ASBO for woman who twice sent hearse to ex-partner's house
A WOMAN twice phoned for a hearse to collect a body from a former partner’s house in sick hoax calls, a court heard.
Nicola Thomas, aged 45, also made a string of false complaints to police, saying she had been attacked by other people on several occasions, Plymouth magistrates were told. She has even reported herself as missing.
Nicola Thomas
Magistrates have banned her from making hoax calls for 10 years in a wide-ranging antisocial behaviour order. Dylan Sadler, applying for the order on behalf of Plymouth City Council, said she was a “prolific stalker and hoax caller”.
He added: “She called a hearse on two occasions to collect a body from the house. I do not think you can get any sicker.”
Mr Sadler said the former partner, who lives in Somerset, felt so intimidated by the harassment that she felt “imprisoned” in her own house.
Magistrates granted a seven-point order covering the next 10 years. Breaking any of its terms could land Thomas in prison. Thomas is banned from making any false complaints about any person to any public authority and from making hoax calls. She is also prohibited from calling 999 except for in a genuine emergency.
Mr Sadler said that as well as the harassment of the ex-partner, she had also made 18 complaints against her next-door neighbour. He added she had reported drug-dealing, antisocial behaviour and noise on the premises.
Mr Sadler said: “She is the archetypal neighbour from hell. If you live next door to her you can kiss goodbye to any quality of life. All the claims were unsubstantiated and false. She is someone who is quite willing to destroy the reputation, the peace, and the lives effectively of other people to satisfy some bitter desire within her.”
He added she had 17 aliases and had used three dates of births. Thomas told the court her real name was in fact Nicola Ryan.
Mr Sadler said she had made numerous complaints about named individuals including ex-partners, claiming that she had been assaulted or sent abusive text messages. She had also made a complaint a male intruder had raped her in her own home, the court heard.
Mr Sadler said she named a suspect and police had investigated for four months before deciding no crime had taken place. He added she then provided the police with little assistance in her allegations.
Mr Sadler said: “She makes it up as she goes along. All of this puts a strain on the resources of the emergency services, especially the police.”
Alex Travers, for Thomas, said she was vulnerable and suffered from anxiety and depression. She added that Thomas was in no fit state to challenge the council’s witnesses or to give evidence herself. Mrs Travers said she also had cirrhosis, needed real help from the health services and a carer regularly visited her home to provide help, but she was feeling more isolated in her own home. Mrs Travers questioned the evidence that she went out of her way to make people’s lives miserable.
She added: “When someone feels threatened or they are a victim of crime they are entitled to report it to police.”
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SIBA is the Society of Independent Brewers who since 1980 have represented the interests of the UK's burgeoning independent brewing sector. The Business Awards, now in their sixth year, invited entries from SIBA's 500+ brewer members into a number of categories such as Best Customer Support, Best E-Business, Best Pump Clip and Best Marketing.
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More than 30 firefighters spend the night tackling a fire at a pub in Chudleigh, Devon.
Fire at Coaching House pub in Chudleigh
Firefighters said the flames reached into the sky some 10m above the building. Video: Simon Grost
More than 30 firefighters have been called to a fire at a pub in Devon.
The blaze started at the Old Coaching House on Fore Street, Chudleigh, at about 20:00 GMT on Wednesday.
A hydraulic platform, water bowser and an incident command unit were called to the scene. Crews have been fighting the fire overnight.
At least two floors of the three-storey building, parts of which date back to the 17th Century, have been damaged, the fire service said.
Station Manager Matt Johnson, of Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service, said: "When we arrived, I could see that the roof was well alight and also starting to spread to the floor below.
"The flames were reaching into the sky some 10m [33ft] above the roof."
There have been no reports of any injuries.
An investigation was to be carried out into the cause, and a building control officer was to examine the structure, the fire service said.
Fore Street has been closed in both directions. Police said it may be closed for the rest of Thursday.
