Live blog: Ultra marathon athlete to RUN entire Tour de France route, Ian To targets LEJOG record, Mail pushes for Alliston perjury charge + more
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Mon, Feb 19, 2018 15:00
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Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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Latest Comments
Bungle_52 1 hour ago
@Freddy56 wrote "No ideal but it is real and now. Adapt and survive" It's a very similar situation to climate change. As a species we had a choice to reduce carbon emissions or do nothing and learn to live with consequences. We chose the latter and now we wait to see which one will kill us off first.
chrisonabike 1 hour ago
@Rendel Harris yes. Though apparent motivations of protestors have been ... mixed. And it's certainly *caused* fear and alarm to Jewish groups here. Hopefully the small numbers of Jewish folks attending some protests didn't feel threatened. I'm not sure I'd appreciate a few folks on such protests apparently randomly celebrating the sport of paragliding etc. any more than if a few of the "fair fuel" protestors had been making knowing references to "piano wire" or joking about mounting spikes on bumpers.
Rendel Harris 2 hours ago
@Nigel Garage Of course you were purporting to be speaking (admittedly totally stupidly and without any justification) for disabled people, claiming that they want to "stand on their own two feet" and that they don't want to be given assistance. It's extremely telling that you claim to be speaking for "decent law-abiding citizens", so anyone who wants the disabled to get the help they need is neither decent nor law-abiding? And these people apparently "want an inclusive society without favouring one group of people over another". You can't have an inclusive society unless you make provision for those who need more assistance than others. There was a group in Europe, just under a century ago, who were very keen to emphasise that the disabled were a financial burden on the state, indeed their first steps towards "cleansing" society were to attempt to eradicate this burden. Ever heard of them? Didn't end well.
Smiley775 2 hours ago
@tomlew A good point. This opinion piece seems to be complaining about how AI is being used to sell us stuff, rather than using humans to sell us stuff. AI has no impact on me enjoying cycling, how I ride, the people I ride with etc that the article says.
jaymack 2 hours ago
People are hard wired to be lazy. From an evolutionary perspective non-essential activity just gets in the way of our core function: reproduction. This is why people drive half a mile to a supermarket to get a few groceries rather than walk, they're not being lazy in the pejorative sense, they're being 'lazy' because that's our biological programming. This goes some way to explain why there's an obesity problem in a world where day-to-day activity levels have dropped off of a cliff edge as work has become a sedentary activity. What's this got to do with AI? If 'automation' has driven westerners into a sedentary existence - we don't dig, hunt, build or walk miles everyday just to be able to eat - with all the attendant health issues that have resulted, what's AI going to do to people's ability to think when it 'relieves' us of the need to exert some brain power to solve a problem or make a decision?
Rendel Harris 2 hours ago
@Rome73 Actually this particular type of crime isn't localised (though possibly may be in this instance as there are comparatively high-crime areas not far away); of the two main areas for bikejacking, Regent's Park is surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and the Richmond Park area is also extremely affluent, the people committing these crimes aren't locals. On a moped with the passenger hefting the bike and willing to ignore speed limits they can be the other side of London in twenty minutes, and if they are spotted by the police they can just drop the bike and escape up alleyways, across parks etc.
Cugel 2 hours ago
@tomlew Absolut! This response hits the nail on the head. The gradual encroachment then hegemony of the mass media has been a creeping sickness for millennia albeit only lately revealed as the omnipresent toxoplasmic mind-plague that it is. Few humans are left who are not utterly possessed by one variety of mad-memeplex infection or another. Consider the historical effects of mind infections such as religions and ideologies. Consider, then, the very similar effects on humans and all about them within an ecology from the various smaller mind diseases such as consumerism, motornormativity and now 1001 utterly ludicrous, but widely believed & acted upon, conspiracy theories, racist prejudies and similar flowing down the mass media rivers like turds in The Thames. No doubt websites like this and others supposedly "serving special interests" will see themselves as a boon to their readers. In fact, they're just another symptom of the general malaise of consumer-rabies. They also enjoy their own Daily Hate Mail variety of heroes and villains, just with a different slant from that gutter press rag's groupings of us vs them. And yet here we are still reading ........ and forming another klutch of daft opinions about things we actually know nothing about, of any truth or cogency.
