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Brent Toderian, a renowned urbanist and city planner shares his insights and experiences in shaping vibrant cities as we look ahead at Mississauga’s future.

England has more than twice as many long-term empty homes this Christmas as there are children living in temporary accommodation, the Liberal Democrats have said, calling this a stark indication of a “broken” housing market.

The numbers of families without a permanent home and in short-term housing, whether hotels and B&Bs or temporary rental properties, has hit a record high this year, with the latest statistics showing it now affects 121,327 children, according to data collated by the House of Commons library.

Other figures, also compiled by the library, show that councils across England have 261,189 homes that are classed as long-term vacant, meaning they have been empty for six months or more.

TO THE EDITORS OF NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

The job guarantee is a policy innovation that helps create full and meaningful employment for all via direct job creation. It is a voluntary program open to every working-age person who is ready, willing, and able to work. It provides living-wage employment opportunities in public service projects that tackle social and environmental needs. The program is funded nationally, administered locally, and available in every community.

Every city in the world is going through a learning curve, working hard to improve, albeit from very different starting points. It’s true that “better” is open to opinion and debate (including answering the really important question, “better for whom?”), and even when the difference between better and worse is well proven, some cities sadly are still doubling down on the wrong path (more freeways, anyone?). But I find even those cities with clear visions of what better means can easily struggle with the “how” part, and the fact that the path to success is often not a straight line.

Over many years working with cities at all points in that learning curve, I’ve developed a simple conversation starter that I call the “five steps toward better cities.” I’ve found it can help break the ice around how to improve, if people are really honest about where they’re starting from.

Council housing, once the bedrock of the housing system — providing secure and cheap tenure — is in shockingly short supply. According to the National Housing Federation, 1.6 million households are languishing on the waiting list — more than the number of households in the North-East — while all of England only managed to deliver a pitiful 8,900 council homes in 2021-22. Only 2,500 of these were for social rent, the traditional rent level for social housing, with the remainder at higher-cost tenures.

In the same period, the UK also sold off or demolished around 20,000 social homes, with 14,000 council homes sold off under the Right to Buy scheme. Over the years, Right to Buy has led to some 3 million homes being lost from the social housing stock. With millions in need of secure and affordable homes, rebuilding the council stock is a vital step — perhaps the most vital — in confronting the housing emergency. Council housing offers secure, lifelong tenancies and rent levels far below that of the private sector and most Housing Association properties, with the homes remaining in public hands, owned by us.

Amid this backdrop of depleted social housing, Sadiq Khan unveiled his ‘Right to Buy Back’ scheme in 2021, which has subsidised London councils to purchase homes from the private sector for use as council housing. This has allowed for former private sector homes to be added to the council housing stock, so long as the homes meet or are brought up to the Decent Homes Standard. In its first year, the scheme managed to facilitate the purchase of 1500 homes — a long way from what is needed to meet the city’s social housing needs, but almost as many council homes as were built across the rest of England last year.

Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023. This systemic online censorship has risen against the backdrop of unprecedented violence, including an estimated 1,200 people killed in Israel, largely in the Hamas-led attack on October 7, and over 18,000 Palestinians killed as of December 14, largely as a result of intense Israeli bombardment.

Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch documented over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch publicly solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoints related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its analysis for this report, meaning that the total number of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded 1,050.

The Centrelink officer on the end of the phone to Eve* was telling her she was dead. Eve, 74, who receives a carer payment, had called after she noticed an extra $3,000 from Centrelink in her 81-year-old husband’s account in May this year, and she was concerned they had been overpaid.

After calling multiple times, she reached someone from Services Australia who looked up her account history.

“As far as we are concerned you are deceased,” the officer said.

The $3,000 was a bereavement payment made to her husband. It was then followed by a letter to him apologising for his loss, and letting him know she had been overpaid by a small amount, that would need to be returned, and that Centrelink would be contacting her bank.

Within a few weeks, all her records were wiped, her bank accounts were shut down, her energy concessions for the Gold Coast council were withdrawn and she could not even book an Uber.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

Standing at the helm of a 16-year-old startup, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, took a trip down memory lane—a nostalgic revisit to a 16-year-old blog that announced his startup idea, Acquia. Little did he know that his fancy trip would occupy the front page of Hacker News, garnering a hundred comments.

[…] 

The discussion concerns the merits and drawbacks of using Drupal as a content management system (CMS) compared to alternatives like WordPress. Several users shared their experiences, highlighting various aspects of Drupal's functionality, including its engineering and backend customization capabilities, upgrade challenges, and suitability for different types of users.

   "I miss Drupal a lot,"

jolted an old Drupal user who wished Drupal would win the CMS battle with WordPress. They feel nostalgic for Drupal's earlier versions and its low-code capabilities for creating custom CRUD apps. They mentioned difficulties with the transition to Composer and the challenges of keeping up with security updates and upgrades, ultimately leading them to explore other technologies like Python.