Archived version: https://archive.ph/rXLlw

A man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after a stabbing near the British Museum in central London, Scotland Yard has said.

Officers said a man was being treated for a stab wound to his arm and his condition was being assessed after the incident at the junction of Great Russell Street and Museum Street at about 10am on Tuesday.

“This was an isolated incident and there is no outstanding risk to the public,” the Metropolitan police said. “It is not being treated as terror-related.”

An area was cordoned off while officers investigated and police said they expected it to remain in place for much of Tuesday. A police tent was erected on the pavement on the museum side of Great Russell Street, just metres from the entrance.

The London ambulance service said its medics treated the man at the scene for his injury “before taking him to a major trauma centre as a priority”.

A 27-year-old woman from New York said she was about to enter the queue at the museum when police told her to leave because someone had been stabbed.

She told PA Media: “I was standing across the street at the Starbucks walking out to get into the line. We decided it was a good time to go, then we walked out and a cop directly in front of us told us we needed to leave and that the crime scene was large.

“I heard that someone was stabbed and the ambulance was parked inside near the grass area and then rushed down the street, right by me, with police following behind. A cop told me the museum is completely closed until tomorrow.”

The museum is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, receiving about 2 million visitors between April 2021 and March 2022.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/rXLlw

A man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after a stabbing near the British Museum in central London, Scotland Yard has said.

Officers said a man was being treated for a stab wound to his arm and his condition was being assessed after the incident at the junction of Great Russell Street and Museum Street at about 10am on Tuesday.

“This was an isolated incident and there is no outstanding risk to the public,” the Metropolitan police said. “It is not being treated as terror-related.”

An area was cordoned off while officers investigated and police said they expected it to remain in place for much of Tuesday. A police tent was erected on the pavement on the museum side of Great Russell Street, just metres from the entrance.

The London ambulance service said its medics treated the man at the scene for his injury “before taking him to a major trauma centre as a priority”.

A 27-year-old woman from New York said she was about to enter the queue at the museum when police told her to leave because someone had been stabbed.

She told PA Media: “I was standing across the street at the Starbucks walking out to get into the line. We decided it was a good time to go, then we walked out and a cop directly in front of us told us we needed to leave and that the crime scene was large.

“I heard that someone was stabbed and the ambulance was parked inside near the grass area and then rushed down the street, right by me, with police following behind. A cop told me the museum is completely closed until tomorrow.”

The museum is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, receiving about 2 million visitors between April 2021 and March 2022.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/rXLlw

A man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after a stabbing near the British Museum in central London, Scotland Yard has said.

Officers said a man was being treated for a stab wound to his arm and his condition was being assessed after the incident at the junction of Great Russell Street and Museum Street at about 10am on Tuesday.

“This was an isolated incident and there is no outstanding risk to the public,” the Metropolitan police said. “It is not being treated as terror-related.”

An area was cordoned off while officers investigated and police said they expected it to remain in place for much of Tuesday. A police tent was erected on the pavement on the museum side of Great Russell Street, just metres from the entrance.

The London ambulance service said its medics treated the man at the scene for his injury “before taking him to a major trauma centre as a priority”.

A 27-year-old woman from New York said she was about to enter the queue at the museum when police told her to leave because someone had been stabbed.

She told PA Media: “I was standing across the street at the Starbucks walking out to get into the line. We decided it was a good time to go, then we walked out and a cop directly in front of us told us we needed to leave and that the crime scene was large.

“I heard that someone was stabbed and the ambulance was parked inside near the grass area and then rushed down the street, right by me, with police following behind. A cop told me the museum is completely closed until tomorrow.”

The museum is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, receiving about 2 million visitors between April 2021 and March 2022.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/rXLlw

A man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after a stabbing near the British Museum in central London, Scotland Yard has said.

Officers said a man was being treated for a stab wound to his arm and his condition was being assessed after the incident at the junction of Great Russell Street and Museum Street at about 10am on Tuesday.

“This was an isolated incident and there is no outstanding risk to the public,” the Metropolitan police said. “It is not being treated as terror-related.”

An area was cordoned off while officers investigated and police said they expected it to remain in place for much of Tuesday. A police tent was erected on the pavement on the museum side of Great Russell Street, just metres from the entrance.

The London ambulance service said its medics treated the man at the scene for his injury “before taking him to a major trauma centre as a priority”.

A 27-year-old woman from New York said she was about to enter the queue at the museum when police told her to leave because someone had been stabbed.

She told PA Media: “I was standing across the street at the Starbucks walking out to get into the line. We decided it was a good time to go, then we walked out and a cop directly in front of us told us we needed to leave and that the crime scene was large.

