High heels row: Firm accused of sexism changes policy

A firm that sent home a temp without pay for refusing to wear high heels has changed its policy.

London receptionist Nicola Thorp, 27, says she was told to wear shoes with a "2in to 4in heel" when she arrived at finance company PwC in December.

When she refused and was sent home she set up a petition calling for the law on dress code to be changed.

Outsourcing firm Portico said "with immediate effect all our female colleagues can wear plain flat shoes".

The company initially said Ms Thorp, from Hackney, had signed its "appearance guidelines" but said it would review them.

'Negative backlash'

Ms Thorp said she would have struggled to work a full day in high heels.

"I was expected to do a nine-hour shift on my feet escorting clients to meeting rooms. I said 'I just won't be able to do that in heels'," she said.

When she asked if a man would be expected to do the same shift in heels, she said she was laughed at and told to go home without pay.

"I said 'if you can give me a reason as to why wearing flats would impair me to do my job today, then fair enough', but they couldn't," she told BBC Radio London.

Despite fearing what she said could be a "negative backlash", she set up a petition calling for the law to be changed so women cannot be forced to wear high heels to work.

More than 50,000 people have signed it which triggers the requirement for a government response.

PwC said the dress code issue involving Ms Thorp at its Embankment offices last December was "not a PwC policy".

Later on Wednesday, Portico managing director Simon Pratt said the firm was "committed to being an inclusive and equal opportunities employer" and actively embraced "diversity and inclusion within all our policies".

"We are therefore making it very clear that with immediate effect, all our female colleagues can wear plain flat shoes or plain court shoes as they prefer."

"I think dress codes should reflect society and nowadays women can be smart and formal and wear flat shoes," said Ms Thorp.

"Aside from the debilitating factor, it's the sexism issue. I think companies shouldn't be forcing that on their female employees."

Car Drops Into Sinkhole On London Road

Residents of a street in Greenwich woke up this morning to the sight of a people carrier disappearing into a sinkhole.

The car in Woodland Terrace would have reportedly disappeared completely if it were not for a pipe running under the road.

Cleo O'Kane, 25, who lives nearby, said police had told her some residents might have to be evacuated.

"I thought it was thunder - I heard a loud bang, but it was raining so much I thought it was thunder," she said.

"It must have been around 4am. I woke up and then just went back to sleep - my window was open - then woke up at six this morning, came outside and there was a car in a hole.

"I've been here for eight years and have never seen anything like this happen."

She added: "Police said they don't know what's going on. They said the car is stuck on a gas pipe or a water pipe. They might have to evacuate all the houses.

Greenwich Police posted a picture of the people carrier on Twitter.

They said the car was parked and no one was injured.

A spokesman said: "Officers are on the scene and there is a cordon in place. The local authority has been called and there are other agencies on scene."

A Royal Borough of Greenwich spokesman said: "We are urgently investigating the matter and will update residents the moment we have more information."

Festival Drops Azealia Banks Over Zayn Rant

A London music festival has cancelled an appearance by US rapper Azealia Banks after she used racist language in a series of tweets to former One Direction star Zayn Malik.

The controversial African-American artist accused Malik of copying her style on his latest music video in the messages which she has since deleted.

Banks used epithets directed at Muslims against the 23-year-old, who is partially of Pakistani origin and was brought up in Bradford.

"When your entire extended family has been obliterated by good ol the U.S of A will you still be trying to act like a white boy pretending to be black?" Banks said in one tweet.

The Rinse/Born & Bred Festival, which will take place next month in London, announced it had removed her from its lineup.

"Rinse/Born & Bred is a celebration of rave culture and has been created for EVERYONE. We celebrate inclusivity and equality," it said in a statement.

Malik kept a distance from Banks, telling her in Twitter lingo that he had seen her remarks and chosen not to take the bait.

"My @'s too good for you," he tweeted.

Some social media users called on Twitter to suspend Banks.

Malik, who has chosen to go solely by his first name as a solo artist, has taken on an R&B sound since leaving One Direction with his songs featuring lyrics about sex and relationships.

Banks, in a fresh tweet on Wednesday, reiterated her accusations about Zayn's music and cast her remarks about Muslims as a gesture of solidarity.

"He felt as if he was too good to acknowledge me yet not too good to copy my creativity," she wrote.

"I had to remind him that we're both in the same boat in this industry and people of colour."

Banks won wide acclaim for her single 212 but has become better known for her Twitter outbursts, with her pledge in March to quit the platform proving short-lived.

She notably engaged in a long-running feud with the Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, whom she accused of exploiting black culture.

