Tampa Mayor Jane Castor is warning residents to listen to evacuation orders amid the looming threat of Hurricane Milton, which the National Weather Service (NWS) warns could be the worst storm to impact the Tampa area in more than a century. The city is especially susceptible to hurricane damage due to its low-lying topography.
“Everyone in the Tampa Bay region needs to stay aware of what’s happening with Hurricane Milton and you need to follow the evacuation orders,” Castor told CBS News. “If Milton stays on the designated path, it will be catastrophic.”
The Tampa Mayor’s Office did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment.
While the city has survived other tropical storms over the years, Hurricane Milton, a category 5 storm which is set to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday, is concerning because Tampa is vulnerable to storm surges due to its shallow waters. Milton’s storm surge is forecasted to raise water levels by eight to 12 feet in Tampa Bay, if peak surge happens during the high tide.
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“The deepest water will occur along the immediate coast near and to the south of the landfall location, where the surge will be accompanied by large and dangerous waves,” the NWS said in its most-recent public advisory.
Tampa, like many other coastal communities, has been susceptible to sea level rises caused by climate change over the past few years. The 2010 Statewide Regional Evacuation Study for Tampa Bay found that 2 million people live in what would be considered an evacuation zone if a Category 5 hurricane impacted the Tampa region, per Yale Climate Connections. That same study found that a hurricane of Milton’s magnitude would cause some 2,000 deaths. It would also cost the city $250 billion in damages.
The storm comes as Florida recovers from the impact of Hurricane Helene, and residents are still leaving their storm debris for collection. Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a state of emergency Saturday afternoon, and the state has mandatory evacuation orders in place for four counties, including Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located.
As of Monday afternoon, Hurricane Milton was about 700 miles southwest of Tampa. With winds measuring 175 mph that will have level 4 wind threat impact on the greater Tampa Bay area, according to the NWS, the storm could cause wall and roof failure in buildings, the destruction of mobile homes, power outages, and tree falls.
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The last hurricane to directly impact Tampa Bay was the Tarpon Springs Hurricane of 1921. As a Category 3 storm, it caused eight deaths, an 11-foot surge and cost $10 million in damages (worth nearly $180 million today when accounting for inflation).
Hurricane Milton will bring flooding that is expected to impact both primary and secondary roads, parking lots, buildings and homes. Rescues could also be necessary, according to the NWS.
The NWS is advising Tampa Bay residents to evacuate if told to do so, and to finish all hurricane prep by Tuesday night. Tolls are being suspended across multiple counties over the next week to speed travel flow as people evacuate.
The Florida Department of Transportation will be updating local traffic and road blockages and closures on their website.
If your business relies heavily on self-employed advisers, now might be a good time to start looking at alternative business models
The recent news of ex-rugby player Stuart Barnes, who lost an IR35 battle against HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), leaving him with a £700,000 tax bill, made me think about the use of self-employed contracts in the adviser sector.
In response to the story, former financial planner Dave Robinson wrote on LinkedIn:
“Very interesting. I wonder how many self-employed financial adviser contracts would pass the test on this latest interpretation? And how many self-employed advisers are there? Surely, given the state of the public purse, it can’t be long before HMRC starts having a closer look.”
Self-employed advisers have an uphill struggle from the outset
As an employment lawyer working within financial services, the prevalence of self-employed advisers has always made me feel slightly uncomfortable.
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It’s a model that is frequently used. Indeed, we regularly draft self-employed adviser agreements, advising on the employment status risks for employment and tax purposes, including IR35.
When looking at the test of employment status, self-employed advisers have an uphill struggle from the outset. There is normally a consultancy agreement in place which requires the adviser to provide services personally to a firm in return for remuneration.
In an industry built on relationships, it’s unlikely a client would accept any old person turning up to give them advice. It’s unlikely a firm would be happy with this arrangement either.
Control is also a problem. In a regulated industry where a firm’s own compliance with its regulatory obligations depends on its workforce complying with the Financial Conduct Authority’s requirements and its own polices and procedures, the “”what, when, where and how” boxes must be ticked.
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As an employment lawyer working within financial services, the prevalence of self-employed advisers has always made me feel slightly uncomfortable
So, with mutuality of obligation, personal service and substitution and control out of the window – what next?
Well, it’s not all bad news. The self-employed adviser can normally carry out the work when they like and, because most are pay-away arrangements, there is no set amount of work required or fixed remuneration – you only get paid for work you do.
But despite these factors, it still feels like there could be a bit of a hill to climb.
There remains a question that could push the adviser over the self-employed line – is the self-employed adviser in business on their account?