mdavidford 3 hours ago
Or they take it round the corner and bung it in the back of a mate's van, or ditch it somewhere it can be picked up later.
mdavidford 3 hours ago
I'm not sure the tens are going to make a great deal of difference, to be honest.
Rome73 3 hours ago
@Defblade yes, but they have to ride the stolen bike back remember. To their manor. And they don’t want to be exposed to arrest for too long by being out and about. You nick it - and it disappears pronto. Plus, they might actually see a 10 mile cycle as a real challenge. Most crime, like this, is localised.
12 thoughts on “Live blog: Ultra marathon athlete to RUN entire Tour de France route, Ian To targets LEJOG record, Mail pushes for Alliston perjury charge + more”
I was in Nottingham on
I was in Nottingham on Saturday. I thought the roads where I live in Northampton were bad. But Nottingham was much, much worse.
If only the Daily Mail could
If only the Daily Mail could use its power and influence for doing some good instead of pushing a fear inspired agenda of hate…
At the end of the day he got
At the end of the day he got convicted so his experience (or lack of) counted for nothing anyway.
Odd one perjury as basically if you lose your case then what they are saying is they didn’t believe you…so surely you’ve perjured yourself by losing your case anyway.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Exactly. Surely every defendant who pleads not guilty and is found guilty is a perjurer. Unless the prosecution are perjurers.
racyrich wrote:
I haven’t looked it up but I thought you entered your plea before you were sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth etc. etc… therefore perjury doesn’t apply to your plea.
Mark.
racyrich wrote:
Next they’ll charge him with not taking the sentence with a smile.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Not really, the jury’s duty is to weigh up conflicting accounts presented by prosecution and defence and decided which account is correct; both sides can believe their evidence is true, Aliston can believe the collisison was unavoidale, the prosecution alleged it wasn’t, the jury went with the prosecution. It’s only perjury if you gave an account which you know wasn’t true, for example if Aliston had said he wasn’t there at all. Generally, as far as I’m aware, prosecutions for perjury only tend to occur if a defendant (e.g. jeffrey Archer) was exonerated on the basis of something which later proved to be a palpable lie. Any lies told during the process of being fond guilty are taken, I think, to be punished by the sentencing, for example people who admit guilt immediately tend to have that taken into account.
But even if Aliston did perjure himself it’s in relation to such a tiny matter – exaggerating his couriering experience – that it’s clearly politically motivated, as was the whole case, which received more media attention than any number of drink drivers killing people. Shameful abuse of the judicial system to hammer an anti-cycling agenda.
So how many 10,000’s of
So how many 10,000’s of drivers are gonna get investigated for perjury then?
Thought so.
StoopidUserName wrote:
Exactly: I wonder exactly how many of those “my client is totally remorseful and needs to keep their driving licence otherwise their wife will leave them, their kids will turn to drugs, and they’ll lose their job, just before the sky falls in”-type pleas are actually a load of foetid dingoes kidneys…?
Is that not perjury too?
Speed-bumps on a shared-use
Speed-bumps on a shared-use path to slow down cycles? Is it April 1st already?
Why don’t they copy the UK and just put loads of broken glass over shared-use paths – that’ll slow down the bikes even more.
Imagine how much better a
Imagine how much better a place the UK would be without the Mail, Sun, Star, Express
This perjury “investigation”
This perjury “investigation” by the Daily Mail is another example of the hypocrisy and double standards which ran through the coverage of the case. See
https://rdrf.org.uk/2017/08/21/the-charlie-alliston-case-the-real-story/ and