Mubeen Blogs

Liverpool council’s success in negotiating with landlords is a model of how to save to invest in housing Local authorities are experiencing some of the highest temporary accommodation bills on record. Councils in England spent £2.8bn last year on homeless accommodation – a 25% increase on the year before and a 100% increase since 2020. How did the bill get so high? The government’s redistribution of social housing stock from public to private hands is largely to blame. Instead of creating the “property-owning democracy” Margaret Thatcher envisioned, her right to buy created a nation of landlords, selling off 2m social homes – 41% of which are now rented out . This, alongside cuts to housing benefit so steep that the subsidy now covers only 2.4% of rental properties in England , ensures a steady queue of homeless people knocking on council doors – with similar problems faced by the devolved administrations. Councils end up paying landlords eye-watering amounts to house homeless peop...

Peter Wright confronted in high court over evidence on newspaper’s relationship with convicted investigator The former editor of the Mail on Sunday has denied claims he misled the Leveson inquiry into press standards over the newspaper’s involvement with corrupt private investigators. Appearing at the high court, Peter Wright, who edited the Sunday newspaper from 1998 to 2012, said some of the allegations aimed at the title – which include landline tapping and bugging – were “just incredible”. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/hR4iPZc

Arsenal could feel the breath of Manchester City on their necks and the questions mounting; the anxiety all around them. The draw at Wolves on Wednesday had been a disaster and, with only two Premier League wins in seven, everybody seemed to want to say the same thing. Mikel Arteta and his players were cracking up in their pursuit of the title. This was the soothing tonic they craved, a comfortable and confident dismissal of a Tottenham team desperate to feel a new manager bounce under Igor Tudor. Spurs did show personality to find a Randal Kolo Muani goal for 1-1 in the 34th minute; it was the striker’s first for the club in the league. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/hAfTgjX

Australian collections of the endangered and notoriously unpredictable flowers have popped off in recent years, as ‘personas’ like Putricia, Stinkerella and Smellanie prove a hit with nosy spectators Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here From little things glorious fetid things grow. Corpse flower blooms, once vanishingly rare, are becoming more commonplace in Australia. More than a dozen bloomed across the country in 2025, including the infamous Putricia in Sydney , Morpheus in Canberra, Big Betty in Cooktown, and Spud and co in Cairns. But with plants kept in gardens across the country, and blooming more frequently after their first flower, you could catch a whiff of one soon. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/qgmZyux

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Ramadan in Gaza, Russian airstrikes in Odesa and flooding in France – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/1bpZV8G

Research adds weight to theory Arrokoth’s two lobes produced by gravitational collapse – and reveals process It is the most distant and primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft from Earth: now researchers say they have fresh insights into how the ultra-red, 4bn-year-old body known as Arrokoth came to have its distinctive snowman-like shape. Arrokoth sits in the Kuiper belt, a vast, thick ring of icy objects that lies beyond the orbit of Neptune. This region of space is home to most of the known dwarf planets as well as comets and small, solid rubble heaps called planetesimals – the building blocks of planets. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/kAtuY1f

‘Iran would be very wise to make a deal,’ says Karoline Leavitt when asked about possibility of US strikes against Iran during press conference On a recent morning Eric Taylor , city manager for a small Georgia town of about 5,000 residents called Social Circle, was contacted by a staffer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement . “They asked me to turn on the water,” he said of a 1m sq ft warehouse nearby that the federal government recently purchased for $128m, with plans to use it for locking up as many as 10,000 detainees as part of the Trump administration ’s mass deportation plan. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/y5unhSW