolated info and objecting to people happy to presume guilt based on trial and appeal process, essentially waiting to see how it plays out. Saw one comment suggesting libel to call her a serial killer, which is just dumb as even if the conviction is overturned one day it surely wouldn't make calling her it now a problem.
"I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not."
Really? Did you need to be immersed in all the detail of the Sally Clarke case, if you realised that the prosecution 'expert' had failed to disclose evidence that pretty much proved her innocence? That one bit of knowledge pretty much invalidated the entire conviction, regardless of other evidence. Certainly, enough to cause doubt.
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
The chart of baby deaths was not presented at trial as being of every death on the unit during that time.
The prosecution case has been tested in 2 trials and over 4 appeal procedures. How much more testing do you see as being appropriate? The defence team have now done a submission to the the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who are looking at the case again. It's their right to make such a submission and I am glad we have the CCRC as an additional backstop against miscarriages of justice. We await the CCRC's response.
And the system of appeals is a re-affirmation and essential part of the system of justice.
Too many people see appeals, whistleblowing etc. as an attack on a structure. In truth, without them, there is no justice.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
There's an interesting quote in some written evidence submitted by Heathrow to the Environmental Audit Committee back in 2023: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/121662/pdf/ -- "we will need significantly more power in the future and we are aware of existing capacity constraints in the UK’s transmission and distribution network – as well as long waiting times for upgrades and connections that in some cases stretch to 15 years. This is considered a particular challenge for West London, with the Greater London Authority warning that it may take over a decade to bulk up grid capacity and suggestions that the electricity distribution network has already run out of capacity."
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure, plus we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe". Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
There's an interesting quote in some written evidence submitted by Heathrow to the Environmental Audit Committee back in 2023: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/121662/pdf/ -- "we will need significantly more power in the future and we are aware of existing capacity constraints in the UK’s transmission and distribution network – as well as long waiting times for upgrades and connections that in some cases stretch to 15 years. This is considered a particular challenge for West London, with the Greater London Authority warning that it may take over a decade to bulk up grid capacity and suggestions that the electricity distribution network has already run out of capacity."
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure and we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe. Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
If it was the Russians, hopefully they have done us a favour.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
There's an interesting quote in some written evidence submitted by Heathrow to the Environmental Audit Committee back in 2023: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/121662/pdf/ -- "we will need significantly more power in the future and we are aware of existing capacity constraints in the UK’s transmission and distribution network – as well as long waiting times for upgrades and connections that in some cases stretch to 15 years. This is considered a particular challenge for West London, with the Greater London Authority warning that it may take over a decade to bulk up grid capacity and suggestions that the electricity distribution network has already run out of capacity."
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure and we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe. Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
If it was the Russians, hopefully they have done us a favour.
It could provide the imeptus to build Boris Island?
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
There's an interesting quote in some written evidence submitted by Heathrow to the Environmental Audit Committee back in 2023: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/121662/pdf/ -- "we will need significantly more power in the future and we are aware of existing capacity constraints in the UK’s transmission and distribution network – as well as long waiting times for upgrades and connections that in some cases stretch to 15 years. This is considered a particular challenge for West London, with the Greater London Authority warning that it may take over a decade to bulk up grid capacity and suggestions that the electricity distribution network has already run out of capacity."
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure and we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe. Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
If it was the Russians, hopefully they have done us a favour.
There was an old joke that the Russian's actually had invaded. But their tanks were stuck in a contra-flow near Basingstoke and would be stuck there for the foreseeable.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
There's an interesting quote in some written evidence submitted by Heathrow to the Environmental Audit Committee back in 2023: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/121662/pdf/ -- "we will need significantly more power in the future and we are aware of existing capacity constraints in the UK’s transmission and distribution network – as well as long waiting times for upgrades and connections that in some cases stretch to 15 years. This is considered a particular challenge for West London, with the Greater London Authority warning that it may take over a decade to bulk up grid capacity and suggestions that the electricity distribution network has already run out of capacity."
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure and we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe. Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
If it was the Russians, hopefully they have done us a favour.
It could provide the imeptus to build Boris Island?
