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Hancock ‘assaulted’ on London Underground
A man has been arrested on suspicion of assaulting former health secretary Matt Hancock on the London Underground. A man is in custody, on suspicion of common assault and a public order offence, after an incident at Westminster Underground station, British Transport Police said.
It happened on Tuesday morning, but details have only just been released. British Transport Police said: “We received a report of a man being assaulted and harassed at Westminster Underground station at 8.47am yesterday [24 January] morning.”
“A 61-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of common assault and a public order offence and remains in custody. Enquiries into the incident are ongoing.” Footage posted to social media shows a member of the Tube staff walking with Mr Hancock along a platform and getting on a Tube train, then pleading with a man to stop following them and making accusations.
A spokesperson for Mr Hancock said the encounter with the man was “unpleasant”, adding: “Both Transport for London staff and the British Transport Police were fantastic and the man has since been arrested.”
Multiple Met officers to appear in court
Two to three Metropolitan Police officers will be appearing in court every week, including more charged with sexual offences and domestic abuse, the commissioner has said.
Sir Mark Rowley admitted there are more than “just a few bad apples” in the force and warned of more “ghastly” cases to come. “Looking at the next few weeks ahead, most weeks there are two or three officers going to court for criminal cases,” he told the London Assembly police and crime committee.
“It tends to be a mix of dishonesty, violence and violence against women and girls type offences – domestic abuse, sexual offences etc – there’s probably two or three a week coming to court … there’s a trickle of them and we’re going to be surfacing more.”
Even more officers are to appear for disciplinary hearings, including a constable who admitted the false imprisonment of a woman after “using tape to restrain her wrists, ankles and cover her mouth”.
Man arrested after drag queen found dead
A man has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter after the death of a well-known drag queen who was found dead in a city centre alley. Darren Moore, 39, was last seen in Cardiff at around 5am on Sunday wearing full face make-up, a luminous green dress, blonde wig, heels and carrying a clutch bag.
Officers were called to an alleyway near Windsor Place and Park Lane later that night where Mr Moore’s body was found. South Wales Police said a 50-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and remains in custody.
A post-mortem has been conducted and further examinations are ongoing to establish the cause of Mr Moore’s death. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Raikes, leading the investigation, said: “Initial investigations have so far not revealed or confirmed any obvious cause of death, however extensive inquiries are continuing to establish the cause and circumstances of Mr Moore’s death.
“I would like to thank the community for the excellent support they have provided to this investigation so far, which has helped enormously, and I would appeal for anyone with information to please come forward. I would also again like to respectfully ask people to refrain from speculating on social media about what has occurred and please let the police investigation take its course.” PA
Microsoft investigates outages as system goes down
Microsoft is investigating after its services including messaging system Teams and email platform Outlook went down for users around the world. The service status monitoring website Downdetector recorded thousands of users reporting problems with Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Xbox Live yesterday morning. The tech giant said yesterday afternoon that the issues have been resolved for some users.
The site had detected 4,132 incidents of people complaining of outages on Outlook in the UK as of 7.54am yesterday, while
1,971 Microsoft Teams issues had been reported by just after 8.10am. Microsoft 365 Status, an account showing updates on Microsoft 365 service incidents, tweeted: “We’re investigating issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.”
It later added: “We’ve isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue, and we are analysing the best mitigation strategy to address it without causing additional impact. We’ll provide more information once we have additional information.”
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