lynda

A brutal analysis but fair in its conclusion. As a 6 tour Northern Ireland Veteran myself, how anyone can think it’s remotely fair to potentially continue to prosecute soldiers after such long passages of time, and after previous investigations is beyond my comprehension. @bphillipsonMP @andyburnham @RhonddaBryant @elliereeves @wesstreeting @LucyMPowell @DanJarvisMBE @MikeTappTweets @BayoAlaba @CalvinBailey @AlexBallingerMP @GerryAdamsSF @MichealMartinTD FYI @TheParachuteReg @AlistairCarns @williams_rje @simonbarry @JohnnyMercerUK @SASRegtAssn

🚨TWO TIERED POLICING This is Emily Geer. She captured her own assault on camera and handed it to Greater Manchester Police, only to be told officers dropped the case because the suspect simply ignored their letters and knocks at his door. Emily Geer, 33, was walking along Oxford Road on her way to study at the University of Manchester when she noticed a man following her and another woman. When the man kept stopping and looking back at her, the Master's student started filming on her phone and asked him why he was staring. The video footage captured the man appearing to lash out and strike her. Emily handed the video over to Greater Manchester Police immediately, gave a full statement from her home, and received a crime reference number. Officers initially told her they were pleased with the footage and spoke positively about the evidence. Yet seven months later, Emily received a text message from the investigating officer confirming the entire case had been closed with no further action taken. The force explained that they had tried to set up a voluntary interview without arrest, but the suspect refused to engage with letters, phone calls, or visits to his house. Officers then requested his arrest, but told Emily that "ongoing operational demand and resource pressures" meant those attempts were limited and unsuccessful. The six-month statutory time limit to prosecute the offence then ran out, forcing police to shut down the file entirely. Emily says the decision has left her terrified because the man knows she tried to have him arrested and still frequents the area. "It just seems as though they have just given up," she said. Greater Manchester Police admitted the case fell short of acceptable standards, stating: "We acknowledge that in this case, the investigation fell short of the standards our communities should expect. Learnings will be taken from it to ensure that investigations are progressed quickly to ensure the best possible outcome for victims."

This morning, The Princess Royal unveiled a commemorative plaque at Cape Pembroke Lighthouse in the Falklands. HRH and her husband, Sir Tim Laurence, also met with veterans at the SAS Memorial and took time to speak with members of the local community during their visit ✨

He crawled for five days with his throat slit. The russians had thrown him into a pit with the bodies of his fellow soldiers and walked away to smoke. Vladyslav had heard his torturers gouging out the eyes of his men. Then they slit his throat and left him to die. He crawled out of the pit filled with garbage, hid from drones twice, and spent five days crawling back to Ukrainian positions. He was half a centimeter away from death. And he survived. Vladyslav is a platoon commander. In the Donetsk region, his platoon came under heavy fire, and he ordered his men to spread out. When he lost contact with them, he went searching through nearby houses. That was when he was ambushed by russian convicts. They took him into a basement. His fellow soldiers were already there, kneeling with their hands tied. There was blood everywhere. The torturers mutilated them in front of Vladyslav. The first two suffered the worst. Their eyes were gouged out, and their ears, noses, and genitals were cut off. They screamed in agony. Vladyslav closed his eyes, but the russians forced him to watch. Then they turned on him. They cut off part of his ear, pulled out a tooth with pliers, and slit his throat. They threw everyone into the same pit and covered them with garbage. The russians did not leave immediately. They stood over the pit filled with bodies, smoking. Vladyslav waited until they were gone. Among the garbage, he found a broken bottle. He used a piece of glass to cut the rope binding his hands. Then he began to crawl. Drones attacked him. He spent two days hiding in some kind of manhole. He crawled for five days until he finally reached Ukrainian positions. He held a grenade in his hand. There were moments when he thought about giving up. But the thought of his daughter and wife gave him the strength to keep crawling. The doctors could hardly believe what they saw. “He looked like the victim of a maniac. His trachea was completely damaged, along with parts of his neck muscles and esophagus.” A surgeon added: “On both sides, he was just half a centimeter away from death. If the carotid artery had been hit, it would all have been over within a minute and a half.” He underwent rehabilitation, during which he could not speak. He communicated with his wife and brother by writing in a notebook. Vladyslav wrote to his wife that he wanted to return to the Donetsk region – to avenge at least those seven men who had been executed before his eyes. Source: text translated from Bairak Oleh

This is how white children are treated by British police. Wouldnt be the same energy if it was an ethnic minority child. Second class citizens, even the kids.

A goat on Mount Etna knows the mountain is about to erupt fourteen hours before the seismographs do, and the best explanation science has come up with so far is that she doesn't like the smell. She goes up every morning of her life, through the beech wood to the high scrub where the gorse is, with the herd behind her. On the morning the volcano is going to blow, she stops at the treeline, chews, and looks at the summit. The herd stops. The goatherd sits on a rock. Nobody has ever asked her how she does it, because the shepherds have been acting on it since the Bronze Age and it has never let them down. A German asked. Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute put collars on the goats and a receiver on the International Space Station to listen to them from orbit, which is the most expensive way anyone has yet devised of finding out where a goat is. On 4 January 2012 the collars reported that the whole herd had turned round and stopped. In Catania, several million euros of seismographs and gas monitors reported a quiet Wednesday. Six hours later Etna went up. It has happened before eight eruptions since, and in the biggest the goats clocked off fourteen hours before anything with a plug in it. The scientists then did what scientists do, which is try to explain the goat. The leading theory is sulphur dioxide seeping up through the rock ahead of the magma, at a concentration no instrument on the mountain can find. There are papers. There are conferences. The institute says it needs more eruptions, more goats and more species before it can call it a warning system. The goat's account of her method, as far as anyone can make out, is: smell bad, not going. Wikelski took the collars to a farm in the Marche and found the cows, sheep and dogs there turned restless up to twenty hours before the 2016 earthquakes, and earlier the closer they stood to the fault. The animals were asked for comment and ate. We bred this creature for milk and cheese for ten thousand years and used the rest of it as an insult. A man who behaves like a goat eats anything and understands nothing. The animal has meanwhile been running the only volcano forecast in Europe that has never needed a software update, on a diet of gorse, and the people reading it had no grant. The sun is up. The goat has not moved. Somewhere in Germany a doctoral student is modelling her decision in a spreadsheet. She is just very good at being a goat. The spreadsheet is catching up.