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not. What i object to online are those people presuming innocence seemingly on isolated info and objecting to people happy to presume guilt based on trial and appeal process, essentially waiting to see how it plays out. Saw one comment suggesting libel to call her a serial killer, which is just dumb as even if the conviction is overturned one day it surely wouldn't make calling her it now a problem.
"I don't think anyone not immersed in all the detail can make realistic comments about her whether there is doubt or not."
Really? Did you need to be immersed in all the detail of the Sally Clarke case, if you realised that the prosecution 'expert' had failed to disclose evidence that pretty much proved her innocence? That one bit of knowledge pretty much invalidated the entire conviction, regardless of other evidence. Certainly, enough to cause doubt.
I was referring specifically to this case where people are relying on complex arguments about statistical analysis and medical expert testimonies, a lot of which is contested, and often without considering if it has previously been considered.
My point was people dont have to make a judgement of probably guilty or probably innocent based on some isolated point which they likely have limited idea of the context - they could raise the point as needing consideration if it hadn't already been and press for that. Declaring multiple methods is whiffy as a concept - rather than picking apart theories on death in cases- surely doesnt help.
Im happy for it all to be tested and be prepared for Letby to be innocent. No stake in that being true. But its not unfair of people not topresume innocence post trial, and so many online comments do that. Pre trial, yes, prepare to change mind to evidence, yes.
It'll be interesting to see whether planners at Heathrow Airport had even considered whether having the airport powered by one substation was a good idea or not. And if they had discussed it, why they thought it was appropriate. At the very least, you'd have expected each terminal to have had its own power source.
It's interesting how much armchair experts are jumping to conclusions about Heathrow's electricity supply based on nothing.
Today's outage is not nothing. What you sneer at is ordinary people asking obvious questions, the first of which is why no-one asked the obvious question.
I’m not sneering at “ordinary people”. I’m suggesting commentators on PB, who are demonstrably not “ordinary people”, should slow down before rushing to blame the Russians, net zero or poor planning.
Definitely poor planning at some level. One fire, airport down. That's interview without coffee time.
It may be poor planning. But even planning done well isn’t perfect. Sometimes bad things can happen without anyone having been able to foresee the specific chain of events.
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
Heathrow has a backup contingency power supply, in the event of power failure, yet they just decided the backup power wasn’t sufficient to power the airport, hence it was shut down. The inevitable future inquiry will focus on they the backup clearly isn’t fit for purpose.
There's an interesting quote in some written evidence submitted by Heathrow to the Environmental Audit Committee back in 2023: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/121662/pdf/ -- "we will need significantly more power in the future and we are aware of existing capacity constraints in the UK’s transmission and distribution network – as well as long waiting times for upgrades and connections that in some cases stretch to 15 years. This is considered a particular challenge for West London, with the Greater London Authority warning that it may take over a decade to bulk up grid capacity and suggestions that the electricity distribution network has already run out of capacity."
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure and we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe. Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
If it was the Russians, hopefully they have done us a favour.
It could provide the imeptus to build Boris Island?
Or at least a tenth runway at Heathrow?
My idea for a concrete gravity based system for building Boris Island was influenced by a Cold War era report I saw on possible Soviet attacks on oil rigs.
According to the report, a Type 65 torpedo with a half ton of high explosive would not even dent one of the legs of the Troll B platform.
A Type 65 with a 20kt (yes, Nagasaki) nuclear warhead would destroy one leg. And wreck the topsides. But the other legs and the base structure would survive!
Given that I am natural cynic I have, since I read an extended article in (Atlantic? NYT? Can't remember) some months ago about the circumstances around Lucy Letby I have thought it entirely possible that she didn't commit those murders.
I didn't sit through hours and hours of the trial, obvs, but I would have zero problem believing that the NHS is so institutionally useless that such a string of events could occur without it being the fault of anyone in particular. Or that high-ups might be keen to find someone to blame.
I have no idea if Letby murdered some, none or all the babies she has been found guilty of killing. I was not in the court.
I am aware of other things though. Firstly people are often wrongly convicted. Secondly people have been convicted of crimes that have later found to have been statistical flukes (Texas sharpshooter, Dutch nurse). There is disagreement over the cause of death for these babies - some experts believe it possible that none were murdered. I don't trust lawyers with statistical arguments. I don't trust juries with lawyers statistical arguments. The ghost of Meadows. The unit was doing things it wasn't set up for and babies died. Possibly they were murdered. Possibly they weren't.
