Scam Factories is a special multimedia and podcast series by The Conversation that explores the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s brutal scam compounds.
The Conversation’s digital storytelling and podcast teams collaborated with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne; Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.
The researchers have spent the past few years interviewing nearly 100 survivors of these compounds and documenting the rise of the industry in Southeast Asia for a forthcoming book.
Scam Factories will unfold across three multimedia articles and three podcast episodes this week. We’ll update this page as more is published.
Part 1
Our first article explores how people are lured into the industry and what life is like inside the compounds, where scammers are forced to work long hours and are often subjected to violence.
And in our first podcast episode, No skills required, our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia called Chrey Thom to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors, a Ugandan man we’re calling George and a Malaysian woman we’re calling Lee, about how they were recruited into compounds in Laos and Myanmar.
The Conversation contacted all the companies mentioned in this series for a comment, except Jinshui, which we couldn’t contact. We did not receive a response from any of them.
Credits
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Photos by Roun Ry, KDA, Halima Athumani and Ivan Franceschini.
Justin Bergman at The Conversation in Australia edited the articles in the series and Matt Garrow worked on the graphical elements of the stories. Series oversight and editing help from Ashlynne McGhee.
Scam Factories is a podcast series from The Conversation Weekly taking you inside Southeast Asia’s brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of articles on The Conversation.
Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam compounds. Many were trafficked there and then forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world via email, phone and social media.
The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Mark Bo, an independent researcher. They’ve spent the past few years researching the expansion of scam compounds in the region for a forthcoming book. They’ve interviewed nearly 100 survivors of these compounds, analysed maps and financial documents related to the scam industry, and tracked scammers online to find out how these operations work.
In this first episode of the podcast series, No Skills Required, we find out how people are recruited and trafficked into the compounds – with many believing they’re going there to do a legitimate job.
Our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia, Chrey Thom, to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors, a Ugandan man we’re calling George and a Malaysian woman we’re calling Lee to protect their real identities, about how they were tricked into travelling to compounds in Laos and Myanmar.
The Conversation contacted all the companies mentioned in this series for a comment, except Jinshui, which we could not contact. We did not receive a response from any of them.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware, with assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Sound design by Michelle Macklem and editing help from Ashlynee McGhee and Justin Bergman.
Mark Bo, an independent researcher who works with Ivan Franeschini and Ling Li, is also interviewed in this podcast series. Ivan, Ling, Mark, and others have co-founded EOS Collective, a non-profit organisation dedicated to investigating the criminal networks behind the online scam industry and supporting survivors.
Scam Factories is a special multimedia and podcast series by The Conversation that explores the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s brutal scam compounds.
The Conversation’s digital storytelling and podcast teams collaborated with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne; Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.
The researchers have spent the past few years interviewing nearly 100 survivors of these compounds and documenting the rise of the industry in Southeast Asia for a forthcoming book.
Scam Factories will unfold across three multimedia articles and three podcast episodes this week. We’ll update this page as more is published.
Part 1
Our first article explores how people are lured into the industry and what life is like inside the compounds, where scammers are forced to work long hours and are often subjected to violence.
And in our first podcast episode, No skills required, our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia called Chrey Thom to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors, a Ugandan man we’re calling George and a Malaysian woman we’re calling Lee, about how they were recruited into compounds in Laos and Myanmar.
The Conversation contacted all the companies mentioned in this series for a comment, except Jinshui, which we couldn’t contact. We did not receive a response from any of them.
Credits
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Photos by Roun Ry, KDA, Halima Athumani and Ivan Franceschini.
Justin Bergman at The Conversation in Australia edited the articles in the series and Matt Garrow worked on the graphical elements of the stories. Series oversight and editing help from Ashlynne McGhee.
Reality TV – love it or hate it, there’s no denying it’s addictive. From explosive arguments to over-the-top love triangles, it can be hard to look away. But is all this drama just for fun, or might it do more harm – to watchers and participants – than we realise?
We asked five experts, and most of them said it might, especially when it comes to promoting negative body image and leaving contestants emotionally scarred.
But one expert argued reality TV is a valuable form of entertainment overall, which reflects modern culture and sparks important conversations.
It’s exactly three years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
During that time, Ukrainians have lived through one of the world’s largest and most brutal humanitarian crises. Yet their resilience remains high.
The United Nations estimates that 64% of micro, small and medium enterprises had to either suspend or close their operations in Ukraine at some stage after the war began.
But the vast majority of these have since opened back up.
Over the past year, our international team of researchers from both Australia and Ukraine sought to find out what might drive such extraordinary resilience. The answer, according to Ukrainian business leaders, is their people.
Running a business in a war
Ukrainians are currently living through their third winter of this war. Some of Russia’s latest attacks have targeted the gas infrastructure and other energy facilities crucial for keeping people alive.
These daily attacks have made previously safe cities no longer safe, leaving residents without water, heat and electricity in bitterly cold conditions.
According to the UNHCR’s 2025 Global Appeal, Russia’s targeting of homes, hospitals and communities has resulted in civilian deaths, mass displacements, restricted access to humanitarian aid, and severely disrupted essential services.
For businesses, the war has impacted virtually every aspect of commercial activity. Beyond the immediate threat of coming under direct attack, firms have had to deal with everything from disrupted supply chains through to frequent power outages.
As one interviewee put it:
Many of us are afraid our main businesses may go bankrupt. We are constantly facing periods with no electricity which stops businesses and cuts us off from the world. We live with constant air raid alarms, moving in and out of underground shelters. We have a significant shortage of personnel because so many have gone to fight on the front lines or left the country.
The UN estimates that utilisation of production capacity for Ukraine’s micro, small and medium enterprises dropped from 72.4% before the war to 45.7% in 2023.
Women have been stepping into historically male dominated professions such as mining, truck driving and welding to fill the gap left by men who’ve joined the fight. But there is still a significant labour shortage.
A diverse range of sectors have continued to operate in Ukraine since the war began, despite labour shortages and other issues. Oleksandr Filatov/Shutterstock
Over the past year, our international team of researchers from both Australia and Ukraine surveyed business leaders from 85 different small and medium-sized businesses across 19 different industries in Ukraine.
These spanned engineering, transportation, aviation and mining through to agriculture, tourism, IT, healthcare, entertainment and finance.
We asked which resources were – and still are – key to the survival of their organisations.
Finance and access to funding came in at number two, followed by production and energy, new customers & markets, equipment technology & information and policy & regulations.
The most important resource
The most important resource, highlighted by 82% of the business leaders we surveyed, was their people.
When operating within an environment of severe crisis and disruption, the pressure can be enormous. But the Ukrainian executives we interviewed figured out a way to unite and lead their teams into the future.
As one reflected:
When team members are motivated, they are more likely to be optimistic and resilient when facing difficulties. Motivated employees are more productive than demotivated ones. This is important when people need to accomplish more with fewer resources.
Forcing positive adaptation
For many organisations in our research, operating within a crisis had pushed them to implement valuable human resource practices other businesses often struggle with.
Some had transitioned to a “flatter” organisational structure, speeding up decision making by giving employees more autonomy. Others invested in team training which focused on empowering employees to share their thoughts on how to best move forward.
Our processes and planning horizons have changed completely. We’ve had to become more agile and flexible in our approach to leadership, often reducing planning cycles and adapting to new realities much faster than before.
A focus on wellbeing was another common theme. Some organisations hosted more meetings to allow their employees to share stories – not only about work but also about their personal fears and victories.
Some also encouraged their employees to complete volunteer work together during work hours.
There was an emphasis across interviews on the fact all employees need additional rest and recovery time, and encouraging them to take time off whenever needed.
Making sacrifices
Many of the new support mechanisms had financial consequences for the organisations.
One business cancelled the salaries of its top management team one month after the war started. Another hired a full-time psychologist to provide counselling in both formal and informal sessions.
Some continued to pay the salaries of their serving members:
All our mobilized employees who are serving in the military have been receiving their salaries for the past three years. We also ensure they are equipped with everything they need, stay in constant contact with them, and support their families.
Knowing their business was supporting the war effort had a positive impact on employee motivation:
The only difference in employee motivation is the understanding that our company actively supports the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Thus, every employee in the company understands that through their work, they are involved in this support.
In the end, it is the connections between people these leaders saw as the key to their organisational resilience.
No matter how hard things get, how much grief and suffering we endure, we know for certain that tomorrow the sun will rise. And even if it’s not for us, it will be for our children. This is what gives us the strength to continue living, creating, and preserving Ukraine — for us and for future generations.
The authors would like to acknowledge their academic partners and coauthors from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, Yaryna Boychuk, Valeria Kozlova, Sophia Opatska, and Olena Trevoho, and thank all the Ukrainian business leaders who participated in this research.
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.
Widespread coral bleaching at Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia’s coast has deeply alarmed scientists and conservationists.
Photos captured by divers, published by The Guardian last week, show severe bleaching at several sites along the reef, which runs for 260 kilometres off the state’s northwest.
A severe marine heatwave in the Indian Ocean off WA has caused the coral bleaching. In some places, surface temperatures up to 4°C warmerthan usual have been recorded.
Hotter temperatures aren’t only happening at the ocean’s surface – data indicates they also extend several hundred metres deep. Warm, deeper water can shut down the ocean’s natural cooling process, putting corals at even greater risk of bleaching.
Counting the cost
The full extent of damage to Ningaloo won’t be known until scientists conduct field surveys in coming months.
So far, bleaching has been documented at several sites, including Turquoise Bay, Coral Bay, Tantabiddi, and Bundegi (Exmouth Gulf).
Other sites such as Scott Reef, Ashmore Reef, the Rowley Shoals and Rottnest Island are also at risk.
Damage wrought by the heatwave extends beyond coral. More than 30,000 fish have died since the September onset.
The below images show the heatwave’s progression. Temperatures from February last year are included for comparison.
The white circle shows the location of Ningaloo. Cooler temperatures are in blue and purple. Warmer temperatures are in yellow and orange.
The images show the heatwave reached Ningaloo in December last year and moved south in January. Temperatures fell slightly in February due to strong southerly winds. From March, temperatures are forecast to increase again.
A complex warming picture
According to recent data and modelled forecasts, hotter ocean temperatures off northern WA run several hundred metres deep.
During La Nina, trade winds strengthen and push warm water westward. This intensifies two important ocean currents.
The first is the Indonesian Throughflow – which carries warm Pacific waters through the Indonesian seas and into the eastern Indian Ocean. The second is the Leeuwin Current, which picks up this warm water and takes it further south towards Perth.
This has led to a build-up of hotter water along the WA coastline.
La Nina is also affecting WA’s reefs in other ways.
The process relies on “stratification” – that is, layers of seawater that differ in temperature, salinity and density (or weight). Warmer, less dense water collects at the surface and colder, denser water falls to deeper levels.
La Nina conditions can suppress, or even shut down, this cooling effect in two ways.
All this means the water pumped to the surface isn’t much cooler than temperatures at the surface.
For many reefs along the coast of WA, the suppression of this tidal cooling is probably contributing to worsening conditions, and more coral bleaching.
Most bleaching forecasts rely on sea surface temperatures. This means scientists may be underestimating the vulnerability of deeper reefs.
What’s in store for Ningaloo and surrounds?
Looking ahead, the situation at Ningaloo and surrounding reefs remains critical.
But unfortunately, temperatures are rising again and the marine heatwave is expected to continue until April, as the below image shows.
Sea surface temperature anomaly forecast for March to May. Ningaloo denoted with black ‘X’. Bureau of Meteorology
Climate change is making marine heatwaves more intense and frequent. It means reefs often don’t have time to recover between destructive bleaching events.
All this is compounded by the general trend towards warmer oceans as the planet heats up.
Drastic action on climate change is needed now. If this alarming pattern continues, the world’s reefs risk being lost entirely.
Nicole L. Jones receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Western Australian government.
Kelly Boden-Hawes 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.
Child vaccination is one of the most cost-effective health interventions. It accounts for 40% of the global reduction in infant deaths since 1974 and has led to big health gains in Australia over the past two decades.
Australia has been a vaccination success story. Ten years after we begun mass vaccination against polio in 1956, it was virtually eliminated. Our child vaccination rates have been among the best in the world.
But after peaking in 2020, child vaccination in Australia is falling. Governments need to implement a comprehensive strategy to boost vaccine uptake, or risk exposing more children to potentially preventable infectious diseases.
Child vaccination has been a triumph
Thirty years ago, Australia’s childhood vaccination rates were dismal. Then, in 1997, governments introduced the National Immunisation Program to vaccinate children against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, and measles.
Measures to increase coverage included financial incentives for parents and doctors, a public awareness campaign, and collecting and sharing local data to encourage the least-vaccinated regions to catch up with the rest of the country.
What followed was a public health triumph. In 1995, only 52% of one-year-olds were fully immunised. By 2020, Australia had reached 95% coverage for one-year-olds and five-year-olds. At this level, it’s difficult even for highly infectious diseases, such as measles, to spread in the community, protecting both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Gaps between regions and communities closed too. In 1999, the Northern Territory’s vaccination rate for one-year-olds was the lowest in the country, lagging the national average by six percentage points. By 2020, that gap had virtually disappeared.
The difference between vaccination rates for First Nations children and other children also narrowed considerably.
It made children healthier. The years of healthy life lost due to vaccine-preventable diseases for children aged four and younger fell by nearly 40% in the decade to 2015.
But that success is at risk. Since 2020, the share of children who are fully vaccinated has fallen every year. For every child vaccine on the National Immunisation Schedule, protection was lower in 2024 than in 2020.
Gaps between parts of Australia are opening back up. Vaccination rates in the highest-coverage parts of Australia are largely stable, but they are falling quickly in areas with lower vaccination.
In 2018, there were only ten communities where more than 10% of one-year-old children were not fully vaccinated. Last year, that number ballooned to 50 communities. That leaves more areas vulnerable to disease and outbreaks.
While Noosa, the Gold Coast Hinterland and Richmond Valley (near Byron Bay) have persistently had some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates, areas such as Manjimup in Western Australia and Tasmania’s South East Coast have recorded big declines since 2018.
Missing out on vaccination isn’t just a problem for children.
One preprint study (which is yet to be peer-reviewed) suggests vaccination during pregnancy may also be declining.
Far too many older Australians are missing out on recommended vaccinations for flu, COVID, pneumococcal and shingles. Vaccination rates in aged care homes for flu and COVID are worryingly low.
What’s going wrong?
Australia isn’t alone. Since the pandemic, child vaccination rates have fallen in many high-income countries, including New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Alarmingly, some regions in Australia have lower measles vaccination than that Texas county.
The timing of trends here and overseas suggests things shifted, or at least accelerated, during the pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy, fuelled by misinformation about COVID vaccines, is a growing threat.
This year, vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr was appointed to run the US health system, and Louisiana’s top health official has reportedly cancelled the promotion of mass vaccination.
In Australia, a recent survey found 6% of parents didn’t think vaccines were safe, and 5% believed they don’t work.
Those concerns are far more common among parents with children who are partially vaccinated or unvaccinated. Among the 2% of parents whose children are unvaccinated, almost half believe vaccines are not safe for their child, and four in ten believe vaccines didn’t work.
Other consequences of the pandemic were a spike in the cost of living, and a health system struggling to meet demand. More than one in ten parents said cost and difficulty getting an appointment were barriers to vaccinating their children.
There’s no single cause of sliding vaccination rates, so there’s no one solution. The best way to reverse these worrying trends is to work on all the key barriers at once – from a lack of awareness, to inconvenience, to lack of trust.
What governments should do
Governments should step up public health campaigns that counter misinformation, boost awareness of immunisation and its benefits, and communicate effectively to low-vaccination groups. The new Australian Centre for Disease Control should lead the charge.
Primary health networks, the regional bodies responsible for improving primary care, should share data on vaccination rates with GPs and pharmacies. These networks should also help make services more accessible to communities who are missing out, such as migrant groups and disadvantaged families.
State and local governments should do the same, sharing data and providing support to make maternal child health services and school-based vaccination programs accessible for all families.
Governments can communicate better about the benefits of vaccination. Yuri A/Shutterstock
Governments should also be more ambitious about tackling the growing vaccine divides between different parts of the country. The relevant performance measure in the national vaccination agreement is weak. States must only increase five-year-old vaccination rates in four of the ten areas where it is lowest. That only covers a small fraction of low-vaccination areas, and only the final stage of child vaccination.
Australia needs to set tougher goals, and back them with funding.
Governments should fund tailored interventions in areas with the lowest rates of vaccination. Proven initiatives include training trusted community members as “community champions” to promote vaccinations, and pop-up clinics or home visits for free vaccinations.
At this time of year, childcare centres and schools are back in full swing. But every year, each new intake has less protection than the previous cohort. Governments are developing a new national vaccination strategy and must seize the opportunity to turn that trend around. If it commits to a bold national plan, Australia can get back to setting records for child vaccination.
Grattan Institute has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.
Wendy Hu 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. Grattan Institute has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024.NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems
NASA will soon launch a new telescope which it says will create the “most colourful” map of the cosmos ever made.
The SPHEREx telescope is relatively small but will provide a humongous amount of knowledge in its short two-year mission.
It is an infrared telescope designed to take spectroscopic images – ones that measure individual wavelengths of light from a source. By doing this it will be able to tell us about the formation of the universe, the growth of all galaxies across cosmic history, and the location of water and life-forming molecules in our own galaxy.
In short, the mission – which is scheduled for launch on February 27, all things going well – will help us understand how the universe came to be, and why life exists inside it.
A massive leap forward
Everything in the universe, including you and the objects around you, emits light in many different colours. Our eyes split all that light into three bands – the brilliant greens of trees, blues of the sky and reds of a sunset – to synthesise a specific image.
But SPHEREx – short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer – will divide light from everything in the sky into 96 bands. This is a massive leap forward. It will cover the entire sky and offer new insights into the chemistry and physics of objects in the universe.
The mission will complement the work being done by other infrared telescopes in space, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
Both of these telescopes are designed to make high-resolution measurements of the faintest objects in the universe, which means they only study a tiny part of the sky at any given time. For example, the sky is more than 15 million times larger than what the James Webb Space Telescope can observe at once.
In its entire mission the James Webb Space Telescope could not map out the whole sky the way SPHEREx will do in only a few months.
SPHEREx will take will take spectroscopic images of 1 billion galaxies, 100 million stars, and 10,000 asteroids. It will answer questions that require a view of the entire sky, which are missed out by the biggest telescopes that chase the highest resolution.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use these filters to capture spectroscopic images of the cosmos. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Measuring inflation
The first aim of SPHEREx is to measure what astronomers call cosmic inflation. This refers to the rapid expansion of the universe immediately after the Big Bang.
The physical processes that drove cosmic inflation remain poorly understood. Revealing more information about inflation is possibly the most important research area of cosmology.
Inflation happened everywhere in the universe. To study it astronomers need to map the entire sky. SPHEREx is ideal for studying this huge mystery that is fundamental to our cosmos.
SPHEREx will use the spectroscopic images to measure the 3D positions of about a billion galaxies across cosmic history. Astronomers will then create a picture of the cosmos not just in position but in time.
This, plus a lot of statistics and mathematics, will let the SPHEREx team test different theories of inflation.
The SHEREx mission will complement the work of the James Webb Space Telescope, which captured this composite image of stars, gas and dust in a small region within the vast Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light-years away from Earth. NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
Pinpointing the location of life-bearing molecules
In the coldest parts of our galaxy, the molecules that create life (such as water, carbon dioxide and methanol) are trapped in icy particles. Those icy biogenic molecules have to travel from the cold gas in the galaxy onto planets so life can come to be.
Despite years of study, this process remains a huge mystery.
To answer this fundamental question about human existence, we need to know where all those molecules are.
What SPHEREx will provide is a complete census of the icy biogenic molecules in our surrounding galaxy. Icy biogenic molecules have distinct features in the infrared spectrum, where SPHEREx operates.
By mapping the entire sky, SPHEREx will pinpoint where these molecules are, not only in our galaxy but also in nearby systems.
Located some 13,700 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Centaurus of the Milky Way, RCW 49 is a dark and dusty stellar nursery that houses more than 2,200 stars. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wisconsin
Once we know where they all are, we can determine the necessary conditions to form biogenic molecules in space. In turn, this can tell us about a crucial step in how life came to be.
Currently 200 spectra have been taken on biogenic molecules in space. We expect the James Webb Space Telescope will obtain a few thousand such measurements.
SPHEREx will generate 8 million new spectroscopic images of life-bearing molecules. This will revolutionise our understanding.
Mapping the whole sky enables astronomers to identify promising regions for life and gather large-scale data to separate meaningful patterns from anomalies, making this mission a transformative step in the search for life beyond Earth.
Deanne Fisher receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Source: The Conversation – France – By Benjamin P. Horton, Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University
Here is a depressing fact: over the coming decades, sea-level rise will continue to threaten ecosystems, communities and cities. No matter how quickly we reduce our carbon emissions, our past emissions commit us to ongoing sea-level rise, given the long-drawn-out impact of climate warming on the oceans and ice sheets. Just how bad it gets, however, will depend on our current and future emissions.
Even as we strive for net-zero emissions, we must prepare for devastating possibilities. But decision-makers face a major obstacle: the specific rate and magnitude of future sea-level rise is deeply uncertain. Different methods produce different projections of long-term sea-level rise. The problem of reconciling these different methods and projections has undermined planning to protect people from future sea-level rise.
In a recent paper published in Earth’s Future, we and our colleagues tackle this problem. We propose a new method that combines the complementary strengths of different sea-level projections. We use our method to quantify the uncertainty of future sea-level rise. It allows us to estimate a “very likely” range. “Very likely” means that there is a 9-in-10 chance (90% probability) that future sea-level rise will lie within this range, if our future emissions follow an assumed emissions scenario.
Under a low-emissions scenario that corresponds to approximately 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels, global sea level will “very likely” rise between 0.3 and 1.0 metres by the end of this century. Under a high-emissions scenario that corresponds to approximately 5°C warming, global sea level will “very likely” rise between 0.5 and 1.9 metres. Given that we will likely exceed 2°C warming, preparing for more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 is, therefore, necessary.
Our method builds on and complements the current reference document for many decision-makers: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report IPCC 6AR. For five emissions scenarios, the IPCC published a most-likely “median” projection and a “likely” range. “Likely” means that there is at least a 2-in-3 chance (66% probability) of sea-level rise within this range. The “likely” range may understate the risk of more extreme possibilities, a weakness that can be addressed by a complementary “very likely” range. However, the IPCC did not estimate a “very likely” range because poorly understood ice sheet processes posed a challenge. We address this challenge, to provide decision-makers with more reliable estimates of future possibilities.
Many processes contribute to sea-level rise. Of particular importance are ice sheet processes in Greenland and Antarctica. Some of these ice sheet processes are well understood, but others less so. We have only a poor understanding of processes that could drive abrupt melting of ice, producing rapid sea-level rise.
Climate models and ice sheet models, such as those used in the IPCC 6AR, are very good at simulating well-understood processes, such as thermal expansion of the ocean. The IPCC used model-based projections to derive a reliable median projection and “likely” range. However, these models often neglect poorly understood processes that could cause the ice sheets to melt much faster than we expect. To complement the models, experts can provide alternative projections based on their understanding of these processes. This is known as expert elicitation. Therefore, the use of models and expert elicitation can provide complementary sea-level projections, but planners have great difficulty deciding when and where to apply the two different approaches.
In our paper, we have developed a novel method to combine the complementary sea-level projections from models and experts. We use our method to quantify the full uncertainty range of future sea-level rise using a probability distribution. This is how we can estimate a “very likely” range and explore the question, “What high-end sea-level rise should we plan for?”
A high-end projection
To make informed judgements, decision-makers often need information about low-likelihood, high-cost possibilities. A high-end projection of sea-level rise is especially useful when planning long-lasting critical infrastructure that is vital for the functioning of society and the economy. A high-end projection can also highlight a catastrophic risk associated with unrestrained carbon dioxide emissions.
We define our high-end projection as the 95th percentile of the probability distribution under the high-emissions scenario. Our high-end projection of global sea-level rise is 1.9 metres by the end of this century.
Our high-end projection complements existing high-end projections of 21st century sea-level rise. The IPCC 6AR included two: 1.6 metres and 2.3 metres. Our projection of 1.9 metres falls between these two values.
In contrast to the IPCC 6AR, we estimate the probability of reaching the high-end projection. If our future emissions follow the high-emissions scenario, we estimate that the probability of reaching 1.9 metres by the end of this century is 5% (1 in 20). Considering that the high-emissions scenario is unlikely, our high-end projection can be interpreted as a worst-case outcome. We also estimate the probability of exceeding 1.0 metres by the end of this century: 16% (about 1 in 6) under the high-emissions scenario, and 4% (1 in 25) under the low-emissions scenario.
Reducing the uncertainty
Through climate science, we have learned much about the Earth’s climate system. However, we still have much more to discover. As our understanding improves, the uncertainty in sea-level rise should reduce. Therefore, the “very likely” range of future sea-level rise should narrow, due to the ongoing research efforts of the climate science community.
In the meantime, we need to identify potential solutions that can reduce coastal flood risk in ways that support the long-term resilience and sustainability of communities and the environment, and reduce the economic costs associated with flood damage. Alongside local adaptation, the best way to mitigate sea-level rise is to slow down climate change by implementing the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement in 2015.
If we can limit warming to well below 2°C, consistent with the agreement, we estimate that the probability of reaching 1.9 metres by the end of the century shrinks to less than 0.2% (1 in 500). The more the world limits its greenhouse gas emissions, the lower the chance of triggering rapid ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica, and the safer we will be.
This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and National Environment Agency, Singapore under the National Sea Level Programme Funding Initiative (Award No. USS-IF-2020-3) and Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its AcRF Tier 3 Award MOE2019-T3-1-004.
Created in 2007 to help accelerate and share scientific knowledge on key societal issues, the Axa Research Fund has supported nearly 700 projects around the world conducted by researchers in 38 countries. To learn more, visit the website of the Axa Research Fund or follow @AXAResearchFund on X.
Benjamin P. Horton was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund: MOE2019-T3-1-004.
Benjamin S. Grandey’s research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and National Environment Agency, Singapore under the National Sea Level Programme Funding Initiative (Award No. USS-IF-2020-3).
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Frans Viljoen, Professor of International Human Rights Law, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
As the armed conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) rages on, calls are being made for non-military solutions.
One such process is a court case before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights – a judicial organ of the African Union (AU) established by African states “to ensure the protection of human and peoples’ rights”.
The case was brought by the DRC against Rwanda on 21 August 2023.
The DRC alleges that Rwanda has violated the African Union’s main human rights treaty, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Kinshasa claims Rwanda has supported M23 rebels since 2021 and that they are responsible for mass killings, mass displacement, destruction of schools, destruction of infrastructure and looting. Rwanda has always denied supporting M23.
I have followed the evolution of the African Court in my research since its inception in 2006. I consider this case to be highly significant. It would set a key precedent for human rights enforcement in Africa and tests the AU’s ability to uphold legal rulings. A successful outcome could encourage peaceful dispute resolution among African nations.
Significant case
The DRC vs Rwanda case is the first inter-state case ever to be submitted to the African Court.
Inter-state cases allow one state to submit a case against another for allegedly violating the African Charter, provided that they have both accepted the court’s jurisdiction. So far, only 34 of the AU member states – including the DRC and Rwanda – have accepted the court’s competence to hear cases against them.
The case of DRC v Rwanda can set an important African precedent. It serves as a way to uphold the integrity of human rights, and not serve the national interest of complaining states.
It’s also the first time African states have agreed to a judicial settlement of a dispute by an independent body of African judges. Eleven judges, of whom all but the presiding judge serve part-time, hear and decide cases at the court’s seat in Arusha, Tanzania. It may serve as an example that other states in similar situations could emulate, thus allowing for future conflicts to be defused.
Before the case can proceed, the court first has to consider “preliminary objections” by the state against which the case has been brought – in this case, Rwanda. If the court finds that it has the authority to hear and rule on the case, there is the possibility of legal consequences, like reparations.
This will be a big test for the African Union. The challenge will be getting countries to comply with decisions – since the African Court does not have an enforcement arm.
Even if both countries have accepted the court’s jurisdiction, compliance is not automatic. Compliance with the court’s orders has historically been far from exemplary – less than 10% of its decisions have been fully observed.
It is up to African Union (AU) states collectively to put pressure on non-compliant states. One possibility is imposing sanctions under article 23(2) of the AU Constitutive Act – something the AU policy organs have been reluctant to do so far.
Public hearing in DRC case
At a public hearing of the case in February 2025, Rwanda insisted that the court did not have the competence to deal with the case. It argues that the court does not have territorial jurisdiction to rule on the case, because the alleged violations took place outside the borders of Rwanda.
The DRC countered that while states are usually responsible for actions within their own territory, they are still accountable for actions they control outside their borders.
The DRC therefore asked the court to conclude that it has jurisdiction over Rwanda, based on the presence in the DRC of Rwanda’s armed forces and their support for M23.
Rwanda objected, claiming no clear “dispute” existed between it and the DRC. The DRC countered that a dispute didn’t need to be formal and one clearly existed due to the many unsuccessful efforts to resolve the conflict diplomatically.
Rwanda argued the case was inadmissible since victims hadn’t exhausted legal remedies in Rwanda. The DRC countered that expecting thousands of people to do so – amid insecurity and rights violations on a massive scale – was unrealistic.
Rwanda further argued that it was an abuse of process for the DRC to have instituted a similar case (Minister of Justice of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) v The Attorney General of the Republic of Rwanda) before the East African Court of Justice. It has heard “preliminary objections” from the attorney general of Rwanda and is yet to give its judgment on this issue. To this, the DRC responded that it had observed the only relevant requirement stipulated in the African Charter, namely, that it must not submit to the court a matter that had been settled by another dispute settlement process.
Next steps
After the public hearing, the court deliberated. Usually, it gives its judgment at its next session, which is likely to be in early June 2025.
The DRC had already approached the court in 2023 to adopt an “expedited procedure”. While the court dismissed this request, in March 2024, it agreed to deal with the case “on a priority basis”. In any event, it is obligated to deliver its judgment within 90 days of its deliberation.
Rwanda strongly opposed the African Court handling the case, but if the case moves forward, it must cooperate. This is because both Rwanda and the DRC have agreed to follow and enforce the court’s decisions as part of their legal commitment.
While this is a test case for the African Court, in the near future it may well become a test case for the African Union as a whole.
Frans Viljoen 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.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Mamadou Camara, enseignant-chercheur, Université des Sciences sociales et de Gestion de Bamako
As Mali’s mining sector faces growing tensions — highlighted by the recent seizure of gold stocks from the Canadian company Barrick by the military government — questions about economic sovereignty and mining governance have become more relevant than ever.
The mining sector plays a strategic role in Mali’s economy, with gold as its driving force. Yet, governance challenges persist at the heart of the sector’s evolution. In this interview, Mamadou Camara, a mining policy researcher, examines ongoing reforms, the impact of these developments, and the key challenges that must be addressed to ensure the sustainable and equitable exploitation of Mali’s mineral resources.
What role does the mining sector play in the Malian economy?
In 2023, the mining sector contributed 644 billion CFA (about US$1 billion) to Mali’s state budget. This represents 21.5% of Mali’s budget for the year and a slight increase from the previous year.
Gold remains the main product, with a production of 70 tonnes in 2023. Of these revenues, 644 billion CFA came from mining companies (US$1.1 billion), and 3 billion CFA (US$4.7 million) came from social payments — taxes based on employee wages, such as housing tax, flat-rate contributions, and professional training levies.
This highlights the significant role of the mining sector in the country’s economy. Including gold, the extractive sector contributed 6.3% of Malian GDP in 2023, up from 5.9% in 2022.
Exports amounted to 500 billion CFA francs (about US$784 million), accounting for three-quarters of the country’s total export revenue. The sector also created 61,023 new jobs in 2023, including 10,000 direct jobs.
Since 2013, Mali has been facing a security and political crisis that has led to coups d’état and the occupation of part of its territory by rebel groups. Amid this crisis, mining revenues have played a key role in financing major infrastructure projects.
These investments have built and maintained schools, health centres, roads and bridges, strengthening trade.
Today, the sector is increasingly seen as a pillar of national sovereignty, a key objective for Malian authorities. In 2023, the government issued 12 new exploration licences, prioritising Malian companies while also granting some permits to foreign firms.
Estimating the volumes extracted in the informal mining sector remains highly complex. Many actors operate outside formal regulatory frameworks, making precise data collection difficult.
What are the key changes in Mali’s new mining code and their expected impact?
The 2023 mining code reflects Mali’s ambition to increase its gains from mining, promote more inclusive local development, and strengthen sovereignty (control) over its natural resources. It emphasises “local content”.
With the introduction of specific legislation on local content, the new mining code prioritises the inclusion of Malian businesses and workers in the extractive sector.
The law sets clear guidelines for their participation and representation.
This initiative could boost local employment and strengthen the national economy. The authorities want Malians to directly feel the benefits of mining. Mining operators are now required to contribute 0.75% of their quarterly revenue to a local development fund. The new code also revises tax exemptions, particularly for fuel, to maximise state revenue.
As a strategic move, Mali now aims to increase its stake in mining projects. The state is set to secure an initial 10% share in any project, and it may get an additional 20% during the early years of production.
With 5% allocated to the Malian private sector, the total share could reach 35%, compared to the current 20%. This approach is expected to generate an additional 500 billion CFA francs (approximately US$784 million) for the national budget.
Mali has also restructured the duration and terms for granting mining licences. The new code allows for better resource exploitation. Large mines are now granted renewable permits for 12 years, while exploration licences are issued for a maximum of nine years.
Before the new mining code was adopted in 2023, exploration licences were granted for an initial period of three years, with the possibility of two renewals of three years each, totalling a maximum duration of nine years.
These changes aim to encourage more intensive and structured resource exploration.
What are the main challenges facing Mali’s mining sector?
The rise of the mining industry has brought both benefits and challenges. To manage these, the players involved have decided to develop a community development policy. This approach aims to create income opportunities while mitigating potential negative effects, such as environmental damage caused by mining operations.
Adaptation strategies are essential. These include improving access to financing, creating joint economic activities, and ensuring the security of mining zones. Other key areas are land management, housing, healthcare and schooling, as well as supporting public policies, programmes and civil society initiatives.
Artisanal gold mining has environmental impacts: it causes deforestation and pollution. Cutting trees destroys wildlife habitats, harms useful plant species and weakens the soil.
Pollution is another major concern. Chemicals contaminate water, soil, plants, animals and people. Air pollution is common due to overcrowding around mining sites.
The mining industry affects the economy, environment and society. It is a very important source of revenue for the country and it provides direct and indirect jobs to many people through the provision of services to companies operating in this sector.
To limit harm, mining communities should focus on four goals:
increase productivity by building the capacity of stakeholders
reduce the socio-economic vulnerability of local communities
strengthen stakeholders’ resilience to the effects of mining industry development
improve biodiversity conservation and mitigate environmental degradation.
How can Mali improve mining governance and sustainability?
The new mining code already improves governance by addressing the legitimate expectations of Mali’s population and government. It promotes a more responsible approach to managing the sector.
This code ensures that mining benefits are shared fairly among all stakeholders, including local communities, authorities and mining companies.
Mali is rich in mineral resources. The country has vast untapped potential throughout its territory. However, security issues in the north hinder exploration and mining activities. Some areas remain unassigned to companies due to ongoing insecurity.
Mamadou Camara is a member a political party in Mali.
Visibility has always been important in people’s decisions about where to live and how to arrange their spaces. People make connections with what they can see. Being able to see prominent landmarks, such as certain mountain peaks, rivers or ancestral sites, could help reinforce a community’s connection to its cultural and spiritual landscape.
Some people prefer homes with scenic views, such as apartments overlooking parks or waterfronts, and businesses often choose locations with high visibility to attract customers. In both ancient and modern contexts, visibility plays a key role in how people position themselves in their environment.
That’s why visibility is a useful concept when studying the past.
Archaeologists are interested in what visible and hidden spaces meant to people in long-ago cultures. They have used the idea of visibility to examine things like where settlements were located, socio-political relationships as well as when and where people chose to move.
In the past 30 years, they’ve been helped in these studies by digital tools like geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is a computer system that uses software and data to map, analyse and manage geographic information.
But this method is still underutilised in Africa. It has only recently been taken up and very few visibility studies have been conducted on the continent.
I’m a geospatial data scientist who specialises in uncovering spatial patterns and relationships in archaeological data. I work with the Arcreate project, a group of researchers working on mobility, migration, creativity and knowledge transmission in African societies.
Recently I published a study of 19th century settlements in the Magaliesberg region in South Africa, using GIS tools to analyse what the visibility of the sites was telling us. Were the settlements designed and positioned to be more visible or less? And did this say something about what mattered to the people who lived there?
I hope my study serves as a framework for comparative analyses of other African sites in archaeology and sheds some light on what went into the choice of these locations.
Sotho-Tswana history in southern Africa
In the early 19th century, the Sotho-Tswana farming communities in South Africa’s hilly Magaliesberg region (about 179km north-west of Johannesburg) grew substantially and became more concentrated. Thousands of settlements developed. Among them were the sites I studied: Marothodi, Molokwane and Kaditshwene. They have also been studied over the years by other archaeologists. Today, all that is left of these sites are the stone wall ruins.
These settlements were densely populated. They consisted of central kraals (livestock enclosures, or lesaka in the Sesotho language) surrounded by homesteads built of stone. Kaditshwene was the most populous, with about 15,000 residents, and was inhabited by Sotho-Tswana farming communities for the longest time (1650-1828), followed by Molokwane (about 12,000, 1790-1823). At Marothodi (about 7,000, 1815-1823), people produced a surplus of iron and copper (which they traded) as well as keeping livestock.
Cattle were very important in these communities, playing a central role in cultural practices and symbolising wealth. The visibility of cattle kraals is therefore of interest: it may reveal what people wanted others to see and know about their wealth. It adds to other kinds of knowledge that archaeologists have built up about these communities.
Technique to analyse visibility
My study analysed how these 19th century Sotho-Tswana kraals would have been visible from certain points inside and outside the settlement.
I used a computational technique that drew on LiDAR imagery (high resolution imagery created using laser technology) and software called ArcMap.
Visibility analysis finds out to what extent observer locations (kraals) can be seen from different points on a map (LiDAR imagery). It compared the visibility of kraals and other spaces, taking elevation (height of structures like stone walls) as a key variable.
The analysis was done at two levels: the settlement (a spatial scale of 650 metres) and the household (a spatial scale of 10×25 metres).
At the settlement level, I found differences within and between sites.
At Marothodi, two kraals were highly visible from the surrounding 650 metre area and others less so. Overall, it was the most visible settlement, comparatively.
At Molokwane, the central cluster of the kraals was highly visible but visibility decreased with distance within the 650 metre surrounding area.
At Kaditshwene, kraals were not very visible; in fact, this was the case for the settlement overall.
Marothodi, though smallest in size, featured more kraals, while Kaditshwene, the largest, had the fewest kraals.
At the household level, the visibility of kraal outlines at Marothodi and Molokwane was significant both from within and outside the kraals.
So what do these findings tell us?
Space and priorities
My analysis of the kraals quantitatively revealed a correlation between spatial arrangements and social, economic and defensive priorities (which other researchers have suggested before).
Many homesteads and kraals were situated close to each other, emphasising visibility within and around the settlements, which served as symbols of social status and wealth. Larger, more elaborate homesteads, typically belonging to elites, were positioned in a manner that showed off their owners’ power and influence.
However, more settlements with much larger surrounding areas (beyond 650 metres) need to be studied to confirm these correlations in other landscapes.
Marothodi had the most visible kraals, likely reflecting its economic focus on the trade of iron and copper. Heightened visibility symbolised wealth and economic activity. Prominent kraals and an open layout suggest deliberate efforts to emphasise trade connections and economic power. The inhabitants evidently wanted to make visible the fact that they were open for business, and that they were doing well from that business.
Conversely, the settlement of Kaditshwene, despite its size, had the least visible kraals. This suggests a defensive strategy aimed at safeguarding cattle from theft during periods of conflict. The undulating landscape and hilltop positioning of settlements reinforced its defensive approach.
These observations underscore the dual nature of visibility. It serves as a symbol of wealth and status while also functioning as a tactical asset in defensive strategies. While Marothodi needed to be visible to facilitate trade, Kaditshwene concealed its kraals to be safer during conflict.
In summary, the visibility patterns of these settlements were influenced by a combination of the landscape, as well as social, economic and defensive needs.
Mncedisi Siteleki 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.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ruchika Gupta, Assistant Professor and Medical Microbiologist, Department of Pathobiology and Lab Medicine, LHSC and Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University
The resurgence of measles in Canada is a stark reminder that we cannot take public health achievements for granted.(CDC and NIAID), CC BY
In the landscape of public health, few stories are as compelling as the unexpected return of a disease we once thought was conquered. Measles, a highly contagious viral infection formally considered eliminated from Canada in 1998, is making a surprising comeback, challenging our public health systems and communities at large.
The rising numbers of measles cases are a concern as they represent real people and real risks. The current measles situation in Canada is a public health challenge and a critical moment for awareness and action. From urban centres like Toronto and Montréal to smaller communities across the provinces, an emerging pattern demands attention and understanding.
Outbreaks in Canada
Current measles outbreaks in Canada are primarily affecting Ontario and Québec. In Ontario, 57 confirmed cases have been documented in 2025, as of Feb. 13. Meanwhile, Québec is experiencing its second outbreak, with 24 confirmed cases reported this year, as of Feb. 21. An earlier outbreak in Québec involved 51 cases from February to June 2024.
This resurgence can be attributed to several factors, including declining vaccination rates, international travel reintroducing the virus into Canada and the highly contagious nature of measles.
Vaccination rates for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine have dropped to approximately 82.5 per cent, a significant decline observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This reduction has created a population of highly susceptible individuals, undermining community immunity — commonly referred to as herd immunity — which requires a vaccination coverage of 95 per cent to effectively prevent outbreaks.
How measles spreads
Measles is also one of the most contagious infectious diseases, with a basic reproduction number (R₀) of 12–18. This means that, in a fully susceptible population, one case of measles can lead to an average of 12–18 secondary cases. For the current outbreak, although the initial source was linked to international travel, the majority of cases are now the result of local transmission within Canada, highlighting the importance of maintaining high vaccination coverage and swift public health interventions.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease that spreads easily through respiratory droplets. When an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes, they release virus particles into the air. These particles can remain infectious for up to two hours, even after the person has left the area. What makes measles particularly challenging to control is its extended period of contagiousness.
An infected individual can spread the virus from four days before the characteristic rash appears until four days after its onset. This means people can unknowingly transmit the disease before they even realize they’re infected.
The virus’s ability to spread before symptoms appear, combined with its long contagious period, makes it difficult to contain outbreaks once they begin. This is why maintaining high vaccination rates across the population is crucial. It’s not just about individual protection, but about safeguarding the entire community, especially those who cannot be vaccinated due to age or medical conditions.
While anyone who isn’t immune either through vaccination or previous infection can contract measles, certain groups — including pregnant women, immunocompromised patients and unvaccinated children under age five — are at higher risk of complications including pneumonia and brain swelling.
Protecting individuals and communities
The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is safe and highly effective, with two doses providing up to 99 per cent protection. (Shutterstock)
The message from health-care providers is clear: vaccination is the most effective way to prevent measles. Here’s what you can do:
Ensure vaccination is up to date: The measles vaccine is typically combined with mumps and rubella (MMR) or with varicella (MMRV). Two doses of the vaccine are 99 per cent effective at preventing infection.
Check your immunization records: If you’re unsure about your vaccination status, consult your health-care provider or check your Personal Immunization Record.
Vaccinate children on schedule: In Ontario, children receive two doses of the measles vaccine before age seven as part of routine vaccinations.
Consider early vaccination for infants: In areas with ongoing outbreaks, infants as young as six months may be eligible for early vaccination. Contact your health-care provider before travel for their advice. Plan ahead for travel: If you’re traveling internationally, consult a health-care provider at least six weeks before your trip to review your immunization history.
Be aware of the symptoms: high fever, cough, runny nose, red eyes and a characteristic rash.
If you suspect you or someone in your family has measles, call your health-care provider before visiting a medical facility. This allows them to take necessary precautions to prevent further spread.
Vaccination is our most effective tool against measles. The MMR vaccine is safe and highly effective, with two doses providing up to 99 per cent protection. By maintaining high vaccination rates across our communities, we can prevent outbreaks and protect those who can’t be vaccinated due to age or medical conditions. As we navigate this situation, it’s crucial to stay informed and follow public health guidelines. Together, we can work to contain these outbreaks and protect the health of all Canadians.
The resurgence of measles in Canada is a stark reminder that we cannot take our public health achievements for granted. Vaccination has been one of the most successful public health interventions in history, saving millions of lives. By working together — health-care providers, parents and communities — we can turn the tide on this resurgence and protect our most vulnerable populations from this preventable disease.
Measles is not just a childhood illness or a simple rash. It’s a serious disease with potentially severe complications. But with vigilance, education and a commitment to vaccination, we can once again push measles to the brink of elimination in Canada. The health of our communities depends on it.
Ruchika Gupta 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.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Joel Westheimer, University research chair in democracy and education, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Institutions once considered stable now feel precarious. The assault on truth — already well underway — has intensified, with political leaders openly flouting constitutional principles, suppressing dissent and dismantling democratic safeguards.
The rhetoric of grievance and retribution has become the soundtrack of public discourse.
People, exhausted by economic precarity and what author, activist and documentarian Astra Taylor calls the deliberate manufacturing of insecurity, are drawn to the false promise of strongman rule. The desire for stability — however undemocratic — threatens to eclipse commitments to liberty and justice.
For educators or civic leaders who teach young people about democracy these are not abstract concerns. Civic educators’ struggles to foster students’ civic engagement and strengthen their commitments to democratic institutions and the growing crisis in democracy makes these efforts even harder.
As a professor of democracy and education, and as an educator, I cannot promise young people that their efforts will always succeed. But I can assure them that whether in the face of victories or defeats, they are walking a powerful and worthwhile path.
The risk of civic despair
One popular approach to strengthening commitments to democracy is to engage students in community projects that address difficult societal challenges.
Some teachers take students to engage in community work that is deeply tied to the curriculum, through approaches known as action civics or service learning.
But when young people take on social action projects — especially those aimed at addressing systemic injustices — the experience can backfire if it leads only to frustration and failure.
Studies have shown that students who participate in civic initiatives that do not produce tangible change often become less likely to engage in civic life in the future.
When efforts to improve conditions in their schools, communities or governments meet bureaucratic obstacles or outright resistance, young people do not always emerge more energized. Instead, many walk away discouraged, cynical and convinced that the system cannot be moved.
This is not to say that teachers, parents or other adult mentors should avoid encouraging activism — far from it. But if educators fail to prepare students for the realities of social change — that it can be slow and difficult — we risk reinforcing exactly the kind of disengagement we seek to combat.
If young people see the struggle for justice only as a series of disappointments, it’s easy to understand why they may turn away.
We need to cultivate the kind of hope that sustains action despite uncertainty — the kind that fuels long-term struggles for justice, even when victories are slow in coming.
Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and political dissident who later became president, wrote that hope is not the same as choosing struggles that are headed for quick success: “Hope … is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
This distinction is vital. As I explore in my book about education for democracy, hope is not a guarantee of success, but the insistence that working for justice is meaningful in and of itself. When we work collectively on projects we believe in, we form bonds that are valued and energizing.
Howard Zinn, the late historian and activist, echoed this idea when he urged us to “hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.”
Being part of something bigger
History is filled with unexpected turns, reversals and moments when change happens against all odds. As German theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg wrote, before the revolution, everyone says it’s impossible. After, they say it was inevitable.
The singer-songwriter Holly Near expressed this artfully in her anthem to the many social change movements that have existed for as long as there have been things to improve. Change does not always happen at broadband speeds, but knowing one is part of a timeless march toward good goals makes much of what we do worthwhile. In her song “The Great Peace March,” Near sings:
“Believe it or not / as daring as it may seem / it is not an empty dream
To walk in a powerful path / neither the first nor the last / great peace march.”
Social change is about connecting with one another and being part of something larger than ourselves — a “powerful path” that stretches beyond any single moment or movement.
Hope as a practice
So how do we teach hope? How do we equip young people not just to work for change, but to sustain that work over the long haul?
First, we must be honest about setbacks. Too often, we romanticize past movements, presenting them as linear progressions toward justice. We do young people a disservice when we erase the years of struggle, failure and uncertainty that preceded social victories. A more honest history includes moments of despair as well as triumph.
Second, we must frame civic action as an ongoing practice rather than a single event. Students should see their work as part of a continuum.
Finally, we must model hope ourselves. Young people are watching us. If we meet today’s challenges with cynicism and resignation, they will learn that democracy is a lost cause. But if we demonstrate an enduring commitment to engagement and justice, they will see that democracy is not something we inherit; it is something we build.
We can promise young people that to engage in the work of justice is to be part of a legacy that stretches across generations. And that, I believe, is hope worth teaching.
Joel Westheimer receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
When U.S. President Donald Trump first suggested Canada should become the 51st American state, the federal government dismissed it as just a joke. Finance Minister Dominic Leblanc insisted it was “in no way a serious comment.”
Now that Trump has carried through on his aggressive economic threats — launching a trade war with China and raising the possibility of similar conflicts with Canada, Mexico and the European Union — his imperialist expansionism is in plain sight.
Canadian leaders have come to realize that Trump’s actions may not be a temporary or minor irritant, but rather an attack on Canadian sovereignty itself.
The failure to take Trump’s words seriously is reminiscent of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s skepticism in 1938 that Hitler would actually risk world war despite the latter’s aggressive rhetoric, annexation of Austria and threats to Czechoslovakia and Poland.
What, then, have been the signs of Trump’s expansionist tendencies? American economic and military might, albeit declining relative to emerging powers like China and India, still provides a solid basis for the projection of U.S. supremacy. But there are also two new key elements at play.
A billionaire-corporate administration
The Trump administration appears to operate with a distinctly corporate mindset, treating the nation like a business empire. Trump has stacked his administration with private sector leaders and corporate billionaires such as Elon Musk, Doug Burgum and Howard Lutnick.
Like other billionaires, their immense business success has been founded not on mainstay competitive market practices like productivity or cost-cutting, but on predatory and cannibalistic ones.
These include controlling resources like oil, gold, diamonds and coltan to secure production inputs; buying out competitors to monopolize markets and patents; and deliberately breaking up and destroying companies through mergers and acquisitions with little regard for the resulting job losses.
Under the guise of national security, the idea is not simply to safeguard borders, but to engage in economic expansionism and real estate development, aided by the U.S. military when needed. Taking control of land, waterways and mineral wealth is critical to building “America’s Golden Age” of corporate capitalism.
This approach seems to be a mainly business one, with little concern for the social costs (recession, unemployment, violence) produced by such imperialistic ventures. In line with his infamous book, The Art of the Deal, Trump appears to view foreign nations and domestic opponents alike as obstacles to be callously bullied, degraded, manipulated, exploited and finally vanquished.
American nationalist populism
The Trump administration’s imperial ambitions lie in the nationalist populism that propelled Trump and his allies into power for the second time.
Trump’s populism has successfully tapped into widespread anxieties among Americans — job insecurity, food prices, the housing crisis — by promising to soothe their worries through the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) agenda.
Like other right-wing populist movements around the globe — Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s in Turkey, Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary and the Brexit campaign in the U.K. — the MAGA movement has sought to unify the U.S. by identifying and targeting perceived national enemies. These include so-called “illegal” migrants, transgender people and the country’s largest trading rivals: Mexico, Canada and China.
By blaming these groups, especially those seen as contributing to America’s economic decline, MAGA whips up nationalist sentiment in the form of suspicion, aggression and vengeance. The result is a deeply polarized nationalist discourse in which one is either a loyal supporter or an enemy; a believer or a “woke” liberal.
A lethal imperial set-up
The combination of U.S. global power, nationalist populism and the Trump administration’s corporate-driven, predatory approach makes for a dangerous dynamic.
This mix is fuelling a form of economic expansionism that is now beginning to manifest itself. The impending trade wars, potential dismantling of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (which Trump initiated in 2018 to avoid unilateral trade moves by its signatories) and the brazen disregard for the socioeconomic consequences of foreign territorial control, such as the forced displacement of Palestinians, are all signs of this.
While many assumed Trump’s administration would be protectionist and isolationist, a more troubling and nefarious reality is emerging. His administration appears to be intent on securing America’s industrial dominance through trade wars while expanding it through hawkish economic imperialism.
There is a clear ruthlessness to this approach, with a willingness to pressure not only America’s perceived enemies but also its allies. “America First” is starting to looks like “America Above All Others” as Trump attempts to bully U.S. rivals into subordination, with disturbing echoes of past authoritarians.
Unravelling American imperial designs
Many obstacles could prevent Trump’s aggressive expansionism from fully taking shape. While the key ingredients may already be there, and some have begun to be deployed, that doesn’t mean they will come to fruition.
The Trump administration’s policymaking process is often chaotic and theatrical, prioritizing short-term political gains over long-term strategy. This instability undermines any consistent efforts at expansion.
There is also the risk that Trump’s trade wars will backfire. They could end up causing hardship to U.S. companies and consumers through higher food and energy prices, job losses in key industries like agriculture and auto manufacturing, and increased stock market instability. Such consequences could negatively affect Trump’s corporate allies.
Meanwhile, Trump’s economic and military rivals could forge new alliances to challenge his attempts at global supremacy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for instance, recently met with the head of NATO and other European allies to strengthen trade and security ties.
The first step to any countermoves by Trump’s foreign adversaries will be seeing his regime’s designs for what they are: chaotic, perhaps, but serious expansionist ones.
Ilan Kapoor 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.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Erin Tolley, Canada Research Chair in Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Carleton University
Twenty. That’s it. That’s the total number of Black Canadians ever elected to the House of Commons of Canada. There have been 372 Johns and 77 Jeans.
You can easily find data on women parliamentarians, members of Parliament with military experience and even parliamentarians who have died in office. However, you’d be hard-pressed to find a complete list of Black Canadians in politics, never mind a comprehensive account of their experiences.
Because of their relative absence from accounts of Canada’s political history, Black Canadians’ contributions to politics are often overlooked or ignored. This erasure prevents governments, political parties, and researchers from crafting strategies to address political inequality.
When we lack relevant racial data on political candidacy and electoral outcomes, we can’t track progress or identify barriers. And when Black Canadians aren’t present in politics, public policies are less likely to reflect their circumstances and less responsive to their needs.
Groundbreaking new research from Carleton University and Operation Black Vote Canada aims to change that. Through archival research, a survey and more than 30 in-depth interviews, our report, Black on the Ballot documents the presence, backgrounds, motivations and experiences of Black Canadians in politics. Here’s what we found.
Black Canadians in elected office
Our research helped to identify more than 380 Black Canadians who have run for and served in elected office over the past two decades. Our focus was on candidates and officeholders at the school board, municipal, provincial and federal levels of politics.
Undoubtedly, there are holes in this list, especially further back in history and at the municipal and school board levels, where more ephemeral record-keeping and gaps in local news coverage make this type of historical research challenging.
From this pool, we tracked down contact information for 212 possible respondents. In January 2023, we invited them to complete the first-ever national survey of Black Canadian candidates and officeholders. Ninety-five did so. This is what they told us.
The local level is an important political entry point for Black candidates. Most survey respondents said they had run at the municipal level as councillors (52 per cent) or mayor (six per cent), while 23 per cent ran as school board trustees. Less costly campaigns and the absence of gatekeeping by political parties contribute to lower barriers to entry at the local level. Nineteen per cent of respondents had run provincially, and 21 per cent federally.
Most Black Canadians in politics are first- or second-generation Canadians. A majority of respondents, 62 per cent, identified as Caribbean. Black candidates and officeholders have high levels of education; 40 per cent have earned a graduate or professional degree, and over half (56 per cent) have a college or university degree.
Business is the most common profession for Black Canadian politicians, followed by government and politics and law. This pipeline into politics roughly mirrors that of other elected officials.
We found that Black men and women were equally likely to run for office. This pattern diverges from research that finds women, in general, are less likely than men to come forward as candidates, at least at the federal level.
More than one-third of survey respondents ran for a provincial or federal party; of these, most (47 per cent) ran for the Liberals, 26 per cent for the New Democratic Party, 12 per cent each for the Greens or Conservatives, and three per cent for the Bloc or Parti Québécois.
Motivations for running
When asked about the factors that influenced their decision to run for office, 73 per cent of Black candidates said they felt it was important for people like them to have a strong voice in government. Just over half (52 per cent) said they were interested in addressing a particular policy issue.
Although Black men and women are equally likely to run for office, our research shows other differences in candidate emergence. Just over half of women respondents said they had not seriously considered running until someone else suggested it, compared to 28 per cent of men. While 47 per cent of Black men said running for office was entirely their own idea, just 26 per cent of Black women said the same.
Encouragement is thus an important catalyst for political engagement, especially for Black women. Other research indicates women are less likely to be recruited by political parties to run for elected office.
In our survey, 52 per cent of Black women said a party official suggested they run, compared to just 16 per cent of Black men. Ten times as many women respondents as men said party recruitment was consequential to their decision to run. Political parties seem to play an important facilitative role in Black women candidate’s emergence; this phenomenon is known as “affirmative gatekeeping.”
Improving Black Canadians’ representation in politics
Our research identifies a number of challenges to gaining elected office, including difficulties raising funds and recruiting volunteers. Half of survey respondents said others had discouraged them from running for office, while 71 per cent said they faced discrimination while running for or serving in office.
We heard that it’s important to share stories of Black success in politics, to adopt multi-pronged recruitment strategies, to demystify the process of running for office and to ensure elections are accessible to all voters.
A clip from the podcast series that accompanies the Black on the Ballot report.
We also heard that diversification initiatives need to focus on the inclusiveness of political spaces, rather than just how many Black Canadians run for office. Candidates and officeholders reported hostility and feelings of isolation, as well as individual and institutional refusals to address discrimination. These experiences are reiterated by guests on the podcast that accompanies our report.
Despite these challenges, when asked whether they would run again, 87 per cent of survey respondents said yes, a number that reveals Black Canadians’ unflinching commitment to public service and to community. We need to stoke this spark, not extinguish it.
Erin Tolley receives funding from the Canada Research Chairs program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This research was undertaken in partnership with Operation Black Vote Canada.
If the American role in globalization has been to consume the world’s products and resources by building on a foundation of ever-increasing debt, China’s has been to make tangible goods for the international market.
China has economies of scale that no other country — except India — can match. Its manufacturing dominance is the logical outcome of introducing an increasingly technologically sophisticated country with a vast population to the modern global system.
The first Donald Trump administration used tariffs to try to draw investment into the U.S. and stimulate domestic industry. He believed tariffs would create more manufacturing jobs, shrink the federal deficit and lower food prices.
To the Global South, there are clear benefits to accessing affordable, high-quality technology and industrial products from China. The industrialized world can also benefit significantly from Chinese manufacturers, but possibly at the cost of its own established industrial capacity.
The world is entering a new era of globalization. For many states, that means trying to keep from being economically undermined by the U.S. while deciding how to manage the economic and political costs and benefits of engaging with China’s massive industrial capabilities.
Shaun Narine 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.
Peter Dutton has launched a game of one-upmanship after Anthony Albanese at the weekend unveiled Labor’s $8.5 billion health policy that promises near universal bulk billing for GP visits by 2030.
Dutton wants to neutralise health as an election battleground. So he immediately pledged to match the Albanese policy. He’s included another $500 million, from an already announced Coalition policy for mental health, so he can get to the bigger number of $9 billion.
What’s more, the Opposition leader said the government should legislate the health plan before the election. There are two issues with that call.
On the present parliamentary sitting timetable, legislation could in theory be passed in budget week, which is set to start March 25. But, as everyone who’s paying attention knows, the current speculation is there probably won’t be a budget, with many players and observers anticipating Albanese will soon announce an April election.
Secondly, however, legislation is not needed. The changes can be made by regulation.
The Coalition decision to take over the Labor health policy holus bolus may be tactically smart – time will tell. Fixing up bulk billing will be popular; the opposition knows it would be on risky ground getting into an argument about it, even on detail.
But just adopting such a big Labor policy, within hours of seeing it, without further thought or strutiny, raises questions about the Coalition’s policy rigour.
Doesn’t it have a few ideas of its own? Labor’s policy, while welcomed, has already come under some criticisms. For instance, there are suggestions it might be harder to address the bulk billing issue in certain areas than in others, so maybe the claims for the policy are too sweeping. And some experts would prefer greater attention on more fundamental reforms to Medicare.
In strict policy terms, as distinct from political expediency, the Coalition’s approach just seems lazy. Shadow health minister Anne Ruston is said to have been out and about with stakeholders – did she come to exactly the same policy conclusions as Labor? Presumably, given the policy’s expense, a Coalition government would not be able to spend more on other health initiatives, which restricts its scope to do further or different things.
On the fiscal side, Dutton is looking for general spending cuts but says there will be no cuts in health. “The Coalition always manages the economy more effectively and that’s why we can afford to invest in health and education,” he said on Sunday.
Can we believe in this “no cuts” line? The government points back to Tony Abbott’s time when similar promises were made and the reality didn’t match the rhetoric. Dutton was health minister then and the government tried to introduce a Medicare co-payment. That attempt fizzled in face of opposition, but some voters might think that a Coalition that puts on Labor’s clothes so readily might shed some of them when in office, pleading the weather was hotter than it expected. That’s especially possible when it is a policy that stretches out several years, as this one does.
Certainly Labor has already been homing in on Dutton’s record from more than a decade ago.
None of this alters the fact that something needs to be done to boost bulk billing, which has now fallen to about 78% of GP visits. The govenrment’s disputes the opposition’s figure that it reached 88% under the Coalition but indisputably, it has certainly tumbled from where it once was.
The question now is, who will people trust more to fix it up?
Dr Chalmers goes to Washington
Meanwhile, the government is still battling on all fronts to make its case heard in Washington for an exemption from the US tariffs on aluminium and steel.
In a flying trip at the start of this week Treasurer Jim Chalmers will be the first Australian minister to visit there since President Trump announced the tariffs.
The treasurer will have discussions with the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whom he met (courtesy of ambassador Kevin Rudd) before the presidential election. So the talks will have the advantage of familiarity.
Chalmers on Sunday played down the prospect of any finality on tariffs coming out of his visit, which will also take in a conference of superannuation fund investors looking to put money into American businesses. The conference is being held at the Australian embassy.
If Australia eventually gets a favourable result on tariffs in the near term, the treasurer will be able to claim at least a tick for his efforts.
Michelle Grattan 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne
Labor yesterday foreshadowed a major Medicare change to address the falling rate of bulk billing, with an A$8.5 billion election announcement. The government said it would increase incentive payments for GPs to bulk bill all patients, from November 1 2025.
Today the Coalition said it would match Labor’s Medicare investment dollar-for-dollar.
Medicare was designed as a universal scheme to eliminate financial barriers to access to health care. The contemporary slogan is that you only need your Medicare card, not your bank card, to see your doctor.
But fewer than half of Australians are always bulk billed when the see a doctor. So how did we get into this situation? And what could these changes mean for access to care?
Until changes introduced by then Health Minister Tony Abbott in 2003, Medicare was the same for everyone.
But in response to declining rates of GP bulk billing at the time, the then Coalition government backed away from Medicare’s universality and introduced targeted bulk billing incentives for pensioners and health-care card-holders, children, people in rural and remote Australia and, in a political fix to appease then Tasmanian independent Senator Brian Harradine, all Tasmanians.
Fast-forward to 2014 and then Health Minister Peter Dutton introduced legislation as part of the budget for a compulsory copayment for GP consultations – a proposal that did not survive six months and failed in the Senate. A smaller optional payment also failed to get approval.
But the idea of getting Australians to pay out of pocket to see a GP survived. It was introduced by stealth by freezing GP rebates, rather than adjusting them to inflation. This slowly forced GPs to introduce patient co-payments as their costs increased and their rebates didn’t.
By the time Labor was elected, bulk billing was said to be in freefall.
Labor’s first response was to restore the indexation of rebates, so they increase increase in line with inflation in November of each year.
It then tripled the bulk billing incentive. This meant GPs received a greater rebate when they didn’t charge patients an out-of-pocket fee.
But the new incentive was not enough to cover the gap between rebate and fees in metropolitan areas.
What proportion of Australians are now bulk billed?
Only about 48% of people have the security of “always” being bulk billed when they see a GP. A further 24% are “usually” bulk billed.
Bulk billing rates are highest in poorer areas – South West Sydney has an “always” rate of 81%, almost quadruple the rate in the ACT (23%), which has Australia’s lowest “always” rate.
The always bulk billed rate – excluding special COVID items which required bulk billing – has dropped from about 64% in 2021–22.
The rate of bulk billing as a percentage of all visits to the GP, rather than people, is much higher. Around 78% of all attendances (aka visits) in the second half of 2024 were bulk billed. The higher rate is because more frequent users, such as older Australians, are bulk billed at a higher rate than younger people.
What does the new bulk billing package include?
The initiative announced yesterday includes three positive changes.
First, it again increases the bulk billing incentive.
It also introduces an additional bonus for general practices which achieve 100% billing.
The new combined Medicare rebate in metropolitan areas for a standard bulk billed visit to the GP is A$69.56 when both changes are applied. This is $27 above the current rebate of $42.85 (without any bulk billing incentive).
The current average out-of-pocket payment when a service is not bulk billed is $46. So there will still be a gap, but the difference between bulk billing and not is now significantly smaller.
*Totals include item Medicare rebate, Bulk Billing Incentive item rebate, and 12.5% Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program payment. Government Press Release
The government expects a major uplift – to 90% of visits bulk billed – as a result.
State government payroll taxes, also encourage bulk billing, by not requiring GPs to pay payroll tax on consultations that are bulk billed. This will provide a further incentive to increase the bulk billing rate.
The second positive change is that the new initiatives are for everyone. This ends the two-tiered incentive the Coalition introduced in 2003 and restores Medicare as a truly universal scheme.
Australia will now rejoin all other high-income countries (other than the United States) in having health funding underpinned by universality.
Third is the introduction of a 12.5% “practice payment” bonus for practices that bulk bill all patients.
This starts the necessary transition from a reliance on fee-for-service payments as the main payment type for general practice.
A “practice payment” is more holistic and better suited to a world where more people have multiple chronic disease which require care for the whole person, rather than episodic care. It signals payments need to be redesigned for that new reality.
Over time, this could fund and encourage multi-disciplinary teams of GPs, nurses and allied health professionals such as psychologists and physiotherapists – rather than patients always seeing a GP.
The downsides
The main risk practices face in contemplating these changes is the fear of how long this new scheme will last. A previous Coalition government showed it was prepared to use a rebate freeze to achieve its policy of a shift away from Medicare as a universal scheme.
The best way of reducing that risk would be to build in indexation of the rebate, and the incentive, into legislation.
The Royal Australian College of GPs says not everyone will be bulk billed because rebates are still too low to cover the cost of care.
This is true, as the gap between the prevailing metro bulk billed fee and the new rebate plus incentive will be about $20. But the aim is to increase bulk billing to 90% not 100% – and that is probably achievable.
Bottom line
The new arrangements will likely reverse the decline in the rates of bulk billing. The government can reasonably expect a bulk billing rate of around 90% of visits in the future.
For consumers facing cost-of-living pressures, it will be a very welcome change. There will be more 100%-bulk-billing practices and patients will no longer face a lottery based on a doctor’s or receptionist’s mood or whim about whether they will be bulk billed.
Yesterday’s announcement and the Coalition’s backing is a watershed, benefiting patients and general practices.
Labor is playing to its strengths and it will hope to reverse its current polling trends with this announcement.
The Coalition obviously hopes to negate the impact of a popular announcement by matching it. What will weigh in voters’ minds, though, is whether today’s Coalition announcement will be delivered after the election. The Coalition has a long history – dating back to Malcolm Fraser – of promising one thing about health policy before an election and reversing it after the vote, and this will probably fuel a “Mediscare” campaign by Labor.
Stephen Duckett 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.
Peter Dutton has launched a game of one-upmanship after Anthony Albanese at the weekend unveiled Labor’s $8.5 billion health policy that promises near universal bulk billing for GP visits by 2030.
Dutton wants to neutralise health as an election battleground. So he immediately pledged to match the Albanese policy. He’s included another $500 million, from an already announced as Coalition policy for mental health, so he can get to the bigger number of $9 billion.
What’s more, the Opposition leader said the government should legislate the health plan before the election.
On the present parliamentary sitting timetable, legislation could in theory be passed in budget week, which is set to start March 25. But, as everyone who’s paying attention knows, the current speculation is there probably won’t be a budget, with many players and observers anticipating Albanese will soon announce an April election.
The Coalition decision to take over the Labor health policy holus bolus may be tactically smart – time will tell. Fixing up bulk billing will be popular; the opposition knows it would be on risky ground getting into an argument about it, even on detail.
But just adopting such a big Labor policy, within hours of seeing it, without further thought or strutiny, raises questions about the Coalition’s policy rigour.
Doesn’t it have a few ideas of its own? Labor’s policy, while welcomed, has already come under some criticisms. For instance, there are suggestions it might be harder to address the bulk billing issue in certain areas than in others, so maybe the claims for the policy are too sweeping. And some experts would prefer greater attention on more fundamental reforms to Medicare.
In strict policy terms, as distinct from political expediency, the Coalition’s approach just seems lazy. Shadow health minister Anne Ruston is said to have been out and about with stakeholders – did she come to exactly the same policy conclusions as Labor? Presumably, given the policy’s expense a Coalition government would not be able to spend more on other health initiatives, which restricts its scope to do further or different things.
On the fiscal side, Dutton is looking for general spending cuts but says there will be no cuts in health. “The Coalition always manages the economy more effectively and that’s why we can afford to invest in health and education,” he said on Sunday.
Can we believe in this “no cuts” line? The government points back to Tony Abbott’s time when similar promises were made and the reality didn’t match the rhetoric. Dutton was health minister then and the government tried to introduce a Medicare co-payment. That attempt fizzed, but some voters might think that a Coalition that puts on Labor’s clothes so readily might shed some of them when in office, pleading the weather was hotter than it expected. That’s especially possible when it is a policy that stretches out several years, as this one does.
Certainly Labor has already been homing in on Dutton’s record from more than a decade ago.
None of this alters the fact that something needs to be done to boost bulk billing, which has now fallen to about 78% of GP visits. The govenrment’s disputes the opposition’s figure that it reached 88% under the Coalition but indisputably, it has certainly tumbled.
The question now is, who will people trust more to fix it up?
Dr Chalmers goes to Washington
Meanwhile, the government is still battling on all fronts to make its case heard in Washington for an exemption from the US tariffs on aluminium and steel.
In a flying trip at the start of this week Treasurer Jim Chalmers will be the first Australian minister to visit there since President Trump announced the tariffs.
The treasurer will have discussions with the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whom he met (courtesy of ambassador Kevin Rudd) before the presidential election. So the talks will have the advantage of familiarity.
Chalmers on Sunday played down the prospect of any finality on tariffs coming out of his visit, which will also take in a conference of superannuation fund investors looking to put money into American businesses. The conference is being held at the Australian embassy.
If Australia eventually gets a favourable result on tariffs in the near term, the treasurer will be able to claim at least a tick for his efforts.
Michelle Grattan 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.
The Albanese government on Sunday will pledge $8.5 billion for Medicare, declaring this would enable all Australians to have access to bulk billing by 2030.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce the policy at a rally in Tasmania, where the Labor seat of Lyons and the Liberal seat of Bass are in play.
Under the plan, Labor would extend the bulk billing incentive to all Australians, and also create an extra incentive payment for practices that bulk billed all their patients.
The changes would mean an extra 18 million bulk billed GP visits annually, the government says. Nine out of ten GP visits would be bulk billed by 2030. On the government’s figures, this would increase the number of fully bulk billing practices to about 4,800, triple the present figure.
The government says its plan would produce patient savings of up to $859 million a year by 2030.
It says this is the single largest investment in Medicare since it was created more than 40 years ago.
The promised big health spend is designed both to focus the election campaign on an area of traditional strength for Labor, and to address the serious erosion of bulk billing rates in recent years. The rate is currently down to about 78%.
The health package also promises to boost the number of nurses and doctors in the system. Four hundred nursing scholarships would be provided. By 2028 2,000 new GP trainee places would be funded each year in federally-funded GP training programs. The number funded in 2025 is 1600.
The government has peviously tripled the bulk billing incentive for pensioners, concession card holders and families with children. From November 1, that would be widened to all Australians.
Also from November 1, in addition to the bulk billing incentive, practices that fully bulk billed would receive an extra 12.5% loading on their Medicare rebates.
“The combined investment means around 4,800 practices will be in a better financial position if they adopt full bulk billing,” Albanese and Health Minister Mark Butler said in a statement.
Albanese said the plan “will make Medicare even stronger, help with cost of living pressures and ensure every Australian receives the best health care that they deserve”.
Butler said people would be worse off if Peter Dutton became PM. “Peter Dutton tried to end bulk billing with a GP tax and then started a six-year freeze to Medicare rebates that froze GP incomes and stripped billions out of Medicare.”
Proposed New Bulk Billing Arrangments
The table below shows how total Medicare payments for common visits would increase from November 1, with the expansion of the bulk billing incentive to all Australians and the new incentive payment for practices that bulk billed every patient.
The bulk billing incentive is scaled according to how far a general practice is from a major city or metropolitan area, with larger Medicare payments as communities get more remote.
The total cost of the bulk billing initiatives over the forward estimates is nearly $7.9 billion.
The costs year-by -year are: 2025-26, nearly $1.2 billion; 2026-27, nearly $2 billion; 2027-28, $2.3 billion, and 2028-29, $2.4 billion.
The government said most of the cost of the Medicare package is accounted for the the December budget update and the rest would be in the next budget.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners this month called for the extension of bulk billing incentives to those under 35. It said this would boost the national rate to 85%.
The Greens have called for tripling the bulk billing incentive for everyone with a Medicare card.
Michelle Grattan 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University – Newark
Attendees take selfies at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., on Feb. 20, 2025. Andrew Harnick/Getty Images
A month later, Trump’s supporters gathered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, from Feb. 19-22 to celebrate the advent of this golden age.
Gold glitter jackets, emblazoned with phrases like “Trump the Golden Era,” are for sale in the CPAC exhibition hall. There, attendees decked out in other MAGA-themed clothing and accessories network and mingle. They visit booths with politically charged signs that say “Defund Planned Parenthood” and collect brochures on topics like “The Gender Industrial Complex.”
Another booth with a yellow and black striped backdrop resembling a prison cell’s bars was called a “Deportation Center.” Attendees photographed themselves at this booth, posing beside full-size cutouts of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan.
Trump’s heroism, his supporters believe, was illustrated after a bullet grazed his ear during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Trump quickly rose to his feet, pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.”
The phrase became a MAGA rally cry and, in February 2025, it has been stamped on CPAC attendees’ shirts and jackets.
After Trump’s 2024 election victory, many Trump supporters dubbed it
“the greatest comeback in political history.” MAGA populist Steven Bannon invoked this phrase at a pre-CPAC event on Feb. 19.
When Bannon spoke on the CPAC main stage on Feb. 20, he led the crowd in a raucous “fight, fight, fight” chant. He compared Trump with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and called for him to run again for president in 2028.
The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is like a human “wrecking ball,” as evangelical leader Lance Wallnau said in 2015. This metaphor speaks to how Trump supporters believe the president is tearing down an entrenched, corrupt system.
One established the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is devoted to eliminating government waste. DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has dismantled USAID and fired thousands of government workers whom MAGA views as part of an anti-Trump “deep state.”
Musk stole the show at CPAC on Feb. 20. Speaking to a cheering crowd, Musk held up a large red chain saw and yelled, “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy.”
Speaker after speaker at this year’s CPAC have celebrated this and other wrecking-ball achievements on panels with titles like “Red Tape Reckoning,” “Crushing Woke Board Rooms” and “The Takedown of Left Tech.”
3. The Midas touch
A golden age requires a builder. Who better, the MAGA faithful believe, than a billionaire businessman with a self-proclaimed “Midas touch.” This refers to King Midas, a figure in Greek mythology who turns everything he touches into pure gold.
“Trump Will Fix It” signs filled his 2024 campaign rallies. And MAGA supporters note that Trump began fixing the country on Day 1 by “flooding the zone” with executive orders aimed at implementing his four-pronged “America First” promise. In addition to draining the swamp, this plan pledges to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again” and “bring back American values.”
These themes run through the remarks of almost every CPAC speaker, who offer nonstop praise about how Trump is securing the country’s borders, increasing energy independence, repatriating who they call illegal aliens, restoring free speech and reducing government regulation and waste.
CPAC speakers said that Trump has already racked up a slew of successes just a month into his presidency.
This includes Trump using the threat of tariffs to bring other countries to the negotiating table.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are pleased that he has been working to cut deals to end the conflict in Gaza and the war between Russia and Ukraine, while reorienting U.S. foreign policy to focus on China.
The MAGA faithful believe that Trump is restoring an era of American exceptionalism in which the U.S. is an economic powerhouse, common senseis the rule, and traditional values centered on God, family and freedom are celebrated.
And they believe in a future where the U.S. is, as Trump said in his inaugural address, “the envy of every nation.”
Alex Hinton receives funding from Alex Hinton receives funding from the Rutgers-Newark Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America, Rutgers Research Council, and Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón, Research Fellow, African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR), University of Cape Town
The unprecedented postponement of the tabling of South Africa’s 2025 budget because of disagreement within the coalition government over a two percentage point increase in value added tax (VAT), highlights the country’s dilemma.
The government needs to raise revenue to deliver on its constitutional obligations. But in a context where the global outlook is uncertain and unpredictable, trade-offs are required.
South Africa has a deficit of around 4.3% of GDP, accounting for R377 billion (US$20,479 billion). According to the Unpublished budget review public debt stands at 76.1% of its GDP.
Whereas the public debt as a percentage of GDP is in line with that of similarly sized economies, its debt servicing costs are considerably higher. The country pays around 5% on public debt interest as a share of GDP while developing and upper-middle-income countries pay, on average, 2.2% and 1.8% respectively.
These figures point to why the finance minister wanted to raise more revenue. Treasury’s estimates in the 2025 unpublished Budget Review were that the increase in Vat and other tax adjustments plus factoring in tax foregone due to expanding the basket of zero-rated goods would have brought in an additional R58 billion (US$3.1 billion) for the 2025/26 financial year.
To date, debates around previous years’ budgets have mostly been about expenditure, with very little scrutiny of the revenue side. Not since the 2013 Davis Tax Committee has there been public debate about reforming the tax policy.
Based on our academicresearch we believe the crucial question around tax reform is: who will bear the burden of the reform? And how taxes connect to the promise of the South African social compact. The social compact since democracy, expressed in the constitution, promises to uphold the rights of all citizens.
Evidence shows that increases in the rate of VAT affect poor households more, particularly women-headed households.
While the government is concerned about financing its budget and being able to raise the resources needed to make the state work, a rethink is needed about who must bear the burden of raising the money.
The cost of food
VAT is a flat tax on consumption of goods and services, usually paid by the end consumer. It affects lower income households more because they spend a greater share of their income on goods such as food, electricity and water.
The uproar over the recent proposed increase is therefore not surprising.
Firstly, the net effect of an increase in VAT will mean that mean that already financially stretched households will be paying more for food. This comes on top of
food inflation was 8% between 2023 and 2024.
One of the largest grants is the old age pension grant. There are around 3.9 million beneficiaries. It amounts to R2,190 (US$118) a month for those between 65 and 74 years and is the sole source of income for many families.
Between 2023 and 2024 this grant increased by R110 (US$5.45) – a 5.2 % increase, while inflation stood at 4.5%. However, after taking into account inflation, the grant amounts to R2,091 (just over US$107), having the net grant increase (after adjusting for inflation) of meagre R11 (the grant was in 2023 R2.080).
A VAT increase would raise their cost of living for working-class South African households (those earning between R8,000 (US$432) and R22,000 (US$1,188) a month) too. This cohort is already using 67% of their income to cover their debts. Middle class households (earning between R22,000 (US$1,188) and R35,000 (US$1,893) a month) use 69% of their income to cover their debts. A VAT-induced increase in the cost of living may push some to neglect servicing debt to maintain their living standards.
If middle and working class households defaulted in large numbers on their debt obligations, a vicious cycle might unfold.
Firstly, banks and financial institutions might face significant losses due to unpaid loans. This could trigger an economic recession as consumption could fall, leading to lower revenue collection. This could increase government debt as the state might need to bail out banks or get loans to cover the revenue shortfall. The result would be a credit downgrade which might make it more expensive to borrow money on international markets.
In a country with such a limited and vulnerable tax base (in 2024, only 7.4 million people of 63 million paid income tax) these risks should not be taken lightly.
Wealthy South Africans
Wealthy South Africans will not be as badly affected by an increase in VAT. Their consumption as a share of their incomes is less. Yet they remain central to the government’s dilemma about raising money from taxes. That’s because taxing wealthier South Africans will result in a push-back, and in some cases put a strain on struggling companies and industries that are central for job creation.
However, the most likely reason a VAT increase was chosen as opposed to a higher income tax for high income earners, taxes on capital gains, or taxes on wealth is that the government knows the wealthy elites (including those in government) will oppose increases taxes targeted at them. They are more organised and have more leverage over the government than vulnerable households.
What next?
The government needs to spend money properly and meet its constitutional obligations. And corruption must be reduced.
What the standoff over the VAT increase has highlighted is that, if South Africa aims to be a society where everyone actually counts, it should place the well-being of all its citizens at the forefront. This should be the principle that informs the process of raising the resources needed to drive future.
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.
The Broccoli family have controlled the James Bond franchise ever since the films were launched by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli in 1962. Now, his daughter and stepson, long-serving producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, have announced that they have surrendered creative control to Amazon MGM Studios.
Within minutes of the announcement on February 21, critics, analysts and fans of the Bond films rushed to proclaim the end of the beloved franchise. “Quite possibly the worst thing to happen to this franchise”, “the end of an era” and “RIP James Bond” were just a few of the responses.
The fear is that, under Amazon’s leadership, Bond will go down the same route as other beloved media properties, such as Star Wars and Marvel.
Having found themselves under the control of global entertainment conglomerates, these franchises have been treated as intellectual property and content. Films and TV shows expanding the universe of the franchises were used to serve corporate aims and cross-support other business segments of their parent companies.
This is exactly what happened with Disney, after it acquired Lucasfilm and Marvel and assumed creative control of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the Marvel films.
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Disney embarked on a well-orchestrated campaign that expanded the narrative universe of its franchises through a host of new films, TV series, documentaries and other content. Such content also supported the launch of its streaming service, Disney+, introduced new lines of merchandise for its stores, and installed new attractions in its theme parks.
While, for a period, this strategy paid off handsomely for the conglomerate, the power of its brands started to become diluted. Complaints about the quality of some of its output and fan fatigue from an infinitely expanding narrative universe seem to have had a strong impact both on Disney’s ability to extract maximum value from its properties. Not to mention the fans’ relationship with their once-favourite stories and characters.
Will Bond meet with a similar fate? A look at the franchise’s history as well as at Amazon’s recent business practices offers a glimpse into what the future may hold for 007.
Bond’s studio history
Eon Productions has controlled the franchise since Bond made his first successful, though not spectacular, appearance in theatres in 1962.
Originally established by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman as a company through which to produce the James Bond films, Eon was a subsidiary of Danjaq, a holding company through which the two men managed the film series’ business.
The film’s distributor, United Artists, eventually became Danjaq’s co-owner and therefore Eon’s production partner, even though creative decisions remained with Eon.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, MGM took United Artists’ place as Eon’s partner. But after a barrage of corporate takeovers and litigation cases, production of the films in the early 1990s halted. They were only reignited in 1995 when Eon passed on to Broccoli’s children.
A new corporate takeover of MGM by a consortium of companies led by Sony in the 2004 brought yet another partner on board for EON. But it also led to the transformation of Bond from a film series to a full-fledged franchise.
Eon rebooted Bond with the origin film Casino Royale in 2006. Ever since, it has carefully managed the Bond universe through a series of films that proved major box office hits worldwide. And it has also cultivated a list of marketing partners, the majority of whom are luxury retail brands such as Tom Ford and Omega.
The arrangement with Sony was modified in the late 2000s as MGM reemerged as a self-owned production company with an ability to make its own deals. MGM and Eon continued their collaboration with Sony for Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). But for the most recent James Bond outing, No Time to Die (2021), the Bond franchise owners decided on a split distribution deal that was not as successful.
Amazon enters the frame
It was at that time that Amazon took over MGM in a deal worth £6.48 billion (US$8.45 billion), making Amazon Studios Eon’s next production partner. But even with the one of the biggest conglomerates in the picture, Eon continued to have ironclad control of the franchise. This was secured through contracts negotiated following MGM’s successive takeovers.
Amazon’s takeover of MGM was part of a list of acquisitions motivated by the tech company’s efforts to support their streaming service, Prime. It meant it could add the approximately 4,000 films and TV programmes available in MGM’s library to their streaming catalogue, with the hopes of attracting new subscribers.
No Time to Die was Craig’s final outing as Bond.
But Amazon is also in the business of producing original content through what is now known as Amazon MGM Studios. This is the reason for the rampant speculation on how it would manage the franchise, and whether there would be a blitz of new Bond-branded content à la Disney’s treatment of Star Wars.
Amazon has the resources to pour vast amounts of funding into productions that can support its other business segments. This means it has the means required to reboot Bond and spend lavishly on production and top talent. This could redefine the franchise for audiences in the streaming era.
Perhaps more intriguingly, Amazon could use Bond’s proven ability to market upscale and luxury products and services through its e-commerce division. This could drive even more (and even more lucrative) business to its online shopping site.
Indeed, I can see a scenario whereby a new James Bond film will be released on Black Friday, creating an unprecedented level among Amazon’s divisions and redefining “Bondmania” for a new, digital era.
Yannis Tzioumakis 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.
So exclaimed the crotchety Mrs Meg in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, in which Olivia Colman plays a moribund and overweight Queen Anne. The queen was afflicted with, among many other conditions, gout – a disorder which causes joint inflammation and severe pain.
In the film, while screaming out in pain, her swollen feet are wrapped in strips of soothing beef. The next day her soon-to-be new favourite, Abigail, collects wild herbs to make a poultice for her. A bit more effective than raw steak, she finds.
You’ve got to feel sorry for Queen Anne. She really didn’t have much of a chance, since doctors of her day had no options for treating gout other than quackery.
She may have been subject to many other absurd treatments of the time to alleviate the symptoms, like scorching the blood vessels supplying the feet, slathering them in goose fat, or bloodletting with leeches. By the time she passed away in 1714 aged just 49, death may have come as a welcome relief.
Queen Anne wasn’t the only member of royalty to suffer with gout. Prince Regent George (later George IV) was similarly afflicted. Gout, then, came to be associated with the aristocracy and over indulgence.
Gout still affects many people. In fact, it is estimated that in 2020 gout affected nearly 56 million people worldwide, a figure that’s predicted to grow to 96 million by 2050. So, a condition that was once considered the disease of kings and queens is a now a disease of the masses, with younger patients also being diagnosed.
Luckily, raw meat strips and herbs are no longer required. We now know much more about how to treat gout and how to prevent it recurring.
Understanding gout
Gout is a crystal arthropathy – a group of joint disorders that occur when crystals build up in joints and soft tissues. Gout develops when uric acid levels rise in the bloodstream, before infiltrating the joints where it solidifies and becomes needle-like crystals that inflame the joints, making them incredibly sore.
And when I say “sore”, I really do mean sore: many people who experience gout often describe it as one of the worst pains they have ever felt. It most commonly affects the big toe and it can make even the lightest touch to the skin unbearable.
Some gout patients sleep with a special cage over their foot that lifts up the bedclothes because they can’t bear even the weight of a bed sheet on the affected joint.
Gout can affect other joints. It may also cause “tophi” to develop (hard swellings around joints and the ears).
The Gout by James Gillray. Published May 14th 1799. Wikimedia Commons
Gout typically occurs in bouts or attacks, before settling with treatment and becoming dormant. But it can reoccur, requiring more acute treatment.
A diagnosis of gout is based around the classic symptoms: excruciating pain,
swelling in and around the affected joint and redness. Microscopic examination of the fluid taken from the swollen joint may also show crystals and there is usually raised uric acid levels on blood tests.
Purines are compounds comprised of uric acid. Purine-rich foods include meat and offal, oily fish like mackerel and anchovies, and yeasty foods, like Marmite and beer. It may be a good idea to avoid these foods in excess if you suffer from frequent episodes of gout.
Medication
But dietary changes alone are unlikely to stave off symptoms of gout. Medications can treat both an acute episode of gout and prevent it recurring.
When the joints are inflamed, options include anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, naproxen, or steroid medications. Another option is colchicine, which is typically used for short periods and can be very effective – though it commonly causes bouts of diarrhoea.
When the inflammation has settled down, it is important to prevent future attacks. Allopurinol can reduce uric acid levels and therefore the risk of further bouts. There’s also evidence to suggest that eating cherries or drinking tart cherry juice could reduce the risk of gout attacks, especially if combined with alloprinol.
If you want to stay free of gout then perhaps it’s time to consider taking preventative action by making subtle lifestyle modifications. Maintain a healthy weight, eat a balanced diet, cut down on alcohol and avoid binge drinking, take regular exercise and keep yourself well hydrated.
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.
Just ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the conflict has taken a dramatic and unexpected turn. The US is abruptly disengaging from its support of Ukraine, having previously promised that they would stand with Kyiv for “as long as it takes”.
Europe is in panic mode, while Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is having public spats with the freshly installed US president, Donald Trump.
At this stage, it seems that Vladimir Putin is firmly on top. But Trump is not the main cause of the current crisis, he merely reflects a more serious problem for Ukraine.
When war broke out in the early hours of February 24 2022, the world was shocked, but not entirely surprised. Warnings of Russia’s attack on Ukraine had the advantage of preparing a united western front against Russia.
Western resolve strengthened as expectations of a quick Moscow victory faded and Ukraine’s self-confidence grew. This mood was reflected in Josep Borrell’s statement the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs on April 9 that Russia must be defeated on the battlefield.
Two weeks earlier, US president Joe Biden declared that Putin “cannot stay in power”. In September 2022, when the Ukrainian army recaptured a large part of the territory occupied by Russia in the Kharkiv region, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, told the EU parliament that “Russia’s industry is in tatters,” and that Moscow was using dishwashing machine chips for its missiles.
In an atmosphere of euphoria on October 4, Zelensky issued an official ban on negotiations with Putin. There would be only one outcome to this war: Putin’s defeat.
Indeed, Putin’s original plan had failed. Russia was retreating in Kharkiv and abandoning its strategic foothold on the right bank of the Dnieper in Kherson. On September 21 Putin had to declare a partial mobilisation, the first since the second world war, because Russia’s professional army was running out of men.
Fortunes of war
How things have changed: as the war approaches its three-year mark the west’s triumphalist mood is now a distant memory. Mark Rutte, secretary general of Nato, warned on January 13 that “what Russia now produces in three months, that’s what the whole of NATO from Los Angeles to Ankara produces in a year”. It’s a far cry from von der Leyen’s “Russian economy in tatters” jubilation of 2022.
In its dying days, the Biden administration rushed more weapons to Ukraine and imposed ever harsher sanctions on Moscow. This could not hide the fact that the US could not continue to fund Ukraine as it had for the first three years. Any US president would now struggle to get another Ukraine funding bill through Congress.
And Donald Trump is not just any US president. In his first month he has changed his country’s Ukraine policy in a characteristically dramatic and abrupt way.
But the underlying problem was always there: what to do with this war that Ukraine is not going to win and in which Russia is slowly getting the upper hand. It’s been clear since the failure of Ukraine’s much touted counteroffensive in summer 2023 that Ukraine can’t win militarily. So continuing to supply Ukraine at current levels can only prolong the fight, not change the course of the war.
From Trump’s perspective, this is a Biden war that has already been lost. And politically, it’s much easier for Trump to seek peace than his European counterparts because he campaigned on an anti-war message, repeatedly blaming Biden for the war and saying it would never have happened if he were president. Trump wants to find a quick fix and move on. If it fails, he can wash his hands of it and let the Europeans deal with it.
Europe clearly doesn’t know what to do now: it can’t accept defeat, but neither can it pretend that Ukraine can win the war without US support. It is a sign of their desperation that in “emergency meetings” called by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, they spend so much time discussing hypothetical and, frankly, highly unlikely scenarios for sending European troops into Ukraine.
After talks with the US in Saudi Arabia, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov made clear the Russian position: “The troops of Nato countries [in Ukraine] under a foreign flag – an EU flag or any national flag … is unacceptable.” And the Europeans are simply not in a position to impose conditions on the Kremlin.
The best that the EU can do on the third anniversary of the invasion is to unveil yet another sanctions package: number 16. But now that the US has changed its mind about its war aims, there’s no hiding the fact that Europe’s war strategy is in tatters.
The end point
Russia is under no pressure to rush into a deal it doesn’t like. Moscow’s terms are known: formal recognition that the four regions it annexed in September 2022 plus Crimea are now part of Russia, and withdrawal of the remaining Ukrainian troops from those regions. Kyiv must pledge permanent neutrality, limits on its armed forces. It must recognise and establish Russian language rights in Ukraine and ban far-right parties.
But these terms are completely unacceptable to Kyiv. And while there’s no good way out for Ukraine, it’s not yet in a desperate enough position to accept such a deal.
The only way to force it on Kyiv is either a complete military collapse by Ukraine’s forces, which is not looking likely at the moment, or concerted pressure from a united west to accept Russia’s unpalatable terms. But the west is divided on this issue, with the Europeans insisting that Ukraine should keep fighting until it can negotiate “from a position of strength”.
It’s a heroic assumption that Ukraine will be in a stronger position by this time next year. After the peak of confidence in early 2023, when Zelensky declared that “2023 will be the year of our victory!” each subsequent anniversary of the invasion saw Kyiv’s position weaker. But still, on current trends, it would take Russia until the end of the year to capture the rest of the eastern province of Donbas, without which an end to the war is unlikely anyway.
For these reasons, there is no guarantee that the US-Russian talks will lead to a resolution of the conflict. Unfortunately, this means that the bloodiest battles of the war are yet to come, as the Russian military pushes to maximise its military advantage.
In keeping with the wishes of Josep Borrell, the outcome of this war is still likely to be decided on the battlefield.
Alexander Titov 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Katryn Furmston, PhD candidate in sustainable furniture, Nottingham Trent University
The UK spent more than £20 million on furniture in 2024, predominantly for bedrooms and living rooms. Many of us are aware of the problems with fast fashion, including the problems caused by dumping this cheap, low-quality clothing in landfills. But there’s a similar issue with furniture, with more than 22 million pieces sent to landfill every year. Unfortunately, most of this will be fast furniture, as it can’t be recycled or reused.
Fast furniture is classed as being made, bought, consumed and disposed of quickly and cheaply. Its flimsiness is due to the materials used and how it is made. The companies making it are often chasing fast-changing trends in interior design.
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Of course, it can be enticing to kit out your house quickly and on the cheap, especially if you’re moving into somewhere unfurnished. But if you have the time and the money, you really should avoid fast furniture as much as possible.
So, if you want good furniture that lasts long, looks good and isn’t going clog up the planet, here are five simple ways to help you spot fast furniture.
1. If the price seems too good to be true …
The biggest giveaway of fast furniture is the price. It tends to be pretty inexpensive and very accessible. Unfortunately, the low cost is often thanks to poor materials or build quality, which means the piece is unlikely to last you very long.
For example, an £89 sofa from a fast furniture company might seem like a good deal when you consider that a good quality sofa will cost you in the region of £800 to £1,500. But while £89 might seem great now, it probably won’t last long and will end up costing the environment and you more as you’ll have to replace it sooner rather than later.
2 . Always check the materials
Companies are supposed to list all the materials in the furniture. If you see a mix of MDF (medium density fibreboard), plastic and chipboard, this is often a signifier that the piece is fast.
For cabinets, shelves, wardrobes and items with a backboard, a key signifier that it’s fast furniture will be that the backboard is made of taped-together sheets of hardboard that you have to nail in place. You will often find that this backboard starts to come away after a while and sometimes separates at the joins.
3. Does it require an Allen key?
If the answer is yes, it’s probably fast. What are the fittings like when you put it together? Do they come in a little bag all jumbled together? If you are using standardised fittings like dowels and bolts with pre-cut holes, known as knockdown fittings, to put the piece together, it will likely be a fast furniture piece.
These fittings are cheap and easy to use, plus companies can easily provide you with an Allen key or small screwdriver in the kit. Unfortunately, these fittings don’t last very long, either separating from the material they are fixed to or snapping from too much load.
4. There’s only one image online
Don’t you just hate it when a company only gives you one view of an item and no way to see any of the details? It’s often not available to view in real life, and the item is either set in a room and looks like a sticker, or is just on a white background.
Similarly, is the image a photograph or a 3D render? You will likely know because renders either look too perfect or just a bit strange.These things can mean that the company hasn’t had the time or money to do a proper photoshoot. It can also mean that the product you receive may not look exactly like the image, or that the parts might not fit together properly.
5. Look at the piece’s finish
Does it have plastic edging strips? Are the finish choices white, black or wood effects? Is it easy to wipe clean? All of these are signifiers of a fast furniture item.
In short, go and look at the piece before purchase, and also look after whatever you choose as this will also make a big difference to how long it lasts.
With the rise of television programmes like BBC’s Repair Shop, we are seeing an increase in furniture repair and upcycling. However, this hasn’t stopped us Brits from continuing to buy new.
While these are a few ways to spot fast furniture, at the end of the day, the decision to buy is yours. Not everyone can spend a lot of money on new pieces but if your budget is smaller and you really don’t want to contribute to fast furniture, consider looking at second-hand items on Facebook Marketplace and in charity shops. Also see if you can repurpose something you already own. The planet will thank you and you will have pieces which will live with you for a long time.
Katryn Furmston receives funding from AHRC via a university scholarship through NTU. She is affiliated with the British Sociological Association and is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Featherstone, Associate Lecturer, Department of Politics, University of York
Plans for the UK and other European countries to send troops to Ukraine are in their very early stages. But the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, will already be thinking about how such a move could play out at home. Sending UK troops abroad, even on a “peacekeeping” mission, always has the potential to spark huge public debate.
This is the first time the government has considered deploying military forces in 11 years, when the Cameron government debated intervening in Syria alongside the US Obama administration in 2014. Since then, the UK has not seriously considered deploying troops overseas.
In the intervening years, the Chilcot inquiry found that the UK’s decision to join the invasion of Iraq was made prematurely, before all peaceful options were exhausted.
This, along with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, may well have decreased UK public support for military interventions.
When polled in 2021, the British public were unconvinced about involvement in Afghanistan, with 53% thinking that two decades of war in Afghanistan didn’t achieve anything. Worse, 62% think that the conflict either didn’t improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, or made their lives worse.
The picture, for now, is a bit different on deploying troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers. Of those polled in mid-January, 58% either strongly or somewhat support deploying UK troops as peacekeepers. Among Labour voters, support is higher at 66%, with Tory voters (67%) and Lib Dem voters (70%) showing similar levels of support.
Reform voters show far less support (44%), potentially building more of a split between Reform and the other mainstream parties. This division may increase polarisation, and could make it even harder for Starmer to slow the rise of Reform’s challenge to Labour’s voter base.
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Starmer will draw comfort from the limited opposition to deploying peacekeepers. Only 15% of Labour voters somewhat or strongly oppose deploying UK troops as peacekeepers, below the national average of 21%.
But looking at history, we can see how changeable public support can be when it comes to war. In 2003, 54% of those polled supported the US and UK invasion of Iraq.
Despite this, there were voluble public protests against the invasion. In February 2003, an estimated 1 million people marched through London.
The 12-week initial campaign went well, so this continued level of support is not surprising. However, when people looked back at the war in 2015, only 37% thought it had been a good idea.
Only eight years later, in 2023, this had fallen further to 23%. Meanwhile one in five thought Tony Blair should be tried as a war criminal for his decision.
Starmer will need to ensure that the public understand what his government sees as the need for UK troops to serve as peacekeepers in Ukraine – and he will need to do so honestly. Much of the criticism Blair received over Iraq stemmed from accusations he wasn’t “straight” and that he “overstated” the case for UK involvement in Iraq.
The Iraq inquiry report also found the military was ill-equipped at the time of the invasion. There are similar concerns now about the readiness of the British army.
Party politics and spending
Starmer will be aware of the importance of parliamentary support for military action. When Cameron sought support for military intervention in Syria, Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party was crucial in the vote against this deployment.
In contrast, when Blair won parliamentary support for invading Iraq, opposition from within the Labour party was so strong that Blair only won because of support from Tory MPs. Starmer will watch the responses in parliament from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, the Lib Dems and SNP.
At the time of writing, Badenoch hasn’t commented on the idea of sending troops to Ukraine. She has, however, rejected Donald Trump’s attacks that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator.
Comments from former prime minister Boris Johnson that Trump accusing Ukraine of starting the war was the same as claiming that “America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor” may help build cross-party support.
The most important challenge to Starmer’s plans could come from the Treasury rather than the Tories. Proposals reportedly involve 30,000 British and European troops.
The number of troops that the UK would contribute to this joint force is unclear. However, the cost will be the prime focus for the chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves.
Reeves has committed to increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP (up from 2.3%), but the timeline for this has not been set out. Starmer is under pressure to increase it even further, but any increase will be financially difficult given the state of Britain’s finances.
This might help Starmer on his trip to Washington next week. Trump will be less likely to criticise Starmer if the PM can show that he is listening to Trump’s demands for Nato countries to increase their military spending.
But crucially, while increased spending to enable this deployment may improve UK-US relations, it could also make things difficult with voters, who could have to endure tax rises or further cuts to public spending.
Badenoch has said that failing to increase defence spending “is not peacemaking, it is weakness”. This suggests that the cost of intervention will be a key point of contention for the Tory leader.
Deploying UK troops to Ukraine may be a defining part of Starmer’s foreign policy. Increasing military spending and showing that the UK will help bear the cost of peacekeeping in Ukraine may also help set the tone of Starmer’s relationship with Trump.
However, politically, the consequences of deploying UK troops to Ukraine could spark numerous domestic challenges. While Labour voters appear to support the proposal now, there is likely to be opposition from at least some Reform voters – something Starmer doesn’t need more of right now. The financial costs will also put even more pressure on Labour’s spending plans, and could build division between PM and chancellor.
Christopher Featherstone 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.
At a time of political tension in Germany, the Bauhaus – arguably one of most influential architecture, art and design schools in the world – has become the target of far-right attacks.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a member of the regional parliament of Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany, has blamed his area’s economic problems on Bauhaus modernism.
His unlikely diagnosis came in response to the regional conservative CDU government’s “think modern” campaign, which seeks to attract investment into the area and cites the Bauhaus movement as an example of locally grown excellence.
Tillschneider asserts that for the area’s economic stagnation to be resolved “we do not need to think modern, we need to think conservatively.” He rejects Bauhaus ideas as diffused with communist ideology. With these attacks, Tillschneider has started a quasi-re-enactment of a historical culture war over German national identity and social anxieties.
Founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius in the German city of Weimar, the Bauhaus and its staff shared a programme of material utopianism. This was expressed via an explorative workshop concept that departed from traditional modes of teaching.
Such avant-garde practices moved the Bauhaus politically to the left, which would make it vulnerable to ideological attack throughout the Weimar republic, Germany’s first (and failed) democracy.
In the contentious debate about national identity that followed the end of the monarchy in 1918, Bauhaus artists inhabited an uncomfortable position between two schools of thought among the educated elite.
One side had opened up to modern aesthetics (such as impressionism and expressionism). The other – the conservatives – instead embraced an artistic nationalism that had manifested with German unification in 1871.
They saw “true art” as coming from the people and in turn educating them as loyal citizens. Aesthetically, conservatives found these values expressed in Weimar classicism. Curiously, given the emphasis on art by the people, this was a rather exclusive, high-brow form of literature, theatre and visual arts.
Bauhaus ideas, instead, were anti-bourgeois, avant-garde and experimental, while at the same time postulating the importance of creating art for everyone to access and enjoy. Such democratisation of style, however, was difficult to achieve, and most of what the Bauhaus produced remained unaffordable to the masses. Nevertheless, these clashing visions politicised culture during the interwar years.
The reconstructed Bauhaus school in Dessau. Wikipedia/Lelikron, CC BY-SA
In 1925, the school had to move from Weimar to Dessau (in Saxony-Anhalt) after it lost its funding. This was the fallout of a dispute with the conservative political parties that ruled the city at the time.
In Dessau, the Bauhaus teachers built a school building that followed their modern aesthetic principles. Despite repeated attempts by Gropius to depoliticise the Bauhaus by pointing to its aesthetic pluralism, internal debates about the place of architecture in society and politics continued.
The point of contention was the concept of “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) which found expression in Neues Bauen: modularised construction which introduced the industrialised pre-fabrication of building parts in a turn away from traditional crafts.
Eventually, Gropius left the Bauhaus and in his place came the openly socialist architect Hannes Meyer. After taking over as director in 1928, he repoliticised the school and moved it back to the left.
In the heated political climate of the late Weimar republic, the Bauhaus encountered a new existential threat. When the Nazis took over in local elections in 1931, they requested the destruction of the Bauhaus school.
The Bauhaus moved again in 1932, this time to Berlin, where it continued as a private institution to avoid renewed conflict with the ever more powerful Nazis. Nevertheless, when Adolf Hitler seized power in early 1933, the school and its staff became victims of the Nazis’ anti-socialist measures.
The Bauhaus school closed on July 20 1933 and its staff dispersed, often to faraway places. Many went to the United States, where they continued in the legacy of the “Bauhaus spirit” by joining the international modernism movement that became the defining Western aesthetic in the 1950s.
Although the artistic influences and expressions had remained diverse throughout the lifetime of the school, postwar discourse has streamlined it to simple geometric shapes, a preference for the colours white, blue, red and yellow, and an emphasis on horizontal lines and perspectives.
The Nazis had labelled Bauhaus aesthetics as “degenerate”. In the cold war era, the socialist East German government called out Bauhaus modernism and its disciples as cosmopolitan in the pejorative sense.
They were accused of abandoning German national heritage for the sake of international “formalism”, elevating form – as pertaining to function – over cultural content. Tillschneider has put it even more provocatively: “They denied man’s connection to land and his cultural roots”. While a huge interpretative overstretch, these statements do not come as a surprise.
This year marks the centennial of the move to Dessau, where the school building still stands proudly as a Unesco world heritage site. Tillschneider used this moment to perpetuate the culture war that the AfD has become known for over the past decade.
He is equating the CDU to an oversimplified depiction of the Bauhaus legacy – one that is anti-crafts, anti-bourgeois and internationalist – he implies his political rivals are against German tradition and culture. These are the nativist sentiments that fuel the AfD. It is a strategy of cheap wins at the expense of the electorate’s anxieties about Germany’s cultural and national identity.
Katrin Schreiter 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Léonie de Jonge, Professor of Research on Far-Right Extremism, Institute for Research on Far-Right Extremism (IRex), University of Tübingen
In the weeks ahead of the German election, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) consistently polled around 20%. For the first time, the AfD poses a challenge to mainstream parties’ longstanding strategy of isolating the far right.
The rise of the AfD is striking, given the country’s history of authoritarianism and National Socialism during the 1930s and 1940s. For decades, far-right movements were generally stigmatised and treated as pariahs. Political elites, mainstream parties, the media and civil society effectively marginalised the far right and limited its electoral prospects.
The AfD’s breakthrough in the 2017 federal election shattered this status quo. Winning 12.6% of the vote and securing 94 Bundestag seats, it became Germany’s third-largest party — unlocking viable political space to the right of the centre-right party CDU/CSU for the first time in the postwar era.
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The AfD was founded in 2013 by disaffected CDU members. This included economics professors Bernd Lucke and Joachim Starbatty, and conservative journalists Konrad Adam and Alexander Gauland. It began as a single-issue, anti-euro party advocating Germany’s exit from the Eurozone.
Dubbed a “party of professors”, it gained credibility through the support of academics and former mainstream politicians, lending it an “unusual gravitas” for a protest party. While nativist elements were arguably present from the start, the AfD was not initially conceived as a far-right party.
When it first ran for the Bundestag in 2013, its four-page manifesto focused exclusively on dissolving the Eurozone. At the time, the party advocated political asylum for the persecuted and avoided harsh anti-immigrant or anti-Islam rhetoric, cultivating more of a “bourgeois” image.
This helped the AfD build what political scientist Elisabeth Ivarsflaten has called a reputational shield — a legacy used to deflect social stigma and accusations of extremism.
Initially, the AfD distanced itself from far-right parties in neighbouring countries. However, successive leadership changes between 2015 and 2017 saw the party adopt a more hardline position, particularly on immigration, Islam and national identity. By 2016, its platform had largely aligned with those of populist radical right parties elsewhere.
Far-right views
Today, the party can unequivocally be classified as far right. This umbrella term captures the growing links between “(populist) radical right” (illiberal-democratic) and “extreme right” (anti-democratic) parties and movements. Ideologically, the far right is characterised by nativism and authoritarianism.
Nativism is a xenophobic form of nationalism, which holds that non-native elements form a threat to the homogeneous nation-state. In Germany, nativism carries a historical legacy. “Völkisch nationalism” was one of the core ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries that was broadly adopted by National Socialism to justify deportations and, ultimately, the Holocaust.
Völkisch ideology is based on the essentialist idea that the German people are inextricably connected to the soil. Thus, other people cannot be part of the völkisch community.
The AfD has evolved into a far-right party by continuously radicalising its positions. It acted like a Trojan horse, importing völkisch nationalist ideology into the parliamentary and public arena, which used to be blocked by the gatekeeping mechanisms of German democracy.
The AfD carved out a niche for itself by advocating stricter anti-immigration policies. This came in response to the so-called “refugee crisis”, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed more than a million asylum seekers into Germany. At its campaign kickoff rally in January 2025, AfD’s chancellor candidate Alice Weidel vowed to implement “large-scale repatriations” (or “remigration”) of immigrants.
The party advocates a return to a blood-based citizenship, insisting that, with very few exceptions for well-assimilated migrants, citizenship can only be determined by ancestry and bloodline rather than birthright.
Additionally, the party upholds the white, nuclear family as an ideal and has pledged to dismiss university professors accused of promoting “leftist, woke gender ideology”. The party also calls for the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia and opposes weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
In recent years, the party has embraced the far-right strategy of flooding the media and public discourse with controversy, misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric, to dominate attention and transgress traditional political norms.
A striking example is former AfD-leader Alexander Gauland’s 2018 claim that the 12 years of Nazi rule were “mere bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history”. With this remark, he sought to reframe modern Germany as a continuation of its pre-1933 history, while downplaying the significance of the Nazi era.
Normalising the AfD
Until recently, the far right was consistently excluded by mainstream political parties. It was a founding myth of the old Federal Republic of Germany that democratic forces do not cooperate with the far right. At least on the parliamentary level, this worked quite well as a part of Germany’s “militant democracy”.
However, the political firewall — the Brandmauer — has started to crumble. The AfD has since celebrated the election of its first mayors at the local level.
The success of the AfD has especially been fuelled by the narrative of a “refugee crisis” in Germany. Harsh political rhetoric about migration has contributed to the party’s electoral success, as well as mainstream adoption of some of its positions.
Oddly enough, the AfD is especially successful in rural, remote areas with low levels of migration. It is weak in more globalised, university-oriented urban areas.
Ahead of the 2025 elections, Friedrich Merz, the lead candidate of the CDU, broke a longstanding political taboo when his proposal to tighten asylum policies narrowly passed in the Bundestag with backing from the AfD. Meanwhile, German media have increasingly treated AfD representatives as legitimate political contenders.
Once marginalised in political debates, they are now regularly invited to talk shows. And they have received international legitimacy from figures such as US vice-president J.D. Vance, and X owner Elon Musk.
This election may give an indication of how far the AfD’s normalisation will go and how it will affect Germany’s political future. Beyond electoral success, the main question will be to what extent mainstream parties will incorporate far-right ideas in their political agenda.
What is already clear, however, is that the political landscape has shifted. The boundaries that once kept the far right at the margins are no longer as firm as they once were
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.