Can Donald Trump win?

It was interesting because the reaction was universal. From Europe to the Middle East and in Africa, the world it seems is terrified of what it happening in the US. Namely they are terrified of what a Donald Trump presidency would look like.

You can understand why many are expressing concern. Latin America is worried that he will build a wall and steal the remittances from their families. He has also promised to round up 11 million undocumented workers from across the globe and send them back to their home countries.

You could understand why 1.6 billion Muslims would be concerned - after all he’s planned to ban them from coming to the country. He would likely let the roughly three million Muslims living in the US stay.

You could probably see why anyone who is actually a part of the global economy might be concerned. He has vowed to tear up all existing trade deals which would likely lead to a trade war.

Then he promised to basically default on the debt. He explained it as asking people to sell back US Treasury bonds at a discount. That is actually a default by a different name. He went on to try and explain that the country couldn’t default because it prints its own money. He didn’t explain exactly what that meant and economists are at a loss to figure it out either.

Given all he has said that is so extreme my fellow panelists had one question for me. How is it possible that America is backing Trump? I explained the country hasn’t voted for Trump. He has won the support of the majority of Republicans who have voted in the primary. People who vote in primaries tend to be the most extreme members of their political parties.

Over 10 million people cast their ballots to give him the Republican nomination. That might sound like a lot but compare that to 129,085,410 people who voted in the last presidential election.

The next question of course is can he win? It seems likely that he will face former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton. I put in all of her past titles to give you a sense of what her problem is.

You might read that and think experience, but for many Americans it’s a reminder that she has been on the national stage for more than two decades and they are tired of her.

She's had her share of controversies and the majority of Americans say they don’t trust her, they don’t think she is honest. She’s still the subject of a federal inquiry into the fact that she set up her own private email server to use while secretary of state.

She says it was for convenience but many think it was an attempt to circumvent public disclosure rules. She literally could not have come up with a scandal that would do more to reinforce the negative narrative about her that she plays by her own rules. Her unfavorability rating is going to work against her. In polls just under 55 percent of people asked say they don’t really like her all that much.

The good news for her team is that a lot more people have an unfavourable opinion of Trump. His number is 65.4 percent. You would be hard pressed to find a more unpopular presidential candidate at any time in the nation’s history.

He has a much higher unfavourability number if you break it down into groups. The vast majority of African-Americans, Latinos, women and young voters say they don’t like him. That is a long list of critical groups. If he can’t change their minds, he can’t win the presidency.

You have heard many shell-shocked Republican politicians try to explain Trump's policy proposals by saying he is not a politician and he will need a little time to learn the issues. They promise he will be less extreme and act more "presidential".

They may want to check with their candidate who just explained he is going to continue to behave exactly the way he has in the primary. He basically says it’s worked so far so why change now?

Both of these candidates tend to bring out the passion of followers on the other side. Fervent Republicans will show up to vote if only to deny Clinton a victory. The most passionate Democrats will make sure they vote to keep Trump out of the White House.

The election will be determined by how those in the middle decide to vote; whether it is for a candidate or against one. And as we have seen in the past - in US elections fear is an excellent motivator.

Hyperloop In First Test Of Super-Fast Transport

A US firm says it has successfully conducted a first public test of its ultra-high speed transportation system.

Hyperloop One aims to whisk passengers through a low-pressure tube at speeds of up to 750mph (1,207 km/h).

In Wednesday's seconds-long test, the start-up accelerated a test vehicle known as a "sled" down a 1,500ft rail track in the desert near Las Vegas.

Hyperloop One says the sled neared 400mph, but it says the same motor could enable a more aerodynamic vehicle to top 700mph in a friction-less tube.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was first to propose the futuristic idea, arguing it would be faster and more efficient than high-speed rail projects

He envisaged such a system would run between Los Angeles and San Francisco in as little as half an hour - it currently takes about eight hours by train.

But early applications for hyperloop could focus on ports, replacing the lorries and freight trains that transport cargo from ships to factories and stores.

Under the design, electromagnetic propulsion technology would levitate the pods on a small cushion of air in the fully autonomous, electric-powered system.

Hyperloop One has just announced it raised $80m (£55m) in funding from investors including France's state-owned railway company, SNCF.

The Los Angeles-based company is led by Brogan BamBrogan, venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar and ex-Cisco president Rob Lloyd.

Its crowdsourced rival, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, is also racing to be first to perfect the same system.

Last month, it signed a deal with the Slovakian government to build a hyperloop between Slovenia with Austria and Hungary.

