Linkage

According to Choice, third-party platforms such as Ignite, 2Apply and Snug regularly require users to hand over excessive amounts of personal data including bank statements, references from five jobs and photos of children.

Samantha Floreani, program lead at charity Digital Rights Watch, said: "The sheer volume and type of personal information that renters are being compelled to provide creates unreasonable privacy and digital security risks.

"It's often very unclear who gets access to this information, and how long it will be kept for."

Major cities have scaled back those requirements in recent years while others like Portland and Minneapolis have gotten rid of them altogether. San Jose, which has only a few thousand fewer residents than Austin, did away with the requirements last year.

Austin City Council Member Zohaib “Zo” Qadri, the proposal’s author, said keeping those requirements makes no sense as the city faces an affordability crisis and pumps billions of dollars into expanding public transit.

“It gobbles up scarce land. It adds burdensome costs to developments that get passed on to renters and buyers. It makes it harder for small businesses to get off the ground. And it harms walkability and actively works against our public investments in transit, bike lanes, trails and sidewalks,” Qadri said Thursday.

Like “detransition,” “regret” can also have different meanings. Narayan et al. (2021) surveyed surgeons who perform gender-affirming surgeries about their experiences with patient regret (which they reported to be in the 0.2–0.3% range). They documented three different “types” of regret: “true gender-related regret” (typically a change in gender identity), “social regret” (typically due to external pressure from family members or societal transphobia), and “medical regret” (e.g., complications due to surgery). Notably, they reported that only 6.5% of patients who experienced regret believed that they had been “misdiagnosed.”

In other words, just as we shouldn’t conflate “detransition” with “regret,” we also shouldn’t conflate “regret” with inadequate assessment or having been misdiagnosed as transgender. Once again, this confirms my previous point that the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative only applies to a small fraction of those who detransition, and thus represents a miniscule number of people who choose to transition in the first place.

To put these numbers in perspective, let’s try a thought experiment: Imagine 10,000 people transitioning. If 2% of them experienced detransition or regret, but only 6.5% of those individuals felt that they had been misdiagnosed as transgender in the first place, that would represent 13 people. Out of 10,000. That’s an incredibly small number of people — no wonder journalists and politicians who want to promote the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative have to rely on the same handful of detrans interviewees over and over again.

Glasgow, Scotland – The atmosphere at Celtic Park on European nights needs few added extras, the electricity in the air on such occasions is enough to light up the Glasgow skyline several times over.

But as 60,000 Celtic fans flocked to the famous arena last Wednesday evening for the Champions League tie against Atletico Madrid, it was not just anticipation for the game powering the pre-match energy.

As kickoff neared, the stadium transformed into a sea of Palestinian flags, every stand awash with the colours of Palestine in a show of solidarity with those in Gaza under Israeli assault.

A few days before, when Celtic fans displayed Palestinian flags at a domestic away fixture, television networks were accused of purposefully avoiding the display. They had no such option this time. The display was beamed around the world, and quickly shared millions of times on social media.

Those who refuse to have their bags checked can be fired, according to the Coles policy which was updated last year but only recently routinely enforced, according to worker representatives. It replaces a previous practice whereby staff bag inspections were only used after a genuine suspicion of theft.

“The reason they’re bag checking is because they know that their own workers are forced to think about stealing because they can’t afford food,” the secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (Raffwu), Josh Cullinan, said.

“We have these ridiculous situations where workers may have their sanitary items and prescription medication, and they have to show it to their manager.”

A Coles spokesperson said bag check policies were standard across the retail industry.

“While the policy was paused for a short time, it has been at Coles for many years,” the spokesperson said.

Coles and rival Woolworths have enjoyed a period of bumper returns after raising grocery prices at a faster pace than inflation, leading to increased profit margins during a period of financial strain for many households.

The evidence – from Israeli meda reports and eyewitnesses, as well as a host of visual clues from the crime scene itself – tell a far more complex story than the one presented nightly on the BBC.

Did the Israeli military fire into the Hamas-controlled civilian homes in the same fashion as it had fired into its own military bases, and with the same disregard for the safety of Israelis inside? Was the goal in each case to prevent at all costs Hamas taking hostages whose release would require a very high price from Israel?

Kibbutz Be’eri has been a favoured destination for BBC reporters keen to illustrate Hamas’ barbarity. It is where Lucy Williamson headed again this week. And yet none of her reporting highlighted comments made to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator. He said Israeli military commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages”.

That echoed the testimony of Yasmin Porat, who sought shelter in Be’eri from the nearby Nova music festival. She told Israeli Radio that once Israeli special forces arrived: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”

In short, it does not look anything like the panic you might expect if the odds of the world entering into war were edging higher. The brightest conclusion is that such odds really are close to zero. A darker one is that, like the investors of 1914, today’s may soon be blindsided. History points to a third possibility: that even if investors expect a major war, there is little they can do to reliably profit from it.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine yourself in 1914, knowing that the first world war was about to arrive. You would need to place your bets quickly—within weeks, the main exchanges in London, New York and continental Europe would be closed. They would stay that way for months. Would you be able to guess how many, and which way the war might have turned by then? If you wisely judged American stocks to be a good bet, would you have managed to trade with a broker who avoided bankruptcy amid a liquidity crisis? You might have decided, again wisely, to trim positions in soon-to-be war-strained government debt. Would you have guessed that Russian bonds, which would experience a communist revolution and Bolshevik-driven default, were the ones to dump completely?

The list of recipients includes party leader Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, and even the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy, who is now shadow international development minister.

These donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region, and Sir Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon and long-time pro-Israel lobbyist.

More than half of Starmer’s shadow cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters or officers of LFI.

Amid the flurry of misinformation and misleading online content about the Israel-Hamas war that’s circulating on social media, these images, too, are being used without disclosure of whether they are real or not.

A handful of small online news outlets, blogs and newsletters have featured “Conflict between Israel and Palestine generative AI” without marking it as the product of generative AI. It’s not clear whether these publications are aware it is a fake image.

The course has long been in the crosshairs of the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, and also the former NSW premier Bob Carr, who argued it occupied prime land in the city centre that could be used by a wider range of people.

A discussion paper will be released year early next as part of a consultation process about the future of the course, but the government’s preferred option is for the new park to be established on the western boundary and part of the section north of Dacey Avenue, which it says will maximise access for residents of Green Square, Zetland and Waterloo.

The government said the Green Square urban renewal area had 33,000 residents and was expected to become one of the most densely populated areas in Australia, with 80,000 people living within 2km of Moore Park by 2040.