- Taxi driver said he sneezed seven or eight times which prevented him seeing car in front
By Amy Oliver
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A taxi driver accused of causing a man's death following a car crash has walked free after claiming he was having a 'sneezing fit'.
Phillip Parker, 38, smashed into Malkit Khatkar's Vauxhall Vectra as he was driving home from work in the early hours of New Year's Day last year.
Mr Khatkar, 70, suffered serious spinal injuries in the accident on the A2 at Wilmington, Kent, before dying two weeks later.
Let off: Phillip Parker, 38, of Chatham, Kent, was left in floods of tears as he was acquitted for causing death by careless driving at Maidstone Crown Court
Mr Parker denied causing death by careless driving, claiming he only hit Mr Khatkar because he sneezed seven or eight times in a row, which prevented him from seeing the car in front.
The taxi driver, of Chatham, Kent, was left in floods of tears as he was acquitted for causing death by careless driving by a jury at Maidstone Crown Court on Friday.
Before the verdict, Anthony Prosser, prosecuting, told the court that Parker was at fault and not driving to the 'standard of a careful and competent driver'.
He said: 'The Crown say if he did have a sneezing fit there was at least 30 seconds of visibility of the car in front and plenty of time to brake and do anything to avoid the rear-end collision.
Tragic: Malkit Khatkar, 70, was initially taken to Darent Valley Hospital in Kent suffering spinal injuries but died two weeks later
'The Vectra was there to be seen on a straight stretch of road. The reality is he drove into the back of the car, causing the collision.'
Mr Prosser added if sneezing did not explain the cause, it could have been lack of concentration or tiredness.
There were no independent witnesses to the crash, which happened at about 5.20am on a long straight stretch of the coast-bound carriageway.
Off-duty PC William Parish arrived on the scene just after the collision on the inside lane.
The Vectra had been struck from the rear and spun around. Mr Khatkar had to be cut out.
He was taken to Darent Valley Hospital, in Dartford, Kent and then transferred to Stoke Mandeville in Aylesbury, Bucks, on January 16.
Parker, who denied the charge, said in a police interview of his sneezing: 'It didn't well up, it just - bang - happened.'
He said in evidence: 'It was just one after another.'
Asked by Mr Prosser how he missed an object in the road directly ahead of him, he replied: 'All I can tell you is I had a sneezing fit and the car was there.
'It looked like it was stationary and I went into the back of it. I did brake.'
Mr Prosser said it was not possible to say how fast Mr Khatkar was travelling and it was possible his car was stationary at the time of the collision.
Mr Parker, who suffered a broken collarbone, said his speed was about 50-60mph. He denied being tired.
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
I never go out without lippy... let alone naked’ - The Sun
And shamed Katie Wilson, 19, also revealed that she was driven to drugs by two tragic deaths in her family.
Her dad David died in 2002 from pancreatic cancer and two years ago sister Lisa hanged herself aged 28.
Shop assistant Katie said: “Just to add to things I’d recently been hurt by a lad I liked and I just thought, ‘What the hell, I’ll give it a try’. I popped the pills and my crazy episode just unfolded.”
The Sun revealed on Friday how Katie ran naked through the store in Bourne, Lincs, and was fined £200 for outraging public decency and criminal damage.
The shop assistant, of Deeping St James, recalled: “Apparently, I trotted about a mile to the supermarket down quite a busy road absolutely naked.
“I remember vaguely waltzing into Tescos like in a dream. I was skipping and prancing up the aisles waving my arms like a fairy and shouting at the staff.”
Katie added: “It is horrifying to think how many people saw me naked.”
She warned others about the danger of Benzo, saying: “It’s legal but lethal.”
Source: www.thesun.co.uk
No sexy outfits nuns told in 1,300-year-old 'rule' book - Daily Telegraph
Warning that both nuns and clergymen are dressing inappropriately, he adds: “It shames me to speak of the bold impudence of conceit and the fine insolence of stupidity which are found both among nuns who abide under the rule of a settlement, and among the men of the Church … With many-coloured vestments and with elegant adornments, the body is set off and the external form decked out limb by limb.”
