The UK observes gay history month in February each year and schools are encouraged to mark it with special classes as a way to teach tolerance.

More than 30 students were pulled out of classes at the George Tomlinson School in East London. The area is made up mainly of immigrant families, many of them Muslim.

Among the parents objecting to the classes was Pervez Latif, who kept his 9- and 10-year-old sons from going to school throughout the week.

“I didn’t want my children to be learning about this,” Latif said.

He said that he wrote a letter to the school explaining his objections and was told the children would be listed as truants if they were not in class.

The law allows for 19 excused days a year – additional days a student is not in class are viewed as truancy. But the school regards the removal of the students as an unexcused absence.

The penalties range from a fine to criminal charges.

“If I am faced with court action, then I will just explain that these are my views,” said Latif.

Special gay history lessons at the school ranged from references to famous gays and gay events in history classes to reading age appropriate books in literature classes.

Two gay-themed books were read in primary classes – ” King and King,” about a prince who falls in love with another prince, and “Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who fall in love and adopt a baby penguin at a New York zoo.

Sarah Saeed was another of the parents who removed their child from the school for the week.

“It is not an appropriate age for the children to be learning such matters. We have our own way of explaining things to them and they should not be subjected to this,” she said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the school said no decision had been made on seeking charges against the parents.

“As part of the borough’s policy of promoting tolerance in our schools, children are taught that everyone in our society is of equal value,” the statement said.

Gavin Alker, 19, was on trial for the killing last July of 18-year-old Michael Causer.

The jury deliberated almost 13 hours before reaching a verdict. Alker stood emotionless in the docket as the verdict was read.

During the trial, the court was told that Alker and Causer were part of a group that had met during a night out at a local pub. After heavy drinking the group went to the home of the grandmother of one of the men to “sleep it off.”

At some point, Alker allegedly discovered from either Causer or one of the other men that Causer was gay.

Prosecutor Richard Pratt told the jury that Alker took a heavy hardbound American history book from a shelf, went into the room where Causer was sleeping and used it to batter Causer’s head. He then beat and kicked him repeatedly.

Pratt told the jury there was only one reason for the attack: “Michael Causer was gay.”

Pratt told the trial that the evidence showed that Alker tried to burn a section of Causer’s leg and prepared to rip his body piercings out with a knife.

At that point, Pratt told the court, as Causer lay unconscious Alker and two other men – Michael Binsteed, 18,  James O’Connor, 19 – decided to dump the body on a street.

They allegedly hoisted the body over a fence and dragged it to the road. Pratt said that Alker then fled and the other two returned to the house and cleaned away evidence. Binsteed called an ambulance.

Paramedics found Causer on the roadway barely breathing and suffering massive brain injuries and was rushed to hospital.  He died eight days later when doctors declared him brain dead and a ventilator was removed.

Alker pleaded not guilty to murder and blamed O’Connor alone for the killing. O’Connor, 19, has already admitted murder.

The murder galvanized Britain’s LGBT community and has drawn comparisons to the murder of  Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in October 1998.

Shepard was a gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten and left to die lashed to a fence on windswept country road. Two men are currently serving life sentences for Shepard’s murder.

The 20-year old victim, whose name is being withheld by police for his protection, was stabbed seven times.

The attacked occurred as the man and his female friend were walking towards a gay-friendly bar. Police said five teens swarmed the victim and the woman. They yelled homophobic taunts at the man, before beating him over the head with a bottle and then stabbing him in the back and torso.

He was rushed to Royal London hospital where he underwent emergency surgery and was listed Thursday in serious condition.

Investigators are continuing to search for two other teens involved in the attack.  They said that the teens could be charged with attempted murder, but that could be upgraded to murder if the victim succumbs to his injuries.

“What we’re concentrating on is tracking down and bringing to justice the people who committed this evil crime,” Det. Insp. Howard Way told the local newspaper The East London Advertiser.

It was the 47th homophobic attack in East London in the past 12 months.

Local politicians appealed for calm in the area’s substantial gay community, as demands for greater police protection rose on Thursday.

“This is a sickening and vile assault,” said George Galloway, the Member of Parliament for the area.

“A near fatal knife attack on a defenseless man is horrific enough. The fact that this also appears to be a homophobic hate crime compounds the evil.”

In passing sentence the judge branded Kylie McGrath, 20, a “danger to professional women” for her violent obsession over attorney Emma Eardley.

