DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
Fair enough and it would be up to Labour members who they want in a 3 way contest between Starmer, Burnham and Streeting if he stands again
Streeting doesn't have the numbers. If he had we wouldn't be where we are.
Of course, having the numbers to trigger a leadership contest and having the numbers to join a leadership contest that is already underway are not identical considerations.
Yes I think if there is a contest Streeting will be in it.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
I think there is a lot of inertia, as in other cases that we have discussed tonight. And I really have no idea if she is guilty as sin or innocent. And to me, that’s a problem.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
It was about a lonely albatross called Stephen who could only fly in circles anti-clockwise and is an internal monologue from the perspective of a bird, but really a subtle questioning of Chinese politics, about whether you can change direction if you give strength and freedom to the under utilised part of you. Deep.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
And led generations of politically minded Brits to assume the perfection of the checks and balances in the US system, and bag on about it a bit too much. Oh.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
I prefer the old Digitiser phrase moc-moc-a-moc.
Sure that’s not Klingon? Some of the Star Trek geeks on here will know.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
"The West Wing" was an early 2000s American television drama about an idealised Democratic American President played by Martin Sheen. It was for its first set of seasons written by the dramatist Aaron Sorkin, who built on ideas he explored in his (underrated but undercooked) movie "The American President" a few years earlier. It became a haven for Democratic voters traumatised by Bush II's successes and became a success d'estime. After Sorkin's drug usage became too big to ignore, he was replaced and the series veered, becoming more based around dramatic events than personalities. It ended with a season-long exploration of a Republican candidate (Alan Alda) vs a Democratic candidate (Jimmy Smits) in the race to succeed Sheen in the 2006 Presidential election (in the West Wing universe the elections are out of sync with ours).
It dominated the US political drama space for decades in the same way that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the TV series) dominated spy dramas, for good and for bad. The writing were brilliant, the characters wonderful, the situations were arch, stylised and not really believable. It's only really yielded to "House of Cards" (US version) and has been rendered entirely obsolete by the excrescences of the Trump era. It was held close by people who believed that American politics was dominated by intelligent people who wanted the best for their country, and when that went out of fashion it finally slipped into history
"Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" was the title of an episode in which that logical fallacy was discussed,
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
It’s striking that the Americans make The West Wing which is a liberal fantasy of what they think the White House should be where in the U.K. we rip politics apart with Yes Minister/Prime Minister and The Thick of It. I think there’s something profound there.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
I think there is a lot of inertia, as in other cases that we have discussed tonight. And I really have no idea if she is guilty as sin or innocent. And to me, that’s a problem.
Well nobody knows for sure except her. The uncertainty will only go away if she confesses. Even if the conviction is set aside we still won't know.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
I think there is a lot of inertia, as in other cases that we have discussed tonight. And I really have no idea if she is guilty as sin or innocent. And to me, that’s a problem.
Well nobody knows for sure except her. The uncertainty will only go away if she confesses. Even if the conviction is set aside we still won't know.
I think you will find that God also knows. Get him in the witness box I say.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
But it’s obvious that recent American military actions have been *caused* by previous movements on the betting markets?!?
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
I think there is a lot of inertia, as in other cases that we have discussed tonight. And I really have no idea if she is guilty as sin or innocent. And to me, that’s a problem.
Well nobody knows for sure except her. The uncertainty will only go away if she confesses. Even if the conviction is set aside we still won't know.
I think you will find that God also knows. Get him in the witness box I say.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
I think there is a lot of inertia, as in other cases that we have discussed tonight. And I really have no idea if she is guilty as sin or innocent. And to me, that’s a problem.
Well nobody knows for sure except her. The uncertainty will only go away if she confesses. Even if the conviction is set aside we still won't know.
I think you will find that God also knows. Get him in the witness box I say.
He doesn't always tell the truth though. He likes to fool around sometimes.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
I think there is a lot of inertia, as in other cases that we have discussed tonight. And I really have no idea if she is guilty as sin or innocent. And to me, that’s a problem.
Well nobody knows for sure except her. The uncertainty will only go away if she confesses. Even if the conviction is set aside we still won't know.
I think you will find that God also knows. Get him in the witness box I say.
Trial by battle?
She might lose the public if she turns up with a syringe full of insulin as her weapon of choice.
The following was posted in Another Place. Do PB's finance types concur or dissent?
"The FT is a paper read by people who don't work in finance assuming that people in finance read it. It hasn't been relevant in finance or even business for many years now. You can also tell this from the comments section which has, like the paper, turned into establishment/"centrist dad" central.
WSJ and Bloomberg took a lot of the top markets/companies people almost a decade ago now (Andrea Felstead was one, genuinely someone who knew UK retail very well). The majority of the remaining columnists either worked in politics or are politics-adjacent. There is almost no detailed finance market coverage. The UK companies stuff was spun out into the Shares magazine 20 years ago.
The FT reflects British society, nothing could be more grubby than becoming involved in commerce. Many of the people who moved up and out go into political journalism because that is high status (i.e. Peston). The FT also has a nasty habit of creating special jobs for people if they are high status enough (Kuper is one, Keynes is the new one, there are many more). The FT is a basically unreformed backwater that is a bit like it was 80s, nothing has really changed. I know a few people who work there in undemanding roles (every couple of weeks attending an expenses paid dinner with a celebrity) and got their job through nepotism. It isn't like anywhere else in UK business or even journalism because of the corporate subscription revenue, the editor is able to run it like a fief.
To give specific examples: Chris Giles is somewhat notorious for being a complete hack. If you are somewhat familiar with how news is made, you should be able to read his stories and work out exactly what conversations led to that story being written. In many cases it is Giles talking to someone adjacent to or in politics. Martin Wolf is a complete dinosaur, if he writes a column you can predict exactly what his take will be because he hasn't had a new idea since 1990. JBM is probably the only journalist who actually writes interesting things, these things however often seem to be conflicted with his personal interests/conversations with civil servants. Stuart Kirk...how does he have a column? Barely worked in markets, somehow the markets guy. Shrimsley, politics guy. Cavendish, worked for Cameron. Beattie, basically a Martin Wolf-lite. Pilita Clark, Lidl Kellaway. It goes on and on. Ineffectual posh people with the most anodyne, pro-establishment positions boring everyone to death with their thoughts."
(Continued below)
Amusingly, I am just about to let my FT subscription lapse, for the first time in... oohhh... twenty years; maybe closer to thirty.
But, no, I disagree.
Yes, Bloomberg is better for breaking company news, but the FT's general market coverage is decent. If I still worked in finance, I would still very much have a subscription.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
"The West Wing" was an early 2000s American television drama about an idealised Democratic American President played by Martin Sheen. It was for its first set of seasons written by the dramatist Aaron Sorkin, who built on ideas he explored in his (underrated but undercooked) movie "The American President" a few years earlier. It became a haven for Democratic voters traumatised by Bush II's successes and became a success d'estime. After Sorkin's drug usage became too big to ignore, he was replaced and the series veered, becoming more based around dramatic events than personalities. It ended with a season-long exploration of a Republican candidate (Alan Alda) vs a Democratic candidate (Jimmy Smits) in the race to succeed Sheen in the 2006 Presidential election (in the West Wing universe the elections are out of sync with ours).