As well as lifestyle advice, Aldhelm - an energetic evangelist and early supporter of women’s education - includes biographies of female saints famed for their virginity who he holds up as role models, including Scholastica, the patron saint of nuns and twin sister of St Benedict; Christina, tortured to death for her faith by her pagan father; and Dorothy, executed for her Christianity after turning down a marriage proposal.
Written in Latin in the seventh century, the book is the first known text from England to be aimed at a female readership. At the time, Barking was a country village outside London and its abbey, founded in 666AD, was home to generations of nuns for more than 800 years.
Whilst Aldhelm had no ecclesiastical authority over the abbey, his advice would have been heeded because he was a noted scholar of his day, of royal blood, who founded two monasteries and served as an abbot and a bishop.
The four pages up for auction at Sotheby’s next month are inscribed on vellum - high quality parchment made from sheep skin or calf hide – from a copy of the book produced in around 800AD, and believed to have been owned at one stage by St Dunstan, a tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. They are expected to fetch £500,000.
Timothy Bolton, a specialist in western medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s, said: “Aldhelm’s work is remarkable because there simply aren’t any texts by English authors addressed to women before this.
"He expects the nuns to study and understand his sophisticated writings, raising the bar of education for women to the same level of men, becoming the first English feminist author.”
The extract forms part of an auction of 60 rare manuscripts, spanning more than five millennia, that are expected to fetch more than £2 million in total.
They include fragments of Homer’s The Iliad dating to the year of Christ’s birth which were used by the Egyptians to wrap around a mummy; a document belonging to the father of King Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king; and the earliest surviving text of one of the most important passages from the New Testament, St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.
They will be sold by Martin Schoyen, a Norwegian collector and heir to a shipping and transport business.
Dr Christopher de Hamel, the fellow librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and an expert on ancient manuscripts, said: “This sale is exceptional in telling the story of Western script from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. It contains the bare bone relics of the history of the English language.”
The sale includes The Godwine Charter, drawn up for Earl Godwine, the most powerful English lord in the decades before the Norman Conquest and the father of King Harold, who was defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Dated c. 1013 to 1020 and written on vellum in Anglo Saxon, the document details Earl Godwine’s sale of a swine pasture, believed to be in Kent, to one of his tenants, Leofwine the Red, for “forty pence and two pounds and an allowance of eight ambers of corn”.
Expected to fetch up to £250,000 at auction, it is one of the rarest surviving Anglo Saxon texts from before the Norman Conquest, after which Old English, replaced by Latin and French, ceased to be the language of officialdom.
The sale will also include the Wyman Fragment, the earliest surviving version of an excerpt from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, widely acknowledged as one of the most famous documents in the history of Christianity.
Dating from the late third century when Christianity was still an illegal cult in the Roman empire, the vellum fragment written in Greek comprises Romans 4:23-5:3 on one side, and on the other, Romans 5:8-13, including the crucial passage on the justification by faith which forms the core of the Epistle and of the theology of Christianity: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
For this passage of the Epistle, the Wyman Fragment is universally accepted as the earliest surviving version and is expected to fetch up to £200,000 at auction.
The fragment was reportedly found in the early 20th century by a group of Arabs at Fustât, in north-eastern Cairo, Egypt, near the site of the Roman fortress of Babylon.
Mr Schoyen acquired it in 1988 from the heirs of the American anthropologist, Dr Leland Wyman, who bought it from an antiquities dealer in Cairo in 1950.
Fragments from Homer’s The Iliad dating from c. 0 will also feature in the sale. Experts believe the papyrus fragments were once part of a scroll once used by the ancient Egyptians to wrap around a mummy, which survived in the sands of North Africa.
They were first acquired by the Austrian conservator, Dr Anton Fackelmann, in Cairo in 1969 as part of a mummy cartonage. Mr Schoyen acquired them from his heirs in 1998 and they are estimated to fetch £30,000 at auction.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
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