Linkage

I expect Jeremy Corbyn is well-rested and ready to help restore sanity after the chaos of the loony extremist Starmer years. Just saying.

The Labour party was plunged into crisis over Keir Starmer’s stance on the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, with the Labour leader under mounting pressure to call for a ceasefire.

As Rishi Sunak joined calls for a “pause” in the Israel-Hamas conflict to allow aid into Gaza, and hostages and British nationals out - Sir Keir continued to grapple with the fallout of his own approach to the crisis.

The Labour leader is facing growing upset among backbench MPs, with dozens having signed a motion urging the British government to call for an immediate ceasefire.

And more than 150 Muslim Labour councillors signed a joint letter to Sir Keir and his deputy Angela Rayner urging him to back an immediate ceasefire.

Perhaps you're a Flygskam (Flight Shaming) devotee, though we prefer the slightly more statesmanlike #Trainbragging (or as the Swedes say #tågskryt ). But, whatever your motivation, and whatever you call it, here are eight innovative options for train and bus travel between Australia's two largest cities.

Some options get you there same day, some let you break your journey and stay overnight. Some are train all the way, some are a mixture of trains and buses. But no matter which you choose, you'll get to see the real Australia.

Most contracts these days also include all sorts of bits and bobs accounting for streaming, podcast content, and so on. In 1963, when the first episodes of Doctor Who aired, though, streaming was more likely to refer to a small river than anything blaring out of one of those new-fangled telly-boxes.

As a result (and we’re not lawyers), it looks like at least some of the rights – or at least a potentially valid claim to them – for the first few episodes of Doctor Who belongs to the estate of the original writer, Anthony Coburn. The BBC hasn’t admitted so much specifically, issuing the simple acknowledgement to the Radio Times. Just imagine the meetings that took place to get to that stage. There’s enough of a worry, clearly, to exclude An Unearthly Child from the line-up.

The contract Coburn signed in the 1960s won’t have given any provisions for reusing the show in a different context, certainly not this one, and their descendants – specifically in this case, Coburn’s son – are under no obligation to let the BBC do anything with the show other than broadcast on terrestrial TV.

Stef Coburn, the son in question, has been very active on his Twitter/X/whatever-it’s-called-this-week account.

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.