Volunteers Firefighters Protest, Say They're Being Used to Disguise New Tax on Victorians
Thousands of Victorian volunteer firefighters, farmers, and residents protested in front of the state's parliament, saying they are being used as a smokescreen for a new tax.
On May 15, the Victorian Parliament passed the Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund (ESVF) bill to replace the previous Fire Services Property Levy, charging households and farms.
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16 hours ago
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Up to £3bn may be needed to fix building cladding
Up to £3bn of public money may have to be spent assessing and removing potentially flammable cladding from buildings in Scotland. New estimates from the Scottish government suggest up to 1,450 residential buildings may need remediation work, including about 250 high-rises. It was previously estimated about 900 buildings were affected. However, full surveys will be needed to establish what needs to be done on a case-by-case basis, with 107 buildings being examined as part of a pilot phase. It is now estimated that the Cladding Remediation Programme could cost £1.7bn to £3.1bn over a 15-year period. If new legislation is passed by the Scottish Parliament, additional funding could be unlocked to fix building safety issues. Ministers making 'painfully slow' cladding progress Scottish ministers given new powers to tackle cladding The Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill will see a tax charged on the construction of certain new residential properties, in line with equivalent legislation in England. The bill seeks to raise about £30m a year to help fund work to fix residential buildings with unsafe cladding which have no linked developer. Public Finance Minister Ivan McKee said: "The Scottish government is committed to doing what is right and necessary to address the challenge of fixing buildings affected by unsafe cladding. "That includes putting the appropriate funding arrangements in place to ensure that the associated costs of cladding remediation do not fall directly onto affected homeowners. "I know that developers share our determination to keep people safe and this levy will ensure they make a fair contribution to these costs, just as they will be doing in England." He added: "I also welcome the continued co-operation of developers who have accepted responsibility for the assessments and any required mitigation and remediation of their buildings." Trade body Homes for Scotland, whose members deliver the vast majority of all new homes in Scotland, said they were committed to remedial action on buildings they had built. But a spokesperson raised concerns about the impact of a building safety levy. "In addition to the proposed Building Safety Levy, Scotland's largest home builders are already contributing to the remediation of other impacted buildings through their payment of the Residential Property Development Tax (RPDT)," they said. The spokesperson said the proposed levy would mean an additional layer of taxation which "will add thousands of pounds to the cost of new homes, pushing families, first-time buyers and future generations further away from home ownership". They added: "At a time when Scotland is facing a housing emergency and 693,000 Scottish households are living in some form of housing need, this is simply unacceptable." The UK government agreed in principle to devolve the powers needed for a Scottish Building Safety Levy last year. Last month ministers announced plans to speed up efforts to inspect and repair buildings in response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London that killed 72 people. The 23-storey tower's cladding is believed to have contributed to the rapid spread of the fire. It broke out in the kitchen of a fourth-floor flat at the tower block in North Kensington, just before 01:00 on 14 June 2017. Within minutes, the fire had rapidly spread up the exterior of the building and moved across all four sides. By 03:00, most of the upper floors were well alight. As well as those killed, more than 70 people were injured. The Cladding Remediation Programme was set up in the aftermath of the disaster but Scottish ministers have been criticised for its slow progress. How are the laws on cladding changing in Scotland? 'No warning' over cladding evacuation, couple say
Yahoo
17 hours ago
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The Real Reason Trump Has Created This Autopen Scandal
When Richard III seized the English throne towards the end of the Wars of the Roses, he pressured Parliament to legitimize his usurpation of the crown from his nephews. Parliament responded by passing a law that accused the late Edward IV, Richard's brother, and his wife Elizabeth Woodville of all manner of misdeeds. The law, Titulus Regius, was an incendiary one. It claimed that Edward's reign had seen the laws of God and his Church, of nature, and of England left 'broken, subverted and disregarded, contrary to all reason and justice.' It denounced his marriage as invalid, in part because Elizabeth had allegedly bewitched him through 'sorcery and witchcraft.' And it conveniently declared that their children, who stood ahead of Richard in the line of succession (and had gone missing under his care), were bastards and automatically ineligible for the throne. The United States is a republic, not a monarchy. But that has not stopped President Donald Trump from taking a similar approach to declaring his predecessor's administration invalid. This week, he issued a memorandum to direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Biden's White House advisors had used an autopen device to fabricate Biden's signature on official documents. Though the memo did not go so far as to accuse Biden officials of using sorcery to bewitch him, it argued that they took advantage of his allegedly compromised mental state to wield presidential powers. 'This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history,' it said. 'The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.' Trump had already signaled that his focus was on Biden's pardons of various people whom he sees as political enemies. 'The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,' he wrote in a post on his personal social-media website in March. 'In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!' Conservative media outlets have written extensively about the previous administration's use of an autopen in recent months, insinuating that it was a sign of Biden's incapacity. There is no evidence that it was used to sign things against the former president's will. Focusing on it is a throwback of sorts to the Obama years, when he began to use the device while traveling overseas. He first used the autopen to sign an extension of the PATRIOT Act in 2011 during a weeklong tour of Europe. In 2013, he used it to sign the bill that prevented the U.S. government from going over the so-called 'fiscal cliff' while vacationing in Hawaii. Less notable uses also followed, such as signing routine annual proclamations. Obama's autopen use initially raised some constitutional questions since Article I requires the president to 'sign' legislation before it can become law. Conservatives occasionally brought it up as part of their broader efforts to paint Obama's tenure as illegitimate in various ways. But a 2005 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel found no issue with a president directing his signature to be attached to a document as opposed to signing it by his own hand. It grounded its reasoning in ancient principles of English and early American legal tradition. 'Under the 'principle of signatures,' the common law recognized that one could sign a document not only with one's own hand, but also by the hand of another who was properly authorized to affix one's signature to the document on one's behalf or who did so in one's presence,' the office explained. 