Elizabeth Fish

A charity ball help in Lincoln raised £4,400 for a two local charities, which also featured the auction of a special anniversary cabinet.

The ball at the DoubleTree by Hilton on the Brayford was attended by 200 people, all looking to help raise money for two mental health charities, MIND and Rethink.

At the auction, the special edition cabinet, which marked Scampton-based Chris Sharp Cabinets’ 500,000th piece of furniture made, went for £440.

Jackie Griffiths won the cabinet after a bidding war with another guest.

Chris Sharp Cabinets’ workforce built the oak and walnut table and laser etched it with a special edition 500,000 mark, alongside the company’s oak leaf logo.

The company has originally asked people to give them ideas of whom to donate the cabinet to, which is when charity ball organisers Kaye Robinson and Melanie Pickering stepped forward.

Paul Kettleborough, operations director, said: “We are really pleased that our milestone has helped two really worthy causes raise much-needed funds which will make a real difference to people’s lives.

“Kaye and Melanie have done an amazing job and we are proud to have played a part in their incredible achievements.”

This is the second charity ball the Sturton women have organised, and they are already planning their third ball next year.

Kaye said: “The night overall raised at least £4,400 but we are still counting and getting money in so the total may exceed that. We are totally overwhelmed by the support of everyone.

“We were especially pleased by the amount raised by the special piece of furniture. It attracted a lot of interest and really made a difference to our fundraising efforts.”

Lincoln MP Karl McCartney is asking Twitter to reassess its security features after a pornographic image was “favourited” on his account.

The Conservative MP said that his Twitter account may have been hacked after seemingly favouriting an explicit tweet featuring an image of a BDSM enthusiast.

The MP is not “following” the account who posted the image, and the image was favourited on another user’s retweet. He did not post the image from his account, or re-tweet it.

Since the incident, the MP has made a number of security changes, and denies that he has ever used the favourite feature on Twitter in the past.

According to his Twitter account, Karl McCartney has favourited a number of tweets in the past. However, after being called out by Lincoln’s prospective Labour candidate, Lucy Rigby, a number of these have since been deleted.

In a statement, Karl McCartney said: “It was brought to my attention earlier today by a number of people that a Twitter post from Lincoln Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate showed a pornographic tweet and around 50 other random tweets that had been ‘favourited’ on my Twitter account from the past four years.

“I have removed all ‘favourites’ from my account, I have reset my password and those who follow me regularly on Twitter will know that I have never been into the practice of favouriting tweets or images in my 6-7 years on Twitter and stick to posting or retweeting in the main (25k+) including at times images of interesting cars I see whilst out campaigning.

“I am writing today to Twitter to express my concern that six months from a General Election the security of Twitter accounts needs to be able to stand up to any malicious and salacious attempts to embarrass the account holder, I will await their reply with interest.”

Lucy Rigby also came under fire from Twitter users due to retweeting the image further, to which she deleted the image and apologised.