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2 weeks ago | 
thetimes.com | Charlotte Wace |Paul Morgan-Bentley |Mario Ledwith
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Paul Morgan-Bentley
The founders of a child safety organisation that received millions in public funding and was closely linked to Sir Tony Blair have been disqualified by the Charity Commission following a Times investigation. Sharon Doughty, a former BBC newsreader, and her partner, Neil Evans, oversaw Miss Dorothy.com, which ran education programmes for children and was backed for many years by the former prime minister and his family.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Paul Morgan-Bentley
In the hours after a young inmate killed himself at HMP Wandsworth, the prison officers’ WhatsApp group began to light up. “He died in custody. Stopped breathing,” an officer wrote about the 21-year-old prisoner, who was awaiting sentencing for drug offences. “Ligatured in cell,” another added. And then the mockery began. Kevin O’Farrell, one of the prison officers, asked if the inmate who had died was one he referred to as “the f***wit”. “Former f***wit,” a colleague joked.
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Paul Morgan-Bentley
Thousands of vulnerable people who were wrongly forced on to prepayment meters by energy companies have so far been offered compensation totalling more than half a million pounds after an investigation by The Times. Ofgem, the energy regulator, ordered suppliers to review cases over a period of about a year when customers struggling to pay their bills were compelled to have the meters.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Paul Morgan-Bentley |Matt Dathan
Prison guards and officials have described how criminals, drug traffickers and a neo-Nazi have bypassed vetting to get jobs behind bars as concern grows about the security of Britain’s jails. They said that a “tsunami” of illicit substances was getting into jails and that security was so poor at one prison that more than half of all inmates who were randomly chosen for testing were found to have been high on drugs.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Paul Morgan-Bentley
Robert Hands and his wife, Margaret, had just returned home from celebrating his 66th birthday at a local steak restaurant when their front doorbell rang. They had only been in the house for about a minute and had not yet sat down. When they opened the door they saw two police uniforms, and the hands of officers showing their ID badges. Margaret, a 64-year-old healthcare worker, immediately thought of Eddie, the second oldest of her four children. “I thought, something bad has happened,” she says.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
shorturl.at | Paul Morgan-Bentley |Federica De Caria
It is just before dawn and I am one of dozens of staff arriving to start our shifts at HMP Bedford. Walking through the prison’s front door, I flash an ID to someone on reception and then carry on walking, straight through security. I pass a stack of trays — the kind used in airports for the x-ray baggage scanners — but no one is using them, and the prison’s scanner appears to be switched off.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Paul Morgan-Bentley |Federica De Caria
It is just before dawn and I am one of dozens of staff arriving to start our shifts at HMP Bedford. Walking through the prison’s front door, I flash an ID to someone on reception and then carry on walking, straight through security. I pass a stack of trays — the kind used in airports for the x-ray baggage scanners — but no one is using them, and the prison’s scanner appears to be switched off.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Paul Morgan-Bentley |Federica De Caria
It is just before dawn and I am one of dozens of staff arriving to start our shifts at HMP Bedford. Walking through the prison’s front door, I flash an ID to someone on reception and then carry on walking, straight through security. I pass a stack of trays — the kind used in airports for the x-ray baggage scanners — but no one is using them, and the prison’s scanner appears to be switched off.
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Mar 26, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Paul Morgan-Bentley |Federica De Caria
An urgent investigation has begun into prison security after an undercover journalist was hired at one of the country’s most dangerous jails and was then able to walk inside and interact with prisoners without security searches. Last month a Times reporter was hired by an agency to work at HMP Bedford amid a nationwide staffing shortage. On two out of eight days that he worked at the prison, there was no one manning the security scanners at the front entrance when he arrived for work.