It dominated the US political drama space for decades in the same way that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the TV series) dominated spy dramas, for good and for bad. The writing were brilliant, the characters wonderful, the situations were arch, stylised and not really believable. It's only really yielded to "House of Cards" (US version) and has been rendered entirely obsolete by the excrescences of the Trump era. It was held close by people who believed that American politics was dominated by intelligent people who wanted the best for their country, and when that went out of fashion it finally slipped into history
"Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" was the title of an episode in which that logical fallacy was discussed,
And it was one of the very earliest episodes, if I remember rightly. I may even be the first one after the pilot.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
It is entirely possible there were no murders at all.
If there were murders, however, it seems unlikely it could have been anyone other than Letby.
The question -I think- boils down to the insulin. Because, unless those samples, were contaminated in some way, then those two babies were killed.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
"The West Wing" was an early 2000s American television drama about an idealised Democratic American President played by Martin Sheen. It was for its first set of seasons written by the dramatist Aaron Sorkin, who built on ideas he explored in his (underrated but undercooked) movie "The American President" a few years earlier. It became a haven for Democratic voters traumatised by Bush II's successes and became a success d'estime. After Sorkin's drug usage became too big to ignore, he was replaced and the series veered, becoming more based around dramatic events than personalities. It ended with a season-long exploration of a Republican candidate (Alan Alda) vs a Democratic candidate (Jimmy Smits) in the race to succeed Sheen in the 2006 Presidential election (in the West Wing universe the elections are out of sync with ours).
It dominated the US political drama space for decades in the same way that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the TV series) dominated spy dramas, for good and for bad. The writing were brilliant, the characters wonderful, the situations were arch, stylised and not really believable. It's only really yielded to "House of Cards" (US version) and has been rendered entirely obsolete by the excrescences of the Trump era. It was held close by people who believed that American politics was dominated by intelligent people who wanted the best for their country, and when that went out of fashion it finally slipped into history
"Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" was the title of an episode in which that logical fallacy was discussed,
And it was one of the very earliest episodes, if I remember rightly. I may even be the first one after the pilot.
One of the targets hit by Ukraine last night was the 15th Navy arsenal in Leningrad region where ammunition was stored IN THE OPEN.
Had they made the same mistake as the chap in charge of pearl Harbour who was so consumed by the threat of sabotage that he put all the planes out in the open thinking it would be harder for saboteurs to cause major damage and instead made a completely different easy target?
‘ BREAKING: President Trump says the Trump Administration might buy equity stakes in US AI companies and that he will host a meeting with AI executives as soon as next week, per Reuters.’
At what point will the US government having to bail it out cause the huge correction in the value of the AI bubble?
SpaceX IPO and the two big AI IPO’s could very well do it.
SpaceX feels like a pump and dump with retail and index trackers being on the hook. Valued at 100 times earnings. Not for me.
Trackers and index funds will be able to add it very quickly too.
Will be obliged to, surely, if they are tracker funds ?
It's been exclude, I think, for 12 months from one of the largest (S&P 500), but otherwise they are forced buyers of a grossly overvalued IPO, for which the ordinary rules have been waived.
Surely the point isn't the x100 valuation and whether it's worth that (it isn't) but whether you think somone else out there will pay more than you in 12 months.
It's not what it's really worth that matters but if someone else thinks it's worth more.
That for me is why we are getting such crazy valuations and into a bubble, the same disconnect between fundamentals and emotion that leads to a crash.
Peter.
Sure, there's a FOMO effect, but what's truly egregious about the SpaceX IPO is that there are rules being waived to allow it rapidly to enter indexes which otherwise would have been barred to it for some time. And that obliges tracker funds to buy large amounts of stock, so existing shareholders get more opportunity to dump stock.
S&P recently reversed course on SpaceX, so it will not immediately join the S&P500, which is by far the biggest and most influential index.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
It’s striking that the Americans make The West Wing which is a liberal fantasy of what they think the White House should be where in the U.K. we rip politics apart with Yes Minister/Prime Minister and The Thick of It. I think there’s something profound there.
And when they did do a sharp comedy about politicans as idiots, it was written by Brit.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
It’s striking that the Americans make The West Wing which is a liberal fantasy of what they think the White House should be where in the U.K. we rip politics apart with Yes Minister/Prime Minister and The Thick of It. I think there’s something profound there.
And when they did do a sharp comedy about politicans as idiots, it was written by Brit.
I don’t think the writer of “John Adams” was British although I could be wrong
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
It’s striking that the Americans make The West Wing which is a liberal fantasy of what they think the White House should be where in the U.K. we rip politics apart with Yes Minister/Prime Minister and The Thick of It. I think there’s something profound there.
And when they did do a sharp comedy about politicans as idiots, it was written by Brit.
I don’t think the writer of “John Adams” was British although I could be wrong
Scotland football fans say they are devastated as last-minute changes to travel permits could prevent them from travelling to the World Cup.
UK citizens who want to go to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa need to apply to the country's Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA).
But dozens of fans who filled out the form have said on social media that their application status had changed this week from "approved" to "travel not authorised".
Some have told BBC Scotland News they could lose out on thousands of pounds in travel costs due to the changes, with Scotland's first World Cup game kicking off in less than two weeks.
Like all the deportations stories, its nailed on they have lied / omitted some information. I believe what happens is close to travel date there is additional updated screening to check who is arriving in the US in the very near future.
And like the deportations of Europeans who lied about their purpose, it happens all the time and has done for 20 years.
"Police tried to intervene in Henry Nowak murder trial At a critical point in the case, Hampshire Constabulary wanted to release a statement about 'disinformation'".
"Police tried to intervene in Henry Nowak murder trial At a critical point in the case, Hampshire Constabulary wanted to release a statement about 'disinformation'".
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
A frothy fantasy partly involving intelligent, funny, principled US politicians. Could never happen of course.
It’s striking that the Americans make The West Wing which is a liberal fantasy of what they think the White House should be where in the U.K. we rip politics apart with Yes Minister/Prime Minister and The Thick of It. I think there’s something profound there.
And when they did do a sharp comedy about politicans as idiots, it was written by Brit.
I don’t think the writer of “John Adams” was British although I could be wrong
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
"Police tried to intervene in Henry Nowak murder trial At a critical point in the case, Hampshire Constabulary wanted to release a statement about 'disinformation'".
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Shows just who wields the political power in the UK. The selfish generation.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
When she was on night shifts, the unusual deaths were at night. When she moved to day shifts, the unusual deaths were in the day.
