NewzIntel.com

Category: Academic Analysis

  • MIL-OSI Global: The pursuit of eternal youth goes back centuries. Modern cosmetic surgery is turning it into a reality – for rich people

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Margaret Gibson, Associate Professor of Sociology, Griffith University

    The Conversation, CC BY-SA

    Kris Jenner’s “new” face sparked myriad headlines about how she can look so good at 69 years old. While she’s not confirmed what sort of procedures she’s undergone, speculation abounds.

    As a US reality TV personality, socialite and Kardashian matriarch, Jenner has long curated her on-screen identity. Her fame and fortune are intimately tied to a multinational cosmetics industry that has, for centuries, bartered in the illusion of timeless beauty.

    The pursuit of cosmetic enhancement can be traced back as far as Ancient Egypt, reminding us the desire to look younger is hardly new.

    But while many women try in vain to battle the ageing process, Jenner is an example of someone who’s actually succeeded, at least visually. What does that mean for the rest of us?

    Decades of surgeries

    Modern cosmetic plastic surgery has its roots in compassion. It was developed to help disfigured first world war soldiers rebuild their faces and identities.

    But this origin story has been sidelined. Today, aesthetic procedures are overwhelmingly pursued by women and marketed as lifestyle enhancements rather than medical interventions.

    Advancements in reconstructive surgery were made after both world wars with treatments on wounded soldiers.
    AFP/Getty Images

    Plastic surgery, once considered extreme or shameful, began to gain popularity in the 1960s, and is now widespread.

    Hollywood has long played a role in shaping these standards. During its Golden Age, stars like Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne are reported to have undergone cosmetic surgeries – rhinoplasty (nose jobs), chin implants, facelifts – to preserve their screen personas.

    Even before Instagram, before-and-after images were a cultural obsession, often used to shame or expose.

    From taboo to trend

    The digital age has further normalised cosmetic enhancements, with social media influencers and celebrities promoting procedures alongside beauty products.

    It’s estimated Jenner spent upwards of US$130,000 (around A$200,000) on cosmetic interventions, resulting in a look that some media outlets suggest places her in her 30s.

    There’s been similar speculation about Lindsay Lohan, Christina Aguilera and Anne Hathaway, though none of the women have confirmed anything themselves.

    On Jenner, social media users are split. Some offer aspirational praise (“If I had the money, I’d get it all done!”), while others criticise her rejection of “ageing gracefully”.

    Today, celebrities increasingly control the narrative. Jenner has embraced her past cosmetic transformations, sharing them openly on social media and in interviews. The taboo is evolving.

    Yet many stars, including Courtney Cox, Ariana Grande, and Mickey Rourke, have spoken openly about regrets and the psychological toll of these procedures. Even with agency, the pressure remains immense.

    Youth as a cultural ideal

    This obsession with agelessness reflects a deeper societal discomfort with visible ageing, particularly in women.

    Celebrities, with access to elite medical professionals and procedures, seem to cheat time.

    Yet the outcome of is often disorienting: when Jenner appears younger than her children, the generational lines blur.

    This erasure of age difference entrenches youth as an end in itself. It also destabilises how we perceive kinship and mortality.

    Supermodel Bella Hadid has said she regrets getting a rhinoplasty as a teenager. Of Palestinian descent, she said “I wish I’d kept the nose of my ancestors”.

    In my own research, I’ve argued cosmetic enhancement is tied to a cultural denial of death.

    The ageing isn’t the problem – it’s our refusal to accept it.

    The desperate clinging to youth reflects a collective resistance to change. Celebrity culture and consumer capitalism exploit this vulnerability, making age a problem to be solved rather than a life stage to be honoured.

    We should mourn our ageing, not erase it. In another world, we could witness it, share it, and celebrate its quiet, powerful beauty.

    So what about us?

    But that’s not the world many live in, and the pressure extends beyond Hollywood.

    With filters, apps, and social media platforms, ordinary people also curate and enhance their images, playing their part in a fantasy of perfection.

    A recent study looked at the way young Australians use selfie editing tools. It found the widespread use of such apps have a significant effect on the body image of young people.



    Read more:
    ‘Perfect bodies and perfect lives’: how selfie-editing tools are distorting how young people see themselves

    The line between self-care and self-deception has never been blurrier. We all want to present the best version of ourselves, even if reality slips into illusion.

    So while women have long tried to outrun visible ageing, whether that be through anti-wrinkle creams or more invasive means, Jenner is an example of something relatively rare: a woman who’s actually managed to do it.

    In doing so, she and her celebrity counterparts set a new youthful beauty standard in what ageing should (or shouldn’t) look like.

    And while that standard may be felt by a variety of women, few will be able to achieve it.

    Extremely wealthy beauty moguls like Kris Jenner can afford elite treatments, while most people face growing financial pressure and a cost-of-living crisis. The divide isn’t just aesthetic – it’s economic.

    Beauty, in this context, is both a product and a privilege.

    And of course, judgement of women’s appearances remains a powerful force for discrediting their political, social, and moral worth. For every bit of praise there is for Jenner’s “youthful” appearance, there are videos claiming she’s “ruined her face” and questioning of whether she should spend so much money on such a cause.

    As long as gender inequality persists and beauty remains a currency of value, the pressure to conform will endure.

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

    – ref. The pursuit of eternal youth goes back centuries. Modern cosmetic surgery is turning it into a reality – for rich people – https://theconversation.com/the-pursuit-of-eternal-youth-goes-back-centuries-modern-cosmetic-surgery-is-turning-it-into-a-reality-for-rich-people-257969

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Dehorning rhinos tips the balance against poaching – new study

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Timothy Kuiper, Senior Lecturer – Biodiversity and Statistics, Nelson Mandela University

    Black and white rhino populations in the Greater Kruger (Kruger National Park and surrounding reserves) in South Africa have plummeted from over 10,000 rhinos in 2010 to around 2,600 in 2023. Hundreds of rhinos are killed each year by poachers for their horns. These are sold on the illegal global market.

    Nature reserve managers, rangers, international funders, and local non-profit organisations have invested millions of dollars in anti-poaching interventions. These include tracking dogs to track poachers, artificial intelligence-enabled detection cameras, helicopters to monitor reserves and, more recently, dehorning (removing rhinos’ horns reduces the incentive for poachers).

    To see if these were working, the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation set up a research project involving several reserve managers, rangers, and scientists from the University of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela University, University of Stellenbosch, and the University of Oxford.

    The South African National Parks, World Wildlife Fund South Africa, and the Rhino Recovery Fund were also involved.



    Read more:
    Why military and market responses are no way to save species from extinction

    Together, managers and scientists gathered seven years of rhino poaching data across 2.4 million hectares in the north-eastern region of South Africa and western Mozambique. During this time, we documented the poaching of 1,985 rhinos across 11 reserves in the Greater Kruger area. This number is about 6.5% of the rhino populations in these reserves annually.

    This landscape is a critical global stronghold that conserves around 25% of all Africa’s rhinos.

    Our study’s headline result was that dehorning rhinos to reduce incentives for poaching achieved a 78% reduction in poaching (average reduction across implementing reserves). This was based on comparison between sites with and without dehorning as well as changes in poaching before and after dehorning. Exactly 2,284 rhinos were dehorned across eight reserves over the seven years of our research – this was most of the rhino in the region.

    Our findings show that significant progress can be made against rhino poaching by reducing the reward attached to poaching (removing the horn). This is a strategic shift in focus away from purely focusing on increasing risks to poachers.



    Read more:
    Chopping off the rhino’s horn and the war on wildlife crime

    But we are being careful to note that dehorning is not a complete solution. Our research found that 111 rhinos were poached even though they had been dehorned. This is because up to 15cm of horn is left on the rhino when it is dehorned by veterinarians. This is to protect the growth plate at the base of the horn.

    Rhinos’ horns regrow over time. During our fieldwork, we also noticed that criminal syndicates remain willing to kill rhinos for their stumps, even if they do this at lower rates than before dehorning.

    It may be best to think of dehorning as a very effective but short-term solution that buys us time to address the more ultimate drivers of poaching: horn demand, socio-economic inequality, corruption, and organised criminal networks.

    A different approach to pinning down the problem

    Part of what made our study special was its strong focus on collaboration between managers and scientists. The project was first conceived by reserve managers at the frontline of rhino conservation and led by Sharon Haussmann, chief executive officer of the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation. They recognised the need to take a look at whether their investments into tracking dogs, artificial intelligence cameras and other anti-poaching interventions were paying off.

    Faced with a poaching crisis despite millions of dollars invested in law enforcement, security and technology, Sharon and the team were bold enough to ask: “Why are we still losing so many rhinos? What could we do differently?” These managers then began working closely with scientists to tackle this problem together through our research.

    Tragically, Sharon died unexpectedly on 31 May, less than a week before our research was published. We want to dedicate this research to her legacy.

    Detecting and arresting poachers alone is not enough

    The nature reserves we studied had invested US$74 million (R1 billion) in anti-poaching interventions between 2017 and 2021. Most of the investment focused on reactive law enforcement – rangers, tracking dogs, helicopters, access controls and detection cameras. This helped achieve over 700 poacher arrests. Yet we found no statistical evidence that these interventions significantly reduced poaching.

    Why? These interventions are a necessary element of the anti-poaching toolkit. But they were compromised by bigger challenges. For example, stark socio-economic inequality in the region creates the ideal conditions for crime to thrive, and criminal syndicates find it easy to recruit people willing to take the large risk of poaching rhino.



    Read more:
    Rhino poaching in South Africa has dipped but corruption hinders progress

    Entrenched corruption among police and reserve staff allowed offenders access to inside information on the locations of dogs, cameras and rhinos. This meant that poaching was not deterred as much as it could have been.

    Finally, ineffective criminal justice systems mean that arrested offenders often escape punishment, with evidence from the Greater Kruger of poachers who were multiple repeat offenders.

    What can be done differently?

    A range of interventions will be needed to complement dehorning, particularly as poaching for stumps would probably continue if there were no risk to poachers. There is also some evidence that dehorning rhino in one area means poachers may move to another area where rhino still have horns and poach there instead. (This has happened in South Africa’s second largest rhino stronghold in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park where rhino have not been dehorned.)



    Read more:
    The fight against poaching must shift to empowering communities

    Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that detecting and arresting poachers is enough on its own. Instead, we recommend these measures:

    1. Give local people a voice and a stake. Many people affected by rhino conservation have no say and don’t share in the benefits of the industry.

    2. Disrupt transnational criminal networks outside protected areas through intelligence-led investigations (follow the money).

    3. Continue supporting dehorning in the short term. This will buy time to solve the biggest drivers of wildlife crime: inequality, horn demand, and corruption.

    4. Dehorning needs to be supported by other measures to protect the rhino.

    5. Support people first, then interventions. Rangers are key here – their welfare, wages, training and safety are not always given the attention or funding they deserve.

    6. Keep loving rhinos and buying your kids pyjamas with them on.

    Timothy Kuiper has received funding from the National Research Foundation in South Africa.

    – ref. Dehorning rhinos tips the balance against poaching – new study – https://theconversation.com/dehorning-rhinos-tips-the-balance-against-poaching-new-study-258315

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: ‘Godfather of AI’ now fears it’s unsafe. He has a plan to rein it in

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Armin Chitizadeh, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Sydney

    fran_kie/Shutterstock

    This week the US Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed two men suspected of bombing a fertility clinic in California last month allegedly used artificial intelligence (AI) to obtain bomb-making instructions. The FBI did not disclose the name of the AI program in question.

    This brings into sharp focus the urgent need to make AI safer. Currently we are living in the “wild west” era of AI, where companies are fiercely competing to develop the fastest and most entertaining AI systems. Each company wants to outdo competitors and claim the top spot. This intense competition often leads to intentional or unintentional shortcuts – especially when it comes to safety.

    Coincidentally, at around the same time of the FBI’s revelation, one of the godfathers of modern AI, Canadian computer science professor Yoshua Bengio, launched a new nonprofit organisation dedicated to developing a new AI model specifically designed to be safer than other AI models – and target those that cause social harm.

    So what is Bengio’s new AI model? And will it actually protect the world from AI-faciliated harm?

    An ‘honest’ AI

    In 2018, Bengio, alongside his colleagues Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, won the Turing Award for groundbreaking research they had published three years earlier on deep learning. A branch of machine learning, deep learning attempts to mimic the processes of the human brain by using artificial neural networks to learn from computational data and make predictions.

    Bengio’s new nonprofit organisation, LawZero, is developing “Scientist AI”. Bengio has said this model will be “honest and not deceptive”, and incorporate safety-by-design principles.

    According to a preprint paper released online earlier this year, Scientist AI will differ from current AI systems in two key ways.

    First, it can assess and communicate its confidence level in its answers, helping to reduce the problem of AI giving overly confident and incorrect responses.

    Second, it can explain its reasoning to humans, allowing its conclusions to be evaluated and tested for accuracy.

    Interestingly, older AI systems had this feature. But in the rush for speed and new approaches, many modern AI models can’t explain their decisions. Their developers have sacrificed explainability for speed.

    Bengio also intends “Scientist AI” to act as a guardrail against unsafe AI. It could monitor other, less reliable and harmful AI systems — essentially fighting fire with fire.

    This may be the only viable solution to improve AI safety. Humans cannot properly monitor systems such as ChatGPT, which handle over a billion queries daily. Only another AI can manage this scale.

    Using an AI system against other AI systems is not just a sci-fi concept – it’s a common practice in research to compare and test different level of intelligence in AI systems.

    Adding a ‘world model’

    Large language models and machine learning are just small parts of today’s AI landscape.

    Another key addition Bengio’s team are adding to Scientist AI is the “world model” which brings certainty and explainability. Just as humans make decisions based on their understanding of the world, AI needs a similar model to function effectively.

    The absence of a world model in current AI models is clear.

    One well-known example is the “hand problem”: most of today’s AI models can imitate the appearance of hands but cannot replicate natural hand movements, because they lack an understanding of the physics — a world model — behind them.

    Another example is how models such as ChatGPT struggle with chess, failing to win and even making illegal moves.

    This is despite simpler AI systems, which do contain a model of the “world” of chess, beating even the best human players.

    These issues stem from the lack of a foundational world model in these systems, which are not inherently designed to model the dynamics of the real world.

    Yoshua Bengio is recognised as one of the godfathers of AI.
    Alex Wong/Getty Images

    On the right track – but it will be bumpy

    Bengio is on the right track, aiming to build safer, more trustworthy AI by combining large language models with other AI technologies.

    However, his journey isn’t going to be easy. LawZero’s US$30 million in funding is small compared to efforts such as the US$500 billion project announced by US President Donald Trump earlier this year to accelerate the development of AI.

    Making LawZero’s task harder is the fact that Scientist AI – like any other AI project – needs huge amounts of data to be powerful, and most data are controlled by major tech companies.

    There’s also an outstanding question. Even if Bengio can build an AI system that does everything he says it can, how is it going to be able to control other systems that might be causing harm?

    Still, this project, with talented researchers behind it, could spark a movement toward a future where AI truly helps humans thrive. If successful, it could set new expectations for safe AI, motivating researchers, developers, and policymakers to prioritise safety.

    Perhaps if we had taken similar action when social media first emerged, we would have a safer online environment for young people’s mental health. And maybe, if Scientist AI had already been in place, it could have prevented people with harmful intentions from accessing dangerous information with the help of AI systems.

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

    – ref. ‘Godfather of AI’ now fears it’s unsafe. He has a plan to rein it in – https://theconversation.com/godfather-of-ai-now-fears-its-unsafe-he-has-a-plan-to-rein-it-in-258288

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Four years after a 15% global minimum tax deal, the world remains divided on how to implement it – podcast

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mend Mariwany, Producer, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

    Dilok Klaisataporn/Shutterstock

    In October 2021, 136 countries agreed to establish new tax rules requiring large multinational companies to pay at least 15% in corporate tax. Nearly four years later, this ambitious agreement is finally being implemented around the world, but its success faces big challenges.

    The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) tax framework aims to end the so-called race to the bottom, where corporations pit countries against each other to pay less tax and shift profits to jurisdictions with lower tax rates.

    In the second part of The 15% solution from The Conversation Weekly podcast, we examine progress towards implementing the global tax deal.

    The OECD’s two-pillar system fundamentally changes how multinationals are taxed. Pillar One determines where companies pay taxes. Pillar Two establishes how much they must pay: a minimum of 15% for any multinational with yearly revenues above US$850 million. The innovative aspect of the system is that it is self-enforcing. If a company pays less than 15% in any country, other nations where it operates can charge a supplementary tax to meet that minimum.

    However, implementation faces significant obstacles. So far around 140 countries have signed up. President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the negotiations in February 2025. China supports the framework in theory but is slow to fully implement it. And some low- and middle-income countries have also not signed up, citing technical complexity or bias toward higher-income countries.

    Martin Hearson, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, explains that for countries with fewer legal and administrative resources, even good rules can be counterproductive due to their complexity. This has led some countries to look for alternatives, including a new UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, for which negotiations began in February 2025.

    Despite these challenges, the OECD expects that approximately 80% of profits previously taxed at low rates will now be appropriately taxed.

    Listen to part two of The 15% solution on The Conversation Weekly podcast. Part one is available here.

    This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

    Newsclips in this episode from DW News, Arirang News, and Bloomberg.

    Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

    Martin Hearson’s research has been supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, the Gates Foundation, the Intergovernmental Group of 24, the World Bank, the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, and ActionAid International.

    – ref. Four years after a 15% global minimum tax deal, the world remains divided on how to implement it – podcast – https://theconversation.com/four-years-after-a-15-global-minimum-tax-deal-the-world-remains-divided-on-how-to-implement-it-podcast-257695

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: African countries are bad at issuing bonds, so debt costs more than it should: what needs to change

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Misheck Mutize, Post Doctoral Researcher, Graduate School of Business (GSB), University of Cape Town

    Over the past two decades, African countries have increasingly turned to international capital markets to meet their development financing needs. For example, Kenya and Benin raised a combined US$2.5 billion through bond issuances during the first half of 2025. Proceeds were used to repay maturing bonds. This means new bonds, with unfavourable terms, are being issued to pay previous lenders.

    Yet African bonds are substantially mispriced, resulting in excessively high yields that are not justified by fundamentals – based on economic, fiscal and institutional strengths. Mispricing occurs when a country has high economic growth, stable institutions that support government policy implementation, rule of law and accountability, yet its bonds trade at higher yields than those of its peers. In other words, there will be every reason for investors to trust that the country will repay what it owes, but they still expect a higher return. This is happening because of lack of information and biases perpetuated by global entities that are facilitating bond sells in Africa.

    Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal have strong growth (5% to 6.5%), yet they face high yields on their bonds (7.8% to 8.2%) compared to Namibia and Morocco with approximately 3% growth and bond interest of 6%.

    This mispricing imposes a heavy debt servicing burden on already constrained public budgets.