I think there is going to be a retrial at some point.
Most people who are convicted are rightly convicted. The case against Letby was not merely statistical. Those who critique the statistical evidence have a tendency to forget about the non-statistical evidence.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of crossover between the 5G/WEF/cyclist-illuminati/JFK/Letby/two-tier groups. It stems from a supposed grand conspiracy by the government to stitch ordinary white folk up. Letby fits that profile.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of statistical/evidence mistake in the trial, but I've no idea if there has yet been a serious attempt to develop such a critique into new evidence to base an appeal around.
I am not particularly a conspiracy theorist, generally preferring the 'cock-up' explanation for many events.
But Letby's case intrigues me. As I said on the previous thread, today's BBC article (1) throws up an interesting point. On the 22nd June, a doctor sent an email to the trust saying that there had been an unusual number of deaths. That seems good to me, and something worth investigating. (*) But he than adds: "There does not seem to be any staff ... present at all three episodes other than one nurse."
That's worrying to me, as once her name was in the frame, they could start looking for all sorts of other connections. But what if she was *not* the cause? Did they look elsewhere, or from that point onwards, was she the one to blame in their minds? The emails mentioned in the article concentrate on her, and not looking at other potential causes for the deaths. Perhaps because blaming her was easier than admitting the hospital was failing in its duty of care?
(*) Though was he correct that three was a noteworthy number of deaths, or may it just have been a statistical cluster?
It seems odd to suggest they rushed to a conclusion when it was over a year after that email before the police were contacted. There was pushback within the hospital to blaming Letby. It is clear that alternative explanations were considered.
Alternative explanations were certainly put to the jury by the defence in two trials. The juries were not swayed by them.
The police didn't arrest her until after they had gathered other evidence, like finding medical records relating to the dead babies under her bed, testimonies of people seeing her acting inappropriately, the notes she wrote to herself, etc.
Do people here really believe our police and court system are so lackadaisical that they just went, "Oh, could be her. Let's just pin it on her and not look any further."?
I am not particularly wedded to Letby's innocence or guilt. I don't know.
But yes: the police could be so lackadaisical as to go for the 'obvious'; the person that had been suspected from the very start. It makes the job easier, and we all like jobs to be easier rather than harder. And it seems that she was suspected from the very start. But also, that meant that patterns that might not be uncommon might be seen as being uncommon, because they were being looked for.
As an example, from what I've read, many doctors keep notes on patients. I certainly know my anesthetist kept notes about me, as she told me such for my second operation with her. Her notes were over and above the ones the hospital kept (in that case, the fact I needed a higher dose of anesthetic before I went lights-out). That might be uncommon; or not; but it happened in my case.
If you look hard enough for guilt in someone, you may find it. Even if the guilt is not real.
Letby wasn't keeping her own notes. She took hospital paper records home, stashed them under her bed and, when quizzed on this, said she meant to get rid of them but didn't have any way of doing that at home... except it turned out she had a paper shredder.
I own a paper shredder. What are you going to accuse me of?
Which highlights the issue really well. Owning a paper shredder is not, in any way, evidence of a crime.
Letby, in court, said she had no way of destroying paper records (to explain records being stashed under her bed). Yet a paper shredder was found in her house. That suggests she lied. Lying can establish a pattern of behaviour. If she lied, then that undermines her explanation for something else suspicious.
It's a long, long way to 'lying' about owning a shredder to killing lots of babies, isn't it?
And to repeat myself: it seems that they focused on Letby really early on, and they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes - and as doctors killing babies is thankfully very rare, you would expect other causes to be more likely.
I don't know if Letby did it or not. But I can easily see how she might not have, and this is either a deliberate or tragic miscarriage of justice.
What, in your mind, is the smoking gun? What proves her guilt to you?
There were multiple lines of evidence, that were examined carefully in the trial. That’s why they got into the weeds of her having a paper shredder. One line of evidence was that she had medical records taken from the hospital and stashed under her bed, which is not normal behaviour. She testified in response to this. On multiple occasions, including on this matter, her testimony contradicted itself.