The deaths that were deemed suspicious, a list tha5 chopped and changed, as did the probable mode of death. There were deaths when she wasn’t on shift, including insulin cases.
Some deaths on an intensive care ward are going to be expected, while others will be suspicious. Babies that are recovering well suddenly dying is suspicious. The original list was drawn up blind to whether Letby was on shift. There were not significant changes after that. The defence didn’t challenge the list at trial. I’m not aware of any cases showing insulin overdosing when Letby wasn’t present.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
They thought it sensible to chip away at pensioner benefits by tinkering around the edges, landing themselves with all the discontent with negligible financial payoff. They would have been better to have bitten the bullet on something big like merging tax and NI, or levying NI on unearned income (which amounts to the same thing without the alarming headline rate).
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
"The West Wing" was an early 2000s American television drama about an idealised Democratic American President played by Martin Sheen. It was for its first set of seasons written by the dramatist Aaron Sorkin, who built on ideas he explored in his (underrated but undercooked) movie "The American President" a few years earlier. It became a haven for Democratic voters traumatised by Bush II's successes and became a success d'estime. After Sorkin's drug usage became too big to ignore, he was replaced and the series veered, becoming more based around dramatic events than personalities. It ended with a season-long exploration of a Republican candidate (Alan Alda) vs a Democratic candidate (Jimmy Smits) in the race to succeed Sheen in the 2006 Presidential election (in the West Wing universe the elections are out of sync with ours).
It dominated the US political drama space for decades in the same way that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the TV series) dominated spy dramas, for good and for bad. The writing were brilliant, the characters wonderful, the situations were arch, stylised and not really believable. It's only really yielded to "House of Cards" (US version) and has been rendered entirely obsolete by the excrescences of the Trump era. It was held close by people who believed that American politics was dominated by intelligent people who wanted the best for their country, and when that went out of fashion it finally slipped into history
"Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" was the title of an episode in which that logical fallacy was discussed,
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
When she was on night shifts, the unusual deaths were at night. When she moved to day shifts, the unusual deaths were in the day.
The deaths that were deemed suspicious, a list tha5 chopped and changed, as did the probable mode of death. There were deaths when she wasn’t on shift, including insulin cases.
Some deaths on an intensive care ward are going to be expected, while others will be suspicious. Babies that are recovering well suddenly dying is suspicious. The original list was drawn up blind to whether Letby was on shift. There were not significant changes after that. The defence didn’t challenge the list at trial. I’m not aware of any cases showing insulin overdosing when Letby wasn’t present.
Like the appeals process, you put too much weight on the defence not presenting expert statistical or medical evidence that was not available at the time. You emphasise the insulin overdoses but these have subsequently been challenged by experts.
Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.
It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.
Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
They thought it sensible to chip away at pensioner benefits by tinkering around the edges, landing themselves with all the discontent with negligible financial payoff. They would have been better to have bitten the bullet on something big like merging tax and NI, or levying NI on unearned income (which amounts to the same thing without the alarming headline rate).
In the latter, isn't there still the main difference in that NI isn't charged on earned income once state pension age is reached?
‘ BREAKING: President Trump says the Trump Administration might buy equity stakes in US AI companies and that he will host a meeting with AI executives as soon as next week, per Reuters.’
At what point will the US government having to bail it out cause the huge correction in the value of the AI bubble?
SpaceX IPO and the two big AI IPO’s could very well do it.
SpaceX feels like a pump and dump with retail and index trackers being on the hook. Valued at 100 times earnings. Not for me.
Trackers and index funds will be able to add it very quickly too.
Will be obliged to, surely, if they are tracker funds ?
It's been exclude, I think, for 12 months from one of the largest (S&P 500), but otherwise they are forced buyers of a grossly overvalued IPO, for which the ordinary rules have been waived.
Surely the point isn't the x100 valuation and whether it's worth that (it isn't) but whether you think somone else out there will pay more than you in 12 months.
It's not what it's really worth that matters but if someone else thinks it's worth more.
That for me is why we are getting such crazy valuations and into a bubble, the same disconnect between fundamentals and emotion that leads to a crash.
Peter.
Sure, there's a FOMO effect, but what's truly egregious about the SpaceX IPO is that there are rules being waived to allow it rapidly to enter indexes which otherwise would have been barred to it for some time. And that obliges tracker funds to buy large amounts of stock, so existing shareholders get more opportunity to dump stock.
S&P recently reversed course on SpaceX, so it will not immediately join the S&P500, which is by far the biggest and most influential index.
Im keen to explore options which let me buy index without SpaceX. Anyone got any ideas? That are simple to implement!
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
When she was on night shifts, the unusual deaths were at night. When she moved to day shifts, the unusual deaths were in the day.
The deaths that were deemed suspicious, a list tha5 chopped and changed, as did the probable mode of death. There were deaths when she wasn’t on shift, including insulin cases.
Some deaths on an intensive care ward are going to be expected, while others will be suspicious. Babies that are recovering well suddenly dying is suspicious. The original list was drawn up blind to whether Letby was on shift. There were not significant changes after that. The defence didn’t challenge the list at trial. I’m not aware of any cases showing insulin overdosing when Letby wasn’t present.
Like the appeals process, you put too much weight on the defence not presenting expert statistical or medical evidence that was not available at the time. You emphasise the insulin overdoses but these have subsequently been challenged by experts.
You put too much weight, perhaps, on press releases by her defence team. It’s easier to write a press release saying things than to stand those claims up in court.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
They thought it sensible to chip away at pensioner benefits by tinkering around the edges, landing themselves with all the discontent with negligible financial payoff. They would have been better to have bitten the bullet on something big like merging tax and NI, or levying NI on unearned income (which amounts to the same thing without the alarming headline rate).
In the latter, isn't there still the main difference in that NI isn't charged on earned income once state pension age is reached?
Wouldn't the equitable solution be the reverse of the current situation. Anyone under retirement age pays no NI while those over pay NI as well as full tax on unearned income. Since there has been a generation of take and pass the cost onto the next generation, it's time to allow the young to save, buy homes and have children without the burden of providing for the ungrateful.
If I had to live in Germany, I’d give Freiburg serious consideration. There’s a pleasant, relaxed, feel about it, there’s quite a lot going on, and like my own home town it has the sunniest weather in its country. And of course there is a stack of other countries just a few hours drive away, as well as Black Forest scenery and villages nearby. The old square around the cathedral is pleasant and lively, although most of the centre is relatively modern, having been rebuilt after the war - the ‘remodelling’ actually begun in 1940 when a few Germany planes got lost in the weather and dropped all their bombs on it thinking it was in France; at the time the raid was blamed on the allies and the truth only began to emerge in the mid-1950s and the full story not until the 1980s.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.
‘ BREAKING: President Trump says the Trump Administration might buy equity stakes in US AI companies and that he will host a meeting with AI executives as soon as next week, per Reuters.’