    At the same time African countries face a puzzling paradox: while they’re paying more for the debt they’re raising, the demand for these bonds is much higher (oversubscribed). All bond issuances in Africa are subscribed by as much as over five times. This has only been common in Africa. It is puzzling why governments are not leveraging on the high demand to bargain for lower interest rates.

    In my view, based on my bond pricing modelling expertise, I believe that mispricing of Eurobonds in Africa – debt instruments issued by a country in a currency different from its own – is not a market anomaly. It shows internal capacity failures in African countries, structural market biases and insufficient understanding of the complex mechanics of global debt markets.

    Oversubscription of Eurobonds should be a source of power for African governments, not a missed opportunity. African countries can move from being price takers to price negotiators. They should be able to reduce debt costs, freeing up resources for development.

    But to get there African countries need to address the power imbalance in the markets.

    Governments need to invest in bond pricing expertise to increase their negotiating power.

    The false success signal of oversubscription

    There are several reasons why African bonds remain mispriced at a higher interest despite the oversubscriptions.

    Firstly, a lack of technical expertise in primary bond issuance in the debt management offices of the majority of African governments. Very few on the continent have intelligence systems for gathering information on financial markets and formal investor relations programmes. Neither do they have in-house quantitative analysts or pricing specialists capable of engaging investment banks on an equal footing during roadshows and negotiations.

    The debt management offices are unable to engage confidently and critically with financial intermediaries to challenge assumptions, simulate pricing scenarios and conduct their own comparative market analysis.

    After initial public offers, most governments don’t engage with holders of their bonds on the secondary market. Nor do they monitor bond post-issuance performance. The lack of interest in the secondary market has created a feedback loop where poor market intelligence has contributed to high coupons on new issuances.

    Secondly, advanced economies engage investors regularly through briefings, roadshows and timely reports. Communication by African governments is often ad hoc and usually limited to the period around a new bond issuance.

    This prevents investors from forming informed, long-term views. It leads to a default risk premium in pricing.

    Thirdly, debt issuance by African governments is often politically driven rather than strategically timed. Often this leads to rushed or ill-prepared entries.

    Sometimes it’s done when the cost of debt is rising globally, close to election cycles, or because governments are facing a financial crunch caused by falling reserves.



    Read more:
    African governments have developed a taste for Eurobonds: why it’s dangerous

    Fourth, African sovereigns often approach the Eurobond market with weak negotiating power. They are heavily reliant on a small pool of western investment banks as technical advisors to manage the bond issuance. These banks tend to be more inclined towards their own global investment client networks. Their incentives are not aligned with achieving the lowest possible yield for the issuers.

    African issuers often accept the initial price guidance from advisors and agree to high yields even in oversubscribed situations. Even when demand could support a lower yield, African issuers fail to negotiate pricing downwards. Issuing syndicates have no incentive to push for optimal pricing for the issuer as they receive transaction-based fees.



    Read more:
    African countries aren’t borrowing too much: they’re paying too much for debt

    The role of bond issuing syndicates is a major factor in the mispricing. In bond issuance, a syndicate is a group of financial institutions that structures the bond, price and market (also known bookbuilding), underwrite the unsold portion of the bond, sell the bond to their investors, and ensure compliance and documentation. These syndicates set coupon rates higher than necessary as a conservative hedge against perceived investor scepticism.

    African governments have become passive participants rather than active price-setters. African-based bond syndicates are systematically bypassed despite growing regional capacity and distribution networks. Bond issues are also allocated to offshore buyers, sidelining local institutional investors.

    Breaking the cycle of mispricing

    To correct the systemic Eurobond mispricing and reduce debt servicing costs, African countries must undertake reforms.

    First, governments should invest in debt management capacity.

    Second, they must actively monitor secondary market trading to identify opportunities such as bond buybacks and exchanges that could improve the debt profile. Real-time analytics on bond trading performance should inform future issuance terms and investor communication strategies.

    Third, governments must build institutional routines for submitting data, and proactively engage investors and rating agencies. This will challenge and influence risk assumptions. Investors need consistent assurances, especially on the ability to easily exit positions.

    Fourth, African countries need to maintain and monitor up-to-date benchmarks from peers with comparable pricing data. Without accurate comparisons, it is difficult to know whether the proposed bond pricing by syndicates is fair and accurate. They must stop solely relying on what investment banks recommends.

    Lastly, African governments should involve at least one African-based syndicate member, prioritise allocation to African institutional investors and promote regional arrangements with international banks to ensure knowledge transfer and equitable participation.

    Misheck Mutize is affiliated with the African Union as a Lead Expert on Credit Ratings

    – ref. African countries are bad at issuing bonds, so debt costs more than it should: what needs to change – https://theconversation.com/african-countries-are-bad-at-issuing-bonds-so-debt-costs-more-than-it-should-what-needs-to-change-257128

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: New rules for cosmetic injectables aim to make the industry safer. Will they work?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Rudge, Law lecturer, University of Sydney

    BearFoto/Shutterstock

    New guidelines to regulate Australia’s booming cosmetic procedures industry have been called “tough” and “a crackdown” in media reports this week.

    On Tuesday, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) announced the new guidelines – one for procedures, the other for advertising – and said it put the lucrative industry “on notice”.

    The guidelines stem from AHPRA’s 2023 review of non-surgical cosmetic procedures – think injectables (such as Botox and dermal fillers), laser skin resurfacing, chemical peels, hair transplants and more.

    That review was established only after AHPRA investigated widespread reports about unsafe practices in cosmetic surgery in 2022, exposing risks and deficiencies in both the surgical and non-surgical cosmetics sector.

    These included the predatory targeting of under-18s, inadequate training for practitioners, and poor screening of patients. For example, 52-second telehealth consultations.

    So, how tough are these guidelines? And can they be enforced?

    What do the guidelines say?

    The new rules aim to put safety before sales and cover many more issues than any previous guidance.

    They also fill a gap, as they apply to all health practitioners. Previously only doctors had clear guidelines, while nurses and midwives had been guided by a “position statement” published by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia.

    These new rules ban financial incentives, discounts and other financial arrangements, such as “contra deals” – where Botox injections might be administered in exchange for restaurant meals, as occurred in one New South Wales case.

    They also ban perks for social media influencers, who often get free treatments.

    The guidelines confirm influencers recruited by practitioners should not create unreasonable expectations of benefits for patients (which is already against the law if practitioners do it). If influencers do, the recruiting practitioner will be responsible.

    The new rules for health practitioners aim to make non-surgical procedures safer.
    Tijana Simic/Shutterstock

    Botox is a prescription-only drug subject to strict controls.

    But several practitioners have been disciplined for administering or procuring it inappropriately, such as in day spas or by arranging “remote” prescriptions by email. Recent cases of unregistered people injecting it at parties, resulting in botulism (a serious condition), also suggest gaps in oversight.

    The new rules allow only suitably trained practitioners to prescribe these drugs following an in-person or video consultation. Batch prescribing – issuing prescriptions for multiple patients – is now clearly unacceptable.

    The guidelines emphasise skills and training. Registered nurses will now need a year’s experience in other fields before giving cosmetic treatments. Enrolled nurses will be expected to first have a year of supervised, relevant experience.

    There must also be robust protocols to manage any complications after a procedure. Practitioners must provide detailed aftercare instructions, and ensure patients are aware of their right to complain and to whom.

    Screening for suitability

    Short and impersonal cosmetic consultations have often not met the legal requirements for informed consent.

    The guidelines address this by requiring registered nurses and nurse practitioners to thoroughly assess a patient’s suitability for a treatment.

    They must confirm the patient’s expectations are realistic, discuss risks and alternatives (including no treatment), be transparent about their own skills and experience, and explain all costs.

    The guidelines specify that screening assessments must check for underlying conditions, such as body dysmorphic disorder, which is known to be more common in those seeking cosmetic treatments.

    It is one of several mental health disorders diagnosed in people who experience anxiety and persistent thoughts about perceived flaws in their physical appearance.

    Patients experiencing this condition would likely be unsuitable. That’s because people with body dysmorphic disorder are at higher risk of poor psychosocial outcomes (such as poorer mental health or wellbeing).

    If found unsuitable, patients must be refused treatment and referred to another appropriate practitioner, such as a psychologist, for appropriate support.

    Overall, the new guidelines foster better informed consent processes. They prompt practitioners to screen for and discuss the psychosocial risks known to be associated with cosmetic procedures.

    Consultations will have to screen patients to see if they’re suitable for treatment.
    Chay_Tee/Shutterstock

    What about under 18s?

    AHPRA says the new rules offer greater protection for young people through new safeguards and special rules for under-18s.

    The guidelines say prescribing dermal fillers to minors is inappropriate. For other procedures, they require parental or guardian consent where practicable, and a cooling-off period of seven days between obtaining informed consent and the procedure.

    However, health practitioners will still be able to exercise their clinical judgement for under-18s within the limits of the law.

    That’s because the general law permits “mature minors” to lawfully consent to medical treatments if they have been assessed as having sufficient understanding and intelligence to appreciate fully what is being proposed.

    So, how are these rules enforced?

    These guidelines are not parliamentary laws.

    Instead, they define the standards expected of all registered health practitioners who perform non-surgical cosmetic procedures – except doctors, who have their own guidelines.

    If a health practitioner does not comply with the guidelines, the board responsible for their registration and accreditation – for example, the Nursing and Midwifery Board – can take “immediate action” to suspend them or launch disciplinary proceedings for extended sanctions.

    The guidelines will make it easier for national boards and state complaints organisations to support any allegations of professional wrongdoing against health professionals performing or promoting cosmetic procedures.

    Before now, there were no specific rules about cosmetic procedures – just the general (but important) codes of conduct for each profession.

    The guidelines give real teeth to the bodies that regulate the health profession and will likely enable them to weed out bad actors from the cosmetic workforce. Even so, they cannot compensate or redress patient harms.

    For that, patients may sue practitioners in court, report unlawful drug advertising to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (where fines can be issued), or take action under Australian consumer law.

    Christopher Rudge worked as a part-time research officer at the Medical Council of New South Wales in 2018.

    – ref. New rules for cosmetic injectables aim to make the industry safer. Will they work? – https://theconversation.com/new-rules-for-cosmetic-injectables-aim-to-make-the-industry-safer-will-they-work-257898

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘Godfather of AI’ now fears it’s unsafe. He has a plan to rein it in

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Armin Chitizadeh, Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Sydney

    fran_kie/Shutterstock

    This week the US Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed two men suspected of bombing a fertility clinic in California last month allegedly used artificial intelligence (AI) to obtain bomb-making instructions. The FBI did not disclose the name of the AI program in question.

    This brings into sharp focus the urgent need to make AI safer. Currently we are living in the “wild west” era of AI, where companies are fiercely competing to develop the fastest and most entertaining AI systems. Each company wants to outdo competitors and claim the top spot. This intense competition often leads to intentional or unintentional shortcuts – especially when it comes to safety.

    Coincidentally, at around the same time of the FBI’s revelation, one of the godfathers of modern AI, Canadian computer science professor Yoshua Bengio, launched a new nonprofit organisation dedicated to developing a new AI model specifically designed to be safer than other AI models – and target those that cause social harm.

    So what is Bengio’s new AI model? And will it actually protect the world from AI-faciliated harm?

    An ‘honest’ AI

    In 2018, Bengio, alongside his colleagues Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, won the Turing Award for groundbreaking research they had published three years earlier on deep learning. A branch of machine learning, deep learning attempts to mimic the processes of the human brain by using artificial neural networks to learn from computational data and make predictions.

    Bengio’s new nonprofit organisation, LawZero, is developing “Scientist AI”. Bengio has said this model will be “honest and not deceptive”, and incorporate safety-by-design principles.

    According to a preprint paper released online earlier this year, Scientist AI will differ from current AI systems in two key ways.

    First, it can assess and communicate its confidence level in its answers, helping to reduce the problem of AI giving overly confident and incorrect responses.

    Second, it can explain its reasoning to humans, allowing its conclusions to be evaluated and tested for accuracy.

    Interestingly, older AI systems had this feature. But in the rush for speed and new approaches, many modern AI models can’t explain their decisions. Their developers have sacrificed explainability for speed.

    Bengio also intends “Scientist AI” to act as a guardrail against unsafe AI. It could monitor other, less reliable and harmful AI systems — essentially fighting fire with fire.

    This may be the only viable solution to improve AI safety. Humans cannot properly monitor systems such as ChatGPT, which handle over a billion queries daily. Only another AI can manage this scale.

    Using an AI system against other AI systems is not just a sci-fi concept – it’s a common practice in research to compare and test different level of intelligence in AI systems.

    Adding a ‘world model’

    Large language models and machine learning are just small parts of today’s AI landscape.

    Another key addition Bengio’s team are adding to Scientist AI is the “world model” which brings certainty and explainability. Just as humans make decisions based on their understanding of the world, AI needs a similar model to function effectively.

    The absence of a world model in current AI models is clear.

    One well-known example is the “hand problem”: most of today’s AI models can imitate the appearance of hands but cannot replicate natural hand movements, because they lack an understanding of the physics — a world model — behind them.

    Another example is how models such as ChatGPT struggle with chess, failing to win and even making illegal moves.

    This is despite simpler AI systems, which do contain a model of the “world” of chess, beating even the best human players.

    These issues stem from the lack of a foundational world model in these systems, which are not inherently designed to model the dynamics of the real world.

    Yoshua Bengio is recognised as one of the godfathers of AI.
    Alex Wong/Getty Images

    On the right track – but it will be bumpy

    Bengio is on the right track, aiming to build safer, more trustworthy AI by combining large language models with other AI technologies.

    However, his journey isn’t going to be easy. LawZero’s US$30 million in funding is small compared to efforts such as the US$500 billion project announced by US President Donald Trump earlier this year to accelerate the development of AI.

    Making LawZero’s task harder is the fact that Scientist AI – like any other AI project – needs huge amounts of data to be powerful, and most data are controlled by major tech companies.

    There’s also an outstanding question. Even if Bengio can build an AI system that does everything he says it can, how is it going to be able to control other systems that might be causing harm?

    Still, this project, with talented researchers behind it, could spark a movement toward a future where AI truly helps humans thrive. If successful, it could set new expectations for safe AI, motivating researchers, developers, and policymakers to prioritise safety.

    Perhaps if we had taken similar action when social media first emerged, we would have a safer online environment for young people’s mental health. And maybe, if Scientist AI had already been in place, it could have prevented people with harmful intentions from accessing dangerous information with the help of AI systems.

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

    – ref. ‘Godfather of AI’ now fears it’s unsafe. He has a plan to rein it in – https://theconversation.com/godfather-of-ai-now-fears-its-unsafe-he-has-a-plan-to-rein-it-in-258288

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The kimono is more than an artefact and more than clothing. It is a concept artists will make their own

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

    The kimono garment, the national dress of Japan, carries within itself all of the magic and traditions of Japanese culture.

    The basic features of the kimono are fairly simple. It is a wrapped front garment with square sleeves that has a rectangular body where the left side is wrapped over the right, except in funerary use.

    The garment may be traced back to the Heian period as a distinctive style of dress for the nobility. In the Edo period (1603–1867) it came to a glorious culmination with colourful and expensive fabrics.

    The great poet Matsuo Bashō once wrote “Spring passes by / again and again in layers / of blossom-kimono”. Since childhood I’ve loved the mystical image “blossom-kimono”.

    In 2020, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London staged their epic exhibition Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk, where hundreds of garments, accessories, prints and photographs charted the history of the kimono from the 17th century through to the present.

    A new exhibition from the National Gallery of Victoria is similarly ambitious. Over 70 fabulous garments of exquisite craftsmanship – some made of silk with gold and silver embroidery and dazzling designs – have been assembled within a context of over 150 paintings, posters, wood block prints, magazines and decorative arts.

    Although many of the items have never been previously exhibited in Australia, most are now in the collection of the NGV, with many specifically acquired for this exhibition.

    Exquisite production

    There are seven newly acquired Edo-period silk and ramie kimonos, richly decorated with leaves, tendrils and falling snow. They provide us with a glimpse at the wealth and sophistication of the samurai and merchant classes of the 18th and 19th centuries.

    One of the highlights is the Uchikake Furisode wedding kimono with pine, bamboo, plum and cranes, from the early to mid-19th century.

    It is a display of exquisite taste with satin silk, shibori tie dyeing, and embroidery with gold thread. The birds and the vegetation seem to float on the surface and must have created an amazing sight when worn.

    Uchikake Furisode wedding kimono with pine, bamboo, plum, and cranes early–mid 19th century. Satin silk, shibori tie dyeing, embroidery, gold thread, 177.5 cm (centre back) 131.0 cm (cuff to cuff).
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Michael and Emily Tong, 2024

    The garment is simple and functional and, despite the exquisiteness of its production, it is also restrained in contrast to the conspicuous exuberance of some examples of 19th century European courtly dress.

    Some of these Edo period kimonos can become quite narrative-driven in their design, as with the Hitoe kosode kimono with themes alluding to eight Noh theatre plays of the late Edo period. Slightly smaller than the wedding kimono, that was 177.5 cm long as opposed to 167 cm, this one revels in a blue background on gauze satin silk with a multiplicity of little narrative scenes like an assembly of diverse stage sets.

    Hitoe kosode, kimono with themes alluding to eight Noh theatre plays late Edo period. Gauze satin silk, paste resist dye, embroidery, gold thread, 167.0 cm (centre back) 124.0 cm (cuff to cuff).
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Jennifer Lempriere and Michael Pithie, 2024

    The exhibition also includes the work of contemporary Japanese kimono designers including Hiroko Takahashi, Jotaro Saito, Modern Antenna, Tamao Shigemune, Y&SONS, Rumi Rock and Robe Japonica.

    The kimono as a concept

    The kimono is more than an historic artefact, one where ideas and methods of production were to remain constant for centuries. It is also an idea that inspires designers working in international fashion houses.

    The NGV exhibition includes kimono-inspired works of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano, Comme des Garçon, Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, Zambesi and Rudi Gernreich.

    Alexander McQueen’s Gown, belt and sandals (Dégradé) (2007) is one of the takeaway memories from this exhibition. The humble functional kimono has been totally transfigured.

    To the silk-satin shell there have been added leather, metal and rubber accessories and synthetic shoulder pads. The purple and pink colour scheme and the sweeping sleeves that trail along the ground create a mesmerising and dominant phantom-like character that owns and dominates the space.

    Gown, belt and sandals (Dégradé), 2007. The blue lady (La Dame Bleue) collection, spring-summer 2008. Silk (satin), patent leather, leather, synthetic fabric (shoulder pads, wadding), cotton (laces), metal (fastenings), rubber, (a) 176.0 cm (centre back) 33.5 cm (waist, flat) (dress) (b) 37.0 × 61.0 cm (belt) (c-d) 23.0 × 19.5 × 80.0 cm (each) (sandals).
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 ©Alexander McQueen

    It is difficult not to be impressed by McQueen’s vision, but we have now moved quite a long way from the kimono.

