Twelve people have died within a week in separate wrong-way driving crashes in England and Ireland. In the most recent incident, seven people — including two police officers aged 37 and 38 — were killed early Saturday when a Volkswagen Passat being driven against traffic on the A66 motorway near Middlesbrough, northeastern England, collided head-on with a police car uninvolved in the preceding chase; an independent police watchdog has opened an inquiry. The deaths follow a crash last Sunday on the M9 motorway west of Dublin in which five teenagers travelling the wrong way were killed, prompting Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin to condemn what authorities describe as a social-media-driven trend of deliberate wrong-way driving on major roads.