The inn, which has 14 guest rooms, was one of the few buildings to survive a large fire in the town in 1807.
Anticipation is building in the run-up to presentations of the best-yet evidence for - or against - the existence of the Higgs boson.
The famed particle is a missing link in current theories of physics, used to explain how everything gains its mass.
Rumours have been swirling about the findings for weeks, ahead of the announcement on Tuesday afternoon.
It is likely to yield only tantalising hints, as the teams do not have enough data to claim a formal discovery.
However, most physicists concede that not finding the Higgs boson is as exciting a prospect as finding it in the place where existing theory predicts it should be.
"If we wouldn't find it it would be even - in a way - more exciting, but you know, both ways, it's a win-win situation," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a particle physicist from the University of Manchester.
"[If] we find it, we know this theory's complete, but there's still more things to look for. If we don't find it, we know there must be something else which we haven't understood yet."
Field day
Finding the Higgs was a key goal for the $10bn (£6bn) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a 27km (17-mile) circumference accelerator ring of superconducting magnets, designed to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang in an attempt to answer fundamental questions of science and the Universe itself.
The collider hosts two experiments - Atlas and CMS - that are searching for the particle independently.
There is intense excitement among physicists working at Cern, the Geneva-based organisation which operates the collider, over hints that the hunters have cornered their quarry.
"It is a fantastic time at the moment, you can feel people are enthusiastic," Dr Christoph Rembser, a senior scientist on the Atlas experiment, told BBC News. "It is really very lively."
If the Universe really is like that, I find it really quite breathtaking and humbling that we can understand it”
Dr Tara ShearsUniversity of Liverpool, UK
Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, called the quality of the LHC's results "exceptional", adding: "Within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists, but it is likely not going to be a Christmas present."
He told me: "The Higgs particle would, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn't exist where theory predicts it to be."
The Higgs boson is a "fundamental" particle; one of the basic building blocks of the Universe. It is also the last missing piece in the leading theory of particle physics - known as the Standard Model - which describes how particles and forces interact.
The Higgs explains why other particles have mass. As the Universe cooled after the Big Bang, an invisible force known as the Higgs field formed together with its associated boson particle.
It is this field (and not the boson) that imparts mass to the fundamental particles that make up atoms. Without it, these particles would zip through the cosmos at the speed of light.
Mass mechanism
The way the Higgs field works has been likened to the way photographers and reporters congregate around a celebrity. The cluster of people are strongly attracted to the celebrity and create resistance to his or her movement across a room. In other words, they give the celebrity "mass".
"The thing about the Higgs is that we always say we need it to explain mass. But the real importance of it is that we need it to make sense of the Universe," said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at Liverpool University.
She told BBC News: "Discovering the Higgs confirms that the approach we have been taking to understand the Universe is correct."
Such deeper motivations underlie the current effort at Cern to dislodge the Higgs and other phenomena. Housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border, the LHC smashes particle beams together at close to the speed of light, with the aim of detecting new particles in the debris.
Physicists do not know the mass of the Higgs itself, which has made hunting for it more difficult. They have to look for the particle by systematically searching a range of masses where it is predicted to be.
From 1989-2000, Cern's LEP particle smasher ruled the Higgs out up to a mass of 114 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). To search for the Higgs beyond that mass, physicists needed a much more powerful machine - the LHC.
Particle physics has an accepted definition for a "discovery": a five-sigma level of certainty
The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect
Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin
The "three sigma" level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row
Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
Unlikely results can occur if several experiments are being carried out at once - equivalent to several people flipping coins at the same time
With independent confirmation by other experiments, five-sigma findings become accepted discoveries
The two detectors Atlas and CMS are looking for signs of it among the billions of collisions that are occurring in each experiment. Hints of the Higgs would look like a little spike or "bump" in physicists' graphs.