Offshore Firms Forced To Reveal UK Properties

Foreign companies owning or buying property in the UK will be forced to reveal who really owns them, David Cameron has vowed, as he hosts a major international anti-corruption summit in London.

Any overseas company buying property or bidding for Government contracts will have to sign up to a new public register before the deal can go through, in a move aimed at cracking down on money laundering.

Around 40 countries, including Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies accused of being tax havens, are poised to pledge to share ownership information as part of the crackdown.

It is estimated that foreign companies own around 100,000 properties across England and Wales, with more than 44,000 in London alone, many of them worth tens of millions of pounds.

Around 50 countries are attending the summit, which is being held at Lancaster House in London and is being attended by presidents and prime ministers from across the world.

"Corruption is the cancer at the heart of so many of our problems in the world today," Mr Cameron declares in a forward to a book of essays published at the start of the summit.

"It destroys jobs and holds back growth, costing the world economy billions of pounds every year.

"It traps the poorest in the most desperate poverty as corrupt governments around the world syphon off funds and prevent hard-working people from getting the revenues and benefits of growth that are rightfully theirs.

"It steals vital resources from our schools and hospitals as corrupt individuals and companies evade the taxes they owe."

The summit finally gets under way after a diplomatic row caused by candid comments by Mr Cameron to the Queen caught on camera inside Buckingham Palace in which he said Afghanistan and Nigeria were "fantastically corrupt" and "two of the most corrupt countries in the world".

Nigeria said it was embarrassed by the comments and Afghanistan claimed they were unfair, but both are among the countries attending the summit and promising to tackle corruption.

But despite a session on the agenda on corruption in sport, football's world governing body FIFA, rocked by financial scandals, has been snubbed, although the International Olympic Committee, grappling with a drugs crisis in athletics, is taking part.

Speaking ahead of the summit, Mr Cameron said: "The evil of corruption reaches into every corner of the world.

"It lies at the heart of the most urgent problems we face - from economic uncertainty, to endemic poverty, to the ever-present threat of radicalisation and extremism.

"A global problem needs a truly global solution. It needs an unprecedented, courageous commitment from world leaders to stand united, to speak into the silence and to demand change.

"That is why I am hosting this summit. Today is just the start of a more co-ordinated, ambitious global effort to defeat corruption."

Malaysia Says 2 More Pieces of Debris Are ‘Almost Certainly’ From Flight 370

(KUALA LUMPUR) — Malaysia’s government said Thursday that two more pieces of debris, discovered in South Africa and Rodrigues Island off Mauritius, were “almost certainly” from Flight 370, bringing the total number of pieces believed to have come from the missing Malaysian jet to five.

The aircraft mysteriously disappeared more than two years ago with 239 people on board, and so far an extensive underwater search of vast area of the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast has turned up empty.

Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the two new pieces were an engine cowling piece with a partial Rolls-Royce logo and an interior panel piece from an aircraft cabin — the first interior part found from the missing plane.

An international team of experts in Australia who examined the debris concluded that both pieces were consistent with panels found on a Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777 aircraft, Liow said.

“As such, the team has confirmed that both pieces of debris from South Africa and Rodrigues Island are almost certainly from MH370,” he said in a statement.

All five pieces have been found in various spots around the Indian Ocean. Last year, a wing part from the plane washed ashore on France’s Reunion Island. Then in March, investigators confirmed two pieces of debris found along Mozambique’s coast were almost certainly from the aircraft.

The jet, which vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is believed to have crashed somewhere in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean about 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia’s west coast. Authorities had predicted that any debris from the plane that isn’t on the ocean floor would eventually be carried by currents to the east coast of Africa.

Though the discovery of the debris has bolstered authorities’ assertion that the plane went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean, none of the parts have thus far yielded any clues into exactly what happened to the aircraft and precisely where it crashed. Investigators are examining marine life attached to the debris to see if it could somehow help them narrow down where it entered the ocean, but haven’t discovered anything useful yet.

The most recent confirmed debris includes a piece discovered by an archaeologist who spotted it while walking along South Africa’s southern coast, and another part found by tourists on Rodrigues Island, off Mauritius.

The Australian Safety Transport Bureau said in a technical report that the interior part, identified by its decorative laminate, is a panel from the main cabin and believed to be part of a door closet.

The most critical clues lie within the elusive underwater wreckage, which would hold the coveted flight data recorders, or black boxes. The data recorder should reveal details related to the plane’s controls, including whether aircraft systems that might have helped track the plane were deliberately turned off, as some investigators believe.

But so far, crews have combed more than 105,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles) of the search zone to no avail. They expect to complete their sweep of the area by the end of June.