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Arquivo diário: setembro 24, 2016
Confira as atrações de hoje , 24/09/2016 , do Altas Horas
Altas Horas
Neste sábado, logo depois do “Zorra”, na Globo, tem o “Altas Horas”, com Serginho Groisman apresentando Laura Muller e Marco Luque.
Divulgação
Malu Mader, Serginho Groisman e Marina Ruy Barbosa
E ainda as participações de Marina Ruy Barbosa, Malu Mader, Titãs e uma entrevista com Amanda Nunes, campeã mundial do peso pena do UFC.
Flávio Ricco com colaboração de José Carlos Nery
Kamila posa nua no quarto neste #SabadoDetreloverSDV
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Ângela posa nua no terraço do prédio neste #SabadoDetreloverSDV
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ACT election 2016: Greens promise $2.75 million on animal welfare
SEPTEMBER 24 2016 – 11:05PM
Georgina Connery
The ACT Greens have promised to spend almost $3 million on “fixing the gaps” in animal welfare services if elected.
The three-point plan aims to deliver $1 million towards a transition package for the end of greyhound racing in the ACT and a further $1.75 to existing community organisations undertaking wildlife care, pound, kenneling and re-homing services for domestic animals.
The policy also launches a plan for subsidised cat neutering for low-income earners, working with veterinary services to conduct low-cost procedures.
Greens candidate for Murrumbidgee Caroline Le Couteur said the policy was distinct from the RSPCA ACT’s Frisky Tom feline de-sexing program already in operation, but said it wouldn’t be until after the election that the finer details of the policy was worked on.
Ms Le Couteur said by law cat owners had to de-sex their pets but the cost of the veterinary procedure meant it was out of reach for some low-income owners.
“We think it is really important that people, particularly low-income earners in Canberra, are able to be responsible pet owners,” she said. “Making sure there aren’t excess cats is in the interest of the wildlife and residents of Canberra.”
The ACT Greens are looking into expanding cat containment but Ms Le Couteur didn’t outline any specific plan for new areas.
While the ACT was a leader having secured bans on caged hens, de-breaking, puppy farms and more, Ms Le Couteur said there were areas in need of funding and policy attention.
“The Greens have always stood up for animal welfare, it’s a core part of Greens policy,” she said.
“The groups we have consulted with have all given us ideas about needs they see. We don’t have a 24-hour seven-day pound or lost animals service, we don’t have enough RSPCA inspectors and there is not enough government support for native animals that are injured. This will fill the gaps and help to improve the situation.”
The policy directs subsidies provided to the ACT’s greyhound industry into an animal welfare rehoming scheme for former racing dogs, and dogs will be vaccinated and microchipped for free.
The package also includes funding for workers involved in the industry to retrain for employment in new industries.
Source : The Canberra Times
Ghost and grave tour promises to bring stories of dead back to life
an hour ago
FROM the sad tale of a young lad who was killed when he fell from a horse, to the stately funeral procession involving 125 horse-drawn carriages to see off one of Burnie’s first entrepreneurs, a new ghost and grave tour in the North-West promises to bring the stories of its dead back to life.
The Burnie Regional Museum’s Ghosts of the North-West tours start on October 1, and tour five of the region’s oldest cemeteries each Saturday night for five weeks.
The tours will follow the opening of an accompanying exhibition at the Burnie Art Gallery on Tuesday.
The kerosene-lamp-led tours are touted as a bit of fun, but guide and museum volunteer Chris Banks said it would not be a flippant exercise.
“We will bring these stories back to life in a respectful way and we invite those who come along to bring a flower to place on a grave,” Mr Banks said.
The Wivenhoe Cemetery, which opened in 1900, will be the site of the first tour.
Those buried there include Duncan Bridley, who was thrown from a horse at 15, and Captain William Jones, a pioneer sawmiller, hotelier and shipping company owner whose funeral procession in 1907 included 125 horse-drawn carriages, 40 horsemen and the Burnie Federal Band.
The tours will continue on October 8 at Somerset before moving to Wynyard, Ridgley and Penguin.
Source : The Mercury
Melbourne’s high-rise nightmares taking a tall toll on residents and investors
SEPTEMBER 25 2016 – 12:15AM
Aisha Dow
We have watched them sprouting up all over Melbourne, transforming our streets and skylines with the promise of solving the housing affordability crisis. But many of those closest to the booming industry say they wouldn’t buy one.
All across Melbourne, new apartments riddled with faults have been sold to investors and residents. Some of the problems are so costly to fix that it would be cheaper to build the apartments again.
