PHILADELPHIA — A porn star who was accused of using a handsaw and an ax to break into stores through their rooftops while his twin brother and occasional co-star acted as a lookout is going to prison for at least three years.
Taleon Gof…
Posts Tagged ‘Camden’
Taleon Goffney, Gay Porn Star, Going To Prison For Using Handsaw, Ax To Break Into Stores
July 17th, 2009 |
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Balls pumps £200m into classrooms
July 15th, 2009 |
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Emergency funds made available to ease crisis in primary school admissions, but are too late for this September’s intake
The schools secretary, Ed Balls, will today announce an emergency £200m plan to build hundreds of new classrooms and ease a growing crisis in the primary school admissions system.
The funding comes amid claims by councils that the recession is forcing up demand for state school places. One in five local authorities say they face exceptional rises in demand for primary places as parents chose state instead of private schools to save money and fewer move house when their child starts school. The survey, by the Local Government Association, also revealed a hike in demand for free school meals in 15% of local authorities, which are worst affected by the recession.
Ministers will make the announcement in parliament today, but it will not be in time to ease the crisis in places for this September. Councils will be expected to bid for their share of the £200m funding, setting out their need and explaining why they could not foresee the problem when birthrates began to rise a few years ago.
Official figures show a rise in the number of reception-aged pupils between January 2008 and January 2009 in 126 local authorities – with a 3.3% increase nationally. A recent report by London Councils, which represents local authorities in the capital, said 25 out of the city’s 33 authorities had capacity problems, with a total shortfall of 5,000 places expected next year. In Camden, north London, the council announced last week it is to rent a church hall to teach 90 pupils from September due to the shortage.
Other areas with problems include Sheffield, Bradford, Bristol and Hove. But it is a patchwork problem with about half a million surplus places in the system overall after several years of falling numbers.
The government has insisted that local authorities should be able to predict changes in population rates but a spokesperson for the LGA said that the recession brought exceptional circumstances which they could not have anticipated.
The LGA survey of council bosses found that just under 20% of local authorities had already witnessed a rise in demand for places, which they attributed to the recession and another 13% are predicting future rises.
Les Lawrence, the chairman of the LGA’s children’s board, said: “Predicting how many school places will be needed from year to year is a complex issue. Councils do their best to produce accurate calculations on how many children will be starting in their schools, but it is not an exact science and will vary from area to area.
“In the short-term, councils will be working with schools to help them find extra capacity and draft in extra teachers and support staff, but there also needs to be an emphasis on improving methods of forecasting for the future.”
A cross party group of MPs, called Balanced Immigration, claimed that immigration is compounding the problem in some areas of England, where the proportion of births to foreign-born women has risen from 17.1% in 2001 to 24.0 per cent in 2007, increasing the birthrate overall in some areas.
Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, co-chairmen of the group, said: “The need to increase funding for primary schools is a direct result of mass immigration feeding into our population. The number of births to foreign mothers has risen by 65% since 2001 while the number of births to UK-born mothers has only risen by 6.4%.
“This is a major reason for the pressure on our primary schools, but the government remain in denial about the consequences of their losing control of our borders. Instead they refer to “local circumstances”. This is deliberately misleading.”
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Mayor faces grilling over Clement expenses
July 15th, 2009 |
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Deputy mayor was forced to quit after discrepancies in claims came to light
Boris Johnson faces a grilling by the London assembly over his role in authorising the expenses of his former deputy, Ian Clement, who was forced to quit after discrepancies in his claims came to light.
The mayor of London will take questions at his monthly session with the full assembly, but has been criticised for refusing to face more detailed questioning by the panel, which scrutinises the business management and administration of the Greater London authority.
Johnson sent another deputy, Sir Simon Milton, to face the BMac committee last month to shed light on how Clement managed to pass through expenses in breach of the policy on the use of credit cards and expenses for months without a formal challenge.
It emerged during the meeting that Milton was not in a position to answer most of the questions and that Johnson had been signing off the claims since March due to a change in the expenses policy.
It also emerged that Johnson had known since last August that Clement was one of seven people in the building to have a credit card because Johnson had ticked him off for using it for expensive upgrades for flights to Beijing at the time.
When allegations that Clement had misused his credit card first surfaced, Johnson’s office insisted that the mayor had not known his deputy possessed one. The deputy mayor was disciplined for using the card for personal items – later repaid – but Johnson refused to sack him.
Clement quit soon after, when further irregularities came to light. Some of the Tory colleagues cited on his expenses came forward to say they had not been present at the time.
Clement also entertained City Hall colleagues and charged the taxpayer, in contravention of GLA rules. The matter has since been referred to the police.
Johnson said before the weekend he would take questions on his oversight of Clement’s expenses at the full London assembly, where questions are time-limited on a range of issues over a two-and-a-half hour session, or the BMac committee, “but not both”.
This prompted claims that the Tory mayor, who promised openness and transparency in his mayoralty, is seeking to limit the amount of scrutiny at the hands of the London assembly.
In what is expected to a heated round of exchanges, Johnson will be asked what he knew and when, and whether he acted swiftly enough.
Today’s meeting will also be used to take a vote on more detailed and regular publication of expenses claimed by both assembly members and the mayor’s advisors.
All but one of the 25 assembly members voluntarily published their expenses following the last BMac meeting.
Brian Coleman, the Tory member for Barnet and Camden, flatly refused, stating in the London Evening Standard that his expenses were “none of the public’s business”.
