Choice of Weapon - Fence Panel

Choice of weapon - Fence panel 

Window cleaner who used a fence panel to attack his friend is sent to prison for six months: The victim of a bottling attack, who then assaulted another man, has been jailed for six months. Window cleaner Thomas Phillips was left covered in blood after being slashed over the head and shoulders, Bristol Crown Court heard. But he then attacked Joseph Youhill with a fence panel, as Mr Youhill screamed: "I haven't done anything!"

Phillips, 26, of Locking Road, Weston-super-Mare, pleaded guilty to affray in August last year. Judge Julian Lambert told him: "The offence of affray is directed at the protection of the public. "It was a wild, wild scene. It was very grave disorder and it would have been terrifying for people watching this."

Neil Treharne, prosecuting, said in August last year police responded to a report of a fight in progress at the rear of Courtenay Walk, Weston-super-Mare. Officers arrived to find a topless Phillips covered in blood, having been stabbed by a broken bottle, the court was told. Police spoke to witnesses who saw Phillips being struck, and how Phillips was kicking another man on the ground and struck him with fence panel.

Phillips told police he had been out drinking and was "six out of ten drunk". He said Mr Youhill was also drunk, they argued and there was some pushing and shoving. He said he was then bottled and he went into "defence mode", utilising the fence panel as a weapon.

Phillips had seven previous convictions for 15 offences, including public order and battery as a juvenile and two charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Farah Rashid, defending, said: "He comes to court ready, knowing the likelihood of receiving an immediate custodial sentence."

Miss Rashid urged the judge to give her client credit for a timely guilty plea. She said it was "cloudy" as to how and where trouble started, and who was involved. Miss Rashid said: "He fully accepts he was violent. He picked up this fence panel and hit it at his friend after he had been stabbed."

The Power Of No - The Gift Of Squeegee

He used the money to buy a squeegee and parlayed his token donation into a window washing service. But McGee was even more inspired to see what happened next.

The Surprising Power of a Gift of ‘No’ (by Collette Caprara): The gift of “no”—captivated participants at The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Antipoverty Forum. The tale was told by the gift’s donor, Patrick McGee, the prison initiatives manager of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP).

The Prison Entrepreneurship Program is a nonprofit organization that links the nation’s top executives, entrepreneurs and MBA students with convicted felons, providing an entrepreneurship “boot camp” and re-entry programs to prevent recidivism and maximize self sufficiency and transform broken lives.

From personal experience and from his service to incarcerated men, McGee is a firm believer in self-determination, having witnessed the power an entrepreneurial venture can have in providing a threshold to becoming a productive, contributing member of society, even for those whose personal history dims prospects for employment.

So, when one of McGee’s nephew in his early teens asked if he would buy him a pair of athletic shoes, McGee declined the role of the generous uncle. He said, “No.” But he did give his nephew $15, and suggested that he make the most of it.

And his nephew did. He used the money to buy a squeegee and parlayed his token donation into a window washing service. But McGee was even more inspired to see what happened next.

The teen noticed that many of the homes that he visited in his neighborhood needed address markings on their front curbs. In response, he invested a portion of his earnings in stencils and spray paint and broadened his business to include that new service. In time, he had earned enough money to purchase a lawnmower, and soon his lawn-care service expanded to the point where he hired additional youths from his community to take on a portion of his growing list of clients.

McGee reported that his nephew is now finally old enough to get his driver’s permit and that he is very excited about getting his license—not as most teens are, with visions of cruising the streets with friends, but with a plan to purchase a truck to take his growing enterprise on the road. McGee summed up his story with a wink and a declaration: “That is a pretty good return on the gift of a No and $15!”

Had McGee chosen to purchase those athletic shoes, they may well have been replaced and discarded by now. In contrast, his small contribution came with a lesson that will serve his nephew for a lifetime.

German Politician & Window Cleaner Faces 5 Years For Tattoo

Window cleaner & Politician Marcel Zech, 27, is accused of displaying this tattoo showing Auschwitz and a Nazi slogan in public at a pool in Oranienburg, 15 miles outside of Berlin.

German charged over 'tattoo of Nazi death camp: Zech, a member of a state council, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if convicted under strict laws which ban the display of Nazi imagery. He is a member of the far-right National Democratic Party, and won a seat on the council of the state of Barnim, which is in north-east Germany and borders Poland. Zech made the pool visit on November 21, where he was pictured with his tattoo on display.

