Linkage

Content Warning: The — wholly fabricated, it appears — subject matter of this piece is stomach-churning.

Following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks that resulted in at least 1,163 deaths, rumors began circulating that Israeli women were experiencing horrific mass rape and sexual violence. Months later, a position paper by Physicians for Human Rights Israel and a New York Times investigation convinced many observers that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war. But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred.

The New Yorker, New York Times, Associated Press, and The Nation treat PHRI’s paper as the gold standard for proof of Hamas’ rape and sexual violence. But the paper is shockingly thin. It lacks original reporting and is based on media reports that are dubious at best with no corroboration—no forensic evidence, no survivor testimony, no video evidence.

While only a small provider of accommodation in Australia (0.03% of all homes compared to Sweden’s 22%), new research reveals how developing the sector could relieve some of the pressure.

[…]

Tenant-members expressed high levels of satisfaction with their living arrangements, a strong sense of home, solid social bonds, and an improved sense of health and wellbeing. These positives were shared with their children.

Importantly, our study found participants had a strong sense of agency and voice, which is often missing in other housing tenures, especially renting.

This year’s State of HATE report focuses heavily on the Radical Right, a political phenomenon we define as right-wing populist in outlook, with strongly anti-immigration and anti-elite rhetoric, but differs from the traditional far right in that it advocates an illiberal democracy rather than overthrow of the system itself.

On Wednesday, J.K. Rowling implicitly denied that transgender individuals were targeted and that books about them were burned in Nazi Germany. This assertion contradicts abundant evidence that transgender people were among the first targeted by the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. This culminated in the looting of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology and the infamous burning of the initial decades of transgender healthcare research, as well as the internment, forced detransition, and murder of transgender citizens. When confronted with numerous scholarly sources, she instead linked to another thread that labeled the first transgender patient a "troubled male.”

The claims emerged after Rowling argued that doctors providing gender affirming care to transgender youth should face prison time. She also advocated for imprisoning leaders of Stonewall and Mermaids, charities serving transgender and queer individuals. Recently, the author has adopted more extreme positions regarding transgender people, including describing a prominent transgender woman and journalist in the United Kingdom as "A man…cosplaying."

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The Albanese government is supercharging its push to break China’s stranglehold on global critical minerals supply with an $840 million package of loans and grants to help Gina Rinehart-backed Arafura Rare Earths develop its Northern Territory mine and refinery.

The support is Labor’s biggest single financial commitment for the critical minerals sector and effectively expands federal taxpayers’ exposure to rare earths mining and processing by more than 50 per cent to well over $2 billion.

Ministers and civil servants will be banned from talking to or funding organisations that undermine “the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy”, under a new definition of extremism criticised by the government’s terror watchdog and Muslim community groups.

Michael Gove, the communities secretary, will tell MPs on Thursday that officials should consider whether a group maintains “public confidence in government” before working with it.

Groups that will be effectively cancelled by ministers for falling foul of the new definition will be named in the coming weeks, government sources said.

There will be no appeals process if a group is labelled as extremist, it is understood, and groups will instead be expected to challenge a ministerial decision in the courts.

Every year Australians waste about 7.68 million tonnes of food — that's about 312 kilograms per person.

And Australia's supermarket duopoly could be making waste worse, according to peak vegetable grower groups.

"Our biggest customer is the rubbish bin," one vegetable grower recently told the ABC.

They said they didn't want to be identified for fear of retribution from Coles and Woolworths. 

In recent years, even as services like Spotify and Apple Music have dominated the music market, there’s been a resurgence in vinyl sales as people have seen the benefit of having a physical product: not just because you actually own it and can display it, but because it sounds better too. (It’s not just vinyl either; even CD sales are up.) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing something similar with video.

There are already suggestions that 4K Blu-rays are filling a similar niche as vinyl for home video, with the backing of prominent directors. Asteroid City director Wes Anderson told The Wrap, “A good Blu-ray is sharp as a tack — and consistent. It always plays exactly right. It does not disappear from a cloud or platform.” Last year, Christopher Nolan put special attention into the Blu-ray release of Oppenheimer and encouraged people who liked the movie to buy it “so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”

The physical disc doesn’t just mean it can never be removed from your digital library, but they also tend to come with bonuses like behind-the-scenes footage and it’s the best way to watch the movie: the visuals and audio will be higher quality than a more compressed version that’s streamed or downloaded. With the flaws in the streaming model becoming increasingly apparent, is physical media in for a resurgence?

Released Tuesday, the proposal dictates what kind of housing can be built, how much can be built and where it could go. It also would create a new neighborhood designation that allows more corner stores and restaurants to be built near housing, and implements the state’s new “missing middle” housing law to allow four to six homes on single-family home lots.

[…]

Changing single-family zoning in Seattle has been politically toxic in the past. Former Mayor Ed Murray proposed allowing missing-middle density across all Seattle neighborhoods as part of his 2015 housing plan. But he ultimately scrapped the proposal in the face of fierce opposition from homeowners.

Quirindongo thinks Seattle residents’ views on the issue have evolved over the past decade as the housing crisis has worsened.

“As people continue to move into the city and try to find a place to rent or a place to buy, it is really hard to do,” said Quirindongo. “So what is coming out of that is that the typical city resident in this town is interested in having more housing choices. … This plan is really trying to answer for the need that people are saying we need to provide for.”

Key Findings

• Referrals are stored within a national Prevent database, regardless of whether they meet the threshold to be reviewed by a Channel panel.
• Data is being held for a minimum of six years but can be kept for up to 100 years. The rationale for this minimum retention period is to consider the possibility of “re-offending” – even though Prevent referees have not in fact committed a crime. If there is no policing purpose for retaining data, this retention could be unlawful. Individuals are not necessarily informed that their data is being stored nor whether their data has been deleted after the six-year period or further retained.
• There appears to be a lack of oversight and parliamentary scrutiny over data sharing, processing and storage of Prevent referrals that are inappropriate for Channel interventions but which are managed by police-led partnerships. Once a case is managed by the police, national security exemptions can be applied to limit rights to rectification, access and removal. But the Intelligence and Security Committee does not deal with policing and the Independent reviewer of Terrorism Legislation does not oversee cases managed by police-led partnerships. This means that new counter terrorism capabilities are being built without Parliamentary oversight or legislative safeguards.
• The data of some Prevent referees is being shared with airports, ports and immigration services. This could explain reports that people who have been referred to Prevent have subsequently been questioned at ports and airports under schedule 7.
• It is very difficult for individuals to exercise their right to erasure and request data is removed because many will not know that they have been referred to Prevent. Even when they do know, the lack of transparency about data sharing makes it very difficult for individuals to find out all the different places that their data is being held.