Posts Tagged ‘West Yorkshire’
Bored with relationship and going to jail after burying fiancée alive
The burial site near Huddersfield
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
A father who attacked his fiancée with a Taser gun before burying her alive in a cardboard box because he was “bored” with her was facing jail today after being found guilty of attempted murder.
Marcin Kasprzak attacked Michelina Lewandowska, 27, the mother of his young son, with the electric shock device at their home and then bound and gagged her with tape. He stuffed her into a cardboard box and later buried in a wood near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, leaving her to suffocate.
The 25-year-old launched the attack because their relationship had ended and he feared she would take their three-year-old son Jakub back to their native Poland, the court heard.
Despite being trapped in a hole, beneath a pile of earth and the branch of a tree, Miss Lewandowska managed to escape by using her engagement ring to cut herself out of the box.
Kasprzak denied attempted murder but was found guilty by a jury at Leeds Crown Court today after three days of deliberation…
Miss Lewandowska described how she feared she would die inside the box and still has nightmares about her ordeal. She said the thought of her young son gave her the strength to save herself…
Meanwhile, her former fiancé took her bank card and withdrew £500 before returning to his accomplice’s home, where they were arrested about nine hours later…
Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, had told the jury that the case was about a young man who had become “bored” with his partner, and had “decided to get rid of her”.
Throw away the key!
Geoffrey Crawley delicately debunked the Cottingley fairies
Were there really fairies at the bottom of the garden, or was it merely a childhood prank gone strangely and lastingly awry?
That, for six decades, was the central question behind the Cottingley fairies mystery, the story of two English schoolgirls who claimed to have taken five pictures of fairy folk in the 1910s and afterward.
Set awhirl by the international news media, the girls’ account won the support of many powerful people, including one of the most famous literary men in Britain. It inspired books and, later on, films, including “Fairy Tale: A True Story” (1997), starring Peter O’Toole, and “Photographing Fairies” (1997), starring Ben Kingsley.
From the start, there were doubters. But there was no conclusive proof of deception until the 1980s, when a series of articles by the English photographic scientist Geoffrey Crawley helped reveal the story for what it was: one of the most enduring, if inadvertent, photographic hoaxes of the 20th century.
A polymath who was variously a skilled pianist, linguist, chemist, inventor and editor, Mr. Crawley died on Oct. 29, at 83, at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England…
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Colin Harding, curator of photographic technology at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, discussed Mr. Crawley’s role in the debunking of the Cottingley fairies case: “He took a scientific and analytical approach that was objective to something that had been previously subjective and so full of emotion,” he said.
Second-hand hardware plugs purchaser into local government
For less than a pound a security expert has got front-door access to a council’s internal network.
Andrew Mason from security firm Random Storm bought some network hardware from auction site eBay for 99p. When he switched it on and plugged it in, the device automatically connected to the internal network of Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire.
Kirklees council called the discovery “concerning” but said its data had not been compromised.
For 99p Mr Mason bought what is known as a virtual private network (VPN) server made by the firm Cisco Systems that automates all the steps needed to get remote access to a network.
On powering up his new hardware Mr Mason expected that the device would need network settings to be input but, without prompting, it connected to the last place it was used…
A spokesman for consulting firm Cap Gemini said it managed Kirklees Council’s network from 2000 to the end of May 2005. At that point, he said, control was handed back to the council which had decided to manage the network itself.
Sounds like the IT crew at Kirklees Council is providing the sort of security Britain is famous for the world over.
Hardly any.
