Suspended Jail Sentence For Fiddling Window Cleaner + Other News

Former Carlisle window cleaner fiddled £44,000 benefits: A former Carlisle window cleaner who falsely claimed nearly £45,000 in benefits was spared jail. Stephen Nicholson (pictured), 58, of Linden Terrace, Harraby, was handed a 36-week suspended jail sentence after admitting two counts of making false statements to the Department of Work and Pensions. Carlisle Crown Court heard Nicholson had up to £40,000 in the bank and in pensions at one stage while he was claiming the benefits cash. Prosecutor Kim Whittlestone told the court that between 2002 and 2008, Nicholson claimed £21,409 in income support. He also claimed £18,445 in housing benefit and £4,163 in council tax benefit from 2004.
But the cash hoard and pensions Nicholson had failed to reveal on his benefits application forms came to light in 2008. The court also heard that at the time of making the claims Nicholson suffered from health issues including obsessive compulsive disorder. Defending, Erinnaz Mushtaq said: “Given his age and lack of convictions, this defendant is unlikely to trouble the courts again. “These proceedings have had a profound effect on him. “It has been a punishment in itself.”
Nicholson has already paid back around £25,000 of the benefits cash. The judge, recorder Kevin Talbot, said in sentencing: “You failed to declare that you were in possession of savings over the prescribed limit. At one point, your total savings amounted to something in the order of £40,000. “Ordinarily for benefits frauds on the scale to which I have referred and over the sort of period I have referred...there should follow an immediate significant custodial sentence. But Mr Talbot said that Nicholson’s guilty plea, lack of previous convictions and mitigating health issues had been taken into consideration. “Your offence is so serious that neither a fine nor community sentence can be justified,” he added. Nicholson was handed the jail term which was suspended for 12 months. He is due to face confiscation proceedings at Carlisle Crown Court on August 20.

Orinda - Fire district report: Live power lines near two critically burned men trapped on a cherry picker this month delayed their rescue, Moraga-Orinda Fire District officials said this week. "The incident had an extended and difficult rescue due to the seriousness of electrical emergencies and the potential for additional injuries or death," said a fire district report released Tuesday night. The rescue crew needed more than 30 minutes to pull the injured men from the cherry picker, which had touched a high-power line, according to the report. Some witnesses said that police and fire departments responded too slowly to the June 5 accident. The firefighters' actions were appropriate given the situation, the fire district chief said Wednesday.
"I understand (witnesses') frustration with how long it took," Chief Randy Bradley said. "Time slows down in emergencies and seconds feel like minutes, so I understand that. But again, from an emergency responder's perspective, we did it the right way." Jose Herrera, 51, and Eduardo Guerra, 30, were washing windows June 5 at the Vintage office building at 25 Orinda Way when their cherry picker touched the power lines. The resulting electrical shock severely burned both men, who are employees of a Santa Clara window cleaning company. They were taken by aircraft to a San Jose burn unit, where they remained in critical condition Wednesday.
Bradley said that several challenges delayed the rescue, including the need for PG&E clearance before raising a ladder near the power lines. Firefighters were right to make the area safe for themselves and bystanders before rescuing the men, he said. According to the report, firefighters arrived at the building at 9:55 a.m., six minutes after receiving a 911 call. The department's ladder truck, seven miles away in Moraga, was summoned at 9:53 and arrived on scene at 10:05, the report said. PG&E's approval came at 10:25 a.m., according to the report. The men were pulled from the cherry picker four minutes later.
Another problem was that firefighters usually at a station 500 feet from the accident instead were a quarter-mile away at a training exercise. Disconnecting equipment and driving around road closures for the weekly farmers market slowed them, Bradley said. The first police officer arrived at 9:53 a.m., according to Orinda police Chief Jeff Jennings. Police officers' primary duty was crowd and traffic control, he said. Police, firefighters and others tried unsuccessfully to use the cherry picker's controls to bring the basket down. Fire officials also were unable to contact the equipment maker for instructions on lowering the basket manually.
Herrera's and Guerra's families declined request for interviews. The state division of Occupational Safety and Health is investigating the accident. An OSHA spokeswoman said such investigations typically take three to four months to complete. One person who saw the accident remained skeptical Wednesday. The fire department's timeline is off by about 15 minutes, said witness Russell Abraham, who was in the Rite Aid parking lot. "I was looking at my watch, saying, 'What the hell is taking these guys so long?' " he said. "That's why people were so angry. It was at least 15 minutes, if not 20, before somebody showed up." Full breaking news story here.


