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Wouldn’t it be great to see talk of ‘beauty’ in the positive sense rather than just the negative?
Felicie Krikler, director at Assael, said she welcomed the reworded policy which prioritised ’quality as well as the quantity of homes’ adding: ’We see the revisions as a great opportunity to deliver buildings that people aspire to live in and that have a positive impact on everyone. Policy implementation is vital to achieve these outcomes and we look forward to seeing further action both from local authorities and the industry.
RIBA President Ben Derbyshire said the ’fulfilment of these proposals’ would be the real test for the NPPF and urged the government to give planners the resources, tools and power to raise the bar of quality design in the system.
And although welcoming the Government’s ’efforts to tighten definitions and processes in the NPPF, such as the presumption in favour of sustainable development’, The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) warned that planning authorities could struggle under the increased demands placed on them by the document.
John Acres, president of the RTPI said: ’[We] must recognise the significant pressure the new NPPF requirements will put on local authority planning teams.
With the summer recess almost here, the anticipated announcement has had us on tenterhooks, but the government has delivered on its promise to publish a final revised NPPF this month.
Disappointingly there has been minimal change following consultation on the draft NPPF in March this year. The industry – from local authorities, interested parties to developers – provided substantial feedback and it was expected to see some of this translated into the final revised NPPF. There are however no big surprises and no real changes.
The focus remains on housing. Overall, there is less, not more, for those looking to deliver employment floorspace. This may be a critical oversight as we all move towards a post-Brexit economy. It is encouraging though to see a new reference to storage and distribution in Paragraph 82, which certainly acknowledges the continued growth in this buoyant sector.
Setting that aside, the long awaited final version of the NPPF is now here, which means we can crack on with delivering what the country needs. The planning system is crucial to delivering growth and places that we all want and need and with this NPPF we can continue to do that.
The trick for everyone now, is to ensure we interpret its content in the same way and remind ourselves that we’re trying to respond to a housing crisis and, economically, a post-Brexit environment.
The entire scope of Planning powers should be reduced.
They should get out of design completely, who is qualified to judge 'design' -none of us can even agree on that. The Client has to be the one who decides on 'design' and he should be smart enough to employ skillful consultants. We get the buildings we deserve, and if we are a greedy, short-thinking, lazy, untalented society, then that's what we get. The very last body you should trust on enforcing standards, is government. After all, they are currently telling is to cut construction costs by 30%.
We would be better served teaching design appraisal in school.
I actually think standards are improving, the worst culprits in design are pompous, self-regarding architects in my view. There are some absolutely dog-awful designs rammed down our throats by the bow-tie, comedy-specs and black turtle-neck brigade.
Planning should be pollution, infrastructure, density, height and strategic issues such as green belt, use-classes zoning and big-picture stuff like Heathrow and HS2.
What size your windows should be is not a planning matter, it is an invasion of freedoms.
Planners should not be involved in the Appeals process either. That would speed things up and get more consistent decisions made.
Sliding doors: is US President Donald Trump a fan of Belgian surrealist René Magritte?
Something seems to have changed. Judging by our collective response to recent events in Las Vegas and Texas, we are becoming affectively stunned, even morally anesthetized, by the recurrence of these horrors. It would seem that people in America and around the world are recalibrating their expectations to a new normal. What is predictable not only appears more inevitable, but it also tends to be deemed less evil. When an injustice becomes the norm, it no longer feels like an injustice.
The same general state of resignation, inescapability and acceptability is also present in the way we respond to President Donald Trump’s manifestly inappropriate rhetoric. Trump’s deplorable response to the Texas mass killing passed unnoticed, which suggests that exactly a year into his presidency, in the words of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, we have become comfortably numb.
Trump’s insight on the worst mass shooting in modern Texas history ("this isn’t a gun situation") may not go down in history as particularly enlightening or informative. But it is philosophically very disconcerting. A man walks into a church carrying an assault rifle and starts shooting indiscriminately at anyone and everyone in sight. And yet, notwithstanding the blaringly obvious, we are supposed to be reassured by the President of the United States that "this isn’t a gun situation"?
Trump’s peculiar comment evokes a comparison with a famous painting by the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, from 1929. The Treachery of Images depicts a pipe, underneath which Magritte has painted the words "ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("this is not a pipe"). Magritte commented on his painting in characteristically stirring fashion: "the famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘this is a pipe’, I'd have been lying!"
The painting is rightly famous for highlighting the gap between language and meaning. Ambiguity fills that gap. The painting forces us to question the importance of the sentence and the word. The word "pipe" is just a word, not a pipe, and a picture of a pipe is just that, a picture, not something that can be smoked. The ambiguity unleashed by the apparent simplicity of this painting became the subject of a book-length analysis by French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1973, where he makes the ambiguous statement: "about even this ambiguity, however, I am ambiguous".
Perhaps Trump is not given the credit he deserves. It might just be that his comment on the latest murderous mass shooting in America is a highly sophisticated observation of our postmodern condition. He may be refering to the surreality of our existence, the ambiguity of what the French refer to as the "quotidien": the ordinary, commonplace, trivial.
"This isn’t a gun situation". Like Magritte, Trump knew that he was going to be reproached by the common people, but it is his moral duty to speak the truth. First of all, it was not a gun that killed 26 people in the First Baptist Church in Texas, it was an assault rifle. The fact that this lethal weapon was legally obtained, by someone with a history of severe domestic violence and mental health issue, is apparently irrelevant. It isn’t a gun situation.
There is a place for ambiguity in our world and perhaps art galleries are that place. But politics is different, or at least it should be.
Just possibly, President Trump is wiser than the world media give him credit for. He is merely reminding us, the gullible masses, not to be misled by appearances. Like the prisoners chained in a dark cave facing a blank wall in Plato’s allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic, we repeatedly and inevitably mistake the shadows on the wall for reality. The truth is elsewhere, and Trump knows the truth: "this isn’t a gun situation".
So what pearls of wisdom can we take from President Trump’s pronouncement? It is not a gun situation, meaning that guns have nothing do with it, since many people own guns, but hardly anyone goes around shooting innocent people indiscriminately. Instead, Trump reassures us that it is only a mental health issue.
This is very profound, but alas, there is a problem. Logic does not give credence to Trump’s statement. After all, many people suffer from mental health issues and yet the vast majority don’t go around shooting people either. So, if it is not a gun situation and it is not a mental health situation either, what is it?
It is all too easy to get lost in the ambiguity of the situation. It is also very convenient to do so, especially for those who want to maintain the status quo. But it would be an insult to those who lost their lives in Texas, Las Vegas and too many other places to mention.
In the last analysis, there is one basic fact: no one can be shot dead unless the murderer has a gadget to shoot them with: a gun. There is nothing ambiguous about this fact. Every time someone is shot, it is a gun situation. Yes, there may be other factors at play, but there is only one common denominator in all mass shootings: guns were involved.
There is a place for ambiguity in our world and perhaps art galleries are that place. But politics is different, or at least it should be. Facts still matter, words have meanings, ambiguity can be fatal and we have a duty to face the truth, no matter how inconvenient the truth may be. For President Trump to suggest in the aftermath of yet another avoidable mass shooting that "this isn’t a gun situation" is simply a ludicrous lie.
People said Floribeth Mora Diaz was crazy to think Blessed John Paul II interceded with God to heal her brain aneurysm, but if so, “then it is a blessed craziness, because I’m healthy”, she told reporters at the Vatican.
The 50-year-old Costa Rican woman spoke at a press conference on Thursday, just three days before she would participate in the Mass for the canonisation of Blessed John Paul. Pope Francis had accepted her healing as the miracle needed for the late pope’s canonisation.
At the same press conference, Daughter of Charity Sister Adele Labianca gave her eyewitness account of the healing of Sister Caterina Capitani, the nun whose healing in 1966 was accepted as the miracle needed for the beatification of Blessed John XXIII. Pope Francis waived the requirement of another miracle for his canonisation.
Even though both women have told their stories hundreds of times, they were emotional before an international gathering of reporters at the Vatican. Sister Labianca said she had to read her testimony from a prepared text because she was certain she would forget something. Mora Diaz simply let her voice tremble.