If your testimony contradicts itself and you can’t explain incriminatory evidence, that’s going to look bad for you at trial.
“they do not seem to have looked too long, or at all, at other potential causes”: that’s simply untrue. You’ve made that up. The hospital went to some length to defend Letby, delaying her referral to the police. They did that by concluding that the deaths had other causes. From Wikipedia: “Records of the hospital board meeting show the medical director telling board members that the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews concluded that the deaths in the neonatal unit were due to issues with leadership and timely intervention.”
I think she was guilty because two juries concluded that, and 5 appeal judges concluded the convictions were safe. Key evidence includes: the testimony of the mother of Baby E; being observed failing to intervene with a desaturating baby; how she falsified times on medical records; a high number of unexpected deaths in the night, which stop when Letby is moved to day shifts and then there’s a high number of unexpected deaths in the day; the various evidence that the babies’ deaths were unnatural.
Again, read that BBC article and see the way Letby was named after the first couple of deaths. She was suspected, and after that there seem to have been efforts to blame her more. Perhaps because it reflected badly on the organisation because of the RCPCH and Hawdon reviews? Why did the court reject the conclusion of those reviews?
And as below, the fact that it is alleged she killed the babies using different methods is a little whiffy, is it not? If you have successfully killed a baby using one method, why would you try to use different methods that might stand more chance of getting caught?
I do fear that there's a chance she's just been caught up in a massive circumstantial web; it is also possible that no babies were murdered. Or alternatively, I fear that there's a chance that she's a mass-murderer. But I don't think it's a slam-dunk in either direction.
But the shredder argument is just stupid.
Your central thesis is that someone being identified early as a possible suspect in an investigation is evidence of their innocence. If your house was robbed and a man was caught running down the street a few minutes later with a bad labelled "swag", you would say we should let them go. You wouldn't want there to be "efforts to blame [him] more".
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
That is not my central thesis. My point is that concentrating on a possible suspect, for what may or may not have been a crime, so early on means that other potential causes may have been missed. I am not saying it is evidence of her innocence, as you claim.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
This aligns very well with my thoughts on the case. And its in everyone's interest that the prosecution case is fully tested and her defence is able to be made (notably if it is markedly different in an appeal).
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
The chart of baby deaths was not presented at trial as being of every death on the unit during that time.
The prosecution case has been tested in 2 trials and over 4 appeal procedures. How much more testing do you see as being appropriate? The defence team have now done a submission to the the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who are looking at the case again. It's their right to make such a submission and I am glad we have the CCRC as an additional backstop against miscarriages of justice. We await the CCRC's response.
And the system of appeals is a re-affirmation and essential part of the system of justice.
Too many people see appeals, whistleblowing etc. as an attack on a structure. In truth, without them, there is no justice.
Defence counsel is also a vital part of the structure but it is regarded by the right wing media as an impediment to justice. I have real concerns about the quality of Letby's representation. Without decent defence lawyers miscarriages of justice will happen. Legal aid cuts (in criminal law anyway) are a false economy.
Comments
I am no clinician but I don't understand why ADHD is even included as a medical condition.
Nat Zero, on the other hand, is the absence of SNP politicians.
As this is one of the periodic former leaders in the betting thread, do we think Sunak is now rather less keen on California and may have a political future of some manner?
Half the time, PB is complaining there are too many regulations. Half the time, PB is complaining that planners didn’t prevent every possible adverse event.
What's the relative cost to the owners of the airport of maintaining a sufficient backup system compared with having your airport fall over for a couple of days? (Personally don't have a clue, what with being a suburban science master.) But right up to the nanosecond that this happened, keeping spending on a backup system that hasn't been used in years/ever is what would have got you the meeting without coffee.
Which is the pervasive mindset that has got us to here.
That's how you justify the backup systems.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-independence-payment-statistics-to-january-2025/personal-independence-payment-official-statistics-to-january-2025
Planning for resilience is pretty standard for all large organisations, for obvious reasons. It just seems that in this case it hasn't been done very well.
