The captain of HMS Queen Elizabeth, the British Royal Navy's largest and most powerful warship, has been stripped of his command for allegedly misusing an official car on weekends, media reports said today.
The Royal Navy confirmed that Commodore Nick Cooke-Priest, 50, had been reassigned to a new role, without giving a reason.
But navy sources told the BBC that his removal was over his use of a car of the Ministry of Defence for personal trips.
A new commanding officer has been appointed to the aircraft carrier, the report said.
It is believed that major Royal Navy warships and their captains are loaned a car for use on official duties.
However, according to The Sun, an official investigation found he had used the Ford Galaxy as if it was his own and found him guilty of an "error of judgement".
The HMS Queen Elizabeth, commissioned in 2017, is the lead ship of the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers, the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy. It is capable of carrying up to 40 aircraft.
The report noted that while the offence may appear relatively minor, it was felt that his position had become untenable and that the commanding officer must be beyond reproach.
A Royal Navy spokesman said: "We can confirm Captain Nick Cooke-Priest has been reassigned to a new role."
"We can only say that management action is ongoing and it would therefore be inappropriate to comment further," he said.
Commodore Cooke-Priest, who joined the Royal Navy in 1990, had been in command of HMS Queen Elizabeth since October.
A former Royal Navy Captain told Sky News: "This was an honest mistake that should have been dealt with swiftly at flotilla level.
"It wasn't and has now escalated far too far. The navy hasn't got enough people as it is - they certainly shouldn't be dismissing their very best," the former officer was quoted as saying.
Your genes decide whether you will own a dog or not
The choice of getting a dog at home is heavily influenced by an individual's genetic make-up, says a study, suggesting that genetic variation explains more than half of the variation in dog ownership.
For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists looked into the heritability of dog ownership using information from 35,035 twin pairs from the Swedish Twin Registry.
"We were surprised to see that a person's genetic make-up appears to be a significant influence in whether they own a dog," said study lead author Tove Fall, Professor at University of Uppsala in Sweden.
"As such, these findings have major implications in several different fields related to understanding dog-human interaction throughout history and in modern times," Fall said.
Although dogs and other pets are common household members across the globe, little is known how they impact our daily life and health.
"Perhaps some people have a higher innate propensity to care for a pet than others, Fall added.
The researchers found concordance rates of dog ownership to be much larger in identical twins than in non-identical ones -- supporting the view that genetics indeed plays a major role in the choice of owning a dog.
"These findings are important as they suggest that supposed health benefits of owning a dog reported in some studies may be partly explained by different genetics of the people studied," said Carri Westgarth, Professor at the University of Liverpool in Britain.
The next obvious step is to try to identify which genetic variants affect this choice and how they relate to personality traits and other factors such as allergy, the researchers noted.