    The kimono is a wonderful concept – an armature on which to hang many different ideas. The beauty of this exhibition is that it frees the idea of a garment from a static piece of cloth, at best to be displayed on a dummy, to something approaching a concept in design that artists will clasp and from which they will create their own work.

    There are many rich nuances in the show, for example the superb almost monochrome and somewhat gothic Men’s undergarment (nagajuban) with graveyard, skulls and crescent moon (c.1930).

    Men’s undergarment (nagajuban) with graveyard, skulls and crescent moon c. 1930. Silk, wool, cotton 127.0 cm (centre back) 130.5 cm (cuff to cuff).
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Maureen Morrisey Bequest, 2018

    At the same time, we have Women’s kimono with geometric design and accessories (c.1930) with its polychrome exuberance with reds, blacks and greys combining geometric motifs with soft organic feather-like forms.

    Bashō’s “blossom-kimono” was a meditation on the passing of time and the hope that a young girl will live to experience wrinkles that come with old age. The kimono in this exhibition celebrates the passing of time and generational change within the life of an immortal idea about function, form and ideas of beauty.

    Kimono is at the National Gallery of Victoria until October 5.

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

    – ref. The kimono is more than an artefact and more than clothing. It is a concept artists will make their own – https://theconversation.com/the-kimono-is-more-than-an-artefact-and-more-than-clothing-it-is-a-concept-artists-will-make-their-own-253030

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: John Pesutto owes Moira Deeming $2.3m, but he doesn’t have it. Can former premiers be forced to pick up the tab?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Legg, Professor of Law, UNSW Sydney

    Victorian MP Moira Deeming attracted headlines recently when news broke she’s intending to sue three former Liberal premiers, among other party figures.

    Why? Deeming is trying to recoup millions of dollars in legal costs after a successful defamation case.

    Who pays for legal action in Australia, particularly in civil courts, can be confusing. But given how expensive litigation can be and the big names involved in this case, it’s worth unpacking.

    How did we get here?

    In March 2023, Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming spoke at a “Let Women Speak” rally held at Parliament House in Melbourne. The rally was interrupted by protesters, who were described as “neo-Nazis”.

    After the rally, the then-Victorian Opposition Leader John Pesutto made a series of public statements implying Deeming had associations with the neo-Nazi groups and therefore needed to be expelled from parliament.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, in December 2023 Deeming sued Pesutto in the Federal Court for defamation. A year later, she won her lawsuit.

    Pesutto was ordered to pay $300,000 in damages for the harm to Deeming’s reputation and the associated emotional distress she suffered.

    But that wasn’t the end of what Pesutto had to pay.

    Last month, the Federal Court also ordered Pesutto to pay $2.3 million to cover Deeming’s costs in winning her suit (in addition to having to pay his own costs).

    This has created some serious problems for both Pesutto and Deeming.

    It is a problem for Pesutto because he doesn’t have the money to pay and is now facing bankruptcy proceedings and his own possible expulsion from parliament.

    Former premier Jeff Kennett has spruiked a crowdfunding campaign to help fund Pesutto’s legal liabilities.

    It is a problem for Deeming because she will be out $2.3 million if Pesutto cannot come up with the money.

    So, Deeming is now looking around for someone else who might be made to pay Pesutto’s tab.

    What does the law say?

    The reason Pesutto has to pay is that in nearly all Australian courts, the standard order at the end of a lawsuit is that the loser has to pay the costs – for example, lawyers’ fees, court costs, and expert witness fees – of the winner.

    Usually the loser simply makes payment, unless they don’t have the financial means to do so, and the court proceedings are over.

    However, the court can make “third-party costs orders”. These are orders making someone other than the losing party responsible for paying the loser’s costs bill.

    Deeming’s solicitor has indicated, in a widely reported letter to Pesutto’s lawyers, that Deeming intends to seek payment of her costs from up to nine Liberal Party notables, including former premiers Ted Baillieu, Denis Napthine and Jeff Kennett, due to their alleged funding of Pesutto’s legal costs during the case.

    Though the court rules allow for a third party to pay costs, and courts have broad discretion to make almost any kind of costs order, the High Court has established certain circumstances that should be considered first.

    These circumstances include where a party to a lawsuit is insolvent or a “person of straw”, and where a third party has an interest in the subject of the litigation.

    Perhaps tellingly, the letter from Deeming’s solicitor reportedly states Pesutto was a person of straw and that the Liberal Party figures did have an interest in the proceedings. However, this would need to be accepted by a court for Deeming to be successful.

    How can people bankroll the court battles of others?

    Providing money to support another person bringing litigation was originally frowned on by the law. It was regarded as “champerty” and “maintenance”. Both were treated as criminal offences.

    The High Court of Australia has observed that law of maintenance and champerty can been traced to the Statute of Westminster the First of 1275. Some trace it back to Greek and Roman law.

    Maintenance was where a person “improperly, and for the purpose of stirring up litigation and strife, encourages others either to bring actions, or to make defences which they have no right to make”.

    But there were exceptions, such as where the maintainer acted from charitable motives or because the person maintained was family.

    Champerty was a type of maintenance where the funder received some reward, such as part of the outcome of the successful litigation. The vice was stirring up litigation, oppressing others and creating an incentive to tamper with evidence.

    Over time, however, Australian jurisdictions abolished the prohibition.

    Access to justice, including the ability to raise a defence, is often costly in Australia because of legal fees and the loser pays system. Many litigants need financial help to bring or defend litigation.

    Indeed, Australia now allows third-party litigation funding where a corporate entity funds the proceedings in return for a share of the recovery, as is commonly used in class actions and insolvency cases.

    While bankrolling of civil litigation is now business as usual, it is not entirely unregulated. The courts have power to prevent an “abuse of process”, typically through permanently halting proceedings.

    An abuse of process typically arises where the use of the court’s procedures unjustifiably negatively affects a party, or where it serves to bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

    If a funder repeatedly supported unmeritorious claims or defences, or misused court procedures, then the courts can step in, but this is a high bar.

    As a result, the main response to third parties financing litigation is to seek costs from them when the unsuccessful party cannot pay. Deeming will need to pursue this through the court.

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

    – ref. John Pesutto owes Moira Deeming $2.3m, but he doesn’t have it. Can former premiers be forced to pick up the tab? – https://theconversation.com/john-pesutto-owes-moira-deeming-2-3m-but-he-doesnt-have-it-can-former-premiers-be-forced-to-pick-up-the-tab-258059

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: We tracked 13,000 giants of the ocean over 30 years, to uncover their hidden highways

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Ana M. M. Sequeira, Associate Professor, Research School of Biology, Australian National University

    Alexandra Vautin, Shutterstock

    Big animals of the ocean go about their days mostly hidden from view. Scientists know this marine megafauna – such as whales, sharks, seal, turtles and birds – travel vast distances to feed and breed.

    But almost a third are now at risk of extinction due largely to fishing, shipping, pollution and global warming.

    Protecting them can be difficult, because we don’t often know where these animals are.

    New research I led sought to shed light on the issue. My colleagues and I gathered 30 years of satellite tracking data to map hotspots of megafauna activity around the globe.

    We tracked 12,794 animals from 111 species to find out where they go. The results reveal underwater “highways” where megafauna crisscross the global Ocean. They also show where megafauna dwell for feeding and breeding. Now we know where these special places are, we have a better chance of protecting them.

    Satellite tracking reveals marine megafauna migration pathways and places of residence.
    Sequeira et al (2025) Science

    Pulling all the data together: a mega task

    For more than 30 years, marine biologists have tagged large animals in the sea with electronic devices and tracked their movements via satellite. The trackers capture data on everything from speed of travel, to direction of movement and where the animals spend most of their time.

    I put a call out to the global research community to bring together the tracking data. I hoped it would help scientists better understand the animals’ movements and identify their favourite places.

    Some 378 scientists from 50 countries responded. We assembled the world’s largest tracking dataset of marine megafauna. It includes species of flying birds, whales, fishes (mostly sharks), penguins, polar bears, seals, dugongs, manatees and turtles. They were tracked between 1985 and 2018, throughout the world’s oceans.

    Ana Sequeira swimming with a whale shark in Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, to collect samples.
    Australian Institute of Marine Science

    Mapping reveals a lack of protection

    When we started analysing the data, it showed the tagged animals used some parts of the ocean more frequently than others. Most of them travelled to the central Indian Ocean, northeast Pacific Ocean, Atlantic north, and waters around Mozambique and South Africa.

    It’s likely this reflects a lack of data from elsewhere. However, these species are known to go to places where they are most likely to find food, so we expect some areas to be used more than others (including the areas we detected).

    Then we were able to identify the world’s most “ecologically and biologically significant areas” for the tracked animals.

    Currently only about 8% of the global ocean is protected. And only 5% of the important marine megafauna areas we identified occur within these existing marine protected areas.

    This leaves all of the other important marine megafauna areas we identified unprotected. In other words, the species using those areas are likely to suffer harm from human activities taking place at sea.

    More than 90% of the important marine megafauna areas we identified are exposed to high plastic pollution, shipping traffic or to intensifying global warming. And about 75% are exposed to industrial fishing.

    We also found marine megafauna tend to spend most of their time within exclusive economic zones. This area lies beyond the territorial sea or belt of water 12 nautical miles from the coast of each country, extending 200 nautical miles from shore. The presence of megafauna in these exclusive economic zones means individual countries could increase the protection afforded within their jurisdictions.

    About 40% of the important marine megafauna areas were located in these zones. But about 60% were on the high seas.

    The future of marine megafauna conservation

    The High Seas Treaty, recently adopted by the United Nations and signed by 115 countries, governs the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological biodiversity on the open ocean.

    Working alongside this treaty, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to protect 30% of the global ocean by 2030. This presents an opportunity to ensure important marine megafauna areas are well represented.

    We used an optimisation algorithm to identify the best areas to protect, when it comes to marine megafauna. We gave priority to areas that are potentially used for feeding, breeding, resting and migrating across all the different species.

    But even if important marine megafauna areas are selected when 30% of the ocean is protected, about 60% of these areas would still stay unprotected.

    Significant risks from human activities will remain. Management efforts must also focus on reducing harm from fishing and shipping. Fighting climate change and cutting down noise and plastic pollution should also be key priorities.

    Like for most megafauna on land, the reign of marine megafauna might come to an end if humanity does not afford these species greater protection.

    Ana M. M. Sequeira receives funding from the Australian Research Council and a Pew Marine Fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trusts. She is also affiliated with the University of Western Australia.

    – ref. We tracked 13,000 giants of the ocean over 30 years, to uncover their hidden highways – https://theconversation.com/we-tracked-13-000-giants-of-the-ocean-over-30-years-to-uncover-their-hidden-highways-254610

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Is black mould really as bad for us as we think? A toxicologist explains

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide

    Peeradontax/Shutterstock

    Mould in houses is unsightly and may cause unpleasant odours. More important though, mould has been linked to a range of health effects – especially triggering asthma.

    However, is mould exposure linked to a serious lung disease in children, unrelated to asthma? As we’ll see, this link may not be real, or if it is, it’s so rare to not be a meaningful risk. Yet we still hear mould in damp homes described as “toxic”.

    Indeed, mouldy homes can harm people’s health, but not necessarily how you might think.

    What is mould?

    Mould is the general term for a variety of fungi. The mould that people have focused on in damp homes is “black mould”. This forms unsightly black patches on walls and other parts of damp-affected buildings.

    Black mould is not a single fungus. But when people talk about black mould, they generally mean the fungus Stachybotrys chartarum or S. chartarum for short. It’s one of experts’ top ten feared fungi.

    The focus on this species comes from a report in the 1990s on cases of haemorrhagic lung disease in a number of infants. This is a rare disease where blood leaks into the lungs, and can be fatal. The report suggested chemicals known as mycotoxins associated with this species of fungus were responsible for the outbreak.

    What are mycotoxins?

    A variety of fungi produce mycotoxins to defend themselves, among other reasons.

    Hundreds of different chemicals are listed as myocytoxins. These include ones in poisonous mushrooms, and ones associated with the soil fungi Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus.

    The fungus typically associated with black mould S. chartarum can produce several mycotoxins. These include roridin, which inhibits protein synthesis in humans and animals, and satratoxins, which have numerous toxic effects including bleeding in the lungs.

    While the satratoxins, in particular, were mentioned in the report from the 90s in children, there are some problems when we look at the evidence.

    The amount of mycotoxins S. chartarum makes can vary considerably. Even if significant amounts of mycotoxin are present, getting them into the body in the required amount to cause damage is another thing.

    Inhaling spores in contaminated (mouldy) homes is the most probable way mycotoxins enter the body. For instance, we know mycotoxins can be found in S. chartarum spores. We also know direct injection of high concentrations of mycotoxin-bearing spores directly in the noses of mice can cause some lung bleeding.

    Stachybotrys chartarum mycotoxins have been blamed for lung issues after exposure to black mould.
    Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

    But just because inhaling spores is the probable route of contamination doesn’t mean this is very likely.

    That’s because S. chartarum doesn’t release a lot of spores. Its spores are typically embedded in a slimy mass and it rarely produces the spore densities needed to replicate the animal studies.

    The original reports suggesting the US infants who were diagnosed with haemorrhagic lung disease were exposed to toxic levels of mycotoxins were also flawed.

    Among other issues, the concentrations of mould spores was calculated incorrectly. Subsequent correction for these issues resulted in the association between S. chartarum and this disease cluster basically disappearing.

    The American Academy of Asthma Allergy and Immunology states while there is a clear, well-established relationship between damp indoor spaces and detrimental health effects, there is no good evidence black mould mycotoxins are involved.

    But mould can cause allergies

    Moulds can affect human health in ways unrelated to mycotoxins, typically through allergic reactions. Moulds including black moulds can trigger or worsen asthma attacks in people with mould allergies.

    Some rarer but severe reactions can include allergic fungal sinusitis, allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis and rarer still, hypersensitivity pneumonitis.

    These can typically be controlled by removing the mould (or removing the person from the source of mould).

    People with impaired immune systems (such as people taking immune-suppressant medications) may also be prone to mould infections.

    In a nutshell

    There is sufficient evidence that household mould is associated with respiratory issues attributable to their allergic effects.

    However, there is no strong evidence mycotoxins from household mould – and in particular black mould – are associated with substantial health issues.

    Ian Musgrave has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council to study adverse reactions to herbal medicines and has previously been funded by the Australian Research Council to study potential natural product treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. He is currently a member of one of the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s statutory councils.

    – ref. Is black mould really as bad for us as we think? A toxicologist explains – https://theconversation.com/is-black-mould-really-as-bad-for-us-as-we-think-a-toxicologist-explains-258173

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Australia is in the firing line of Trump’s looming ‘revenge tax’. It’s a fight we’re unlikely to win

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Cooper, Professor of Taxation Law, University of Sydney

    Alexey_Arz/Shutterstock

    The Australian Labor Party just won an election victory for the ages. Now, it may be forced to walk back one of the key achievements of its first term.

    Here’s why: United States President Donald Trump is about to declare an income tax war on much of the world – and we Australians are not on the same side.

    Over in the US, the “One Big Beautiful Bill act” – a tax and spending package worth trillions of dollars – has been passed by the House of Representatives. It’s now before the Senate for consideration.

    Within it lies a new and highly controversial provision: Section 899. This increases various US tax rates payable by taxpayers from any country the US claims is maintaining an “unfair foreign tax” by five percentage points each year, up to an additional 20% loading.

    Having been an integral part of an international effort to create a global 15% minimum tax, Australia now finds itself in the firing line of Trump’s “revenge tax” warfare – and it’s a fight we’re unlikely to win.

    A global minimum tax rate

    The origins of the looming income tax war started in 2013, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its plan to stamp out “base erosion and profit shifting”.

    This refers to a range of strategies often used by multinational companies to minimise the tax they pay, exploiting differences and gaps in the tax rules of different countries.

    The OECD’s first attempt to tackle the problem was a collection of disparate measures directed not only at corporate tax avoidance, but also controlling tax poaching by national governments and “sweetheart deals” negotiated by tax officials.

    Under both Labor and the Coalition, Australia was initially an enthusiastic backer of these attempts.

    However, the project was not a widespread success. Many countries endorsed the final reports but, unlike Australia, few countries acted on them.

    After the failure of this first project, the OECD tried again in 2019. This evolved to encompass two “pillars” to change the global tax rules.

    Pillar one would give more tax to countries where a company’s customers are located. Pillar two is a minimum tax of 15% on (a version of) the accounting profits of the largest multinationals earned in each country where the multinational operates.

    Labor picked up this project for the 2022 election, promising to support both pillars – and they honoured that promise.

    US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on May 22.
    The Washington Post/Getty

    Mixed success

    Around the world, the two pillar project had mixed success. Pillar one was dead-on-arrival: most countries did nothing. But Australia and several other countries, mostly in Europe, implemented pillar two – the global minimum tax.

    The OECD has always maintained the base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) project was a coalition of the willing, meant to rebalance the way income tax is allocated between producer and consumer countries, and rid the world of tax havens.

    In the US, Republicans did not share that view. For them, BEPS was simply another attempt by foreign countries to get more tax from US companies.

    This Republican dissatisfaction with the OECD is now on full display. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order, formally repudiating any OECD commitments the Biden administration might have given.

    He also directed his officials to report on options for retaliatory measures the US could take against any foreign countries with income tax rules that are “extraterritorial” or “disproportionately affect American companies”.

    Why Australia is so exposed

    Australia could find itself in the firing line of Trump’s tax warfare on many fronts. And the US doesn’t lack firepower. Section 899 adds to a number of retaliatory tax provisions the US already had at its disposal.

    The increased tax rates would affect Australian super funds and other investors earning dividends, rent, interest, royalties and other income from US companies.
    Australian super funds in particular are heavily invested in US markets, which have outperformed local stocks in recent years.

    It would also affect Australian managed funds owning land and infrastructure assets in the US, as well as Australian entities such as banks that carry on business in the US.

    And there are other measures that would expose US subsidiaries of Australian companies to US higher tax.

    The bill would even remove the doctrine of sovereign immunity for the governments of “offending” countries. Sovereign immunity refers to a tax exemption on returns that usually applies to governments. This means the Australian government itself could have to pay tax to the US.

    There are concerns on Wall Street this will dampen demand for US government bonds from foreign governments, which are big buyers of US Treasuries. The argument may sway some in the Senate – but how many remains to be seen.

    What Australia may need to do next

    We may be incredulous that anyone would consider our tax system combative, but enacting the OECD pillar two was always known to be risky.

    There are other, homegrown Australian tax measures that have drawn American ire.

    In 2015, Australia enacted an income tax measure (commonly called the “Google tax”) specifically directed at US tech companies. In 2017, we followed this up with a diverted profits tax. Trump’s bill specifically targets both measures.

    Tying ourselves to the OECD’s global minimum tax project might have seemed like a good idea in 2019. In 2025, it looks decidedly unappealing, and not just because of Trump.

    First, there is not actually any serious revenue in pillar two for Australia. Treasury’s revenue estimate totalled only $360 million after four years, just slightly more than a rounding error in the federal budget.

    Second, we are increasingly alone and vulnerable in this battle. It might feel emotionally satisfying to stand up to the US. If there was a sizeable coalition alongside us, there might be some point.

    If Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill act does pass through the US Senate, the Australian government and business will be left exposed to much higher costs.

    Since abandoning the US market is not really an option, it might be time to surrender quietly and gracefully – by reversing, at the very least, the contentious bits of pillar two.

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

    – ref. Australia is in the firing line of Trump’s looming ‘revenge tax’. It’s a fight we’re unlikely to win – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-in-the-firing-line-of-trumps-looming-revenge-tax-its-a-fight-were-unlikely-to-win-257961

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Spit or swallow? What’s the best way to deal with phlegm?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Niall Johnston, Conjoint Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney

    Pop Paul-Catalin/Shutterstock

    A spitting pot I consider as an essential part of the bed-room apparatus.

    That’s what French physician René Laennec wrote in 1821. Laennec, who invented the stethoscope, spent his days gazing at his patients’ phlegm. In the days before x-rays and blood tests, phlegm was considered a valuable diagnostic tool.

    Today, most of us don’t carry around a spitting pot. But a persistent question remains, especially during winter, when noses are dripping and chests are rattling.

    When you have a cough, should you spit out phlegm or is it better to swallow it?

    It might feel like an odd or even slightly stomach-churning topic, but it’s a remarkably common question patients ask doctors.

    What is phlegm?

    Phlegm, also known as sputum, is the thick, sticky mucus your lungs and windpipe make. This acts as a defensive barrier to protect them.

    Its main ingredients are mucins – large, sugar-coated proteins that trap viruses, bacteria, allergens and dust. These mucins also regulate inflammation and the body’s immune response to bacteria and viruses.

    We most commonly see phlegm with viral illness during winter. But phlegm is also evident in other medical conditions including asthma and allergies, bacterial infections, such as sinusitis, or with smoking or exposure to air pollution.

    In fact, we’re always making phlegm, even when we are healthy. Cells in the lungs secrete mucus to keep surfaces moist and trap irritants. When we encounter something potentially harmful, such as a virus or allergen, immune cells detect the threat and release signals that tell mucus-producing cells to step up their game.

    This extra mucus helps trap the invader and move it out of the lungs. Tiny hairs lining the airways (called cilia) then sweep the mucus up to the throat, where we cough it out or swallow it.

    These tiny hairs, or cilia, sweep phlegm up to your throat.
    Sakurra/Shutterstock

    The case for spitting

    Some people feel better if they spit out phlegm, especially if the phlegm is thick, sticky or irritates the throat.

    Spitting also lets you see what’s coming up. If phlegm contains blood, for example, it is important to see a doctor to exclude a more serious underlying illness, such as tuberculosis or cancer.

    If you do spit out, do so into a tissue and throw it in the bin. Wash your hands afterwards. This reduces the risk of spreading infection to others via respiratory droplets or contaminated surfaces.

    However, spitting out phlegm isn’t always practical, or polite. And for most viral infections, it doesn’t help you get better any faster than swallowing. The aim is to remove phlegm from the lungs, which occurs with either method.

    Spitting is also not feasible for young children, who haven’t yet developed the coordination to do so effectively. They’ll generally swallow their phlegm.

    How mucus keeps us healthy all year round, even if we’re not sick.

    The case for swallowing

    It might not sound particularly appealing, but swallowing phlegm is a normal process, and harmless. In fact, we often swallow phlegm without realising it.

    The lungs generate about 50 millilitres of phlegm daily. It goes unnoticed because it’s thin, blends with saliva and we continuously swallow it. We only become aware of it when it thickens, such as during a viral infection.

    After you swallow phlegm, it travels to the stomach, where acid and enzymes break it down, along with any germs it carries.

    Swallowing phlegm doesn’t “recycle” the germs, and it won’t result in the infection spreading elsewhere.

    In fact, swallowing viruses can even help build immunity. Once inside the gut, immune cells begin to recognise pieces of the virus and start preparing the body to respond more effectively to it in the future. Some important immunisations, such as the oral polio vaccine, work through this very mechanism.

    So, what’s the verdict?

    Whether you spit or swallow phlegm, both are safe. Spitting can help some people feel better, especially if their cough is associated with thick phlegm that’s causing distress.

    But for most healthy people, there’s no need to force a cough or spit out phlegm. Swallowing phlegm is completely safe. And in young children, it’s the only feasible option.

    In the end, it won’t matter if you spit or swallow your phlegm this winter. So choose what feels right (and least icky) for you.

    Phoebe Williams receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, and the Gates Foundation.

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

    – ref. Spit or swallow? What’s the best way to deal with phlegm? – https://theconversation.com/spit-or-swallow-whats-the-best-way-to-deal-with-phlegm-256216

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Premature babies are given sucrose for pain relief – but new research shows it doesn’t stop long-term impacts on development

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mia Mclean, Senior lecturer, Auckland University of Technology

    Getty Images

    Infants born very preterm spend weeks or even months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) while their immature brains are still developing.

    During this time, they receive up to 16 painful procedures every day. The most common is a routine heel prick used to collect a blood sample. Suctioning of the infant’s airways is also common.

    While many of these procedures provide critical care, we know they are acutely painful. Even tearing tape off the skin can be painful.

    We also know, from decades of research, that preterm babies’ exposure to daily painful invasive procedures is related to altered brain development, stress functioning and poorer cognitive and behavioural outcomes.

    The commonest strategy to manage acute pain in preterm babies is to give them sucrose, a sugar solution. But my recent research with Canadian colleagues shows this doesn’t stop these long-term impacts.

    In New Zealand, there is no requirement to document all procedures or pain treatments. But as the findings from our Canadian study show, we urgently need research to improve long-term health outcomes for children born prematurely.

    Long-term effects of pain in early life

    We collected data on the number of procedures, clinical exposures and sucrose doses from three NICUs across Canada.

    One of these sites does not use sucrose for acute pain management. This meant we were able to compare outcomes for children who received sucrose during their NICU stay and those who did not, without having to randomly assign infants to different care as you would in a randomised controlled trial – the gold standard approach.

    At 18 months of age, when children born preterm are typically seen for a follow-up, parents report on their child’s behaviour. Our findings replicate earlier research: very preterm babies who were exposed to painful procedures early in life showed more anxiety and depressive symptoms by toddlerhood.

    Our findings are similar regarding a child’s cognition and language, backing results from other studies. We found no link between preterm babies’ later behaviour and how much sucrose they were given to manage pain.

    The sweet taste of sucrose is thought to alleviate pain because it leads to the release of endorphins. It has become the worldwide standard of care for acute neonatal pain, but it doesn’t seem to be helping in the long term.

    Improving pain treatment

    About 1 in 13 babies are born preterm each year in Aotearoa New Zealand. Some 1-2% are very preterm, two to four months early. Māori and other ethnic minorities are at higher risk.

    Studies in New Zealand show children born very preterm have up to a three-fold risk of emotional disorders in preschool and by school age. This remains evident through adulthood.

    Sucrose may stop preterm babies from showing signs of pain, but physiological and neurological pain responses nevertheless happen.

    As is the case internationally, sucrose is used widely in New Zealand, but there is considerable variation in protocols of use across hospitals. No national guidelines for best practice exist.

    Infant pain should be assessed, but international data suggest this isn’t always the case. What’s more, pain isn’t always managed. Routine assessment of pain and parent education videos are useful initiatives to encourage pain management.

    Minimising the number of procedures is recommended by international bodies. Advances in clinical care, including the use of less invasive ventilation support and the inclusion of parents in the daily care of their infant, have seen the number of procedures decrease.

    Pain management guidelines also help, but whether these changes improve outcomes in the long term, we don’t know yet.

    We do know there are other ways of treating neonatal pain and minimising long-term impacts. Placing a newborn on a parent’s bare chest, skin-to-skin, effectively reduces short and long-term effects of neonatal pain.

    For times when whānau are not able to be in the NICU, we have limited evidence that other pain management strategies, such as expressed breast milk, are effective. Our recent research cements this: sucrose isn’t helping as we thought.

    Understanding which pain management strategies should be used for short and long-term benefits of this vulnerable population could make a big difference in the lives of these babies.

    This requires additional research and a different approach, while considering what is culturally acceptable in Aotearoa New Zealand. If the strategies we are currently using aren’t working, we need to think creatively about how to limit the impact of pain on children born prematurely.

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

    – ref. Premature babies are given sucrose for pain relief – but new research shows it doesn’t stop long-term impacts on development – https://theconversation.com/premature-babies-are-given-sucrose-for-pain-relief-but-new-research-shows-it-doesnt-stop-long-term-impacts-on-development-256804

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Defections are fairly common in Australian politics. But history shows they are rarely a good career move

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

    For many years now, Australian political scientists have pointed out that that established partisan allegiance is in decline. In 1967, 36% of Coalition supporters and 32% of Labor voters reported lifetime voting for their side. At the 2022 election, the Australian Election Study found the figures to be 16% and 12%.

    These changes help to explain the rising support for independents and minor parties at federal elections; they now take about a third of the primary vote.

    So much for voters. What about for politicians? Of course, there have always been plenty of parliamentarians who had an earlier stint as a member of some other party before landing in the one that sent them into parliament. Brendan Nelson was in the Labor Party before he was Liberal. John Gorton was Country Party before he was Liberal. Adam Bandt was Labor before he was Green. And so on. We are all entitled to change our minds, even if switching political parties was once closer to changing football teams – a habit that immediately arouses suspicion in a sports-loving nation.

    Senator Dorinda Cox’s switch from the Greens to the Labor Party was apparently a homecoming, according to Cox. She was once a Labor Party member, she said. Last week, she was criticising the party over its approval of Woodside’s Northwest Shelf gas project. This week, she finds Labor’s values aligned with her own.

    Of course, her defection has been accompanied by a steady leaking of little details of her Greens career, such as an excoriation of the Labor Party, in her application to run for the Greens, when she said the ALP patronised “women and people of colour” and cared more about its donors than members.

    That’s politics, but it’s a democratic deficit that senators elected as part of a Senate team, in a system that has facilitated above-the-line voting since 1984, can sit for years afterwards in the parliament as a member of another party.

    But good luck in getting up a constitutional change, via referendum, to change that.

    Still, it is easy to understand how such nimbleness breeds cynicism about political parties. Another perspective might be that the fluidity of allegiance out in the electorate has come to inhabit the political class itself.

    All the same, defections from one party to another are quite rare these days in federal politics, at least after one is sitting in parliament. But defections from a party to sit as an independent are not and some, such as Bob Katter, have managed to build successful political careers outside the parties.

    One who did not was was Julia Banks, the Liberal member for Chisholm, who announced she would not be seeking re-election and then left the party for the crossbench in the wake of Scott Morrison’s ascension to the leadership in 2018. Banks complained of bullying and intimidation within the Liberal Party and the wider parliament, and wrote a book on her experiences. She subsequently failed to gain election as an independent in another seat.

    There were several defectors in the last parliament. A House of Representatives crossbench that began at 16 had reached 19 by the end, with the defections of two Liberals (Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough, both after losing preselection) and one National, Andrew Gee, the latter over his party’s opposition to the Voice. Only Gee has lived politically to tell the tale, winning Calare as an Independent, as Peter Andren did before him.

    Defections from minor and microparties are especially common, based as they often are on a high-profile leader and lacking traditions of party discipline or solid structures of organisational governance. Jacqui Lambie began as a Palmer United Party senator. Tammy Tyrrell began as a Jacqui Lambie Network senator.

    The biggest “defection” in modern Australian politics was that of Cheryl Kernot from the Australian Democrats to the Labor Party in 1997. It is easy, over a quarter of a century on, and with the Australian Democrats no longer in the Australian parliament, to underestimate what a big deal this was at the time.

    Kernot was a rock star of a politician, leader of the Australian Democrats, and a national celebrity. But there are significant differences with Cox beyond Kernot’s greater eminence. She resigned her Senate seat immediately and would win the marginal Brisbane seat of Dickson in the following year’s election. Then, in 2001, she would lose it to a young and ambitious former policeman named Peter Dutton.

    The experience was ultimately an unhappy one for Kernot: she believed that having recruited her into the ranks, the Labor Party – and its leader, Kim Beazley, did not know how to make the best use of her. She was also on the receiving end of some relentlessly negative and sometimes intrusive media coverage. And by her own admission, she made mistakes. The story of her career’s unravelling is not straightforward. The role that gender played in it remains contentious.

    Perhaps Kernot’s experience would alone be sufficient to prompt second thoughts in anyone seeking to jump ship. There are, of course, older prohibitions. In the Labor Party, a defector was known as a “rat”. Billy Hughes, the prime minister whose effort to introduce conscription in the first world war split the party, is the most famous of them.

    “Rat” is not a word much heard these days, but it was thrown around a bit when Senator Fatima Payman defected in 2024, and applied more seriously in 1996 to Labor Senator Mal Colston when he resigned from the Labor Party in exchange for the deputy presidency of the Senate.

    The best historical example of a defection being good for your career is that of Joe Lyons, who ratted on Labor in 1931 to lead a new party called the United Australia Party, a switch engineered by a small group of influential businessmen.
    The circumstances – the Great Depression, real fear of civil violence, and the disintegration of a federal Labor government – were highly unusual.

    More commonly, defection is a bad career move. Most of the Labor politicians who went over to the breakaway anti-communist Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in the mid-1950s found themselves out of parliament and looking for a new job. Stan Keon, one of those flying high ahead of the split, even occasionally mentioned – unrealistically – as a possible future prime minister, would run a Melbourne wine shop. Others, such as Vince Gair, Queensland Labor premier, lived to fight another day as a DLP senator (and ambassador to Ireland).

    Cox has three years left of her senate term. After that, she will be at the mercy of the Labor Party. Labor won three Senate seats at the 2022 half-Senate election in Western Australia and perhaps it could do so again. On that occasion, in a surprise victory, the third place went to the young up-and-coming union organiser, Fatima Payman.

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

    – ref. Defections are fairly common in Australian politics. But history shows they are rarely a good career move – https://theconversation.com/defections-are-fairly-common-in-australian-politics-but-history-shows-they-are-rarely-a-good-career-move-258177

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘There are too many unpleasant things in life without creating more’: why Impressionism is the world’s favourite art movement

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

    Installation view of French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on display from June 6 to October 5, at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy

    Impressionism is the world’s favourite art movement.

    Impressionist paintings create an oasis of beauty into which a viewer can escape from a sometimes dark and troubling world, or simply from the mundane boredom of urban living.

    The Impressionist master, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, once famously observed:

    To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty. Yes, pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

    The new Impressionism exhibition at the National Gallery of Victory brings together over a 100 of these pleasant, cheerful and pretty paintings and graphics. It features some of the greatest names in French Impressionism, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac and Alfred Sisley.

    Claude Monet French, 1840–1926 Water lilies, 1905. Oil on canvas. 89.5 x 100.3 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Edward Jackson Holmes.
    Photography © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved

    For the first time in Australia

    Initially, the Impressionist painters had difficulty in selling their work amid the torrent of negative criticism.

    But then their Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel established a gallery in New York City, and the American artist Mary Cassatt – who worked with the Impressionists in Paris – found increasing popularity. By the 1880s and 1890s, American collectors started to buy Impressionist paintings by many of the top French artists.

    This explains why the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston possesses such an outstanding collection of Impressionist paintings. Yet, unlike the museums in New York, the Boston museum is less well known and Australians are seeing many of these paintings for the first time.

    Mary Stevenson Cassatt American, 1844–1926 Ellen Mary in a white coat, c. 1896. Oil on canvas 81.3 x 60.3 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gift of Charles, Hope, and Binney Hare in honor of Ellen Mary Cassatt.
    Photography © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved

    To say that most works in this exhibition have never been previously seen in Australia is only partially true. Four years ago, just before Melbourne was locked down for COVID, the NGV launched a similar show. Apart from a handful of art lovers posing as media, that show expired under lockdown and was packed up and returned to Boston without being widely exposed to Australian audiences.

    The new reiteration is supplemented with six additional paintings, including the early and deeply moving painting by Degas of Degas’s Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar (1869–72).

    Edgar Degas, French, 1834–1917, Degas’s Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar, about 1869–72.
    Museum of Fine Arts Boston

    The whole exhibition has been totally reimagined as part of an immersive interior design. It moves far away from the clinical white cube of a modern exhibition space and closer to the 19th century posh domestic interiors in which the paintings first appeared.

    An extensive and in-depth exhibition

    Chronologically, the exhibition charts the development of French Impressionism from the mid-19th century and the so-called Barbizon school and realism, through to late Impressionism in the early 20th century.

    It includes the great paintings by Cézanne and Manet, and memorable paintings from early to late Impressionism. There is an abundance of important works by the main Impressionist masters including Monet (16 of his canvases in one room), Degas, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Cassatt and Morisot, and a few unexpected gems by van Gogh and Signac.

    Installation view of French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on display from June 6 to October 5, at NGV International, Melbourne.
    Photo: Sean Fennessy

    It is an extensive and in-depth exhibition.

    The depth of the Boston collection enables rare insights. For example, when we see Édouard Manet’s Street Singer (1862), we may be aware that he employed his favourite model Victorine Meurent. Apart from being a model, Meurent was also an artist in her own right and in the same exhibition there is a self-portrait of her from 1876.

    Left: Edouard Manet, French, 1832–1883. Street singer, c. 1862. Oil on canvas. 171.1 x 105.8 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Bequest of Sarah Choate Sears in memory of her husband, Joshua Montgomery Sears. Right: Victorine Meurent, French, 1844–1927. Self-portrait c. 1876. Oil on canvas 35 × 27 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund.
    Photography © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved.

    Strictly speaking, perhaps neither painting can be described as “Impressionist”. But it is a wonderful encounter of a woman being observed and, in the same exhibition, this woman looking out of the picture space and doing the observing. The self-portrait is one of those additions that was not in the original show.

    If we glance at a handful of some of the outstanding paintings in the show – including Monet’s Grainstack (snow effect) (1891), The water lily pond (1900), or Water lilies (1905); Renoir’s Dance at Bougival (1883) or The Seine at Chatou (1881); Pissarro’s Spring pasture (1889); Degas’s Racehorses at Longchamp (1871/1874); and Morisot’s Embroidery (1889) – we have all of the beloved features of French Impressionism.

    Camille Pissarro French (born in the Danish West Indies), 1830–1903 Spring pasture, 1889. Oil on canvas, 60 x 73.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Deposited by the Trustees of the White Fund, Lawrence, Massachusetts.
    Photography © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved

    Light and bright

    While the French Impressionists were not a monolithic group, their art was generally characterised by three things.

    Firstly, a lighter and brighter palette with a conscious move to the ultraviolet end of the colour spectrum.

    Secondly, a divisionist application of colour with juxtaposed dabs of pigment allowing for colour to blend in the eye rather than on a mirror-smooth surface of the canvas.

    Finally, a move to a more democratic subject matter with landscapes, gardens, drinking parties, picnics and street scenes easily outnumbering images of pagan gods in complicated embraces.

    Paul Signac, French, 1863–1935. Port of Saint-Cast, 1890. Oil on canvas, 66 x 82.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gift of William A. Coolidge.
    Photography © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved

    Australian audiences never seem to tire of French Impressionism. This exhibition brings a fresh crop of rarely seen major paintings and graphics of the highest order.

    If you love Impressionism, French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is a must-see exhibition. This new exhibition will change the history of Australian art exhibitions from Australia’s greatest Impressionist show that no one had seen, to Australia’s greatest Impressionist exhibition that everyone has seen.

    French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is at the National Gallery of Victoria until October 5.

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

    – ref. ‘There are too many unpleasant things in life without creating more’: why Impressionism is the world’s favourite art movement – https://theconversation.com/there-are-too-many-unpleasant-things-in-life-without-creating-more-why-impressionism-is-the-worlds-favourite-art-movement-253031

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: E-bikes and e-scooters are popular – but dangerous. A transport expert explains how to make them safer

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Rose, Professor in Transport Engineering, Monash Institute of Transport Studies, Monash University

    nazar_ab/Getty

    Last weekend a pedestrian in Perth tragically died after being struck by an e-scooter.

    This followed the death of another person in Victoria last month who was hit and killed by a modified e-bike which police alleged could travel at 90 kilometres per hour.

    A study published earlier this week also found nearly 180 e-scooter injuries in young people aged five to 15 at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital in 2023 and 2024. One in ten injuries were life-threatening or potentially life-threatening.

    Even though e-bikes and e-scooters have many benefits, such as improving urban accessibility and giving people scope to reduce or even eliminate carbon-emitting car use, these examples highlight their associated risks.

    For these risks to be properly addressed, an overhaul of regulations covering e-bikes and e-scooters is urgently needed.

    All to do with power

    E-bikes have a battery-powered motor to assist the rider. The key word there is “assist”: to be legal the rider has to be pedalling to get the power assistance.

    E-scooters are a new variant of the once humble children’s kick scooter. They are more sturdy to support an adult rider, and the battery-powered motor provides all the power.

    Some e-bikes and e-scooters have throttles, which enable riders to accelerate to higher speeds without pedalling. Technically, these are illegal.

    These new forms of urban transport are surging in popularity. This year alone, about 150,000 e-bikes are forecast to be sold across the country. An estimated 350,000 Australians – about 1.3% of the population – owned an e-scooter in 2024.

    Regulations governing e-bikes and e-scooters were historically designed with reference to the power required to ride a regular bicycle.

    A person needs to provide power equal to 220 watts to propel a regular bicycle at 32km/h on a flat road without a headwind.

    The figure of 250 watts emerged as the baseline in Europe for the power limit on e-bikes. It is 500 watts in Canada and 750 watts in the United States.

    In 2017, Australia harmonised its e-bike regulations with with those in Europe.

    The regulations specify that power-assisted e-bikes can have a motor up to 250 watts. But the rider must pedal to get the power assistance and it must cut out above 25km/h.

    E-bikes can travel faster than 25km/h. But the rider has to be providing all the power above that speed.

    The same power limit was applied to e-scooters. But given their design and smaller wheels, regulators in Australia were more conservative, specifying a 20km/h maximum speed.

    Differences across Australian states have since emerged with New South Wales allowing e-bikes up to 500 watts. Queensland has also removed motor power output from its e-scooter regulations and allows them to travel at speeds up to 25km/h.

    There are two main problems with the existing system of regulations. First, there is nothing to stop the import of high-performance e-bikes and e-scooters from overseas. Second, enforcement is difficult and rarely occurs, because the police don’t have the equipment to easily test motor power.

    There is a wide variety of e-bikes on the market.
    Sergey Ryzhov/Shutterstock

    What needs to change?

    The federal government has a clear role to play in stemming the import of e-bikes and e-scooters that exceed the legal limits for public use in Australia.

    However there is no evidence the government has engaged with the issue. This is inconsistent with its commitment to the National Road Safety Strategy and the approach taken to the management of vehicle safety and import regulations which apply to motor vehicles.

    State and territory governments must revise and simplify their e-bike and e-scooter regulations.

    Tasmania is on the front foot with its review of e-bike regulations. But e-scooter regulations also need reform – to make them easier for the public to understand, to ensure these devices offer a viable travel option for people and, importantly, to enable efficient enforcement.

    Local government and road authorities should have the power to set speed limits for e-bike and e-scooter riders on shared paths.
    Cromo Digital/Shutterstock

    A few changes to the rules could then make a big difference.

    For a start, references to motor power should be removed because the severity of a crash depends on speed not the power of the device. Having the regulations framed in terms of power is a complication for enforcement and we don’t use it to regulate motor vehicles.

    Then we need to focus on where, and how fast, these vehicles can be ridden.

    A good first step would be to follow the lead of Queensland and Tasmania and legalise footpath riding, subject to a 12km/h or 15km/h speed limit as is the case in those states.

    Restricting e-scooters to low-speed roads (up to 50km/h), and with a lower speed limit when ridden on the footpath, would minimise the risk of dangerous collisions with pedestrians and reduce the risk of dangerous collisions with cars on high-speed roads.

    Specifying a max speed under power assistance for e-bikes of 32km/h would bring us in line with the regulations for countries that have cities similar to Australia’s such as Canada and New Zealand.

    This would open our market to more models from overseas. It would also ensure e-bikes are better able to keep up with traffic when ridden on roads and are more competitive in terms of travel time relative to the car, to help further reduce car use.

    When it comes to e-scooters, moving to a 25km/h speed limit (as is the case in Queensland), combined with restricting their use to roads of up to 50km/h, would improve their compatibility with the flow of motor vehicles on local streets.

    Local government and road authorities should also have the power to declare areas where footpath riding is not permitted – for example, inner-city footpaths with heavy pedestrian activity. They should also have the power to set speed limits for riders on shared paths and bicycle lanes where there is likely to be interaction with pedestrians.

    With those changes in place, police would be able to enforce displayed speed limits for e-bikes and e-scooters using radar guns, as is already done in Queensland, and issue fines where appropriate.

    Geoff Rose has received in-kind support for his research, in the form of data, from shared e-scooter operating companies; he has served on the oversight panel for the Victorian Government’s shared e-scooter trial and he has consulted to the Tasmanian Department of State Growth on e-bike regulations.

    – ref. E-bikes and e-scooters are popular – but dangerous. A transport expert explains how to make them safer – https://theconversation.com/e-bikes-and-e-scooters-are-popular-but-dangerous-a-transport-expert-explains-how-to-make-them-safer-257126

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘No one knew what was happening’: new research shows how domestic violence harms young people’s schooling

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Roberts, Professor of Education and Social Justice, Monash University

    Taiki Ishikawa/ Unsplash, CC BY

    Every school around Australia is almost certain to have students who are victim-survivors of family and domestic violence.

    The 2023 Australian Child Maltreatment Study found neglect and physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children is widespread. Among Australians aged 16–65 years, 32% experienced physical abuse, 28.5% experienced sexual abuse, 39% experienced emotional abuse and 9% had been neglected during their childhoods.

    As the place where children spend the bulk of their time outside home, schools could be an important source of help and support. But are they equipped to do this?

    Our research, published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues, explores the impact of domestic and family violence on young people’s education. Our findings show just how significant the disruption to a young person’s education can be, including how safe or supported they feel at school.

    Our study

    Our study draws on data from the Adolescent Family Violence in Australia project. This is a national survey of more than 5,000 young Australians aged 16–20 years old. We focused on a subset of 1,651 respondents who had experienced domestic and family violence, either by experiencing violence between other family members or being directly subjected to it.

    The survey asked both structured and open-ended questions to explore the impacts of domestic and family violence.

    Family violence disrupts school attendance and participation

    Our study showed family violence has a significant impact on school attendance. Young people told us they missed classes or dropped out of school during their experiences of violence.

    For some young people, attending school while coping with trauma, fear and instability at home was too overwhelming.

    A 19-year-old woman shared how she became so anxious in the presence of teachers and other authority figures she could only manage one day of school per week in a secluded setting.

    Another young woman described missing classes regularly to care for her mother after violent episodes, while a 20-year-old man said he stayed home to protect his mother.

    Even when young victims did attend school, the emotional toll of family violence often meant they were socially withdrawn. Some spoke about losing friends due to frequent house moves and school shifts, while others withdrew socially because of anxiety and trauma. One 17-year-old explained:

    I don’t talk a lot to male teachers and don’t really have close friendships with girls at my school, so I tend to stay home.

    Some participants described school as a safe haven away from their abusive home. But even in these cases, learning was often still difficult. One young person commented:

    Yes, I wanted to go to school to get away from home, but felt very alone and isolated because no one knew what was happening.

    Family violence and homework

    The effects of family violence extend beyond the classroom. Many young people told us how the chaos, fear and emotional exhaustion of life at home made it difficult, if not impossible, to complete homework or study for exams. One young woman remarked:

    I can’t do any homework at home because it’s not a safe environment for me.

    Another young person described being kept up late listening to fighting or because of police visits, leaving them physically and emotionally exhausted in the morning.

    In some cases, abusive parents directly prevented their child from attending school or doing homework. Other young people described not having access to the tools they needed, like a working computer or internet connection – sometimes withheld deliberately by a parent.

    These accounts show how for some children experiencing family violence, learning at home is not just difficult, it is fundamentally unsafe.

    Young people spoke of how domestic violence made it impossible to study at home.
    C.T.PHAT/Shutterstock, CC BY

    A missed opportunity

    It can be difficult for schools to fully understand and appreciate what’s happening for students at home.

    Few of the young people we surveyed proactively disclosed their experiences to school staff, including teachers and counsellors. Disclosure rates ranged from just 12% to 17%, depending on the type of violence the young person reported experiencing.

    For those young people who did disclose, their experiences varied. Some young people described school staff as a lifeline – listening without judgement, offering helpful information and taking action where needed.

    Others described being ignored, dismissed or harmed further by insensitive responses. As one young person said, the “school counsellor told me I needed to understand dad’s behaviour and keep my head down”.

    The help students received seemed to depend on the individual teacher or school counsellor, their knowledge and training. This inconsistency represents a major barrier to effective and early intervention.

    What needs to change

    As well as learning, schools can also provide safety, stability and healing. We need schools to be supported to provide more effective and consistent care for students experiencing family violence.

    As other research has similarly found, responses need to be trauma-informed (recognising the impact of trauma on students) and student-centred (focusing on individuals’ needs). This involves:

    • providing trauma and domestic violence-informed training to all school staff

    • ensuring schools have clear processes to follow if a student disclosures domestic violence, including referrals to appropriate external supports

    • adopting flexible attendance and academic policies for young people impacted by domestic violence

    • building collaborative partnerships with community-based domestic violence and mental health services.

    The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault. The Men’s Referral Service (1300 766 491) offers advice and counselling to men looking to change their behaviour.

    Steven Roberts receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Government and ANROWS, among others. He is a Board Director at Respect Victoria, but this article is written wholly separate from and does not represent that role.

    Kate has received funding for research on violence against women and children from a range of federal and state government and non-government sources. Currently, Kate receives funding from Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), the South Australian government, Safe Steps, Australian Childhood Foundation and 54 Reasons. This piece is written by Kate Fitz-Gibbon in her role at Monash University and Sequre Consulting, and is wholly independent of Kate Fitz-Gibbon’s role as chair of Respect Victoria and membership on the Victorian Children’s Council.

    Rebecca Stewart is a project officer at No to Violence. The views expressed in this article are her own.

    – ref. ‘No one knew what was happening’: new research shows how domestic violence harms young people’s schooling – https://theconversation.com/no-one-knew-what-was-happening-new-research-shows-how-domestic-violence-harms-young-peoples-schooling-256890

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: We tracked 13,000 giants of the ocean over 30 years, to uncover their hidden highways

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ana M. M. Sequeira, Associate Professor, Research School of Biology, Australian National University

    Alexandra Vautin, Shutterstock

    Big animals of the ocean go about their days mostly hidden from view. Scientists know this marine megafauna – such as whales, sharks, seal, turtles and birds – travel vast distances to feed and breed.

    But almost a third are now at risk of extinction due largely to fishing, shipping, pollution and global warming.

    Protecting them can be difficult, because we don’t often know where these animals are.

    New research I led sought to shed light on the issue. My colleagues and I gathered 30 years of satellite tracking data to map hotspots of megafauna activity around the globe.

    We tracked 12,794 animals from 111 species to find out where they go. The results reveal underwater “highways” where megafauna crisscross the global Ocean. They also show where megafauna dwell for feeding and breeding. Now we know where these special places are, we have a better chance of protecting them.

    Satellite tracking reveals marine megafauna migration pathways and places of residence.
    Sequeira et al (2025) Science

    Pulling all the data together: a mega task

    For more than 30 years, marine biologists have tagged large animals in the sea with electronic devices and tracked their movements via satellite. The trackers capture data on everything from speed of travel, to direction of movement and where the animals spend most of their time.

    I put a call out to the global research community to bring together the tracking data. I hoped it would help scientists better understand the animals’ movements and identify their favourite places.

    Some 378 scientists from 50 countries responded. We assembled the world’s largest tracking dataset of marine megafauna. It includes species of flying birds, whales, fishes (mostly sharks), penguins, polar bears, seals, dugongs, manatees and turtles. They were tracked between 1985 and 2018, throughout the world’s oceans.

    Ana Sequeira swimming with a whale shark in Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, to collect samples.
    Australian Institute of Marine Science

    Mapping reveals a lack of protection

    When we started analysing the data, it showed the tagged animals used some parts of the ocean more frequently than others. Most of them travelled to the central Indian Ocean, northeast Pacific Ocean, Atlantic north, and waters around Mozambique and South Africa.

    It’s likely this reflects a lack of data from elsewhere. However, these species are known to go to places where they are most likely to find food, so we expect some areas to be used more than others (including the areas we detected).

    Then we were able to identify the world’s most “ecologically and biologically significant areas” for the tracked animals.

    Currently only about 8% of the global ocean is protected. And only 5% of the important marine megafauna areas we identified occur within these existing marine protected areas.

    This leaves all of the other important marine megafauna areas we identified unprotected. In other words, the species using those areas are likely to suffer harm from human activities taking place at sea.

    More than 90% of the important marine megafauna areas we identified are exposed to high plastic pollution, shipping traffic or to intensifying global warming. And about 75% are exposed to industrial fishing.

    We also found marine megafauna tend to spend most of their time within exclusive economic zones. This area lies beyond the territorial sea or belt of water 12 nautical miles from the coast of each country, extending 200 nautical miles from shore. The presence of megafauna in these exclusive economic zones means individual countries could increase the protection afforded within their jurisdictions.

    About 40% of the important marine megafauna areas were located in these zones. But about 60% were on the high seas.

    The future of marine megafauna conservation

    The High Seas Treaty, recently adopted by the United Nations and signed by 115 countries, governs the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological biodiversity on the open ocean.

    Working alongside this treaty, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to protect 30% of the global ocean by 2030. This presents an opportunity to ensure important marine megafauna areas are well represented.

    We used an optimisation algorithm to identify the best areas to protect, when it comes to marine megafauna. We gave priority to areas that are potentially used for feeding, breeding, resting and migrating across all the different species.

    But even if important marine megafauna areas are selected when 30% of the ocean is protected, about 60% of these areas would still stay unprotected.

    Significant risks from human activities will remain. Management efforts must also focus on reducing harm from fishing and shipping. Fighting climate change and cutting down noise and plastic pollution should also be key priorities.

    Like for most megafauna on land, the reign of marine megafauna might come to an end if humanity does not afford these species greater protection.

    Ana M. M. Sequeira receives funding from the Australian Research Council and a Pew Marine Fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trusts. She is also affiliated with the University of Western Australia.

    – ref. We tracked 13,000 giants of the ocean over 30 years, to uncover their hidden highways – https://theconversation.com/we-tracked-13-000-giants-of-the-ocean-over-30-years-to-uncover-their-hidden-highways-254610

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Resident-to-resident aggression is common in nursing homes. Here’s how we can improve residents’ safety

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joseph Ibrahim, Professor, Aged Care Medical Research Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care, La Trobe University

    Wbmul/Shutterstock

    The Coroners Court of Victoria is undertaking an inquest into the deaths of eight aged care residents across six facilities, over a nine-month period in 2021.

    Each death occurred after an interaction between residents, known as resident-to-resident aggression.

    If your loved one is living in aged care, it’s natural to be distressed and concerned for their safety after hearing about these deaths.

    Here’s what we know about when and where it’s more likely to happen, how relatives can safeguard their loved ones, and what’s happening across the system to reduce the risk of it occurring.

    What does it look like?

    Resident-to-resident aggression refers to aggressive and intrusive interactions between long-term care residents that would likely be unwelcome and potentially cause the recipient physical or psychological distress or harm. It includes physical, sexual and verbal aggression.

    However, the term “aggression” is potentially misleading. In most cases, the residents involved are not consciously intending to cause harm.

    The prevalence of resident-to-resident aggression in aged care has been estimated at 20%, but is likely under-reported. This means that over a month, 20% of aged care residents are likely to experience an incident of resident-to-resident aggression. This is usually verbal abuse or an invasion of privacy.

    The variation in reported prevalence rates makes it hard to know if the rate is increasing.

    The consequences of resident-to-resident aggression range in seriousness from functional decline, to psychological or physical injury, to death.

    In 2017, we published a national study of deaths from resident-to-resident aggression in nursing home residents in Australia. Over 14 years, we identified 28 deaths.

    Almost 90% of residents involved – either as an “exhibitor” (often referred to as the aggressor) or a target – had dementia. Three-quarters of those diagnosed with dementia had a history of behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia, including wandering and physical aggression.

    Exhibitors of aggressive behaviour were mostly male (85.7%), often younger, and more recently admitted to the aged care facility than the target.

    Resident-to-resident aggression leading to death was most likely to occur between two male residents.

    Half of all incidents leading to death involved a resident pushing and the target falling, leading to injuries such as hip fracture and head injury. This underscores the vulnerabilities posed by physical frailty among aged care residents.

    Incidents resulting in death occurred mostly in communal areas, reflecting the ongoing challenges of an aged care system that relies on residents living together.

    Learning from past incidents

    Resident-to-resident aggression was previously brought to national attention by the death of a resident at the Oakden facility in South Australia. This led to a coronial inquest and the facility closed in 2017.

    The case raised issues including the need for residents exhibiting potentially aggressive behaviour to have regular clinical reviews, accurate and detailed documentation, and adequate escalation and reporting of any incidents of aggression.

    Since 2021, facilities have been required to report incidents of “unreasonable use of force”. The Australian Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission monitors these events through the Serious Incident Response Scheme.

    The last report, from March 2023, provides a series of case studies and highlights the need for better approaches to behaviour support and risk assessment.

    However, prevention requires a broader systems-based approach to better understand the problem, and generate and evaluate interventions. This should include reviewing trends at the facility, provider and national level.

    Approaching individual situations

    Resident-to-resident aggression is expected to become more common as more people are diagnosed with dementia.

    Cognitive impairment in both the exhibitor of aggressive behaviour and targets makes this more complex, as a resident could become either one, depending on the precipitating circumstances.

    In one-third of the cases we analysed, the exhibitor of aggressive behaviour and the target had been involved in an earlier incident together in the past 12 months. This suggests there are opportunities for intervention.

    Are police involved?

    When serious injury or death occurs, it is the role of police to investigate the incident and refer to the Office of Public Prosecutions, if appropriate.

    Attributing legal responsibility is problematic and criminal charges are rarely filed. This may be because the residents involved are unfit for police interview or unfit to stand trial.

    Alternatively, prosecution may not be deemed in the public interest.

    Managing symptoms of dementia

    Dementia may impair a person’s ability to reason, express their needs and manage their emotions. It can also impair their ability to respond, in a socially acceptable way, to interpersonal conflict.

    Behaviour-management strategies to support the person with dementia include having a calm environment with a familiar routine and clear communication.

    Over the past decade, more formal services have become available to help manage behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia.

    Dementia Support Australia operates a Severe Behaviour Response Team which is available 24/7, responding to referrals from health professionals within 48 hours.

    Specialist dementia care units also operate across Australia, as recommended by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety final report.

    Managing dementia symptoms requires multidisciplinary expertise spanning the aged care, disability and mental health sectors. Yet integrating these services remains a challenge.

    The federal government has committed to addressing the sub-optimal management of residents living with dementia.

    Supporting your loved one

    If you’re worried about your loved one, the first step is to express these concerns directly to the facility staff, as you would with any other matter. Open communication helps the facility staff to get to know your loved one and provide more tailored support.

    Being better informed about the subject can help you to advocate for your loved one.

    The Older Persons Advocacy Network is available to residents for free, independent and confidential support. They can advocate for you if you feel your concerns aren’t being heard or your loved one’s care is compromised.

    What happens next with the inquest?

    The Coroners Court will investigate this important and distressing issue and aims to reduce the number of preventable deaths.

    The coroner will hear the evidence, and may make formal recommendations about how to improve resident safety. Government agencies are required to consider and respond to these recommendations.

    It’s clear we have a long way to go to safeguard the rights of older people living in residential care.

    Joseph Ibrahim is a medical specialist in geriatrics and an academic with over 30 years of clinical experience. He is a Professor with the Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care, La Trobe University and an Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University. He previously received funding from state and national government for research into the safety and quality of aged care homes and resident-on-resident aggression. He has also been an expert witness for criminal and coroners court cases as well as the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.

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

    – ref. Resident-to-resident aggression is common in nursing homes. Here’s how we can improve residents’ safety – https://theconversation.com/resident-to-resident-aggression-is-common-in-nursing-homes-heres-how-we-can-improve-residents-safety-257818

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is black mould really as bad for us as we think? A toxicologist explains

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide

    Peeradontax/Shutterstock

    Mould in houses is unsightly and may cause unpleasant odours. More important though, mould has been linked to a range of health effects – especially triggering asthma.

    However, is mould exposure linked to a serious lung disease in children, unrelated to asthma? As we’ll see, this link may not be real, or if it is, it’s so rare to not be a meaningful risk. Yet we still hear mould in damp homes described as “toxic”.

    Indeed, mouldy homes can harm people’s health, but not necessarily how you might think.

    What is mould?

    Mould is the general term for a variety of fungi. The mould that people have focused on in damp homes is “black mould”. This forms unsightly black patches on walls and other parts of damp-affected buildings.

    Black mould is not a single fungus. But when people talk about black mould, they generally mean the fungus Stachybotrys chartarum or S. chartarum for short. It’s one of experts’ top ten feared fungi.

    The focus on this species comes from a report in the 1990s on cases of haemorrhagic lung disease in a number of infants. This is a rare disease where blood leaks into the lungs, and can be fatal. The report suggested chemicals known as mycotoxins associated with this species of fungus were responsible for the outbreak.

    What are mycotoxins?

    A variety of fungi produce mycotoxins to defend themselves, among other reasons.

    Hundreds of different chemicals are listed as myocytoxins. These include ones in poisonous mushrooms, and ones associated with the soil fungi Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus.

    The fungus typically associated with black mould S. chartarum can produce several mycotoxins. These include roridin, which inhibits protein synthesis in humans and animals, and satratoxins, which have numerous toxic effects including bleeding in the lungs.

    While the satratoxins, in particular, were mentioned in the report from the 90s in children, there are some problems when we look at the evidence.

    The amount of mycotoxins S. chartarum makes can vary considerably. Even if significant amounts of mycotoxin are present, getting them into the body in the required amount to cause damage is another thing.

    Inhaling spores in contaminated (mouldy) homes is the most probable way mycotoxins enter the body. For instance, we know mycotoxins can be found in S. chartarum spores. We also know direct injection of high concentrations of mycotoxin-bearing spores directly in the noses of mice can cause some lung bleeding.

    Stachybotrys chartarum mycotoxins have been blamed for lung issues after exposure to black mould.
    Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

    But just because inhaling spores is the probable route of contamination doesn’t mean this is very likely.

    That’s because S. chartarum doesn’t release a lot of spores. Its spores are typically embedded in a slimy mass and it rarely produces the spore densities needed to replicate the animal studies.

    The original reports suggesting the US infants who were diagnosed with haemorrhagic lung disease were exposed to toxic levels of mycotoxins were also flawed.

    Among other issues, the concentrations of mould spores was calculated incorrectly. Subsequent correction for these issues resulted in the association between S. chartarum and this disease cluster basically disappearing.

    The American Academy of Asthma Allergy and Immunology states while there is a clear, well-established relationship between damp indoor spaces and detrimental health effects, there is no good evidence black mould mycotoxins are involved.

    But mould can cause allergies

    Moulds can affect human health in ways unrelated to mycotoxins, typically through allergic reactions. Moulds including black moulds can trigger or worsen asthma attacks in people with mould allergies.

    Some rarer but severe reactions can include allergic fungal sinusitis, allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis and rarer still, hypersensitivity pneumonitis.

    These can typically be controlled by removing the mould (or removing the person from the source of mould).

    People with impaired immune systems (such as people taking immune-suppressant medications) may also be prone to mould infections.

    In a nutshell

    There is sufficient evidence that household mould is associated with respiratory issues attributable to their allergic effects.

    However, there is no strong evidence mycotoxins from household mould – and in particular black mould – are associated with substantial health issues.

    Ian Musgrave has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council to study adverse reactions to herbal medicines and has previously been funded by the Australian Research Council to study potential natural product treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. He is currently a member of one of the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s statutory councils.

    – ref. Is black mould really as bad for us as we think? A toxicologist explains – https://theconversation.com/is-black-mould-really-as-bad-for-us-as-we-think-a-toxicologist-explains-258173

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Making it easier to build a granny flat makes sense – but it’s no solution to a housing crisis

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Welch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

    RyanJLane/Getty Images

    As part of its resource management reforms, the government will soon allow “super-sized granny flats” to be built without consent – potentially adding 13,000 dwellings over the next decade to provide “families with more housing options”.

    This represents genuine progress in reducing regulatory barriers. But the scale of the housing crisis means we have to ask whether incremental reforms can deliver meaningful change.

    The numbers provide important context. Against current consenting rates of 40,000 to 50,000 new dwellings per year, those projected 70-square-metre granny flats represent a 2.6% increase in housing supply.

    In Auckland, where housing pressure is most acute, 300 additional units might be built annually. For some, that’s likely to be useful. But for a country already facing a housing crunch, it’s insignificant.

    The costs of a granny flat

    The numbers also reveal who can participate in this proposed solution. Building a basic 70-square-metre granny flat will cost between NZ$200,000 and $300,000. Add site works, utility connections and mandatory licensed building practitioner supervision, and total project costs will be closer to the upper end of that range.

    At current interest rates, financing $250,000 requires approximately $480 weekly in loan payments. While rents of $500-$600 per week are achievable in urban markets, these thin margins assume optimal conditions.

    For property owners with existing equity, this presents a viable investment. For those seeking affordable housing – young families, essential workers, recent immigrants – the benefits remain largely theoretical.

    This dynamic illustrates a persistent challenge in market-based housing solutions: policies intended to improve affordability often primarily benefit those with capital to deploy.

    Pressure on the pipes

    Each granny flat requires full residential infrastructure – water, wastewater and stormwater connections. The development contributions – fees councils charge on new builds to fund infrastructure – will help fund network upgrades. But New Zealand already faces a $120-185 billion water infrastructure deficit over the next 30 years, just to fix existing systems.

    The challenge is particularly acute in established suburbs where these units are most likely to appear. Parts of Christchurch serviced by vacuum sewers already operate at capacity. Auckland’s combined sewer areas face overflow risks during heavy rainfall. Wellington’s ageing pipes struggle with current demand.

    Adding thousands of dispersed infill units to stressed networks poses genuine engineering challenges that funding alone cannot solve.

    Transport infrastructure faces similar pressures. With minimum parking requirements axed across the nation, these new granny flats will likely increase on-street parking demand and local traffic.

    While some granny flat residents may rely on public transport or active modes, New Zealand’s car ownership rates – 837 vehicles per 1,000 people – suggest most will own vehicles.

    Auckland’s sewer systems are already under pressure. New granny flats will add strain on the infrastructure.
    Janice Chen/Getty Images

    Approved but not always built

    International experience offers instructive parallels. California’s 2017 Accessory Dwelling Unit legislation provides the closest comparison. After removing similar regulatory barriers, California saw permits increase from 1,000 in 2016 to 13,000 in 2019.

    However, construction costs and infrastructure constraints limited actual completions to roughly 60% of approved units.

    Australian cities report similar patterns. Despite permissive regulations in many areas, only 13-23% of suitable properties actually added secondary dwellings. High construction costs and infrastructure limitations proved more binding than regulatory constraints.

    Closer to home, Auckland’s experience with minor dwellings under the Unitary Plan suggests cautious optimism. Since 2016, the city has averaged 300-400 secondary dwelling consents annually where permitted. The number of units actually constructed is unknown.

    Allowing one-storey detached 70-square-metre units without building consent may increase this modestly. But they are unlikely to dramatically accelerate production given persistent cost and capacity constraints.

    Another form of wealth transfer

    The policy’s benefits flow primarily to existing property owners. They will gain new development rights without competitive tender or public process. While perhaps justified by broader housing benefits, it’s worth acknowledging this is a form of wealth transfer.

    Granny flats typically add roughly their construction cost to property values, providing capital gains alongside rental income potential.

    For renters, benefits depend on how many units actually materialise and at what price point. Secondary units often rent at 20-30% below comparable standalone houses due to their size and backyard location.

    This could meaningfully expand options for singles and couples. But families requiring larger accommodation will see limited benefits.

    The policy’s design constraints also tell us what kind of urban density is acceptable. Single-storey height limits, two-metre boundary setbacks and standalone requirements essentially mandate the least efficient form of intensification.

    Units could share walls and services, and two-storey designs that use less land could be permitted. Instead, the granny flat exemption favours the one configuration that maintains suburban aesthetics while delivering minimal extra housing.

    A modest response to the housing crisis

    The granny flat exemption exemplifies New Zealand’s approach to housing challenges: acknowledging a crisis while implementing modest responses.

    Despite severe shortfalls in housing supply, the medium-density development common in comparable countries remains largely unrealised. An estimated 180,000 households could be accommodated through comprehensive densification.

    There are genuine benefits worth acknowledging, of course. The exemption reduces bureaucratic barriers, enables some additional housing and gives property owners new options.

    The question isn’t so much whether the new policy should be embraced. But rather whether the government is willing to complement it with larger changes the housing crisis demands.

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

    – ref. Making it easier to build a granny flat makes sense – but it’s no solution to a housing crisis – https://theconversation.com/making-it-easier-to-build-a-granny-flat-makes-sense-but-its-no-solution-to-a-housing-crisis-258185

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘Deadly’ sports diplomacy: why Australia’s Indigenous people must be a part of our sports strategy

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stuart Murray, Associate Professor, International Relations and Diplomacy, Bond University

    Sean Garnsworthy/ALLSPORT

    Since coming to power in 2022, the Albanese government has focused strongly on the Indo-Pacific.

    The prime minister’s recent trip to Indonesia was the latest high-level bilateral summit as Australia seeks to recalibrate relationships, enhance security and, where possible, win the battle for hearts and minds in the region.



    Read more:
    There’s no country more important to Australia than Indonesia. Trouble is, the feeling isn’t mutual

    In a world slipping further into “strategic atrophy,” art, music, food, culture, sport and other forms of soft power are no longer peripheral.

    In the foreword to the recently launched Australian Sports Diplomacy 2032+ strategy, for example, Labor MP Tim Watts stated:

    Sport is an important tool for Australia’s diplomatic engagement at a time when Australia needs to use every dimension of our national power to advance our interests.

    The First Nations of Australia are mentioned in this strategy but it fails to reflect the depth, power and influence Indigenous sports diplomats could bring.

    Arguably, our sports diplomacy would be more authentic, unique and effective (especially in the Pacific) if First Nations people, perspectives and programs were genuinely integrated from the outset – baked in, not bolted on.

    The epic history of First Nations sport

    Indigenous Australians were the first people to play sport on this land.

    Before colonisation, Australia’s population was around 750,000, divided into about 500 nations.

    Though sometimes hostile, these communities shared a common language: sport.

    Physical pursuits served, and still serve, many purposes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: fostering communication, preserving lore, teaching youth to be effective providers and most importantly, practising survival skills.

    Sport was also a civilising force used for social, cultural and diplomatic ends. Games and carnivals increased contact between clans, easing tension, division, xenophobia and misunderstandings that could spark violence.

    Battendi (spear-throwing), Marngrook (football), Koolchee (ball games), and Prun (mock war) are examples of diplomatic games that predate the ancient Greek Olympics by tens of thousands of years.

    Sport became central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, culture, identity and diplomacy.

    “Deadly” – a term meaning excellent – sports diplomacy is a more fitting way to describe this unique form of diplomacy. Done well, it offers a more accurate, authentic brand of Australia to the region and beyond.

    The battle for the Blue Pacific

    The “Blue Pacific” – a term describing a shared Pacific culture, identity and collective diplomatic strategy – offers an opportunity to harness the power of deadly sports diplomacy.

    If Australia hopes to win Pacific hearts and minds, it should send more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sports diplomats and teams to countries such as Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and New Zealand, because the nations of the Blue Pacific deeply respect the old, wise First Peoples of Australia.

    These relationships are built on shared values: culture, family, spirituality and sport.

    The Black Swans – Australia’s First Nations netball team, which debuted at the PacificAus Sports netball series in 2024 – are included as a case study in Sports Diplomacy 2032+. However, it’s the government’s A$600 million NRL project in PNG that has dominated headlines.



    Read more:
    Sports diplomacy: why the Australian government is spending $600 million on a new NRL team in PNG

    The Albanese government’s backing of this initiative has sparked criticism among supporters of other codes in Australia with strong ties to Pacific nations – especially rugby union, which until recently was the code of choice in Fiji and throughout Polynesia.

    A rise in Pacific Island interest in rugby league may impact rugby union, some argue.

    However, rugby league may be a more effective sports diplomacy tool. It enjoys growing popularity in those locations and has undisputed national sport status in PNG, the most populous Pacific nation by far.

    It’s also arguably more “deadly,” with its Indigenous All Stars team and an Indigenous Round.

    In the NRL, 48% of players have Pasifika heritage, and 12% identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, compared to 3% across the Australian population.

    Should rugby union receive similar support? Perhaps, but first, it must address the absence of Indigenous players.

    Since Rugby Australia’s founding in 1949, only 15 Aboriginal men have played Test rugby for Australia.

    What about similar funding for soccer, the national obsession of strategically important near neighbours Solomon Islands and Vanuatu?

    It too has had a relative absence of Indigenous players at Australia’s highest levels, notwithstanding the pioneering careers of Charlie Perkins, John Moriarty, Archie Thompson and recent Matildas Lydia Williams and Mackenzie Arnold.

    Extra time

    Integrating the world’s oldest living culture in Australia’s sports diplomacy program can only enhance our relationships, diplomacy and national brand.

    The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS)’s Share a Yarn initiative is helping lead the way.

    Established in 2020, it connects elite First Nations athletes with respected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mentors.

    Throughout the year, athletes and mentors meet online, attend monthly storytelling sessions and attend an annual cultural connection camp at the AIS campus.

    As Marissa Williamson Pohlman, the first Aboriginal woman to compete in boxing at the Olympics in 2024, noted:

    Mainstream sport can be challenging but having the unwavering support of mob keeps me grounded and focused on my goals.

    The fact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have practised sports diplomacy for more than 60,000 years is a powerful story. It is one that should be celebrated at every international sporting event we attend, bid for, or host.

    Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, programs and perspectives would strengthen and innovate our strategies, add vital cultural iconography, inspire like-minded nations and help win hearts and minds from Honiara to Hawaii.

    The authors would like to thank Kombumerri woman Emily Pugin (DFAT) and Butchulla/Goreng Goreng Paul Martin for their contribution, teaching and help in commissioning and drafting the report that informs this article.

    Stuart Murray receives funding from The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

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

    – ref. ‘Deadly’ sports diplomacy: why Australia’s Indigenous people must be a part of our sports strategy – https://theconversation.com/deadly-sports-diplomacy-why-australias-indigenous-people-must-be-a-part-of-our-sports-strategy-257542

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump’s justifications for the latest travel ban aren’t supported by the data on immigration and terrorism

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Taliban fighters guard the former U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on June 5, 2025. AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi

    The Trump administration on June 4, 2025, announced travel restrictions targeting 19 countries in Africa and Asia, including many of the world’s poorest nations. All travel is banned from 12 of these countries, with partial restrictions on travel from the rest.

    The presidential proclamation, entitled “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” is aimed at “countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a full or partial suspension on the entry or admission of nationals from those countries.”

    In a video that accompanied the proclamation, President Donald Trump said: “The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted.”

    The latest travel ban reimposes restrictions on many of the countries that were included on travel bans in Trump’s first term, along with several new countries.