'Furthermore, a document signed in one's name by the hand of another in either of these manners was equally effective as a document signed with one's own hand.' It is worth noting that the original autopen controversy stemmed largely around the president's use of it to sign legislation, where the Constitution explicitly requires a signature. For practical reasons, presidents do not commit all or even most of their orders, instructions, or official actions to paper. A president's direct order to someone serving in the military, for example, carries the same legal weight whether delivered over the telephone, via videoconference, or in person. Since Trump's particular issue with the autopen centers around pardons, it's worth noting that the historical precedents for that power are much looser than for any other official act a president might undertake. The modern practice is for would-be recipients to apply to the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, who reviews cases and makes recommendations to the president. If approved, the office gives pardon recipients a formal document bearing the president's seal and signature. That is a modern convenience rather than an actual legal requirement, however. Trump himself has ignored or bypassed the pardon attorney and issued almost all of his pardons at his personal whim. Past presidents have also wielded the pardon power by proclamation instead of individualized certificates. They have issued mass pardons to ex-Confederate officials, to formerly polygamous Mormons, Vietnam War draft evaders, and so on without difficulty. My favorite examples of the pardon power's ad hoc usage come from the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln developed a reputation during his time in office as a bit of a soft touch when it came to clemency. He was also strikingly informal about it. In one encounter, Lincoln once wrote out a pardon for a young boy accused of desertion on a nearby scrap of bandage. When General Joseph Hooker once sent a list of death warrants for 55 convicted deserters to the White House during the war, historian Ron Soodalter recounted, Lincoln simply wrote 'pardoned' on the envelope and mailed it back. Lincoln's current successor is familiar with this freewheeling approach to governance, albeit to achieve far different ends. Trump has often gone to great lengths to conceal or destroy government records, whether by tearing them up after he is done with them or absconding with them to his Florida golf resort. He notoriously does not use email or a computer and prefers to conduct business over the phone instead of putting anything into writing. This approach conveniently avoids creating a paper trail that could be used against him later. Trump has also argued before that a president's intent matters more than the precise physical or ministerial act that he performs when running the executive branch. He asserted in a 2022 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, for example, that he could declassify documents telepathically. 'There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it,' Trump said. 'You're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it.' Naturally, part of Trump's argument is that Biden's intent was dubious because of his 'cognitive decline' while president. 'This was especially true of actions taken during the second half of his Presidency, when his cognitive decline had apparently become even more clear to those working most closely with him,' his memorandum stated. The 'investigation' appears designed to create a pretextual justification to nullify a wide range of official actions undertaken by the Biden administration. The White House's documents take pains to mention Biden's executive orders and judicial appointments as part of this alleged scheme. 'If his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name,' the memorandum claimed, 'that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden's name.' If someone forged Biden's signature on an official document that carried legal weight, that would indeed be a scandal and could be a criminal offense. But Trump's theory has a few flaws in it. For one thing, there is no evidence that any Biden officials took any actions without his approval or consent. Biden himself has also denied that it happened. 'I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,' he said in a statement on Friday. 'Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false.' Trump's idea that a president could invalidate all of his predecessor's acts by claiming that predecessor was mentally incompetent at the time is also untenable, both practically or legally. There is no 'undo' button in the Constitution. A Democratic president could also do the same thing to the Trump administration's executive actions and judicial appointments upon taking office in 2029, perhaps even extending it to his first term. After all, Trump's own mental fitness is far from uncontested: He publicly defended himself from such claims in 2018 by boasting that he was a 'very stable genius.' For those reasons, Trump's own attempt to delegitimize his predecessor's administration would be unlikely to achieve any substantial legal goals. A Supreme Court where one-third of the justices were appointed by Trump is unlikely to agree that a mentally incompetent president's judicial appointees can be removed from the bench by executive fiat. As with Richard III's Titulus Regius, the memorandum's real effect may be as propaganda—grist for the content mills of right-wing media. That this is all arriving ahead of a summer simmering with bad economic headwinds is significant. Even so, it will be hard to distract from the damage wrought by Trump's own administration over the next four years.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Executive bonuses banned at six UK water companies over pollution
Six UK water companies were banned Friday from paying bonuses to senior executives, which the government said would be inappropriate given their failure to clean up their massive sewage discharges. The new measures, whose targets include the country's biggest supplier, financially troubled Thames Water, prohibit the companies from paying bonuses "to water bosses that oversee poor environmental and customer outcomes", the government announced in a statement. Suffering from underinvestment in a sewer system that dates largely back to the Victorian era, UK water companies, privatised since 1989, have been under fire for several years due to the discharge of significant quantities of sewage into rivers and the sea. Despite this, "water companies have awarded over £112 million ($152 million) in bonuses and incentives over the last decade," the government noted. These executives "should only get bonuses if they've performed well, certainly not if they've failed to tackle water pollution", said environment minister Steve Reed. The Labour government, which came to power in July, has promised to reform a sector "in crisis" and has already legislated to toughen penalties for water company bosses who fail to comply with the law. Water regulator Ofwat last week imposed a record fine of £123 million on London supplier Thames Water, which serves 16 million customers, for repeated sewage spills. Some £18.2 million of the fines related to "unjustified" payouts of dividends. The firm is seeking a private buyer to avoid a state bailout. US investment fund KKR pulled out of a potential deal on Tuesday. Yorkshire Water, Anglian Water, Wessex Water, United Utilities and Southern Water were also hit with the bonus ban. Britain's public spending watchdog warned in April that the water sector as a whole will need to invest £290 billion over the next 25 years to meet environmental and supply challenges. ode/jwp/pdh/jhb