A window cleaner works at Rosenblatt Stadium, in Omaha, Neb. This year's College World Series, starting Saturday, June 19th, will be the last one played at Rosenblatt Stadium. Every year since 1950, the Division I championship has culminated with the College World Series at the ballpark atop a hill in Omaha, Neb. Come Saturday, the series will begin its last run at Rosenblatt before moving to a new downtown stadium in 2011.

Businesses in Toronto are poised to profit from the G20 summit as controversy looms over its hefty price tag. Simon Tucker, who has been sent to Toronto from Sarnia, Ont., to help the city prepare for the G20, said money spent on the summit is helping his business, as well as Toronto companies. The cost of hosting the G8 and G20 summits this month in Ontario has exceeded $1 billion. Tucker, who works for Sharp Solutions, has been in Toronto with a crew since May installing a shatterproof protective film on the glass of some downtown Toronto buildings. It's a security measure in case there are violnt protests. "If there is a bomb or a Molotov cocktail thrown at the glass, all the glass stays in place [and] there are no flying shards," he said. "In explosions that's what actually injures people - the flying glass." Tucker said he expects the two months of G20-related work will double or possibly triple his company's bottom line this year. The G20 summit is scheduled for June 26 and 27 at Toronto's Metro Convention Centre.

Despite the cumbersome process, local businesses do have chances to gain lucrative government contracts with the help of the Colorado Procurement Technical Assistance Center. Governments at all levels buy almost any kind of product or service a company offers -- even a small business, said PTAC Director Tom Elam during a workshop on how to access government contracts at Morgan Community College on Tuesday afternoon. "They buy everything," he said. Ads for government contracts go out with 14 to 20 requests for bids every day, said Pam Shaddock, regional director for Sen. Mark Udall, whose office helped bring the workshop to Morgan County. These requests are for both products and services, from paper and furniture to window cleaning.

Big plans for little unit: Dunedin-based Farra Engineering has forged a niche export market in manufacturing large high-rise building maintenance units (BMU's) during the past 20 years, but has just built a world-first with a light-weight, mobile unit. During the past 20 years Farra has generated tens of millions of dollars in export receipts manufacturing more than 50 building maintenance units, some weighing up to 50 tonnes each and worth more than $1 million apiece.
The standard units run on roof-top rails across some of the world's tallest high-rises, giving access from the cages slung hundreds of metres below for window and facade maintenance and cleaning. The latest Farra BMU, worth $300,000, weighs two tonnes and has a 250kg payload, but can be dismantled and shifted around in hotel lifts and through doorways; to reach inaccessible areas up to 150m below the BMU.
Farra Engineering manager of engineering and design division, Marc Murray, said about 18 months of research and development had gone into the mobile BMU, and said its portability was unique and it was the smallest known unit of its kind in the world. He envisaged multiple uses for buyers, especially in the Asian market and cities with many high rises. "It can be broken down; with the 1 tonne counterweight and 1 tonne machine able to be taken through doors and put in lifts," he said. The architecture of some new high rises meant a standard BMU could not be installed.
He said Hong Kong was a good example of where the portable unit could be used toward the end of construction time, as without the 1 tonne cage its pay-load hanging directly off the wire ropes would increase from 250kg to 400kg; such as window frames, for glass installation or the delivery of building materials or fittings, in lieu of a lift from a tower crane. Farra, which received its first order for the new unitafter beginning research and development, is now concentrating on marketing the mobile BMU in Hong Kong and further afield around Asia. The mobile BMU would take three staff about four months to build, and while the first unit was priced at $300,000, this figure would be expected to drop as more orders were received, Mr Murray said. The company is presently working on building two of the larger "standard" BMUs, destined for Auckland and Brisbane, the latter being a 20-tonne model.

Law still ignored on workers' heat breaks: Workers toiling under the afternoon sun were a rare sight during yesterday’s first compulsory two-and-a-half hour midday break, but not as rare as the Ministry of Labour might have hoped for. The break, introduced to shelter and cool workers from peak temperatures between 12.30pm and 3pm for the next three months, put most contractors on guard to keep their employees indoors and rested. During break hours, dozens of work areas in the capital and Dubai were left with empty window-washing gondolas and vacant construction sites. Near the capital’s Central Souq around noon, streams of gardeners and scaffolding workers crossed roads to board buses back to their accommodations. Narindar Singh, 52, from India, said his team had been working since 7am. They had not been informed about their rights, which are that their employers must provide them well-ventilated shelter for rest during the specified time every day until September 15. Steven Van der Vyver, the health and safety manager for Dutco Balfour Beatty, said at other sites workers were given airconditioned rooms and mattresses to lie on.