All I've done is extrapolate from publicly available information, and asked a couple of questions which the usual news sites don't seem to have thought about. (Though per BBC, "questions are now being asked" abut backup power.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg5dg4p2l0o
But no, Uruguay
The food here is bad even by dire South American standards. I may have to subsist entirely on Tannat wine
Of course, eventually some idiot will come along and scrap the spare capacity, as in the NHS.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tate-museum-visitor-numbers-pandemic-fall-b1218046.html
This is odd. Museum visitor numbers have recovered from the pandemic (and/or Brexit) but art galleries have not.
The revenue cost of one day's outage for the airlines that fly there is going to be many times that. Not to mention their customers.
(Power is just now reported back on for the airport, FWIW).
I'd guess the extra investment for battery systems large enough to provide a few hours backup power would pay for itself quite easily, as it's only a few million pounds.
And you could probably recoup some of that investment from power arbitrage.
BBC reporting that they do have UPS, but "not enough capacity" to run the whole airport.
So if most people drive so little, why are people so obsessed with their cars? All these people spending a fuckton on new SUVs, I would have thought to make the expenditure worthwhile you must have to virtually live in the car. Or have we just become lazy and everyone walks half a mile to the newsagents?
@Benpointer Do you work for Citizens Advice? I used to in the 90s/early 00s, and it felt quite unusual for a claimant of these types of benefits to be young. Is that something that's becoming more expected now? Or does the increase still feel unusual?
What intrigues me is why the transformer fire was not extinguished by its own fire deluge system. Once a fire is detected it should be put out in minutes by effectively flooding the transformer with high pressure water. I wonder whether one was installed here or if it malfunctioned.
You claimed that alternate explanations for the deaths were not considered. I showed that they were, and indeed they were accepted as the correct explanation for some months. Are you going to acknowledge this?
Harold Shipman used more than one method to kill. Or did he kill? You would say using "different methods is a little whiffy" and we should posthumously exonerate him!
But the main point is that they should not have lost power from the national grid.
It'll be interesting to read what the reports say about how the system was supposed to work, regardless of the root cause of the failure.
They would have to fly one out. Ooops.
https://www.flightradar24.com/BAW86S/39900a26
I expect they (or their insurers) are going to end up paying out sufficient compensation to strongly incentivise them to install adequate backup.
But it's a valid question.
And your analogy is rather silly, given a burglary is a known and undebated crime, whereas the cause of these deaths - at least the number - is very much debated.
Do you really have no doubts about the conviction? My view is that I have no idea if she killed the babies or not; but there's a great deal about the case that makes me concerned about the conviction. I am *not* saying she is innocent; but I would be unsurprised if she innocent. I would also be unsurprised if she was guilty.
And that, if you really wanted to sow chaos in the UK, - from whatever angle - that’s what you’d aim for. He might mention substations explicitly
1) they would have done it if they could have
2) they did nothing to prevent it
3) they've done far far worse to Ukraine.
So they're still guilty and deserve us sending another round of weapons shipments to their enemies.
That's a reasoned and proportionate response.
It is reassuring that after 14 years as the mouthpiece of Government the BBC are now calling Government to book.
The words that will haunt Rachel Reeves in the coming months. If we think next week is going to be a bitter pill for her to swallow, the October budget is looking like it could be even worse.
Why oh why did she come out with that?
Statistics wasn't the only evidence used against her, but its undeniable that 'the chart' of baby deaths vs the staff rota presents as extremely damning. And yet it may be flawed. It certainly doesn't include every baby death on the unit during that time.
For something as potentially serious as this, you'd want to be sure.
I wonder sometimes, what some on PB would have said about the Meadows evidence and the conviction of Sally Clarke. At the time I thought immediately that there was something off about the numbers and odds and that was before I'd ever heard of Bayes. I would have always assumed that if you have one cot death in a family you would be at higher risk of a second because they may be linked (see also miscarriage). Quite why Meadows believed different and NO ONE ELSE challenged it at the time is beyond belief. But here we are again - statistics is being set up as the killer blow and presented by people who are not experts in stats (the prosecution) to people who are not experts in stats (the jury).
