Two people were killed and 12 were injured when a helicopter crashed into a crane in central London.

Police said the helicopter hit the crane on top of The Tower, One St George Wharf at about 08:00 GMT.

About 80 firefighters were at the scene near Wandsworth Road in South Lambeth. Pilot Pete Barnes was killed in the crash, while the other person killed was on the ground.

The pilot had asked to be diverted to a nearby heliport because of bad weather.

Jon Horne, chief executive of Redhill Aerodrome Ventures, where the helicopter began its flight at 07:35, said it was owned by the Rotormotion private charter firm.

Metropolitan Police Commander Neil Basu told BBC News it was "miraculous" the crash was not much worse.

Burning wreckage lay in the road but the fire was brought under control within 25 minutes, the fire brigade said.

Five people were taken to hospital. One had a broken leg and the others had minor injuries. Seven people were treated at the scene.

Pauline Cranmer, from London Ambulance Service, said: "There were a number of injuries that would potentially be consistent with being hit by debris."

The Civil Aviation Authority said pilots had previously been notified of the crane involved in the crash.

President Barack Obama’s deputies have quadrupled the number of signatures that petitioners on the administration’s “We the People” website must collect to get an official response from the White House, following a series of popular, provocative and disrespectful signature drives by his critics.

Some of the petitions sought approval for states to secede after Obama’s re-election, while others called on the White House to disavow executive orders that restrict gun rights, or to deport CNN’s British-born, progressive host Piers Morgan.

“Starting today, as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration,” said an early evening Jan. 15 statement from Macon Phillips, the White House’s digital strategy director.


Usage of the petition site has spiked since the election, partly because more than 600,000 people have signed various secession petitions. (RELATED: Secession petitions deluge White House website) “In the first 10 months of 2012, it took an average of 18 days for a new petition to cross the 25,000-signature threshold,” said Macon’s statement. “In the last two months of the year, that average time was cut in half to just 9 days, and most petitions that crossed the threshold collected 25,000 signatures within five days of their creation.”

Just last week, Amber Rose shared a photo of her sizable baby bump (in fact, tweeting bare-belly pictures seems to be a trend for pregnant celebrities lately).

And now comes another glimpse of the mama-to-be, who looks as if she's due any moment. Rose, 29, stepped out to a salon in West Hollywood, Calif., Monday, looking ready to pop in a black Lycra ensemble and pink leather jacket.

The model and fiance Wiz Khalifa, 25, recently made headlines for their candid remarks about how Khalifa's penchant for pot will affect their parenting.

"Of course, I'm not going to be smoking right there over the baby, because smoke in general and being high is not good for a kid. None of that," Khalifa told E! News. "But definitely he's going to know what it is—and he'll know the difference between being a child and not being able to use it and being an adult and knowing how to use it."

A middle-school science teacher fired after students learned she had appeared in pornographic movies had hoped not just to get her job back, but to set a precedent for people looking to escape an embarrassing personal history.

A three-judge commission put a decisive stop to both, saying firmly and unanimously that Stacie Halas should not be in the classroom.

"We were hoping we could show you could overcome your past," Halas lawyer Richard Schwab said Tuesday. "I think she's representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."

Judge Julie Cabos-Owen said such a past matters in an age when technology makes porn easy to access and hard to bury.

"Although her pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague," Cabos-Owen said in the 46-page decision issued Friday by the Commission on Professional Competence.

Halas, 32, was continually deceitful about her nine-month career in porn before she went to work at the school, the judges said.

Schwab said Halas "was being honest and forthright, but was embarrassed and humiliated by her past experience in the adult industry."

Halas was fired in April from her job as a science teacher at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard after online videos of her in porn were discovered by students and teachers.

Student claims that the teacher was moonlighting as a porn star were initially dismissed after school officials said they couldn't find any images of her on the Internet – but they were using the school's computers, which don't allow access to porn.

Teachers then showed administrators downloads of Halas' sex videos from their smartphones.

In hearings, former assistant principal Wayne Saddler testified that at the start of a sex video, Halas talked about being a teacher and he felt her effectiveness in the classroom had been compromised.

A former porn star teacher who went by the name of "Tiffany Six" lost her appeal to get her job back, according to a Jan. 16 My Fox 8 report. When students discovered Stacie Halas, a middle school biology teacher, had a porn star past, she was removed from her classroom at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard.

Even so, the former porn star turned teacher appealed to get her job back despite her adult film past. However, the three judge panel denied petition made by Stacie Halas and her lawyer. Her lawyer Richard Schwab said,

    "We were hoping we could show you could overcome your past. I think she’s representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."
It does seem that people deserve a chance to overcome their past, but one of the problems is that Stacie Halas was not up front about her porn star past as "Tiffany Six" when she applied for her teaching position. It is possible that former porn stars will not be able to effectively teach in middle schools.

    "Although her pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague."

It certainly does pose a problem when students can access explicit films featuring their teachers. What do you think? Should this porn star teacher formerly known as "Tiffany Six" be allowed to remain in the classroom? What about other former adult film stars? Is the avenue of teacher completely closed for them?

A land battle that has been raging for nearly two decades landed Tuesday at the Supreme Court, which will decide whether the government went too far in regulating a development in Florida.

Coy Koontz in the 1970s bought a parcel of land, the majority of which later was classified a wetland. When he sought a permit to develop a portion of it in the 1990s, the Florida agency in charge of the area said Koontz would need to take steps to remediate the damage he would cause.

Koontz offered to give the agency 11 of the 15 acres, in exchange for a permit to develop the remaining land. In addition, the state government said he would need to undertake other improvements. Options ranged from numerous changes to the original plot to paying for enhancement of 50 government-owned acres miles away from the Koontz plot.

