Grim, Hopefully, As It Should Be In Our Prisons....

A British teenager - eight months pregnant and charged with drugs smuggling - is awaiting sentencing in prison in Georgia, South Caucasus. A payment of £137,000 by her family will reduce her sentence but what are the days like for Bella Culley, incarcerated 2,600 miles (4,180km) from home?

Who cares? Why the focus on this particular idiot drugs mule? There's plenty of them to choose from... 

Lyanne Kennedy says her daughter has been boiling pasta in a kettle and toasting bread over a candle flame but is now allowed to cook for herself and other women and children in the unit, and is learning Georgian. "She now gets two hours out for walking, she can use the communal kitchen, has a shower in her room and a proper toilet," she says, describing the improved conditions since a transfer earlier this month.

"They all cook for each other," Ms Kennedy says. "Bella has been making eggy bread and cheese toasties, and salt and pepper chicken."

Perhaps if she'd showed such skills in a job in her local cafe, she wouldn't have decided to smuggle drugs into a country that unlike the UK, doesn't ptovide holiday camps for the incarcerated felons it houses. 

Miss Culley claimed she had been tortured and forced to carry the drugs but was warned she was facing 20 years in prison. But, for a "substantial sum", she could be released, she was told. Back in Tbilisi City Court last Tuesday, the teenager heard her family had managed to raise £137,000. Not the amount needed for her to walk free but enough to reduce her sentence significantly, to two years. She is due in court again on Monday to hear her final sentence. Ms Kennedy says the family is doing everything they can to get her home "where she should be".

And she's now been freed. Blood money is acceptable in such a country, clearly.

Ms Kennedy, who has been traveling back and forth between the UK and Georgia, says her daughter is getting on well with staff and prisoners and she had been able to take in baby clothes for her. Her daughter's full story "will come in time", she says.

No doubt, once she's hired a ghostwriter. I assume the restriction on profiting from crime won't be applicable?

They Heard Hoofbeats And Thought ‘Horses’

That's not so strange, is it?

Police officers urged paramedics and firefighters to treat the second novichok incident in 2018 as a drug overdose despite warnings from the ambulance and fire services that it had similarities to the first poisoning four months earlier in Salisbury, a public inquiry has heard.

The fact the victim was known to the police as a junkie helped, no doubt.

The inquiry heard that Rowley had a number of convictions for possession of class A and class C drugs and, as a result, a Wiltshire police inspector concluded his symptoms were most likely drug-related – a judgment that led to Wiltshire police officers entering Rowley’s contaminated flat. The ambulance service spoke to an inspector with the Wiltshire police, O’Connor said. “Based on the intelligence, [he] formed the opinion that this incident was most likely owing to drugs,” O’Connor told the inquiry. “He noted the apparent nervousness of the other emergency services, but remained of the opinion that this was drug-related and was to be treated as such.”

Wiltshire police’s deputy chief constable, Paul Mills, told the inquiry: “The police officers were overly confident. I don’t believe it was wrong for them to have a hypothesis, based on the recent intelligence that they were aware of through the lens of the police service in Wiltshire, that this potentially could have been a drugs-related incident.”

No-one would. Even knowing the details of the other case, what's most likely, exotic Russian assassins targeting the local junkie, or overdose? Who wouldn't make the same calculation? 

Nor was he the only one to screw up, although this mistake actually helped...  

It was also revealed to the inquiry that Skripal’s life may have been saved because he was mistakenly given atropine, a drug used for organophosphate poisoning. Wayne Darch, the deputy director of operations at the South Western ambulance service NHS foundation trust, told the inquiry that paramedics at the scene had misdiagnosed Skripal and his daughter Yulia’s symptoms as an opiate overdose. O’Connor said: “Atropine was in fact administered to Sergei Skripal by one of the ambulance staff present by accident. He intended to give the administration of naloxone but picked up the wrong bottle and in fact gave him atropine. “We will hear from Mr Faulkner, the expert, that that would have clearly helped Mr Skripal and may have even saved his life.”

This must surely be the only time an error has had a good outcome in the history of the NHS.