At what point will the US government having to bail it out cause the huge correction in the value of the AI bubble?
SpaceX IPO and the two big AI IPO’s could very well do it.
SpaceX feels like a pump and dump with retail and index trackers being on the hook. Valued at 100 times earnings. Not for me.
Trackers and index funds will be able to add it very quickly too.
Will be obliged to, surely, if they are tracker funds ?
It's been exclude, I think, for 12 months from one of the largest (S&P 500), but otherwise they are forced buyers of a grossly overvalued IPO, for which the ordinary rules have been waived.
Surely the point isn't the x100 valuation and whether it's worth that (it isn't) but whether you think somone else out there will pay more than you in 12 months.
It's not what it's really worth that matters but if someone else thinks it's worth more.
That for me is why we are getting such crazy valuations and into a bubble, the same disconnect between fundamentals and emotion that leads to a crash.
Peter.
Sure, there's a FOMO effect, but what's truly egregious about the SpaceX IPO is that there are rules being waived to allow it rapidly to enter indexes which otherwise would have been barred to it for some time. And that obliges tracker funds to buy large amounts of stock, so existing shareholders get more opportunity to dump stock.
S&P recently reversed course on SpaceX, so it will not immediately join the S&P500, which is by far the biggest and most influential index.
Im keen to explore options which let me buy index without SpaceX. Anyone got any ideas? That are simple to implement!
Presumably you could take a buy spread bet on the index and then work out what sell bet on SpaceX you would need to remove its weighting?
If I had to live in Germany’s I’d give Freiburg serious consideration. There’s a pleasant, relaxed, feel about it, there’s quite a lot going on, and like my own home town it has the sunniest weather in its country. And of course there is a stack of other countries just a few hours drive away, as well as Black Forest scenery and villages nearby. The old square around the cathedral is pleasant and lively, although most of the centre is relatively modern, having been rebuilt after the war - the ‘remodelling’ actually begun in 1940 when a few Germany planes got lost in the weather and dropped all their bombs on it thinking it was in France; at the time the raid was blamed on the allies and the truth only began to emerge in the mid-1950s and the full story not until the 1980s.
I’ve been there on business a couple of times in the 2010’s.
You have to look at the constituency-level data, and bear in mind Scottish politics is different.
Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine, which overlaps heavily with Aberdeen South, was extremely close between the SNP and Conservatives at Holyrood last month, with just over 1,000 votes in it. The combined Conservative and Reform vote was over 48%.
In a two-horse Westminster by-election, with different voter motivations, oil and gas policy front and centre, and the SNP carrying the baggage of recent scandals, with potentially more to come, I think the Conservatives represent genuine value here.
would you like a £5 fun bet on it, SNP to beat the southern carpetbaggers.
On the subject of Aberdeen. I am currently staying 3 days a week at the house of a friend (a South African) in the city whilst I work on decomm jobs up there. His house is in one of the nicer parts of the city close to Duthie Park. He had intended selling up last year and moving back to South Africa with his family.
He bought his house in 2012 for £600,000. He has had about £150,000 in work done on the place. When he tried to sell in spring last year he priced it at £500,000 on the recommendation of various estate agents and got no interest at all. He has now taken it off the market. The collapse in house prices in Aberdeen in the last 2 years has been remarkable.
Looks about right. A house near me on the South Coast listed for £895K. Sold for £750K. Not just Aberdeen but a general downturn in prices. OH used to spend her summers in Duthie Park.
Wish that was case in Ayrshire, where I am looking they are going like hotcakes at well above valuation
"Bank of England axed Churchill, Turing, and Austen from notes after being told they were 'not representative of the UK's cultural and natural diversity'"
Totally circular logic. Young people who've become largely ignorant of our history and where knowledge is shared, told that it is shameful and wicked, strangely don't like or appreciate representations of it. Therefore we take it off bank notes so even fewer people are aware of our history and the idea that it is shameful is further reinforced. The only thing that should change on the banknotes is they should add text in plain English explaining why these people are there.
The way round this is to "Woke it up" to the powers that be, so they get all excited instead.
Thus, Turing is Gay, Austen a feminist icon and Churchill, with his dual British-American heritage, an internationalist and global citizen; you could try and put on there advocacy for a united Europe as well.
Watch how they lap it up.
It's quite funny. The Daily Mail and Bobajob Jenners are trying a bit too hard in the outrage fluffing department.
The Bank of England's version is 'we held a consultation and the public said they wanted British natural heritage on our banknotes.' It's a bit of an open and shut case.
Aren't populists supposed to want to follow the voters?
What's funny is the tendency of our hip and trendy progressives (average age 62) to leap on any unjustifiable shite as long as it's anti-traditional and Farage wouldn't like it.
I'll give you at least a small amount of credit for not demeaning your own intelligence by going on the 'security' angle, as if dots arranged on a substrate are somehow more secure when they are arranged in the shape of a hedgehog than Winston Churchill.
But the 'public consultation' isn't much better as a figleaf. Focus groups are not a plebiscite, and I think we all know you can get them to say whatever you like. The public are allowed to vote on which animal of farthing wood they want on the notes - if the Bank is so confident that public opinion is behind them, why not allow them to vote for Churchill and the rest too, to test their theory?
These figures from our history have not diminished. Europe still enjoys the freedom from Nazism that Churchill helped to give it. Readers worldwide still fall in love with Austen's books. It is not that our history has become irrelevant, it is that in some quarters we're clearly doing a shit job of teaching it. If young people don't find Churchill relevant, we realise we need to teach them better, we don't welcome their complacent ignorance and change everything to fit around it.
You will not be surprised that I disagree slightly.
The practice is not even traditional. Traditionally UK banknotes have been plain.
We have only had historical figures on our banknotes since 1970, and Churchill has only been on there since 2016.
There is no attack on tradition, nor is there any attempt to marginalise historic figures. Rather this is an attempt to fabricate a Potemkin tradition out of whole cloth in order to have something to complain about.
It is a manufactured, attention-seeking fuss about a complete non-issue. This is peak snowflake.
Jenrick needs to find something useful to say rather than indulge in his displacement activity of making up nonsense. The Daily Mail is ... the Daily Mail.
(Edited)
As the UK transitions to a cashless society these arguments become redundant.
I've been to London three times in the last month and not once did I take cash with me.
One time I visited London without my wallet*.
*Technically it is a card holder.
About 30,000,000 UK people still use cash. Millions still mostly use it for retail.
A minority pursuit then ;-)
Edit: Actually I'd be surprised if the number of UK citizens who use cash is anywhere near as low as 30m. I always choose phone payments if I can but still carry a few tenners around for those rare vendors who won't take electronic payments. So strictly speaking, I still use cash (occasionally).
Me too, always carry cash and pound coins for beggars/big issue sellers
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.
