Man who infected woman with HIV after stopping treatment is jailed
A man who infected a woman with HIV after he stopped his treatment and did not tell her about his diagnosis has been jailed for four-and-a-half years.Luke Davis, 31, was found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm on the woman, who described being diagnosed with HIV as a “life sentence”.Davis, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, had initially taken his medication after being diagnosed with HIV in 2017, but disengaged completely from his care in 2019, Hereford crown court heard.His victim discovered she was HIV positive in 2021 after a routine screening.Judge Martin Jackson said Davis chose not to tell the woman about his diagnosis for “entirely selfish reasons”.
The judge told the defendant: “You had been told by the healthcare service, following your diagnosis, that it was important that you used protection, condoms, that it was important you were open with any future sexual partners.“You chose to ignore that advice.I’m satisfied that somebody … who chooses not to tell that other person they are carrying a condition such as HIV, who chooses to ignore advice about informing partners … does so, in my view, with a significant degree of premeditation.“[The victim] lives with the constant threat that that virus could prove really quite serious indeed … to the point of being fatal.”Davis’s victim, whose statement was read to the court, said she felt “physically sick as though my skin was crawling” after being diagnosed with HIV, which she described as “the darkest time in my life”.
She said: “I struggle to love myself as I see this as a part of me I can never get rid of.To me, it’s a life sentence as I will never be, or see myself as, the same.”The court heard Davis lost his 13-month-old baby in 2017 and he blamed himself for bringing Covid into his grandfather’s home, which caused his death in 2020.After the sentencing, Giovanni D’Alessandro, a senior crown prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service West Midlands complex casework unit, said: “We hope the sentence imposed provides some measure of justice to the victim and dissuades others from this type of dangerous and reckless behaviour.”After Davis was reported to police, an investigation revealed Davis had been regularly sexually promiscuous and had several other partners.
Officers made an appeal, working closely with public health officials, for other potential victims to come forward at the time.No further victims have been identified to date.
Post your questions for R&B star Jill Scott
In the age of GLP-1s and the deep-plane facelift making dozens of famous women appear perpetually 32 years old, there’s something extra heartening about Pressha, the lead single from three-time Grammy-winner Jill Scott’s sixth album. “I wasn’t the aesthetic / I guess, I guess, I get it / So much pressure to appear just like them / Pretty and cosmetic,” she sings in a coolly unimpressed kiss-off to a former paramour too cowardly to be seen with her in public.It’s typical of the 53-year-old neo-soul superstar’s direct way with singing about femininity – a quality that’s made her an in-demand collaborator with artists including Dr Dre, Pusha T, Will Smith, Common and Kehlani. As well as having several US No 1 albums to her name, Scott is an artist’s artist: her new record features Tierra Whack, JID and Too $hort; she was originally discovered by Questlove back in her spoken-word days before releasing her platinum-certified debut Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol 1 in 2000.As well as music, Scott has maintained a vivid acting career, starring as James Brown’s wife, Deirdre or “Dee Dee”, in the 2014 biopic Get on Up and taking roles in HBO’s adaptation of Alastair McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and BET+’s TV adaptation of The First Wives’ Club
Mindy Meng Wang on the ‘disorienting’ experience of her father’s funeral – and the Chinese cyber-opera it inspired
The guzheng virtuoso remembers being shocked by the traditional ceremony in China’s north-west. Now she’s processing it on stageGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailWhen Mindy Meng Wang’s father died in 2015, the Melbourne-based musician found herself navigating grief while also organising his funeral in her home city in north-western China. It was to be an elaborate, three-day ceremony filled with prescribed rites, including burning paper effigies, ritualised crying and prayer chants.Looking back, Wang describes the experience as “completely shocking and disorienting”. “There were so many rules for what I had to do over those three days, and so many things that I could not understand,” she says
Hawaii: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans review – a feather-filled thriller full of gods, gourds and ghosts
British Museum, LondonThis retelling of Captain Cook’s death and the merging of two cultures is a trove of miraculously preserved wonders – but beware of the shark-toothed club!Relations between Britain and the Pacific kingdom of Hawaii didn’t get off to a great start. On 14 February 1779 the global explorer James Cook was clubbed and stabbed to death at Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay in a dispute over a boat: it was a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding that still has anthropologists arguing over its meaning. Cook had previously visited Hawaii and apparently been identified as the god Lono, but didn’t know this. Marshall Sahlins argued that Cook was killed because by coming twice he transgressed the Lono myth, while another anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, attacked him for imposing colonialist assumptions of “native” irrationality on the Hawaiians.It’s a fascinating, contentious debate
Three board members and board chair resign from Adelaide festival as Randa Abdel-Fattah sends legal notice
The Adelaide festival is facing an unprecedented leadership crisis after three board members resigned this weekend.The journalist Daniela Ritorto, the Adelaide businesswoman Donny Walford and the lawyer Nick Linke stepped down at an extraordinary board meeting on Saturday following the board’s controversial decision to dump the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 writers’ week program.Separately on Sunday evening, festival board chair Tracey Whiting confirmed that she had decided to resign, “effective immediately”.She did not detail her reasons for resigning, saying only in a statement: “Recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances.”“My tenure as Chair has been immensely enjoyable, as has working with the terrific AF team
Adelaide festival did not dump Jewish columnist from 2024 program despite request from Randa Abdel-Fattah and others
The Adelaide festival board did not dump a Jewish columnist from its 2024 lineup at Adelaide writers’ week, despite being lobbied by a group of 10 academics – including Randa Abdel-Fattah – to do so.On Saturday South Australia’s premier, Peter Malinauskas, claimed that the board had dumped the New York Times pro-Israel columnist Thomas Friedman in 2024, and reiterated his support for the festival board’s decision on Thursday to remove Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian Australian academic, from this year’s program.“I note the Adelaide Festival also made its own decision to remove a Jewish writer from the Adelaide Writers’ Week program in 2024 in very similar circumstances,” Malinauskas told the Guardian through a spokesperson on Saturday.“I support that decision, and the consistent application of this principle.”On Saturday News Corp publications picked up on the premier’s statement, reporting the apparent inconsistency between the public outcry against Abdel-Fattah’s removal compared with the alleged removal of Friedman two years earlier, which did not ignite the massive boycott the writers’ week is now seeing, making the 2026 event look increasingly untenable
Eddie Izzard: ‘I once ran 90km in just under 12 hours. That was a tough day’
When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play’s most iconic lines, such as “To be or not to be”?The first thing I found when I was rehearsing Hamlet was that I felt very at home. I thought, “That’s unusual – I should be quaking in my boots!” I just felt very at ease and happy to be there. But the first time I performed “to be or not to be” on stage, there was a sense of – aren’t bells supposed to ring here? Isn’t there supposed to be a klaxon?I come to “to be” in a slightly different way each night so hopefully the audience haven’t seen it done that way before. I was a street performer for years, so I know how to talk to an audience, which is what they were doing in Shakespeare’s time; they were performing to the people, not at them. Actors got into this fourth-wall thing in the 1800s, it wasn’t there in Elizabethan times
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