A piece by Frances Gibb, Legal Editor, in today’s Times:

The daughter of a wealthy engineer is fighting a £500,000 court battle with the Korean “domestic servant” who she claims tried to marry her father on his deathbed.

Deborah John-Woodruffe, 47, claims that Bok Soon Song, 72, was nothing more than a “live-in housekeeper” who took advantage of her dying father.

She says the former waitress tried to marry John Williams in hospital only for the pensioner to send her and the registrar packing. Soon after his death from bowel cancer in 2016, Miss Bok changed the locks on his home in Kensal Rise, northwest London, and began a claim to obtain more than £500,000 from his estate, which was worth more than £1 million.

Mr Williams, 66, died without making a will and so his assets would normally be divided between his three children, Mrs John-Woodruffe and her brothers, David and Andrew Williams.

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A piece by Rosemary Bennett, Education Editor, in today’s Times:

Teachers will be offered paid sabbaticals for the first time in the hope of making the profession more attractive and stemming the flow of departures from the classroom.

Damian Hinds, the education secretary, said that he wanted teaching to offer greater flexible working to compete more effectively with other graduate careers. [J4MB: If teachers will be adopting “greater flexible working”, will this require pupils to adopt greater flexible learning?] Although it is renowned for its generous holidays — 13 weeks a year — in other ways teaching is inflexible, with job-shares and part-time working slow to catch on. [J4MB: Possibly “slow to catch on” because they disrupt the smooth running of schools? Why is it that organizations must always cater for the wishes of female staff, rather than employing men who wouldn’t make such demands?]

The number of teachers leaving the profession has risen from 22,260, or 6 per cent, in 2011, to 34,910, or 8.1 per cent, in 2016. Secondary school teachers in particular are deserting in large numbers.

Under the pilot sabbatical scheme, applicants must demonstrate that their time off will complement their teaching role, either through studies or working elsewhere. Sabbaticals would last between a term and an academic year and only teachers with ten years’ experience would be eligible. The government has given the scheme £5 million, which will cover 138 year-long sabbaticals or about 400 term-long breaks.

As always, the elephant in the room is ignored. Which teachers want “greater flexible working… job shares and part-time working”? Female teachers, that’s who.

The feminisation of the state education system has been accompanied by the introduction of Teaching Assistants, who weren’t required when I was a lad, and most teachers were men.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Picture of Laura McClintock, Dr Jane Greatorex, Amy Hamizah Haidi and Aoife Byrne with the guinea pigs (left – right)

Our thanks to Mike P for this. Extracts:

Students at Cambridge University are being given guinea pigs to help ease their stress levels.

Bosses at the famous university’s Lucy Cavendish College say the furry pets will improve mental wellbeing.

Three of the pets have been named after feminist icons. One’s moniker is inspired by suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and is called Emmeline Squeakhurst…

Senior Tutor Jane Greatorex said: ‘We are dedicated to promoting mental wellbeing amongst our students, and numerous studies over the years have shown the benefits of owning pets including stress-relief and getting outside to enjoy our beautiful gardens.

‘We hope that our new friends [J4MB: She refers to the guinea pigs as friends. What is wrong with women like her?] settle in quickly and help relieve any stress over the approaching period of exams. Thanks to Scotsdales Garden Centres for finding them for us.’ [J4MB: Finding them? Do guinea pigs roam wild in Cambridgeshire?]…

Student Union Officer, Laura McClintock, said: ‘In the short time I’ve been here I’ve missed having pets. I think it’ll be good for us to care for them, and a welcome distraction from deadlines.’

Lucy Cavendish is one of three women-only university colleges in England and only accepts postgraduates and women over 21.

Women are strong! Women are amazing!! Women over 21 at women-only colleges need guinea pigs named after feminist icons to distract them from deadlines!!!

When some of these women make it into FTSE350 boardrooms as a result of gender quotas – how else could Snowflakes get there? – will they take their guinea pigs into meetings, to help them cope with the stress?

Our thanks to a supporter for this. Extracts:

Tour de Yorkshire organisers have turned this year’s race into the most lucrative on the women’s calendar, offering a first prize for the one-day event that will exceed the men’s winnings for their three-day stage race over the same weekend…

“Compared to our men’s race, if a rider won all three stages in that, and the overall, they would make €14,000, so that is 40% more,” said Sir Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire. The total prize purse will be €63,623. “The aim was always to create the most lucrative women’s race on the planet,” Verity added. “There are three things women cyclists have been asking for: the same course as the men, the same media coverage and financial parity. [J4MB emphasis. Confusing. Have the women cyclists not been asking for a race of the same duration as the men’s race? An oversight, surely?] All three are valid criteria and we hope we can address all three. What I don’t want is for my daughter to say to me: ‘I want to be a professional cyclist’ and for me to have to answer: ‘how will you earn a living?’”

Caroline Criado Perez remains the leading Lying Feminist of the Month, with three awards to her name. Yesterday she was a commentator for the full hour of Daily Politics, with the feminist presenter Jo Coburn. You’ll need a BBC licence to watch the programme through the link, on iPlayer.

CCP’s evident excitement at seeing her own image on a screen in the studio may be (it’s only a hunch) attributable to Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a common trait among young feminists – Special Snowflake (aka Laura Bates) being another obvious example).

CCP says in the programme that what drives her is “blind rage”, for example the shocking realisation (whilst she was jogging) that all the statues in Parliament Square were of men. She must be in a blind rage most days. Given their narcissism, CCP and Special Snowflake will undoubtedly have their own names on “Google Search”, so will be alerted to this blog post. A happy thought.