WFA was a ridiculous frippery from a bygone age before pensioners did not form a large part of those with the highest disposable income after housing costs in the country. It was absolutely the right thing to do, it is astonishing that this relic survived the Osborne years. We have got to get away from the situation where so much of our limited resources are given away to those not in need by way of universal benefits. Sooner or later that is going to include at least some of the pension.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For non-Latin speakers:
"After this, therefore because of this". It is the faulty assumption that because one event happened after another, the first event must have caused the second.
Surely everyone on here watched the West Wing?
No. Don't even know what it was about.
It was about a lonely albatross called Stephen who could only fly in circles anti-clockwise and is an internal monologue from the perspective of a bird, but really a subtle questioning of Chinese politics, about whether you can change direction if you give strength and freedom to the under utilised part of you. Deep.
If I had to live in Germany’s I’d give Freiburg serious consideration. There’s a pleasant, relaxed, feel about it, there’s quite a lot going on, and like my own home town it has the sunniest weather in its country. And of course there is a stack of other countries just a few hours drive away, as well as Black Forest scenery and villages nearby. The old square around the cathedral is pleasant and lively, although most of the centre is relatively modern, having been rebuilt after the war - the ‘remodelling’ actually begun in 1940 when a few Germany planes got lost in the weather and dropped all their bombs on it thinking it was in France; at the time the raid was blamed on the allies and the truth only began to emerge in the mid-1950s and the full story not until the 1980s.
I’ve been there on business a couple of times in the 2010’s.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
Given the state of maternity care in England we will no doubt hear in 15-20 years that it is a monumental injustice and was in fact a cover up of incompetence and butt covering.
Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.
It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.
Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.
I don't think pooh-poohing Rawnsley's argument here works, either as thesis or as tactic.
The fact that the Tories have not collapsed, despite figures such as Jenrick walking out is, I think, pretty significant. The defections have helped the Tories by getting rid of an overly ambitions and disloyal crew, but have weakened the RefUK "insurgency" brand. The polls are not demonstrating the kind of momentum that could lead RefUK to any kind of power, and may have already turned over. Even more problematic, increasingly Farage is being challenged on the dodgy donations, his closeness to Trump and the question of what he got for mouthing Putin propaganda over Ukraine- and this is defintely cutting through. If the punters are right, Farage will win nothing in the three by-elections and may even see the Tories snatch an unexpected victory in Aberdeen South, which seriously challenges the idea that the right should unite under his questionable leadership.
This could be the beginning of a slow puncture for RefUK which takes them out of the game.
More than the Prime Minister but less than an Olympic swimming pool.
And who seriously believes that Farage will give up all of his 10 jobs for that salary?
Unless he awards himself a million quid a year pay rise on day 1
He’s a disruptor. He’s there to disrupt the mainstream and establishment although he’s a part of it.
The moment he becomes that which he seeks to destroy the game is up, the fun is over.
He’s also surplus to requirements.
Agreed with your first two points, not so sure about the third.
Farage is absolutely vital to the project; noone else works as its figurehead. Tice is a nobody, Jenrick is too obviously a Tory with career disappointment, Yusuf too much an internet troll.
My hunch is that, if presented with an opportunity for actual responsibility, Farage will run away, much as he did in 2016 and 2019. He just needs an excuse.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.
WFA was a ridiculous frippery from a bygone age before pensioners did not form a large part of those with the highest disposable income after housing costs in the country. It was absolutely the right thing to do, it is astonishing that this relic survived the Osborne years. We have got to get away from the situation where so much of our limited resources are given away to those not in need by way of universal benefits. Sooner or later that is going to include at least some of the pension.
Not even that, it was exceeded by the double bubble malfunction that the triple lock does when an inflation spike is followed by a pay spike the subsequent year. Something that I'm sure nobody considered at the time, but you can't help seeing once it's there.
The political problem is that there's Noone Quite Like Grandma.
More than the Prime Minister but less than an Olympic swimming pool.
And who seriously believes that Farage will give up all of his 10 jobs for that salary?
Unless he awards himself a million quid a year pay rise on day 1
He’s a disruptor. He’s there to disrupt the mainstream and establishment although he’s a part of it.
The moment he becomes that which he seeks to destroy the game is up, the fun is over.
He’s also surplus to requirements.
Agreed with your first two points, not so sure about the third.
Farage is absolutely vital to the project; noone else works as its figurehead. Tice is a nobody, Jenrick is too obviously a Tory with career disappointment, Yusuf too much an internet troll.
My hunch is that, if presented with an opportunity for actual responsibility, Farage will run away, much as he did in 2016 and 2019. He just needs an excuse.
I don't think Reform are really much of a political party. More a collection of fellow travellers - I expect any Reform government to disintegrate within weeks. (Possibly a little more stable than the Truss and upcoming Burnham governments mind)
The following was posted in Another Place. Do PB's finance types concur or dissent?
"The FT is a paper read by people who don't work in finance assuming that people in finance read it. It hasn't been relevant in finance or even business for many years now. You can also tell this from the comments section which has, like the paper, turned into establishment/"centrist dad" central.
WSJ and Bloomberg took a lot of the top markets/companies people almost a decade ago now (Andrea Felstead was one, genuinely someone who knew UK retail very well). The majority of the remaining columnists either worked in politics or are politics-adjacent. There is almost no detailed finance market coverage. The UK companies stuff was spun out into the Shares magazine 20 years ago.
The FT reflects British society, nothing could be more grubby than becoming involved in commerce. Many of the people who moved up and out go into political journalism because that is high status (i.e. Peston). The FT also has a nasty habit of creating special jobs for people if they are high status enough (Kuper is one, Keynes is the new one, there are many more). The FT is a basically unreformed backwater that is a bit like it was 80s, nothing has really changed. I know a few people who work there in undemanding roles (every couple of weeks attending an expenses paid dinner with a celebrity) and got their job through nepotism. It isn't like anywhere else in UK business or even journalism because of the corporate subscription revenue, the editor is able to run it like a fief.
To give specific examples: Chris Giles is somewhat notorious for being a complete hack. If you are somewhat familiar with how news is made, you should be able to read his stories and work out exactly what conversations led to that story being written. In many cases it is Giles talking to someone adjacent to or in politics. Martin Wolf is a complete dinosaur, if he writes a column you can predict exactly what his take will be because he hasn't had a new idea since 1990. JBM is probably the only journalist who actually writes interesting things, these things however often seem to be conflicted with his personal interests/conversations with civil servants. Stuart Kirk...how does he have a column? Barely worked in markets, somehow the markets guy. Shrimsley, politics guy. Cavendish, worked for Cameron. Beattie, basically a Martin Wolf-lite. Pilita Clark, Lidl Kellaway. It goes on and on. Ineffectual posh people with the most anodyne, pro-establishment positions boring everyone to death with their thoughts."
(Continued below)
Amusingly, I am just about to let my FT subscription lapse, for the first time in... oohhh... twenty years; maybe closer to thirty.
But, no, I disagree.
Yes, Bloomberg is better for breaking company news, but the FT's general market coverage is decent. If I still worked in finance, I would still very much have a subscription.
Over the years I have had FT, WSJ, Bloomberg and Reuters, and I agree, as a wire service for breaking markets stuff, Bloomberg can' really be beaten, I do find the FT a gives a much better in depth analysis on a more international range of topics than either Bloomberg or the WSJ does. Reuters is a better news feed for non-markets business stuff.
Burnham is 1.21 to win Makerfield but only 1.45 to be next PM.
Implies there is a far from trivial chance he does not become PM even if he wins Makerfield.
There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, I guess. It would be no surprise at all if Burnham's ascension to PM is not as smooth as he hopes, or possibly expects, in these unpredictable times. I suspect he'll make it, though.
I'm in Makesfield at the moment, Andy having restored my faith, provisionally. It's a tight Lab-Ref marginal, judging by the canvass returns. Restore are getting a few votes - yet to meet a single voter for the other parties. Andy is running purely on the basis of his success as Greater Manchester mayor, and doing well. Well enough? Probably, but not a sure thing.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
Given the state of maternity care in England we will no doubt hear in 15-20 years that it is a monumental injustice and was in fact a cover up of incompetence and butt covering.
I don't think anybody disputes the latter point. Their safeguarding procedures were more amateurish and the coverups of blatant and serious problems more egregious than those of OFSTED under that lunatic Spielman.
The question is, was it an injustice? At the moment I'm personally inclined to think it probably wasn't, but they can happen.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.
WFA was a ridiculous frippery from a bygone age before pensioners did not form a large part of those with the highest disposable income after housing costs in the country. It was absolutely the right thing to do, it is astonishing that this relic survived the Osborne years. We have got to get away from the situation where so much of our limited resources are given away to those not in need by way of universal benefits. Sooner or later that is going to include at least some of the pension.
Not even that, it was exceeded by the double bubble malfunction that the triple lock does when an inflation spike is followed by a pay spike the subsequent year. Something that I'm sure nobody considered at the time, but you can't help seeing once it's there.
The political problem is that there's Noone Quite Like Grandma.
Yes, though it is a political truism on PB that the Triple Lock and WFA must go, this polls very badly, even with the young.
A large part of the problem is that few in Britain understand where governments spend money.
Taking the most recent data point, in a council by-election on Thursday, the Tories were on the receiving end of a drubbing, falling from 1st to 3rd behind Reform and Labour.
Burnham is 1.21 to win Makerfield but only 1.45 to be next PM.
Implies there is a far from trivial chance he does not become PM even if he wins Makerfield.
There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, I guess. It would be no surprise at all if Burnham's ascension to PM is not as smooth as he hopes, or possibly expects, in these unpredictable times. I suspect he'll make it, though.
I'm in Makesfield at the moment, Andy having restored my faith, provisionally. It's a tight Lab-Ref marginal, judging by the canvass returns. Restore are getting a few votes - yet to meet a single voter for the other parties. Andy is running purely on the basis of his success as Greater Manchester mayor, and doing well. Well enough? Probably, but not a sure thing.
Taking the most recent data point, in a council by-election on Thursday, the Tories were on the receiving end of a drubbing, falling from 1st to 3rd behind Reform and Labour.
The Kemigasm is not being translated into votes.
Like all the country, the vote is fragmented. I mean the SNP got precisely zero votes in my constituency.* If you take every vote and use that in isolation then you will get nowhere. It’s pretty clear that Badenoch is doing pretty well in presentation and I do agree that this is not yet showing as a decent upturn in votes, but the maxim was always to consider the leaders polling when looking at GEs, was it not?
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.
There are worse crimes.
It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.
WFA was a ridiculous frippery from a bygone age before pensioners did not form a large part of those with the highest disposable income after housing costs in the country. It was absolutely the right thing to do, it is astonishing that this relic survived the Osborne years. We have got to get away from the situation where so much of our limited resources are given away to those not in need by way of universal benefits. Sooner or later that is going to include at least some of the pension.
Not even that, it was exceeded by the double bubble malfunction that the triple lock does when an inflation spike is followed by a pay spike the subsequent year. Something that I'm sure nobody considered at the time, but you can't help seeing once it's there.
The political problem is that there's Noone Quite Like Grandma.
Yes, though it is a political truism on PB that the Triple Lock and WFA must go, this polls very badly, even with the young.
A large part of the problem is that few in Britain understand where governments spend money.
Time for politicians to educate them, rather than pandering to them, then. Doing the latter only sets them up for failure every time they're in government, which is one reason they're held in such low esteem.
I can't say I have much hope of Burnham on that score.
Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.
It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.
Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.
I don't think pooh-poohing Rawnsley's argument here works, either as thesis or as tactic.
The fact that the Tories have not collapsed, despite figures such as Jenrick walking out is, I think, pretty significant. The defections have helped the Tories by getting rid of an overly ambitions and disloyal crew, but have weakened the RefUK "insurgency" brand. The polls are not demonstrating the kind of momentum that could lead RefUK to any kind of power, and may have already turned over. Even more problematic, increasingly Farage is being challenged on the dodgy donations, his closeness to Trump and the question of what he got for mouthing Putin propaganda over Ukraine- and this is defintely cutting through. If the punters are right, Farage will win nothing in the three by-elections and may even see the Tories snatch an unexpected victory in Aberdeen South, which seriously challenges the idea that the right should unite under his questionable leadership.
This could be the beginning of a slow puncture for RefUK which takes them out of the game.
Rawnsley has been phoning it in for a while now
The Tories have gone backwards. I think Kemi is doing a decent job but I’m not the target audience and never likely to vote for them. They’re not gaining or moving forward in the polls
Burnham is 1.21 to win Makerfield but only 1.45 to be next PM.
Implies there is a far from trivial chance he does not become PM even if he wins Makerfield.
There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, I guess. It would be no surprise at all if Burnham's ascension to PM is not as smooth as he hopes, or possibly expects, in these unpredictable times. I suspect he'll make it, though.
I'm in Makesfield at the moment, Andy having restored my faith, provisionally. It's a tight Lab-Ref marginal, judging by the canvass returns. Restore are getting a few votes - yet to meet a single voter for the other parties. Andy is running purely on the basis of his success as Greater Manchester mayor, and doing well. Well enough? Probably, but not a sure thing.
Thanks! Any mention of the Nowak case and Reform's intervention on the doorsteps?
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
Given the state of maternity care in England we will no doubt hear in 15-20 years that it is a monumental injustice and was in fact a cover up of incompetence and butt covering.
I don't think anybody disputes the latter point. Their safeguarding procedures were more amateurish and the coverups of blatant and serious problems more egregious than those of OFSTED under that lunatic Spielman.
The question is, was it an injustice? At the moment I'm personally inclined to think it probably wasn't, but they can happen.
