Imperial College London has been fined £70,000, and an NHS Trust £80,000 for health and safety breaches after a 32 year old scientist died in a laboratory in a building the university shared with Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

Damian Bowen was working alone in the laboratory in 2011, using liquid nitrogen to test blood samples for HIV and was unaware that the ventilation system had been switched off. Escaping nitrogen displaced the oxygen in the air and he suffocated…

The university and the hospital both pleaded guilty to two charges of breaching a general duty to an employee and were both ordered to pay costs of £23,000.

Some large contract caterers serving food in UK event venues have admitted including on their menus species of fish on the red at-risk list compiled by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). Species are red-listed because of over-fishing endangering their survival, because they are produced unsustainably, or because some part of the supply chain involves slavery.

Caterers admitting to serving red-listed fish are Compass Group UK and Ireland, ISS and Sodexo, and the survey was carried out by food charity Sustain.

The MCS recommend that caterers avoid 63 varieties, including yellow fin tuna, king prawns and eel.

Another couple from Liverpool have been found submitting a fraudulent claim for holiday food poisoning.

Craig and Lisa Boyd claimed £2,000 in compensation from holiday firm TUI, claiming that the food in their Mexican resort hotel made them too ill to leave their room, both in 2015 and 2016. Despite this they had booked the same hotel for the third time this year, and their Facebook posts showed them abseiling, sailing on a yacht and necking cocktails when they had claimed to be violently ill in bed.

Faced with this the Boyds withdrew their claim, saying they had been pressured by a tout paid to drum up business for a no-win no-fee solicitor. They then had to pay the £6,000 costs of the case and hear the judge brand them as “fundamentally dishonest”.

This follows the recent jailing of another Liverpool couple, Paul Roberts and Deborah Briton, for a fraudulent claim of nearly £20,000 against Thomas Cook. (See Event Organisers Update, November – HOLIDAY FRAUDSTERS JAILED)

The owner of a Magaluf nightclub where a young female teenager performed an oral sex act on 24 men there in 2014 to win what she thought was a holiday (it was a £4 drink) is being investigated by the authorities there on suspicion of being the ringleader behind the escalation in fraudulent claims for food poisoning.

Laura Joyce, 37, was fined, along with Carnage, the organisers of the pub crawl during which the above took place, £43,500. Joyce closed her club after the fine, reopened under a new name but has now closed that too.

The old In and Out club on Piccadilly is being developed into a luxury hotel after planning permission was granted to the billionaire Reuben brothers, David and Simon.

One notable feature for events will be a 2, 360 ballroom, and there will also be a restaurant, bars, a spa, a pool and a gym.

Those who haven’t seen Fritz Lang’s famously ground-breaking Expressionist sci-fi feature film, Metropolis from 1927 have missed a real treat.

Silent and shot in black and white the film is set in a fabulous futuristic city where it’s utopia upstairs for the rich and powerful rulers and dystopia downstairs, deep underground, where a subhuman species shuffle along to punishing ten hour shifts of hard labour. They are led by the beautiful and saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm, 21, in a stunning debut) who promises them that a mediator is coming to bring the working and ruling classes together. Continue reading →