Though Koontz continued to offer the 11 acres, he refused to go along with the government's other requirements and decided to sue.

On Tuesday, the justices at the Supreme Court considered whether the land dispute amounts to a "taking" -- whether by denying Koontz the opportunity to further develop his land unless he spent thousands to meet government demands, it deprived him of its potential value.

His attorneys called the offer a "government shakedown,” but the government’s lawyers say Koontz simply walked away and refused to negotiate. Koontz has since died, and his son -- Coy Koontz Jr. -- has continued the case.

Though Koontz Jr. and his legal team felt confident following the arguments Tuesday, they had to acknowledge the tough questions from Justice Antonin Scalia. Arguably one of the court's most conservative justices, he seemed unconvinced that the government's actions violated the Fifth Amendment.

"I can't see where there's a taking here," Scalia said, adding, "Nothing's been taken."

But his colleague, Justice Anthony Kennedy, seemed to think the Koontz case is the classic example of an unlawful, unconstitutional taking, asking why the government can "force you, as a condition to using your property to its highest and best use, to pay them money?"

Koontz Jr. says he never considered dropping the fight.

"It is important for anyone to understand that the government can at times be a creeping blob, absorbing your rights, and hopefully this will at least put a halt to that," Koontz Jr. said as he stood on the plaza in front of the Supreme Court.

For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana. We recently spoke to him to learn more about how he's making a difference.

Kopplin, who is studying history at Rice University, had good reason to be upset after the passing of the LSEA — an insidious piece of legislation that allows teachers to bring in their own supplemental materials when discussing politically controversial topics like evolution or climate change. Soon after the act was passed, some of his teachers began to not just supplement existing texts, but to rid the classroom of established science books altogether. It was during the process to adopt a new life science textbook in 2010 that creationists barraged Louisiana's State Board of Education with complaints about the evidence-based science texts. Suddenly, it appeared that they were going to be successful in throwing out science textbooks.
A pivotal moment

How 19-year-old activist Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana's creationists "This was a pivotal moment for me," Kopplin told io9. "I had always been a shy kid and had never spoken out before — I found myself speaking at a meeting of an advisory committee to the State Board of Education and urging them to adopt good science textbooks — and we won." The LSEA still stood, but at least the science books could stay.

No one was more surprised of his becoming a science advocate than Kopplin himself. In fact, after writing his English paper in 2008 — when he was just 14-years-old — he assumed that someone else would publicly take on the law. But no one did.

"I didn't expect it to be me," he said. "By my senior year though, I realized that no one was going to take on the law, so for my high school senior project I decided to get a repeal bill."

Indeed, it was the ensuing coverage of the science textbook adoption issue that launched Kopplin as an activist. It also gave him the confidence to start the campaign to repeal the LSEA.

Encouraged by Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University — and a staunch critic of intelligent design and the Discovery Institute — Kopplin decided to write a letter that could be signed by Nobel laureate scientists in support of the repeal. To that end, he contacted Sir Harry Kroto, a British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. Kroto helped him to draft the letter — one that has now been signed by 78 Nobel laureates.

In addition, Kopplin has introduced two bills to repeal the LSEA, both of which have been sponsored by State Senator Karen Carter Peterson. He plans on producing a third bill later this spring. And along with the Nobel laureates, he has the support of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), New Orleans City Council, and many others.

But as the early results of his efforts have shown, it's not going to be an easy battle.

"We've had gains over the last few years," he says, "But our first attempt to repeal the LSEA was defeated 5-1 in committee, and in our second attempt we lost 2-1." Kopplin is hoping to get out of committee this year.

He also has his eyes set on vouchers. After an Alternet story came out about a school in the Louisiana voucher program teaching that the Loch Ness Monster was real and disproved evolution, Kopplin looked deeper into the program and found that this wasn't just one school, but at least 19 other schools, too.

School vouchers, he argues, unconstitutionally fund the teaching of creationism because many of the schools in these programs are private fundamentalist religious schools who are teaching creationism.

The newly single singer continued to show Justin Bieber what he's missing -- not that she wants him back -- with another super-sexy dress.


Dressed in a gold Atelier Versace dress, the 20-year-old hit up both the Weinstein Company party and the InStyle/Warner Bros. soiree following the 2013 Golden Globes on Sunday night.

Gomez is enjoying the single life, and showed up to the party with pal and "Spring Breakers" co-star Vanessa Hudgens, who wowed in a sequined Jenny Packham dress with a plunging neckline.

selena gomez golden globes

Since announcing that she and beau Kanye West are expecting a child, Kim Kardashian has been hiding her curves more than usual. Just last week, she was spotted at the airport in a flowy ensemble that looked way more comfortable than the tight-fitting leather pieces that are de rigueur for the reality star.

But when Kim headed to brunch with her sister Kourtney's boyfriend, Scott Disick, in Calabasas, Calif., Sunday, she sported a formfitting white dress that revealed the beginnings of a baby bump.

The expectant couple recently celebrated the big news with a "babymoon" in Paris.

We often forget that "Modern Family" actress Sarah Hyland only plays a teen on TV.

The 22-year-old actress looked stunning in a cleavage-baring dress on the red carpet at the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday. Hyland looked nothing but glam, calm and in control when she chatted with Ryan Secreast, but she spent the morning dealing with a bit of drama.

"Don't you love it when you wake up with hives all over your face? #morningoftheglobes," Hyland tweeted earlier today.

The actress is nominated along with the rest of her TV family for Best TV Series, Musical or Comedy -- the same award they picked up at last year's show.