But Coleman relented the following day following pressure from Johnson’s office.
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Transgender Woman Dies In Voodoo Ritual
July 15th, 2009 |
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LUCILLE HAMILTON paid $621 to have her “spiritual grime” removed by a voodoo high priest in an ordinary townhouse on a winding street in Camden County, a friend said.
Hamilton, 21, a male living as a woman, flew in on Friday from her home in …
A once in a lifetime show
July 14th, 2009 |
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Delicate works by artists from Fra Angelico to Leonardo to include loans from the Uffizi in Florence
The British Museum’s collection of Italian Renaissance drawings is so fragile that its masterpieces are exhibited only once in a generation.
Next summer a chance to see these delicate objects will finally come around, as the museum launches an exhibition, in partnership with the Uffizi in Florence, of works on paper by artists from Fra Angelico to Leonardo.
The 100 or so works will span the period 1400-1510 and artists including Jacopo and Gentile Bellini, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Michelangelo and Raphael.
About half of the works will come from Florence, and some have never been shown in the UK before. Bringing the drawings from Florence together with those from London, said British Museum director Neil MacGregor, will “together allow a different reading of draughtsmanship from the period. It will allow a new engagement with this part of the Italian Renaissance.”
In typical British Museum style, the message is “only connect”; for the museum will at the same time mount an exhibition of West African sculpture of the same period. Works from the kingdom of Ife – a powerful, cosmopolitan city state in what is now Nigeria that flourished from the 12th to the 15th centuries – will form the focus of an exhibition for the first time outside Africa.
“They are works of absolutely comparable quality [to the Renaissance drawings],” said MacGregor of the strikingly finely worked, naturalistic sculptures.
The exhibitions together form a counterpoint to the blockbuster Moctezuma exhibition, opening this autumn, which will also focus on the early 16th century – this time on the last Aztec emperor before Spanish conquest. MacGregor said Mexican colleagues had been “astonishingly generous” in loans to the exhibition, which include the ceremonial throne-cum-altar of Moctezuma.
Alongside elaborate Aztec skulls, the exhibition will also show a selection of contemporary Mexican skulls created for the Day of the Dead, the festival energetically celebrated in Mexico on 1 November. The British Museum will also celebrate the feast, and, according to MacGregor, “large quantities of sugar skulls, the delicacy of the Day of the Dead, are already on order”.
MacGregor, launching the museum’s annual review, reported on the British Museum’s next big step: its “north-west development”, a 11,000 sq metre exhibition space and conservation centre.
Two-thirds of the funds for the £135m extension are secured, and, according to British Museum chair Niall FitzGerald, the museum is “shovel-ready” to start work on building, pending trustees’ go-ahead and planning permission from Camden council, a decision on which is expected later this month. English Heritage, said a museum spokeswoman, are fully backing the plans for the extension.
The new space, designed by Graham Stirk of Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, Sir Richard Rogers’s practice, is planned as a replacement for the reading room in the museum’s Great Court as the venue for large-scale exhibitions such as those recently devoted to Hadrian and Shah Abbas. Permission to use the reading room as a venue for exhibition expires in 2012 and, warned FitzGerald: “If we don’t have another space for our exhibitions that would be a catastrophe.”
The government has pledged £22.5m for the development; about £30m will come from the museum’s reserves and the balance, MacGregor was “hopeful and confident”, is being found from private donors.MacGregor said that a key challenge for the museum was getting its collection out on the road. In the last financial year, 2,500 objects from the museum were seen in other UK locations.
Transporting objects, he said, was “technically safe – the limits are now ones of resources and making sure there are places that can receive them”.
Developing the museum’s online facilities was also crucial. “By the end of this year there will be 2m objects online – well ahead of any major institution in the world,” said MacGregor. “Making available free digital downloads of the highest possible quality is the natural corollary of free entry to the museum.”
It was a year of growth for the institution, with visitor figures for 2008 at 5.93m, making it the most popular visitor attraction in the UK.
A number of important gifts had been made to the museum, and new galleries created for the matchless Percival David collection of Chinese art, which has been lent to the museum in perpetuity. It is, said MacGregor, the most important addition to the museum collection since the Sutton Hoo treasure in 1942.
The world around 1500: connecting the British Museum’s exhibitions
In 1492, Christopher Columbus sails to the Americas.
In 1498, Vasco da Gama reaches India after rounding the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1492, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Boabdilm, surrenders to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. In 1499, forced baptisms begin.
In 1502, Moctezuma becomes ruler of the Aztec empire (Aztec mask below); under him it reaches its largest size. In 1519, he and Cortés meet.
By the end of the 15th century, the kingdom of Ife in modern Nigeria begins to give way to Benin as a wealthy west African political and artistic centre.
In the early 16th century Benin sends an ambassador to Portugal; Portuguese missionaries are sent to Benin.
Somewhere between 1503 and 1507, Leonardo paints the Mona Lisa.
In about 1507, Raphael paints St Catherine of Alexandria, now in the National Gallery.
In 1513, Machiavelli writes The Prince.
In 1516, Rafael Perestrello, a cousin of Christopher Columbus, becomes the first European explorer to land on the southern coast of mainland China. The following year, the Portuguese send an expedition to try to set up trade relations with China in Guangzhou.
In the early 16th century, the Mughal empire begins its rise.
In 1503, Henry VII obtains a papal dispensation allowing his son Henry to marry his widowed daughter-in-law, Catherine of Aragon.
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