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Category: Academic Analysis

  • MIL-Evening Report: AI is now used for audio description. But it should be accurate and actually useful for people with low vision

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Locke, Associate Researcher in Digital Disability, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University

    Chansom Pantip/Shutterstock

    Since the recent explosion of widely available generative artificial intelligence (AI), it now seems that a new AI tool emerges every week.

    With varying success, AI offers solutions for productivity, creativity, research, and also accessibility: making products, services and other content more usable for people with disability.

    The award-winning 2024 Super Bowl ad for Google Pixel 8 is a poignant example of how the latest AI tech can intersect with disability.

    Directed by blind director Adam Morse, it showcases an AI-powered feature that uses audio cues, haptic feedback (where vibrating sensations communicate information to the user) and animations to assist blind and low-vision users in capturing photos and videos.

    Javier in Frame showcases an accessibility feature found on Pixel 8 phones.

    The ad was applauded for being disability inclusive and representative. It also demonstrated a growing capacity for – and interest in – AI to generate more accessible technology.

    AI is also poised to challenge how audio description is created and what it may sound like. This is the focus of our research team.

    Audio description is a track of narration that describes important visual elements of visual media, including television shows, movies and live performances. Synthetic voices and quick, automated visual descriptions might result in more audio description on our screens. But will users lose out in other ways?

    AI as people’s eyes

    AI-powered accessibility tools are proliferating. Among them is Microsoft’s Seeing AI, an app that turns your smartphone into a talking camera by reading text and identifying objects. The app Be My AI uses virtual assistants to describe photos taken by blind users; it’s an AI version of the original app Be My Eyes, where the same task was done by human volunteers.

    There are increasingly more AI software options for text-to-speech and document reading, as well as for producing audio description.

    Audio description is an essential feature to make visual media accessible to blind or vision impaired audiences. But its benefits go beyond that.

    Increasingly, research shows audio description benefits other disability groups and mainstream audiences without disability. Audio description can also be a creative way to further develop or enhance a visual text.

    Traditionally, audio description has been created using human voices, script writers and production teams. However, in the last year several international streaming services including Netflix and Amazon Prime have begun offering audio description that’s at least partially generated with AI.

    Yet there are a number of issues with the current AI technologies, including their ability to generate false information. These tools need to be critically appraised and improved.

    Is AI coming for audio description jobs?

    There are multiple ways in which AI might impact the creation – and end result – of audio description.

    With AI tools, streaming services can get synthetic voices to “read” an audio description script. There’s potential for various levels of automation, while giving users the chance to customise audio description to suit their specific needs and preferences. Want your cooking show to be narrated in a British accent? With AI, you could change that with the press of a button.

    However, in the audio description industry many are worried AI could undermine the quality, creativity and professionalism humans bring to the equation.

    The language-learning app Duolingo, for example, recently announced it was moving forward with “AI first” development. As a result, many contractors lost jobs that can now purportedly be done by algorithms.

    On the one hand, AI could help broaden the range of audio descriptions available for a range of media and live experiences.

    But AI audio description may also cost jobs rather than create them. The worst outcome would be a huge amount of lower-quality audio description, which would undermine the value of creating it at all.

    AI shouldn’t undermine the quality of assistive technologies, including audio description.
    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    Can we trust AI to describe things well?

    Industry impact and the technical details of how AI can be used in audio description are one thing.

    What’s currently lacking is research that centres the perspectives of users and takes into consideration their experiences and needs for future audio description.

    Accuracy – and trust in this accuracy – is vitally important for blind and low-vision audiences.

    Cheap and often free, AI tools are now widely used to summarise, transcribe and translate. But it’s a well-known problem that generative AI struggles to stay factual. Known as “hallucinations”, these plausible fabrications proliferate even when the AI tools are not asked to create anything new – like doing a simple audio transcription.

    If AI tools simply fabricate content rather than make existing material accessible, it would even further distance and disadvantage blind and low-vision consumers.

    We can use AI for accessibility – with care

    AI is a relatively new technology, and for it to be a true benefit in terms of accessibility, its accuracy and reliability need to be absolute. Blind and low-vision users need to be able to turn on AI tools with confidence.

    In the current “AI rush” to make audio description cheaper, quicker and more available, it’s vital that the people who need it the most are closely involved in how the tech is deployed.

    Kathryn Locke is employed as a researcher on the Australian Research Council’s discovery grant, “Diversifying audio description in the Australian digital landscape”.

    Tama Leaver receives funding from the Australian Research Council. This work is supported by the discovery grant, “Diversifying audio description in the Australian digital landscape”. He is a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

    – ref. AI is now used for audio description. But it should be accurate and actually useful for people with low vision – https://theconversation.com/ai-is-now-used-for-audio-description-but-it-should-be-accurate-and-actually-useful-for-people-with-low-vision-256808

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: NZ Budget 2025: science investment must increase as a proportion of GDP for NZ to innovate and compete

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Gaston, Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

    Shutterstock/Olivier Le Queinec

    A lack of strategy and research funding – by both the current and previous governments – has been well documented, most comprehensively in the first report by the Science System Advisory Group (SSAG), released late last year.

    If there is one word that sums up the current state of New Zealan’s research sector, it is scarcity. As the report summarises:

    We have an underfunded system by any international comparison. This parsimony has led to harmful inter-institutional competition in a manner that is both wastefully expensive in terms of process and scarce researcher time, and is known to inhibit the most intellectually innovative ideas coming forward, and of course it is these that can drive a productive innovation economy.

    The government expects research to contribute to economic growth, but policy and action undermine the sector’s capacity to do so.

    The latest example is last week’s cancellation of the 2026 grant application round of the NZ$55 million Endeavour Fund “as we transition to the science, innovation and technology system of the future”. Interrupting New Zealand’s largest contestable source of science funding limits opportunities for researchers looking for support for new and emerging ideas.

    Changes to the Marsden Fund, set up 30 years ago to support fundamental research, removed all funding for social science and the humanities and shifted focus to applied research. This is despite fundamental research in all fields underpinning innovation and the international ranking of our universities.

    New Zealand has an opportunity to change its economy based on the potential of emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence, cleantech and quantum technologies. Other countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, already consider quantum technologies a priority and fund them accordingly.

    But when it comes to strategy, the composition of the boards of new Public Research Organisations, set up as part of the government’s science sector reform, are skewed towards business experience. Where there is scientific expertise, it tends to be in established industries. The governance of the proposed new entity to focus on emerging and advanced technologies is yet to be announced.

    Critical mass requires funding and strategy

    Scientists have been calling for a science investment target of 2% of GDP for a long time. It was once – roughly a decade ago – the average expenditure within the OECD; this has since increased to 2.7% of GDP, while New Zealand’s investment remains at 1.5%.

    The SSAG report repeatedly refers to the lack of funding, and it would be the obvious thing to see addressed in this year’s budget. But expectations have already been lowered by the government’s insistence there will be no new money.

    The report’s second high-level theme is the engagement of government with scientific strategy. Government announcements to date seem focused on attracting international investment through changes to tax settings and regulation. I would argue this is a matter of focusing on the wrapping rather than the present: the system itself needs to be attractive to investors.

    Creating a thriving research sector is also a matter of scale. International cooperation is one way for New Zealand to access efficiencies of scale. And work on building international partnerships is one area of positive intent. But we need to look at our connectivity nationally as well, and use investment to build this further.

    Countries with greater GDPs than New Zealand’s invest much more in research as a proportion of GDP. It means the size of these other countries’ scientific ecosystems – if measured by total expenditure – is three to four times New Zealand’s on a per capita basis.

    A matter of scale

    Per-capita scale matters because it tells us how easy it is for researchers to find someone else with the right skillset or necessary equipment. It tells us how likely it is for a student to find an expert in New Zealand to teach them, rather than needing to go overseas.

    And it tells us how quickly start-up companies in emerging technologies will be able to find the skilled employees they need. A thriving university system that attracts young people to develop the research skills needed by advanced technology companies is a key part of this challenge.

    The government’s science sector reform aims to increase its contribution to economic growth. But research contributes to economic growth when scientists can really “lean in” with confidence to commercialising and translating their science.

    That can’t happen if budgets don’t fund the critical mass, connectivity and resources to stimulate the transition to a thriving science system.

    Nicola Gaston receives funding from the Tertiary Education Commission as the Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. She also receives funding from the Marsden Fund. All research funding goes to the University of Auckland to pay the costs of the research she is employed to do.

    – ref. NZ Budget 2025: science investment must increase as a proportion of GDP for NZ to innovate and compete – https://theconversation.com/nz-budget-2025-science-investment-must-increase-as-a-proportion-of-gdp-for-nz-to-innovate-and-compete-255591

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The public service has a much smaller gender pay gap than the private sector. It’s a big achievement

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leonora Risse, Associate Professor in Economics, University of Canberra

    NDAB Creativity/Shutterstock

    After two years of publishing the gender pay gaps of Australia’s private-sector companies, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has released public-sector employer data for the first time.

    The report shows a stark contrast between the private and public sectors. The Commonwealth public sector has a gender pay gap of 6.4%, far less than the equivalent gap of 21.1% in the private sector.

    The agency attributes a big part of the “substantially better” outcome in the public sector to the achievement of gender balance at managerial and board levels.

    Women’s representation in senior and governance roles doesn’t just narrow the pay gap at the top. It can also change workplace cultures and embed more gender-equitable practices that ripple through to all occupational levels.

    The agency says public-sector employers have achieved this outcome by “long-term and deliberate actions that address gender equality”. These include conducting a gender pay gap analysis and formulating a gender-equality strategy.

    The public sector’s results also illustrate the power of setting targets. The Australian government has set – and now achieved – targets for women to hold 50% of all Australian government board positions.

    Who’s performing well?

    Of the 120 public-sector employers in the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s dataset, 55 have a gender pay gap that falls into the target range of between –5% and +5%.

    Several have a gender pay gap in total remuneration at or very close to zero. These include the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Department of Treasury, Department of Social Services and the Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman.

    A handful have a slight positive gender pay gap in favour of women, including the Productivity Commission.

    Where is there room for improvement?

    To support greater transparency, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has published a searchable database of Commonwealth public sector employers. This is broken down by each department and agency.

    The largest gender gaps in median total remuneration are reported by the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (50.4%) and Coal Mining Industry Corporation (31.7%).

    Closer to the middle of the pack, the Australian Federal Police reports a gender pay gap of 12.2%. The Reserve Bank of Australia has a gap of 11.5%, and Australia Post 8.6%.

    The data does not include elected officials such as members of parliament.

    All up, half of Commonwealth public-sector employers have a gender pay gap larger than 5%, which the agency deems the acceptable maximum.

    But this is still a better performance than in the private sector, where 60% of companies exceeded the 5% threshold.



    Read more:
    Women’s annual salaries are narrowing the gap. But men still out-earn women by an average $547 a week

    How much less are women earning?

    Women working in Australia’s public sector earn on average A$8,200 less per year than their male colleagues.

    The data cover both the Australian Public Service (APS) (which is directly responsible for the delivery of government services) and non-APS organisations (which deliver services on behalf of the government).

    Within the APS workforce, men’s average total remuneration of $128,503 compares to women’s $121,146. This equates to a 5.7% gap.

    In public-sector agencies outside the APS, this gender pay gap widens to 8.8%. Men’s average salary of $127,354 compares to women’s $116,157.



    Read more:
    Women’s annual salaries are narrowing the gap. But men still out-earn women by an average $547 a week

    In agencies outside the APS, more of this gender gap – 5.6 percentage points – is due to men being paid more in bonuses, overtime and superannuation. Within the APS, these above-base payments contribute only 1.1 percentage points to the overall gap.

    The role of discretionary above-base payments in widening the gap in total remuneration is similar to the dynamics of the private sector, where there is also greater scope for individual negotiation.

    Research shows negotiation practices are laced with gender biases.

    Public sector employers have taken action after conducting gender pay gap analysis.
    Tint Media/Shutterstock

    More standardised recruitment, promotion and wage-setting practices in the public sector, compared with private companies, mean there’s less scope for personal subjectivity and implicit biases in hiring, promotion and salary decisions.

    Turning data into action

    This is the first year the Commonwealth public sector’s performance on gender equality has been published at employer level. It follows changes to legislation in 2022 requiring public sector employers to report their gender equality indicators to WGEA from 2023, similar to the obligations of large private companies.

    The point of publishing gender pay gaps is to spark awareness and motivate employer action.

    Three in four public sector employers report they have taken action after conducting a gender pay gap analysis. Of these actions, one in four employers have corrected instances of unequal pay.

    With a heightened awareness of the benefits of flexible work, almost all public-sector employers (96%) reported “flexible working is promoted throughout the organisation”.

    But there is scope to improve the practical implementation of flexible work policies.

    Only 56% of public-sector employers offer an online option for all team meetings. Only 43% provide support to managers to ensure performance evaluations are not unfairly biased against staff who work remotely or hybrid. And only 5% report that management positions can be designed as part-time.

    With this greater transparency, there will be opportunity to monitor changes in future to look for ongoing improvements in gender-equality practices and outcomes.

    It’s in the interests of fostering a more equitable, productive and effective public sector for all.



    Read more:
    Working from home is producing economic benefits return-to-office rules would quash

    Leonora Risse receives research funding from the Trawalla Foundation and the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia. She has previously undertaken commissioned research for the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. She is a member of the Economic Society of Australia and the Women in Economics Network. She serves as an Expert Panel Member on gender pay equity for the Fair Work Commission.

    – ref. The public service has a much smaller gender pay gap than the private sector. It’s a big achievement – https://theconversation.com/the-public-service-has-a-much-smaller-gender-pay-gap-than-the-private-sector-its-a-big-achievement-256810

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: After another call with Putin, it looks like Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

    After a two-hour phone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on May 19, US president Donald Trump took to social media to declare that Russia and Ukraine will “immediately start negotiations” towards a ceasefire and an end to the war. He did, however, add that the conditions for peace “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be”.

    With the Vatican, according to Trump, “very interested in hosting the negotiations” and European leaders duly informed, it seems clear that the US has effectively abandoned its stalled mediation efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

    It was always a possibility that Trump could walk away from the war, despite previous claims he could end it in 24 hours. This only became more likely on May 16, when the first face-to-face negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for more than three years predictably ended without a ceasefire agreement.

    When Trump announced shortly afterwards that he would be speaking to his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts by phone a few days later, he effectively mounted the beginning of a rearguard action. This was further underlined when, shortly before the Trump-Putin call, Vice-President J.D. Vance, explicitly told reporters that the US could end its shuttle diplomacy.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    The meagre outcomes of the talks between Russia and Ukraine – as well as between Trump and Putin – are not surprising. Russia is clearly not ready for any concessions yet. It keeps insisting that Ukraine accept its maximalist demands of territorial concessions and future neutrality.

    Putin also continues to slow-walk any negotiations. After his call with Trump, he reportedly said that “Russia will offer and is ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”, including “a possible ceasefire for a certain period of time, should relevant agreements be reached.”

    The lack of urgency on Russia’s part to end the fighting and, in fact, the Kremlin’s ability and willingness to continue the war was emphasised the day before the Trump-Putin call. Russia carried out its largest drone attack against Ukraine so far in the war, targeting several regions including Kyiv.

    There has been no let-up in the fighting since. And the fact that Putin spoke to Trump while visiting a music school in the southern Russian city of Sochi does not suggest that a ceasefire in Ukraine is high on the Russian leader’s priority list.

    A large part of the Kremlin’s calculation seems to be its desire to strike a grand bargain with the White House on a broader reset of relations between the US and Russia. It is signalling clearly that this is more important than the war in Ukraine and might even happen without the fighting there ending.

    This also appears to be driving thinking in Washington. Trump foreshadowed an improvement in bilateral relations by describing the “tone and spirit” of his conversation with Putin as “excellent”. He also seemed pleased about the prospects of “large-scale trade” with Russia.

    Abandoning European allies

    Trump is on record as saying that there would be no progress towards peace in Ukraine until he and Putin get together. But it is worth bearing mind that very little movement towards a ceasefire in Ukraine – let alone a peace agreement – occurred after the last phone call between the two presidents in February.

    Part of this lack of progress has been Trump’s reluctance to put any real pressure on Putin. And despite agreement in Brussels and preparations in Washington for an escalation in sanctions against Russia, it is unlikely that Trump will change his approach.

    In this context, the sequence in which the calls occurred is telling. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had a short call before the former spoke with Putin. Zelensky said he told Trump not to make decisions about Ukraine “without us”.

    But rather than presenting Putin with a clear ultimatum to accept a ceasefire, Trump apparently discussed future relations with Putin at great length before informing Zelensky and key European allies that the war in Ukraine is now solely their problem to solve.

    This has certainly raised justifiable fears in Kyiv and European capitals that, for the sake of a reset with Russia, the US might yet completely abandon its allies across the Atlantic.

    However, if a reset with Russia at any cost really is Trump’s strategy, it is bound to fail. As much as Putin seems willing to continue with his aggression against Ukraine, Zelensky is as unwilling to surrender. Putin can rely on China’s continued backing while Zelensky can count on support from Europe.

    Supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine is essential for China to keep Moscow on side in its rivalry with the US. And for Europe, supporting Ukraine has become an existential question of deterring and containing a revisionist Russia hell-bent on restoring a Soviet-style sphere of influence in central and eastern Europe.

    In a world that has been in flux since Trump’s return to the White House, these are some of the emerging constants. And they make a US-Russia reset highly improbable.

    Even if it were to happen, it would not strengthen Washington’s position with Beijing. Walking away from Ukraine and Europe now will deprive the US of the very allies it will need in the long term to prevail in its rivalry with China.

    By abandoning his mediation between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump may have broken the deadlock in his efforts to achieve a reset with Russia. But getting this deal over the line will be a pyrrhic victory.

    Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

    – ref. After another call with Putin, it looks like Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/after-another-call-with-putin-it-looks-like-trump-has-abandoned-efforts-to-mediate-peace-in-ukraine-257021

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Feats of the human body behind Tom Cruise’s stunts in Mission: Impossible movies

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol

    He’s leapt from cliffs, clung to planes mid-takeoff and held his breath underwater for as long as professional freedivers. Now, at 62, Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt for one final mission – and he’s still doing his own stunts.

