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The storm chaser and his wife

Posted on Nov. 12, 2009 at 11:00 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The story of the “balloon boy” came crashing down to earth yesterday when police said that they were going to charge his parents with criminal conspiracy.

The storm chaser and his wife, who claimed that their son had floated away in a home-made flying saucer over Colorado, face charges of conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and attempting to influence a public servant, as well as misdemeanour for filing a false police report. The parents face up to six years in jail for each criminal charge and a fine for the pearl jewelry lesser offence.

The authorities will also seek reimbursement of the cost of the rescue operation, which could run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one point rescuers planned to dangle from a helicopter and snatch the boy to safety. A number of aircraft were diverted away from the area.

The local sheriff, who originally defended the boy’s parents, did an about-face after the police re-interviewed Richard and Mayumi Heene and searched their house in Fort Collins. “These people are actors. Not only have they appeared on several reality TV shows and YouTube, we have since determined they met in acting school in Hollywood,” Jim Alderden, the Larimer County sheriff, said. “Needless to say, they put on a very good show for us and we bought it.”
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He added: “On the bizarre meter, this rates a 10.”

Mr Alderden said that the Heenes’ three sons — Falcon, 6, Ryo, 8, and Bradford, 10 — were all involved in a hoax. The sheriff cast doubt on Mr Heene’s claimed scientific credentials, saying that he had only a high school education. “He may be nutty, but he’s not a professor,” Mr Alderden said.

Investigators initially believed the Heenes when they raised the alarm on Thursday, saying that Falcon had taken off in a helium balloon that they had built in their back garden. Millions of people around the world watched on live television as the balloon floated for more than two hours across Colorado before it sprang a leak and landed 40 miles away with nobody aboard. Falcon was later discovered safe and sound and said that he had been hiding in the attic of the family’s garage.

Mr Alderdeen suggested yesterday that the boy might have been hidden somewhere else before he was “found”in the attic.

Mr Heene, a self-styled “psyience detective” who believes he is descended from aliens, repeatedly insisted that the balloon flight was not a akoya pearl publicity stunt. But Falcon gave the game away when he told his father during a television interview on Thursday night: “You said we did this for a show.”

The boy vomited repeatedly when he appeared beside his father on two breakfast TV shows the following day.

Richard and Mayumi Heene met in an acting class in California and lived in Burbank, near Hollywood, before moving to Colorado. The couple were members of the Screen Actors Guild, which refused to comment on their current membership status.

The Heenes had already appeared twice on the reality television show Wife Swap, in which mothers switch families for two weeks. The producers of the programme said that the Heenes had their own show in development but that the deal was now dead.

Robert Thomas, a researcher who worked with Mr Heene, told the Gawker website that he helped to prepare a reality television proposal with the amateur scientist that included mounting a media stunt with a weather balloon that “resembles a UFO”.

The reality show was to be billed as “MythBusters-meets-mad scientist” — 52 episodes in which Mr Heene would test various scientific theories. The proposal said that the UFO stunt would be “be the most significant UFO-related news event to take place since the Roswell crash of 1947, and the result will be a dramatic increase in awareness about the Heene family, our reality series, as well as the UFO phenomenon in general”.

Mr Thomas said that Mr Heene was finding it freshwater pearl hard to find enough work as a handyman and was obsessed with becoming famous. On Saturday morning, Mr Heene told reporters outside his house to submit questions in writing so he could answer them later. He ended up answering the sheriff’s questions instead.

Aides to Dr Abdullah said that

Posted on Nov. 12, 2009 at 10:59 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The White House has issued its strongest warning yet that President Karzai cannot count on continued US support if he fails to accept that Afghanistan’s fraudulent election has critically undermined his authority.

President Obama was said yesterday to freshwater pearl be more concerned at “whether there’s an Afghan partner” worth defending than with the politically fraught question of how many more troops to send, according to Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff and a central figure in White House deliberations on Afghanistan.

His rare public remarks were echoed by comments from Senator John Kerry, who has flown to Kabul to join efforts to persuade Mr Karzai to either accept a second round of voting or enter a power-sharing deal with his opponent, Dr Abdullah Abdullah.

The Karzai campaign has said it will not negotiate unless the incumbent is declared the outright winner of the August election. It raised the stakes further at the weekend by continuing to defy the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission.
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The commission has spent more than eight weeks examining 2,584 allegations of ballot-stuffing, phantom polling stations and police intimidation. Its findings are expected to cut the President’s lead to about 47 per cent when made public this week — a figure that would require a run-off.