I hope to God she IS guilty because if she isn't she is in a hell of other peoples mistakes.
https://x.com/markham80780803/status/1902780022869447166?s=46&t=fJymV-V84rexmlQMLXHHJQ
Anyway about those steaks. Last night I had a bad done. A bad, dry, overcooked, under seasoned steak
AND STEAK IS ALL THEY DO
It’s their one dish. They have 3m people and 10m cows. They go on and on about their fucking beef, especially the steaks. Yes ok everything else is hideous - the food is even worse than Brazil or Argentina or Peru - but surely the steaks will be ace, given it’s their solitary gastro product of note and they eat it every fucking day.
NO. THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THEM
The same furry insurgents who took down the Galactic Empire with wooden spears and log traps could easily their attention to the UK's transport and energy infrastructure, targeting what they call the capitalist-industrial power grid.
We all know Ewoks have been radicalized by woke ideology after exposure to Earth media. Reports suggest they’ve been protesting deforestation, over-reliance on fossil fuels, and “speciesist” portrayals of primitive cultures in sci-fi films. One alleged manifesto, scrawled in an unknown dialect, shows crude pictographs of X-wing pilots bowing before an Ewok elder.
Completely made up eyewitness accounts are even more disturbing. One maintenance worker reported hearing strange chittering sounds moments before the fire broke out. Another swore they saw a tiny figure in a hood waving a protest sign made from repurposed stormtrooper armor.
This expert warns that if left unchecked, woke militant Ewoks may escalate their attacks—perhaps targeting 5G towers next, or worse, blocking Tube stations with log barricades until Heathrow agrees to run on 100% Ewok-approved renewable energy.
I suspect here it was most likely cock-up, the backup was covering mechanical failure but nobody thought about a big enough fire in the main unit knocking out the backup too. Or the risk was assessed as extremely low.
And suggests organic growth, as starting from scratch you'd site the backup somewhere else in the first place
We have issues with things like parole after a conviction where the convicted is actually innocent. To obtain parole they need to admit guilt, but being honest they cannot. What should they do? Lie about doing it so they can get out? Or stick to their story and stay inside?
(*Until she isn't).
Bread is a staple but the average loaf wont blow your socks off as the best thing since, well, sliced bread.
The prosecution case has been tested in 2 trials and over 4 appeal procedures. How much more testing do you see as being appropriate? The defence team have now done a submission to the the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who are looking at the case again. It's their right to make such a submission and I am glad we have the CCRC as an additional backstop against miscarriages of justice. We await the CCRC's response.
That’s where Uruguay is now
*cheers up*
Courts sadly do get things wrong occasionally, and so do appeals courts.
As for how much 'testing' is appropriate: as much as required, as long as there is new or fresh evidence or reasons to believe the conviction is unsafe. What would you limit it to? One appeal? Two?
According to Wikipedia they filmed the murder film In Cold Blood at the location of the murders, no squeamishness there!
Really? Did you need to be immersed in all the detail of the Sally Clarke case, if you realised that the prosecution 'expert' had failed to disclose evidence that pretty much proved her innocence? That one bit of knowledge pretty much invalidated the entire conviction, regardless of other evidence. Certainly, enough to cause doubt.
Too many people see appeals, whistleblowing etc. as an attack on a structure. In truth, without them, there is no justice.
So it might be that from the airport's point of view what they had was the best they could get, and that some of the underlying cause is good old "underinvestment in infrastructure, plus we can't build anything in this country in a reasonable timeframe". Or it might be that I've been tempted into "this crisis shows that the things I've always thought were bad are clearly bad" thinking :-)
My point was people dont have to make a judgement of probably guilty or probably innocent based on some isolated point which they likely have limited idea of the context - they could raise the point as needing consideration if it hadn't already been and press for that. Declaring multiple methods is whiffy as a concept - rather than picking apart theories on death in cases- surely doesnt help.
Im happy for it all to be tested and be prepared for Letby to be innocent. No stake in that being true. But its not unfair of people not topresume innocence post trial, and so many online comments do that. Pre trial, yes, prepare to change mind to evidence, yes.
According to the report, a Type 65 torpedo with a half ton of high explosive would not even dent one of the legs of the Troll B platform.
A Type 65 with a 20kt (yes, Nagasaki) nuclear warhead would destroy one leg. And wreck the topsides. But the other legs and the base structure would survive!
We like to think we'd stand up to power, but usually dont.