Linkage

“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.

It really is hard to imagine a more malicious statement than “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves” when children in Gaza are now being massacred by the hundreds. But this was actually said in a recent Knesset session. And it wasn’t someone considered an extreme right-winger, but a liberal centrist – Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid.

Two years ago, I was proud to be elected as a Labour councillor for Notting Dale, the ward in North Kensington, London, where I grew up. Since then, I have had the privilege of serving the community here and acting as deputy leader of the Labour group. Yesterday, I submitted my resignation from the party following Keir Starmer’s appalling statements, which amounted to the endorsement of war crimes committed by Israel against civilians in Gaza.

It is absolutely correct to unequivocally condemn the killing of innocent civilians on both sides. Instead of adopting this highly uncontroversial position, Keir Starmer chose to provide disturbingly one-sided support for Israel even as it was committing what he, as a former human rights lawyer, must have known to be war crimes. 

“We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past,” states the journal article, “Robust weakening of the Gulf Stream during the past four decades observed in the Florida Straits,” published in Geophysical Research Letters. The Florida Straits, located between the Florida Keys, Cuba, and The Bahamas, has been the site of many ocean observation campaigns dating to the 1980s and earlier. “This significant trend has emerged from the dataset only over the past ten years, the first unequivocal evidence for a recent multidecadal decline in this climate-relevant component of ocean circulation.”

The B.C. government is taking aim at rule-breaking short term rental operators with a proposed law that would increase fines and ban most short-term rentals that aren’t in the operator’s principal residence.

The goal is to discourage landlords and investors from taking desperately needed suites off the long-term rental market by listing them on websites like Airbnb and VRBO. But housing officials acknowledge that almost 50 per cent of short-term rental operators are already flouting bylaws that exist in local communities.

Rishi Sunak has given Britain’s full approval to the flattening of Gaza.

Late on 7 October, the prime minister tweeted “we stand unequivocally with Israel”. Sunak had expressed “full solidarity” to Benjamin Netanyahu, the tweet added.

As Netanyahu had promised “mighty vengeance” following the Hamas-led offensive that morning, there was no room for doubt about the signal which Sunak was sending.

In a few words, Sunak took Britain’s foreign policy to a new extreme.

Israel’s “mighty vengeance” is shaping up to be its most destructive bombardment ever of Gaza and its 2.3 million inhabitants.

A “mighty vengeance” endorsed by 10 Downing Street.

Using a free browser is now more important than ever. We've written recently on this topic, but the issue we wrote about there was minor compared to the gross injustice Google is now attempting to force down the throats of web users around the world. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) is the worst stunt we've seen from them in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI will be upon us in no time.

By giving developers an API through which they can approve certain browser configurations while forbidding others, WEI is a tremendous step toward the "enshittification" of the web as a whole. Many of us have grown up with a specific idea of the Internet, the notion of it as a collection of hyperlinked pages that can be accessed by a wide variety of different machines, programs, and operating systems. WEI is this idea's antithesis.

I don't think Jeremy wrote the headline for this.

We should condemn the targeting of all civilian life, no matter who does it. That this is apparently controversial is testament to the depravity of a media and political class that shuts down, distorts and denounces calls for peace. The heinous attacks on civilians in Israel by Hamas were utterly deplorable.

This cannot justify the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, who are paying a price for a crime they did not commit. All human life is equal. Why is it so difficult for our politicians to be consistent in this basic moral principle?

This is the question that many people in this country are asking when they express solidarity with the Palestinian people. They are not expressing support for Hamas. To deliberately conflate the two is a disgusting, cynical and chilling attempt to further erode our democratic rights, and wilfully ignores a very basic demand: to stop the killing of innocent people.