There are cracked and leaking buildings, glass that falls out of high-rise dwellings, diluted paint, windows that are not quite square, sinkholes and car-park fumes funnelled directly into living areas.
Often these cases play out behind closed doors or, quietly, in the courts. After all, who wants to tell the world that they’ve bought a disaster?
Many people involved in the strata industry say faults in Melbourne’s proliferating apartment buildings are common, blaming poor enforcement of construction standards and an influx of cheap materials.
Almost 3000 complaints about defective and unsatisfactory workmanship were made to Consumer Affairs Victoria during the past financial year, an annual increase of 13 per cent.
Strata Community Australia (which represents Victoria’s body corporate managers) is aware of at least 58 apartment buildings in Melbourne with defects, valued at a total of about $49 million.
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” the group’s Victorian general manager, Rob Beck, said. “It is rare for buildings to be defect-free.”
In Caulfield North, sinkholes developed in a basement car park. At a Collins Street apartment tower, rain was coming through the roof. In Brunswick, 34 unit owners were told it would be easier to pay $1.4 million out of their own pockets to fix problems with water seeping into the complex, rather than pursue a deregistered builder in court.
Strata Community Australia is calling for a new system, where developers have to put aside a “bond” worth 2 per cent of the cost of their residential development.
“Within two years of being built, they have to fund a defects report. If there are defects in the building, there is money in the kitty,” Mr Beck said.
“It may not be enough in a lot of cases – but it’s a very good start.”
An attempt to seal a leaking window in a Melbourne apartment. Photo: supplied
‘If it has a balcony, it will leak’
Waterproofing (or the lack of it) is considered a leading and systemic problem for apartment buildings in Melbourne today, with many who manage the city’s apartment towers saying “if it has a balcony, it will leak”.
Some apartments have become uninhabitable through water damage caused by poor construction methods, with water seeping through multiple levels where proper waterproof membranes have not been installed.
Phil Dwyer, president of the Builders Collective of Australia, has no doubts about the damage poor waterproofing can wreak.
“What might happen is that the water gets into walls or the structure of the floor, and it starts to rot the timber,” he said. “It can do a lot of damage in a short period of time.”
An air gap between a wall and a window frame. Photo: Supplied
Windows have fallen out of high-rise apartments
Another key problem in Melbourne is windows and glazed balconies leaking, falling out, warping or cracking when installed incorrectly or used for the wrong purpose.
Express Glass managing director Adrian Grocott said glass installers were not licensed as a trade and mistakes were not being picked up by building surveyors before new residents moved in.
“There is really nothing stopping anyone bringing in a container of product from overseas, installing it in a building and having that installer hand over a piece of paper saying this product complies with the building code in Australia,” he said.
“That’s the end of it until something goes wrong. There is no policing of work that is being installed on a construction site.”
Do you know more about this issue? Email aisha.dow@theage.com.au
Australian Window Association chief executive Tracey Gramlick said that when problems occurred they could cost many millions of dollars to fix, especially if the window faults caused water to leak into the walls and ceilings of apartment buildings.
She said there was a growing national trend of cheaper imported glass and glazing being substituted during the design process to save money.
Owners are left carrying the can
But it is what happens when thing go awry that is perhaps the greatest cause for alarm.
Consider the case of Amanda Frazer, a first-home buyer who bought in Ormond off the plan in 2012. When she went to inspect her two-bedroom home, she discovered something different to what she had signed up for. The developer had squeezed another unit into the building and significantly reduced the size of her property’s balcony.
Ms Frazer contacted her lawyer, who told her to settle on the property or risk being sued.
She called the council. The council inspected the building and declared it illegal; because of the extra apartment jammed in, the complex no longer complied with the planning permit.
Ms Frazer said an inspector found further breaches in the building code: the floors weren’t level, the stairs were too steep and the ceilings too low. “It was a shoddy finish. You could see the lack of care,” she said.
Amanda Frazer says she has been so scarred by her experience she will never buy another home. Photo: Justin McManus
Although the property had been approved by a private building surveyor following construction, her home remained “illegal” for three years, meaning it could not be sold. Ms Frazer said she would probably still be in the same situation if Mr Dwyer had not volunteered his time to help the owners get retrospective approval.
“I would call the Victorian Building Authority and they would say call Consumer Affairs. Consumer Affairs would say call the Law Institute, and the Law Institute would say contact the surveyor or the council and it would just go round and round for months,” she said.
“I just think it’s disgusting that in Australia you can buy a property and when it turns out to be illegal, it’s the owner’s responsibility.