The court heard that over a two year period McGrath flooded Eardley with phone calls and text messages and had constantly stalked her. One one day alone McGrath sent nearly 50 messages to Eardley.

At one point McGrath’s psychiatrist warned the attorney that she should be vigilant and that McGrath could be dangerous.

The campaign of terror ended when McGrath broke into Eardley’s home armed with a knife and rope.

Claiming she ” ‘could not live without her”, McGrath broke into Eardley’s house and hid behind the curtains.

When Eardley returned home with her boyfriend, McGrath jumped out from behind the curtains and attempted to slash the attorney.

Eardley and her boyfriend tackled McGrath to the floor and held her until police arrived.

The terror campaign began two years earlier when McGrath sought legal advice from the firm in which Eardley was a partner.

In many ways, the Roman Emperor Hadrian and his 2,000-year-old world sound familiar.

A new exhibition at the British Museum aims to show that Hadrian, best remembered for building a 117-kilometer wall to separate England and Scotland, is a leader whose achievements and contradictions helped forge our times.

“Hadrian is one of the great Roman emperors,” exhibition curator Thorsten Opper said. “He takes over the empire at a time of acute military crisis, he stabilizes that empire and he assures its survival.

“In a sense, he made the world we still live in today.”

That’s a bold claim for a man who died in AD 138, but “Hadrian: Empire and Conflict,” which opens to the public Thursday, makes a strong case.

Under Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan, the Roman Empire stretched from Britannia (modern-day Britain) to Mesopotamia _ today’s Iraq. But its armies were overstretched and rebels harried its fringes. Hadrian’s first act on taking power in AD 117 was to pull troops out of Mesopotamia, where insurgency raged. He went on to trim back the limits of his empire and consolidate Roman power.

He loved architecture and ordered a flurry of construction _ homes, temples, new cities, that famous wall.

A surprising amount remains today. The wall still snakes across moor and dale in northern England. In Italy, there is Hadrian’s vast villa at Tivoli – the holiday home to end all holiday homes -and Rome’s Pantheon, one of the best-preserved and most beautiful of all classical buildings. Its giant dome has inspired buildings from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to Turkish mosques to the British Museum itself.

The exhibition is being held in the museum’s round Reading Room, whose domed roof, Opper said, is “a Victorian version of the Pantheon.”

Opper said every generation reinvents historical figures in its own image, and Hadrian is no exception.

“The empire-builders, the Victorians, saw him almost as a weak figure because he withdrew,” Opper said. “After the horrors of World War I and World War II, he was seen as the sort of prince of peace that the world needed. Our picture of Hadrian changes constantly based on our own experience.”

The show paints a highly attractive picture of Hadrian. An introductory film bills him: “Warrior. Dreamer. Visionary.” He is virile and energetic, a military commander, perceptive ruler and part-time poet. He’s even a bit of a gay icon who deified his dead male lover, Antinous _ the cult caught on, rivaling Christianity among the masses – and founded a city in his honor.

The 255-year-old British Museum has developed a knack for assembling populist but critically praised shows that set a historical figure in a modern context. The exhibitions have helped make the museum Britain’s most popular tourist attraction, with six million visitors last year.

Museum director Neil MacGregor said the Hadrian show is one of four linked exhibitions “looking at a great reign that is resonating on through history.” It follows last year’s exhibition about China’s first emperor and his terra-cotta warriors, which drew 850,000 visitors. Upcoming shows will look at Persia’s Shah Abbas and the Aztec king Montezuma.

The museum has gathered more than 170 objects for Hadrian show, some from its own collection and others loaned from 31 institutions in 11 countries. They range from the monumental – including a giant marble head of Hadrian found in Turkey last year – to domestic items such as notes from soldiers stationed at remote outposts on Hadrian’s Wall.

There is a poignant display of everyday items left behind by Jews who hid in caves as Hadrian’s Roman forces crushed an uprising led by charismatic rebel leader Simon bar Kokhba in AD 132. The Roman historian Cassius Dio estimated that 580,000 people were killed.

Among the artifacts found in the “Cave of Letters” in the Judean Desert are knives with perfectly preserved wooden handles, jewelry boxes and hand mirrors, a beautiful glass bowl and the keys to hastily abandoned houses.

“They look as if they could have been used yesterday,” Opper said of the artifacts, on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “But they belonged to people who all perished.

“That gives quite a different picture of Hadrian and of Roman power. Not the great civilizing power here, but brutal imperialism.”

“Hadrian: Empire and Conflict” runs until Oct. 26 and will not travel.