British Woman Faces Jail for 'Sex in Backseat of Dubai Taxi' after All-day Drinking Binge

MAIL ONLINE: A British businesswoman faces up to three years in jail for allegedly having sex in a taxi in Dubai while she was drunk.

Rebecca Blake, 29, and Conor McRedmond were arrested after an all-day drinking binge.

They were held for five days and accused of having sex outside marriage and being drunk in a public place – both criminal offences in the strict Islamic state.

Miss Blake, a recruitment consultant, met Irishman Mr McRedmond at The Irish Village, a hotel bar where patrons pay £10 a head for an all-you-can-drink brunch event. After drinking for 12 hours, the pair hailed a cab towards Dubai Marina.

Minutes later they were spotted in a passionate embrace by the driver in his rear view mirror, according to police reports.

Incensed by their behaviour, the driver stopped and complained to police in a patrol car parked nearby. When he returned with an officer, they saw Miss Blake having sex on the back seat of the cab with Mr McRedmond, it is alleged.

A source said: ‘They were completely drunk, started kissing and then got carried away. That’s when they started having sex.

‘When the police officer went over, he found the woman was completely naked and they were having sex on the back seat.’ Read on and comment » | Arthur Martin | Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Drink Strength Cut in Alcohol "Pact" to Tackle Bingeing Epidemic
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The alcoholic strength of one of Britain’s bestselling drinks is to be cut by up to a quarter as part of a Government “pact” with supermarkets and the drink industry.

The deal, to tackle the growing binge-drinking culture, will also see one of the Big Four supermarkets restricting the display of beers and wines for the first time and the number of units of alcohol stamped on millions of pint glasses in pubs.

It will form a key part of a wide-ranging “responsibility deal” between the alcohol and food industries, retailers and the Government.

It is thought that when the deal is announced this week by Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, it will be the biggest voluntary agreement of its kind between the Government and business.

Food firms including McDonald’s, Subway, PepsiCo and Pizza Hut will also reveal a health pledge which will cover a reduction in salt and sugar content, health advice and information and better calorie labelling. >>> Kamal Ahmed, Business Editor | Saturday, March 12, 2011

My comment:

Lansley is an interfering, meddlesome sort of a guy, isn't he? He likes to stick his nose into all manner of things. First it was smoking, now it's drinking. What next? Perhaps they should make it compulsory for us all to convert to Islam. That way they'll have done with all these health problems. At a stroke! Maybe that's what these useless politicians are aiming for.

As for binge-drinking, I agree it is a dreadful problem. But these silly little measures won't do an iota of good in the fight against it, for the problem has its roots elsewhere.

If they are truly serious about tackling binge-drinking, then they need to start encouraging mothers to stay at home to look after their children; they need to start encouraging mothers to raise their children properly. So please pass the necessary laws to make this possible. Further, they need to discourage divorce: make a divorce much harder to obtain. And very importantly, the government needs to pass laws which promote family values, because these binge-drinkers, I'd bet a dollar to a dime, have no-one to sanction their bad behaviour. In an old-fashioned, traditional family, they would. The mother would be overseeing them, as would the father, and the grandparents.

So stop demonising the drink, and get dealing with the real issues – the true causes of the problem. Alcohol isn't the problem; its misuse is. – © Mark

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Supermarkets Criticise Government Plans to Raise Cost of Alcohol
Socialist governments just can’t help themselves, can they? They believe that for every societal ill, there is a tax that will solve the problem. Either that, or they come with an outright ban, as has been done for all smoking in public places, and fox-hunting.

Now they come with this hare-brained idea to put even more tax on alcohol in order to combat the ugly binge-drinking ‘culture’ if culture it can indeed be called!

Binge-drinking has its causes deeply-rooted in the way we bring up our children today. We in the West have forgotten that children need to be raised by full-time mothers, not part-time ones. A part-time mother is as much use as a part-time lover!

If this government is really serious about tackling binge-drinking, it needs to find a way to encourage mothers to return to being there full-time for their children in the formative years. The government also needs to find a way of reversing the trend of the break-up of the family, for without a strong family unit, there is no sanction on dreadful behaviour by our young people.

It’s time that we stopped deluding ourselves. Good, responsible behaviour is learnt in the home, and from good, solid mothers and fathers. No tax from a socialist government wll ever be a substitute for that! – © Mark

THE TELEGRAPH: Britain’s biggest supermarkets have criticised Government proposals to introduce a minimum price for alcohol saying it will fail to curb the country’s binge drinking culture.

They are outraged at the plans which they claim will end up targeting the wrong people and penalize middle-class consumers who drink responsibly instead.

A spokesman for Sainsbury’s said: “We believe that minimum pricing will unfairly penalise our shoppers, the vast majority of whom buy alcohol as part of their weekly shop and drink responsibly in their own homes.”

And a spokesman for Tesco agreed, saying: “We accept that the country has a binge drinking problem, but the vast majority of alcohol bought at our stores is by responsible people who enjoy a bargain.”

Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph revealed the Government was planning to fight the next election on proposals to cut alcohol abuse with a staged scheme including tougher warnings on labels and bans on discounting drinks which would culminiate in minimum prices.

But the price-fixing scheme could lead to a doubling in price of the cheapest alcoholic drinks sold in supermarkets.

Tesco said the doubling of prices would not stop alcohol abuse and would just encourage consumers to buy elsewhere.

The British Retail Consortium said cheap alcohol sold by supermarkets was not to blame and described the introduction of minimum prices as “unfair”.

Andrew Opie, food director at the British Retail Consortium, said: “Any change in alcohol policy must be based on evidence and not disadvantage the millions of people who drink responsibly and would be unfairly affected by price hikes.

“Simply putting prices up will not tackle problem drinking. It has cultural causes and they are what must be addressed. The UK already has some of the highest alcohol taxes in Europe. >>> Myra Butterworth, Rosa Prince and Simon Johnson | Thursday, January 14, 2010

Somebody, at Last, Speaks Some Sense on the (British) Family!
DAILY MAIL: Family breakdown is a "cancer" behind almost every evil affecting the country, a senior judge will declare today.

Mr Justice Coleridge blames youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction and binge-drinking on the "meltdown" of relations between parents and children.

He warns that the collapse of the family unit is a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming.

The speech to family lawyers contains a fierce attack on the "neglect" of successive governments.

The 58-year-old judge, who is married with three grown-up children, will say family breakdown is an epidemic affecting all levels of society from the Royal Family down.

It is "on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even "a decade ago. It is a never-ending carnival of human misery. A ceaseless river of human distress.

"I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family."

The judge, who is in charge of family courts across South-West England, will say he has a duty to speak out.

He will call on the Government to put the family at the top of its agenda, alongside the economy and the war on terror - and make it "rather more important than taking oaths of allegianc" [sic].

His speech will say: "Families are the cells which make up the body of society. If the cells are unhealthy and undernourished, or at worse cancerous and growing haphazard and out of control, in the end the body succumbs.

"In some of the more heavily populated urban areas, family life is quite frankly in meltdown or completely unrecognisable . . . it is on an epidemic scale. In some areas of the country family life in the old sense no longer exists." Family Life Is in 'Meltdown': Judge Launches Devastating Attack on Our Fractured Society >>> By Steve Doughty

Mark Alexander