Local police launched a manhunt at the start of this month to find the man's identity, which led prosecutors in the town of Neuruppin to name Zech on Friday. Zech has a criminal record for race hate crimes. In June this year he was ordered to pay €360 after posing as a police officer to try to learn the identities of anti-fascist demonstrators who tore down his party's posters in his hometown.

In a 2013 court appearance he was fined €1,200 for assault. He won his council seat in 2014. He works as a window cleaner and, according to local media reports, has been seen at least once before swimming in a lake with his tattoos on show. On his stomach he has the old Reich eagle tattooed - not a forbidden symbol. On his left arm he has a black sun, a typical Nazi-era symbol. Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence agency, lists him as a 'neo-Nazi'.

He belongs to one group which provocatively buried a wooden swastika in the ground opposite the gates of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Zech has so far declined to comment on the charges.

A German man has been charged with incitement to hatred after he was pictured with a tattoo apparently of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. The tattoo has the slogan "To Each His Own", which was on the gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The photo was taken at a swimming pool in the town of Oranienburg, north of Berlin, at the end of November.

German media named the man as Marcel Zech, a member of the far-right National Democratic Party. Mr Zech sits on the council in the district of Barnim in eastern Germany. The trial process has been sped up, German media reports say, and is scheduled to start on 22 December. Germany has strict laws against the promotion of Nazi ideology in Germany. The punishment for Mr Zech if he is convicted could be as much as five years in prison.

Artist Jonathan Meese was prosecuted in 2013 for giving Nazi salutes at an event the previous year, but successfully argued the gesture was part of an interview-turned-art performance and was acquitted. The latest case comes after several violent incidents this year at reception centres for migrants in Germany. A senior German intelligence official told the BBC in October that Germany's decision to take in asylum seekers was fuelling a resurgence in the far right.

UK Window Cleaner Abused The Trust Of Customers

Giving window cleaners everywhere a bad name.

Man watched where householders kept their cash while doing his round: The customers of window cleaner Stephen Garner probably thought he would keep an eye out for burglars as he did his round. But little did they know he was checking where his clients kept their cash so he could come back and clean out more than their double glazing.

The dad has now been sent to prison for three years and four months after stealing from three of his customers and forcing his way into 88-year-old Mary Surrey’s home before fleeing when she looked up from her bed to see him standing in the doorway. Charlie Gabb, prosecuting at Southampton Crown Court, said the 36-year-old used “the guise and cover of his window cleaning business”. “It was clearly the means by which he came upon these houses and did what he did,” he added.

Garner, of Northam Road, Southampton, had been cleaning the windows of Ysobel Purkis home in Hordle, near Lymington, for more than two years and it was his fingerprints found on a money box from which £420 had gone missing on June 17 this year, the court heard. “She trusted him,” Mr Gabb said. “She made the mistake of allowing him to see her going into a room to collect cash and emerging from that room and paying him. That told him there was cash in the house and that’s where she kept it.”

Another customer, teacher Suzannah Mclean, found the £60 she had left on her worktop at her Lymington home was missing after witnesses saw Garner visit on November 10, Mr Gabb said. “She trusted him too. He looked through the window and saw the money and walked into the kitchen before making a very hasty exit,” he said.

Mr Gabb told the court the crimes put Garner in breach of a community order of unpaid work imposed on January 5 for stealing from a handbag on the kitchen table of a window cleaning customer aged in her 80s last year. Garner admitted breaching the community order and the three new burglary charges.

David Lyons, defending, said his client wanted to make a “sincere, unconditional and abject apology” to Mrs Surrey, who was in court. Mr Lyons cited Garner’s “chequered late youth” and his fall into depression as well as a “toxic” mix of irregular use of anti-depressants and drinking as factors in the crimes. “He’s thrown his business away, his relationship and his liberty,” he said.

Judge Derwin Hope said Garner had 18 previous offences and had “abused the trust” of his customers. “It’s not just the money you stole but the manner in which you acted,” he said. Garner was given three years for each of the three burglaries but with those sentences to run at the same time. He received an extra four months for breaching the community order he was serving for theft from a house and two counts of making false representation last year.