Mr Emanuel and Mr Kerry are considered doves in the debate on whether to grant General Stanley McChrystal’s request for up to 40,000 more troops. But their comments reflect growing White House frustration over Mr Karzai’s refusal to compromise, despite the events of August.

“It would be reckless to make a decision on US troop levels if you haven’t done a thorough analysis of whether there’s an Afghan partner ready to fill the space that US troops would create,” Mr Emanuel told CNN.

Using similar language, Mr Kerry said it wheat pearl would be “entirely irresponsible for the President of the US to commit more troops” before the electoral process had run its course and “we know who the President is, and what kind of government we’re working with”.

Mr Kerry said that he believed official claims that a second vote could be arranged within two weeks, but the Afghan winter is looming. In a worst case scenario, a run-off vote could stall efforts to introduce a new American strategy until spring.

The French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, led diplomatic efforts in Kabul yesterday, meeting Mr Karzai and Dr Abdullah. He said they both expressed “a real will to work together”. Scenarios discussed include a run-off before winter, a run-off in spring, or “Abdullah not competing in the run-off”.

Aides to Dr Abdullah said that working with a “corrupt” Karzai government would be “like drinking dirty water” — potentially fatal. But rhetoric on round pearl both sides has softened with the arrival of Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to the UN, with a mission to bring the sides together.

Dr Abdullah has hinted that he will talk to Mr Karzai once results are announced, while diplomats say delegations from both sides have been meeting in secret over the past week.

The UK, US and UN have all urged Mr Karzai to seek a quick and peaceful resolution.

The British National Party has

Posted on Nov. 12, 2009 at 10:59 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The British National Party has launched an online assault on the two ethnic-minority members of the BBC Question Time panel who will take on Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, this week.

A posting on the BNP’s website derided Bonnie Greer, the writer and broadcaster, as a “black history fabricator”, and said that round pearl Baroness Warsi, the Conservative spokeswoman for community cohesion, who is of Pakistani origin, was a “product of Tory affirmative action”. The remarks came as the BBC struck back at ministers such as Peter Hain, the Welsh Secretary, and Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, who have criticised the corporation for inviting Mr Griffin on to Question Time.

Ric Bailey, the broadcaster’s chief political adviser, said that the BBC was legally bound to include the BNP and that if Mr Johnson wanted to change that he should outlaw the party.

Mr Bailey said: “If the politicians feel strongly that the BNP should not be on programmes like Question Time because of Keishi pearl their policies, they have the ability to take things through Parliament and change the law.”
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Mr Hain has written to the BBC warning that it could face legal action unless it suspended plans to have Mr Griffin on Question Time. Mr Hain argued that the BNP was “an unlawful body” because its whites-only membership rules breached discrimination legislation.

Thousands of protesters from groups such as Unite Against Fascism are expected to gather outside BBC Television Centre, in West London, when Question Time is filmed on Thursday.

Mr Bailey said that the BBC had a legal obligation to cover the BNP as it had won two seats in the European Parliament.If the party continued to enjoy similar levels of public support it is likely to be invited back on to biwa pearl the programme in the future.

A posting on the BNP website about Ms Greer focused on Radio 4’s In Search of the Black Madonna, which she presented in 2000. The party claimed that the show, which examined how European Catholics had worshipped in front of black icons, represented a “fabrication” of history.

In an interview on Sky News Mr Griffin said of Ms Greer: “I think she’s a bit wacky when she sets out to say that Europeans, throughout the Middle Ages, worshipped black women,” he said. “So she’s got quirky aspects but the British like an eccentric so I’m sure we’ll get on all right.”

Employers yesterday called

Posted on Nov. 12, 2009 at 10:58 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Employers yesterday called upon the Government to get to grips with its ballooning debts as a new study put the true size of the public sector’s net liabilities at £2,200 billion, almost three times official figures.

The CBI said that the Government needed to biwa pearl cut its planned spending by £120 billion over the next six years, amid forecasts that official figures due tomorrow will show that total net borrowing has surged by another £10 billion in the past month.

The true level of Government debt is equivalent to 157 per cent of national output and nearly three times as large as the £805 billion figure reported by the Office for National Statistics, according to a new book published by a centre-right think tank.