“I heard that someone was stabbed and the ambulance was parked inside near the grass area and then rushed down the street, right by me, with police following behind. A cop told me the museum is completely closed until tomorrow.”

The museum is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, receiving about 2 million visitors between April 2021 and March 2022.

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

Not sure how wide spread some of these issues are. Has anyone here experienced anything like what the author describes?

Archived version: https://archive.ph/zDSbp

An enormous amount has been made lately about Barbie and (to a lesser extent) Oppenheimer reversing the terminal decline of the theatrical cinema experience. The films have enmeshed themselves in the cultural conversation in ways that movies simply don’t do any more and, as a result, scores of people who don’t habitually go to the cinema are being dragged out to see them. This is a good thing. Anything that prolongs the life of cinema deserves to be celebrated.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect outcome, because all these newcomers have clearly forgotten how cinemas are supposed to work. The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.

In Maidstone, a woman took her ticketless child into Barbie; an act that resulted in a stand-up, full-volume physical fight. A Brazilian Barbie screening ended with a similar brawl, apparently because a woman let her child watch YouTube throughout the movie. Nor is this confined to Barbie. In June, a fight broke out at a screening of The Little Mermaid in Florida, and in March the same thing happened in France at the end of Creed III. Meanwhile, Twitter is awash with tales of poor cinema etiquette, from talking during films to taking photos during films.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is that social media – TikTok especially – has made it easier for people to record and publish fights in cinemas, to the extent that the Maidstone melee seems to have been posted by multiple accounts from multiple angles, like a sort of mega Zapruder. Perhaps, for all we know, cinemas have always been a tinderbox of mouthy idiots itching for a scrap, but it’s only since the advent of shareable video that anyone has actually noticed.

But then again, the fact that all these fights were recorded on phones – in an environment that repeatedly and explicitly discourages the use of phones – speaks to a deterioration of etiquette in itself. Plus, as a regular cinemagoer myself, I’ve seen first-hand the lack of basic common sense that has trickled in over the last few months.

I went to see Barbie on opening day and, although it was nice to see a full auditorium for once, it was slightly confusing to see how many people had brought their children along. Not their older, age-appropriate 12A children, either – their tiny, young toddlers who in all honesty were unlikely to appreciate the intricacies of a film that largely exists to deconstruct feminist iconography. The film was preceded by a trailer for Joy Ride, in which all the characters start singing the line from WAP about all the whores in the house. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen several dozen mums simultaneously panic in the dark, but I’d recommend it.

So what’s causing this spate of awfulness? My guess is our old friend Covid. The lockdowns of 2020, coupled with the film studios’ sudden mania for slinging all their new releases on the nearest streaming platform, stopped people from going to the cinema altogether. Nobody wants to spend several hours sitting shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of strangers in an enclosed space when there’s a fatal virus going around, after all. And it isn’t like people went to the cinema all that much before then either, given the enormous cost of tickets and snacks and drinks and babysitters.

The fact that Barbie is so successful means that, for a huge percentage of its audience, this will be their first cinema visit since 2019. And four years is easily long enough to forget some of the rules. They’re so used to twin-screening during films at home that it seems alien for them to not have their phones in their hands. They’re so used to talking through films at home that it seems unreasonable to be expected to remain silent in a cinema. And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt. It’s like stumbling across an unexploded bomb, or being on a standing room only train next to someone who has their backpack slung in an empty seat. Things are always going to kick off.

The good news is that the wild success of Barbieheimer might have reminded people how much fun it is to go and see a new film in the cinema. Things are rough now, etiquette-wise, but if this has shaken people out of their slumber enough for them to return to cinemas regularly, then it will only be a matter of time before they start obeying the rules once again. The bad news is that Barbieheimers don’t come along every day. Unless The Meg 2 inexplicably ends up becoming a Star Wars-level hit, it might be a while before these people return to the big screen again.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/zDSbp

An enormous amount has been made lately about Barbie and (to a lesser extent) Oppenheimer reversing the terminal decline of the theatrical cinema experience. The films have enmeshed themselves in the cultural conversation in ways that movies simply don’t do any more and, as a result, scores of people who don’t habitually go to the cinema are being dragged out to see them. This is a good thing. Anything that prolongs the life of cinema deserves to be celebrated.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect outcome, because all these newcomers have clearly forgotten how cinemas are supposed to work. The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.

In Maidstone, a woman took her ticketless child into Barbie; an act that resulted in a stand-up, full-volume physical fight. A Brazilian Barbie screening ended with a similar brawl, apparently because a woman let her child watch YouTube throughout the movie. Nor is this confined to Barbie. In June, a fight broke out at a screening of The Little Mermaid in Florida, and in March the same thing happened in France at the end of Creed III. Meanwhile, Twitter is awash with tales of poor cinema etiquette, from talking during films to taking photos during films.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is that social media – TikTok especially – has made it easier for people to record and publish fights in cinemas, to the extent that the Maidstone melee seems to have been posted by multiple accounts from multiple angles, like a sort of mega Zapruder. Perhaps, for all we know, cinemas have always been a tinderbox of mouthy idiots itching for a scrap, but it’s only since the advent of shareable video that anyone has actually noticed.

But then again, the fact that all these fights were recorded on phones – in an environment that repeatedly and explicitly discourages the use of phones – speaks to a deterioration of etiquette in itself. Plus, as a regular cinemagoer myself, I’ve seen first-hand the lack of basic common sense that has trickled in over the last few months.

I went to see Barbie on opening day and, although it was nice to see a full auditorium for once, it was slightly confusing to see how many people had brought their children along. Not their older, age-appropriate 12A children, either – their tiny, young toddlers who in all honesty were unlikely to appreciate the intricacies of a film that largely exists to deconstruct feminist iconography. The film was preceded by a trailer for Joy Ride, in which all the characters start singing the line from WAP about all the whores in the house. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen several dozen mums simultaneously panic in the dark, but I’d recommend it.

So what’s causing this spate of awfulness? My guess is our old friend Covid. The lockdowns of 2020, coupled with the film studios’ sudden mania for slinging all their new releases on the nearest streaming platform, stopped people from going to the cinema altogether. Nobody wants to spend several hours sitting shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of strangers in an enclosed space when there’s a fatal virus going around, after all. And it isn’t like people went to the cinema all that much before then either, given the enormous cost of tickets and snacks and drinks and babysitters.

The fact that Barbie is so successful means that, for a huge percentage of its audience, this will be their first cinema visit since 2019. And four years is easily long enough to forget some of the rules. They’re so used to twin-screening during films at home that it seems alien for them to not have their phones in their hands. They’re so used to talking through films at home that it seems unreasonable to be expected to remain silent in a cinema. And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt. It’s like stumbling across an unexploded bomb, or being on a standing room only train next to someone who has their backpack slung in an empty seat. Things are always going to kick off.

The good news is that the wild success of Barbieheimer might have reminded people how much fun it is to go and see a new film in the cinema. Things are rough now, etiquette-wise, but if this has shaken people out of their slumber enough for them to return to cinemas regularly, then it will only be a matter of time before they start obeying the rules once again. The bad news is that Barbieheimers don’t come along every day. Unless The Meg 2 inexplicably ends up becoming a Star Wars-level hit, it might be a while before these people return to the big screen again.

It looks like we weren't the only ones thinking this was a bit suspicious...

Archived version: https://archive.ph/O7x45

Full article:

Police have said they are “reviewing all of the available evidence” on the cause of a fire that destroyed the famous Crooked House pub in the West Midlands just two weeks after it was sold to a private buyer.

The pub in Himley, near Dudley, was completely gutted on Saturday night by a blaze that took 30 firefighters to extinguish, days after being sold by the brewer Marston’s.

On Monday, Staffordshire police said an investigation into the cause of the fire at the 18th-century pub was open and that a cordon around the site remained in place.

DI Richard Dancey said: “This incident has caused a great deal of speculation locally and we understand the significance of the building within the local community.

“We would like to remind the public that our investigation is ongoing and we are reviewing all of the available evidence alongside fire investigators to determine the cause of the incident.”

Dancey said people were being asked to avoid the area due to damage to the structure of the building. The force confirmed that no one had been inside the building at the time and no one was injured as a result of the fire.

The pub was famous for its wonky appearance, caused by the building sinking due to mining subsidence, which created optical illusions such as coins appearing to roll uphill.

It had been put up for sale by Marston’s in January this year, a company spokesperson said.

Six fire crews from Staffordshire fire and rescue service (SFRS) and the West Midlands fire service used a high-volume pump and several jets to extinguish the flames after emergency services were called at 9.58pm on Saturday.

Station manager Liam Hickey from SFRS said: “Crews have worked diligently to safely extinguish the fire and make sure damage was minimised as much as possible.

“We know the significance that the building has within the local community and we are working alongside our colleagues in the police to investigate what happened.”

The Black Country Living Museum, which is based nearby, responded to suggestions it could have stepped in to save the building, which dates back to 1765.

“The fire at The Crooked House, Himley, is devastating news, after the recent sale seemed to offer a future for the building, albeit with a new use,” a spokesperson said.

“Unfortunately, the museum was not in a position to save, let alone relocate, the building. Our hope remains, despite the fire, that the Crooked House can, and will, be restored, and once again have sustainable use at Himley.”

Staffordshire police urged anyone with information that may help the investigation to contact the force quoting incident 761 of 5 August.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/tbaxT