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Cardiff Bay Opera House

Former music venues in CardiffOpera houses in WalesUnbuilt buildings and structures in the United KingdomZaha Hadid buildings

Cardiff Bay Opera House was a proposed centre for the performing arts in Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, conceived in the 1990s as a crucial part of the Cardiff Bay redevelopment project. One aim of the scheme was to create a new home for the Welsh National Opera company, which was then based in the New Theatre in Cardiff. The Wales Millennium Centre was built in its place and it opened in 2004. The plan, supported by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation, was to construct a permanent home for Welsh National Opera on a site near the Inner Harbour, Cardiff Bay. An international design competition was held and was eventually won by the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid. The Hadid design was called the Crystal Necklace by some in the media. However, the project failed to win financial support from the Millennium Commission, the body which distributed funds from the UK National Lottery.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Cardiff Bay Opera House (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Cardiff Bay Opera House
Bute Place, Cardiff Cardiff Bay

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Wikipedia: Cardiff Bay Opera HouseContinue reading on Wikipedia

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N 51.465038888889 ° E -3.1635361111111 °
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Wales Millennium Centre

Bute Place
CF10 5AL Cardiff, Cardiff Bay
Wales, United Kingdom
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wmc.org.uk

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Murder of Lynette White

Lynette Deborah White (5 July 1967 – 14 February 1988) was murdered on 14 February 1988 in Cardiff, Wales. South Wales Police issued a photofit image of a bloodstained, white male seen in the vicinity at the time of the murder but were unable to trace the man. In November 1988, the police charged five black and mixed-race men with White's murder, although none of the scientific evidence discovered at the crime scene could be linked to them. In November 1990, following what was then the longest murder trial in British history, three of the men were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. In December 1992, the convictions were ruled unsafe and quashed by the Court of Appeal after it was decided that the police investigating the murder had acted improperly. The wrongful conviction of the three men has been called one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in recent times. The police insisted that the men had been released purely on a legal technicality, that they would be seeking no other suspects, and resisted calls for the case to be reopened. In January 2002, new DNA technology enabled forensic scientists led by Angela Gallop to obtain a reliable crime scene DNA profile. The extracted profile led police to the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, who confessed to White's murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Gafoor received a shorter minimum tariff (the length of time before a prisoner may be considered for parole) than had been given to the wrongfully convicted men, due to the reduction for a guilty plea, highlighting a controversial feature of the sentencing guidelines. In 2004, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) began a review of the conduct of the police during the original inquiry. Over the next 12 months around 30 people were arrested in connection with the investigation, 19 of whom were serving or retired police officers. In 2007, three of the prosecution witnesses who gave evidence at the original murder trial were convicted of perjury and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. In 2011, eight former police officers were charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Their subsequent trial was the largest police corruption trial in British criminal history. A further four police officers were due to be tried on the same charges in 2012. In November 2011, the trial collapsed when the defence claimed that copies of files which they said they should have seen had instead been destroyed. As a result, the judge ruled that the defendants could not receive a fair trial and they were acquitted. In January 2012, the missing documents were found, still in the original box in which they had been sent to South Wales Police by the IPCC.

Senedd building
Senedd building

The Senedd building (Welsh pronunciation: [ˈsɛnɛð]) in Cardiff houses the debating chamber and three committee rooms of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament; Welsh: Senedd Cymru, formerly the National Assembly for Wales). The 5,308-square-metre (57,100 sq ft) Senedd building was opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 1 March 2006, Saint David's Day, and the total cost was £69.6 million, which included £49.7 million in construction costs. The Senedd building is part of the Senedd estate that includes Tŷ Hywel and the Pierhead Building. After two selection processes, it was decided that the debating chamber would be on a new site, called Site 1E, at Capital Waterside in Cardiff Bay. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect Lord Rogers of Riverside won an international architectural design competition, managed by RIBA Competitions, to design the building. It was designed to be sustainable with the use of renewable technologies and energy efficiency integrated into its design. The building was awarded an "Excellent" certification by the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), the highest ever awarded in Wales, and was nominated for the 2006 Stirling Prize. The Senedd building was constructed in two phases, the first in 2001 and the second from August 2003 until it was handed over to the then National Assembly for Wales in February 2006. Between phases, the National Assembly changed contractors and the project's management structure, but retained Lord Rogers of Riverside as the scheme architect. The building was nearly six times over budget and four years and 10 months late, compared to the original estimates of the project in 1997. Total costs rose due to unforeseen security measures after the 11 September attacks, and because the National Assembly did not have an independent cost appraisal of the project until December 2000, three years after the original estimate. Phase 2 costs rose by less than 6% over budget, and that phase was six months late.