Brooks Newmark, the Conservative MP for potato pearl Braintree, Essex, says in The Hidden Bombshell, published today by the Centre for Policy Studies, that government debt is actually £2,200 billion. In the book, Mr Newmark argues that the UK’s public sector net debt is equivalent to £85,610 per household and in the last year has risen by £346 billion — or by £11,000 a second.
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Mr Newmark arrives at his figure by saying that official numbers do not take into account the full cost of projects financed through the private finance initiative (PFI), which by his calculation adds £139 billion to the public debt. “A major attraction of PFI is that, in theory, it transfers the risk of failure of a project from the Government to the private sector. However, in reality, the Government carries most of the risk ... £139 billion is a cautious figure as it does not include local PFI projects, some of which may fail,” Mr Newmark says.

Unfunded public sector pension liabilities, which the Government will need to pay, are also omitted and add a further £1,104 billion. Contingent liabilities, such as Network Rail, add another £22 billion. Finally, the £130 billion cost of recent interventions in the financial sector needs to be factored in — bringing the total “hidden liabilities” to £1,395 billion and the total debt to £2,200 billion.

The UK’s latest public finance figures are wheat pearl expected to show that net borrowing increased by £10.4 billion in September, taking cumulative net borrowing for the year to £80 billion.

The CBI called on the Chancellor to ensure that his Pre-Budget Report includes a credible plan for balancing the public finances by 2015-16, two years earlier than set out in the March Budget, in a bid to boost investor confidence and improve Britain’s economic prospects.

The CBI said the Government will need to reduce its spending by a total of £120 billion between now and then to balance its books. About £50 billion of these savings will need to be made between now and 2013 to allow for a slower economic recovery than the Government is predicting, with a further £70 billion needed after 2013.

John Cridland, the CBI’s deputy dir-ector-general, said: “We are facing the biggest peacetime deficit in our history and it is not simply going to disappear with the economic recovery. That is why we need a credible plan to convince financial markets and taxpayers alike that public finances will be restored to health.

“Just as families and businesses are tightening their belts up and down the country, the Government must decide what it can afford to deliver.”

National Express on Sunday

Posted on Nov. 12, 2009 at 10:57 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

National Express on Sunday night confirmed that it had received another takeover approach from Stagecoach despite its rival walking away from a bid last month.

The bus and trains group said it would consider the Stagecoach offer but would continue to work on an equity fund-raising to wheat pearl strengthen its balance sheet in the meantime.

In an unusual move, National Express released a statement last night confirming that an all-share offer had been received. Speculation that First Group, another bus and trains operator, had made an approach was denied.

It is understood that Brian Souter, Stagecoach’s chief executive, wrote to the National Express board over the weekend. He proposed that National Express shareholders should hold up to 40 per cent of a combined company. However, insiders said a 50/50 split would better reflect the earnings of the two groups and the Stagecoach offer is thus likely to be rebuffed.
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The statement from National Express hinted at its unhappiness with the Stagecoach offer. “For the avoidance of doubt, there can be no certainty that the approach by Stagecoach will lead to an offer being made for the group or as to the terms on which any offer might be made,” it said.

In its statement, Stagecoach said that it had approached National Express at the invitation of the board to indicate the terms under which it would be prepared to enter into talks about a merger of the two companies.

However, there was confusion last night over the extent of that invitation as National Express described the approach as a “disruption” to its business.

Stagecoach is under orders from the round pearl Takeover Panel to walk away from National Express for at least six months after dropping an earlier bid.

It was part of a consortium that was mulling over a bid for National Express during the summer. The Takeover Panel issued a “put up or shut up” order that required the consortium to make an offer or walk away.

Stagecoach dropped its bid while CVC Partners and the Cosmen Family of Spain, the two other consortium members, pressed ahead with a £765 million offer. That bid was ditched last week.

In its statement, National Express said: “The board believes that it is now necessary to rapidly conclude this phase of potential corporate activity to avoid further disruption to the business and to allow the group to secure additional equity funding before the end of 2009.”

National Express ran into difficulties this year when it was forced to give up the prestigious East Coast Mainline rail franchise. The company, which also operates the East Anglia rail franchise and numerous bus routes, is looking to raise an estimated £300 million from a rights issue by the biwa pearl end of this year. This will help the company to reduce its £977 million debt burden.

Shares in National Express slumped by 23 per cent to close at 362p on Friday after CVC and the Cosmens withdrew. The transport group is expected to hold a board meeting today to discuss the Stagecoach offer and whether to go ahead with the £300 million rights issue.