NEW STATESMAN
Kwajo Tweneboa: ‘Politicians underestimate the impact of housing’

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Kwajo Tweneboa didn’t plan to become Britain’s leading social housing campaigner. Two years ago, he was a business student, living with his father and two sisters in a flat in south London riddled with damp, mice, cockroaches and asbestos. Mould grew on beds, kitchen cabinets were rotten and, at one point, the living room had no ceiling. Repeated requests for help from Clarion, the housing association responsible for the property, were met with silence or obfuscation. Ten months after Tweneboa moved in, his father Kwaku was diagnosed with stage one oesophageal cancer. His deterioration was rapid.

THE TELEGRAPH
Trapped in a warzone: surrogate mothers and newborns ensnared in Ukraine’s crisis

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Four days after the Russian invasion, Adam and Lara were frantically trying to get into Ukraine. They flew to Poland and managed to flag down a bus to Rava-Ruska, a border town in Lviv Oblast. Then they waited.

Shops were shuttered. Their Polish SIM card didn’t work. Nowhere accepted their euros. As the night drew on, they huddled in a public lavatory to shelter from the piercing cold.

THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Debt burden traps global south in a vicious circle

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It was the $100bn question during COP26 last year: would rich countries fulfil their pledge to give that sum to poorer states of the global south, to address climate change. In 2009, they said they would do so by 2020. But the figure was not achieved — falling short at $83.3bn, and Oxfam calculates that most of this was provided as loans, rather than grants.

THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Legal advisers who open doors for pioneering products

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When compiling a list of the types of expert involved in the innovations that are changing our world, you might write: data-whizz, researcher, and entrepreneur. ‘Lawyer’ would probably not be the first to come to mind. But behind many of today’s most bold and groundbreaking advances is an army of legal pioneers challenging old laws, shaping new ones, and stitching together novel financial instruments to bring new products to the market.

THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Reversing Roe has sharpened the data mining threat

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When I went to get a quarantine-releasing Covid test last year, I had no idea that my DNA could end up permanently in someone else’s hands. There was no explicit warning when I booked the test online with Cignpost Diagnostics, trading as ExpressTest. I simply ticked a box next to the privacy policy, as we all do. Had I trawled through the 4,876-word policy and clicked a further link, I would have found a document on Cignpost’s “research programme”, and discovered that it reserved the right to sell customers’ DNA to third parties. And that the swabbers’ data would be retained indefinitely. Cignpost has since changed its privacy policy — the company said the document had been uploaded in error and that it has “not shared any human DNA” from Covid tests.