Men admit manslaughter over street attack in 2000: Two men who attacked a man and left him in a pool of blood in a Guildford street almost 10 years ago have admitted manslaughter. Stephen Puttock and Barry Stretch set upon Keith Nicholson after they had been thrown out of a bar on September 17, 2000. The 62-year-old retired builder, of South Road in Guildford, then suffered a heart attack and died in hospital. Puttock, 29, and Stretch, 35, were arrested five years later and sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder in 2007. But the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial and window cleaner Puttock and jobless Stretch walked free last year after the jury was unable to reach a verdict. They had been in jail for 1,083 days.

A man who police said twice tried to lure a 13-year-old into his pickup Monday in Titusville told investigators that he was in the neighborhood to have "safe sex" with a prostitute. The police responded and stopped Harper's Nissan at South Street and Deleon Avenue, two blocks from where the girl was first lured. Harper gave officers consent to enter his vehicle. Inside, they found three folded pocketknives, rope and black latex gloves. Harper said he needs the equipment for his window-cleaning business but would not offer further explanation as to how the items are used, Edens wrote in her report.

An MP who is axing several of his constituency staff has blamed tighter new parliamentary allowances for the cuts. Rob Flello, who represents Stoke-on-Trent South, will make three workers at his Meir constituency office redundant later this month. They include the deputy leader of Stoke-on-Trent City Council's Labour group, Councillor Tom Reynolds, and Jane Heggie, who has been the MP's political assistant for the past five years. Mr Flello, pictured, told The Sentinel he "bitterly" regrets having to lose his employees. But he said he was placed in an "impossible" position by restrictions on MPs' staffing budgets. After this month, his constituency office staff will be cut from four to three, as he is taking on two new employees. All MPs currently receive staffing allowances of £109,548 in addition to their basic £64,766 annual salaries."We even have to pay things like window cleaning costs out of our staff budgets now, instead of our general office expenses.

A Teesside window cleaner, who almost died in a vicious assault by Bristol Rovers player David Pipe, has spoken of his relief that his attacker is behind bars. Rhys Morris, 29, from Middlesbrough, spoke out after Pipe, pictured, was jailed for three years and two months for grievous bodily harm with intent. The 26-year-old thug had been on a nine-hour binge in Bristol, when he hit Mr Morris with a bottle of wine on September 16, last year. Bristol Crown Court heard Pipe, of Barkleys Hill, Stapleton, was drunk on a cocktail of double vodka and sambuca, when he smashed the part-drunk bottle over Mr Morris’ head in a row over a girl outside a nightclub. His victim suffered two skull fractures in the attack, including a depressed fracture which pushed bone into his brain. He had to have three metal plates inserted in his head after he was left with a four-inch hole in his skull. The court heard that following the attack Mr Morris suffered headaches, falls, short-term memory loss and hadn’t worked since the attack. He said that in March he returned home to be cared for by his family, had difficulty sleeping and took tablets to stop fits. Mr Morris said after the case: “He’s got what he deserves and I hope being in jail teaches him a lesson.” Following the violent incident, the footballer was sacked from Bristol Rovers.

Most people have just one pedicurist, but a new salon has opened in London where you can have your toes worked on by 150 beauticians at the same time. The only thing is they're fish. Yes, the vast majority of staff at Aqua Sheko in Kensington, west London, are miniature carp no more than four inches long. And to them, sucking dead skin from your feet is not so much work as lunch. There's no doubt that the feet I pull out of the water, after 30 minutes, are lighter and tinglier than the ones I put in. They're smoother and a lot less lino-like around the soles and heels. The local window cleaner is impressed, too. "Very nice," he tells Ho and Chan. "Could your fish get rid of my corns, too?" The answer is yes, provided he comes back for a couple of follow-up sessions. For generations, it seems these finned therapists (species Garra rufa) have been employed in the treatment of skin conditions far worse than window cleaner's toe or athlete's foot.

York coroner issues warning after heroin deaths of Scott Wade and Adrian Leetham: Inquests have heard how two men – both in their 30s – died in their York homes after using heroin. York Coroner Donald Coverdale warned that even small quantities of the drug could kill, particularly in the case of people who were not regular users. “Any injection of heroin can have fatal consequences,” he said. The hearing heard Mr Wade, an unemployed window cleaner, was known to have smoked cannabis in the past, but not to have used heroin. He was in a good, normal mood when he was last seen and went up to bed, but the following day he was found dead on the bedroom floor. Injection marks were found on him and tests on blood and urine samples showed the presence of heroin.

Day in Pictures: A window cleaner abseils down the side of the Sage music center in Gateshead, England (U.K.). AP Photo/Scott Heppell.