Bloomberg, Johnson to talk mayor-to-mayor

LONDON, May 9 (UPI) -- Boris Johnson, the newly elected Conservative mayor of London, plans to pick New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's brain during a meeting Friday.

During his campaign against Ken Livingstone, who had been mayor for eight years, Johnson made crime an issue, the BBC said. One solution he proposed was the kind of mapping now being done in New York, where local police commanders are made responsible for the crime rates in their districts.

Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman who moved from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, at least partly to get the nomination in New York, more recently became an independent. Johnson is a journalist turned politician, a lifelong Tory with a reputation for making outrageous remarks while he was in parliament.

After his meeting with Johnson, Bloomberg is to tour a London school with David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader.

Bloomberg spent Thursday in Belfast for talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen.