Tim Worstall

A Sainsbury’s potato buyer accepted £5 million in corrupt payments from a key supplier, staying at Claridge’s and taking luxury holidays in return for a lucrative contract. I have worked in parts of the world where this is actually the point of contract negotiations. Who gets what slice in the middle. This is actually what [...]

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During the flight, Osbon began reciting numbers and talking about “sins in Las Vegas,” according to prosecutors. The co- pilot locked him out of the flight deck and passengers subdued him as he banged on the cockpit door, prayed and talked about “Jesus, Sept. 11, Iraq, Iran and terrorists,” prosecutors said. If convicted, Osbon could [...]

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The City of London police, undaunted and eager to retain their strange independence, The reason the City police do a lot of the fraud investigations is because the City police are the experts at fraud investigations. They might not be quite as expert as we’d like, this is true, but they’re more expert than, say, [...]

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A businessman accused of being the mastermind behind an alleged £100m ‘Ponzi’ scheme was warned he faced a jail sentence after admitting charges of fraud and deception. OK, this was a big one but Ponzis are hardly unusual. I’ve been invited into one or two even in my very limited business life. But here’s the [...]

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Manchester ‘mole gang’ escapes with just £6,000 after 100ft tunnel heist Gang may have been left out of pocket by having to hire expensive drilling equipment, say police OK, so they dug the tunnel, got to the target and then found that there wasn’t as much cash as they had thought. Diddums. That’s not the [...]

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Sarah McKinley, 18, shot and killed Justin Martin with a 12-gauge shotgun after calling police and asking in a near-whisper: “I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes through the door?” “Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” a dispatcher replied. “I [...]

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see more Very Demotivational

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Indeed, prison guards have a duty to make sure that it doesn’t. Young offenders jailed in the wake of the summer riots were attacked by fellow inmates who had seen their home towns targeted. Criminals already in custody and worried about their families and friends being caught up in the disturbances turned on the perpetrators [...]

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New York murders fell dramatically when hospitals were compelled to admit critical cases irrespective of insurance cover, cutting the lag before treatment and thus the chance of survival by a crucial 20 to 23 minutes. And whether or not it’s an entirely true one is another matter. Yet there is a truth in it: some [...]

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In measuring human violence, Steven Pinker (Profile) appears, understandably, to favour a per capita rate of homicides over the centuries. A revealing alternative would be killings as measured against their time span, ie how many humans are actually slaughtered in the shortest-possible time. In this case, our era is by far the bloodiest and most [...]

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Fraud cost the British economy more £38 billion in the 2010/11 – just £2 billion less than the entire defence budget. More than half of all fraud in Britain – around £21 billion – involves public sector money. Tax fraud accounts for £15 billion a year while around £1 billion in benefits are illegally claimed. [...]

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Wasn’t there a Robert Redford film about this sort of thing? Hiring out prisoners as labour to the local politicians? Perhaps this is the second episode in the tragedy/farce circuit?

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The Guardian corrections column attempts to get to grips with the slippery numbers. Yes, the 6.5% number shouldn’t be used. But there’s another for people to complain over: The 2010/2011 Home Office statistics show that the sanction detection rate for violence against the person was 44.5%, and for rape 29.9%. The most obvious point here [...]

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The men became the first to be sentenced by crown court judges for their involvement in the mass civil disobedience that swept England. Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were jailed for four years each for inciting the disorder on Facebook despite both being of previous good character. Blackshaw created an event on the [...]

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Bailey, who earns £1,000 a month at Stockwell Primary School, south London, left court with a newspaper over his face. A headline about “copycat cretins” covering his eyes, he walked into a lamp-post.

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A thought. We are told, endlessly, that only the rapist is to blame for rape. Nothing that the victim does, has done, where they go, how they’re dressed, nothing at all changes the fact that the rapist is solely and completely responsible, in and of themselves, for the crime. So why isn’t this true for [...]

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Hooh Hah! The justice department is to accuse Edwards, once a rising star of the Democratic party as its 2004 vice-presidential candidate, of accepting substantial donations to his 2008 campaign from two wealthy supporters in order to cover up the relationship with his campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that they had a child [...]

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A businessman arranged his wife’s murder on their honeymoon six months after telling a male prostitute he had been forced into marriage and “needed to find a way out”, a court heard yesterday. …. Sources said the man willing to give evidence has claimed that Mr Dewani paid him for sexual intercourse on three occasions. [...]

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Strange that it’s currently illegal to tell the truth in the UK: A leading actor granted a gagging order by a judge was trying to prevent the public discovering he had cheated on his wife with a prostitute, Helen Wood, whose clients include Wayne Rooney.

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Ended up at this wikipedia page. The last executions in England. The murder was on 7 April 1964. The executions were on 13 August 1964. Is there actually anything that works this quickly in our current legal system?

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