Britain to spend £200 million fixing cladding on high-rise buildings

Business reporter(wp/reuters):::
The British government will spend 200 million pounds to replace combustible cladding on the outside of high-rise buildings after some private developers refused to pay to make them safe in response to fire that killed 71 people.

The announcement comes two years after a blaze engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-story London social housing block, the deadliest domestic fire in Britain since World War Two.

The fire raised questions about building regulation and the quality of cladding in particular. Officials have said aluminium cladding with a plastic core contributed to the rapid spread of the blaze.

After spending months trying to persuade property companies to pay to remove the cladding with only limited success, the government has decided to step in with public funds to fix the cladding on about 170 high rise buildings.

Prime Minister Theresa May said although some private companies had acted, many had failed to do or had tried to pass on the cost of the work to people living in the buildings.

“It is of paramount importance that everybody is able to feel and be safe in their homes,” May said. “We will now be fully funding the replacement of cladding on high-rise private residential buildings so residents can feel confident they are secure in their homes.”

Government figures show 166 private buildings out of 176 identified with the cladding after inspections carried out after the Grenfell fire have yet to start removing the material.

The government has already committed to funding replacement of the cladding for all social housing. But, currently 23 blocks are still covered in it.

The housing minister James Brokenshire said he had changed his mind on waiting for developers pay up for safety work because of the stress on the residents living in the buildings.

“What has been striking to me over recent weeks is just the time it is taking and my concern over the leaseholders themselves - that anxiety, that stress, that strain,” he said.

Residents of tower blocks wrapped in combustible cladding are suffering bouts of depression and suicidal feelings, a survey found last month.

Leaseholders were facing bills of tens of thousands of pounds each to fix their homes.

Building owners will have three months to claim the funds, with one condition being that they take “reasonable steps” to recover the costs from those responsible for the cladding.

Grenfell United, a group of survivors and the bereaved, said the news offered hope to people feeling at risk at home.

“This result is a testament to residents themselves, in social and private blocks, who refused to be ignored,” the group said. “The truth is we should never have had to fight for it.”

Danny Baker fired by BBC over royal baby chimp tweet

Staff reporter(wp/bbc):::

The BBC has sacked Danny Baker, saying he showed a "serious error of judgement" over his tweet about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's baby.

The tweet, which he later deleted but which has been circulated on social media, showed an image of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee dressed in clothes with the caption: "Royal Baby leaves hospital".

The BBC 5 Live presenter was accused of mocking the duchess's racial heritage.

Baker claimed it was a "stupid gag".

The 61-year-old presented a weekend show on the network.

The corporation said Baker's tweet "goes against the values we as a station aim to embody".

It added: "Danny's a brilliant broadcaster but will no longer be presenting a weekly show with us."

His comment about red sauce references the Sausage Sandwich Game from his Saturday morning 5 Live show, in which listeners choose what type of sauce a celebrity would choose to eat.

After tweeting an apology, in which he called the tweet a "stupid unthinking gag pic", Baker said the BBC's decision "was a masterclass of pompous faux-gravity".

"Took a tone that said I actually meant that ridiculous tweet and the BBC must uphold blah blah blah," he added. "Literally threw me under the bus. Could hear the suits' knees knocking."

Speaking to the media outside his house, he told reporters: "I do not, not understand all of this, I get it. But for 5 Live to chuck us under the bus like this, dear lord."

When quizzed on what he would do next, he added: "I'm annoyingly ebullient and if you're accused of the kind of grotesque racism but you're not, you don't wring your hands. Ill advised, ill thought out and stupid, but racist? No, I'm aware how delicate that imagery is."

Harry and Meghan, whose mother Doria Ragland is African American, revealed on Wednesday their new son was named Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor.

Broadcaster Scarlette Douglas, who works on shows including 5 Live podcast The Sista Collective and The One Show, told the BBC: "I think somebody told him what you've tweeted was incorrect, so you should maybe say something or take it down.

"Yes, OK, he took it down, but his apology for me wasn't really an apology. I don't think it's right and I think subsequently what's happened is correct."

After the initial backlash on social media on Wednesday, Baker said: "Sorry my gag pic of the little fella in the posh outfit has whipped some up. Never occurred to me because, well, mind not diseased.

'Enormous mistake'

"Soon as those good enough to point out its possible connotations got in touch, down it came. And that's it."

Just before he was sacked, he told his half a million Twitter followers he was doorstepped by reporters at his home, saying he was asked: "Do you think black people look like monkeys?"

His tweet added: "No mate. Gag pic. Posh baby chimp. Alerted to circs. Appalled. Deleted. Apologised."

In a following tweet, he added: "Would have used same stupid pic for any other Royal birth or Boris Johnson kid or even one of my own. It's a funny image. (Though not of course in that context.) Enormous mistake, for sure. Grotesque.

"Anyway, here's to ya Archie, Sorry mate."

Baker's Saturday Morning show on BBC Radio 5 Live won him a Sony Gold award for Speech Radio Personality of the Year in 2011, 2012 and 2014 and a Gold Award for entertainment show of the year in 2013.

His irrepressible style made him one of the most popular radio presenters of his generation and saw him described by one writer as the "ultimate geezer".

Baker was also a successful magazine columnist, scriptwriter and TV documentary maker.

He wrote a number of TV shows including Pets Win Prizes and Win, Lose or Draw and, in 1990, The Game, a series about an amateur soccer team in east London.

A stint at BBC London station GLR in the late '80s saw him strike up an enduring friendship with fellow broadcaster Chris Evans, and Baker would later write scripts for the Channel 4 show TFI Friday, which Evans hosted.

Controversial comments

It's the second time Baker has been axed by 5 Live and is the third time he has left the BBC.

In 1997, he was fired for encouraging football fans to make a referee's life hellafter the official had awarded a controversial penalty in an FA Cup tie.

He later claimed he had never incited fans to attack the referee, only that he would have understood if they had.

In 2012, two weeks before he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, he was was back in the news after an on-air rant in which he resigned and branded his bosses at BBC London "pinheaded weasels". The outburst came after Baker had been asked to move from a weekday programme to a weekend.

"It's a dirty rotten shame and a rotten way they did it," he said at the time. "Nobody phoned me. Apparently they were planning on getting round to telling me."

In 2016, Baker took part on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here but was the first person to be voted off in the series.

Facebook's co-founder joins calls to break up the company

IT reporter,USA(wp/reuters):::
Facebook Inc co-founder and former Mark Zuckerberg roommate Chris Hughes called for the break up of the world’s largest social media network in an opinion piece in the New York Times on Thursday.Hughes joins U.S. lawmakers who have also urged anti-trust action to break up big tech companies as well as federal privacy regulation. Facebook has been under scrutiny from regulators around the world over its data sharing practices and hate speech and misinformation on its networks.

“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” Hughes wrote in the New York Times piece.

Facebook’s social network has more than 2 billion users across the world. It also owns WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, each used by more than 1 billion people. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate, in March vowed to break up Facebook, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google if elected U.S. president to promote competition in the tech sector.

“Today’s big tech companies have too much power—over our economy, our society, & our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private info for profit, hurt small businesses & stifled innovation. It’s time to #BreakUpBigTech,” Warren said on Twitter on Thursday.

U.S. President Donald Trump has called for the creation of “more, and fairer” social media companies in response to discrimination he alleges he has faced as a Republican from Twitter Inc.

Hughes co-founded Facebook in 2004 at Harvard with the company’s Chief Executive Officer Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. He quit Facebook in 2007 and later said in a LinkedIn post that he made half a billion dollars for his three years of work.

“It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility,” said Hughes, who later was an online strategist for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said in a statement that he agreed that in retrospect that U.S. regulators “should not have approved Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram & WhatsApp in 2012.”

He said that “the way forward is to heavily scrutinize future mergers and to ensure no company has anti-competitive platform privileges.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In one of a number of security and privacy scandals to hit the company, Facebook is accused of inappropriately sharing information belonging to 87 million users with the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The company has been in advanced talks with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to settle a year-old investigation and said last month it expected to spend between $3 billion and $5 billion on a penalty.

On Monday, Republican and Democratic U.S. senators criticized reported plans for the settlement, calling on the FTC to impose harsher penalties and more restrictions on Facebook’s business practices.

Hughes said he last met with Zuckerberg in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.

“Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks,” Hughes said.

“And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.”

Debenhams' creditors approve UK retailer's restructuring

Busines reporter(wp/reuters):::

The creditors of struggling British department stores group Debenhams on Thursday backed a restructuring plan that will see 22 stores closed next year, putting 1,200 jobs at risk.

Executive Chairman Terry Duddy said: “I am grateful to our suppliers, our pension stakeholders and our landlords who have overwhelmingly backed our store restructuring plans.

“We will continue to work to preserve as many stores and jobs as possible through this process. This is a further important step to give us the platform to deliver a turnaround.”

Debenhams’ lenders took control of the retailer last month in a rescue deal which wiped out the company’s shareholders, including Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley, who had tried to buy the whole group.

Once the country’s biggest department store chain, Debenhams was hit by a sharp slowdown in sales, high rents and ballooning debt.

Administrators, appointed after Ashley’s last-ditch bid to rescue the company failed, sold the group to its creditors including British banks and U.S. hedge funds.

Earlier on Thursday, the investor consortium said it would retain ownership after bids for the chain fell short of the level they wanted.

They will restructure the chain using company voluntary arrangements (CVAs), which allow retailers to avoid insolvency by offloading unwanted stores and securing lower rents on others and reach a compromise with creditors.

The CVAs ultimately aim to reduce Debenhams’ current 166 UK store portfolio by closing about 50 stores, with 22 set to shut their doors in 2020.

Swearing by the EU - UK's anti-Brexit Lib Dems opt for earthy election slogan

Political Reporter(wp/reuters):::

Britain’s pro-EU Liberal Democrats are showcasing their European election campaign with a down-to-earth slogan they hope will attract frustrated voters who want to remain in the bloc: “Bollocks to Brexit”.

Fresh from a strong showing in local council elections, the opposition party posted a photograph on Twitter of its leader Vince Cable with a “special edition” of its manifesto for the May 23 European parliament vote. The document will be launched on Thursday evening.

The picture showed a black front cover emblazoned with the phrase on a yellow placard at its centre.

“It is an attempt to put in a more pungent way what a lot of people think actually,” 76-year-old Cable told broadcaster ITV, which featured the cover with the presenter’s finger partially covering the colourful word.

Literally meaning testicles, it is used as a synonym for ‘nonsense’ in colloquial British English.

Britain’s third mainstream party more than doubled its number of seats in last week’s local elections, when voters punished the governing Conservatives and main opposition Labour over a perceived collective failure to break the political deadlock over Britain’s EU departure.

The phrase adopted by the Lib Dems, who also support holding a second Brexit referendum, has previously been used on stickers and T-shirts by ardent ‘remain’ campaigners.

“It is clear, it is honest,” said Cable, a former business minister. “Some people will be offended, some people are easily offended. Other people will think well actually these guys are absolutely straightforward about what they believe.”

For those keen on more measured language, there is an alternative front cover with the words: “Stop Brexit”.