Over 0:30 – 11:25 CCP witters on about the Millicent Fawcett statue in Parliament Square, women on banknotes, and makes some outrageous comments about gender-specific healthcare provision in relation to the breast screening IT failure, which is estimated to have resulted in the region of 135 – 270 early deaths of elderly women. A non-feminist presenter could have pointed out that in Britain today fewer women die of breast cancer than men die of prostate cancer, and there has long been a national screening programme for the former but none for the latter – and no plans to introduce one. Predictably, Jo Coburn didn’t make that point. Healthcare provision for women far exceeds that for men, as we detailed in our last manifesto (pp. 61-5).

There’s only so much CCP I can take on one day, so if anyone can email me (mike@j4mb.org.uk) with the times of her other contributions, I’d be grateful, and will add them to this blog piece.

A piece in today’s Times:

Yesterday’s World Password Day, an annual PR stunt from Intel, took on unexpected relevance after Twitter asked all of its 336 million users to change their passwords, admitting that a “bug” had left them exposed.

Twitter passwords would normally be stored only in encrypted form but the company said yesterday that due to an oversight they had been kept in plain text in an internal log. This would have left them freely accessible to at least some Twitter employees and more vulnerable to external hackers.

The microblogging site insisted that it was recommending that users change their passwords only out of an “abundance of caution” due to the company’s sense of social responsibility. It said that there was no evidence or indication that passwords had been obtained or misused by hackers.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Our thanks to Pete for this.

A piece by Ben Webster, Environment Editor, in Wednesday’s Times:

More than 5,000 wet wipes have been found on a short stretch of the Thames foreshore, the highest concentration recorded.

They have changed the shape of the riverbed near Hammersmith Bridge in west London, creating mounds visible at low tide, according to the charity Thames21. It held a litter pick during which 5,453 wet wipes were collected from a 116 sq m patch — almost 50 per square metre.

Wipes enter the river via sewerage overflow pipes having been flushed down lavatories. About 20 billion are used annually in the UK and many contain resins to hold fibres together, preventing them from breaking down in water. Water companies say that wipes, particularly baby wipes, make up 93 per cent of the material that causes sewer blockages, combining with cooking oil poured down drains to form “fatbergs”.

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The 9in pothole could not be seen as it was filled with water. Simon Moss was thrown off his bike and landed on his face.

A piece in yesterday’s Times:

A cyclist was left with severe injuries to his face and a fractured spine after being thrown from his bike when he hit a deep pothole that had been left unrepaired by the council.

Simon Moss, 44, had to have metal plates inserted into his face to repair a broken jaw, cheek and nose. He also lost four teeth in the incident on Sunday. He was still in hospital yesterday.

The crash happened near Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire as Mr Moss, a married father of two who is an account manager for a bicycle distribution company, was riding with two friends, one of whom suffered minor injuries after crashing into Mr Moss as he went down. They said that the pothole was difficult to spot because it was filled with rainwater.

Three days earlier Milton Keynes council had inspected the pothole, said to be 23cm (9in) deep. The council’s own guidance says that any defect more than 7.5cm (3in) deep is “made safe within two or 24 hours based on risk assessment”.

The incident underlines the risks faced by cyclists on crumbling roads. Reports of potholes and other defects have soared in recent months after the wet and freezing weather. Government figures show that defective roads have contributed to the deaths or serious injuries of 390 cyclists in the past decade.

This week a Times investigation revealed that councils are avoiding fixing even large potholes because of a lack of funds. This newspaper also revealed that the government had ordered roadworks to be shifted on to pavements to avoids roads being dug up and weakened, making them more susceptible to potholes.

The crash wrote off Mr Moss’s bike, which he used to cycle to work every day. His wife, Helen, said that he would be making a claim against the council.

Last year Milton Keynes council received 46 claims for pothole damage. In 2016 it paid out just over £1,200 to the public. A spokesman for the council said: “We’re very sorry to hear about Mr Moss’s experience and injuries. Following notification by a resident, we inspected the site of the pothole on April 26 and sent a gang out to repair it on April 29.”

Why is there “a lack of funds” to finance basic infrastructure requirmeents? Arguably, because the government is wasting huge sums of taxpayers’ money on initiatives aimed at privileging women over men, and its many social engineering programmes (e.g. spending £30 million in a futile bid to increase the number women studying engineering).

You can subscribe to The Times here.

A piece in yesterday’s Times:

A teenage mother obsessed with male sacrifice has been jailed for 11 years after stabbing her boyfriend as they had sex.

Zoe Adams, 19, was judged to have planned the attack on Kieran Bewick, who was 17 at the time last July, despite claiming that she had panicked and had no memory of it. “You had decided to cause serious harm to Mr Bewick during sex,” Judge James Adkin told her at Carlisle crown court.

The judge said that she had taken a knife and duct tape in the hope that she would be able to tie up Mr Bewick in her bedroom. She asked him to put a pillow over his head moments before the knife attack to “make it more kinky”, reassuring him with the words: “Trust me.”

Earlier Adams had confronted him while wearing clown make-up, which she knew scared him. She was charged with attempted murder but admitted grievous bodily harm with intent. [J4MB: Performing MGM is the same crime.]

Mr Bewick suffered two stab wounds to his chest, and cuts to a leg, an arm, and a hand. In a victim impact statement he told the court: “I am convinced that she planned it. It wasn’t personal. She was going to do it to someone and it just happened to be me.”

On the night of the attack Adams had been drinking and smoking cannabis and had asked Mr Bewick to let her tie him to the bed, but he refused.

The pair had belonged to a Facebook group called Murder Files for Curious [People] and on Adams’s phone police found a message she had sent him which read: “I don’t think about males unless said male is strapped up and being used as a human sacrifice — you should be grateful you are not part of it.”

In her evidence Adams, who had a traumatic experience as a child, said: “I did stab him but I overreacted.”

You can subscribe to The Times here.