More than 50,000 families have been silently shipped out of London boroughs in the past three years, an investigation by The Independent can reveal.

Leaked documents obtained by this newspaper expose the true scale of the "social cleansing" taking place across the capital as a result of welfare cuts and soaring rents. The figures show an unprecedented number of families who cannot afford to find homes in their local area being uprooted from their neighbourhoods and dumped further and further away from the capital, cut off from their relatives and support networks.

The spike coincides with the Coalition's introduction of the benefit cap and "bedroom tax", both of which have made it significantly harder for poor people to afford housing in London. In 2010, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, vowed that the controversial welfare reforms would not lead to "Kosovo-style social cleansing", pledging: "You are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living."

But official figures - which the authorities have previously refused to publish - show the problem is much worse than campaigners feared. They show that councils are currently moving homeless mothers and children out of their boroughs at a rate of close to 500 families a week, with numbers continuing to rise.

Allen Bullock, the 18-year-old seen in photos smashing in a police car with a traffic cone, turned himself in after being encouraged by his parents. But now he is being held on $500,000 bail, an amount his parents cannot afford, The Guardian reports.

Bullock faces charges of rioting and malicious destruction of property, among other criminal counts, after turning himself in at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center with his stepfather, Maurice Hawkins, at his side. According to Hawkins, who saw footage of his stepson on Saturday, the teen agreed to turn himself in after his stepfather told him that the police would "find him, knock down our door and beat him" if he didn't, The Guardian notes.

However, no good deed goes unpunished, and Hawkins now believes that they are making an example of the teen. "By turning himself in, he also let me know he was growing as a man and he recognized what he did was wrong," Hawkins told The Guardian on Wednesday. "But they are making an example of him, and it is not right."

"As parents, we wanted Allen to do the right thing," Bullock's mother, Bobbi Smallwood, said. "He was dead wrong, and he does need to be punished. But he wasn't leading this riot. He hasn't got that much power."

Hawkins noted that the proposed amount is higher than that placed on some accused murderers in the city. "Who could afford to pay that?" the stepfather asked.

David Dehmann, 33, died last week at the Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. Dehmann, who suffers from several conditions (Asperger's Syndrome, Tourette's Syndrome and autism), was seriously injured by a deputy at the Knox County Jail in Mount Vernon, Ohio, on April 21.

Dehmann was taken into custody for alleged public intoxication, transported to a hospital, then released, but arrested a second time for alleged persistent disorderly conduct (video below).


The state's Bureau of Criminal Investigation's Special Investigation Unit is now investigating the incident, noted Mount Vernon News.

A known child sex offender has been arrested on suspicion of stealing a school bus and driving it around to pick up youngsters. Patrick James Fredricksen, 30 - who has previous convictions for unlawful sexual activity with a minor and impersonating a firefighter - was stopped on his way to one child's home in eastern Utah, police say. He had already used the bus's on-board list of children's names and addresses to try and abduct a young girl, they added.

Fredricksen has now been booked into Emery County Jail for investigation of theft of a vehicle and attempted child kidnapping. He is also expected to face a charge of damaging a prison after breaking a sprinkler pipe inside his cell and flooding the booking area, said sheriff spokeswoman Janalee Luke. Fredricksen's crime spree is alleged to have started while he was laying turf for a landscaping firm at a baseball complex in Huntington on Monday.

An employee at the site phoned the local sheriff's office to report a worker 'was acting strange' and had left on foot with a set of master keys to the complex. Shortly afterwards, a nearby funeral-parlor worker reported that his car had been stolen from the company car park. He told police he had noticed a 'suspicious' person around the building' but was talking to a bereaved family at the time so 'wasn't too concerned', according to the sheriff's office. They claim Fredricksen was the thief and that he drove the car to an empty school bus, which had its keys inside.

Rincon Fire Chief Corey Rahn was on his way to an actual emergency on April 10 when he was aggressively pursued by police. Naturally, he believed they were en route to the same incident. A series of videos have been released documenting the absurd actions of the officer.

The chief was out running errands when he was alerted that a garbage truck had rear-ended a gas truck that was carrying 9,000 gallons of gas, 15 miles away from where he was. Understanding the severity of the situation, Rahn jumped in his personal vehicle and put a mini row of red emergency lights up so that he could rush to the scene and help.

As the fire chief was rushing to the scene, he became an unknowing suspect in a car chase. Despite his emergency lights, an officer began recklessly attempting to pull him over. However, as there was an extraordinarily dangerous situation, with a person trapped, Rahn assumed the officer was just on his way to the scene as well.

According to SavannahNow, the Central Dispatch was reportedly "too busy" to check if it was someone who was responding to an incident. So, the chase continued until eventually the officer used his PA system to demand that the fire chief stop. Rahn heroically ignored the orders and continued to where he was needed, only then learning that he was being chased.

Over the past 35 years, California's high-wage workers have seen steady increases in their paychecks. But low-wage workers, 4.8 million strong and about one-third of the state's workforce, earned less in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2014 than they did in 1979, according to a new analysis from UC Berkeley.