There are massive failures in Maternity care in the UK. The one up the road from me at Nottingham is quite shocking.
But these are very different to problems on neonatal units such as the one Letby worked at. The babies that suddenly died in her care were often nearly ready for discharge when they suddenly and mysteriously deteriated.
Do not forget that as well as the deaths there are a large number of near misees resulting in lifelong disability. The Baby K story is typical with her standing over a deteriorating baby doing nothing with the alarms turned off.
The idea that somehow she was the scapegoat to cover up for unit failures is risible. A murderer on the loose is far worse for unit reputation than a string of preventable deaths. The hospital management famously pushed concerns away rather than deal with real concerns:
Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.
It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.
Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.
I don't think pooh-poohing Rawnsley's argument here works, either as thesis or as tactic.
The fact that the Tories have not collapsed, despite figures such as Jenrick walking out is, I think, pretty significant. The defections have helped the Tories by getting rid of an overly ambitions and disloyal crew, but have weakened the RefUK "insurgency" brand. The polls are not demonstrating the kind of momentum that could lead RefUK to any kind of power, and may have already turned over. Even more problematic, increasingly Farage is being challenged on the dodgy donations, his closeness to Trump and the question of what he got for mouthing Putin propaganda over Ukraine- and this is defintely cutting through. If the punters are right, Farage will win nothing in the three by-elections and may even see the Tories snatch an unexpected victory in Aberdeen South, which seriously challenges the idea that the right should unite under his questionable leadership.
This could be the beginning of a slow puncture for RefUK which takes them out of the game.
Rawnsley has been phoning it in for a while now
The Tories have gone backwards. I think Kemi is doing a decent job but I’m not the target audience and never likely to vote for them. They’re not gaining or moving forward in the polls
Yet. It’s going to be a long haul but undeniably Badenoch* is the least unpopular leader of the main parties.
*How much do I love that her name is essentially Bad Enoch (as in Powell). Far too much.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
I still think the WFA changes were perfectly fine but I accept they communicated it horrendously and perhaps there is no way to do this policy that doesn’t tank your popularity.
Supposedly Osborne and Cameron were also given this policy as an option and vetoed it. That shows they have a lot more political ability than Starmer and Reeves.
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
Given the state of maternity care in England we will no doubt hear in 15-20 years that it is a monumental injustice and was in fact a cover up of incompetence and butt covering.
I don't think anybody disputes the latter point. Their safeguarding procedures were more amateurish and the coverups of blatant and serious problems more egregious than those of OFSTED under that lunatic Spielman.
The question is, was it an injustice? At the moment I'm personally inclined to think it probably wasn't, but they can happen.
There are massive failures in Maternity care in the UK. The one up the road from me at Nottingham is quite shocking.
But these are very different to problems on neonatal units such as the one Letby worked at. The babies that suddenly died in her care were often nearly ready for discharge when they suddenly and mysteriously deteriated.
Do not forget that as well as the deaths there are a large number of near misees resulting in lifelong disability. The Baby K story is typical with her standing over a deteriorating baby doing nothing with the alarms turned off.
The idea that somehow she was the scapegoat to cover up for unit failures is risible. A murderer on the loose is far worse for unit reputation than a string of preventable deaths. The hospital management famously pushed concerns away rather than deal with real concerns:
Just as @bondegezou suggest some are influenced by the defence team press release so this is the prosecution version of events. It has been challenged that these babies were all healthy and doing well before a sudden decline. It’s also not true that a doctor found Letby ignoring a deteriorating baby - his contemporaneous notes said something different to his words in court.
Taking the most recent data point, in a council by-election on Thursday, the Tories were on the receiving end of a drubbing, falling from 1st to 3rd behind Reform and Labour.
The Kemigasm is not being translated into votes.
In a seat last fought in 2022 when the Tories were on 30% when Boris was still PM and Reform were nowhere.
Whereas in London for example where Reform are weaker the Tories made net gains of council seats in May
DecrepiterJohnL said: Andy_JS said: Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.
I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.
Please do share Cyclefree.
I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?
The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."
As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:
“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.
Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).
Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.
doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit
I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.
I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.
My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.
This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.
A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.
The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.
Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.
It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.
The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.
And the deaths stopped when she was removed.
The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.
They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.
If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?
Pass. I'm a bit rusty.
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
Given the state of maternity care in England we will no doubt hear in 15-20 years that it is a monumental injustice and was in fact a cover up of incompetence and butt covering.
I don't think anybody disputes the latter point. Their safeguarding procedures were more amateurish and the coverups of blatant and serious problems more egregious than those of OFSTED under that lunatic Spielman.
The question is, was it an injustice? At the moment I'm personally inclined to think it probably wasn't, but they can happen.
There are massive failures in Maternity care in the UK. The one up the road from me at Nottingham is quite shocking.
But these are very different to problems on neonatal units such as the one Letby worked at. The babies that suddenly died in her care were often nearly ready for discharge when they suddenly and mysteriously deteriated.
Do not forget that as well as the deaths there are a large number of near misees resulting in lifelong disability. The Baby K story is typical with her standing over a deteriorating baby doing nothing with the alarms turned off.
The idea that somehow she was the scapegoat to cover up for unit failures is risible. A murderer on the loose is far worse for unit reputation than a string of preventable deaths. The hospital management famously pushed concerns away rather than deal with real concerns:
Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.
It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.
Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.
I don't think pooh-poohing Rawnsley's argument here works, either as thesis or as tactic.
The fact that the Tories have not collapsed, despite figures such as Jenrick walking out is, I think, pretty significant. The defections have helped the Tories by getting rid of an overly ambitions and disloyal crew, but have weakened the RefUK "insurgency" brand. The polls are not demonstrating the kind of momentum that could lead RefUK to any kind of power, and may have already turned over. Even more problematic, increasingly Farage is being challenged on the dodgy donations, his closeness to Trump and the question of what he got for mouthing Putin propaganda over Ukraine- and this is defintely cutting through. If the punters are right, Farage will win nothing in the three by-elections and may even see the Tories snatch an unexpected victory in Aberdeen South, which seriously challenges the idea that the right should unite under his questionable leadership.
This could be the beginning of a slow puncture for RefUK which takes them out of the game.
Rawnsley has been phoning it in for a while now
The Tories have gone backwards. I think Kemi is doing a decent job but I’m not the target audience and never likely to vote for them. They’re not gaining or moving forward in the polls
Yet. It’s going to be a long haul but undeniably Badenoch* is the least unpopular leader of the main parties.
*How much do I love that her name is essentially Bad Enoch (as in Powell). Far too much.
Kemi’s problem is that although she isn’t personally unpopular, her party still are, and it’s going to take a few more years for that to change.
Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.
I still think the WFA changes were perfectly fine but I accept they communicated it horrendously and perhaps there is no way to do this policy that doesn’t tank your popularity.
Supposedly Osborne and Cameron were also given this policy as an option and vetoed it. That shows they have a lot more political ability than Starmer and Reeves.