The Costa Rican woman, who travelled to the Vatican with her husband and four children, told about having a severe headache in April 2011, going to the doctor and being told she had a brain aneurysm. The doctors in Costa Rica said surgery might be able to help, but she would have to go to Mexico or Cuba for the operation, and she did not have the money.
The local doctors could do nothing more for her, so they sent her home, “telling me I had only a month to live”. She began crying as she talked about her husband trying to prepare their children for their mother’s death and urging them to pray.
The doctor’s reaction was important, she said, “because I wasn’t the only one saying I was healed, but there were doctors, who were very serious, saying so”.
After months of treatment, doctors removed most of her stomach, which was covered with tumours, and her entire spleen and pancreas. At first she improved, but then she developed an external fistula, which leaked, Sister Labianca said. She was on the point of death on May 22, 1966, when the assistant provincial of the Daughters of Charity brought her a relic, reportedly a piece of Pope John’s bed sheet.
“Frightened to hear a man’s voice” in her room, she turned and saw Pope John standing by her bed. He told her she was fine, and she went to tell the other sisters that she was healed and hungry, Sister Labianca said.
With the acceptance of her healing as a miracle, Pope John Paul beatified Pope John in 2001, and Sister Capitani was there. She died in 2010, more than 43 years after she was healed.
As temperatures soared, a Chocolate Labrador mix died in the backseat of a parked car Sunday afternoon at Vaughan Mills shopping centre.
Two Sudbury residents in their early 20s face animal cruelty charges after a passerby spotted the dog in distress around 2:15 p.m. and notified mall security.
A security guard said his colleagues were called to the south end of the parking lot near Bass Pro Mills Dr. and notified emergency services. He said he’s never heard of a similar occurrence in his three years on the job.
York police say security personnel tried to splash water through a small opening in the window of the silver four-door Dodge Avenger. Fire crews later broke open the back-left window after the dog had fallen unconscious.
The mercury soared to 32C in Vaughan on Sunday, but the temperature inside the vehicle would have been much higher.
The Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says a dog’s normal body temperature is about 39C and that dogs can only stand being 41C for a short time before irreparable brain damage or death occur.
Officials tried in vain to resuscitate the dog and impounded the car. A 21-year-old man and 20-year-old woman were both charged with causing unnecessary suffering to animals under the Criminal Code and will appear in court July 10.
Dogs release heat slowly through panting, as they have no pores. While open windows and a bowl of water can help, Steinhoff said it’s safest to leave dogs at home. She said most cases happen when people are delayed after planning to only be gone a few minutes.
Breeds tolerate heat differently, Steinhoff said, noting that a husky might have had issues just being outside Sunday. She said even five minutes in a vehicle in the day’s blazing heat would be too much for most pets.
Every month for the next two decades, 50,000 Latinos will turn 18 years old. With that many new eligible voters and dramatic population growth expected, Latinos could dominate voting in the Southwest, particularly Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.
Every year, 600,000 more Latinos become eligible voters, making them a potentially potent voting force. However, Latinos have a historically low turnout at the polls: Only around 30 percent of eligible Latinos vote, according to the non-profit Washington, D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center. Advocacy groups see the national push toward more stringent voter identification laws as a way to suppress an already apathetic Latino vote.
Of the nation's 21.3 million eligible Latino voters, only 6.6 million voted in the 2010 elections, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. White and black voters had higher turnout — 48.6 percent and 44 percent, respectively.
"We haven't been able to engage the community to really participate in the democratic process," said Carlos Duarte of the Phoenix-based non-partisan voter education organization, Mi Familia Vota Education Fund. "To be focusing our energy on trying to generate another obstacle for the people to participate, I think is completely misguided."
Duarte, Texas director of Mi Familia Vota, which also has branches in Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, said legislators should instead encourage Latinos to vote.
Despite the low turnout of recent elections, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials predicts record voting by Latinos in November - more than 12.2 million voters. That would be a 26 percent increase in turnout from the 2008 election.
Evan Bacalao is senior director of civic engagement for the Los Angeles-based NALEO, the leadership organization representing more than 6,000 elected and appointed Latino officials. He said the group's projections are typically conservative. NALEO uses the Census and Latino voter turnout in previous elections to forecast turnout for November.
NALEO still is concerned about confusion over new ID legislation, Bacalao said. The organization is focusing on voter education so that Latinos are not discouraged from voting because they are misinformed about what documents they need, he said.
Of the eight states with the largest Latino populations, four — Texas, Florida, Arizona and Colorado ¬– have some form of voter ID law, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The Texas photo ID law is awaiting a U.S. District Court decision.
Florida voters must show a photo ID that includes their signature, a student ID card for example. Arizona voters may show a photo ID or two non-photo forms of identification. Colorado voters must show ID, but that could include a bank statement, utility bill, paycheck or some similar form.
In the other four states with large Latino populations, voters in New York, Illinois and New Jersey are not required to show ID, but legislatures in each state have ID bills pending. California has no ID requirement and none is before the legislature.
With the exception of Rhode Island, voter ID legislation has passed by a party-line vote — Republicans for, Democrats against, said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
Supporters say photo ID laws will reduce voter fraud, but Texas Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fisher calls the legislation "a solution in search of a problem."
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott cited 50 voter fraud convictions since 2002 as justification for the strict photo ID law that passed in March 2011. Texas has more than 13 million registered voters. The majority of voter fraud cases in Texas involved mail-in ballots, according to state records reviewed by News21. Only one case resulted in a guilty plea to in-person voter impersonation, the type of alleged fraud a photo ID is supposed to prevent.
Other Southwestern states report little to no voter fraud.
New Mexico, which doesn't require photo ID, has never convicted a voter of fraud, said Lyn Payne, records custodian for the state attorney general's office.
Arizona, which has a strict, non-photo ID requirement to vote , has had seven voter fraud convictions since 2000 and none for voter impersonation at the polls, according to state records reviewed by News21.
Colorado, which has a less strict, non-photo voter ID requirement, has had 21 convictions for voter fraud since 2000. Three were for voter impersonation, according to state records reviewed by News21. It is not clear whether the voter impersonation was by mail or in person.
Despite increasing legislative action on photo ID bills nationally, the majority of Southwestern states do not have such laws.
Photo ID laws have been proposed in the Colorado Legislature in each of the last eight years. The New Mexico Legislature has considered photo ID laws in each of the last four years.
Latinos make up 13 percent of eligible Colorado voters. In April, Democratic legislators defeated in committee a bill that would have let Colorado voters decide on a photo ID law by putting a referendum on the November ballot. The Denver Post reported that the bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Shawn Mitchell, has said he may ask citizens to petition to put ID legislation on a future ballot.
New Mexico legislators struck down three photo ID proposals this year alone. The state has the highest concentration of Latino residents in the country and 38 percent of eligible voters are Latino, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
A significant turnout by Latinos in Colorado and New Mexico could have an impact on the electoral vote count in November. President Barack Obama won Colorado in 2008 — after the state voted Republican in eight of the last nine presidential elections. New Mexico has typically leaned Democratic in recent years.
Latino voters accounted for 31.6 percent of the turnout in New Mexico for the 2010 elections. In Colorado, 7.9 percent of the 2010 vote was Latino.
Arizona requires voters to show proof of citizenship when registering by using a state form. A federal court struck down the portion of Arizona law that required citizenship proof when registering with a federal form. The Arizona secretary of state's office website directs voters to prove citizenship, but does not inform them that they can register by using federal forms.
Arizona Solicitor General David Cole said the state plans to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Tammy Patrick, a federal compliance officer at the Maricopa County Recorder's office, said if a voter tries to register without proof of citizenship, an election officer is not obligated to inform them of the federal form option. However, if a voter asks specifically for that form, the officer is required to provide it.
Civil rights groups cite the handful of fraud convictions as evidence that ID laws are unnecessary and could disenfranchise eligible voters.
VIDEO: The Texas Voter ID bill was signed into law in May 2011, requiring every voter to present a government-issued photo ID at polling places. Many in the Latino community and Democratic Party believe the law will disenfranchise voters at a time when the number of Hispanic voters is growing. Produced by Lizzie Chen and Ana Victoria Lastra.
"These measures are usually reported to be justified by fraud but in fact voter fraud — it has been demonstrated time and time again — is frankly minuscule in proportion to the number of folks that vote," said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
MALDEF, a national Latino civil rights organization with headquarters in Los Angeles, has strongly opposed ID laws and has filed legal challenges to voting rights laws in Arizona, Colorado, California, and New Mexico — most recently against the Texas photo ID law, which, in July, was argued before a three-judge U.S. District Court panel in Washington, D.C.
Voter fraud pales in comparison to the number of voters who would be disenfranchised by ID laws, Saenz said. Estimates of the number of voters who lack ID under the new Texas law has ranged from the state's 167,724 to the U.S. Department of Justice's 1.5 million.
Despite opponents' claims that voter fraud is rare, supporters of ID laws maintain that it threatens fair elections.
"It's something that we hold very dear as a fundamental right in our country and in our state — the sanctity of our elections, that we have full and open, honest access elections to protect that right," said Chris Elam, communications director and deputy executive director for the Texas Republican Party. "And we as Republicans feel that it needs to be protected and to make sure that we can do so."
The push for ID laws comes at a time of dramatic growth in the Latino population.
There are about 50.5 million Latino U.S. citizens — native-born and naturalized — and the Census projects that number will more than double to 132.8 million by July 2050.
Latino political muscle first drew attention in the 2008 presidential election when 9.7 million Latinos voted — 2 million more voters than in 2004, according to the Census. And their potential is even greater.
Voting rights activists are focused on Texas, where Latinos accounted for 63.1 percent of all population growth between 2000 and 2009, according to the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based, non-partisan progressive think tank.
One in five registered Texas voters is Latino, according to the 2010 Census. The Center for American Progress estimates that nearly 2.15 million eligible Texas Latinos are not registered to vote. An additional 880,000 Texas legal residents are eligible to naturalize, and therefore vote, according to Department of Homeland Security estimates.
That exceeds the 950,695 votes by which Sen. John McCain beat Barack Obama in Texas in the 2008 presidential elections. Despite population growth and increased participation in 2008, Latinos did not make themselves a force at the polls.
Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a non-partisan Latino voter participation organization based in San Antonio, said the Southwest is not a voting culture. There are fewer independent organizations — unions, for example — to engage and educate the electorate, compared to other parts of the nation, Gonzalez said.
"It's sad enough that Latinos don't vote, now you're gonna cut that group in half," Austin, Texas, resident Rachael Torres said of the state's new strict photo ID law. "There's no reason for that." If people have legally registered to vote, that should be enough, said Torres who is a registered voter.
Latino voters don't think their votes count so they don't see the vote as a right they must exercise, Torres said. She encourages other Latinos to vote, calling the ID law another "scare tactic" to discourage them.
Photo ID laws deter voters for several reasons, Saenz said. Some people do not have documents that prove their identity — they were born before it was common to issue birth certificates or they were born in rural areas where they might never have received the documents. Others might be deterred by the time and resources required to get the documents, Saenz said.
VIDEO: The Texas Voter ID bill was enacted to prevent voter fraud after the state investigated more than 100 cases of voter fraud since 2002. Of those cases, Texas claims 50 convictions. One was for voter impersonation, which is the type of fraud that voter ID is supposed to prevent. The Texas Democratic Party and civil rights groups believe the law will disenfranchise minority groups, specifically Latinos. Produced by Lizzie Chen and Ana Victoria Lastra/News21.
The Texas voter ID bill, SB-14, is one of the strictest photo ID laws. The Justice Department denied approval on the grounds that Texas violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because of the disproportionate impact the law would have on minorities and the poor.
Democratic state legislators and civil rights groups such as MALDEF question the intent of the ID law, citing the lack of state studies to determine the potential impact on minorities and the racially motivated rhetoric behind the bill in the state with the nation's second-largest Latino population.
At the federal court hearings in July, several state lawmakers testified about reasons Republicans gave for the ID law — hotly debated in the Texas Legislature since 2005. Democratic state Rep. Martinez Fischer described the debate as "goal posts that kept moving." Justification ranged from stopping illegal immigrants from voting to preventing voter fraud and maintaining election integrity, he said of the floor debate.
Despite allegations of discriminatory intent, Republican lawmakers and supporters of the bill maintain that it was designed to strengthen Texans' confidence in the voting process.