Three teenagers were crushed to death as they waited to get into a St. Patricks Day disco at the Grenvale Hotel in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

It is understood that around 400 young people were in the crowd waiting for the hotel’s club entrance door to be opened at 9.30 pm when the lethal pushing and shoving started by people desperate to get to the front of the queue, resulting in the deaths of Lauren Bullock, 17, Morgan Barnard, 17, and Connor Currie, 16.

The owner of the hotel, Michael McElhatton, 53, and a 40 year old man were arrested two days later on suspicion of manslaughter. Mr McElhatton has since been released on police bail.

In a sad sign of our times sick internet trolls quickly set up fake profiles mocking those who died.

The three-star, 11 bedroom hotel on the outskirts of Cookstown is a popular venue for weddings, with a capacity of 250, and conferences for up to 200.

Like lots of others we rushed to renew our passport early because of the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, which had more than nine months left on it Like lots of others we were impressed that HM Passport Office were pledging to add up to nine months that passports had to run to the expiry date. Indeed the helpful HM Passport Office information leaflet we got a few weeks ago from the Post Office, who processed our application, stated: “You can renew your passport whenever you want. You do not have to wait for it to run out. We will add any period your passport has left to run (up to nine months) to your new passport”.

Sadly this isn’t the truth. Apparently last September HM Passport Office quietly “altered their policy” and no longer add back up to nine months of validity. This is now made clear on their web site as their information leaflets distributed by the Post Office tell a very different story.

The concept of reduction in trust comes to mind…

The Vice-Chancellor of De Montford University, Dominic Shellard, has resigned over business links he had with the chairman of the university’s remuneration committee, Anthony Stockdale.

Shellard owned shares in the Metamorph Group, a holding company run by Stockdale, who approved a 22.4% salary increase for Shellard, the largest pay rise of any UK University Vice – Chancellor this year and one that bought Shellard’s salary to £350,000. Following Shellard’s resigning Stockdale has resigned his post on the university’s governing board.

The Office for Students watchdog has now launched a probe into “regulatory matters” at De Montford.

One concern many travelers have is being the victim of an infestation of bed bugs, something that unfortunately happened to the writer at the Moorfields Premier Inn, Liverpool last month.

So what’s it like? Well it’s horrible. The bites don’t really come out till two days after, when they itch maddeningly, and scratching too hard breaks the skin on the bumps that form and risks infection. Creams can stop some of the itching but I needed a course of anti-biotics and anti-histamine to properly clear it all up.

Just in case any of our readers, or their delegates, are similarly unlucky we are publishing the emails between ourselves and Premier Inn, part of Whitbread and these follow here.

1. From Premier Inn to Peter Cotterell 08 March 2019

Shoah, for many was the ultimate Holocaust documentary, taking its French director Claude Lanzmann 11 years to shoot and spanning more than nine hours after the selections had been made from the 350 hours of footage shot. Shoah is Hebrew for “catastrophe”, also “calamity” and “destruction”.

The film, released in 1985 concentrated on four main areas – the Chelmo, Auschwitz-Birkenhau and Treblinka extermination camps in Poland and the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, and Lanzmann interviewed survivors from, witnesses to and perpetrators of what has been called the greatest evil of modern times. Excepting a poor reception in Poland, where the hatred of Polish peasantry for the Jews was exposed (without balancing this with the help given by many Poles to the Jews) Shoah was a triumph, winning universal acclaim, a 100% score on the Rotten Tomatoes website, based on 33 reviews giving an average rating of 9.2/10, and a BAFTA award for the best documentary.