Trouble is that we've had about forty years of society elevating politics over government, which is the underlyreason for all of this.
And I'm not entirely sure what we do about it. Politicians explaining the situation and their solutions, clearly and compellingly, would be a start... But they would still need a way to reach the national audience and an audience prepared to listen.
Neither of those things really exists right now. It's more comforting to believe that, if we punish Bad People X, it will all be fine- we just have to work out who X are, and that's fun. If a politician comes along saying "it's more complicated than that" (was Rory the ex-Tory the last one to try?), they don't get far.
And whilst there's a market for talking things though properly, it's niche rather than mass. The days of ten million people watching the News at Ten are long gone.
Comments
What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?
Oh.
It dominated the US political drama space for decades in the same way that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the TV series) dominated spy dramas, for good and for bad. The writing were brilliant, the characters wonderful, the situations were arch, stylised and not really believable. It's only really yielded to "House of Cards" (US version) and has been rendered entirely obsolete by the excrescences of the Trump era. It was held close by people who believed that American politics was dominated by intelligent people who wanted the best for their country, and when that went out of fashion it finally slipped into history
"Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" was the title of an episode in which that logical fallacy was discussed,
I think there’s something profound there.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/06/david-sullivan-steps-down-at-west-ham-to-fight-claims-about-private-life
4th v 85th
42nd v 77th
But, no, I disagree.
Yes, Bloomberg is better for breaking company news, but the FT's general market coverage is decent. If I still worked in finance, I would still very much have a subscription.
Bob calls his boss “boss I’m not coming into work today”.
Boss “why not?”
Bob “I’m sick”.
Boss “how sick are you?”
Bob “well I’ve just shagged my mum”.
If there were murders, however, it seems unlikely it could have been anyone other than Letby.
The question -I think- boils down to the insulin. Because, unless those samples, were contaminated in some way, then those two babies were killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Hoc,_Ergo_Propter_Hoc_(The_West_Wing)
And like the deportations of Europeans who lied about their purpose, it happens all the time and has done for 20 years.
Inane shit.
"Police tried to intervene in Henry Nowak murder trial
At a critical point in the case, Hampshire Constabulary wanted to release a statement about 'disinformation'".
https://www.thetimes.com/
At around 11 mins 20 secs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs5Cgb6vKXw
The murder of five family members in 1985 sent Bamber to prison, but a Channel 5 documentary casts doubt over the conviction
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2026/06/06/the-999-call-that-could-clear-jeremy-bamber/ (£££)
Jeremy Bamber: Proof of Innocence – The Missing Phone Call is on Channel 5 on Monday 8 June at 9pm.
As we are discussing possible miscarriages of justice.
https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-06/dozens-of-double-decker-buses-destroyed-in-suspected-arson-attack
36 buses in Essex.
I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .
All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .
https://www.cityam.com/city-law-firm-boosts-junior-lawyer-salaries-to-189k-in-london/
More than the Prime Minister but less than an Olympic swimming pool.
Unless he awards himself a million quid a year pay rise on day 1
There are worse crimes.
She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.
The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.
Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.
Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.
What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.
For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xd80
John Terry landed the plane?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UiRHEPbYzrc
It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.
Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.
The moment he becomes that which he seeks to destroy the game is up, the fun is over.
He’s also surplus to requirements.
Yes, it’s a very nice part of Europe.
The fact that the Tories have not collapsed, despite figures such as Jenrick walking out is, I think, pretty significant. The defections have helped the Tories by getting rid of an overly ambitions and disloyal crew, but have weakened the RefUK "insurgency" brand. The polls are not demonstrating the kind of momentum that could lead RefUK to any kind of power, and may have already turned over. Even more problematic, increasingly Farage is being challenged on the dodgy donations, his closeness to Trump and the question of what he got for mouthing Putin propaganda over Ukraine- and this is defintely cutting through. If the punters are right, Farage will win nothing in the three by-elections and may even see the Tories snatch an unexpected victory in Aberdeen South, which seriously challenges the idea that the right should unite under his questionable leadership.
This could be the beginning of a slow puncture for RefUK which takes them out of the game.
Farage is absolutely vital to the project; noone else works as its figurehead. Tice is a nobody, Jenrick is too obviously a Tory with career disappointment, Yusuf too much an internet troll.
My hunch is that, if presented with an opportunity for actual responsibility, Farage will run away, much as he did in 2016 and 2019. He just needs an excuse.
The political problem is that there's Noone Quite Like Grandma.
The question is, was it an injustice? At the moment I'm personally inclined to think it probably wasn't, but they can happen.
A large part of the problem is that few in Britain understand where governments spend money.
The Kemigasm is not being translated into votes.
If you take every vote and use that in isolation then you will get nowhere. It’s pretty clear that Badenoch is doing pretty well in presentation and I do agree that this is not yet showing as a decent upturn in votes, but the maxim was always to consider the leaders polling when looking at GEs, was it not?
Doing the latter only sets them up for failure every time they're in government, which is one reason they're held in such low esteem.
I can't say I have much hope of Burnham on that score.
The Tories have gone backwards. I think Kemi is doing a decent job but I’m not the target audience and never likely to vote for them. They’re not gaining or moving forward in the polls
But these are very different to problems on neonatal units such as the one Letby worked at. The babies that suddenly died in her care were often nearly ready for discharge when they suddenly and mysteriously deteriated.
Do not forget that as well as the deaths there are a large number of near misees resulting in lifelong disability. The Baby K story is typical with her standing over a deteriorating baby doing nothing with the alarms turned off.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/25/lucy-letby-denies-tampering-baby-breathing-tube?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
The idea that somehow she was the scapegoat to cover up for unit failures is risible. A murderer on the loose is far worse for unit reputation than a string of preventable deaths. The hospital management famously pushed concerns away rather than deal with real concerns:
BBC News - Hospital bosses ignored months of doctors' warnings about Lucy Letby - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66120934?app-referrer=deep-link
*How much do I love that her name is essentially Bad Enoch (as in Powell). Far too much.
Supposedly Osborne and Cameron were also given this policy as an option and vetoed it. That shows they have a lot more political ability than Starmer and Reeves.
Whereas in London for example where Reform are weaker the Tories made net gains of council seats in May
Whatever else happens the entire senior management of that unit needs disbarring for negligence.
And I'm not entirely sure what we do about it. Politicians explaining the situation and their solutions, clearly and compellingly, would be a start... But they would still need a way to reach the national audience and an audience prepared to listen.
Neither of those things really exists right now. It's more comforting to believe that, if we punish Bad People X, it will all be fine- we just have to work out who X are, and that's fun. If a politician comes along saying "it's more complicated than that" (was Rory the ex-Tory the last one to try?), they don't get far.
And whilst there's a market for talking things though properly, it's niche rather than mass. The days of ten million people watching the News at Ten are long gone.