"Teacher lied about involvement in killing spree to get day off"

From The Metro:

Derek McGlone once told his school he would be able to come into work as he was being held in custody after having shot and killed a dozen people in the cinema. He claimed to be at the police station using his one phone call and was heard shouting "No cell can hold me!" just before the line went dead.

After admitting the lie, the 42-year-old head of music, who played lead guitar on Led Zeppelin's 2008 reunion album, said he was "embarrassed and sorry" about his actions and insisted he still wanted to teach. McGlone appeared at a General Teaching Council Scotland hearing where the panel found his fitness to teach was impaired.

His other excuses for skipping days at work included telling a deputy head that he had to go to the airport to plant a bomb, despite being at home in Glasgow. He had also gone on drunken Facebook rants, threatening to kill other staff "in cold blood".

McGlone made false statements about his absence from Calderhead High School, North Lanarkshire, between June 2008 and May last year. He admitted three charges brought by the GTCS, including lying about being a senior Al Qaeda commander in the Syrian civil war.

On his return, he was excluded from the staff biscuit club for a year.

Re: France’s Tobin Tax

From City AM:

Why no mention of perhaps the oldest financial transaction tax in the world – the UK’s stamp duty. It’s been running since 1694, is levied at 0.5 per cent, and raises £3bn a year. Why do opponents only ever mention the failed Swedish example?

Jon Slater.

I'm not sure if he's arguing for or against transaction taxes, but it is staggering how inconsistent the anti-TT people are.

As far as I can see, Stamp Duty is a bad tax, so let's rail against that before we start making snide comments about other countries' tax systems. And if I'm wrong, then surely we should be encouraging other countries to introduce a 0.5% charge on sales and purchases of shares (most countries which had such a tax have phased it out over the last ten or twenty years).

Olympic Tourism

From The Independent:

[Jeremy Hunt] said he was not disappointed by reports of empty streets and a dramatic fall in trade since the Games began.

"It is very difficult to predict what will actually happen to consumer spending in one part of London during something like an Olympic games because the upheaval is so huge. We are hoping to come away net positive in terms of the overall period of the Games but we don't know."

Well, not really. Economists have looked at the figures for the last three Olympiads and if Jeremy Hunt had done the same, he'd know that they show no or little tourism boost, either short- or long-term from hosting the Olympics.

What you get from the Olympics is a three-week sporting/marketing festival. That's it. Love the sport, but it has to be pointed out that we are paying a huge amount of money for the right to see the handball from the inside of a stadium in London rather than the inside of a stadium in Paris.

"Giant, ten-feet-deep sinkhole on New York street almost swallows two cars"

From The Daily Mail:
Residents of a Brooklyn street were shocked to discover a large chunk of their street had collapsed creating a 25-by-12-foot sinkhole that almost swallowed two cars.

The sinkhole was said to be between ten and 15-feet-deep and was created by a broken sewer line and residents say it is a common occurrence in the area.

Thank G-d for that, I was worried that it might be due to catastrophic climate change or something. But there again, I'm not too worried about giant sinkholes in the street as I park my car on the drive.

"The precise scope of the contract is still being defined"

From investegate.co.uk:

The Department for Work and Pensions has today announced the award of three regional contracts to deliver health and disability assessments for the new Personal Independence Payments (PIP). Capita (LON:CPI) has been awarded one of the three contracts, to deliver assessments across central England and Wales.

The precise scope of the contract is still being defined but it is anticipated to be worth around £140m over 5 years. PIP, which is part of the Government's welfare reform agenda, will replace Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for people of working age (16 to 64) from 8 April 2013, and is designed to better reflect today's understanding of disability.

Assessments will be provided for new claimants of PIP as well as existing claimants of DLA. The assessments will be delivered through a network of local consultation centres across central England and Wales, utilising both existing Capita centres and those of disability group partners, and through home visits.

I think this falls within Bob E's definition of deficit spending: the government pretends to receive services and corporatists pretend to provide them.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (226)

It's a quiet news day, apart from HM Government chucking another £80 billion of subsidised money at their chums in the banking sector, so let's crack on with the series.

The self-appointed Home-Owner-Ist shock troops (i.e. The Taxpayers' Alliance) dreamed up the splendid new expression "dry tax charges", which they trot out e.g. here:

"Taxes on property that people already own - such as Council Tax and proposals for a Mansion Tax or Land Value Tax - are dry tax charges, not necessarily levied when people have the cash to pay them, which can cause serious hardship."

I've also had Faux Libertarians saying "OK, the landlord can pay the tax out of the rental income, but how's a homeowner going to pay it? His home doesn't generate any cash."