For more than a week, rumours have been circulating on physics blogs that Atlas and CMS see a Higgs signal at 125 GeV, between the 2.5 and 3.5 sigma level of certainty.
These numbers represent a measure of the likelihood that any bump the scientists see is down to chance, rather than caused by a real physical phenomenon.
If those are the numbers quoted on Tuesday, it would not be enough for Cern to make a definitive statement. Three sigma counts as an "observation", while five sigma is regarded as the threshold for claiming a discovery.
Indeed, Cern's director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer has told staff by email that the announcement would not be conclusive.
Any such spike could diminish as more data are gathered. But if Atlas and CMS both see a signal in about the same place, there would be an irresistible temptation to pop champagne corks - though behind closed doors.
In public, however, physicists would be obligated to say that a definitive "yes" or "no" would need to wait until 2012.
Asked where a Higgs discovery would rank among scientific milestones of the last 100 years, Dr Shears said: "I don't think that I could compare it to any other scientific advance... it is quite different.
"This is a prediction that stems from a very mathematical approach to understanding the Universe, which is guided by the idea that it is simple at heart.
"If the Universe really is like that, I find it really quite breathtaking and humbling that we can understand it."
The state of Nebraska is almost the size of the entire UK, with a population smaller than
Manchester's. It is classic "over-fly" country, ignored by the rest of the US - which, it turns out, is a big mistake.
The rest of America may be having a miserable time. But if you want to be rich, come to Nebraska and be a farmer. There is a gold rush going on, and it is because of corn.
The price of corn has tripled in the last decade. Why? Because places like India and China simply cannot get enough of the stuff.
'A really good time'
Brandon Hunnicutt, chairman of the Nebraska Corn Growers' Association, loves his new combine harvester - which is just as well because it cost three times the price of a large family house here.
Equipped with an on-board computer, an iPad, a satnav and an Android phone, this high-tech monster cuts the corn that feeds the pigs that fill the stomachs of Asia. It also makes the ethanol for American petrol.
There's been a lot of ebbs and flows, but nothing this good.Brandon Hunnicutt, corn farmer
Brandon Hunnicutt admits that he and farmers like him have never had it so good.
"The short time I've been around on this planet, the really good time was right when I was a baby," he says. "And now, 38 years later, this is another really good time.
"So there's been a lot of ebbs and flows, but nothing this good."
And Brandon is a post-modern farmer, which means he is on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. His finger is never off the racing pulse of commodity prices and land values - which keep going up in this part of America.
The price of land in the region has increased fourfold in five years. Land prices in the rural Midwest are doing the opposite to house prices in the rest of America. They continue to shoot up, even prompting whispers of a bubble.
'Phenomenal income year'
There is a ton of extra cash here, and not all of it from the grain shipped in freight trains. Astonishingly, the farming community of states like Nebraska and neighbouring Iowa is still receiving billions in indirect subsidies on products like corn for ethanol, as well as direct payments to each farming family.
It is a legacy of the depression, which in this part of the country now seems like a very distant era.
We have a pehomenal income year that is beyond record.Prof Bruce Johnson, Nebraska-Lincoln University
"No question about it, we have a phenomenal income year that is beyond record," says Professor Bruce Johnson of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
On the subject of farming subsidies, Professor Johnson admits that for local farmers to continue to receive them "gets to be a questionable call".
And Brandon Hunnicutt admits that he does not need the $60,000 annual subsidy he receives in direct payments. In fact, those direct payments could be scrapped by the end of the year.
But the fact is that the American dream is being kept alive nowadays not in an industrial powerhouse or in Silicone Valley, but here in a small-town America, back on the farm where it all started.
Economist Steve Keen says we are already in another Great Depression. He advocates bankrupting the banks, nationalising the financial system and paying off people's debt.
Economist Steve Keen is one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis and now he says we are already in a Great Depression. He says the way to escape it is to bankrupt the banks, nationalise the financial system and pay off people's debt.
