Drivers to get five minutes to decide whether to park and 10 minutes to leave after their session ends
Drivers will get a guaranteed five minutes to decide whether to park and 10 minutes to leave after their parking session ends before they face a fine under new rules for private car parks that Andy Burnham said were designed to outlaw “rip-off” charges.
In the latest in a series of “everyday fixes” to ease the cost of living and give consumers a “fairer” deal, the prime minister said a new official code of practice for the industry meant motorists in England, Scotland and Wales would enjoy a range of new rights.
The award-winning Irish novelist faces possible arrest if she enters the UK. Yet, Britain has welcomed the ex-commander of Syria’s al-Qaeda offshoot with open arms, writes Fatima Bhutto.
OTTAWA: Residents of Alberta began voting Monday in a non-binding referendum that will determine whether the western-Canadian province should pursue separation from Canada.
The vote comes at a time when the province is mourning the deaths of four soldiers, while dozens of others were injured from a fast-moving fire that burned through a military base in Alberta.
While the results of a poll involving 1,021 respondents released by Abacus Data on Saturday showed that 74% of decided voters favor Alberta remaining within the Canadian Confederation, the independence issue won’t disappear for the nearly 30% who want Alberta’s government to begin the process to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether Alberta should separate from Canada, according to veteran separatist organizer Cory Morgan, who leads a group called Pathway to Independence.
"It will say that about one in three Albertans have had it," Morgan told Fox News Digital. "There is a big rift within Alberta and if things don’t change, it will be a growing faction in this province — so this vote is an important one."
About 3 million Albertans are eligible to vote in the referendum.
Another recent Abacus poll found that 61% of the 1,021 eligible voters surveyed expect Albertans will vote again on separation, even if most choose to remain in Canada.
On Friday, the Angus Reid Institute released the results of its poll that found 62% of 1,010 Albertans surveyed believe "there will never be an end to the separatist movement" in the province.
Morgan, who led the short-lived Alberta Independence Party from 2000 to 2001, said that while "a vocal minority" within the separatist movement favor Alberta becoming the 51st state, most pro-independence Albertans "don’t want to become a small fish in an even bigger pond." He added that "Albertans in general are not too thrilled with President Trump right now and that makes them less inclined to leave the federation."
At a "Forever Canadian" rally on Friday in Edmonton, where he was raised, Prime Minister Mark Carney told a crowd of over 5,000 people that "this referendum comes at the worst possible time." He said that "the world is becoming more dangerous and divided [and] some outside our borders are working to break us so they can own us," making an indirect reference to Trump’s trade war against and annexation talk about Canada.
Alberta-born and raised, 55-year-old Morgan said that his home province is "politically and culturally different" than eastern Canada. "There’s a lot more focus on individual freedoms and property rights," he noted, acknowledging that those values are traditionally viewed as American.
"Most Albertans are going to feel much more comfortable sitting down for a beer with people from Great Falls, Montana, than they would in Ottawa," said Morgan. He explained that when Alberta became a Canadian province in 1905, its population grew largely from a migration of Montanans, and when oil was discovered in the 1940s, U.S. companies Chevron and Mobil helped develop what became Alberta’s biggest industry.
Also, earlier this year during an appearance on Real America’s Voice at Davos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described Alberta as "a natural partner for the U.S." and described Albertans as "very independent people."
In response, Carney said that he "expect[ed] the U.S. administration to respect Canadian sovereignty."
Earlier this month, The Globe and Mail reported that Alberta separatist leaders met with Republican strategists in Calgary in January to look at software designed to identify and mobilize supporters. Separatist leaders also reportedly suggested exchanging water and oil for U.S. support when they met with State Department officials in Washington last year.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told CBC News that if most Albertans support staying in Canada, she would not hold another referendum on the matter as long as she heads the provincial government.
However, on Oct. 18, 2027, residents of the province will vote again in a general election, and Smith could be out of her job by then, warned Morgan, a founding member of the former conservative Wildrose Party, for which Smith served as leader.
That party merged with the then-Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta in 2020 to form the United Conservative Party (UCP) that Smith heads. But Morgan explained that more than half of the UCP’s nearly 55,000 members support Alberta’s independence. The premier has said that she will vote to keep the province in Canada.
Angus Reid, founder and chairman of the Angus Reid Institute, told Fox News Digital that in his firm’s recent polling, 67% of the 293 UCP voters who support a future binding referendum on separation said that they would either "definitely support" or "consider" supporting the creation of a separatist provincial political party – not unlike the Parti Québécois, which won the recent election in Quebec.
The emergence of an independence party in Alberta "would probably spell the death of the UCP since it is so badly divided between separatists and non-separatists, and it would likely end the career of Danielle Smith because of the amount of breakage in her party," said Reid, whose firm’s survey found that 60% of the respondents who support a future binding referendum are "more likely sending a message to Ottawa" about the Canadian government’s often fractious relationship with Alberta.
"Separatist types are looking at how much leverage Quebec has been able to achieve in Canada as a result of its threats of exiting, and saying ‘Hold it, we can play that game too,’" explained Reid.
As of Saturday, more than 1.2 million Albertans had cast a ballot on the referendum, which, in addition to the question on separation, has nine others, five focusing on immigration, such as one asking voters whether their province should take more control "for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities."
Cooley has made billions doing what law firms do: hire great lawyers, bill for their time, and keep clients happy. Artificial intelligence is scrambling that formula. If machines can do in minutes what once took an associate hours, what exactly should clients be paying for?
Rachel Proffitt thinks she has the answer.
On a toasty October afternoon in San Francisco, I met Proffitt for lunch to talk about the future of the global law firm she now leads. When the check arrived, neither of us knew how much the restaurant paid the dishwasher or how many minutes the chef spent preparing our meal. We were paying for the experience, not the labor behind it.
Why, she wondered, should legal services be so different?
"Clients have never been excited about the fact that it took us 82 hours to do something. They don't care," she says. "They just want the outcome. They want the results."
The billable hour is only the beginning. AI is forcing law firms to rethink how many associates they really need and how those young lawyers learn their craft. Client relationships are changing as companies use software to get a head start on the work they send to outside counsel. Some of that work may never reach a lawyer at all.
If tech is about to reinvent law firms, Cooley should be one of the firms with the clearest view of what's coming. From its early days on San Francisco's Market Street, it worked with semiconductor manufacturers and venture capitalists when the valley was still covered in fruit trees and canneries. Cooley grew up alongside the tech industry, and today it is as comfortable defending Meta in court as it is helping Andreessen Horowitz round up billion-dollar funds.
That evolution has been lucrative. Cooley says its gross revenue jumped from $912 million in 2015 to $2.4 billion last fiscal year. Its crosstown rival, Wilson Sonsini, brought in $1.7 billion in 2025, according to The American Lawyer. Still, the gulf between Cooley and Big Law's largest firms remains enormous. Kirkland & Ellis, the industry's revenue leader, cracked $10 billion last year. Latham & Watkins, another go-to firm for Silicon Valley, hit $8.3 billion.
The next wave of tech public listings promises a fortune in legal fees for the chosen few. Gibson Dunn landed SpaceX's IPO. Anthropic tapped Wilson Sonsini for its coming listing. And Cooley is reportedly sharing OpenAI's IPO work with Wachtell Lipton, one of Wall Street's most formidable law firms.
The irony is hard to miss. Big Law is fighting for a piece of the biggest technology companies in the world, even as those companies build the tools that could upend the business of law itself.
Proffitt came up as a lawyer under the old rules. Her next task is to figure out what it will take to build a great law firm under the new ones.
'The winner's circle'
Rachael Wright for BI
Profitt didn't grow up wanting to be a lawyer but liked how law school taught her to think. Litigation was out of the question: Public speaking during mock trials made her stomach turn. "It was transactional law or bust," she says.
She started her career as a summer associate at Wilson Sonsini and worked her way up to partner. She fell in love with the intensity of the work, pulling all-nighters at the financial printers where she marked up securities filings by hand. She recalls the Christmas Eve when her father marveled that she had made it through the day without taking a work call. After 15 years at the firm, she left for Cooley in 2017.
Three years ago, Proffitt got a call at home that she didn't see coming. Joe Conroy, then Cooley's chief executive, wanted to know whether she would consider succeeding him.
She was flattered, but also "a bit terrified," she says. She spent two decades helping startups, including Unity Software, Procore, and Instacart, raise money and go public. Running a firm with 3,000 employees was another matter. She talked to her family, then put herself forward for the job. She started in 2024.
Proffitt couldn't have guessed how quickly AI would jolt her industry from its steady state. It wasn't too long ago that clients insisted that the technology go nowhere near their work, fearing what would happen if their data disappeared into someone else's model.
"It was clear to me then that we don't get to just exist as we are and continue to be at the top of our game," she says.
Cooley had remade itself once before. The firm's Silicon Valley roots were both a strength and a liability, said Conroy in an interview. Cooley was known for helping startups get off the ground. The conventional wisdom was that as those companies grew, they would graduate to one of the elite New York law firms for their biggest deals and courtroom battles.
To keep clients from the garage to the boardroom, as Conroy put it, Cooley needed to expand. It opened new offices and built out its litigation and capital markets practices. The firm also spent years courting Wall Street banks, says Proffitt, so that when a company asked which law firm to hire for its IPO, Cooley would make its shortlist.
Today, its client roster reads like a Kiplinger roundup of hot tech stocks: Nvidia, Uber, Snowflake, and Zoom, to name a few listings it worked on. Since 2016, Cooley has advised issuers on 183 IPOs that raised nearly $59 billion, making it the second-most active firm by deal count after Latham, according to Deal Point Data. Proffitt wouldn't discuss reports that Cooley has landed OpenAI's IPO work.
For 16 years, Conroy pushed Cooley toward what he calls Big Law's "winner's circle." Proffitt's job is to get it there.
Startup speed
Rachael Wright for BI
Her strategy starts with making Cooley move more like the tech companies it represents.
Proffitt recruited David Wang, a former lawyer turned legal technology executive, with an ambitious mandate. She didn't just want to make Cooley's lawyers more productive, Wang said in an interview. She wanted to change how clients interact with them altogether.
Earlier this year, Cooley launched a tool with the startup Legora that lets Y Combinator founders review common contracts without calling a lawyer. OpenAI helped it build a tool for Cooley's lawyers to prepare paperwork for companies going public. Next, Cooley is working with Google on an AI agent that scans documents for confidential information before they're filed in court, then suggests redactions for lawyers to review.
There's something almost cannibalistic about a law firm building software that could eat into its own billable hours. But Cooley sees a bigger risk in letting someone else do it. In-house legal teams are increasingly using chatbots to take the first crack at work they would otherwise send to outside counsel. A new breed of "AI-native" law firms is promising cheaper, faster services.
Big Law does not want to be caught flatfooted. Firms are throwing money at startups like Harvey and Legora, and increasingly, they're building their own technology. Kirkland has committed $500 million to proprietary software, starting with a platform for private equity fundraising built with Palantir. Latham bought its own Nvidia servers so it can customize models in-house. Like Cooley, Wilson Sonsini has self-service tools that let companies handle basic legal work.
For Proffitt, the danger isn't lost billable hours. It's the missed connections. The scrappy startup that needs a contract reviewed today might need help closing an acquisition later. But if the bots take care of the small stuff, Cooley could miss its chance to build the relationship.
Proffitt says Cooley must find new ways to connect with clients. Putting technology in their hands is one option, even if it means giving away a little of the work.
"When you need the next thing that matters, the thing that you don't trust to put into the machine," she says, "how do I ensure that you want to talk to our team?"
The firm is also rethinking its own structure for the new era. Wang now leads Cooley AI, a wholly owned subsidiary designed to operate at something closer to startup speed. The separate company gives his team more freedom to hire engineers and put new technology through its paces, he says, without getting bogged down in the parent firm's bureaucracy.
The irony, Proffitt says, is that all this technology could leave lawyers with more time for the human stuff. Lawyers may visit their clients more. Talk through thorny decisions. Drop in on the strategy session to learn how their advice fits into a client's business.
Keeping those relationships alive might require a little more old-fashioned schmoozing. When I asked Proffitt whether the answer was throwing great parties, she didn't entirely disagree. "Everyone loves a party," she says.
The future of legal work
Proffitt doesn't pretend to have a crystal ball. She has ideas, though.
The billable hour? Not dead yet. She expects law firms to offer clients a menu of pricing options, from hourly rates to flat fees and outcome-based pricing.
Hiring slowdowns at the junior level? "Too early to tell," she says.
The apprenticeship model? That gets trickier. If software can write first drafts and spot issues, how will young lawyers get the practice they need? Proffitt says Cooley is exploring ways for associates to sharpen their skills on simulated legal matters, starting with AI-powered mock depositions.
Proffitt came up in an era when canceled dinners and all-nighters were a badge of honor. She's betting that the next generation won't need quite so many of them to become great lawyers. Her test will come a decade from now, when today's junior associates are ready to make partner.
If Cooley has found a better way to teach them, perhaps the old model won't be missed. If it hasn't, no amount of AI can make up the difference.
Melia Robinson is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where she writes about how artificial intelligence is changing the legal industry.
One of the factors that led Greg Pirio to buy his house in Loudoun County, in northern Virginia, 14 years ago, was the nature surrounding it. A historian specializing in Africa, he loved to take long walks with his dog and listen to the birds. Three years ago, a large data center was installed just a hundred meters from his door. Since it began operating a year and a half ago, the birdsong has been replaced by a constant buzzing together with fumes that cause headaches, conjunctivitis and respiratory problems.
The meal kit delivery service denies the allegations, saying it found claims to be ‘entirely without merit’
Workers at a HelloFresh facility in Newark, New Jersey have claimed in court documents that they were verbally and physically abused and denied regular bathroom breaks, with one former worker telling the Guardian he experienced incontinence issues as a result.
The newly proposed amended complaint comes in a class action lawsuit first filed in August 2024 against the food prep service giant and staffing agencies. A New Jersey state court judge is expected to review the amended complaint in a hearing scheduled for 23 October.
Foreign Ministry condemns confrontation with the dual national as ‘disgraceful and unacceptable’; activists accuse the woman of bringing Israeli soldiers to Turkey on vacation
Trudy weakens to tropical storm after warnings of strong winds and heavy rain, while one person killed in Greece
In contrast to the quiet Atlantic hurricane season, there has been ongoing activity in the Pacific, with Trudy being the 22nd and latest named system. The category 2 hurricane remained roughly 100 miles (160km) south-west of the coast of Mexico, meaning the worst of the conditions stayed offshore. However, the US National Hurricane Center put coastal parts of the states of Jalisco, Michoacán and Colima under hurricane warnings, with sustained winds of up to 60-90mph forecast on Sunday.
Rainfall totals of 100-150mm were likely for these areas, prompting warnings of flooding and landslides. Warnings also covered the risk of a dangerous storm surge accompanied by damaging waves in areas of onshore winds across the coast of south-western Mexico. By Monday morning, Trudy had weakened and been downgraded to a tropical storm, with coastal warnings being lifted.
Downing Street delivered a rare rebuke to a senior member of Donald Trump’s administration
Asked why the Lib Dems were opposed to a third runway at Heathrow when they professed to be in favour of growth, Cooper said she did not accept that a third runway would produce all the benefits its supporters claimed.
She explained:
On Heathrow, it is clear from looking at all of the economic analysis of airport growth over the last few years that many of the promises made by all sorts of different airport companies simply haven’t come to bear.
The promise of higher wage jobs hasn’t been substantiated. Often it’s lower paid jobs, and often not as many as they’ve claimed.
The consumer champion has raised concerns about proposals that could limit savings for households switching suppliers when wholesale energy prices fall.
Hamptons says figure of 56% is highest in at least a decade, with mortgage rates rising since start of Iran war
A majority of first-time UK buyers now pay more towards their monthly mortgage bills than they used to pay in rent, the estate agent Hamptons has found.
Last month 56% of first-time buyers said their monthly mortgage bills exceeded their previous rent, the highest proportion in at least a decade, according to Hamptons. They paid £39 more on average.
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