Ahsan Zia, 33, was suffering from delusions and hallucinations involving the late Queen and that there was a plot to rape and kill him, Newcastle Crown Court heard.
He launched a 28-second attack on Michael Matthews, 55, in his victim's room on the acute Fellside Wing of Newcastle's Hadrian Clinic in April last year.
If the races were reversed we'd be seeing this a bit further up the webpage, I suspect...
Mr Dry said Zia had used cannabis the day before the attack, but there was no evidence that this had any influence on his behaviour when he lashed out.
No, just a stunning coincidence. Like all the other cases.
Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Pablo Vandenabeele, via videolink, told the court Zia suffered from a treatment-resistant form of paranoid schizophrenia.
We put down rabid dogs. We don't send them to an animal shelter.
Zia will be treated at the maximum security Rampton Hospital, the judge said.
Another triumph for the mental health advocates, no doubt.
When Alexander Fleming discovered the crude penicillin in 1928, one important observation he made was that many bacteria were not affected by penicillin.[46] This phenomenon was realised by Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham while trying to identify the exact of penicillin. In 1940, they discovered that unsusceptible bacteria like Escherichia coli produced specific enzymes that can break down penicillin molecules, thus making them resistant to the antibiotic.
Because penicillin resistance is now so common, other antibiotics are now the preferred choice for treatments. For example, penicillin used to be the first-line treatment for infections with Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Neisseria meningitidis, but it is no longer recommended for treatment of these infections. Penicillin resistance is now very common in Staphylococcus aureus, which means penicillin should not be used to treat infections caused by S. aureus infection unless the infecting strain is known to be susceptible.
In 2014, I started a petition to end the unfair and sexist “luxury” tax on period products.
Oh, and how did that go?
...in December 2020, Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, announced he was “proud” to finally end the 5% tax rate applied to period products.
Hurrah! Right?
Due to a simple administrative error, period pants (a reusable and environmentally friendly menstrual product) were wrongly categorised by HMRC as clothing rather than menstrual products. As a result, period pants are still being taxed today at 20%.
Ah. The government screwing things up. Gosh. What a shock. Still, everything else is cheaper, right?
It has been two and a half years since Sunak announced the end of the tampon tax (on all products except period pants). You would expect products to be cheaper as a result.
You might. I'm not sure I would...
Yet a report by the not-for-profit advisory firm Tax Policy Associates found they are hardly any cheaper today than they were in 2020, even after adjusting for inflation. This is for a simple and extremely disappointing reason: retailers have kept prices the same and pocketed the reduction in tax as profits, amounting to an estimated £15m every year.
Wow! Who could have forseen that? Except, maybe, everyone..?
It’s time to stop weaponising periods. The point of ending tax on sanitary products is to make them more accessible, not to make retailers richer.
As soon as you figure out how to do that, let us all know, eh?
Rachel Riley, the co-presenter of Countdown, has said she will stop supporting Manchester United if the club allows Mason Greenwood to return.
Oh? Who on earth is he? I'm not very up to date on my footballers...
She told her 684,000 Twitter followers: “I’m with Em, I won’t be able to support United if Greenwood remains at the club. We’ve all seen and heard enough. Pretending this is OK would be a huge part of the problem.
“It would be devastating for my club to contribute to a culture that brushes this under the carpet … I really hope they do the right thing.”
Gosh! What was he convicted of, then? As I said, I'm not really up to date on my footballers.
Well, Reader....nothing:
Greenwood was arrested in January 2022 and in October of that year was charged with attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Greenwood denied all the charges and they were dropped in February.
Well, that's awkward. Why did they drop it?
In February, the Crown Prosecution Service said it had dropped the charges against him because there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction” after key witnesses withdrew their cooperation from the investigation.
Rachel needs to be careful. It's easy to say things in the heat of the moment and then have to expensively face consequences, as she should be well aware...
I work in heritage in a rural area and am a minority in my workplace and local community. I really love living close to nature and what I do for work, but I feel that I don’t belong here. I grew up in a nearby rural county where we were the only Black family. Race was almost never mentioned by the white people around me...
Well, that's good, it means no-one cares that you're black, right?
...but I now realise I was treated as an outsider my whole childhood.
Oh! So...how did you come to 'realise' this?
I have over the past couple of years – after reading up about anti-racism – started to challenge the everyday racism that I had previously ignored. This has caused a massive backlash against me professionally with the resulting victimisation hounding me out of a job I loved at a large heritage organisation. I have learned the consequences of speaking out on racism and discrimination is to have your life and livelihood destroyed.How will Sisonke Msimang (Yes, Reader, 'tis she) answer this one?
...when you ask about the ethics of telling “people to challenge racism when the power balance is so skewed that challenging may result in greater harm to the individual”, I hear this not as cynicism but as exhaustion. So many of us have been wounded by our attempts to stand up to racism that it sometime feels unwise to continue.
Ah. Of course. Reinforce and join in with the perpetual victimhood. I should have guessed, shouldn't I?
One of the sadnesses of modern life is that, as James Baldwin has said, it can feel like, “your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world […]”. And yet of course, despite the many problems facing Black people around the world today, history tells us that nothing we are experiencing is new.
*yawns*
You say you feel like you are the minority in every area of life, and I can understand why. It’s because you have been minoritized — that isn’t okay that you have been rendered a minority by virtue of processes of domination that place you at the bottom of the social ladder. I hope that knowing this helps you to feel less alone.
Why not tell her to go where she isn't a minority, if it bothers her so much? You can go with her, if you like...
But surely what's even more appalling is that they are trying to 'educate' children that babies gestate in the digestive system, rather than the womb?
You know, that organ men don't have, and never will?