The "dry tax" nonsense is just the Poor Widow Bogey #8,942,753, but it misses the obvious. Apart from banks and bank note printers, no business generates cash. Car makers make cars. Cake makers make cakes. Workers work. And so on. What they do is exchange their output or services for cash (instead of consuming this themselves), and then use that cash to pay the tax.

Every homeowner is of course sitting on an asset which is more than capable of generating enough income to pay any LVT you can throw at them, namely the home itself - it's just that they want to consume/enjoy the rental value themselves. So to turn these nasty "dry tax charges" into lovely, slushy wet ones, all they have to do is rent their homes out to somebody else, and then take the cash which is left (i.e. the earned element plus the untaxed part of the ground rent element) and rent themselves somewhere to live in. Their landlord in turn will have no problem paying etc etc.

Where's the "serious hardship" here? It may happen that some people end up living somewhere smaller than they were used to, but nobody will be homeless. They'll whine that they can't find anywhere nice to live within their budget - but it was the self-same Homeys who dreamed up the idea of making people overpay for crappy housing, so as the saying goes: Taste democracy!

Psycho: Surprisingly good England manager

"Legendary author, playwright and hair stylist Vidal dies, aged 85"

From The Daily Mail and The Daily Mail:

The acerbic Vidal was known for creating the ‘wedge’ style haircut in the 1960s as well as best-selling novels such as Burr and Myra Breckenridge, the play The Best Man, and was the first stylist to allow his name to be used on products and salons.

In the 1960s and 70s he was a fixture on talk shows and other television programmes and feuded openly with Norman Mailer, Mia Farrow, Michael Caine and others. He also worked on screenplays and appeared in several beauty salons, including Bob Roberts and With Honors.

Along with such contemporaries as Mary Quant and Truman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers and hair stylists who were also genuine celebrities, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who had not read their books or had their hair cut by them knew who they were.

Celebrity stylist and New York columnist Oscar Blandi said Sassoon made him fall in love with the hair business and showed him the 'true art of writing'.

"He truly changed the world of hair and beauty," Blandi wrote. "He was definitely the most innovative person ever to enter the industry. And his books were real page turners."

"Bali Teenager Passes Out Marrying Cow He Had Sex With"

Spotted by Chuckles & James Higham in Jakarta Globe:

A Balinese teenager caught in the act of intercourse with a cow passed out on Friday when he was forced to marry the animal in a ceremony witnessed by hundreds of curious onlookers.

As the Jakarta Globe reported earlier in the day, Ngurah Alit, 18, an unemployed youth from the seaside village of Yeh Embang in Jembrana, was caught stark naked positioned behind the cow in a rice paddy field. In his defense, Alit admitted to the act of bestiality but claimed the cow, which he believed was a young and beautiful woman, had wooed him with flattering compliments.

As part of a Pecaruan ritual, a ceremony to cleanse the village of the unholy act of a man mating with a cow, Alit was forced to “marry” the animal...

Fair enough, humiliate the lad a bit, he'll learn his lesson...

As part of the ceremony, Alit’s victim and new bride was drowned in ocean. Alit, on the other hand, was symbolically drowned and bathed on the beach.

That sounds like a very Islamic punishment to me. No wonder the cows hate us.

Another day, another desperate throw of the dice (46, approximately)

From the BBC:

A new scheme to prompt banks and other lenders to make more money available to homeowners and businesses has come into operation.

Under the Funding for Lending initiative, the Bank of England will lend money at below-market rates to the financial institutions. The Bank will then monitor their progress in lending the cash out.

If they want businesses to have more money, they could just cut taxes on business a bit, and we also know that there never was much lending to businesses anyway, so why, I wonder, do homeowners need to borrow so much money?

But the lower borrowing costs being introduced by mortgage lenders are so far only being offered to people with large deposits.

Aaron Strutt, at mortgage brokers Trinity Financial, said: "Most deals attractive to first-time buyers, such as those at 90% or 95% loan-to-value, have not changed yet."

The introduction of the new lending scheme comes as the Nationwide building society said house prices had fallen last month for the fourth time in five months. The decline of 0.7% in July means prices are now 2.6% lower than they were a year ago, at an average of £164,389.

Oh I see.

They don't want to make more money available to homeowners or even homebuyers, all that cheap money is going to end up in the hands of homesellers. They are desperately trying to keep house prices up, which clearly is only for the benefit of people who own a house but don't need it, which is hardly a big chunk of the electorate, so mainly this is for the benefit of the usual suspects, the large landowners and banks, who will of course be paying "below-market rates" for all this lovely money the taxpayer is being forced to lend them merely so that some of them can borrow it back at, presumably, "market rates".