    But this travel ban, like the earlier ones, will not significantly improve national security and public safety in the United States. That’s because migrants account for a minuscule portion of violence in the U.S. And migrants from the latest travel ban countries account for an even smaller portion, according to data that I have collected. The suspect in Colorado, for example, is from Egypt, which is not on the travel ban list.

    As a scholar of political sociology, I don’t believe Trump’s latest travel ban is about national security. Rather, I’d argue, it’s primarily about using national security as an excuse to deny visas to nonwhite applicants.

    Terrorism and public safety

    In the past five years, the U.S. has witnessed more than 100,000 homicides. Political violence by militias and other ideological movements accounted for 354 fatalities, according to an initiative known as the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, which tracks armed conflict around the world. That’s less than 1% of the country’s homicide victims. And foreign terrorism accounted for less than 1% of this 1%, according to my data.

    The Trump administration says the U.S. cannot appropriately vet visa applicants in countries with uncooperative governments or underdeveloped security systems. That claim is false.

    The State Department and other government agencies do a thorough job of vetting visa applicants, even in countries where there is no U.S. embassy, according to an analysis by the CATO Institute.

    The U.S. government has sophisticated methods for identifying potential threats. They include detailed documentation requirements, interviews with consular officers and clearance by national security agencies. And it rejects more than 1 in 6 visa applications, with ever-increasing procedures for detecting fraud.

    Members of the Yemeni community and others wave American and Yemeni flags as they gather on the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall to protest President Donald Trump’s first travel ban on Feb. 2, 2017, in New York.
    AP Photo/Kathy Willens

    The thoroughness of the visa review process is evident in the numbers.

    Authorized foreign-born residents of the U.S. are far less likely than U.S.-born residents to engage in criminal activity. And unauthorized migrants are even less likely to commit crimes. Communities with more migrants – authorized and unauthorized – have similar or slightly lower crime rates than communities with fewer migrants.

    If vetting were as deficient as Trump’s executive order claims, we would expect to see a significant number of terrorist plots from countries on the travel ban list. But we don’t.

    Of the 4 million U.S. residents from the 2017 travel ban countries, I have documented only four who were involved in violent extremism in the past five years.

    Two of them were arrested after plotting with undercover law enforcement agents. One was found to have lied on his asylum application. One was an Afghan man who killed three Pakistani Shiite Muslim immigrants in New Mexico in 2022.

    Such a handful of zealots with rifles or homemade explosives can be life-altering for victims and their families, but they do not represent a threat to U.S. national security.

    Degrading the concept of national security

    Trump has been trying for years to turn immigration into a national security issue.

    In his first major speech on national security in 2016, Trump focused on the “dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country.”

    His primary example was an act of terrorism by a man who was born in the U.S.

    The first Trump administration’s national security strategy, issued in December 2017, prioritized jihadist terrorist organizations that “radicalize isolated individuals” as “the most dangerous threat to the Nation” – not armies, not another 9/11, but isolated individuals.

    If the travel ban is not really going to improve national security or public safety, then what is it about?

    Protesters wave signs during a demonstration against President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban on May 15, 2017, in Seattle.
    AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

    Linking immigration to national security seems to serve two long-standing Trump priorities. First is his effort to make American more white, in keeping with widespread bias among his supporters against nonwhite immigrants.

    Remember Trump’s insults to Mexicans and Muslims in his escalator speech announcing his presidential campaign in 2015. He has also expressed a preference for white immigrants from Norway in 2018 and South Africa in 2025.

    Trump has repeatedly associated himself with nationalists who view immigration by nonwhites as a danger to white supremacy.

    Second, invoking national security allows Trump to pursue this goal without the need for accountability, since Congress and the courts have traditionally deferred to the executive branch on national security issues.

    Trump also claims national security justifications for tariffs and other policies that he has declared national emergencies, in a bid to avoid criticism by the public and oversight by the other branches of government.

    But this oversight is necessary in a democratic system to ensure that immigration policy is based on facts.

    Charles Kurzman has received funding for research on terrorism from the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation.

    – ref. Trump’s justifications for the latest travel ban aren’t supported by the data on immigration and terrorism – https://theconversation.com/trumps-justifications-for-the-latest-travel-ban-arent-supported-by-the-data-on-immigration-and-terrorism-255471

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The proposed Strong Borders Act gives police new invasive search powers that may breach Charter rights

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Robert Diab, Professor, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University

    The new Liberal government has tabled its first bill in Parliament, the Strong Borders Act, or Bill C-2. Buried within it are several new powers that give police easier access to our private information.

    The bill responds to recent calls to beef up the enforcement of our border with the United States. It gives customs and immigration officials new powers: to search items being exported, like potentially stolen vehicles, and to deport migrants believed to be abusing Canada’s refugee protections.

    New police powers

    But while facing pressure from the U.S. to act, the Canadian government is using the apparent urgency of the moment to give police and intelligence agents a host of new powers to search our private data — powers that have nothing to do with the border.

    Some of them are already controversial and will no doubt be tested in the Supreme Court of Canada, if and when they’re passed. But many have also been on the wish list of previous governments, as part of “lawful access” bills that would make it easier for police to obtain details about a person’s online activity in cases involving child pornography, financial or gang-related crime.

    Why now? Why make another attempt to lower the barriers to police access to private data? And what is the controversy over these new powers?

    Gaps in the law

    The Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right to privacy of anyone in Canada. Police need authority — explicit permission set out somewhere in the law — to carry out a search or seizure of our private data for an investigative purpose.

    A law that allows police to do this must itself be reasonable, in the sense of striking the right balance between law enforcement and individual privacy.

    For the first 20 years of the web, it wasn’t clear what the police could or couldn’t do to gather information about us online.

    The Supreme Court held in 2014 that when police ask Shaw or Telus to give them a name attaching to an online account, this amounts to a search. While a person’s name and address may not reveal much on its own, the court held, it opens a door to something very private: a person’s entire search history.

    But the court in that case did not decide what kind of power police needed to make this demand, only that police need permission in law to make it.

    In Canadian law, requesting a name and address attached to an online account amounts to a search.
    (Shutterstock)

    In 2024, the Supreme Court held that when police ask for an internet protocol (IP) address linked to a person’s online activity, even that is private because it can open a window onto a lot more personal information.

    Police have been using warrant provisions in the Criminal Code to make a demand for an IP address, or the name and address linked to an online account. To get a warrant, in most cases, they need to show a judge they have reason to believe a crime has been committed that is linked to the account — in other words, they must show probable cause.

    Police have complained about how difficult this can be in some cases. They’ve long been calling for more tools.

    Expansive new powers

    The Strong Borders Act makes it easier for police and other state agents in a few ways.

    It will be easier to get a warrant because the new bill allows police to ask service providers like Shaw or Telus — without a warrant — whether they have information about an IP address or a person’s account.

    To then obtain that information, police need a warrant — but on the lower standard of reasonable suspicion of a crime, instead of probable cause. This can also apply to foreign entities like Google or Meta.

    Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents can ask a provider like Shaw or Google whether they have information about an account holder on no grounds at all. But in this case, the person of interest can’t be a citizen or a permanent resident.

    Compelling providers

    More concerning are powers in the bill compelling companies like Google or Apple, along with Shaw and Telus, to assist police in obtaining access to private data.

    Any company that provides Canadians with a service that stores or transmits information in digital form — pretty much anything we do on a phone or computer — can be ordered to help police gain immediate access to our data.

    The bill does this by stipulating that a company can be told to install “any device, equipment or other thing that may enable an authorized person to access information.”

    There are important limits on this. Police can only gain access if they have a warrant or other lawful permission. And a service provider need not comply with any order that would “introduce a systemic vulnerability,” like compelling them to install a backdoor to encryption.

    But the point is that these new powers compel companies to implement “capabilities” for “extracting… information that is authorized to be accessed.” They turn the brands we have an intimate relationship with — gmail, iCloud, Instagram and many others — into tools of the state.

    Future challenges

    For some of us, the thought that Apple or Google can now be conscripted to serve as a state agent to facilitate ready access to private data is unsettling. Even if there are safeguards.

    Courts will have to decide at some point whether searches conducted under these new powers strike a reasonable balance between law enforcement and personal privacy. Courts have held that our privacy interest in personal data is high.

    Whether police interest in quicker and easier access to that data in certain cases is equally high is an open question. But one thing is clear: it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the border.

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

    – ref. The proposed Strong Borders Act gives police new invasive search powers that may breach Charter rights – https://theconversation.com/the-proposed-strong-borders-act-gives-police-new-invasive-search-powers-that-may-breach-charter-rights-258257

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Labubus, Sonny Angels and Smiskis: Are blind toy boxes just child’s play or something more concerning?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Eugene Y. Chan, Associate Professor of Marketing, Toronto Metropolitan University

    Collectible figurines on display at Pop Mart in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, on April 29, 2025. (Shutterstock)

    If you’ve seen videos of people tearing into tiny toy packages online, or noticed teens obsessing over pastel-coloured figurines at the mall, you’ve probably encountered the global craze for blind box toys.

    These small collectibles — usually figures of cartoonish characters — are sold in sealed packaging that hides which specific item is inside. You might get the one you want, or you might not. That uncertainty is part of the thrill.

    Unlike traditional toys, these figures are marketed as collectibles. Many are part of themed series, with some designs labelled as “rare” or “secret,” appearing in as few as one in every 144 boxes. This sense of exclusivity fuels repeat purchases and has spawned a resale market where rare figures can command hundreds of dollars.

    Popular among children and adults alike, blind box toys have grown into a billion-dollar industry. One of the more popular brands is Pop Mart, a Chinese toy company founded in 2010 known for its collectible designer toys sold in mystery packs.

    Gen Z consumers, in particular, have embraced blind box toys both as a nostalgic pastime and as a form of legitimate collecting. The proliferation of unboxing videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, where creators open dozens of blind boxes on camera, has added to their appeal.

    For many fans, these toys offer more than just cuteness: they also provide suspense, surprise and a rush of dopamine with every box opened. But how did this niche product become a global obsession?

    From Tokyo streets to western malls

    The origins of blind box toys trace back to East Asia. Capsule toy vending machines called gashapon originated in Japan in the 1960s. By the 1980s, they had become a cultural fixture. These machines dispense small toys in opaque plastic balls, with customers never quite sure which item they’ll receive.

    In the early 2010s, Chinese companies like Pop Mart adapted the gashapon model for the mainstream retail space. Instead of vending machines, they began selling artist-designed vinyl toys in blind boxes at dedicated boutiques.

    A tourist uses a gashapon machine in Osaka, Japan, in 2024. Gashapon machines are similar to the coin-operated toy vending machines seen outside grocery stores and other retailers in North America.
    (Shutterstock)

    Pop Mart’s success helped transform the blind box into a mainstream commercial phenomenon. Characters like Molly, Skullpanda and Dimoo became instant hits, combining Japanese kawaii esthetics with western pop art sensibilities.

    Pop Mart figures have since developed a cult-like following. Many consumers treat the toys as affordable art objects, displayed in cabinets, on purses or traded online.

    Today, blind box retail stores have expanded globally from Asia to Europe and North America. In October 2024, Pop Mart opened its first store in the Midwestern United States, located on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile at The Shops at North Bridge. The store offers exclusive products and taps into the growing demand for collectibles among American consumers.

    The psychology behind the mystery

    What makes blind box toys so hard to resist?

    Their success relies on a psychological principle known as variable-ratio reinforcement — the same reward pattern that makes slot machines so addictive.

    You never know exactly when you’ll score the item you’re after, but the possibility that the next box might contain it keeps people coming back. This unpredictability keeps people engaged, especially when the potential reward is framed as rare or valuable.

    Cconsumer psychology research also suggests that anticipation plays a major role. Studies show that dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical, spikes not just when we get what we want, but when we anticipate it. The sealed packaging, the suspense of unwrapping and the hope for a rare figure all heighten this effect.

    Sonny Angels on display in a store in Shenzhen, China, in March 2019.
    (Shutterstock)

    For younger collectors, the excitement of “the chase” can foster compulsive buying habits. This effect is amplified by the social influence of watching unboxings online or seeing friends complete their sets, and it becomes a powerful loop.

    Even when buyers don’t get the figure they want, the sunk cost fallacy — the feeling that they’ve already invested too much time or money to walk away — keeps them buying more.

    The hidden costs of blind boxes

    As blind box toys surge in popularity, they have drawn criticism from consumer advocates, psychologists and environmentalists alike.

    Some worry that blind boxes normalize gambling-like behaviours, especially among children. The randomness, excitement and promise of rare rewards closely mirror the mechanisms behind loot boxes in video games — another product that has sparked global concern over youth exposure to gambling psychology.

    Several countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands, have regulated loot boxes under gambling laws. Blind boxes, though currently unregulated, may be next in line for scrutiny.



    Read more:
    Blind bags: how toy makers are making a fortune with child gambling

    There are also environmental concerns. Many blind box toys come in excessive packaging — plastic wraps, foil bags, cardboard boxes — most of which is discarded immediately. The collectibles themselves are often made of non-recyclable plastics, raising questions about sustainability in an era of rising consumer awareness over waste.

    Even among adult fans, some critics question whether blind boxes are designed less to bring joy and more to trigger compulsive consumption. The joy of collecting, they argue, is increasingly overshadowed by the mechanics of engineered desire.

    What should we make of the blind box boom?

    Blind box toys are not inherently harmful, and for many, they’re a source of fun, nostalgia and self-expression. They also offer an accessible way for consumers to engage with designer art in a collectible, miniature form, as many of them are created by individual artists.

    But blind box toys also raise deeper questions about how modern marketing leverages psychological triggers associated with gambling, especially when it comes to children.

    As these toys continue to gain traction in the West, it’s worth asking more critical questions, like: are we buying into mystery or are we being sold obsession and compulsion?

    The blind box trend reflects broader shifts in how products are marketed, how value is perceived and how consumer behaviour is shaped in a digital, attention-driven economy. Understanding the forces at play may be the first step toward more informed — and perhaps more mindful — collecting.

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

    – ref. Labubus, Sonny Angels and Smiskis: Are blind toy boxes just child’s play or something more concerning? – https://theconversation.com/labubus-sonny-angels-and-smiskis-are-blind-toy-boxes-just-childs-play-or-something-more-concerning-257611

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How Trump’s ‘gold standard’ politicizes federal science

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By H. Christopher Frey, Glenn E. Futrell Distinguished University Professor of Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University

    President Donald Trump holds up an executive order promoting coal production, with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, left, and the secretaries of Interior and Energy behind him. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

    The first time Donald Trump was president, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency developed a regulation known as the “science transparency” rule. The administration liked to call it the “secret science” rule.

    “Transparency” sounds positive, but this rule instead prevented the EPA from using some of the best available science to protect human health.

    For example, it required the EPA to ignore or downplay studies that established links between exposure to chemicals and health damage if those studies were based on confidential patient information that could not be released to the public. The problem: Many health studies, including those underpinning many U.S. pollution rules, rely on confidential patient information.

    A U.S. District Court struck down the rule on procedural grounds a few weeks after it was issued. But now, the idea is back.

    Trump’s so-called Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order of May 23, 2025, resurrects many features of the EPA’s vacated rule, but it applies them to all federal agencies.

    To many readers, the executive order might sound reasonable. It mentions “transparency,” “reproducibility” and “uncertainty.” However, the devil is in the details.

    What’s wrong with transparency and reproducibility?

    “Transparency” implies that scientists should adequately explain all elements of their work, including hypotheses, methods, results and conclusions in a way that helps others see how those conclusions were reached.

    “Data transparency” is an expectation that scientists should share all data used in the study so other scientists can recalculate the results. This is also known as “reproducibility.”

    Trump’s executive order focuses on reproducibility. However, if there are errors in the data or methods of the original study, being able to reproduce its results may only ensure consistency but not scientific rigor.

    More important to scientific rigor is “replicability.” Replicability means different scientists, working with different data and different methods, can arrive at consistent findings. For example, studies of human exposure to a set of pollutants at different locations, and with different populations, that consistently find relationships to health effects, such as illness and premature death, can increase confidence in the findings.

    Replicability doesn’t require releasing confidential health data, as reproducibility would. Instead, it looks for the same results broadly from other sources.

    During the first Trump administration, people in cities across the U.S. participated in marches for science, protesting the administration’s actions to cut the use of scientific evidence out of policymaking.
    Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    The science transparency rule in the first Trump administration was intended to limit the EPA’s ability to consider epidemiologic studies like those that established the health harms from exposure to secondhand smoke and to PM2.5, fine particles often from pollution.

    Many large-scale studies that assess how exposure to pollution can harm human health are based on personal data collected according to strict protocols to ensure privacy. Preventing policymakers from considering those findings means they are left to make important decisions about pollution and chemicals without crucial evidence about the health risks.

    These attempts to create barriers to using valid science echoed tactics used by the tobacco industry from the 1960s well into the 1990s to deny that tobacco use harmed human health.

    Uncertainty: A matter of balance

    Trump’s new executive order also emphasizes “uncertainty.”

    In the first Trump administration, the EPA administrator and his hand-picked science advisers, none of whom were epidemiologists, focused on “uncertainty” in epidemiological studies used to inform decisions on air quality standards.

    The EPA’s scientific integrity policy requires that policymakers “shall not knowingly misrepresent, exaggerate, or downplay areas of scientific uncertainty associated with policy decisions.”

    That might sound reasonable. However, in the final 2020 rule for the nation’s PM2.5 air quality standard, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler stated that “limitations in the science lead to considerable uncertainty” to justify not lowering the standard, the level considered unhealthy. PM2.5 comes largely from fossil fuel combustion in cars, power plants and factories.

    In contrast, an independent external group of scientific experts, which I was part of as an environmental engineer and former EPA adviser, reviewed the same evidence and came to a very different conclusion. We found clear scientific evidence supporting a more stringent standard for PM2.5.

    Skepticism versus denial

    The executive order also requires that science be conducted in a manner that is “skeptical of its findings and assumptions.”

    A true skeptic can be swayed to change an inference based on evidence, whereas a denialist holds a fixed view irrespective of evidence. Denialists tend to cherry-pick evidence, set impossible levels of evidence and engage in logical fallacies.

    The first Trump administration stacked the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which advises EPA on setting health-protective air quality standards, with opponents of environmental regulation, including people connected to industries the EPA regulates. The committee then amplified uncertainties. It also shifted the burden of proof in ways inconsistent with the statutory requirement to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety.

    The current administration has been dismantling science advisory committees in various agencies again and purging key EPA committees of independent experts.

    Who decides when politics trumps science

    According to Trump, “violations” of his executive order will be determined by a “senior appointee designated by the agency head.” This means a political appointee accountable to the White House. Thus, science in each federal agency will be politicized.

    The political appointee is required to “correct scientific information.”

    Anyone can file a “request for correction” regarding a published agency report. During the first Trump administration, chemical companies or their representatives repeatedly filed requests for changes to final EPA toxicity assessments on ethylene oxide and chloroprene. The administration delayed health-protective actions, which were finally addressed during the Biden administration for both chemicals.

    The request for correction process is intended to correct errors, not to bias assessments to be more favorable to industry and to delay protective actions.

    The bottom line on Trump’s ‘gold standard’

    While the language of the executive order may seem innocuous based on a casual reading, it risks undermining unbiased science in all federal agencies, subject to political whims.

    Setting impossible bars for “transparency” can mean regulators ignore relevant and valid scientific studies. Overemphasizing uncertainties can be used to raise doubt and unduly undermine confidence in robust findings.

    A politicized process also has the potential to punish federal employees and to ignore external peer reviewers who have the temerity to advance evidence-based findings contrary to White House ideology.

    Thus, this executive order could be used to deprive the American public of accurate and unbiased information regarding chemicals in the environment. That would prevent the development of effective evidence-based policies necessary for the protection of human health, rather than advancing the best available science.

    H. Christopher Frey receives funding from the California Air Resources Board via a research grant to North Carolina State University. He was on leave from NCSU to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2021 to 2024. From 2021 to 2022, he served as Deputy Assistant Administrator of Science Policy. From 2022-20224, he served as the senate-confirmed Assistant Administrator of the Office of Research and Development and concurrently served as the EPA Science Advisor. He was a member of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee from 2008 to 2012, and chaired CASAC from 2012 to 2015.

    – ref. How Trump’s ‘gold standard’ politicizes federal science – https://theconversation.com/how-trumps-gold-standard-politicizes-federal-science-258277

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why Canada needs a law that gives workers the right to govern their workplace

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Tom Malleson, Associate Professor of Social Justice & Peace Studies, Western University

    Democratic worker co-operatives are workplaces where workers collectively own the firm and elect the governing board. (Shutterstock)

    A major fault line in contemporary society is that while our political lives are governed by democratic principles, our economic lives largely are not.

    At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Maple Leaf Foods experienced an outbreak in its Brandon, Man. factory. Not only were workers ordered to keep working in unsafe conditions, they were forced to work overtime.

    Walmart has long been accused of forbidding its cashiers from sitting down, even during long shifts.

    At one of its warehouses in Pennsylvania, Amazon allowed the temperature to reach an unbearable 102 F in 2011. When employees pleaded to open the loading doors to let in fresh air, management refused, claiming this would lead to employee theft. Instead, Amazon parked ambulances outside and waited for employees to collapse from heat stroke. Employees who were sent home because of the heat were given demerits for missing work, and fired if they accumulated too many.

    These examples reflect the fact that, in most workplaces, employees have no say in who manages them or how major decisions are made. Entering the workplace typically means leaving the freedoms of democratic society behind and entering a private domain unilaterally controlled by an employer. For most workers who are not in senior management, the main job of every job is to follow orders. Functionally speaking, workers are servants.

    In its governance structure, the modern workplace operates as a kind of mini dictatorship. Although workplace discipline isn’t enforced with physical violence, supervisors still have the power to discipline or punish those who dissent.

    But what if there were an actual legal right to workplace democracy?

    My research scrutinized the pros and cons of such novel legislation by drawing on decades of research comparing conventional, top-down firms with democratic worker co-operatives (where workers collectively own the firm and elect the governing board).

    Why workplace democracy matters

    In large American firms, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio is now a jaw-dropping 351 to one. As CEO, Jeff Bezos made roughly 360,000 times more than Amazon’s minimum wage workers. This inequality ripples across society with significant consequences.

    By contrast, most worker co-ops maintain a pay ratio of three to one and only very rarely exceed 10 to one.

    There’s also a stark difference in how workers are treated. While conventional firms lay off workers whenever it’s profitable to do so, co-ops do everything in their power to save jobs.

    Top-down decision-making also breeds degradation and disrespect. A 2016 Oxfam report, for instance, documented how some Tyson Foods employees were prevented from using the bathroom to the point where some urinated themselves and other felt compelled to wear diapers to work.

    A Gallup survey from 2021 found that across the American economy as a whole, only 20 per cent of workers strongly agreed with the statement that “my opinions seem to count.”

    In co-ops, workers are generally treated with more respect and dignity. They typically participate more in decision-making, have higher job satisfaction and have less antagonism with management.

    In conventional workplaces, many employees hate or fear their boss. Roughly 17 per cent of the workforce opt for self-employment in order to get away from the tyranny of the boss, even though self-employed workers typically earn about 15 per cent less than their salaried counterparts and receive less than half the benefits.

    Worker co-operatives are typically less dominating than conventional firms because workers elect their managers and can create self-managing teams where workers have more autonomy over matters like scheduling and how tasks are carried out. Though co-ops are far from perfect, with workers often feeling that they aren’t able to participate in decision-making as much as they would like.

    Most workers are trapped in undemocratic jobs

    Most workers have no viable alternative to undemocratic work, and so no choice but to suffer its harms. While in theory, workers can quit and rely on welfare or social assistance, in practice, this isn’t viable because welfare rates are often too low to live on.

    Starting a business or becoming self-employed is another theoretical option, but it’s too financially risky to be a serious alternative for most.

    Joining a worker co-operative is the most promising alternative, but there were less than 400 worker co-ops in Canada in 2022, representing less than one per cent of employment.

    Converting an existing workplace into a co-op faces serious barriers too. Even if the workers desperately want a conversion, if the employer doesn’t, they’re out of luck; their employer owns the organization and can simply say no.

    So what’s the solution?

    Canada needs a new law to expand democracy by granting workers the legal right to collectively buy into the firms they work for. The process would resemble how unionization works today.

    It would start after a majority of employees sign a declaration stating their intent to form a worker co-operative. After this threshold is reached, a formal process would be triggered: employers would be required to disclose all relevant financial documents with the workers, and workers would receive education on the managerial, technical and legal requirements of co-ops. Co-op development bankers would provide loans and financing options.

    Once this is done, workers would hold a final vote. If a simple majority (50 per cent plus one) votes in favour, the employer would be paid the fair market value for the firm and the business would be restructured as a worker co-operative.

    Importantly, the law would allow this transition even if the employer is opposed, just as collective bargaining legislation allows workers to unionize without employer approval. It would also ensure owners are fairly compensated; owners shouldn’t lose their property, but they should lose the right to unilaterally govern other human beings in perpetuity, especially when those others are willing and ready to govern themselves.

    Of course, this law might bring some economic disruption. It’s possible that certain owners might oppose democratic ownership so strongly that they would rather shut down the business altogether than work as equals, but such cases would likely be rare.

    On the other hand, research shows that worker co-ops are just as productive as conventional firms (if not more so) and they have similar survival rates. This is highly reassuring for the overall well-being of the economy.

    Moreover, workers would need to invest significant amounts of their own money in order to buy out the firm, so conversions will occur only after serious consideration.

    The bottom line is that while the costs of this legislation would likely be modest, the benefits to workers and society at large would be substantial: reduced inequality and domination, increased job security and respect. Canada should establish a right to buy-in as soon as possible.

    Tom Malleson has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

    – ref. Why Canada needs a law that gives workers the right to govern their workplace – https://theconversation.com/why-canada-needs-a-law-that-gives-workers-the-right-to-govern-their-workplace-257776

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Inside Ukraine’s remarkable drone attack

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor

    You can generally tell when Vladimir Putin appears rattled by an adverse event in his war on Ukraine. He (or one of his proxies) ramps up the bloodcurdling rhetoric. And so it is with Ukraine’s “Spiderweb” drone attack on four airbases inside Russia, which reportedly destroyed or damaged as many as 40 warplanes, a good chunk of Russia’s fleet of strategic nuclear-capable bombers.

    These aircraft have been used during the war to deliver cruise missiles at targets within Ukraine and have been kept on airbases far enough from Ukraine to be well out of range of anything Kyiv could fire at them. So Ukraine’s secret intelligence service, the SBU, hatched a plot to send truckloads of home-grown drones in vans to locations close to airbases as far away as Irkutsk in Siberia and Murmansk close to the top of Finland.

    Technological savvy aside, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the plan was that it was 18 months in the making and yet the SBU managed to keep it a secret shared by only a few, including Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Significantly, the plan was reportedly kept from the US government.

    Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

    An angry Putin is reported to have accused Ukraine of “organising terrorist attacks”, saying to aides: “How can we have meetings like this under these conditions? What is there to talk about? Who has negotiations with  … terrorists?”

    Nothing much has been revealed as to what was actually said about the drone attack when delegates for the two sides met on Monday, apparently for barely an hour, to continue their peace talks. But as Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko suggest, the fact that both sides have continued to land blows against each other is hardly a sign of a sincere commitment to serious negotiations.

    As it is, both sides restated their maximalist positions. For Kyiv this means that any concessions over territory or sovereignty are out of the question. For Moscow this means Ukrainian and international recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea as well as four provinces it has partially occupied since 2014, no Ukrainian membership of Nato and limits to Ukraine’s armed forces.

    Wolff and Malyarenko, experts in international security and politics at the University of Birmingham and National University Odesa Law Academy, respectively, believe that little will change on the battlefield in the foreseeable future. A lot will now depend on Washington. And it should be noted that the US president had a lengthy chat with Putin on June 4, after which Trump delivered the Kremlin’s message that: “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”

    We’ve already seen a blitz on the southern city of Kherson, where Russia launched glide bombs and attacked with drones and artillery this morning. But Trump’s envoy to Russia, Keith Kellog, among other senior officials have talked about the drone strike being an attack on part of Russia’s [nuclear] triad, impying the threat level is actually far greater.



    Read more:
    Ukraine ‘spiderweb’ drone strike fails to register at peace talks as both sides dig in for the long haul

    Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1994 in return for an undertaking, signed by Russia, the US, UK and France, to guarantee the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders. So as Matthew Sussex of the Australian National University in Canberra writes, the drone attack was very much a case of a David striking a clever blow against a Goliath.

    Sussex says this and other missions, such as the targeting of the Kerch bridge – Putin’s pride and joy – and the relentless attacks on Russia’s power infrastructure, are an effective counter to Russia’s attritional style of warfare. This involves throwing as many men as possible at its objectives, something Ukraine cannot hope to compete directly with. The truth is, writes Sussex, that Kyiv “has focused on winning the war they are in, rather than those of the past”.



    Read more:
    The secret to Ukraine’s battlefield successes against Russia – it knows wars are never won in the past

    “This isn’t just asymmetric warfare, it’s a different kind of offensive capability,” concludes Michael A Lewis, an expert in autonomous vehicles at the University of Bath. Lewis notes that both sides have been using drones almost continuously on the frontlines of the war and each has developed their own strategy for countering the threat.

    But this operation combined the use of drones with smart intelligence planning. The key was getting the drones to where they could exploit vulnerabilities in Russia’s air defence systems. “In low-level airspace, visibility drops, responsibility fragments, and detection tools lose their edge,” he writes. “Drones arrive unannounced, response times lag, coordination breaks.”

    The attack will have defence planners around the world scratching their heads as to how to cope with this emerging threat. Lewis believes the operation exposed the problems with centralised airspace management which will require new and better detection systems and faster responses to counter. “Operation Spiderweb didn’t just reveal how Ukraine could strike deep into Russian territory,” he writes. “It showed how little margin for error there is in a world where cheap systems can be used quietly and precisely.”



    Read more:
    Ukraine drone strikes on Russian airbase reveal any country is vulnerable to the same kind of attack

    Not that Russia has exactly been standing still when it comes to drone warfare. As Marcel Plichta of the University of St Andrews writes, having initially relied on Iran for the supply of its Shahed drones, Russia has been quick to establish its own sizeable drone manufacturing industry. Plichta, a drone specialist and former US government intelligence analyst, walks us through some of the innovations that Russian-made drones are now employing, including Sim cards which can transmit data back to Russia via mobile networks, carbon coating to avoid radar detection, and enhanced incendiary and fragmentation warheads that can start fires or spread large volumes of shrapnel to make them more deadly.

    But also notable is the sheer volume of drones that Russia is deploying – 472 against Ukrainian cities on June 1, as well as large numbers of decoys – with the aim of simply exhausting Ukrainian air defences. Even if Ukraine manages to shoot down 80% as it claims, that still leaves enough to wreak utter havoc for the defenders.



    Read more:
    Russia has been working on creating drones that ‘call home’, go undercover and start fires. Here’s how they work

    From the Oval Office

    The latest controversial measure announced by the White House is the planned travel ban on people from 12 countries thought by the Trump administration to pose a threat. The ban is scheduled to come into effect on June 9.

    Less than a week later, the US will host – jointly with Mexico and Canada – the Fifa Club World Cup, which will feature players from some of these countries. Next year the US hosts the Men’s World Cup and in 2028 the Olympics are scheduled to be held in Los Angeles.

    The announcement of the ban said that “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives travelling for the World Cup, the Olympics, or other major sporting events as defined by the Secretary of State” will be exempted.

    But, as Eric Storm from Leiden University points out, this does not include fans who might have been planning to travel to these major sporting carnivals. Storm, a historian who has researched the intersection of politics and tourism, says that the way geopolitical tensions manifested themselves at big sporting events was a feature of the cold war, but that these sorts of tensions largely dissipated after 1991. Now we may see politics being played out on the pitch, once again.



    Read more:
    Trump’s travel ban casts shadow over the upcoming Fifa Club World Cup and other US-hosted sporting events

    South Korea’s new president

    Voters in South Korea backed the liberal candidate, Lee Jae-myung for the Democratic Party, by nearly 50% in the June 3 election. This gave the man who led the campaign to topple former president Yoon Suk Yeol a clear mandate in what is reported to have been the election with the highest turnout since 1997.

    But while women had been very prominent in the campaign to oust Yoon, there were no female presidential candidates and very little discussion of some of the massive gender issues besetting Korea, including structural inequality, harassment and domestic violence, write Ming Gao of Lund University and Joanna Elfving-Hwang of Curtin University, both experts in South Korean politics and society. In fact, some candidates actively campaigned in a manner they clearly hoped would engage with disenchanted young men who feel their position may be under threat from women.



    Read more:
    South Korea election: Lee Jae-myung takes over a country split by gender politics

    The new South Korean president will bring with him what he calls a “pragmatic” approach to foreign affairs. He has restated his commitment to the longstanding alliance with the US, but has also stressed the need for his country to improve relations with China and North Korea, believing that South Korea should not be wholly dependent on Washington.

    This, writes Christoph Bluth, could become a point of tension between Seoul and Washington. “The Trump administration has taken a hawkish approach towards China and wants its allies to do the same,” he says.

    Lee has made it quite clear that while Seoul’s relationship with Washington is the “basic axis of [South Korea’s] diplomacy,” the country “should not put all [its] eggs in one basket”. He has already signalled that he would resist any attempts by the US to draw South Korea into a conflict with China over Taiwan.



    Read more:
    Why South Korea’s new leader may be on a collision course with Trump

    Gaza: when aid is politicised

    There was yet more tragedy in Gaza this week as the new aid distribution scheme backed by Israel and the US got underway and quickly descended into chaos, with Israeli troops shooting at people it claimed were Hamas militants, resulting in the deaths of dozens of people.

    The new plan handed control of aid distribution to a private company called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which established four depots, three in the very south of the Strip and one in the centre, close to Israeli checkpoints. As a result many people had to travel considerable distances to get desperately needed supplies.

    As Irit Katz of the University of Cambridge writes here, the GHF plan is similar in character to a scheme put forward last December by an Israeli veterans group that prioritises control over humanitarianism. She says the resulting chaos and violence should come as no surprise.



    Read more:
    Lethal humanitarianism: why violence at Gaza aid centres should not come as a surprise

    World Affairs Briefing from The Conversation UK is available as a weekly email newsletter. Click here to get updates directly in your inbox.

    – ref. Inside Ukraine’s remarkable drone attack – https://theconversation.com/inside-ukraines-remarkable-drone-attack-258326

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Japanese walking: the benefits of this fitness trend

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sean Pymer, Academic Clinical Exercise Physiologist, University of Hull

    A fitness trend known as Japanese walking is capturing attention online, promising major health benefits with minimal equipment and time.

    Based on interval-style bursts of fast and slow walking, Japanese walking was developed by Professor Hiroshi Nose and Associate Professor Shizue Masuki at Shinshu University in Matsumoto, Japan. It involves alternating between three minutes of walking at a higher intensity and three minutes at a lower intensity, repeated for at least 30 minutes, four times per week.

    The higher-intensity walking should be done at a level that is “somewhat hard”. At this level, it is still possible to talk, but holding a full conversation would be more difficult.

    The lower-intensity walking should be done at a level that is “light”. At this level, talking should be comfortable, though a little more laboured than an effortless conversation.

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

    Japanese walking has been likened to high-intensity interval training or Hiit, and has been referred to as “high-intensity walking”, although it is less taxing than true Hiit and is performed at lower intensities.

    It is also easy to perform and requires only a stopwatch and space for walking. It requires little planning and is less time-consuming than other walking targets, such as achieving 10,000 steps a day. This makes it suitable for most people.

    What does the evidence show?

    Japanese walking offers significant health benefits. A 2007 study from Japan compared this method to lower-intensity continuous walking, with a goal of achieving 8,000 steps per day. Participants who followed the Japanese walking approach experienced notable reductions in body weight. Blood pressure also dropped – more so than in those following the lower-intensity continuous walking routine.

    Leg strength and physical fitness were also measured in this study. Both improved to a greater extent in those following the Japanese walking programme, compared to those completing moderate-intensity continuous walking.

    A longer-term study also found that Japanese walking protects against the reductions in strength and fitness that happen with ageing.

    These improvements in health would also suggest that Japanese walking can help people live longer, though this has not yet been directly studied.

    There are a few things to consider with this new walking trend. In the 2007 study, around 22% of people did not complete the Japanese walking programme. For the lower intensity programme, with a target of 8,000 steps per day, around 17% did not complete it. This means that Japanese walking may not be suitable for everyone, and it might not be any easier or more attractive than simple step-based targets.

    Achieving a certain number of steps per day has also been shown to help people live longer. For those aged 60 and older, the target should be around 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day and 8,000 to 10,000 for those aged under 60. Similar evidence does not appear to exist for Japanese walking… yet.

    So is this walking trend really the be-all and end-all? Or does it matter less about what exercise you do and more about how often and how hard you do it? The answer is likely to be the latter.

    Research tells us that people who regularly perform more bouts of moderate to vigorous physical activity live longer, regardless of how long each bout is.

    This means that we should focus on ensuring we perform regular moderate to vigorous physical activity and make it habitual. If that activity happens to be Japanese walking, then it’s a worthwhile choice.

    Sean Pymer receives funding from The National Institute for Health and Care Research.

    – ref. Japanese walking: the benefits of this fitness trend – https://theconversation.com/japanese-walking-the-benefits-of-this-fitness-trend-257302

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –