Linkage

At least eight MPs who spoke during a Parliamentary debate on renters’ rights yesterday were landlords, openDemocracy analysis has found.

Tenants’ groups told us they were concerned about a lack of transparency during the second reading of the Renters (Reform) Bill, with one MP forgetting to declare an interest until after the fact, while those with rental income below £10,000 a year were under no obligation to declare anything.

Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition supporting a suspended Tube driver who led a chant of “free, free Palestine” on a London Underground train.

After around 100,000 protesters took part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London, footage posted online and then deleted by Open Democracy journalist Ruby Lott-Lavigna appeared to show the chant being led over the train’s speaker system.

After the uproar, the driver was quickly identified and suspended whilst TfL vowed to “fully investigate the incident in line with our policies and procedures”.

A petition started by passengers on the tube carriage called for TfL to reverse the suspension and uphold free speech has now hit nearly 70,000 signatures in just over 24 hours.

The city has unveiled a $36-billion plan to build 65,000 rental homes in Toronto over the next seven years, a target that would require a massive unconfirmed investment from the federal and provincial governments.

[…]

“We are reversing the destructive thinking over the past two decades … that only the private sector can build housing,” Chow said. “The path in front of us is ambitious. It is urgently needed.”

The answer, I think, lies in a decade-old idea about how to organize the internet. It’s called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. (Sometimes the P is also “Post,” and the E can be “Elsewhere.” The idea is the same either way.) The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s unjustifiable atrocity, Israel’s military onslaught has already slaughtered thousands of civilians, many of them children. That the worst is to come is not supposition, but evident from the public pronouncements of Israel’s political leaders. They have made no effort to disguise their intentions, and thus they have left their cheerleaders with nowhere to hide, no ignorance to plead. “The emphasis is on damage, not accuracy,” declared the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents,” said one IDF official, adding, “There will be no buildings.” Israel’s economy minister, Nir Barkat, told ABC News that hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas, “even if takes a year”.

One prominent supporter of Keir Starmer on Labour’s national executive committee claimed that Israel was not in breach of international law on the grounds that its actions were “proportionate”, and that the “command structure involves sign-off by lawyers to ensure conformity with intl law for all IDF actions”. So let’s hear from one such lawyer, Israel’s former chief military advocate general and the country’s former attorney general no less, who declared that to destroy Hamas “then you have to destroy Gaza, because everything in Gaza, almost every building there, is a stronghold of Hamas”.

Over the last few years, staying informed has become increasingly difficult. With the chaos brought by social media algorithms, influencers, and advertising, finding reliable news requires effort. For me, one tool remains as relevant as ever - RSS (Really Simple Syndication). While many have deemed RSS obsolete, it is more essential than ever for making sense of the overloaded modern media landscape.

Across Australia, 3.7m households have experienced food insecurity over the past 12 months, a jump of almost 350,000 on the previous year, Foodbank’s annual hunger report has revealed.

More than 2.3m of those households were “severely food insecure”, meaning they were actively going hungry, reducing food intake, skipping meals or going entire days without eating.

“The primary purpose of the law is to fill empty homes,” supervisor Dean Preston, the law’s chief backer, told Fortune Friday. “Holding housing off the market for a long time, when there are people who need housing, is bad for our city,” he said. “Our hope is that [the tax] is enough to change the decision making of the real-estate speculator or the owner of the property.”

Sometimes, developers have a strategy of buying buildings, removing longtime tenants, and then reselling at a profit, Preston said. More recently, some new constructions have failed to sell units amid a market slump, creating “zombie buildings,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month.

Infrastructure Victoria has used a major new report to call for changes including building 130 more buildings taller than nine storeys in the city centre, setting targets for constructing new homes in established areas and replacing stamp duty.

It sounds the alarm on the social, environmental and economic costs if Melbourne’s growth continues to be predominantly in outer suburbs, where 56 per cent of the city’s development has been occurring.

If wet bulb temperatures exceed 31°C (88°F), people cannot consistently perform physical labor without endangering their lives; in temperatures that exceed 35°C (95°F), a healthy human can die within a few hours without access to water or shelter. The authors of the PNAS study analyzed "wet-bulb temperature thresholds across a range of air temperatures and relative humidities" using bias-corrected climate change models. Their conclusions were sobering.

"Some of the most populated regions, typically lower-middle income countries in the moist tropics and subtropics, violate this threshold well before 3°C of [global] warming," the authors write.