Berkeley researchers analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data at the campus's Center for Labor Research and Education found that low-wage workers, defined as those earning hourly wages of $13.63 or less, have seen steady declines in their inflation-adjusted buying power. This low-wage workforce, nearly three-quarters nonwhite and concentrated in two industries -- retail trade, and restaurants and other food services -- has also become older and more highly educated.

Teens made up 5 percent of low-wage workers in 2014, down from 16 percent in 1979, and 48 percent of low-wage earners in 2014 had attended some college, compared to 39 percent in 1979. The analysis also showed that 40 percent of the state's low-wage workers in 2014 were foreign-born.

"We found that low-wage workers in California are older and more educated than they were 30 years ago, and yet they've seen stagnant and even declining wages," said Annette Bernhardt, a visiting UC Berkeley professor of sociology and a senior researcher at the center. "The story of growing inequality is not just about the top 1 percent, it is also about the millions of low-wage workers and their families who struggle with economic insecurity every day."

If U.S. economic growth falls any lower, we are officially going to be in recession territory. On Wednesday, we learned that U.S. GDP grew at a 0.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2015. That was much lower than all of the "experts" were projecting. And of course there are all sorts of questions whether the GDP numbers the government feeds us are legitimate anyway. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were used they would show that U.S. GDP growth has been continuously negative since 2005. But even if we consider the number that the government has given us to be the "real" number, it still shows that the U.S. economy has stalled out. It is almost as if we have hit a "turning point", and there are many out there (including myself) that believe that the next major economic downturn is dead ahead. As you will see in this article, a whole bunch of things are happening right now that we would expect to see if a recession was beginning. The following are 16 signs that the economy has stalled out and the next economic downturn is here...

#1 We just learned that U.S. GDP grew at an anemic 0.2 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2015...

Night of horror at Ben Gurion airport for two French music students

We are two students, both studying musicology at the Université Paris 8 and in the CRR 93 at Aubervilliers and the CRD at Gennevilliers [translator's note : all located in the suburbs north of Paris]. After taking our baccalauréat exams at the end of high school, we left in September 2013 to spend a year living in Palestine. We gave and attended music classes (violin and flute) at the Edward Said National Conservatory in Ramallah and helped to create a music school in Jericho. This year we had decided to go back during our recent Easter break to see our friends again and to return to the places where we had spent time the previous year.

On Sunday April 19, we arrived at 2:30 AM at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. At the customs desk we stated the purpose of our visit ; but when the officer heard the word "Ramallah" we were sent straight to a small room where other people were waiting for us. We were immediately asked to write our telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

After an hour's wait, a security officer came to pick up Philomène, telling her to take her luggage. In this first interrogation, the security officer asked her the reason for her visit, whether or not she had previously been to Israel, and why. After a few minutes, he began to get angry and called her a "liar" because it seemed to him impossible that a 20-year old would come to Palestine for a year for the sole purpose of playing and studying music. He asked her whether or not she had a Palestinian cell phone. She said no because she was afraid of placing her contacts in a bad position. The man stood up and pounded the desk with his fists, saying "You're a liar, I don't believe you!" He then brought Philomène back to the waiting room and asked Bastien to follow him. The same script ; he warned him that his friend is a liar and that he had better not tell any lies. Bastien told him the truth but the officer didn't believe him, and a dialogue of the deaf ensued. Then he ordered him to bring our Palestinian SIM cards and our camera. Having made Bastien translate all the messages on the cell phone and watch him look at our Paris photos to be sure we weren't activists, he told him to return to the waiting room.

Why did the Baltimore riots seem like they were perfectly staged to be a television event? Images of police vehicles burning made for great television all over the planet, but why were there abandoned police vehicles sitting right in the middle of the riot zones without any police officers around them in the first place? Why was the decision made ahead of time to set a curfew for Tuesday night and not for Monday night? And why are Baltimore police officers claiming that they were ordered to "stand down" and not intervene as dozens of shops, businesses and homes went up in flames? Yes, the anger over the death of Freddie Gray is very real. Police brutality has been a major problem in Baltimore and much of the rest of the nation for many years. But could it be possible that the anger that the people of Baltimore are feeling is being channeled and manipulated for other purposes? The following are 12 unanswered questions about the Baltimore riots that they don't want us to ask...

#1 Why are dozens of social media accounts that were linked to violence in Ferguson now trying to stir up violence in Baltimore?...

While we already observed that in Q1, US GDP rose by an appalling 0.2%, far, far below the consensus Wall Street estimate (in case you missed it, here again is the one thing every Wall Street economist desperately needs) and precisely in line with the Atlanta Fed forecast which we brought attention to in early March, confirming yet again that US stocks no longer reflect any fundamentals but merely Fed and global liquidity injections, there is something far more disturbing under the surface of today's GDP report.

Inventories.

Specifically, the $121.9 billion increase in private, mostly nonfarm, inventories in the first quarter.

Cutting to the punchline, this was the biggest inventory build in history.