“Isn’t this why we have councils? Isn’t this why we have surveyors? They should just do their job properly. Because when I don’t do my job properly, I get held accountable.”
Ms Frazer received no compensation from the developer and there was little point pursuing him for the lost value in her home and repairs (estimated to be up to $100,000) as his businesses went into administration.
This is not unusual. Many apartment owners choose to fix thousands of dollars’ worth of defects themselves, because the developer has gone bankrupt, or it would be too expensive to take them to court.
What about insurance?
Although domestic building insurance is mandatory for all Victorian homes up to three storeys, high-rise dwellings are exempt.
Construction law expert Andrew Whitelaw, of TressCox Lawyers, said this meant if a builder went bankrupt, home owners and investors might have no choice but to pay substantial bills to fix building defects.
“A purchaser who buys a lot for $350,000 might be looking at contributions to multimillion-dollar rectification projects that they had little or no knowledge of at the time they purchased,” Mr Whitelaw said.
“It’s a fundamental flaw in the system.”
He said that while the “overwhelming majority of builders” did the right thing, things did still go awry, and when that happened “complicated and complex circumstances” needed to be worked through.
The Andrews government is considering making changes to domestic building insurance arrangements before the next election, while a new body called Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria will have the power to compel builders to fix problems, finish work or pay for the rectification – part of a range of recent reforms in the sector.
“We’re strengthening consumer protection to avoid costly disputes and, if disputes do arise, [to] resolve them quickly and without the personal cost and financial stress of the old system,” Planning Minister Richard Wynne said.
The jury is still out on whether these changes will significantly help the home owners lumped with major defects, or prevent them in the first place.
“I’m worried that they won’t,” Mr Dwyer said.
While the new laws prohibit builders from appointing the building surveyors who are meant to check their work, Mr Dwyer said builders would still ask their clients to appoint their preferred building surveyors.
“It remains exactly the same – nothing changes – so that’s a waste of space,” he said.
Mr Dwyer is also concerned the new dispute resolution system would not involve enough people with building industry expertise.
“It might be better, but I don’t think it will be good,” he said.
Source : The Age
ACT election 2016: Labor to ban property developer donations, introduce ‘real-time’ reporting
SEPTEMBER 24 2016 – 7:13PM
Matthew Raggatt
ACT Labor will ban political donations from property developers, introduce real-time reporting rules and investigate the public funding of election campaigns if re-elected.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr said on Saturday he would also introduce an ACT Integrity Commissioner who would be aided by a team of “specialised investigators” to look into serious public sector breaches of integrity.
Echoing the laws in New South Wales, Labor would immediately refuse to accept any new property developer donations as part of the commitments.
Mr Barr said the major governance changes would “increase transparency, accountability and integrity in government”.
“We’ll expand the scope of the ACT Lobbyist Register to cover in-house government relations staff, industry associations, and project management liaison officers and companies,” he said.
“We will investigate complementary schemes for public funding of election campaigns that encourage candidates and parties to raise funds from small individual contributions.”
Donations would have to be declared within seven days of being received under the proposed law changes.
The Canberra Liberals have previously promised to set up an Independent Commission Against Corruption if elected next month.
Mr Barr said the integrity commissioner would have the power to conduct hearings and recommend criminal prosecution. The office’s operations would be reviewed after five years.
In a clear swipe against current Speaker and Liberal MLA Vicki Dunne, Mr Barr said Labor would also seek to remove the risks of political interference into complaints against MLAs by preventing the speaker from blocking a complaint to the Independent Commissioner for Standards, or from “insert[ing] their own views when referring the matter”.
Labor said earlier this month that Ms Dunne had “tainted” an independent investigation into a Liberal election flyer.
Mr Barr said ACT Labor supported federal Labor’s proposed ban on international donations, which became a national issue after the controversy surrounding Labor Senator Sam Dastyari’s acceptance of money from a company with direct links to the Chinese government.
The broad reforms would also change enrolment time limits, allowing voters to get on the electoral roll as late as election day itself.
“We will also clos[e] nominations on day five of the formal campaign period to allow for an earlier distribution of postal votes, so more Canberrans get a chance to have their say,” he said.
In a statement, Opposition Leader Jeremy Hanson described the proposed integrity commissioner was a “watered-down” version of the Liberals’ ICAC policy.
He said while his party was open to donation reform, an ICAC was “essential” for the ACT.
“The stench surrounding the Labor and Greens government will not be washed away by this desperate and disingenuous last minute announcement,” he said.
“If Andrew Barr was was serious about donation reform he would stop funnelling pokie money through the CFMEU and ‘1973 Foundation’ to ACT Labor.”
With Stephen Jeffery
Source : The Canberra Times
Man charged with murder after body found at Bass Hill in Sydney’s west
SEPTEMBER 24 2016 – 4:37PM
Han Nguyen
A 29-year-old man will remain behind bars after he was charged with murder following the discovery of a body in western Sydney.
Michael Hadler did not appear in Parramatta Local Court on Saturday and did not apply for bail after being charged with the murder of Brian Hamilton, whose body was found in a shared rental home in Bass Hill on Friday morning.
It is believed the men were known to each other.
Emergency services were called to the home on Buist Street at about 11:20 am on Friday morning and located the body with “obvious signs of injury”, Chief Inspector Glen Fitzgerald from NSW Police said.
Police said there were no reports of fighting or screaming in the area in the time Mr Hamilton ois thought to have died.
Investigators combed through the nearby area, checking in gutters and down stormwater drains.
Mr Hamilton was last seen alive in the house on Thursday night by another person who lives in the share house.
Mr Hadler handed himself in to Bass HIll Police Station and was taken to Bankstown Police Station where he was charged with murder.
He will appear on Burwood Local Court on September 28.
– With AAP.
Source : Sydney Morning Herald
Minister rejects call for external child protection inquiry
SEPTEMBER 24 2016 – 11:28PM
Tony Moore
An external independent investigation to ask “big questions” into Queensland’s foster care system was now essential, Queensland’s opposition said yesterday.
Queensland has 5000 foster parents.
This came as Child Safety Minister Shannon Fentiman on Saturday fast-tracked the appointment of an extra 47 front-line child safety workers by Christmas.
Ms Fentiman said the Queensland and Family Child Commission – set up in 2014 after former chief magistrate Tim Carmody investigated Queensland’s child protection services in 2013 – would also investigate foster-care approvals.
She said more “unannounced” visits to foster families would be allowed under pressure from the opposition.
Ms Fentiman said KPMG had been engaged by the state government to check where the case loads were highest on child protection officers and what could be learned.
On Saturday a North Queensland man – who was acting as a foster father with three children in his care – was arrested in Cairns and appeared in Cairns Magistrates Court.
He faces charges of indecent dealing of a child under the age of 16, possessing child exploitation material and accessing child exploitation material.
The charges were confirmed by police on Saturday and follow a week of intense pressure on Queensland’s foster care system.
The 41-year-old man from Edmonton appeared in Cairns Magistrates Court on three charges of indecently dealing with a child under 16, two charges of possessing child exploitation material, one charge of using a carriage service to make child pornography available and possessing dangerous drugs.
Shadow child safety minister Ros Bates said important questions about the operation of Queensland’s child protection system still needed to be asked.
“The situation has become so urgent,” Ms Bates said.
“It’s time this government finally took some real action and commenced a rapid response investigation into failings of the department and foster care system.
“Most foster families are doing a great job, but sadly more and more cases are emerging where the system is letting down our most vulnerable children and big questions need to be answered.
“There is something gravely wrong with the system as it stands – we don’t want promises of action in six months, or in 12 months, we want action right now.”
Ms Bates questioned Ms Fentiman’s reluctance to act on issues within the foster care system, which were raised with her department back in April.
“Why did it take five months and widespread media reports for the minister to finally come clean and acknowledge real failings within the system she’s in charge of?”
Ms Bates said while the previous government had invested $406 million into Queensland’s child protection services, Ms Fentiman appeared reluctant to act.
“If resources aren’t making it through to the front line the minister needs to take responsibility and fix it urgently.”
Ms Fentiman rejected suggestions the Child Safety portfolio was under-resourced with staff or funds and said the LNP had cut 225 child safety officers.
“We have 166 more frontline staff and frontline support staff than we did two years ago,” she said, as she announced the recruitment of the extra staff.
Ms Fentiman said her portfolio’s 2016-17 budget was $77 million larger than in 2015-16.
“It is $144 million more than the last LNP budget handed down by the member for Clayfield (Opposition Leader and former treasurer Tim Nicholls).”
An extra 230 early-intervention positions had been created and that would grown to 630 early-intervention positions within two years, she said.
She said Mr Carmody had last week expressed his confidence in the actions of the government.
Ms Fentiman said the “overwhelming majority” of foster parents did a “tremendous job, opening their hearts and their homes”.
Source : Brisbane Times
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