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In many situations, this is the case. Self-employed advisers who have their own book of business bring it to the firm with them and can take it when they leave.
Ownership of clients and a degree of financial risk taken by the self-employed adviser certainly helps with the employment status analysis.
It feels like only a matter of time until HMRC decides to shift its focus away from the world of sport and media to the financial services sector
However, matters aren’t always this straightforward and the firm may need to have some level of client ownership and protection to sufficiently protect its business.
With this in mind, a firm will need to carefully consider and balance the employment status risk against the risk to its business if it doesn’t have post-termination protections in place, such as restrictive covenants, which would protect its confidential information and client relationships if the self-employed adviser were to leave.
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All that said, being “in business on your account” didn’t end up helping Barnes, with the Upper Tribunal drilling into other factors such as the right to provide a substitute, exclusivity and lack of financial risk.
It feels like only a matter of time until HMRC decides to shift its focus away from the world of sport and media to the financial services sector. If your business relies heavily on self-employed advisers, now might be a good time to start looking at alternative business models.
“All that I can say is we are living in the most exciting time for sports law”. A sentence worthy of the headstone above the grave of the game we all once loved. They are the words of King’s Counsel Nick De Marco, described in his Blackstone Chambers bio as one the leading barristers in sports law.
So marked is his growing celebrity it was considered worthy of embellishment in The Times, no less, where last month he submitted to the scrutiny of one of sports writing’s leading journalists.
This is the stage we have reached, where the field of play has shifted and the heroes wear suits not kits. Though not involved on this occasion, De Marco was offering his professional opinion on the result of the case brought by Manchester City against the Premier League over Associated Party Transactions (APTs), the regulatory framework that seeks to police sponsorship deals between clubs and companies linked to the owners.
Since both sides claimed victory in a complex dispute it was helpful to receive some guidance on social media via his Twitter account.
According to The Times interview, which he shared proudly on his LinkedIn account, De Marco is a football supporter, a fan of Queens Park Rangers who feels that matters are ideally best determined on the pitch – despite his profession. Nevertheless, he gleefully recognises that the economic scale of the modern game makes the deployment of lawyers inevitable.
In that, he is right. The divergence with the common fan comes at the point where De Marco and the lawyer class, the highest paid of whom submit invoices the start at £5,000 an hour, revel in hitting the back of the net in court. As you might, if the gains include a home in Surrey that backs on to a river with an outside kitchen. There will be a few ballers in Cobham looking on with envy at garden hardware as full-bore bling as that.
This does not make De Marco a bad actor. Indeed we share a similar past, working as doorman at neighbouring venues in the West End to support our education.
Whilst De Marco’s professional excitement is entirely understandable it represents a nadir for the game itself, highlighting its hijacking by forces whose relationship to football is entirely transactional. What do the distant owners of Manchester City, Arsenal, Newcastle United, Chelsea and Manchester United, care about winning and losing for its own sake?
Their association with the clubs they own is driven not by passion for the shirt but propaganda and business. Florida “red” Joel Glazer has flown into Manchester to attend a series of scheduled club meetings, not to watch United at Aston Villa on Sunday.
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City’s most important player over the coming weeks is Baron Pannick, leading the fight against the 115 charges related to financial irregularities levelled by the Premier League, all denied, in a court battle now in its third week.
Whether or not City are found to have acted against the rules, the involvement of sovereign wealth funds and venture capitalists has bent football out of shape, perverted the competition and severed the ancient social contract between fan and club. There is no sense in which this version of City aligns with the identity of those who stood on the Kippax cheering for Shaun Goater, Kevin Horlock and Nicky Weaver a generation ago, let alone Colin Bell, Mike Summerbee and Franny Lee in the Sixties.
They will take the transformation, of course, revelling like schoolboys in a power hike unimaginable when local businessman Peter Swales was the man signing the cheques at Maine Road. But the win requires them to ignore their role as useful idiots, being played by a regime engaged in a soft power game in which lawyers like De Marco are the stars of the show, stopping for selfies with the fans every time they roll back regulation or fend off a points deduction.
On the day City claimed victory against the Premier League – and against the eight teams who gave evidence to the hearing against them – Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy returned to court over the size of the legal bill that fell to the latter after the court found in favour of the former in the libel case dubbed “Wagathie Christie”.
Vardy’s lawyers were outraged at counterparts who sent the bill for their services spiralling beyond £1.8m, outstripping the estimated costs by almost £150,000. Since Vardy was responsible for 90 percent of Rooney’s costs they baulked at expenses inflated by stays at Nobu Hotel costing £2,000 plus £225 food and minibar charges. Well a lawyer has to subsist.
The legal dispute between the wives of Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy, enthusiastic beneficiaries of football’s transformed economic profile, signposts a game gorging on excess and where no dispute is too trivial, the wives of prominent footballers willing to burn through hundreds of thousands of pounds just to settle a social media spat.
As football careers into the entertainment space this kind of stuff is increasingly part of the tapestry, WAGS, billionaire owners and their legal attendants driving the narrative as much as the players.
So here we are reporting on crack silks going at it over balance sheets, loan deals and hotel receipts. An exciting time for sports law, but also a depressing reflection of the Tower of Babel football has become. And we all know what happened there.
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This portrayal of Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff is framed by the context of what was felt to have gone wrong since Labour took office. Among them: cabinet ministers being unable to appoint as many special advisers as they needed, spads receiving a pay cut that took them below their salary level in opposition (I know of several spads who were taking on roles that had been filled by two or three advisers in the last government and being offered a pay cut to do it), and a cabinet secretary, Simon Case, who did not inspire confidence and who many felt should have been ushered out the door in Starmer’s first week.
Similar dynamics played out when the Conservatives came into office in 2010 (indeed, one former Tory spad told me that reading about the rows gave them “a wholly unwelcome sense of déjà vu” about negotiating their pay with Sue Gray during the latter’s time as a civil servant). There were two complicating factors then: the first was that the Conservatives had pledged to reduce the number of spads, but also they had failed to win a majority. That meant negotiating both a reduced headcount and having to unexpectedly share that headcount with another party. (That also had implications for pay offers, as the Liberal Democrats had been on rather less money in opposition than their Conservative counterparts.)
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What resolved some of those issues was David Cameron intervening in the process and adding political direction: the role that many expect McSweeney to now fulfil. But breaking down barriers between departments is also key to one of Labour’s big projects in office: the “five missions”. Some thoughts on historic attempts by previous governments to do something similar below.
Just checked in, to see what condition my five missions were in
What distinguishes the missions from the other promises Labour made at the last election is that they are explicitly cross-departmental. Achieving them requires various bits of Whitehall working together.
One reason why cross-departmental working has proved hard to pull off in the past is that the structure of the British government gives secretaries of state both broad and wide-ranging statutory powers, but also specific statutory responsibilities. It is those responsibilities that cabinet ministers are questioned on in the House of Commons, interrogated on by select committees and will be challenged on in the courts.
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Equally importantly you have your own budget. As we speak, cabinet ministers are negotiating the terms of these budgets with the Treasury ahead of the Budget on October 30. Let’s take, say, Labour’s plans to increase the UK’s employment rate: if you are Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for work and pensions, then the lever you can pull yourself is to hire more work coaches or to deploy them differently. You can’t, however much you might wish to, start funding further education colleges yourself directly.
The big and most significant discussion within Labour in opposition was whether to do a further Whitehall reorganisation — with all the discombobulation that causes, the disruption to what ministers can do — or to continue with the structure Rishi Sunak had created. As Sunak’s reorganisation had fixed the biggest single problem in Labour’s mind, by bringing back a freestanding department for energy/climate change, the party opted to run with the existing set-up. That means finding ways to make “mission delivery” work with it — hence, in part, the agent of change/smasher stuff.
Greater devolution is, in part, intended to solve some of these problems: the idea being that if departments devolve money to combined authority mayors then they will use that money in new, innovative and cross-departmental ways. (Sam Freedman, a former policy adviser to Michael Gove, has written an interesting report on how to use combined authority mayors to improve public services for Labour Together, which you can read here.)
Starmer is far from the first prime minister to try and tackle this problem — in modern times, Winston Churchill’s peacetime government experimented briefly with “overlords”: cabinet ministers without portfolio who were meant to co-ordinate cross-departmental working, but he abandoned the experiment in 1953. Harold Wilson experimented with two innovations: the first in his 1964 to 1970 government was an “Inner Cabinet” not a thousand miles away from the idea of “overlords”, but he could never settle on who he wanted to have in it.
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The second, more enduring innovation came in Wilson’s second stint as prime minister from 1974 to 1976: the Downing Street Policy Unit, which provides policy advice to the prime minister, separate from the civil service. We can expect that as a result of Starmer’s Downing Street reboot, this unit will get larger over the coming months.
Yesterday, our poll asked you: will Sue Gray’s exit draw a line under Labour’s difficult start? About 44 per cent of you said no, 31 per cent said yes it would, and a quarter of respondents were on the fence. Thanks for voting.
Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport will temporarily close its runways on October 17, 2024, from 11 am to 5 pm for its annual post-monsoon maintenance.
ASOS has made a major change to its return fees, sparking fury amongst shoppers.
The online retailer will start charging customers when they return items unless they spend a certain amount.
UK shoppers who frequently return orders will be charged £3.95 unless they keep up to £40 of their order.
The new rule, which has been introduced to crack down on serial returners, comes into effect today, October 8.
Talk of the rule change has upset ASOS shoppers, with some even threatening to boycott the online store.
Commenting on X, formally Twitter, one user wrote: “The problem for large returns is the fact half of your stock is ill-fitting and poor quality.
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“You’re another brand now alienating your loyal customers.”
“Well ASOS if you actually made clothes that fit so I wouldn’t need to buy multiple sizes we wouldn’t have that problem, consider me no longer a customer,” posted another.
While another wrote; “Did you [ASOS] consider that returner fee isolates customers who don’t fit ideal body standards?
“As a curvy girl, I have to order several sizes and often make returns as your sizing is not consistent, now I’m going to be charged for it? Way to make me feel bad about my body.”
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ASOS previously said that a “small number of shoppers” will be charged but has not elaborated on the exact number of shoppers affected.
Those hit by the change will need to keep £40 worth of goods to avoid the new charge.
Shoppers who already pay £9.95 a year for Asos Premier to get perks like free next-day delivery will not be exempt from the extra fee – but will have to keep a lower value of items.
For Premier customers affected, that will be £15.
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Craig Smith, UK country manager at Scayle, an e-commerce platform, said the move could risk damaging customer loyalty.
He said: “Retailers like ASOS have tried to tackle the problem of returns by asking customers to foot the bill – but this is far from a silver bullet.
“Firstly, brands risk damaging customer loyalty by alienating customers who are reluctant to fork out a fee. “
YOUR RETURN RIGHTS EXPLAINED
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THE SUN’S Head of Consumer, Tara Evans, explains your return rights:
Your right to return items depends on where you purchased them and why you want to return them.
If you bought an item online then you are covered by the Consumer Contracts Regulations, which means you can cancel an item 14 days from when you receive it.
You then have a further 14 days to return the item, once you’ve notified the retailer that you want to return it.
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If an item is faulty – regardless of how you bought it – you are legally able to return it and get a full refund within 30 days of receiving it.
Most retailers have their own returns policies, offering an exchange, refund or credit.
Shops don’t have to have these policies by law, but if they do have one then they should stick to it.
It’s just the latest of many retailers to start charging for returns.
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Here’s a full list of all the other retailers now charging customers to make returns.
The huge Swedish-owned retailer updated its policy on its website.
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Shoppers returning parcels bought online via courier are now charged, with the cost coming out of their refund.
Those who are H&M members, which is free to sign up for, still get to return their hauls for free, though.
On the H&M website, it says: “There is a £1.99 return fee per return parcel to store or online for non-members, which will be deducted from your refund.”
However, it says that shoppers won’t be charged the fee if the item they’re bringing back is faulty or incorrect.
The large online retailer updated its policy on its website.
It states: “Please note a returns charge of £1.99 per parcel will be deducted from your refund amount.
“Returns are FREE for premier customers.”
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A Boohoo spokesperson at the time said the change was due to the increase in the cost of shipping.
They added the decision was made so the company can “continue to offer great prices and products and do this in a more sustainable way”.
Boohoo’s policy also applies to shoppers who use gift cards, store credit, or vouchers.
Boohoo’s website states: “If you paid for your order with a gift card, store credit or a voucher, a replacement to the value of the refund will be issued minus the cost of £1.99 for returning the item to us.”
Shoppers are being charged £1.95 to send back items, with the fee deducted from their refund.
However, customers can still return items purchased online to a Zara store free of charge, as long as they have the matching e-receipt and it’s within 30 days from the date of shipment.
A spokesperson for Zara said previously: “Customers can return online purchases at any Zara store in the UK free of charge, which is what most customers choose to do.
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“The £1.95 fee only applies to the return of products at third-party drop-off points.”
New Look
Back in 2023, New Look announced it was trialling a £1.99 return fee for online orders to offset any possible price rises.
The fee applies to postal returns only, with in-store returns for online orders continuing to be free.
In a statement at the time, a New Look spokesperson said: “New Look has taken the decision to trial a £1.99 fee for postal returns.
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“This is in line with the wider industry and reflects increased costs related to delivery and collection. Customers are still able to return their online orders to our stores free of charge.”
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