    With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the saga reaches its high-stakes finale. But behind the scenes of death-defying spectacles lies a fascinating question: just how far can the human body be pushed – and trained – to pull off the seemingly impossible?

    And at what cost? In filming the eight Mission: Impossible films, Cruise has suffered a broken ankle, cracked ribs and a torn shoulder.

    Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to consider the capabilities – and limits – of the human body in being able to achieve these awesome heights. How much is it possible to train to achieve the apparently impossible?

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    Breathing underwater

    In Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Hunt navigates an underwater vault to recover a stolen ledger. Cruise wanted to film this all in one take and sought help from freediving instructors in order to hold his breath for the required time – over six minutes!

    The average human can hold their breath for about 30 to 90 seconds. That’s without training. Although there’s an innate diving reflex built into the human body that allows it to temporarily adapt to immersion underwater.

    The response is to lower the heart rate and redirect blood to the body’s core, essentially enabling it to lower its metabolic demand and preserve the function of the vital organs, like the brain and heart.

    All well and good, but consider now the need to swim, as well as resist the pressure of the water pressing on the lungs. And also while fighting that desperate urge as a result of rising CO₂ to take a deep breath – which, underwater, would be catastrophic.

    And if the diver’s oxygen levels fall too low, they might black out and lose consciousness. That’s why shallow water drowning is a real risk here.

    That’s where freediving training comes into play. With practice, there are several ways you can increase the time you’re able to remain underwater. These include mastering breathing techniques to retain the maximum amount of air in the lungs. Sustained practice might also lead to increased oxygen storage capacity in the bloodstream.

    This process takes months to years to attain and might lengthen the immersion time, on average, to around five minutes. What Cruise managed to achieve was nothing short of exceptional.

    The official trailer for Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning.

    Free climbing – and that scene

    Mission Impossible films often open with Ethan Hunt working his way up some impossibly sheer building or cliff face with the agility of a mountain goat. He appears to be free climbing without a harness, and at the start of Mission: Impossible 2, clinging on with just one hand. While Cruise used safety wires to secure himself, the climbing was 100% real.

    Then, of course, how could we forget that scene? The one in the original Mission: Impossible – where he has to suspend all limbs, centimetres from the ground, to prevent himself from setting off the alarms.

    Although Cruise hasn’t revealed his specific training regime for these stunts that I can see – performing any of these actions would require an exceptionally strong back and core.

    The muscles of our backs keep the spine straight and upright. Some span the space between back and limb, such as latissimus dorsi, or “lats”. These sheets of muscle, prized by bodybuilders, are also particularly valuable to climbers – allowing you to perform a chin-up, or pull yourself up that rock face.

    Besides this, many other muscles are needed for extreme climbing – those that enable a strong grip, allow for reaching and “push offs”, and maintain tension and hold. It’s no wonder climbing is considered one of the best whole-body workouts.

    It’s no surprise that Cruise is known to have trained extensively for this. To understand even an element of the difficulty he may have faced, you could try adopting that vault heist pose, with your belly in contact with the floor, and see how long you can hold it. I won’t tell you how pitiful my own attempt was.

    What a blast

    Hunt has also escaped a fair few explosions in his time, from a helicopter in the Channel tunnel to a detonating fish tank in Prague. In Mission: Impossible 3, on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, another helicopter launching a missile triggers an explosion that sends Hunt smashing into a car. Again, Cruise did it all himself, for the price of two cracked ribs.

    Pyrotechnics were used for the explosion, but of course, they couldn’t be used to lift Cruise up and deposit him against the car. The solution? A series of wires were used to drag him sideways. Never has the direction “brace, brace” been so apt.

    And just so you know, broken or bruised ribs are far from fun. Some describe them as one of the most painful injuries you can experience, since the simple acts of coughing, sneezing and merely breathing exacerbate the pain.

    But Tom Cruise picks himself up yet again, dusts himself off and gets on with it. His motivation? He has reportedly claimed that he wants the audience to experience what it really feels to be in that moment. And what a good sport he is.

    This article won’t self-destruct in five seconds.

    Dan Baumgardt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Feats of the human body behind Tom Cruise’s stunts in Mission: Impossible movies – https://theconversation.com/feats-of-the-human-body-behind-tom-cruises-stunts-in-mission-impossible-movies-256908

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Spotify continues to change music. What’s next – will AI musicians replace music made by humans?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

    Spotify was started, according to its official claims, because its founders “love music and piracy was killing it”. In Mood Machine, music journalist Liz Pelly argues this is rewriting history.

    In fact, she points out, Spotify founder Daniel Ek initially patented a platform around 2006, for circulating “any kind of digital content”. Only months later did he and his co-founder decide music might be the most profitable form of content.

    Review: Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist – Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton)

    Ek grew up in a working-class suburb of Stockholm. A neighbour recalled that, while still at school, Ek had set up a website-making business – and was earning more than his teachers. Rejected for a job at Google, he founded an ad-targeting business, Advertigo. After he sold it to tech entrepreneur Martin Lorentzon, the two men registered a new company: Spotify.

    ‘The Google of music’

    Spotify would allow users to find their desired piece of music quickly. Ek described it in 2009 as “essentially the Google of music”, Pelly writes. He had a “maniacal focus” on ensuring a user would get a virtually instantaneous response when they pressed play; no annoying buffering.

    Spotify launched in Europe in 2008 and in the United States in 2011. It listed on the stock market in 2018. Spotify has just recorded its first annual profit. It is valued at over US$100 billion: more than the three leading recording companies combined.

    It had 678 million users at March 2025: of them, 268 million were paying subscribers. The rest contribute to Spotify’s earnings by listening to advertisements: the so-called “freemium” model.

    Boon or bane of musicians?

    Music streaming now accounts for 84% of recorded music revenue, according to Pelly – and Spotify is the largest music streamer.

    Initially, Spotify looked like a boon to musicians, she writes. It could save music from the threat of “pirate” downloading, which gave no payments to creators. But many musicians are critical of the low payments artists get: fractions of a cent per stream.

    Spotify claims that in 2024 it paid out more than US$10 billion to the music industry. It claims nearly 1,500 artists are earning over US$1 million annually.

    Spotify pays the recording and publishing rights holders, not the singers and songwriters. How much the latter gets depends on their contracts with the record companies. The system is complicated, indirect and not that transparent.

    ‘Mixtapes still work’ – so do playlists

    Spotify gradually shifted towards playlists, to simplify the process of users selecting music. Some playlists, like “today’s top hits”, just consisted of the currently most popular songs. These are like the “top 40” format of many commercial radio stations.

    Spotify also hired music experts to compile their choice of the best new releases. The compilers of the most popular of these playlists, such as the playlist “rap caviar”, became very influential. A Spotify advertisement in 2013 made the analogy between playlists and mixtapes (as featured in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity), claiming “mixtapes still work”.

    Spotify advertising claims ‘mixtapes still work’, referencing High Fidelity.

    Spotify also increasingly tried to increase passive listening. It introduced playlists geared to match the existing tastes of listeners and allow for how these might vary across the day. It termed this “music for every moment”: music to exercise to, background music for studying, music to help you sleep and so on. I have a playlist of songs about economics.

    Ek said in 2016: “we really want to soundtrack every moment of your life”.

    One of the parts of the book I found most intriguing was Pelly’s discussion of how this echoes a strategy developed by Thomas Edison around a century ago. He produced shellac 78 rpm records with titles such as “in moods of wistfulness” and “for more energy!”.

    In 2014, Spotify made large investments in “algorithmic personalisation”. This suggested music similar in key, tempo, time signature, acousticness, danceability, loudness, mode and energy to whatever the user was already choosing.

    This kept users “within their comfort zone (or as Spotify thought of it, their customer retention zone)”. But it meant users were much less likely to encounter new styles and artists, or broaden their musical horizons.

    Generic music and AI

    While Spotify denies it, Pelly claims Spotify commissions session musicians, playing under assumed names, to record very generic-sounding music, for playlists such as “chill instrumental beats”. Pelly gives an example of 20 songwriters using 500 names to produce thousands of tracks, streamed millions of times.

    A “looming cloud” is the prospect AI-generated music will displace human musicians and singers in Spotify’s playlists, Pelly writes. She mentions that Spotify blocked a start-up called Boomy, which released over 14.5 million AI-generated songs – and has since struck up a partnership with Warner.

    Another controversy is around Spotify’s Discovery Mode, which offers artists more promotion of their songs in exchange for accepting lower payments. But if most artists do this, the promotions cancel each other out, leaving all the artists worse off.

    How Spotify is changing music

    Pelly quotes an independent record label founder who says Spotify has changed the nature of the music being made.

    It’s not sustainable to put out challenging records […] you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops […] that are going to be playlist friendly.

    This is despite some music fans saying the music they experience as “life-changing, really profound” is different from the songs they play most often.

    Songs streamed are only monetised after 30 seconds. This has created “a particular emphasis placed on perfecting song intros […] songwriters would just dive directly into the chorus”. So, no more songs with long waits for the vocals, like U2, the Temptations, Dire Straits or Pink Floyd.

    Artists who want their songs to appear on playlists need them to match a particular mood or context. This means songs increasingly “remain in a single emotional register throughout”.

    It may mean artists are less likely to release songs with marked tempo changes, such as Dexys’ Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen (1982), Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) or Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out (2004). There may still be much smaller tempo changes, such as Taylor Swift’s Evermore from 2020.

    Artists may now be less likely to release songs with marked tempo changes, such as Dexys’ Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen.

    The “Spotify for artists” service provides artists with data about the streaming of their songs. A band planning a tour can see in which cities or countries they are most popular. They can even alter their set lists to include the songs particularly popular in particular areas.

    But Spotify monitors use of this facility, Pelly writes – and it is not clear how they use the data. Over time, it may encourage artists to repeat aspects of their most popular songs, rather than innovate and evolve.

    A serious look

    The book is interesting and informative, but somewhat dryer than some other recent exposes of the tech sector. Partly this is because Ek is a less colourful character than X’s Elon Musk, or Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.


    Pelly does not provide the witty lines of tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book. She is not a gossipy former insider, like director of global public policy at Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams.

    As an economist, I felt the book complemented sociologist Michael Walsh’s Streaming Sounds: Musical Listening in the Digital Age. Walsh describes the demand for music streaming. Pelly analyses the supply side.

    Pelly rightly describes her book as a “serious look” at Spotify. It brings together a lot of useful information about the company and raises good questions about whether it is changing the music industry – and music itself – for the better.

    The debate will continue, as AI increases its influence and artists become more concerned about their songs being “TikTok friendly”, as well as “Spotify friendly”. Perhaps there will be more songs like Steve’s Lava Chicken from A Minecraft Movie. Just 34 seconds long, it recently became the shortest song to make the UK top 40.

    John Hawkins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Spotify continues to change music. What’s next – will AI musicians replace music made by humans? – https://theconversation.com/spotify-continues-to-change-music-whats-next-will-ai-musicians-replace-music-made-by-humans-253630

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘Outdated and irrelevant’: what do young Australians think of their schooling?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jun Eric Fu, Senior Research Fellow, Youth Research Collective, The University of Melbourne

    LBeddoe/Shutterstock

    Australia’s school system – and whether it is doing its job – is often under the microscope from politicians, experts and parents.

    The most recent NAPLAN results in 2024 triggered a wave of heated discussions after about one in three students were not meeting literacy and numeracy benchmarks.

    Education Minister Jason Clare is among those who also have serious concerns about rates of students who complete Year 12. In 2024, the retention rate of students between Year 7 and Year 12 was 79.9%. For government school students, it was 74%.

    But what do students themselves think about their schooling? Our new study asked recent school leavers about their experiences.

    Our research

    Our study draws on a 2023 survey as part of the Life Patterns research program, which follows different generations of young Australians after school.

    We surveyed more than 4,000 young people recruited from a diverse sample of 100 government, Catholic and independent schools in urban and regional areas of Victoria, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania.

    These young people completed high school in 2023 and were asked to comment on their school experiences.

    Students in the study were from public and private schools.
    pio3/Shutterstock

    Students are mostly satisfied, but …

    The participants rated their overall impression of school on a five-point scale, from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. About 60% of them were “quite satisfied” or “very satisfied”.

    Despite this broadly positive picture, many of them also expressed concerns about their education, feeling its current content did not prepare them for life after school.

    As one female student from a capital city told us:

    I feel like school doesn’t prepare us for the real world at all and it freaks me out.

    This sentiment was echoed by another female student from a regional city:

    School seems extremely disconnected from either knowledge or experience that will help with jobs, or life skills that will assist in becoming a good, productive, happy person.

    For many, this disconnect between the education on offer and the education they wanted contributed to a disengagement from school. A male student from a regional city said:

    I am committed to my education and a dedicated student, but find it hard to connect with some of the information we are learning as it seems outdated and irrelevant. I want to learn things that are going to improve my life.

    This follows researchers’ longstanding concerns the education system is not adequately setting students up for life outside school – and the complex social, political and economic changes they will confront.

    Don’t focus on uniforms

    Students also spoke about schools focusing on issues that do not matter to young people, such as students wearing the “correct” uniform or whether or not they have their phone at school.

    As one female student commented:

    Focus on more real issues. The debates about phones allowed at school or uniforms at school seem almost irrelevant when you compare them to the everyday common hardships and problems young people face.

    Too much stress

    A strong theme in young people’s responses was the amount of stress they faced with their studies. These feelings were often linked to heavy workloads (particularly in Year 11 and 12) and the pressure they felt to achieve certain grades.

    A male student from a country town said:

    […] the pressure and the expectations to do well in school is so high and caused a lot of stress and anxiety.

    Another male student from a capital city also felt:

    There is so much pressure on high school and how one exam can change the course of your future which isn’t true.

    This echoes other studies that query the focus on a single score (the ATAR) and supports alternative approaches to measuring education outcomes at the end of Year 12.

    Students said they faced too much stress in their senior years of school.
    GillianVann/Shutterstock

    More mental health support

    Amid ongoing reports of young people struggling with their mental health, mental health also emerged as a major concern in students’ responses.

    A male student from a capital city told us young people were “battling every day” and they needed more free, accessible resources and support from school staff.

    They also saw a connection between the pressures of schooling and mental health concerns. As one female student told us:

    There is too much expected from students at school, leading to burn out and mental illnesses.

    What next?

    Our study shows many young people care deeply about their education. But they also feel it isn’t working for them or preparing them for life beyond school.

    This suggests government institutions and schools need to be doing more to include young people’s perspectives as they design and implement curricula.

    By recognising young people as active stakeholders in schools,
    education shifts from something happening to them to something happening with them. This approach can foster a stronger sense of belonging, ownership and engagement with learning.

    Jun Eric Fu works on the Life Patterns research program, which is funded by the Australian Research Council.

    Julia Cook receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

    – ref. ‘Outdated and irrelevant’: what do young Australians think of their schooling? – https://theconversation.com/outdated-and-irrelevant-what-do-young-australians-think-of-their-schooling-256889

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The Queensland melioidosis outbreak is still growing. What’s keeping this deadly mud bug active?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Jeffries, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, Western Sydney University

    ap-studio/Shutterstock

    The outbreak of the deadly “mud bug” melioidosis in north Queensland has not yet abated since it began at the start of this year.

    So far there have been 221 cases and 31 deaths from the disease in 2025. This encompasses a 400% increase in cases in Cairns and a 600% increase in Townsville compared to the average over previous years.

    Fortunately, case numbers have begun to drop. Queensland Health reports new cases weekly, and in the most recent reporting period – up to May 6 – seven new cases were recorded, down from a peak of 29 cases in the week to February 16.

    However, people are still contracting and dying from this disease. So what’s keeping it active in Queensland, and are there any promising vaccines on the horizon?

    What is melioidosis?

    Melioidosis is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei which lives in soil, mud and groundwater, usually not causing any harm. But B. pseudomallei can cause disease in humans and animals if it enters the skin via a cut. Or it can be inhaled in water droplets and enter the lungs.

    The disease generally takes one to four weeks to establish itself, meaning people don’t develop symptoms immediately after they’ve been exposed.

    Melioidosis most commonly presents as pneumonia. However chronic skin infections, called cutaneous infections, occur in 10–20% of cases. Melioidosis can also lead to blood infections.

    Symptoms of the pneumonia form include fever, headache, difficulty breathing, muscle pain, chest pain and confusion.

    We don’t understand cutaneous infections as well as we do lung infections with melioidosis. Cutaneous infections are also less responsive to standard antibiotic treatments due to the nature of the chronic wound. For example, the bacteria can form a slimy layer called a biofilm. This can help the bacteria produce proteins which can block the antibiotics from working.

    Melioidosis occurs most commonly in tropical areas, such as Thailand. But it’s also regarded as endemic in northern Australia, occurring in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Nonetheless, the scale of the current outbreak in north Queensland is highly unusual.

    Anyone can contract melioidosis, but certain medical conditions can increase a person’s risk. These include diabetes, liver, kidney or lung disease, cancer, or other conditions which might compromise the patient’s immune system.

    During the current Queensland outbreak 95% of cases have been in people with risk factors such as diabetes or lung disease.

    How is melioidosis spreading in Queensland?

    Melioidosis increases during periods of high rainfall and flooding, and this has been the case in the current outbreak. However, patterns have begun to emerge suggesting the bacterium may now be spreading in other ways.

    Experts have suggested that while the Townsville cases can be explained by flooding and correlate to high levels of rainfall, the Cairns cases do not match with this explanation.

    One suggestion is that the construction of the Bruce Highway upgrade south of Cairns has caused an increase in cases due to clay soil particles becoming airborne during construction.

    It’s not an entirely new idea. The movement of soil during highway construction and urban expansion has been investigated as a potential mode of transmission during previous spikes of melioidosis cases in far north Queensland.

    The infrastructure body responsible for the upgrade has pledged to follow expert health advice as investigations continue.

    Could B. pseudomallei be evolving and becoming more deadly?

    This potential change in how the disease is spreading, and the increased number of cases and deaths, might indicate the organism is evolving to spread more easily and become more deadly. Genome analysis is ongoing to determine this.

    Notably, bacteria found in the environment can acquire genes from other bacteria in soil and water. This may give them enhanced abilities to survive in unfavourable conditions and be more resilient to changes in their natural habitat, as well as potentially infect human hosts more effectively.

    In a warming climate with increased rainfall, the bacterium behind melioidosis is likely to be a prime candidate for this kind of change.

    Melioidosis is caused by the bacterium B. pseudomallei.
    TheBlueHydrangea/Shutterstock

    How about treatments and protection?

    There’s currently only one way to treat melioidosis, which involves receiving intravenous antibiotics in hospital for several weeks, followed by up to six months of oral antibiotics.

    Against a backdrop of urgent calls for more research and increased public awareness around melioidosis, there may be hope on the horizon.

    Researchers at the University of California have developed a vaccine which produces a protein that mimics the proteins in B. pseudomallei, leading to an immune response against this bacterium. The vaccine has been successful in mouse models and will continue to a further animal trial, which, if successful, will lead to human trials.

    It seems melioidosis is a problem that’s not going away.

    If you live in an affected region such as tropical Queensland or the NT, limit exposure to mud and water as much as possible. If you’re spending time in muddy areas, use appropriate personal protective equipment such as gloves and boots. You can also protect yourself by covering any open wounds and wearing a respirator if you’re working closely with water.

    Monitor for symptoms and see a doctor if you feel unwell. More information is also available from Queensland Health.

    Thomas Jeffries does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The Queensland melioidosis outbreak is still growing. What’s keeping this deadly mud bug active? – https://theconversation.com/the-queensland-melioidosis-outbreak-is-still-growing-whats-keeping-this-deadly-mud-bug-active-256794

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: For making stars, it’s not just how much gas a galaxy has that matters – it’s where it’s hiding

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Catinella, Professor and Senior Principal Research Fellow, International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), The University of Western Australia

    One of the galaxies mapped by WALLABY: the red shade shows the atomic hydrogen gas content of the galaxy, overlaid on an optical image showing the stars. Much of it is typically found beyond the stellar disk (thin white line), where star formation takes place. Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute) / T. Westmeier

    Galaxies are often described as vast star factories, churning out new suns from clouds of gas. For decades, astronomers have assumed that the more raw material a galaxy holds, the more stars it should be able to make.

    But our latest study, published this month in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA), challenges that assumption. We found that when it comes to forming stars, it’s not just the amount of gas in a galaxy that matters – it’s where that gas is located.

    Getting the ingredients in the right place

    Our research is part of one of the largest efforts to map atomic hydrogen gas in nearby galaxies. This huge project is called the WALLABY survey (or the Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind Survey).

    Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and the basic building block of stars. But surprisingly, a large fraction of this gas in galaxies lies far from where stars actually form – out in the faint outer regions, well beyond the bright stellar disk.

    Think of atomic hydrogen as the flour in a cake recipe. It’s the essential ingredient for making stars. But what really matters for the recipe is not how much flour there is in the bag, but how much ends up in the mixing bowl.

    In the same way, to understand how stars form, we need to focus on the gas that’s in the right place. In a galaxy, that means within the stellar disk, where it can actually be used.

    A closer look

    Until now, most measurements of atomic hydrogen in galaxies have focused on their total gas content, without showing where that gas is located. That’s because earlier observations – especially those made with single-dish radio telescopes – couldn’t detect where in a galaxy hydrogen gas was located.

    However, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope in Western Australia has a very wide field of view and moderate resolution. This means astronomers can use it to efficiently map the hydrogen gas across large areas of the sky and within individual galaxies.

    Using the ASKAP telescope, the WALLABY survey should eventually detect more than 200,000 galaxies and provide detailed hydrogen maps for many thousands of them.

    A puzzle resolved

    Our study, led by PhD student Seona Lee, draws on hydrogen maps for around 1,000 galaxies. This is an unprecedented sample size for this kind of analysis.

    The results reveal a clear trend. The amount of star formation is much more closely linked to the amount of hydrogen gas within the stellar disk than the gas farther out. That outer gas, even when it is plentiful, appears to play little immediate role in fuelling new stars.

    This helps explain a long-standing puzzle – why some galaxies with large gas reservoirs form relatively few stars. It turns out much of their gas may be sitting idle in the galactic outskirts, too far from the regions where stars actually form.

    In short, measuring the total gas content of a galaxy doesn’t give the full picture. To understand star formation, we need to zoom in – not just total up the ingredients, but see where they’re actually being used.

    Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013.

    – ref. For making stars, it’s not just how much gas a galaxy has that matters – it’s where it’s hiding – https://theconversation.com/for-making-stars-its-not-just-how-much-gas-a-galaxy-has-that-matters-its-where-its-hiding-257011

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Biden is getting prostate cancer treatment, but that’s not the best choice for all men − a cancer researcher describes how she helped her father decide

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Luisel Ricks-Santi, Senior Associate Vice President Community Health, Education and Training, Old Dominion University; Associate Professor of Pharmacy, University of Florida

    Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative had funded hundreds of cancer research projects across the country. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

    “Me encontraron càncer en la pròstata,” my father told me. “They found cancer in my prostate.”

    As a cancer researcher who knows very well about the high incidence and decreased survival rates of prostate cancer in the Caribbean, I anguished over these words. Even though I study cancer in my day job, I struggled to take in this news. At the time, all I could muster in response was, “What did the doctor say?”

    “The urologist wants me to see the radiation oncologist to discuss ‘semillas’ (seeds),” he said. “They are recommending treatment.” Many men, including former President Joe Biden, whose case is advanced, do choose with their doctors to treat prostate cancer.

    However, I understood from my work that not undergoing treatment was also an option. In some cases, that is the better choice.

    So I took it upon myself to educate my father on his disease and assist him with the life-changing decisions he would need to make. Our journey can give you a preview of what a cancer diagnosis can be like.

    Prostate cancer diagnosis

    Prostate cancer was not a new topic for my father and me. His battle with his prostate health started over 10 years ago with an initial diagnosis of benign prostate hyperplasia, or BPH.

    The prostate gets bigger with age for a number of reasons, including changing hormone levels, infection or inflammation. Two of the most frequent symptoms of BPH are difficulty urinating and a sudden, urgent need to urinate, both of which my father experienced.

    Although research suggests that the factors that contribute to BPH similarly contribute to prostate cancer, there is no evidence that an enlarged prostate will necessarily develop into cancer.

    Prostate cancer diagnoses have risen in the U.S. in recent years.

    Upon my father’s initial BPH diagnosis, I asked about his PSA levels, the amount of prostate-specific antigens in his blood. PSA is a protein that both normal and cancerous prostate cells produce, and elevated amounts are considered red flags for prostate cancer. When combined with a digital rectal exam, a PSA test can allow doctors to more accurately predict a person’s risk of having prostate cancer.

    My father said his PSA levels were elevated but that the doctors would begin active surveillance, what he called “watchful waiting,” and monitor his PSA every six months to see if it rose.

    After several years of monitoring his PSA, doctors found my father’s PSA level had doubled. He then got a biopsy that indicated he had intermediate-risk prostate cancer.

    Cancer risk categorization

    After his diagnosis, my father was faced with the decision of how to proceed with treatment. I explained that categorizing how aggressive the cancer is and how far it has spread can help determine the best course of treatment.

    Prostate cancer can be grouped into four stages. Stages 1 and 2, when the tumor is still confined to the prostate, are considered early-stage or intermediate risk. Stages 3 and 4, when the tumor has spread beyond the borders of the prostate, are considered more advanced and high risk.

    Some patients with early-stage or intermediate-risk prostate cancer undergo additional treatment, including surgery, radiation or radioactive seed implants called brachytherapy. Patients with late-stage prostate cancer typically undergo hormone therapy along with surgery or radiation, or chemotherapy with or without radiation.

    Although I was not surprised by my father’s diagnosis, given his advanced age and his battle with prostate disease over the past decade, I still struggled emotionally. I struggled with our conversations about what “curing” his cancer meant and how to explain his treatment options to him. I wanted to ensure he would have the best outcome and could still live his best life.

    Our initial inclination was to undergo active surveillance. That meant we would monitor his PSA every six months instead of immediately starting treatment. That is appropriate for patients with early-stage and less aggressive tumors.

    Prostate cancer screening problems

    My father was leaning on me to help him decide how to proceed. I felt overwhelming anxiety because I did not want to fail him or my family. Even with all my expertise studying cancer genetics and working with cancer patients, I couldn’t help second-guessing our decisions, and I sometimes questioned our decision not to immediately treat his cancer.

    Some people diagnosed with prostate cancer don’t immediately start treatment, because many of the tumors found through PSA testing grow so slowly that they are unlikely to be life-threatening. Detecting these slow-growing tumors is considered overdiagnosis, because the cancer ultimately will not harm the patient during their lifetime. Nearly half of all patients with prostate cancer are overdiagnosed, often leading to overtreatment.

    Research suggests that many prostate cancer patients undergo unnecessarily aggressive treatments, which are often associated with significant harms, like urinary and bowel incontinence, sexual impotence and, in some cases, death. Several studies in the U.S. have shown that patients with early-stage prostate cancer generally have a good prognosis, and the cancer rarely progresses further. With careful observation, most will never need treatment and can be spared the burdens of unnecessary therapy until there are clear signs of progression.

    The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended personalized PSA-based screening in 2018 to avoid overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

    Overdiagnosis and overtreatment of prostate cancer led the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to recommend against PSA-based screening in 2012, with caveats for high-risk groups including African American men and those with a family history of prostate cancer. The recommendation was updated in 2018 to make screening a personal choice after discussion with a clinician.

    Those recommendations have resulted in reduced screening and increased prostate cancer diagnoses. Given that Black men are more likely to see the cancer progress to aggressive forms of the disease after initial diagnosis, this may worsen existing health disparities.

    Developing tests that better identify patients at risk of dying from prostate cancer can decrease overtreatment. In the meantime, educating patients can help them decide if screening is appropriate for them. For underserved and marginalized communities, community outreach can help improve health literacy and enhance awareness and screening.

    When I looked through my father’s stack of medical records, I found a beacon of light that eased my apprehension. His doctor had ordered a genetic test that estimates how aggressive a tumor may be by measuring the activity of specific genes in cancer cells. An increase in gene activity linked to cancer would indicate that it is likely to grow fast and spread.

    The test predicted that my father’s risk of dying from the disease in the next five years was less than 5%. Based on these results, we both understood that he had adequate time to make a decision and seek additional guidance.

    My father ultimately decided to continue active surveillance and forgo immediate treatment.

    Because of disparities in access to screening and treatment, African American men are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
    FG Trade/E+ via Getty Images

    Surviving prostate cancer

    I still worry about my father’s diagnosis, because his cancer is at risk for progression. So every six months, I inquire about his PSA levels. His doctors are monitoring his PSA levels as part of his survivorship plan, which is a record of information about his cancer diagnosis, treatment history and potential follow-up tests.

    My father’s decision to undergo active surveillance was controversial among our friends and family. Many were under the impression that prostate cancer required immediate treatment. Several shared successful treatment stories, sometimes followed by stories of adverse treatment-related side effects.

    To date, my father believes that active surveillance was the best decision for him and understands that this may not be the same for someone else. Talk to your doctor to see what the best options are for you or your loved ones.

    This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 8, 2023.

    Luisel Ricks-Santi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Biden is getting prostate cancer treatment, but that’s not the best choice for all men − a cancer researcher describes how she helped her father decide – https://theconversation.com/biden-is-getting-prostate-cancer-treatment-but-thats-not-the-best-choice-for-all-men-a-cancer-researcher-describes-how-she-helped-her-father-decide-257071

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Recent spy scandals reveal how western allies are increasingly unreliable friends

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security & Dean of Faculty, University of Hull

    Denmark’s foreign affairs minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen sounded surprised and emotional as he addressed a press conference on May 7. He announced he would call in the acting head of the US embassy in Copenhagen, Jennifer Hall Godfrey, over highly charged allegations that Washington has instructed its intelligence agencies to step up espionage on Greenland and Copenhagen.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, US intelligence operatives have been asked to collect information on Greenland’s politicians, independence activists and mining interests that could be leveraged in a potential purchase or coerced transfer of Greenland to the US.

    Greenland is a semi-autonomous Danish territory that Donald Trump has stated he would like to become part of the US. The US State Department has refused to comment on the allegations and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said she was opening an investigation into leaks of classified information.

    This looks like a large powerful nation doing all it can to undermine an ally and fellow member of Nato, which is why the Danes are so affronted.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    The real surprise of the story is that it became so public. But this drama comes at a time of increasingly frosty relations between Denmark and the US, made worse by a visit by US vice-president, J.D. Vance, that didn’t go through diplomatic channels. Even before this, Danish supermarkets were marking US products so consumers could boycott them.

    In another case with some parallels to the Greenland spy saga with one ally spying on another, there has been reports of a newly uncovered Hungarian spy ring in Ukraine, collecting military data for Russia. Hungary said the reports were propaganda.

    Hungary is, in theory, aligned with Ukraine as a member of the EU and Nato. However, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has expressed sympathy for Russian agendas and has the closest relationship with Moscow of any current EU leader. Orbán has even repeatedly attempted to block EU aid to Ukraine.

    The alleged discovery of a Hungarian spy network may ramp up the creeping distrust of Hungary by other EU members and the sense of it becoming even more closely aligned with Russia.

    There has even been a recently reported example of spying going on among countries that are loosely considered allies. North Korean spies were recently caught spying on China, for example.

    The Greenland and Hungary episodes, particularly, shed light on how the world order is being remade. We are in the middle of this shift, with technology-enabled intelligence playing a significant part. These episodes demonstrate that governments who thought they were allies are quickly discovering they could be adversaries.



    Read more:
    How Donald Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland really went down in Denmark

    Regulation by revelation

    The US’s reported efforts at spying on Greenland and Denmark is a window into intelligence business.

    Intelligence efforts against allies are generally only curtailed when they become subject to a public scandal. Intelligence historian Richard Aldrich described this as “regulation by revelation”. The inquiries into these operations normally result in a light censure from politicians or judges, pledges not to repeat the offences and subsequent changes to processes.

    Denmark claims the US has been spying on Greenland.

    What will happen in the Greenland case is as yet unclear, particularly when the Trump administration has shown itself to be particularly immune from public, media and political challenge. The most effective challenge to hostile activity against Greenland could be any ramifications for international stock market sentiment, but even that is not guaranteed.

    The reliance of the US constitution and international law on participants behaving appropriately now looks strained under the Trump administration. The lack of restraint on US power may cause nations to rely more heavily on their own intelligence capabilities.

    Intelligence could, as a policy area, begin to mirror that of tariffs and trade as a way that the US can create further uncertainty among other nations about its foreign policy objectives.



    Read more:
    US and Russia squabble over Arctic security as melting ice opens up shipping routes

    Technology makes it easy

    But another factor in contemporary intelligence is that nations can now spy on each other much more easily. Technical capabilities are getting cheaper and easier to use.

    For instance, communications intercepts, satellite imagery and open source data-analysis spying methods are cheaper than ever before. These approaches offer more insight, because of the development of machine analytics and the ready availability of computing power and data storage.

    So, allies will continue to spy on allies because they are able to. That ability drives a demand, even in peace time, to know what other national leaders, and their public, are thinking and doing.

    Nations will also aggressively spy at the moment because the world is particularly unstable, and on the edge of conflict in many regions. Understanding where conflicts might erupt, why and with what force and consequence is essential to any nation’s defence posture.

    Nations only know what equipment to buy, what resources to stockpile and how many people to employ in their militaries with this insight. Intelligence is as much about avoiding surprise as it is creating the circumstances to surprise others. In this sense, intelligence is just another tool of statecraft.

    Most nations have spied on their allies for as long as they have been able. During the cold war the US purchased the Swiss encrypted communications company Crypto AG and sold hundreds of secure communications devices with weakened security, which allowed it to listen in on the countries that were using it and gain intelligence

    This type of operation was the forerunner of the widespread intelligence practices of the US National Security Agency, which is in charge of collecting information for counter intelligence purposes, in recent years.

    For Denmark, the challenges of working with its allies through Nato, while defending Greenland, are increasingly complex. Meanwhile, the EU will also be concerned about what Hungary is sharing with its other “friends”. International allies and alliances are increasingly untrustworthy as part of 2025 tectonic shifts in global geopolitics. The recent revelations are just part of that moving picture.

    Robert Dover has previously received funding from the AHRC around the subject of lessons learned from intelligence operations.

    – ref. Recent spy scandals reveal how western allies are increasingly unreliable friends – https://theconversation.com/recent-spy-scandals-reveal-how-western-allies-are-increasingly-unreliable-friends-256353

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: UK film and TV boom hides a crisis that threatens the whole industry – new report

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Philip, Lecturer in Filmmaking and Knowledge Exchange Fellow, University of Reading

    Judging by the recent success of UK productions like Adolescence and Baby Reindeer, you might assume that the UK film and television industry is flourishing. And indeed, spending on production has risen dramatically in the last year, a boom which is expected to continue through to 2026.

    Unfortunately, our new report highlights a workforce crisis that raises serious questions about the future of the UK screen industry. And Donald Trump’s recent threat to impose tariffs on non-US films adds to the grim situation, throwing the industry’s vulnerability into stark relief.

    We carried out extensive interviews with 29 participants from across the sector who painted a bleak picture of overwork, financial instability, discrimination and barriers to career progression.

    Charities supporting the sector have already noted that the industry has a longstanding retention problem – the so-called “leaky pipeline”. But our report highlights that economic volatility in the UK and elsewhere is worsening financial and working conditions so much that the film and television industry risks a debilitating loss of its most valuable resource: freelancers.

    This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

    Long gaps between jobs are widening, and even experienced freelancers with long careers are struggling to make ends meet. Currently there is no publicly available data on numbers entering and leaving the industry, but companies have reported worsening skills shortages, not due to poor recruitment, but because people are leaving in response to worsening conditions.

    As many as two thirds of screen freelancers are considering leaving the industry within the next five years. Since just under 50% of the film production workforce is freelance, such a large-scale exodus would seriously damage our domestic screen industry.

    That industry contributes £13.48 billion to the UK economy, and its talent on-screen and behind the cameras is world-renowned, so why is this crisis happening at all?

    Boom and bust

    The key change has been a reduction in domestic investment by UK-based public service broadcasters in tandem with increased investment from US-based studios and streamers.

    While a recent boom in international investment led to a rapid expansion in UK film and TV infrastructure and a corresponding acute shortage of workers, it also inflated the costs of production, which has proved unaffordable to traditional domestic commissioners. Without consistent local productions, the UK market is exposed to international disruptions like never before.

    Since the deregulation of the TV sector in the 1990s, the UK’s screen industry has relied on a high proportion of freelance workers. This model provided flexibility in a thriving domestic industry boasting some of the world’s most skilled talent and specialist infrastructure to match.

    A shift in the 2000s towards international workflows in production and post-production fuelled by competitive tax incentives transformed the UK film and TV industry into a global operation. Coupled with healthy domestic competition, the UK’s film and TV industry soared.

    But more recently, this globalised business model has been tested by an extended period of economic volatility that has left experienced talent out of work.

    First came the COVID lockdowns. Then a post-pandemic boom as companies moved to refill their schedules, took UK film and TV production to a record high in 2021.

    But then industrial action by US writers and actors in 2023 brought many UK productions to a halt. Once the strike was over, falling subscriptions numbers led to market volatility for streaming giants, who immediately tightened their budgets and slowed investment in UK-based productions.

    High inflation – partly caused by the influx of international money – led many domestic companies to slash their commissioning budgets. By the middle of 2024, plans to build new studios in the UK were being put on hold and more than half the workforce were still unemployed.

    As one worker told us: “I’ve got friends who’ve been out of work for a year … they’re having to sell their houses and these are experienced, serious producers.” Another contributor told us how: “So many people I know at the moment are looking elsewhere for work completely outside of the industry.”

    And another interviewee said: “There have been some unfortunate casualties along the way, some people simply haven’t had the income or the interest to sustain a living and and they’ve got to do what comes first, which is earn a wage that lets them survive.”

    Until recently, a healthy domestic broadcasting industry helped provide consistent work opportunities for freelancers. But at the same time as production costs have risen, broadcasters’ revenue from advertising – and for the BBC, from the licence fee – has fallen.

    The effect has been a precipitous 22% drop in domestic high-end television commissions in 2024, alongside a 50% decrease in international co-productions. UK broadcasters no longer have the financial capacity to plug the gap in the periods when international investors cut back.

    In effect, the domestic industry has become dominated by, and heavily reliant on, a handful of international players led by unpredictable economic interests and global market fluctuations. It’s no coincidence that the two most notable recent British success stories, Adolescence and Baby Reindeer, are produced by Netflix, which has the financial resources British broadcasters lack.

    And despite the presence of the streamers, inflated costs are making it harder for producers to make programmes with British subject matter. Patrick Spence, the executive producer of the hugely successful Mr Bates vs. the Post Office, has said he wouldn’t even try to make the show today.

    To make matters worse, productions funded by international finance (that might have been funded by UK broadcasters in the past) bring little subscription or licensing profits back to the domestic industry.

    As our research shows, this constellation of issues means freelancers face extreme financial insecurity like never before, alongside increasingly poor working practices as production companies try to cut costs and, in some cases, promote too early where experienced staff are missing. It is little wonder that so many are considering leaving the sector.

    If significant numbers do leave the sector, there will no longer be a supply of skilled workers to meet the demands of an uptick in productions – and the US firms will go elsewhere, leaving only a depleted domestic industry in financial crisis.

    Netflix has already made a thinly veiled threat to seek out more competitive territories in the event of a levy on streamers. We could expect a similar decision if they find that the skilled talent they count on in the UK is no longer available.

    The next bust may already be in sight thanks to President Trump’s proposed tariffs on “foreign-made” films. Though such a levy would be difficult to implement and would cause as much harm to the US industry as it would its global partners, it’s not hard to imagine it having a chilling effect on commissioning in the UK.



    Read more:
    Why Trump’s plans for tariffs on foreign films probably won’t have a happy ending

    Structural change needed

    So what can be done? The introduction of a new programme of tax breaks for productions made in the UK, initiated by the Conservatives and ratified by the Labour government, has been rightly celebrated. However, industry experts predict these will not solve the financial sustainability of a homegrown industry.

    MPs have called on the government to go further in its support for the UK independent film and high-end television sectors, to provide a counterbalance to the fluctuations in investment in big budget fare, and to appoint a freelance commissioner to protect workers rights.

    We wait to hear whether the government will take up its recommendations, and bring us closer to other countries, such as France, that have protected their domestic workforce by negotiating specific investment agreements with the major US streamers.

    In our report, we argue that a minister for self-employed and precarious workers working across government departments is the only way to ensure that the appropriate measures can be achieved to address the challenges freelancers now face.

    Better data on freelancer movements will help policy makers and industry to understand the effects of changes to the domestic industry, to help better secure that workforce for future growth as part of the government’s Invest 2035 growth plans.

    We also recommend better data for freelancers themselves: a central source of information on taxation, employment rights, training, funding and the other resources they need to thrive in this challenging landscape.

    These are only the first steps to lessen the immediate risk of losing a substantial section of the skilled workforce that is the engine of the UK industry, preparing the ground for the much larger structural shifts that are needed. Participants in our research at different stages of their career repeatedly insisted that the industry needs root and branch care to overcome the extreme cycles of feast and famine.

    Protecting the cultural value of the UK’s screen industry goes far beyond making economic sense. The sector forms a major part of the country’s diverse national identity and projects a global image that is literally priceless.

    Andrew Philip receives funding for his screen industries research from the Arts & Humanities Research Council through the University of Reading’s Impact Acceleration Account programme.

    Lisa Purse receives funding for her screen industries research from the Arts & Humanities Research Council through the University of Reading’s Impact Acceleration Account programme.

    – ref. UK film and TV boom hides a crisis that threatens the whole industry – new report – https://theconversation.com/uk-film-and-tv-boom-hides-a-crisis-that-threatens-the-whole-industry-new-report-255986

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Falling back into the shadows? How to keep internal displacement on the humanitarian agenda

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Megan Bradley, Full Professor, Political Science and International Development Studies, McGill University

    The international humanitarian system is in freefall. Following the dramatic funding cuts initiated by Donald Trump’s administration in the United States, deliveries of essential food, medicines and clean water to those in need have halted and stockpiles are dwindling. Aid agencies are scrambling to figure out how to do less with less, even as global needs are mounting.



    Read more:
    The growing threat to U.S. democracy will literally cost lives

    Those displaced inside their own countries, as a result of conflict or natural disaster, have been particularly hard hit by this upheaval.

    Internally displaced persons already fall through the cracks of the humanitarian system, despite dramatically outnumbering those who cross borders as refugees.

    Worldwide, there are an estimated 43.7 million refugees, compared to 83.4 million internally displaced people. Yet media coverage still focuses on those fleeing their country as refugees, while internally displaced people remain less visible and beholden to national governments that have the primary responsibility to assist them.

    Some governments, such as Ukraine’s, work hard to meet this challenge but need outside support. In countries like Myanmar and Afghanistan, governments are complicit in displacing their own citizens, necessitating stronger international leadership.

    The UN’s central role

    The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to protect and assist refugees. But from as early as the 1970s — as a result of calls from the UN General Assembly to address displacement crises — it has also become a leading entity in the international response to internally displaced persons.

    Advocacy from the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons (established in the early 1990s), and more recently from the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Internally Displaced Persons and the work of the Office of the UN Special Advisor on Solutions to Internal Displacement, has also promoted increased attention to the issue and advocated workable solutions.

    This progress is now at risk in the face of U.S. humanitarian aid cuts.

    The danger today is not that the UNHCR and other humanitarian leaders will treat internally displaced people as unimportant or undeserving of help. Instead, ground could be lost through a return to the UNHCR’s traditional, narrow refugee mandate. Responsibility for internally displaced persons could be shirked as many UN agencies are also under stress.

    This will further increase the marginalization of internally displaced people and expose them to heightened levels of insecurity, poverty and disease.

    The UNHCR is far from the only international organization involved with internally displaced persons. The International Organization for Migration is another important player, particularly in natural disasters, and other agencies, including the UN Development Programme, support longer-term development solutions.

    Yet the UNHCR is the core protection agency for those who are forcibly displaced and its leadership is critical to ensuring a comprehensive response to both refugees and those displaced within their own country’s borders.

    Difficult choices

    In the face of a 30 per cent reduction in operating expenses in its headquarters and regional bureaus, the UNHCR faces some agonizing choices. But these cuts must not produce a competition between internally displaced persons and refugees in humanitarian assistance.

    Experience has shown that effective responses must consider displacement dynamics not only across but also within borders — especially since many refugees are internally displaced before they seek safety abroad and many face internal displacement if they return to their countries of origin.

    The good news is that the UNHCR remains committed to supporting inter-agency co-operation on solutions for internally displaced people, following up on the work of the Office of the UN Special Advisor.

    However, the head of the UNHCR has not yet publicly and clearly reaffirmed his agency’s commitment to standing up for internally displaced people alongside refugees in this moment of flux in the humanitarian sector.

    The need for strong leadership

    As the UNHCR reduces its commitments and shrinks its operations, there could be a void of senior leadership on internal displacement at headquarters and in the field. This means the agency’s response may be determined by regional and country directors with different levels of comfort with and commitment to internally displaced persons.

    The irony is that the UNHCR routinely calls for governments dealing with internal displacement crises to clearly allocate responsibility for effective responses. Today’s budget crisis is no excuse for the UNHCR not to walk its own talk.

    In the face of declining resources but mounting humanitarian needs, the UNHCR and its donors should prioritize preserving their investment in strengthened, reliable and rights-based responses to internally displaced persons — not only for the sake of these citizens, but also as an integral element of a comprehensive response to refugee situations.



    Read more:
    Ethiopia’s war may have ended, but the Tigray crisis hasn’t

    The UNHCR should recognize and insist that refugee response requires an effective response to those displaced internally and vice versa. As a core part of this approach, the agency should also enhance its support for local efforts led by internally displaced people themselves, recognizing they can be, and have been, at the forefront of more effective solutions to their displacement.

    The UNHCR’s funding cuts are putting the agency in a pared-down holding pattern until the next high commissioner of the organization is chosen later this year. A key criterion for selecting the next leader should be their vision for sustaining engagement with internally displaced persons alongside refugees in this moment of global turmoil.

    Megan Bradley receives funding from SSHRC.

    Jennifer Welsh receives funding from the Social Science and Research Council of Canada and the European Research Council.

    – ref. Falling back into the shadows? How to keep internal displacement on the humanitarian agenda – https://theconversation.com/falling-back-into-the-shadows-how-to-keep-internal-displacement-on-the-humanitarian-agenda-255856

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Feats of the human body behind Tom Cruise’s stunts in Mission: Impossible movies

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol

    He’s leapt from cliffs, clung to planes mid-takeoff and held his breath underwater for as long as professional freedivers. Now, at 62, Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt for one final mission – and he’s still doing his own stunts.

    With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the saga reaches its high-stakes finale. But behind the scenes of death-defying spectacles lies a fascinating question: just how far can the human body be pushed – and trained – to pull off the seemingly impossible?

    And at what cost? In filming the eight Mission: Impossible films, Cruise has suffered a broken ankle, cracked ribs and a torn shoulder.

    Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to consider the capabilities – and limits – of the human body in being able to achieve these awesome heights. How much is it possible to train to achieve the apparently impossible?

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    Breathing underwater

    In Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Hunt navigates an underwater vault to recover a stolen ledger. Cruise wanted to film this all in one take and sought help from freediving instructors in order to hold his breath for the required time – over six minutes!

    The average human can hold their breath for about 30 to 90 seconds. That’s without training. Although there’s an innate diving reflex built into the human body that allows it to temporarily adapt to immersion underwater.

    The response is to lower the heart rate and redirect blood to the body’s core, essentially enabling it to lower its metabolic demand and preserve the function of the vital organs, like the brain and heart.

    All well and good, but consider now the need to swim, as well as resist the pressure of the water pressing on the lungs. And also while fighting that desperate urge as a result of rising CO₂ to take a deep breath – which, underwater, would be catastrophic.

    And if the diver’s oxygen levels fall too low, they might black out and lose consciousness. That’s why shallow water drowning is a real risk here.

    That’s where freediving training comes into play. With practice, there are several ways you can increase the time you’re able to remain underwater. These include mastering breathing techniques to retain the maximum amount of air in the lungs. Sustained practice might also lead to increased oxygen storage capacity in the bloodstream.

    This process takes months to years to attain and might lengthen the immersion time, on average, to around five minutes. What Cruise managed to achieve was nothing short of exceptional.

    The official trailer for Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning.

    Free climbing – and that scene

    Mission Impossible films often open with Ethan Hunt working his way up some impossibly sheer building or cliff face with the agility of a mountain goat. He appears to be free climbing without a harness, and at the start of Mission: Impossible 2, clinging on with just one hand. While Cruise used safety wires to secure himself, the climbing was 100% real.

    Then, of course, how could we forget that scene? The one in the original Mission: Impossible – where he has to suspend all limbs, centimetres from the ground, to prevent himself from setting off the alarms.

    Although Cruise hasn’t revealed his specific training regime for these stunts that I can see – performing any of these actions would require an exceptionally strong back and core.

    The muscles of our backs keep the spine straight and upright. Some span the space between back and limb, such as latissimus dorsi, or “lats”. These sheets of muscle, prized by bodybuilders, are also particularly valuable to climbers – allowing you to perform a chin-up, or pull yourself up that rock face.

    Besides this, many other muscles are needed for extreme climbing – those that enable a strong grip, allow for reaching and “push offs”, and maintain tension and hold. It’s no wonder climbing is considered one of the best whole-body workouts.

    It’s no surprise that Cruise is known to have trained extensively for this. To understand even an element of the difficulty he may have faced, you could try adopting that vault heist pose, with your belly in contact with the floor, and see how long you can hold it. I won’t tell you how pitiful my own attempt was.

    What a blast

    Hunt has also escaped a fair few explosions in his time, from a helicopter in the Channel tunnel to a detonating fish tank in Prague. In Mission: Impossible 3, on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, another helicopter launching a missile triggers an explosion that sends Hunt smashing into a car. Again, Cruise did it all himself, for the price of two cracked ribs.

    Pyrotechnics were used for the explosion, but of course, they couldn’t be used to lift Cruise up and deposit him against the car. The solution? A series of wires were used to drag him sideways. Never has the direction “brace, brace” been so apt.

    And just so you know, broken or bruised ribs are far from fun. Some describe them as one of the most painful injuries you can experience, since the simple acts of coughing, sneezing and merely breathing exacerbate the pain.

    But Tom Cruise picks himself up yet again, dusts himself off and gets on with it. His motivation? He has reportedly claimed that he wants the audience to experience what it really feels to be in that moment. And what a good sport he is.

    This article won’t self-destruct in five seconds.

    Dan Baumgardt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Feats of the human body behind Tom Cruise’s stunts in Mission: Impossible movies – https://theconversation.com/feats-of-the-human-body-behind-tom-cruises-stunts-in-mission-impossible-movies-256908

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: English schools to increase mental health support – why they need to get children involved in designing it

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gemma McKenna, Fellow – Medical Sociology, University of Birmingham

    BalanceFormCreative/Shutterstock

    The UK government has announced the continuing rollout of the provision of mental health support teams in schools in England, with the intention of providing six in ten pupils with this support by March 2026.

    One in five children over the age of eight has a probable mental health condition in England today. Mental health support teams are needed to support children and young people early with their mental health and wellbeing to help prevent problems escalating.

    Mental health support teams are made up of experts who work with a number of schools in their local area. They collaborate with school staff, provide group or one-to-one sessions for pupils, parents and carers, and help schools create a culture that promotes mental health and wellbeing.

    With colleagues, I work on research investigating mental health in schools. This has involved assessing the early progress of the mental health support teams – the first ones were created between 2018-19 as part of the then Conservative government’s trailblazer initiative, which aimed to test out approaches and solutions to complex societal problems in specific regions.

    Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.

    Our research looked in particular at one of the key purposes of the mental health support teams – to help schools set up or improve a “whole school” approach to mental health support.

    A whole school approach means that all areas of the school or college work together to put mental health and wellbeing at the heart of their school community. This contrasts to standalone mental health activities that aren’t grounded within the everyday school culture. For instance, a school might hold an assembly on wellbeing but continue to implement a behaviour policy that heavily relies on punishment and therefore risks affecting children’s wellbeing.

    School culture

    Well-designed and implemented whole school approaches can have positive effects on children and young people’s wellbeing and contribute to the prevention and reduction of mental health problems. We also know that children are more likely to achieve at school if they feel like they belong, can participate and have autonomy, all fostered by the whole school approach.

    An example of a whole school approach is identifying and supporting children and young people early with mental health support. It can include “global learning”, where learning about mental health and wellbeing becomes a core part of schools’ assemblies, clubs and project-based learning. However, these are just some of a number of combined approaches to a whole school approach.

    In our research, children and young people in schools and colleges where mental health support teams had helped put whole school approach activities in place, told us that they were visible and felt seen. Teachers reached out to them about their wellbeing, either in classrooms through emotional check-ins, or through special lessons focused on mental health attached to curriculum teaching.

    Feeling like there was somewhere to go, someone to talk to, and be heard, made a clear difference to children and young people.

    However, we found that some schools were not including children and young people in their development of whole school mental health strategies. In one of the participating schools, mental health support team work was only known about by the child who had experience of the team. In this school, there was no discernible whole school work being undertaken in addition to direct support.

    The key missing ingredient to really support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing is for them to feel that they have agency – some input – into the activities that help them.

    Feeling that they have agency and input into decisions that affect them is good for children’s wellbeing.
    Nadya Lukic/Shutterstock

    Also, involving children in developing activities like this can help them to feel valued and included. This in itself is good for mental health.

    Creating together

    With my colleagues at The University of Birmingham’s Institute of Mental Health Youth Advisory Group and National Children’s Bureau, we worked with children and school staff to put together England’s first guide to creating a whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing in schools with pupils. The set of resources include a structured classroom activity, introductory video and practical guide.

    The classroom activity prompts a creative conversation with children about what wellbeing means to them, how their school supports their wellbeing, and what more the school could do. The guide includes practical suggestions about how to talk to pupils about mental health and wellbeing at school in a safe, supportive and inclusive way. It also offers ideas about how to use the information from the classroom activity to support pupils.

    The activity itself asks children to reflect on where and how their wellbeing is supported at school, alongside a focus on the people, places and practices that might help them. The overall aim is to develop a child-centred, whole school approach, one which focuses on the things that matter most to children about their emotional wellbeing.

    Whole school approaches could provide schools with a more holistic way of supporting children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Involving them in all areas of design and implementation could help to keep wellbeing and mental health at the heart of schools.

    Gemma McKenna receives funding from University of Birmingham, Impact Fund.
    Affiliations include: Health Services Research UK ,HSR UK, https://hsruk.org/
    TONIBOBANDLOU CIC https://www.tonibobandlou.com/

    – ref. English schools to increase mental health support – why they need to get children involved in designing it – https://theconversation.com/english-schools-to-increase-mental-health-support-why-they-need-to-get-children-involved-in-designing-it-252121

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: For long-tailed tits, it really does take a village

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Morinay, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Sheffield

    Any parent will tell you how useful it can be to have family living nearby, giving a helping hand when raising your children. In humans, relatives and even non-relatives act as childminders. Such behaviour is widespread in other animals too, particularly birds.

    In our recent study we explored why long-tailed tits, one of the UK’s tiniest bird species, often act as foster parents instead of raising their own brood.

    Since Darwin’s musings on apparent altruism in honeybees, scientists have discovered that individuals of many species help each other, including bacteria, insects, shrimps, mammals and especially birds. We now know that almost 10% of bird species cooperate, helping to raise nestlings that are not their own. This is called cooperative breeding.

    The question that has puzzled scientists since Darwin is why do other animals (and why do we) cooperate? The answer usually lies in a shift in focus from the individual to the genes that make them. The revolutionary work of evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton in the 1960s (popularised in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in 1976), showed that helping family members can improve the transmission of shared genes to the next generation.

    But when is it more advantageous to help family members than to raise your own kids? That is the question we asked of long-tailed tits, the most cooperative of the UK’s birds. In our recent study published last month, we summarised 30 years of research on the cooperative breeding system of long-tailed tits.

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    These tiny and highly social birds with their characteristic chrrr-rr-rr calls are common in UK woods and gardens. In winter, they hang out in groups of 10-20 birds. These flocks often contain close family members, such as parents with offspring and siblings. They forage together during the day and, at night, they sleep in tight huddles on branches, to keep themselves warm.

    In February or March, when they sense that spring is just around the corner, the groups disband, and each bird finds a partner. Then follows what must seem like a marathon effort. Their domed nests, usually built in spiky bushes or high in tree forks, are elaborate constructions that may take weeks to complete. Females lay 9-11 eggs that they incubate until hatching two weeks later. Nestlings are fed by both parents for 16-18 days, when they fledge.

    However, small carnivores and other bird species are waiting for this bonanza of eggs or chicks, and about 70% of long-tailed tit nests are destroyed by such predators every year. Pairs must then start all over again, building a new nest and laying eggs. No wonder that they can only raise one brood per year.

    Long-tailed tits make elaborate nests to raise their chicks in.
    Chosg/Shutterstock

    By early May, the season is too advanced to re-nest, and if a pair has lost their brood they give up for the year. Some lucky ones manage to reproduce, of course. Is it luck? Maybe, in part – but the secret for half of the successful nests is that they got help from family members.

    Birds that fail to breed often become helpers, moving to another nest and assisting that pair in raising their offspring. Around half of all broods have helpers, typically just one or two, but up to eight at a single nest. The extra food that helpers provide increases the survival of offspring. Helpers normally choose the nest of relatives, increasing the number of birds carrying their genes in the next generation. For birds that may live for just a couple of years, this is the next best option after failing to breed successfully themselves.

    Small birds with persistent family bonds

    In our study, we aimed to understand how these family bonds persist and are important for the long-tailed tits. First, they tend to stay and reproduce near where they were born, especially males. As a consequence, we observed that long-tailed tits live in “kin neighbourhoods”. Second, even when they move and decide to settle further afield, long-tailed tits do so with sisters and brothers, maintaining their family ties as they move.

    Long-tailed tits are less than half the weight of a robin.
    David OBrien/Shutterstock

    These family ties can persist over thousands of kilometres. Long-tailed tits in the UK stay in the same area all year. However, populations in the Baltics migrate and spend the winter in central Europe. By catching groups on their southward and northward journeys, we discovered that long-tailed tits travel over large distances in family groups and end up nesting next to each other. These strong family bonds enable them to keep their support network in place.

    Males help more than females, and only birds in good condition help. But, most importantly, it is the strength of the family bond – how closely related and familiar they are – that affects this decision. We also identified external factors that promote cooperation. When predation is intense there are more failed breeders seeking helping opportunities. And when the weather limits time for breeding, long-tailed tits are more likely to help others. Out of adversity comes opportunity.

    We have unpicked the web of causes and effects that explain why long-tailed tits have complex social lives and a cooperative breeding system. Now, our aim is to understand how they recognise family members, whether it is with their calls, their smells, or simply because they built strong friendships over time with them.

    Ben Hatchwell receives funding from a Horizon Europe Guarantee grant from UKRI, via EPSRC, for a project selected by the ERC.

    Jennifer Morinay does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. For long-tailed tits, it really does take a village – https://theconversation.com/for-long-tailed-tits-it-really-does-take-a-village-256128

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Starmer says migrants should speak English – but all of the UK’s languages are important for integration

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mike Chick, Senior Lecturer in TESOL/English, University of South Wales

    William Perugini/Shutterstock

    When Keir Starmer said: “If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English”, it laid bare an assumption – that English is the only language that counts in the UK.

    This view not only overlooks the UK’s rich linguistic diversity, but also runs counter to the language policies being developed across the devolved nations.

    While the UK government’s latest proposals on immigration treat English proficiency as the main pathway to integration, governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are taking different approaches.

    Immigration is a matter controlled by Westminster. But integration, including language education, is devolved. That means each UK nation sets its own direction.

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    England

    Despite frequent political emphasis on English language learning and testing as key to integration, England does not have a national strategy for migrant or refugee integration. It also does not have an England-wide policy for teaching English for speakers of other languages (Esol).

    Instead, decisions about language classes are made locally but provision is uneven. In some areas, support is well-organised and accessible. In others, it’s barely there.

    Despite the lack of national leadership, the Esol sector in England has long benefited from grassroots activism. Organisations like the National Association for Teaching English and Community Languages to Adults and English for Action have been vocal in campaigning for better funding. Researchers and teachers also continue to call for a joined-up strategy for migrant and refugee integration.

    Wales

    By contrast, the Welsh government has made language education a core part of its progressive integration policies. Its ambition to become the world’s first “nation of sanctuary” is backed up by practical measures. This includes a dedicated language education policy for migrants, focused primarily on Esol – the only one of its kind in the UK.

    The first national Esol strategy was published in 2014, revised in 2018, and will be updated this year following a review.

    The introduction of Welsh as an element of migrant language education is helping to build a more inclusive, multicultural society too. It shows learners that all languages, including their mother tongue, have a role to play in a modern, multilingual nation.

    Scotland

    Since 2014, Scotland has implemented three refugee integration strategies. The new Scots refugee integration strategy has been internationally recognised as a model of good practice. It adopts a multilingual, intercultural approach, emphasising that language learning should include home languages and the language or languages of the new community, which may include Gaelic, Scots and English.

    Scotland had two successive adult Esol strategies from 2007 to 2020. These were developed in consultation with Esol learners and detailed clear progression routes into further training, education and employment. But they were discontinued in favour of a broader adult learning strategy in 2022 which covers all adult learners rather than just the needs of migrants.

    It was a decision criticised by some due to concerns about losing focus on the specific needs of Esol learners, and reducing the voice of Esol learners and teachers in Scotland.

    Northern Ireland

    In Northern Ireland, there is no dedicated migrant language policy yet. But its draft refugee integration strategy does at least acknowledge the importance of language in helping migrants feel “valued and respected”.

    In 2022, the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act granted official status to the Irish language, and to Ulster-Scots as a minority language. Nevertheless, the Northern Ireland refugee integration strategy focuses solely on English language classes as the primary language education provision.

    Welsh for speakers of other languages.

    What all UK nations share, however, is chronic underfunding. Adult education, where Esol funding sits across all four nations, now faces yet more cuts meaning many language learners will continue to face long waiting lists for classes.

    But how language education for migrants, especially migrants seeking sanctuary in the UK is perceived, organised and provided is critical to fostering inclusion, promoting integration and bestowing a sense of belonging. Developing competency in the dominant language or languages of the host nation can enable migrants to navigate health, housing or social security systems. It can help them cope with the needs of daily life and to use their skills and knowledge to enter work or education.



    Read more:
    How the Welsh language is being promoted to help migrants feel at home

    Many people seeking sanctuary have experienced trauma from undergoing forced migration. This makes it vital that language provision is trauma-informed and recognises a learner’s existing multilingual skills. It’s also important that it is shaped around their needs, not just on externally imposed assessments of English proficiency.

    The value of multilingualism

    Multilingual education is more than just a nice thing to have.
    There is growing evidence that valuing the languages refugees already speak, and recognising their linguistic skills as assets, improves wellbeing, builds confidence and enhances social inclusion.

    Too often in the UK, language learning is treated as a condition for acceptance, rather than a right that can enable belonging. That risks undermining the very integration that policymakers claim to support.

    If the UK is serious about being a modern, inclusive and multicultural state, it must embrace the reality that it is also multilingual, and that different nations may choose different routes to welcome those seeking sanctuary.

    The authors wish to thank their respective universities for the support they have received in researching this issue. They would also like to thank their co-researchers Sylvia Warnecke and Mel Engman and their co-authors on their recently published policy briefing.

    Gwennan Higham and Sarah Cox do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Starmer says migrants should speak English – but all of the UK’s languages are important for integration – https://theconversation.com/starmer-says-migrants-should-speak-english-but-all-of-the-uks-languages-are-important-for-integration-255286

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: M&S cyberattack: how can retailers regain customers’ trust after a hack? A marketing expert explains

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kokho Jason Sit, Senior Lecturer in Marketing; Associate Head (Global), University of Portsmouth

    Several big British retailers have been in the news recently – but not for buoyant sales or new product launches. Firms like Marks & Spencer and Co-op have been hacked, affecting online sales and the range of products available in-store, and forcing them to apologise to customers and other stakeholders. Luxury retailer Harrods also suffered a near-miss.

    M&S, a legacy retailer that has more than 1,000 stores across the UK, appears to have suffered the most significant damage from its cyberattack. Bank of America analysts estimated that the company has lost more than £40 million in weekly sales since the incident began over the Easter bank holiday weekend.

    As a precaution, the retailer was reported to have shut down many IT operations, effectively locking itself out of its core systems as it tried to address the incident.

    And then the situation worsened. M&S acknowledged that the personal data of customers, including names, dates of birth, telephone numbers, home and email addresses, and online order histories, had been stolen. However, the retailer insisted that the data theft did not include usable card, payment or login information.

    There are logical reasons why M&S may have opted for the cautious approach. It did not wish to create more panic and anxiety among customers. It preferred to tackle the issue covertly while the outcome was pending. It did not want to be seen as digitally incompetent. Of course, this reasoning is only speculative.

    That said, M&S’s approach to managing the incident has raised questions from a branding perspective.

    First, how long has the retailer been aware of the attack? And, more importantly, how long did it wait to share news of the data theft with its customers and the public?

    Research suggests that brands that are prompt and transparent in disclosing a hack, notifying the affected customers and communicating the potential implications for their privacy, are more likely to win consumer trust. It is better for brand image than those that opt for a “wait-and-see” or “drip-drip” approach.

    In 2016, US IT firm Yahoo was slapped with lawsuits after it announced a hack. The company’s stock price plunged amid fears that a data breach could derail its pending merger with Verizon Communications, set to be worth US$4.8 billion (£3.6 billion).

    But the lawsuits and the market’s adverse reaction were less about the data breach and more about Yahoo’s delayed actions. It involuntarily announced the data breach when the hacker attempted to sell the stolen user data online. Yahoo reportedly learned of the breach two years previously but did not warn its users and stakeholders. An internal review later found that the company had “failed to act sufficiently” on the knowledge it had.

    Bring in the marketers

    Second, does M&S need to do more than simply assure its customers that no usable payment or login information was stolen? Other personal data like date of birth, home and email addresses did get hacked, and are useful for criminals to commit identity theft.

    A prudent retailer will do more than follow the laws and regulations, it can take a more customer-centric, moralistic approach in protecting its customers’ welfare after a cyberattack. A study has highlighted the strategic value of involving marketers – either in-house or an external PR firm – in protecting consumer data and responding to breaches.

    The authors of the study stated that a marketer’s remit typically involves working with people from different backgrounds across all departments of a firm. This enables them to facilitate talks and negotiations between the relevant people, from company lawyers, tech experts, and security officers, to those overseeing investor relationships and the CEO managing the board relationship.

    Being focused on customer experience, even in times of deepening crisis, marketers instinctively think about the benefits and barriers experienced by consumers.

    Talking points between the company’s departments should focus on moral, as well as legal, options for protecting consumer data. Communications should consider the negative effect of the crisis on consumers, beyond the firm stressing its victimhood and seeking sympathy.

    Marketers can put the consumer’s point of view front and centre. They can highlight issues that others in the business may not consider, such as who drafts consumer communications, how messages are communicated and monitored, and how consumers can reach out to the brand to seek or offer help.

    At the end of the day, M&S has been the victim of a crime. Known as a “victim crisis”, a data breach is instigated exclusively by criminal actors. The way and pace at which M&S has communicated the data theft to its customers could potentially leave it open to criticism, however.

    The issue of when the retailer learned about the theft versus when it decided to share the information with its customers remains unclear. Also uncertain is how much personal data was taken, whether this includes any profiling data the retailer conducted on customers (things like their purchase frequency, coupon redemption and product choices). It should also share any plans it is devising to tackle potential identity thefts.

    M&S has come a long way since first opening up a stall at Kirkgate Market in Leeds in 1884.
    annaj77/Shutterstock

    M&S’s current crisis management activities could seem to be about preserving its bottom line while arguably the focus should be on caring for customers. As a legacy retailer which is nearly 141 years old, M&S can do better than following the typical “let me tell you” approach. This is where communication flows in one direction only and is pushed out on to the public, and is what M&S appears to have done in response to the attack.

    Instead, it should consider the more transparent “let’s work together” approach. This may promote better customer trust and brand image, allowing M&S to seek customer cooperation (things like reporting unusual emails or misinformation where a critical mass may identify a meaningful pattern). This could help to spot data breaches and criminal activities like identity theft and fraud.

    Kokho Jason Sit is affiliated with the Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK).

    – ref. M&S cyberattack: how can retailers regain customers’ trust after a hack? A marketing expert explains – https://theconversation.com/mands-cyberattack-how-can-retailers-regain-customers-trust-after-a-hack-a-marketing-expert-explains-257142

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Is Donald Trump doing the world a favour by isolating the United States?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Shaun Narine, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, St. Thomas University (Canada)

    United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs against most of the world tanked stock markets, disrupted the U.S. bond market and destabilized the global economy.

    Trump has economically and politically threatened American allies, shattering the unity of the western world. But Trump’s chaos may have inadvertently produced an opportunity to create a better world.

    Some western commentators argue that the U.S. has been a benevolent superpower.

    That may have been true for a small group of mostly western states that have benefitted from American domination. But much of the Global South was victimized by American military, economic and political interventions.

    Losing dominance?

    The West could be in the midst of losing its dominant position in the global order. This is probably inevitable, but it may not be the tragedy some western commentators assume it to be.

    In most of the world, there is a desire for a more equitable world order that doesn’t feature the moral, racial and cultural double standards of the western-dominated system. A world where American and western power is limited and contained could not only end up being more peaceful but, over time, more prosperous.

    Without the co-operation of the allies alienated by Trump, it may be harder for the U.S. to initiate conflict around the world as it often has since the end of the Cold War.

    In a recent Foreign Affairs article, American political scientist Stacie Goddard argues the emerging multipolar, post-American world will be one in which great powers — primarily the U.S., Russia and China — will divide the globe into “spheres of influence.”

    The U.S. is seeking to maintain disproportionate power in Asia. Closer to home, neighbours of the U.S. have reason to fear American expansionism.

    By contrast, even if it has imperialist ambitions, Russia doesn’t have the military might to dominate Europe. It’s a country of 144 million people with one-sixth the GDP of the European Union. Russia can cause trouble within countries with sizable Russian minorities, but its ability to project power is limited, as demonstrated by its grinding war in Ukraine.



    Read more:
    After another call with Putin, it looks like Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine

    China’s stance

    The Chinese have scored a win against Trump’s tariffs with a 90-day tariff pause that’s being hailed as vindication of China’s defiant negotiating strategy. China called Trump’s bluff and won as global stocks soared.



    Read more:
    China-US trade war: the next 90 days are a big deal for Beijing as it seeks long-term solutions

    This has bolstered China’s goal to have a sphere of influence. However, Chinese foreign policy is largely non-interventionist and, compared to the U.S., remarkably restrained.

    China may intimidate its rivals in the South China Sea, Senkaku Islands, and Taiwan, but it does not easily resort to military force. China has not resorted to military force since its war with Vietnam in 1979.

    China is committed to most of the guiding structures of the current international system and values a stable and mutually beneficial global economic order that enables it to focus on and improve its domestic development.

    Its export-oriented economic sectors need customers abroad. Unlike the West, China has a vested interest in helping the Global South develop and prosper in order to create those customers.

    Asian trade alliance?

    The Chinese are using their resources to promote economic and technological development in the Global South.

    As China spreads its renewable energy technologies globally, some of the poorest countries may leapfrog carbon-based fuels and go directly to renewable energy to make development affordable and attainable, and to mitigate climate change.



    Read more:
    What Canada can learn from China on effectively engaging with Africa

    In response to Trump’s tariffs, China, South Korea and Japan have discussed a renewed free-trade arrangement. President Xi Jinping has toured Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia to encourage a common front against American actions.

    Asian states are wary of China, but they remain committed to global trade. The U.S. may be retreating from globalization, but the rest of the world is not, though China’s manufacturing dominance concerns many states.

    Emerging international order

    New institutions may help to manage the evolving world order. The BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — have created the New Development Bank (NDB). China has created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

    The United Nations remains the favoured instrument of global diplomacy, even if western states have been accused of undermining its authority and efficacy.

    The European Union will continue as a major global power in the emerging international order, but on a more even footing with the rest of the world.

    Europe is reconsidering its trade war with China. In the words of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission: “The West as we knew it no longer exists.”

    Western states will undoubtedly continue to try to exercise disproportionate global influence. Canada has suggested that “like-minded states” form an alliance to promote international trade and institutions that remain dominated by western interests. This idea seems designed to continue marginalizing the Global South in the international decision-making process.

    Most Global South states are not high-functioning liberal democracies. Many struggle with the legacies of colonialism while managing an international system dominated by the West that keeps them subservient. Others have created governments that fit their particular circumstances, cultures and levels of development.

    But many weaker countries generally share a commitment to international law that is seemingly stronger than the West. They need a stable, predictable, fairly applied set of global rules more than stronger nations. Ironically, the decline of the U.S. may facilitate a much more genuine and legitimate rules-based international order.

    America’s loosening grip

    Readjusting the world economy away from the U.S. to a more diverse, evenly distributed economic model will be difficult and disruptive.

    Nonetheless, loosening the American grip on global power is an essential first step towards achieving a more just and balanced international order.

    For putting this process in motion, the world may owe Trump a measure of thanks.

    Shaun Narine is affiliated with Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East and Jewish Voice for Peace.

    – ref. Is Donald Trump doing the world a favour by isolating the United States? – https://theconversation.com/is-donald-trump-doing-the-world-a-favour-by-isolating-the-united-states-252671

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Financial firms are driving up rent in Toronto — and targeting the most vulnerable tenants

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Cloé St-Hilaire, PhD Candidate in Planning, University of Waterloo

    In recent years, Canadians have increasingly seen financial firms — such as private equity firms and real estate investment trusts (REITs) — buying up apartment buildings. The largest 25 financial landlords in Canada hold nearly 20 per cent of the country’s private, purpose-built rental stock.

    At the same time, Canada’s housing affordability crisis has exploded. A 2022 report found that in 93 per cent of Canadian neighbourhoods, a full-time minimum wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.

    Many observers have connected this financialization of housing to rising unaffordability. But until recently, a lack of data has made it challenging to prove it.

    Our recent study, based on building-level rent and ownership data in the Greater Toronto Area, is the first to decisively show that financial firms charge higher rents and raise them more quickly than other landlords. We also found that financial firms raise rents most aggressively in lower-income areas with more racialized residents.

    Why does financialization raise rents?

    Financialization refers to the growing role of the finance sector in various parts of the economy. In the rental housing market, it involves the purchase of rental buildings by financial firms like asset managers, REITs and pension funds.

    These “financial landlords” treat housing as an investment product, not as a basic human need.



    Read more:
    Housing is both a human right and a profitable asset, and that’s the problem

    Financial landlords act differently from other landlords. Unlike smaller landlords, they are guided by the “shareholder value maximization” principle, which means their primary goal is to maximize returns for their shareholders.

    While smaller landlords are most likely also motivated by profit, they do not have a duty to external investors like financial firms do and they do not have access to the same strategies to manage their properties. Financial landlords have the scale and sophistication to pursue these profits in ways that smaller-scale landlords cannot.

    Research shows that financial landlords in Canada are associated with increased cost burdens for renters, higher eviction filing rates and higher rates of building disrepair. Our study adds to this evidence by showing they also charge higher rents.

    Financial firms openly promote higher rents

    Even before conducting our analysis, we had reason to believe financial firms would charge higher rents, in part because many of them have publicly said so.

    In a 2018 investor presentation, Minto REIT wrote that they charged “the highest in-place rent” among their public peers.

    Similarly, Centurion REIT published a report in 2020 featuring a graph demonstrating that its rent increases were outpacing both inflation and average rents.

    In a 2019 white paper, Canada’s largest private landlord, Starlight Investments, wrote about how their “value add strategy” for upgrading apartments sets them apart from other types of landlords. In the same publication, they reported increasing the monthly rent in one property by $411 — a 31 per cent increase.

    Financial firms charge the highest rent premiums

    Our analysis reveals that financial firms do indeed charge more.

    Our study compared building-level quarterly rent data to average rents from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation for 1,602 buildings between 2022 and 2024.

    We found that when landlords advertise a unit to rent, they typically charge more than the average neighbourhood rent. We call this upcharge a rent “premium” — the dollar or percentage difference between the rent posted for an available unit and the average neighbourhood rent for a unit of the same size.

    We found that financial firms charged the highest premiums across the GTA, posting 44 per cent higher rents — or $670 more — than local averages. By comparison, non-financial chain landlords — those with multiple buildings but not classified as financial firms — charged a 30 per cent, or $477, premium.

    Meanwhile, smaller-scale owners owners of just a few buildings charged a smaller rent premium of 15-22 per cent. We found financial firms charged the highest premiums regardless of whether the building was brand new or in need of repairs.

    Algorithmic pricing and rent inflation

    One of the landlords with the highest rent premiums is private equity firm Woodbourne, which said they used RealPage’s YieldStar platform, an algorithmic pricing software.

    This software is at the centre of a lawsuit alleging more than a dozen landlords and property managers conspired to artificially inflate rents across Canada.

    The use of AI-driven pricing tools in Canada’s rental market is now under investigation by the Competition Bureau.

    Our study also found that, over time, financial firms raised rents more aggressively than other landlords. On average, they increased asking rents by five per cent — or $96 — every quarter. By comparison, smaller-scale landlords owning just one property raised asking rents by 3.6 per cent, or $59.

    Using a regression model, we demonstrated that out of all ownership types, financial ownership was the strongest predictor for higher rents and higher rent premiums. Using our model, we estimated that a tenant would pay 13 per cent more for their unit if it was owned by a financial firm instead of a single property owner.

    Low-income, marginalized tenants are exposed

    Our study also found that the highest rent premiums were being charged in Toronto’s “neighbourhood improvement areas.” These are areas the city has identified as having inequitable social and economic outcomes.

    While we found that all landlords charge higher premiums in these neighbourhoods, financial landlords were the most aggressive, charging a 49 per cent premium compared to 41 per cent elsewhere.

    We also identified a spatial connection between high rent premiums and the number of racialized residents in a neighbourhood: areas with higher rent premiums often had a greater percentage of racialized residents.

    These findings suggest that financial firms are complicit in driving gentrification in marginalized neighbourhoods, targeting areas with lower-income and racialized renters for the most aggressive rent increases.

    Reining in financial landlords

    While financial firms report on record breaking annual returns and “rental uplifts” of 15 per cent, Canada faces a dire housing affordability crisis.

    Financialization is detrimental to the right to adequate housing. We show that financialization is worsening affordability in Toronto: a trend that will continue, especially since financial landlords are the largest acquirers of suites in the city and the country’s largest landlords.

    To address this issue, we support recent policy recommendations aimed at reining in the power of financial landlords. These include better tracking of who landlords are, stricter tenant protections and more social housing.

    If left unchecked, financialization will continue to deepen the affordability crisis, with the greatest harms falling on those who can least afford it.

    Cloé St-Hilaire receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship). She previously received funding from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec.

    Martine August receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Ontario Early Researcher Award.

    – ref. Financial firms are driving up rent in Toronto — and targeting the most vulnerable tenants – https://theconversation.com/financial-firms-are-driving-up-rent-in-toronto-and-targeting-the-most-vulnerable-tenants-255935

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Independence Hall, Gettysburg and – Epcot? How Reagan helped elevate Disney to America’s roster of honored patriotic sites

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Bethanee Bemis, Museum Specialist, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

    First lady Nancy Reagan kisses Mickey Mouse as President Ronald Reagan and Minnie Mouse watch 20 bands marching in the unofficial inaugural parade at Disney’s Epcot Center on Memorial Day, May 27, 1985. Bettmann/Getty Images

    A presidential or political visit is one of the ways in which the United States marks places as uniquely important. A space meriting the pomp and circumstance that accompanies a president, or a place viewed as so particularly American that an aspiring president might want to have their picture taken there, takes on special status in American culture.

    Twelve of the last 14 presidents visited Philadelphia’s Independence Hall during their political careers. American politicians often visit sites of great importance to the national character, and Independence Hall is the location of both the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution.

    The U.S. has many sacred civil spaces, places that the country looks to when celebrating or reflecting on American identity. Some of these places were established for the express purpose of serving these functions: the National Mall and the U.S. Capitol in Washington and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, built to commemorate the country’s westward expansion.

    Some of these places earn this designation through association with history: Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, sites of significant events in the American Revolution; the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, commemorating American deaths from the Japanese attack that sparked U.S. entrance into World War II; and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where local police in 1965 attacked and bloodied civil rights protesters, who ultimately crossed the bridge two weeks later under the protection of a federal court order.

    Still other places emerge through a sort of national consensus, taking on special status over time as Americans use them in ways that mark them with meaning.

    And while twelve of the last 14 presidents may have visited Independence Hall, the same 12 also visited some of the places often forgotten when accounting for holy civic sites: the Disney theme parks.

    Thousands attended presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s election eve rally at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Nov. 7, 2016.
    Joe Sohm, Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Record cold and a second chance

    In my book “Disney Theme Parks and America’s National Narratives: Mirror Mirror for Us All,” I explore how Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Florida, have become two of the most important spaces for the celebration and creation of American identity.

    One of the reasons for this is the legitimization a presidential visit bestows on a site. Forty years ago this month, Walt Disney World received a very special visitor.

    In January 1985, as President Ronald Reagan prepared to take the oath of office for a second time, temperatures in the Washington area dipped to record lows. The inauguration and some related festivities were due to take place outdoors, but conditions were severe enough to cause concern for the many thousands scheduled to participate. So the usual celebrations, including the popular Inaugural Parade, were canceled in favor of a smaller event indoors.

    Only a handful of the 25 high school marching bands that had traveled from places like Kentucky, Massachusetts and Michigan to play in the parade were able to perform for the president. That left thousands of students and their families disappointed.

    In a presidential history first, however, the Inaugural Bands Parade would get a second chance to march outside the ceremonial space of Washington at what could be called the nation’s other capital – Walt Disney World.

    In April 1985, Walt Disney World announced that it had partnered with Days Inn, Greyhound Bus Lines and Burger King to offer reduced price accommodations and food for about 4,000 students to enjoy a weekend at the theme park before performing in their own parade on Memorial Day, May 27.

    Not only would the bands get to play at Disney’s Epcot Center, but they would also be able to perform for the president, who flew from Washington to be there for this special parade.

    President George H.W. Bush at a Disney World 20th anniversary celebration marking his volunteerism initiative, on Sept. 30, 1991.
    Dirck Halstead/Contributor/The Chronicle Collection, Getty Images

    New site for American identity

    Memorial Day, the day of the parade itself, was warm and sunny. Disney visitors thronged the 1.2-mile parade route and waved American flags as they listened to patriotic songs. The parade was watched over by the president and first lady, Nancy Reagan. The equivalent of the president and first lady of Disney, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, joined them.

    This moment was remarkable for several reasons.

    First, Reagan had been one of the hosts of the show “Dateline Disneyland,” the live coverage of the opening of Disneyland in 1955 only 30 years before, when no one knew he would be the nation’s 40th president.

    Second, the visit marked an important moment in the recognition of the Disney theme parks as sites of American identity.

    Reagan went directly from laying wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, a treasured American tradition, to an appearance at Epcot, where in an economic policy speech to the crowd, he introduced a “new American revolution.” This second American revolution was announced not in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but at the American Adventure pavilion in Orlando.

    The Reagans’ photo with Mickey – with Mickey dressed as Uncle Sam and Minnie in a colonial-style dress – captures the idea, I believe, that culturally Disney spaces are as legitimate as national parks or historic sites as places for the celebration of the American story.

    As longtime Disney cast member Terry Brinkoetter remembers, presidential visits like Reagan’s affirmed Disneyland and Walt Disney World as “places where people could learn and be inspired to continue our shared journey toward a more perfect union.”

    Disney parks have become stops on a secular pilgrimage made by presidents and ordinary citizens alike, places to understand what it means to be an American.

    Bethanee Bemis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Independence Hall, Gettysburg and – Epcot? How Reagan helped elevate Disney to America’s roster of honored patriotic sites – https://theconversation.com/independence-hall-gettysburg-and-epcot-how-reagan-helped-elevate-disney-to-americas-roster-of-honored-patriotic-sites-254919

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The Coin by Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher wins the Dylan Thomas Prize – an expert from the judging panel explains why

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel G. Williams, Professor of English Literature, Swansea University

    Yasmin Zaher’s remarkable novel The Coin has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 40.

    This is not a story that begins at the beginning. Instead, its narrator starts with dirt and an obsession with cleanliness, but suggests later that the coin of the title – an Israeli shekel that she accidentally swallowed on a family road trip in which her parents were killed in a car crash – would have been an equally appropriate place to begin.

    Long forgotten, the swallowed coin begins to make its presence felt, somewhere in her body, following her move to America. The narrator is a wealthy young Palestinian woman, teaching boys at a New York City middle school. Her wealth, however, is in the hands of a brother who controls her allowance. She responds by developing a scheme to resell luxury handbags with a homeless con-artist, known throughout as “Trenchcoat”.

    This is one of several attempts at shaping the world around her: she revels in her sexuality and ability to redefine herself through fashionable clothes and accessories; she teaches her class about black power and takes them on a trip to listen to the “dagger poems” of a black nationalist poet in New Jersey.

    I assume this poet is Amiri Baraka since they eat “Black Dada Nihilismus” burgers, a reference to his poem of the same name. But such acts of resistance, if not futile, are limited. Like the swallowed coin, the levers of control, whether material or psychic, lie out of reach as we witness the narrator’s gradual unravelling.

    It is perhaps appropriate that a novel set in New York should win the prize named after Swansea’s most famous poet. New York both enticed and frightened Dylan Thomas. It was the city in which he died. The city, also, in which he recorded the ground-breaking reading of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

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    In that story, as in his earlier Return Journey, his childhood self is a ghostly presence wandering among the “blitzed flat graves” of shops “marbled with snow and headstoned with fences”. The snow hides devastation. The destruction of the city that Thomas knew as a child. The 44 air raids mounted on Swansea between 1940 and 1943 killed 390 people. And it’s the similar loss of people and places, and the suffering in Gaza today, which Zaher’s novel examines.

    Palestine is a persistent and troubling presence in the The Coin. For Dylan the devastation of Swansea was a metonym for a wider world where civilians were increasingly the victims of war. His world is, regrettably, still ours in that sense. The Coin is a profound meditation on our contemporary world and our complicity in the destruction of another place and people.

    In a moving scene, the narrator recalls a Jewish friend, “a very gentle girl who dreamed of becoming a ballerina”. She lived in a house that once belonged to “a Palestinian family that had been expelled in 1948”. The friend tells her about two underground rooms in the garden. One of the rooms, “the poop room”, allows access to the second which contains “a big wooden chest full of treasures and gold”. The narrator keeps “thinking of that secret chamber off the shit room, the wooden chest inside, full of silverware and gold of the family who thought they would return.”

    The swallowed coin. The inaccessible allowance. The wooden chest full of treasures and gold. Unreachable currency functions as a powerful symbolic centre connecting the brief scenes and meditations that constitute this appropriately fragmented novel. Lost somewhere in the narrator’s entrails, removed from economic exchange, the coin belongs with the excrement and detritus of urban life, which is the object of the narrator’s disgusted obsessions.

    New York in this novel is a repository of failed circulation – the filth of the city’s streets offering a gothic underside to the endless flows of capitalism, frustrating the narrator’s obsessive attempts at keeping herself clean. Narratives and circulation end in the stasis of dirt. Palestinian history ends in dispossession. Swallowed coin, inaccessible allowance and a buried treasure chest are symbolic repositories of Palestinian traumatic memory.

    Zaher shows us how the novel form can still offer a unique way of understanding the world, of mapping our contemporary disorientation. It does this not by offering clarity, but by lingering in the spaces where movement, value and meaning break down. This is a novel about circulation – of money, of bodies and of meaning.

    The swallowed coin is itself a kind of resistance, a refusal to go along with the restless movement of capital that defines our world. The coin refuses liquidity and thereby refuses complicity; its removal from the economic system mimics a kind of muted protest. Beneath the novel’s often frenetic and energetic surface hides a resistant counter-politics of inaction.

    Daniel G. Williams was a judge of this years’ Dylan Thomas Prize.

    – ref. The Coin by Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher wins the Dylan Thomas Prize – an expert from the judging panel explains why – https://theconversation.com/the-coin-by-palestinian-writer-yasmin-zaher-wins-the-dylan-thomas-prize-an-expert-from-the-judging-panel-explains-why-257063

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How mindfulness therapy could help those left behind by depression treatment

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thorsten Barnhofer, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, School of Psychology, University of Surrey

    Yuri A/PeopleImages.com/Shutterstock

    For some people, depression is like an unwanted guest who moves in and refuses to leave. Even with therapy and medication, the heavy fog of low mood, exhaustion and hopelessness never fully lifts for long. For around 30% of people with depression, this is a daily reality.

    It’s not just a personal burden. Difficult-to-treat depression affects families, workplaces and communities – and carries a huge cost for society.

    In England, the NHS Talking Therapies programme is the first place many adults turn when they’re struggling with depression or anxiety. In 2023-24, it supported more than 1.26 million people. Yet, for all its reach, around half of those who complete treatment still feel depressed by the end. And if the therapy hasn’t worked, there are often no further options available.

    Most people in this situation are sent back to their GP. A small number may be referred to more specialist mental health services, but those are typically reserved for the most severe cases. That leaves a significant number of people in limbo – still unwell, but without a clear route to further care.

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    This is part of a wider problem in mental health services: the so-called “missing middle”. These are people whose needs are too complex for primary (GP) care, but not severe enough for secondary services. As a result, they fall through the cracks.

    For many of these people, medication is often the only treatment on offer. But our study, with colleagues, suggests that a different approach, using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), could offer a way forward.

    Promising results

    We worked with more than 200 patients who had completed NHS Talking Therapies but were still experiencing symptoms of depression. Half were offered an eight-week MBCT course, delivered in small online groups. The others continued with their usual care.

    MBCT blends traditional cognitive therapy (which aims to reduce negative thinking patterns) with intensive mindfulness training. Participants learn how to stay present, recognise harmful thought spirals early, and respond to difficult emotions with greater awareness and compassion. Most importantly, they gain skills they can use for the rest of their lives.

    The results were promising. People who took part in the mindfulness programme reported bigger improvements in their depressive symptoms than those who didn’t. Six months later, the benefits had not only lasted – they had consolidated and slightly strengthened.

    What’s more, those in the MBCT group used fewer health and social care services overall. The programme was also inexpensive to run, costing less than £100 per person. In a time when health systems are under extreme financial pressure, that’s a big deal. Our research suggests MBCT is not just effective, it’s cost-saving too.

    When depression doesn’t respond to standard treatment, it can upend lives. People may struggle to work, maintain relationships, or care for their families. Children are especially affected when a parent has long-term depression. Without the right support, things often get worse – and the costs, both personal and financial, continue to grow.

    MBCT is already being used for relapse prevention – and there is a trained workforce to deliver it. Consisting of just eight group-based sessions, it is accessible and designed to equip people with practical tools. We believe it can offer hope to those who do not benefit sufficiently from existing services, and should be made available to more people.

    Beyond the promise of MBCT itself, this research offers a wider message: we need to invest in psychological therapies for people in the “missing middle”. These are people who are often overlooked but stand to gain the most from targeted, practical support.

    In times of tight budgets, the idea that we can improve lives and save money is more than compelling – it’s necessary. This is a clear opportunity to improve outcomes, reduce strain on overstretched services, and help people move forward with their lives.

    Thorsten Barnhofer is the author of a book on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). He regularly provides workshops on mindfulness-based interventions. He is co-investigator of a programme grant evaluating an adapted MBCT course for adolescents experiencing depression and is among the investigators for the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit-funded trial described in this article.

    Barney Dunn receives funding from the National Institute of Health Research for mental health treatment trials at the University of Exeter, including the Research for Patient Benefit Funding for the RESPOND trial discussed in this article. He co-directs an NHS commissioned psychological therapies service, which delivers Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy.

    Clara Strauss is co-lead for Sussex Mindfulness Centre (SMC), part of Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and has received funding to conduct MBCT research from NIHR and other funders, funding to deliver MBCT courses and funding to train MBCT therapists within SMC.

    – ref. How mindfulness therapy could help those left behind by depression treatment – https://theconversation.com/how-mindfulness-therapy-could-help-those-left-behind-by-depression-treatment-256547

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Labour governments have always struggled with immigration – here’s what Keir Starmer could learn from them

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Erica Consterdine, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Lancaster University

    The government has outlined its plans to reduce net migration to the UK. The proposals are generally restrictive: scrapping social care visas, tightening work visas, longer residency requirements, tougher English tests and restructuring student visas.

    While Reform’s recent success at the local elections hardened Keir Starmer’s rhetoric in announcing the changes, the thrust of this policy was to be expected. But will the political calculation pay off?

    Immigration has long been a headache for Labour. It is a topic that cuts across the party’s ideological factions – its protectionist roots, its universalist values, and its market-friendly third way leanings. Each of these calls for a different approach on immigration.

    Labour’s record on immigration is historically patchy. Previous Labour governments have been responsible for some of the most deplorable immigration acts, including the racially discriminatory 1968 act, which restricted non-white immigration in a betrayal of Kenyan Asians fleeing persecution.

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    The British public then was far more illiberal on immigration than it is today. Trade unions were historically anti-immigrant, perceiving foreign labour as a threat to wages and job displacement. Labour, like their Tory counterparts, mostly operated on a bipartisan consensus of limiting immigration, on the idea that this was better for cohesion.

    This is exemplified in the Hattersley equation (named for former MP Roy Hattersley), a bipartisan political consensus that lasted from the postwar years up until Thatcher’s government. The compromise was between restrictive immigration policy and liberal integration measures (the Race Relations Act) to appease Labour’s liberal base.

    New Labour embraced the Thatcherite, neoliberal agenda, with Tony Blair declaring that there is no alternative to globalisation and therefore immigration. Framing immigration as an economic good, and humanitarian mobility as the bogeyman, Labour’s regime radically transformed the immigration system from one of the most restrictive in Europe to one of the most liberal labour regimes. But this was never for the benefit of migrants – it was simply economic calculation.

    We know what happened next: the political battleground, the cursed net migration target, Brexit and the lurches to the right ever since. In opposition, Labour has never been able to resolve this.

    Starmer’s approach

    A sticking point since 2010 has been traditionally working-class Labour constituents, viewed as “left behind” due to globalisation, and who now make up the red wall. The narrative goes that these voters have drifted rightwards due to dissatisfaction with immigration.

    But overall, Labour voters are still more positive than Conservatives towards immigration. A regressive policy on migrant rights could lose Labour some of its voter base.

    What’s more, net migration is likely to decrease over Labour’s term anyway, due to changes made by the last government and the tailing off of unprecedented migration from bespoke humanitarian schemes, like the one for Ukrainians. Arguably, Starmer’s reforms weren’t strictly necessary.

    Starmer could have framed the same policies around a softer rhetoric, one that embraces multicultural Britain while making the case for reforming the labour market. The enemy could have easily been cast as the Conservative government that neglected investment in the people at the expense of global corporations.

    Data from the Institute of Public Policy Research suggests that the UK public has become softer on immigration, but they want fairness. The easy way out here was to praise the benefits that immigration can bring while emphasising the need for control to maximise those benefits.

    Denigrating the current system as a “squalid chapter” of history is playing to Reform voters – arguably a foolish move, given that evidence shows you can’t beat the far right at its own game.

    Will the proposals work?

    If these proposals do reduce migration, it will come at a high cost for the country, not least in the consequences for the higher education and social care sectors. It may even increase irregular migration, as more people go underground in their attempts to reach Britain.

    The crux of the government’s problem is promising to reduce immigration in a system dependent on labour market flexibility. The proposals would make the UK extortionately expensive for both applicants and the employers who sponsor them, and make it economically unviable for the sectors that rely on foreign labour to recruit.

    A more social democratic immigration policy would invest in training, skills and wages of domestic workforces, while providing rights to the migrants who already reside here.

    Labour’s policy does not do this. It curtails rights significantly, for example in the doubling of the waiting period to apply for the right to stay indefinitely, and the plans to review how the right to family life is applied. Both of these are arguably counterproductive to the aims of integration and out of step with other countries.

    The theory behind the government reforms is that migrant workers will be replaced by the economically inactive domestic labour force – a win-win. Aside from the suspect simplicity of this equation, it will require more than sticks on employers and migrants. It necessitates a radical overhaul of the system, the economic model and a more interventionist state to move towards a coordinated market economy, one with more organisation and regulation on the labour market.

    Despite the government’s significant majority, a disciplined cabinet and an infighting opposition, the government appears reluctant to make such dramatic change, wedded to the existing paradigms of neoliberal free markets in a quest for growth in stagnating economies. If it wants its plans to work, Labour will have to be bolder and provide carrots to go with the sticks.

    Erica Consterdine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Labour governments have always struggled with immigration – here’s what Keir Starmer could learn from them – https://theconversation.com/labour-governments-have-always-struggled-with-immigration-heres-what-keir-starmer-could-learn-from-them-256737

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: After another call with Putin, it looks like Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

    After a two-hour phone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on May 19, US president Donald Trump took to social media to declare that Russia and Ukraine will “immediately start negotiations” towards a ceasefire and an end to the war. He did, however, add that the conditions for peace “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be”.

    With the Vatican, according to Trump, “very interested in hosting the negotiations” and European leaders duly informed, it seems clear that the US has effectively abandoned its stalled mediation efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

    It was always a possibility that Trump could walk away from the war, despite previous claims he could end it in 24 hours. This only became more likely on May 16, when the first face-to-face negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for more than three years predictably ended without a ceasefire agreement.

    When Trump announced shortly afterwards that he would be speaking to his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts by phone a few days later, he effectively mounted the beginning of a rearguard action. This was further underlined when, shortly before the Trump-Putin call, Vice-President J.D. Vance, explicitly told reporters that the US could end its shuttle diplomacy.

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    The meagre outcomes of the talks between Russia and Ukraine – as well as between Trump and Putin – are not surprising. Russia is clearly not ready for any concessions yet. It keeps insisting that Ukraine accept its maximalist demands of territorial concessions and future neutrality.

    Putin also continues to slow-walk any negotiations. After his call with Trump, he reportedly said that “Russia will offer and is ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”, including “a possible ceasefire for a certain period of time, should relevant agreements be reached.”

    The lack of urgency on Russia’s part to end the fighting and, in fact, the Kremlin’s ability and willingness to continue the war was emphasised the day before the Trump-Putin call. Russia carried out its largest drone attack against Ukraine so far in the war, targeting several regions including Kyiv.

    There has been no let-up in the fighting since. And the fact that Putin spoke to Trump while visiting a music school in the southern Russian city of Sochi does not suggest that a ceasefire in Ukraine is high on the Russian leader’s priority list.

    A large part of the Kremlin’s calculation seems to be its desire to strike a grand bargain with the White House on a broader reset of relations between the US and Russia. It is signalling clearly that this is more important than the war in Ukraine and might even happen without the fighting there ending.

    This also appears to be driving thinking in Washington. Trump foreshadowed an improvement in bilateral relations by describing the “tone and spirit” of his conversation with Putin as “excellent”. He also seemed pleased about the prospects of “large-scale trade” with Russia.

    Abandoning European allies

    Trump is on record as saying that there would be no progress towards peace in Ukraine until he and Putin get together. But it is worth bearing mind that very little movement towards a ceasefire in Ukraine – let alone a peace agreement – occurred after the last phone call between the two presidents in February.

    Part of this lack of progress has been Trump’s reluctance to put any real pressure on Putin. And despite agreement in Brussels and preparations in Washington for an escalation in sanctions against Russia, it is unlikely that Trump will change his approach.

    In this context, the sequence in which the calls occurred is telling. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had a short call before the former spoke with Putin. Zelensky said he told Trump not to make decisions about Ukraine “without us”.

    But rather than presenting Putin with a clear ultimatum to accept a ceasefire, Trump apparently discussed future relations with Putin at great length before informing Zelensky and key European allies that the war in Ukraine is now solely their problem to solve.

    This has certainly raised justifiable fears in Kyiv and European capitals that, for the sake of a reset with Russia, the US might yet completely abandon its allies across the Atlantic.

    However, if a reset with Russia at any cost really is Trump’s strategy, it is bound to fail. As much as Putin seems willing to continue with his aggression against Ukraine, Zelensky is as unwilling to surrender. Putin can rely on China’s continued backing while Zelensky can count on support from Europe.

    Supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine is essential for China to keep Moscow on side in its rivalry with the US. And for Europe, supporting Ukraine has become an existential question of deterring and containing a revisionist Russia hell-bent on restoring a Soviet-style sphere of influence in central and eastern Europe.

    In a world that has been in flux since Trump’s return to the White House, these are some of the emerging constants. And they make a US-Russia reset highly improbable.

    Even if it were to happen, it would not strengthen Washington’s position with Beijing. Walking away from Ukraine and Europe now will deprive the US of the very allies it will need in the long term to prevail in its rivalry with China.

    By abandoning his mediation between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump may have broken the deadlock in his efforts to achieve a reset with Russia. But getting this deal over the line will be a pyrrhic victory.

    Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

    – ref. After another call with Putin, it looks like Trump has abandoned efforts to mediate peace in Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/after-another-call-with-putin-it-looks-like-trump-has-abandoned-efforts-to-mediate-peace-in-ukraine-257021

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why do protestors use disruptive, confrontational tactics? New research shows they’re not just a last resort

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mete Sefa Uysal, Lecturer in Social & Political Psychology, University of Exeter

    HJBC/Shutterstock

    Public protests are on the rise globally, from climate marches and university occupations to roadblocks and mass political demonstrations. These actions may sometimes include confrontational tactics such as civil disobedience, disruption and, at times, violent resistance.

    At Columbia University in the US, for instance, pro-Palestine student protests recently captured global attention for their tactics. They ranged from non-confrontational actions such as gatherings and sit-ins to campus encampments and occupations aimed at disrupting daily activities, which eventually led to confrontations with police.

    Actions like these often spark debate. Are activists acting strategically, or simply reacting out of desperation and rage? Our new research sheds light on this question. Contrary to popular belief, people do not only turn to confrontational protest because they are desperate or lack political alternatives.

    Confrontational protests are frequently portrayed negatively. They are often associated with extremism, disorder, or desperation. So it’s long been a mystery why people choose such confrontational forms of protest, especially given more conventional options like petitions or authorised rallies offer broader public support and visibility.

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    In our surveys of 3,833 people across three countries – Germany, Turkey and the UK – we found that people choose confrontational action when they believe it is effective and legitimate for achieving their group’s political goals.

    That said, in some protests, confrontational tactics may emerge spontaneously as a self-defence, driven by immediate threats. But it is not simply an emotional outburst or a last resort: it can be a strategic choice.

    This challenges a widely discussed idea in social and political psychology called the “nothing-to-lose” hypothesis. According to this view, people are driven to confrontational protest when they see non-confrontational action (such as voting, petitioning, or authorised marches) as ineffective. This is often because they have little political trust or are oppressed. Our studies ultimately tested this hypothesis.

    We found that most people rated non-confrontational actions as more effective than confrontational ones. But they still saw confrontational tactics as worthwhile if they also seemed effective and justifiable.

    Interestingly, we discovered that low political trust – a lack of belief that the political system works fairly – did not predict confrontational protest. In fact, it was only weakly linked to perceived effectiveness and legitimacy of such tactics.

    While previous theories suggested that people with nothing to lose would be the ones most drawn to radical action, our findings paint a more complex picture. People don’t necessarily need to lose all faith in the political system before considering disruptive protest. Rather, they judge whether a specific tactic will advance their cause and align with their collective moral values.

    Just Stop Oil protestors with hands glued to the frame of da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
    wikipedia, CC BY-SA

    We also found that when people think that protests are more likely to be met with state violence, they are more likely to view confrontational tactics as legitimate and effective. In other words, when crowds foresee push-back, they recalibrate their strategies rather than withdrawing altogether from activism.

    Constructive disruption

    This research matters now more than ever. From climate movement and pro-Palestine rallies in many countries to anti-government and pro-democracy protests in the US, Turkey, Serbia and Argentina, we are witnessing a global wave of protest crowds.

    Understanding what drives people to disruptive and confrontational actions can help both policymakers and the public make sense of protest in today’s divided world. This may be a better option than moralising about good versus bad forms of protests, which serves to silence and criminalise disruptive and confrontational actions.

    The former UK home secretary Suella Braverman labelled climate protesters “extremists” and pro-Palestinian protests “hate marches”. She also proposed harsher crackdowns. But such an approach is only likely to make the protests more disruptive.

    Similarly, several government responses to UK parliamentary reports on protest policing distinguish “right to peaceful protest” from any kind of disruptive and confrontational activism. They also highlight that the legal definition of “serious disruption” has been widened.

    But viewing all disruptive protests as being outside of legal boundaries is likely to create pushback among activists and limit the potential constructive social influence of such protests.

    We argue that it’s time to rethink how we talk about confrontational and disruptive protests. Rather than viewing them as irrational, extreme or born of despair, we should understand it as part of a wider repertoire of political action.

    Here, labelling a set of protests through binary, moralised terms can lead to overlooking and silencing a crucial and effective protest strategy: constructive disruption. Constructive disruption relies on carefully balancing non-violent but disruptive actions. This can apply pressure for change while signalling positive intent that encourages a conciliatory response to protest.

    As a group of social psychologists recently showed, constructive disruption could generate support even among those who are most resistant.

    If we recognise that such tactics are often grounded in a sense of justice and strategic reasoning, we can move away from moralistic judgements and toward democratic dialogue by better engaging with the underlying demands that drive them.

    As protest movements continue to shape political life around the world, we believe it’s time to take their strategies seriously – not just their slogans.

    Mete Sefa Uysal received funding from the International Society of Political Psychology Scholar Under Threat Fund for a part of this study.

    John Drury and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Why do protestors use disruptive, confrontational tactics? New research shows they’re not just a last resort – https://theconversation.com/why-do-protestors-use-disruptive-confrontational-tactics-new-research-shows-theyre-not-just-a-last-resort-256716

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Is this bad for my health? Kenyan study tests three types of warning labels on food

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Shukri F. Mohamed, Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

    Diet-related health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity, are on the rise in Kenya, putting immense strain on already over-stretched public health systems. These conditions are often driven by high intake of sugars, salts and unhealthy fats. So it’s more critical than ever for consumers to understand what’s in the foods they’re buying.

    But making sense of nutrition information isn’t always straightforward, especially with the small, complex labels on the back of most packages.

    Our recent study examined whether front-of-pack food labels could help Kenyan consumers make better choices. We tested three types of label designs to see which one was most effective at helping people identify nutrients of concern and make healthier purchase decisions.

    Front-of-pack labels are simplified labels on the front of food packaging, designed to help consumers quickly assess healthiness through symbols, colours, or ratings. Examples include providing a “high in sugar” warning. In contrast, back-of-pack labels provide mandatory, detailed information such as full ingredient lists, nutrition facts and expiry dates typically in a standardised, text-heavy format on the back or side. Front-of-pack labels aren’t mandatory in all countries but back-of-pack labels are.

    Many countries, including Chile, Mexico and Israel, have already introduced mandatory warning labels. Research shows that there has been a positive impact on public health.

    Kenya is planning to take a major step in promoting public health by introducing a front-of-label system that will rank packed foods and non-alcoholic beverages based on their nutritional quality. Currently, packaged foods in Kenya are required to list ingredients, but this information can be hard to interpret. Front-of-pack labels will simplify this by highlighting key nutritional facts at a glance.

    The new system will also guide policies like restricting marketing of unhealthy foods to children and other measures to improve Kenya’s food environment. With rising obesity and diet-related diseases driven by a shift from traditional foods to processed options, changes are urgently needed.



    Read more:
    Marketing unhealthy food as good for kids is fuelling obesity in South Africa: how to curb it

    We have been involved in food environment policies research for the last five years. Our study emphasises the potential of front-of-pack food labels to affect consumers’ choices. Presenting clear information about a product’s nutritional content on the front of packaging could shift consumer behaviour towards healthier choices. In turn, this could lead to better public health outcomes.

    Testing three label types

    The study randomly assigned participants to different label types to compare the results fairly.

    The study involved 2,198 adults from four counties: the capital, Nairobi; Mombasa, the second largest city; Kisumu, which is home to the third largest city; and Garissa in north-eastern Kenya. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three label types: red and green octagon label (RG), red and green octagon with icons (RGI), and black octagon warning label (WL).

    Each label had a unique approach to highlighting sugars, fats and salts, which are the nutrients linked to diet-related diseases.

    • The Red-Green (RG) label used the colours red and green to show if a product had high or within-threshold levels of salt, sugar, fat, or saturated fat. Red meant the nutrients were above the set threshold, making that food unhealthy, while green meant it was below the set threshold levels.

    • The Red-Green with Icons (RGI) label worked like the RG label and it also included icons (like a spoon for sugar, a salt shaker for salt) and abbreviations (F for fat, SF for saturated fat) to make it easier to understand.

    • The black octagon Warning Label (WL) only appeared on products high in salt, sugar or fats, with a clear “high in” warning message to alert consumers.



    Read more:
    Why South Africa should introduce mandatory labelling for fast foods

    Each participant was asked to evaluate a sample of food products based on the label type they were shown. They were also asked about their purchase intentions and perceptions of the products’ healthiness.

    First, the study participants were shown images of packaged foods without any labels, and they were asked to answer questions about them. Then, study participants were shown the same images, but this time with a front-of-pack label added to the images. They were then asked the same questions again to see if the labels influenced their responses.

    Our results showed that warning labels were the most effective in helping consumers identify foods high in sugars, salts and fats. Participants who saw the warning labels were more likely to recognise unhealthy packaged food products and less likely to choose them, compared to those who used the Red and Green labels.

    In the same study we asked consumers about awareness and use of labels and we found that approximately two thirds (64.3%) reported being aware of food labels, while 55.0% reported reading nutrition information before purchasing products.

    Next steps

    Our research provides a strong evidence base to support policymakers in adopting mandatory front-of-pack labelling.

    Moving forward, establishing a clear regulatory framework that mandates simple, effective and standardised labelling systems is essential in reducing diet-related diseases. Ensuring these labels are easily understandable and prominently displayed on all packaged foods will empower consumers to make healthier choices, particularly those in low- and middle-income communities, who are at higher risk of poor dietary outcomes.

    Several law-making processes are in place that Kenya could use to implement mandatory labelling. But efforts are needed to identify and pursue the most effective route to effective legal change.

    Shukri F. Mohamed receives funding from the International Development Research Center.

    – ref. Is this bad for my health? Kenyan study tests three types of warning labels on food – https://theconversation.com/is-this-bad-for-my-health-kenyan-study-tests-three-types-of-warning-labels-on-food-253657

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Armed groups are invading Benin’s forest reserves. Why and what to do about it

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Papa Sow, Senior Researcher, The Nordic Africa Institute

    Benin’s Pendjari Biosphere Reserve, also called Pendjari National Park, and its surroundings have been targeted by non-state armed groups since 2019.

    Pendjari National Park, which covers approximately 4,800km², is one of five protected areas in Benin and is one of the main biodiversity conservation areas in west Africa. It has been a World Heritage Site since 2017.

    It is an integral part of the W-Arly-Pendjari complex, a transboundary biosphere reserve. The W Park is shared by Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso. Arly is located in Burkina Faso and Pendjari in Benin.

    The geographical configuration of the park facilitates all kinds of movements. Non-state armed groups attempt to exploit the porous borders to hide, stock up on natural resources — including gold and poached wildlife — or turn them into rear bases. Non-state armed groups take advantage of the park’s inaccessibility and its dense, wild forests to turn them into refuges.

    Bloody battles are underway to conquer special forest territories, which I call “protected jihadism areas” because of their use by armed movements claiming to be jihadists.

    As part of a study on the causes of migration in and from the northern parts of Benin Republic, close to Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo and Nigeria, I analysed the impact that these non-state armed groups were having on local populations and protected areas.

    I have been working on migration issues for about 25 years, and most of my observations in west Africa show that armed groups cause displacements in the sub-region. They contribute to a land and pastoral crisis, inconsistency in the distribution of forest resources, and a poorly integrated approach to the management of protected areas.

    I interviewed experts, local journalists, research assistants who I worked with during several years and displaced people in Benin and the west African sub-region about the direct impacts of smuggling, the depletion of natural resources, threats, and the use of violence in forest reserves.

    My observations are that the spiral of violence by non-state armed groups is dangerously disrupting the conservation and protection of the environment, increasing fear and insecurity among communities, and ruining the local economy, especially activities that revolve around the tourism sector.

    The violence

    On 8 January 2025, close to 30 soldiers were killed in the north of Benin, in Karimama near the “Triple Point” – an extensive area in the W-Arly-Pendjari complex where Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso meet.

    More than 120 soldiers were killed in the area between 2021 and 2024. There has also been carnage of the animals and plants.

    Since 2018, the Katiba Ansar-ul Islam, Serma, Sekou Muslimou and Abou Hanifa have been operating in Burkina Faso. They are considered jihadists – mostly under the aegis of Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), the Al Qaeda branch in the Sahel.

    Reasons for the proliferation of non-state armed groups in the park are multiple. It’s difficult for the state authorities to reach them there. There is the battle among non-state armed groups over the control of pastures and water bodies in the area. The park is also a place where non-state armed groups work with traffickers of adulterated gasoline from Nigeria, called Kpayo in Benin. They buy thousands of litres of gasoline from them every week at exorbitant prices.

    The Beninese state is is not very visible in some places despite the anti-terrorist Operation Mirador launched in 2021 with more than 3,000 soldiers. Since the first attack in 2019, more than US$120 million has been spent on security by Benin. But the number of attacks and kidnappings has multiplied.

    The main reason is the fragility of the security of the three state border areas.

    The non-State armed groups have their own crossing points that they control. Sub-regional collaboration between states is almost non-existent. The 2017 Accra Initiative, composed of five countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo – seems to have stagnated since some member states pulled out of the regional grouping Ecowas. A genuine regional force capable of countering the activities of these non-state armed groups is necessary.

    Benin is developing a military partnership with France. But the already tense diplomatic relationship between Benin and its neighbours – Niger and Burkina Faso – and the ambivalent policy of Togo, which “threatens” to join the Alliance of Sahel States – are not factors conducive to effective regional military cooperation.

    How people are being affected

    The park depends, in part, on funding generated by tourism and external partners. Conservation has been managed, since 2020, by the APN – Rangers African Parks Network. In 2024, it employed 337 eco-guards, including six expatriates. These eco-guards, on the front lines against non-state armed groups, are also being killed. Their work in gathering threat-related information is important to the Beninese Armed Forces.

    The activities of residents living near the park, transport networks and systems, and trekking services are the hardest hit. The work of NGOs that supported local populations has been reduced. Many NGOs have withdrawn from their activities. Small businesses are under threat.

    But the hardest-hit sector is tourism, which has affected the livelihoods of people. There has been a significant decline in the number of tourists. This directly affects local communities for whom tourism activities remain an important source of income.

    Tanguiéta, a town 70km from the border with Burkina Faso and not far from Pendjari Park, has been the worst affected due to a decline in income from accommodation and catering activities. Jobs have been lost.

    Migrants from the sub-region who had specialised in tourism entrepreneurship, including tour guides and artisans, have turned to other activities or left the town.

    What needs to be done

    The following measures could help protect the park and local people:

    • strengthen communication and surveillance capabilities

    • increase surveillance aircraft, helicopters and drones with the support of international donors and the Ecowas

    • train Beninese Armed Forces in conservation practices

    • increase support for community development projects

    • diversify activities to reduce dependence on tourism.

    Papa Sow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Armed groups are invading Benin’s forest reserves. Why and what to do about it – https://theconversation.com/armed-groups-are-invading-benins-forest-reserves-why-and-what-to-do-about-it-256136

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The UK might have accepted the idea of youth mobility with the EU, but it’s not happening any time soon

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics & International Studies, The Open University

    View Apart/Shutterstock

    The language might be dry, but the political shift is significant. Monday’s summit between the UK and EU leaders in London resulted in an acknowledgement of the “mutual interest to deepen our people-to-people ties, particularly for the younger generation”.

    This announcement is an important step forward in the creation of a youth mobility scheme between the EU and UK, even if it has required a name change to become a “youth experience scheme”. It is the first time that a British government has formally accepted this as something to negotiate and implement.

    However, there is scant detail about how it will work in practice and what the inevitable limits will be. While the permitted activities (“work, studies, au-pairing, volunteering, or simply travelling”) seem extensive, they are prefaced with the dreaded words “such as” – which means no one has actually agreed any of it.

    It was clear over a year ago that the basic models that the two sides have for youth mobility differ. The EU wants lengthy exchange periods and home tuition fees for students; the UK wants shorter stays, caps on numbers and retention of international fees for EU students at UK universities. The achievement of a deal would require at least one of them to move. This week makes this difference now the formal position, rather than showing whether movement is possible.

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    It’s possible that discussion of British participation in the Erasmus+ scheme for student mobility might be a partial stopgap, making exchanges within study programmes easier. However, the ambition for creating those deeper people-to-people ties will need more to make it meaningful.

    As the troubled history of this idea should indicate, there’s still a very long way to go before anyone gets to use the scheme in practice.

    The founding irony of a youth mobility scheme with the EU after Brexit is that it was originally a British idea. It was produced under Rishi Sunak following his conclusion of the Windsor Framework on Northern Ireland, when he was looking for areas to rebuild ties with Europe.

    In 2023, feelers had been put out to various EU member states about concluding bilateral deals with the UK. While there was some interest, the general feeling was that this was best handled at an EU level, to avoid any cherrypicking of countries by London.

    A summary of UK-EU youth mobility proposals.
    Simon Usherwood, CC BY-NC-SA

    In April 2024, the European Commission produced an ambitious proposal for a scheme. It put forward that 18- to 30-year-olds would be able to get a visa for up to four years for any purpose – work, study, travel – without quotas on numbers.

    Both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition had rejected the proposal out of hand. This was partly out of concerns over the potential impact on immigration figures and on student finances: the commission suggested EU students should be able to pay UK university fees. Mostly, however, it came from a desire not to be seen to make a big agreement with the EU that looked a bit like freedom of movement.

    To be clear, youth mobility is very much not freedom of movement. The latter implies no limits on entry, length or purpose of stay, as well as access to any kinds of public services as if you were a resident national. The former still means paying for a visa and strict limits on those services. But such legal points remain rather marginal in the British political and media debate.

    Since last year, there has been some to and fro, but largely behind closed doors and with the incoming Labour government continuing the line that such a scheme wasn’t on the cards. While the UK has a number of youth mobility schemes with countries around the world, these are typically limited by quotas and time (normally to two years) and require the person to be working or studying.

    Moving on?

    On the British side, Home Office concern about immigration figures is clearly still critical, especially in the context of the recent white paper that aims to cut back migration. Universities too have been vocal about the financial impact of losing tuition fee income from EU students.

    But on the EU side, the matter is seen very differently. To some extent, the interest is in maintaining the links with the UK, especially for young people that could gain from experiencing more of how their neighbours live. But much more than this is the sense that youth mobility has become something of a test for the British government.

    Labour’s return to office last July marked the unleashing of a significant diplomatic effort to engage with European counterparts and to talk up the value of working together. Youth mobility is a test of that value for some in European capitals, both in terms of being able to negotiate an agreement and of being able to sell it to the British public.

    The coming weeks and months will therefore be a key period if the reset is to result in more sustainably improved relations. Even if the basic shape of UK-EU relations isn’t about to shift, the ability for both sides to be able to talk and act constructively will still matter in delivering from that long list of summit ambitions.

    Simon Usherwood receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, as a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.

    – ref. The UK might have accepted the idea of youth mobility with the EU, but it’s not happening any time soon – https://theconversation.com/the-uk-might-have-accepted-the-idea-of-youth-mobility-with-the-eu-but-its-not-happening-any-time-soon-256628

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The DIY guide to checking how well you’re ageing

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marco Arkesteijn, Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Biomechanics, Aberystwyth University

    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    A few years ago, a social media trend challenged people to see if they could stand up from the floor without using their hands. Now, it’s all about how long you can balance on one leg while brushing your teeth. These quirky “tests” promise to tell us how well we’re ageing – but do they really?

    When we talk about “ageing well”, we’re usually referring to both physical and psychological wellbeing. That includes feeling good (hedonic wellbeing) and finding meaning and purpose (eudaimonic wellbeing). Engaging in activities and monitoring ourselves plays a role in both.

    But ageing isn’t just about how strong your grip is or how fast you can walk. It’s a complex mix of physical, cognitive, emotional and social changes – and no single test captures the whole picture.

    Physically, one simple measure that gets a lot of attention is walking speed. According to one famous study, people who walk faster than 1.32 metres per second were less likely to die in the next three years – jokingly framed as “too fast for the Grim Reaper to catch”.

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    On the flip side, a slower walking speed – below 0.8 metres per second – can be a sign of sarcopenia, a condition involving reduced muscle mass, muscle strength and physical function. These are all important indicators of age-related decline.

    But while these markers are useful, they’re not easy to measure at home. Most research relies on specialist equipment and your local GP probably doesn’t have a grip-strength dynamometer sitting in a drawer. But they could time how long it takes you to stand up and sit down five times from a chair.

    How to do a DIY MOT

    So, what can you realistically do to track your own ageing?

    To truly understand how you’re ageing, it helps to think beyond physical health. Mental sharpness, emotional resilience and social connection matter just as much. One helpful idea is to assess your cognitive fitness, which includes skills like attention, memory and flexibility.

    Here are some cognitive tests you can try at home:

    Trail making test: connect numbers and letters in sequence (1, A, 2, B, etc.) and time how long it takes. This measures your ability to switch between tasks.

    Stroop task: challenges your ability to ignore competing information. Try saying the colour of a word, not the word itself – like saying “red” when you see the word “blue” printed in red ink. It’s harder than it sounds!

    Dual-task challenge: walk at your normal speed while counting backwards from 100 in threes. If your walking speed changes significantly, it could indicate cognitive strain.

    These kinds of tasks test how well your brain handles competing demands – a key ability that becomes even more important as we age. This skill is known as cognitive flexibility, and it helps you adapt to changing situations, switch between tasks and manage distractions.

    Trying out these tests is great, but how do you know if you’re improving? After all, when you have spent time trying to improve your walking speed, or Stroop ability – or even rubbing your head, patting your belly while saying the Finnish alphabet out loud – it’s important to know if you are seeing benefits.

    Some measures, like single-leg stance, can vary wildly from day to day – or even hour to hour. You might get better just from repeating it, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ageing better, just that you’ve practised.

    Others, like grip strength, change very slowly even with regular strength training. And some improvements are task-specific: getting better at the trail making test doesn’t necessarily make you sharper at doing Wordle.

    That’s why it helps to complete the test a few times at the start, then retest yourself once a month or so – again, doing it a couple of times – to track any improvements. Cognitive changes may be slower to notice than physical ones, so regular checks can help reveal progress over time.

    More of a puzzle than a test

    There’s no single test or score that can capture how well you’re ageing. Think of it more like a jigsaw puzzle. Physical health, mental agility, emotional balance, social connection – they all matter, and they all interact. And, of course, even if you perform well now, some changes in the future may be beyond your control. No test can fully predict what lies ahead.

    At the end of the day, maybe the best sign of ageing well isn’t how fast you walk or how long you can stand on one leg – it’s how you feel about your life. Are you feeling engaged, content, connected?

    Tools like the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience can help you take stock of your emotional wellbeing. This short, 12-question survey asks about your everyday feelings – from joy and calm to sadness and frustration – offering insight into both the pleasurable (hedonic) and meaningful (eudaimonic) sides of wellbeing.

    Ageing well isn’t about beating a stopwatch or acing a memory test. It’s about knowing yourself – your body, your mind and your values – and making small, meaningful changes that help you feel more you.

    So, go ahead, stand on one leg if you like. But don’t forget to check in with your brain, body, emotions and your sense of purpose too.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The DIY guide to checking how well you’re ageing – https://theconversation.com/the-diy-guide-to-checking-how-well-youre-ageing-256297

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –