The so-called Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so, regularly invoked to frame the escalating rivalry between the United States and China.
Coined by political scientist Graham Allison — first in a 2012 Financial Times article and later developed in his 2017 book “Destined for War” — the phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his “History of the Peloponnesian War,” “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
At first glance, this provides a compelling and conveniently packaged analogy: Rising powers provoke anxiety in established ones, leading to conflict. In today’s context, the implication seems clear – China’s rise is bound to provoke a collision with the United States, just as Athens once did with Sparta.
But this framing risks flattening the complexity of Thucydides’ work and distorting its deeper philosophical message. Thucydides wasn’t articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics. He was writing a tragedy.
History repeats as tragedy?
Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War on the Athenian side. His world was steeped in the sensibilities of Greek tragedy, and his historical narrative carries that imprint throughout. His work is not a treatise on structural inevitability but an exploration of how human frailty, political misjudgment and moral decay can combine to unleash catastrophe.
That tragic sensibility matters. Where modern analysts often search for predictive patterns and system-level explanations, Thucydides drew attention to the role of choice, perception and emotion. His history is filled with the corrosive effects of fear, the seductions of ambition, the failures of leadership and the tragic unraveling of judgment. This is a study in hubris and nemesis, not structural determinism.
Much of this is lost when the phrase “Thucydides Trap” is elevated into a kind of quasi-law of international politics. It becomes shorthand for inevitability: power rises, fear responds, war follows.
But Thucydides himself was more interested in why fear takes hold, how ambition twists judgment and how leaders — trapped in a narrowing corridor of bad options — convince themselves that war is the only viable path left. His narrative shows how conflict often arises not from necessity, but from misreading, miscalculation and passions unmoored from reason.
Even Allison, to his credit, never claimed the “trap” was inescapable. His core argument was that war is likely but not inevitable when a rising power challenges a dominant one. In fact, much of Allison’s writing serves as a warning to break from the pattern, not to resign oneself to it.
Traditional Russian wooden dolls depict China’s President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky
To read Thucydides carefully is to see that the Peloponnesian War was not solely about a shifting balance of power. It was also about pride, misjudgment and the failure to lead wisely.
Consider his famous observation, “Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.” This isn’t a structural insight — it’s a human one. It’s aimed squarely at those who mistake impulse for strategy and swagger for strength. Or take his chilling formulation, “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.” That’s not an endorsement of realpolitik. It’s a tragic lament on what happens when power becomes unaccountable and justice is cast aside.
Seen in this light, the real lesson of Thucydides is not that war is preordained, but that it becomes more likely when nations allow fear to cloud reason, when leaders mistake posturing for prudence and when strategic decisions are driven by insecurity rather than clarity.
Thucydides reminds us how easily perception curdles into misperception — and how dangerous it is when leaders, convinced of their own virtue or necessity, stop listening to anyone who disagrees.
In today’s context, invoking the Thucydides Trap as a justification for confrontation with China may do more harm than good. It reinforces the notion that conflict is already on the rails and cannot be stopped. But if there is a lesson in “The History of the Peloponnesian War,” it is not that war is inevitable but that it becomes likely when the space for prudence and reflection collapses under the weight of fear and pride. Thucydides offers not a theory of international politics, but a warning — an admonition to leaders who, gripped by their own narratives, drive their nations over a cliff.
Avoiding that fate requires better judgment. And above all, it demands the humility to recognize that the future is not determined by structural pressures alone, but by the choices people make.
Andrew Latham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Despite the challenges faced by local democratic activists, Thailand has often been an oasis of relative liberalism compared with neighbouring countries such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
Westerners, in particular, have been largely welcomed and provided with a measure of protection from harassment by the authorities. Thailand’s economy is extremely dependent on foreign tourism. Many Westerners also work in a variety of industries, including as academics at public and private universities.
That arrangement now seems under pressure. Earlier this month, Paul Chambers, an American political science lecturer at Naresuan University, was arrested on charges of violating the Computer Crimes Act and the lèse-majesté law under Section 112 of Thailand’s Criminal Code for allegedly insulting the monarchy.
Chambers’ visa has been revoked and he now faces a potential punishment of 15 years in jail.
The lèse-majesté law has become a common tool for silencing Thai activists. At least 272 people have been charged under the law since pro-democracy protests broke out in 2020, according to rights groups.
Its use against foreigners has, until now, been limited. No foreign academic has ever been charged with it. Because of the law, however, most academics in Thailand usually tread carefully in their critiques of the monarchy.
The decision to charge a foreign academic, therefore, suggests a hardening of views on dissent by conservative forces in the country. It represents a further deterioration in Thailand’s democratic credentials and provides little optimism for reform under the present government.
Thailand’s democratic deficit
Several other recent actions have also sparked concerns about democratic backsliding.
Following a visit by Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra to China in February, the government violated domestic and international law by forcibly returning 40 Uyghurs to China.
The Uyghurs had fled China a decade earlier to escape repression in the western Xinjiang region and had been held in detention in Thailand ever since. They now potentially face worse treatment by the Chinese authorities.
Then, in early April, Thailand welcomed the head of the Myanmar junta to a regional summit in Bangkok after a devastating earthquake struck his war-ravaged country.
Min Aung Hlaing has been shunned internationally since the junta launched a coup against the democratically elected government in Myanmar in 2021, sparking a devastating civil war. He has only visited Russia and China since then.
In addition, the military continues to dominate politics in Thailand. After a progressive party, Move Forward, won the 2023 parliamentary elections by committing to amend the lèse-majesté law, the military, the unelected Senate and other conservative forces in the country ignored the will of the people and denied its charismatic leader the prime ministership.
The party was then forcibly dissolved by the Constitutional Court and its leader banned from politics for ten years.
In February, Thailand’s National Anti-Corruption Commission criminally indicted 44 politicians from Move Forward for sponsoring a bill in parliament to reform the lèse-majesté law. They face lifetime bans from politics if they are found guilty of breaching “ethical standards”.
Even the powerful former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, whose daughter is also the current prime minister, is not immune from the lèse-majesté law.
He was indicted last year for allegedly insulting the monarchy almost two decades ago. His case is due to be heard in July.
This continued undermining of democratic norms is chipping away at Thailand’s international reputation. The country is now classified as a “flawed democracy” in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, with its ranking falling two years in a row.
The lèse-majesté law has always represented something of a challenge to academic freedom in Thailand, as well as freedom of speech more generally. Campaigners against the law have paid a heavy price.
The US State Department has provided a statement of support for Chambers, urging the Thai government to “ensure that laws are not used to stifle permitted expression”. However, given the Trump administration’s attacks on US universities at the moment, this demand rings somewhat hollow.
Academic freedom is a hallmark of democracies compared with authoritarian regimes. With the US no longer so concerned with protecting academic freedom at home, there is little stopping flawed democracies around the world from stepping up pressure on academics to toe the line.
The undermining of democracy in the US is already having palpable impacts on democratic regression around the world.
With little international pressure to adhere to democratic norms, the current Thai government has taken a significant and deleterious step in arresting a foreign academic.
In the future, universities in Thailand, as in the US, will find it harder to attract international talent. Universities – and the broader society – in both countries will be worse off for it.
Adam Simpson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Cornel Grey, Assistant Professor in Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Western University
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, a global reckoning on anti-Black racism ignited protests, conversations and demand for action. Across North America, universities scrambled to make public commitments to racial justice. They pledged to make changes and address systemic inequalities.
One of the most significant commitments was what’s known as cluster hiring. Recruiting multiple Black scholars at the same time can foster a thriving intellectual community. Research shows cluster hires improve Black faculty representation and retention.
As austerity measures as well as political shifts impact students, faculty and administrators, a big question looms. What programs will institutions cut in these times of fiscal restraint and shifting cultural values?
But as public support for DEI initiatives wanes and universities face growing financial pressures, will these efforts to build a more equitable faculty be sustained?
Disciplines like Black Studies, Indigenous Studies and Gender Studies are not just academic pursuits. They provide students with essential analytical tools to understand our most pressing issues, including economic precarity, the erosion of civil freedoms and land sovereignty.
These university programs are at the forefront of equity education. They are crucial to foster the ability of students and scholars to critically engage with the key challenges we face today.
At the University of Alberta, the move away from DEI discourses to more neutral language like “access, community, and belonging” has marked a fundamental shift.
Within these changes are urgent questions about how research and funding agencies like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) will respond.
When Black Studies is treated as an administrative deliverable rather than a radical intellectual tradition grounded in resistance to oppression, it is stripped of its political edge.
Institutional integrity
As Canadian universities face financial pressures and shifting political tides, the commitments will now be put to the test.
Anti-Black racism and equity cannot be a temporary trend that universities go through during times of public scrutiny. It must remain at the core of academic values, regardless of political or financial pressure.
The fight for Black and Indigenous hiring initiatives continues and the 2020-21 promises made by universities need to be held to the highest standard. This is about sustained commitment to structural change in our institutions. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Cornel Grey receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Muna-Udbi Abdulkadir Ali receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Stephanie Latty receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
One of the first executive orders that President Trump signed after his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, was titled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship. The order accused the previous administration of having “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms.”
What Trump was referring to as censorship was the government’s attempt to work with social media and broadcasting platforms to regulate misinformation, disinformation and misleading information by removing content, limiting its dissemination or labeling it, sometimes with fact-checking included. Similar accusations had been brought before the Supreme Court in 2024, where the justices sided with the federal government, preserving its ability to interact and coordinate with social media platforms.
However, the decision came during a trend toward deregulation of online platforms as Elon Musk removed guardrails after acquiring X, and Meta and YouTube removed policies meant to combat hate and misinformation. With Trump’s commitment to free speech protections through deregulation, online platforms are likely to remove more guardrails.
This is not surprising considering that free speech has long been associated with the metaphor of free trade in ideas, closely tied to the value of a deregulated market economy. The presumption has been that the way to protect freedom of speech is through a deregulated marketplace, and speech on social media platforms is no exception. However, research on online speech shows the opposite to be the case: Regulating online speech protects free speech.
What is content moderation?
Free speech and its exceptions
Free speech in the U.S. has always been accompanied by a series of exceptions, laid out clearly by the courts, that constrain speech based on a competing concern for the prevention of harm. For example, speech that threatens, incites or directly causes harm is not protected speech.
Yet, when it comes to content-based regulation dealing with ideas or ideological expression, the courts have been clear that the government should not place burdens on speech that is objectionable. The government cannot censor speech that is false but does not lead to a specific, identifiable harm.
Despite these legal constraints, researchers have suggested that upholding the value of free speech requires some content-based regulation. To understand this seemingly paradoxical conclusion, it’s important to understand why free speech is valuable in the first place. Free speech enables you to be an autonomous member of society by allowing you to express yourself and hear other people express themselves.
People consider it wrong when a government bans discussion of a viewpoint or piece of content because that violates their right as speakers and listeners to engage with the viewpoint or content. In other words, having free speech is essential because citizens need to be able to choose freely what they say and listen to.
In addition, democracy is served by having a citizenry that is able to engage freely and meaningfully in the content of their choosing. Democratic dissent, after all, was the original inspiration for free speech protections and serves as the backbone of their protections today.
Regulating for free speech
The need for citizens in a democratic state to be autonomous speakers and thinkers underscores the importance of content-based regulation in upholding free speech. Research hasshown that hate speech online in particular and the proliferation of extremism online in general have a chilling effect on online speech through intimidation and fear. So, restrictions on hate speech can support free speech rather than undermining it.
All of this is evidence that deregulating social media platforms is a net loss for free speech. In economic markets, maintaining a consumer’s freedom of choice requires regulations against coercion and deceit. In the marketplace of ideas, the principle is the same: The free trade of ideas requires regulation.
Michael Gregory does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Mathers, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, Aberystwyth University
Ending Russia’s war in Ukraine was one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises, and one that he famously boasted could be achieved in 24 hours. But three months after taking office, the Trump administration has only managed to negotiate a partial ceasefire that has done nothing to stop the fighting.
On April 13, for example, Russia fired ballistic missiles into the city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine, killing at least 35 civilians gathered to celebrate Palm Sunday and injuring over 100 more.
Military attacks have continued despite numerous meetings between senior Russian and US officials, and phone conversations where Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have spoken directly.
So, why are Trump’s efforts to end the war struggling to get off the starting blocks? The most important reason is that Russia is blocking progress. Moscow has created obstacles, deployed delaying tactics and has generally muddied the waters.
Fighting in Ukraine has continued as Washington and Moscow discuss the future of Ukraine. Institute for the Study of War
Trump’s major initiative is his proposal for a 30-day general ceasefire to prepare the way for broader peace negotiations. While Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed to this immediately when it was proposed in March, Putin did not. He instead offered a counter proposal: a partial ceasefire banning attacks on energy infrastructure.
Russia relies heavily on the export of energy, especially oil, to fund the war. But Ukraine has been systematically targeting Russia’s oil refineries and storage facilities, mainly using domestically produced drones. Ukraine is estimated to have destroyed 10% of Russia’s refining capacity since the beginning of 2025.
By narrowing the scope of the ceasefire, Putin was able to shield Russia’s energy production while continuing to attack Ukraine. Moscow needs the fighting to continue to achieve its openly stated goal of controlling all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the four regions of Ukraine it claimed to annex in 2022.
Another Russian tactic has been to take every opportunity to present a list of demands for Ukrainian concessions. These include Kyiv giving up its claims to Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, abandoning its goal of joining Nato, and reducing its armed forces significantly. Russia also wants Ukraine to agree to a change of political leadership.
This tactic is important for two reasons. First, Russia’s demands make it clear that Moscow envisages the war as the first stage in a longer-term plan to exercise control over all of Ukraine, not only the annexed territories. And second, repeatedly stating Russia’s demands gets them into the public discourse.
When journalists – or, especially, US officials – repeat them, as Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff did recently, they gain an air of legitimacy. This creates the expectation that a peace agreement will comply with Moscow’s agenda.
Russia is also good at deflecting attention away from ending the war. Sometimes Putin does this with flattery and by appealing to Trump’s sense of self-importance.
In an interview about his March trip to Moscow, Witkoff glided over his failure to secure a pledge from the Russians to agree to a general ceasefire and instead conveyed a touching story demonstrating Putin’s regard for Trump.
Putin apparently told Witkoff that he went to church and prayed for Trump’s recovery after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt during the election campaign. Putin also sent Witkoff back to the US with a portrait of Trump, painted by an artist who is known for producing flattering portraits of Putin himself.
Another effective tactic of deflection involves money. Russian officials dangle the prospect of lucrative deals involving trade and investment in front of Trump administration officials. This was evidently the focus of much of the first meeting between US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia in February, although it was convened to discuss plans for peace.
It is also probably the reason for Kirill Dmitriev’s visit to Washington at the beginning of April. Dmitriev, a figure close to Putin and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, confirmed to journalists that his discussions encompassed possible deals with the US involving rare-earth metals, exploiting resources in the Arctic, and resuming direct flights between the US and Russia.
Trump’s role
While Russia places obstacles in the path of peace, Trump and his officials do nothing to remove them. This allows Moscow to continue waging war without constraints.
Despite Trump’s occasional tough talk about running out of patience with Moscow, as well as his threats of secondary tariffs on countries that buy oil from Russia, no measures that would put pressure on Russia have been implemented.
Trump has instead made excuses for Moscow. He described the attack on Sumy as a “mistake”, and has expressed admiration for Putin for dragging his feet to get a better deal with Washington.
This contrasts sharply with Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Zelensky was publicly humiliated during his meeting with Trump and US vice-president, J.D. Vance, in the Oval Office in February. Trump has even accused Zelensky of starting the war, which was launched by a mass invasion of Russian forces.
Trump and his team have shown far less interest in Ukraine’s security needs than in striking a lucrative deal to extract the country’s natural resources. The prospect of the Trump administration negotiating a peace agreement that the Ukrainians would accept seems remote.
So, where does this leave the peace process? When the partial ceasefire arrangement comes to an end later in April, Washington will have to decide whether to resume its efforts to secure a general ceasefire or chart a new course.
Based on his track record so far, Trump might just blame the Ukrainians for refusing to surrender to Russia’s terms, abandon attempts to reach a negotiated settlement to the war, and go straight to reestablishing normal relations with Russia.
Jennifer Mathers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The number of people with young-onset dementia could be even higher than current estimates suggest.AtlasStudio/ Shutterstock
Around 57 million people worldwide have dementia. While most cases of dementia are diagnosed in older adults, about 7% of cases occur in people under 65. This number may be even higher as young-onset dementia continues to be under-recognised. This means many people may be missing out on the support they need.
Here are five reasons young-onset dementia remains under-recognised:
1. Dementia is typically associated with older age
When you hear the word “dementia” do you picture someone under 65? While dementia is usually associated with older adults, the condition doesn’t discriminate based on age. In fact, anyone (even children) can be diagnosed with different forms of dementia.
But this common assumption means many younger people may not seek a diagnosis from their doctor, as many don’t assume dementia could be causing any of the symptoms they’re experiencing.
Doctors, too, often fail to consider the possibility of a younger person having dementia. Many people diagnosed with young-onset dementia initially had their symptoms dismissed. Some doctors even showed little concern for their experiences. It also isn’t uncommon for younger adults to be told they’re “too young” to have dementia.
It’s not surprising then that these experiences lead to frustration, with patients and their families feeling unheard and neglected by the healthcare system.
The misunderstanding that dementia is a disease of older adults leaves people with young-onset dementia fighting to be heard.
2. Symptoms are different
Dementia is most often linked to short-term memory loss. However, cognition (which encompasses all of our mental processes, from thinking to perception) is very complex. For this reason, dementia can lead to a huge variety of symptoms – such as changes in personality and language, difficulties recognising objects, judging distances or coordinating movement and even hallucinations and delusions.
Compared to dementia in older adults, people with young-onset dementia are more likely to experience symptoms other than memory loss as the earliest signs of the condition. For instance, research shows that for around one-third of people with young-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the earliest symptoms they had were problems with coordination and vision changes.
3. Rarer causes of dementia
Dementia is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of brain disorders that all cause problems with cognition. In older adults, the most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease – accounting for 50-75% of cases. But in people under 65, only around 40% of dementia cases can be attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Instead, young-onset dementia tends to be caused by rarer neurodegenerative conditions, such as frontotemporal dementias. Frontotemporal dementias only affect around one in 20 people diagnosed with dementia. These conditions affect parts of the brain responsible for personality, behaviour, language, speech and executive functioning.
For example, primary progressive aphasia is one type of frontotemporal dementia. This condition affects around three in every 100,000 people. Primary progressive aphasia mainly alters a person’s ability to communicate and understand speech.
Secondary dementias are also more common in people with young-onset dementia. These are dementias that are caused by another underlying medical condition, disease (such as Huntington’s disease or a brain tumour) or external factor (such as a viral infection, substance misuse or head injury).
Recognition of these rarer forms of dementia is increasing – thanks in part to celebrities such as Fiona Phillips, Pauline Quirke and Terry Jones opening up about their experiences. But there’s still much less understanding around treatment options and managing symptoms when it comes to these rarer forms of dementia. Rarer dementias are also linked to atypical symptoms, which often go missed. This prolongs the diagnostic journey.
4. Symptoms overlap with other conditions
Symptoms of young-onset dementia have considerable overlap with those common in certain mental health conditions, such as bipolar disorder, psychosis, depression and anxiety. Symptoms might also include apathy, feelings of panic, irritability, hallucinations and delusions.
Of course, not everyone experiencing these symptoms will have young-onset dementia. But it’s important we raise awareness about symptom overlap to make the diagnosis process easier for those who do.
A person’s cognitive reserve (the brain’s ability to maintain good cognitive function despite damage or brain changes) also affects their experience of dementia symptoms and how they cope with them. Some people may adapt more effectively, drawing on strong support networks, psychological resilience or their own personal coping strategies to overcome these challenges.
All of these factors together can make it difficult to recognise symptoms of young-onset dementia, especially in its early stages.
Need for awareness
The under-recognition of young-onset dementia is significant. It contributes to the lack of resources, specialised care and advice, appropriate support and early diagnosis for people with young-onset dementia. While this is improving, greater awareness still needs to be brought to the experience of dementia in younger adults – especially given research shows that the progression of cognitive decline is more pronounced in younger adults.
If you’re worried about yourself or a family member showing signs of dementia, it’s important to discuss symptoms and seek support early. You can also contact local dementia support organisations such as Alzheimer Scotland, Dementia UK, and Alzheimer Society, who can provide information, resources and guidance on support options.
Molly Murray is a PhD student at the University of the West of Scotland. She receives a Studentship and funding from the University of the West of Scotland for completing her PhD which explores experiences of navigation in people with young-onset dementia.
The trade war between China and the US has spiralled into unchartered territory. On April 10, the Trump administration imposed a tariff of 125% on all Chinese imports. China called the actions unfair and responded with similar measures.
Within the broader debate around unravelling economic ties between the US and China, where economic interdependence has increasingly been viewed as a threat to US national security, this escalation raises questions about whether global finance is also reducing its presence in China.
After all, the risks of financial connectivity with China have been discussed prominently by US policymakers in recent years. And many financial analysts have spent much of the past year discussing whether China has become “uninvestable” due to rising geopolitical tensions.
However, as I show in a recently published study, most global financial firms have continued to expand their presence in Chinese markets over the last decade, even as tensions have intensified.
Crucially, they have done so on China’s terms, operating within a system that prioritises government oversight and policy goals over liberal market norms. This pragmatic accommodation is quietly reshaping the global financial order.
China’s capital markets, which have historically been sealed off from the rest of the world, have been opening up in recent decades. This has prompted global financial firms to expand their footprint in China.
Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have taken full ownership of local joint ventures. And asset managers like BlackRock or Invesco have established fund management operations on the Chinese mainland.
Yet China has not liberalised in the way many in the west expected. Rather than conforming to global norms of open, lightly regulated markets, China’s financial system remains largely guided by the state.
Markets there operate within a framework shaped by the policy priorities of the central government, capital controls remain in place, and foreign firms are expected to play by a different set of rules than they would in New York or London.
Foreign investors have been allowed to buy into mainland markets, but through infrastructure that limits capital outflows and preserves regulatory oversight.
Rather than adapting China to the global financial order, Wall Street has accommodated China’s distinct model. The motivation behind this is clear: China is simply too big to ignore.
Take China’s pension system as an example. Whereas pension assets in the US amount to 136.2% of GDP in 2019, in China these only amounted to 1.6%. The growth potential in this market is enormous, representing a trillion-dollar opportunity for global firms.
Consequently, index providers such as MSCI, FTSE Russell, and S&P Dow Jones – key gatekeepers of global investment – have included Chinese stocks and bonds in major benchmark indices.
These decisions, taken between 2017 and 2020, effectively declared Chinese markets “investment grade” for institutional investors around the world. This has helped legitimise China’s market model within the architecture of global finance.
America strikes back
In recent years, Washington has sought to curtail US financial exposure to China through a growing set of measures. These include investment restrictions, entity blacklists, and forced delisting for Chinese firms on US stock exchanges. Such actions signal a broader effort to use finance as a tool of strategic leverage.
The moves have had some effect. Some US institutional investors and pension funds have declared China “uninvestable”, and are reducing their exposure. American investments in China have roughly halved since their US$1.4 trillion (£1.1 trillion) peak in 2020.
More strategically oriented investors from Asia, Europe and the Middle East have invested more into Chinese markets, filling gaps left by US investors. Sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East, especially, have engaged in more long-term investments as part of broader efforts to strengthen economic cooperation with China.
And at the same time, many western financial firms have doubled down on their presence in China, expanding their onshore footprint. Since 2020, institutions like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock have opened new offices, increased their staff, acquired new licences and bought out their joint venture partners to operate independently as investment banks, asset managers or futures brokers.
It has become more difficult to invest foreign capital in China. But western financial firms are positioning themselves to tap into China’s huge domestic capital pools and capture its long-term growth opportunities – even as they tread carefully around geopolitical sensitivities.
Fragmenting financial order
It is too early to predict the long-term effects of the current geopolitical tensions. But Wall Street is trying to placate both sides. On the one hand, it is adapting to capital markets with Chinese characteristics. And on the other, it is trying not to antagonise an increasingly interventionist America.
However, while holding its breath amid further escalation and having scaled back some of its activities, Wall Street has not left China. It is instead learning how to work within the constraints of a system shaped by a different set of priorities.
This does not necessarily signal a new global consensus. But it does suggest that the liberal financial order, once defined by Anglo-American norms, is becoming more pluralistic. China’s rise is showing that alternative models – where the state retains a strong hand in markets – can coexist with, and even shape, global finance.
As tensions between the US and China continue to rise, financial firms are learning to navigate a world in which existing relationships between states and markets are being reconfigured. This process may well define the future of global finance.
Johannes Petry receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christiaan De Beukelaer, Senior Lecturer in Culture & Climate, The University of Melbourne
The UN’s International Maritime Organization has just agreed to start charging ships for the greenhouse gases they emit. After decades of ineffective incremental tweaks to shipping emissions, the breakthrough came on April 11 at a summit in London. It makes shipping the first industry subject to a worldwide – and legally binding – emissions price.
The positive spin is that getting any sort of deal is a major win for multilateral climate action, especially considering two strong headwinds.
From within the meeting, there was sustained opposition to ambitious action from Saudi Arabia and other petrostates, as well as from China and Brazil. Second, the US had already disengaged from negotiations. Even so, from outside the meeting, the US administration’s tariff war and explicit threat to retaliate against states supporting a shipping pricing regime could have affected talks far more than they did.
But we’re not sure that this agreement can be considered a success. While there is little traditional climate change denial at the IMO, “mitigation denial” is alive and kicking. Mitigation denial means making lofty promises, often in line with scientific evidence, but not adopting concrete measures able to deliver on these targets. This is exactly what petrostates pushed the IMO to do last week.
Ultimately, the IMO has well and truly failed the most climate vulnerable, by favouring a more gradual and less certain transition to low-carbon shipping. It’s even effectively making these countries pay the price.
What are the measures?
The IMO agreement introduces a global fuel standard for shipping, with financial penalties for ships that don’t meet emissions targets. This is effectively a carbon-trading scheme.
It sets two targets, both of which get tougher every year: a “base” level and a stricter “direct compliance” level. Ships that miss the direct target have to buy “remedial units”, and more expensive ones if they also fail the base level. Ships that go beyond their targets earn “surplus units”, which they can trade or save for up to two years.
In practice, this means that the companies and countries that can invest in new technologies will earn a double dividend: they won’t pay for emissions and they will receive rewards for using low-emission fuels.
At the same time, countries and shipping companies lacking the means to invest will effectively subsidise those early movers by paying penalties that reward them. Hardly any revenues will be available for the promised “just and equitable” transition that would ensure no country is left behind. No wonder nearly all delegates from vulnerable Pacific nations abstained from the vote at the IMO.
For a typical ship burning heavy fuel oil in 2028, it works out at around US$25 (£19) per tonne of greenhouse gas. That’s far lower than needed to drive a rapid transition to cleaner fuels. We also still don’t know exactly how the money raised will be used.
Delegates also agreed to update the IMO’s “carbon intensity” policy, which now requires ships to be 21.5% more fuel efficient by 2030 compared to 2019. This is a modest 2.5% improvement per year.
Pacific island states and the UK were among those arguing for bigger cuts (up to 47%). China pushed for 15% and the EU proposed the surprisingly low 23%. The final result of 21.5% is a bad compromise that does not reflect scientific recommendations on meeting the IMO’s goals or what is possible with available technology.
Climate action at the IMO
This geopolitical struggle goes back decades. Following the adoption of the Kyoto protocol (a precursor of the Paris agreement) in 1997, the UN tasked the IMO with reducing shipping emissions. After two decades of little progress, in 2018 the IMO eventually set a weak target to cut emissions by 50% from 2008 levels. In 2023, that goal was strengthened to net-zero emissions “by or around 2050”, with interim targets of 20-30% cuts by 2030 and 70-80% by 2040.
Most importantly, the 2023 strategy also committed to adopting legally binding measures in April 2025 to deliver on these targets. This has now happened.
In light of that history, the new measures do constitute progress. However, their success has to be judged on whether they can actually meet the IMO’s targets.
The 2030 goal is especially important as climate damage is proportional to cumulative emissions over time, so it’s important to cut emissions as soon as possible. If the shipping sector misses its 2030 target, it may have emitted too much carbon to still make a fair contribution to the Paris agreement.
Academics at UCL have analysed the new IMO agreement. Unfortunately, they calculated the new policies will only deliver a 10% reduction by 2030 – that’s not even close to the 20% goal the IMO set, let alone the “strive” target of 30%.
Mitigation denial?
At the IMO’s closing meeting, Harry Conway, chair of its Marine Environment Protection Committee, held up a glass of water and remarked that at the start of the week, the glass was empty, now the glass is half full.
As political spin, that image might work. But when it comes to setting a clear and ambitious path forward, the measures fall well short.
The 2023 strategy committed nations to “strive” to deliver 30% emissions cuts by 2030. Last week’s meeting might yield 10%. Another reason why Pacific delegates abstained from voting. There is a lot more striving – and delivering – to be done.
A credible pathway to reach net-zero by 2050 is now at risk. Strong pushback by the US, Saudi Arabia, China and Brazil, and weak leadership from the EU all played a role. Even adopting these modest measures – which requires a vote in October – and specifying operational “guidelines” afterwards will be an uphill battle.
Christiaan De Beukelaer receives funding from the ClimateWorks Foundation.
Simon Bullock is a member of the Institute for Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST)
As television grew rapidly in popularity in the second half of the 20th century, many people assumed it would cause a knock-on crisis for the film industry. After all, it meant that viewers no longer had to leave their sofas to enjoy onscreen entertainment.
But the reality was far more nuanced. The “death of cinema” has been habitually touted ever since the introduction of the TV, but never really came to pass. Instead, cinema found ways to work with new competition through technological innovation, aesthetic invention and engaging with challenging subject matters.
Today, lessons from the introduction of TV demonstrate how the creative industries have navigated the introduction of new technology. And could offer some comfort to those who fear that artificial intelligence (AI) technology could be a death knell for the creative industries.
This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.
As far back as 1938, long before its widespread popularity, film production company Paramount Studios sought to break into television. It made significant investment in DuMont Laboratories, which evolved into a pioneering commercial TV network.
Other studios followed suit and experimented with “live cinema”. This was a form of entertainment in which broadcast images, including sporting events, were converted into 35mm film and projected onto cinema screens, and it was made throughout the 1940s.
The “Paramount decrees” antitrust case issued by the US Supreme Court in 1948 ended the monopolistic practices of the studios, which precluded them from owning broadcast companies in favour of the radio networks. They were also ordered to sell their cinema chains, which meant that their films no longer had guaranteed screenings to the public.
After the break-up of the studios, many studio personnel found work in the television industry. It provided a training ground for future cinema stars, including as Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and John Travolta. Studios could also rent out their studios and facilities to television production companies.
The “star system” (in which the popularity of film stars had always driven the commercial potential of cinema) was now complimented by the exposure of these stars on television programmes.
Many studios began using TV to advertise their films. For example, Disneyland TV programmes helped to advertise the Disney studio and its cinematic products as distinct from television. And film trailers became another important conduit for cinema advertising. The summer blockbuster era was ushered in by Jaws in 1975 with blanket advertising on every prime-time TV show.
When early television schedules lacked enough new content to fill the airwaves, British cinema and cheap films and serials (a series of short films with cliffhanger endings; an early progenitor of television series) from the smaller Hollywood studios filled the early schedules.
Other studio executives took note that their back catalogues of film, which mainly sat untouched in vaults, were a financial goldmine that could be ploughed back into film production and technological development. MGM, which owned titles including perennial favourite The Wizard of Oz, which CBS reserved exclusive rights to screen for 20 years, from August 1956 US$34 million (£12 million) for its titles, while Paramount held out for US$50 million (£17.8 million). Screening rights were sold to the television networks.
As a result, television became the primary conduit for film viewing. Subsequently, more films were seen on television than on the big screen. There were 3.4 billion film viewings on UK TV in 2013 compared with 165 million cinema admissions – these are now shared with streaming and on demand services. Something had to be done to keep people going to the cinema.
Technical and aesthetic innovation
In attempting to preserve the experience of the big screen, widescreen, 3D and multi-track sound systems were introduced to cinemas. The move to standardised colour film accelerated, while extended film length attempted to link the cinematic experience with “high culture” such as the theatre and opera, with overtures and intermissions.
While many were seen as gimmicky (such as “smell-O-vision” in Scent of Mystery, 1960), widescreen filming became the aesthetic choice of filmmakers, producing epic canvasses and an alternative viewing experience to the small television screen.
A trailer for A Scent of Mystery and its ‘smell-o-vision’ marketing.
Although many of these technologies dated back to the 1920s, small-screen competition drove technological and aesthetic innovation, and was partly financed by the tele-visual licensing of their films. Alongside these innovations, the content of the films themselves offered a demonstrable alternative to the small screen.
By the late 1960s, Hollywood had essentially broken free from the self-imposed censorial strictures of the Hay’s production code, which regulated everything from language to interracial relationships. Instead, film-makers had absorbed the influences of documentary, avant-garde and the French New Wave, among others, as well as the rock n’ roll and counterculture movements to make bold and controversial films, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Easy Rider (1969).
The topics and levels of sex and violence portrayed in these films were unthinkable within the heavily regulated family and advertiser-friendly television industry.
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Director Alfred Hitchcock made the most of this distinction between mediums. He utilised the agile tele-visual working crew of his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) for the taboo-bothering horror film Psycho in 1960, suggesting that the two mediums could be related but also divided by content. This, along with the aesthetic innovations helped to elevate cinema artistically in relation to the small screen.
And so the AI era dawns. The writers and actors strike of 2023 showed that the creative industries are ready to fight for their survival. Adaptability, as Hollywood has demonstrated throughout its history, can also be the key to continued success.
Dr Mark Fryers received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (MA & PhD funding, 2011-2015).
The Birkin bag made by French luxury retailer Hermès has become a status symbol for the global elite. Notoriously difficult to obtain, the world’s rich obsess over how to get their hands on one.
But when US retailer Walmart recently launched a much cheaper bag that looked very similar to the Birkin, nicknamed a “Wirkin” by others, it sparked discussions about wealth disparity and the ethics of conspicuous consumption.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to two sociologists about the Birkin and what it symbolises.
For the rich housewives of Delhi, the Birkin bag is a must have, says Parul Bhandari. A sociologist at the University of Cambridge in the UK, she’s spent time interviewing wealthy Indian women about their lives and preoccupations. She told us:
A bag that is carried by rich women of New York, of London, of Paris, is something that you desire as well, so it’s a ticket of entry into the global elite.
Birkins are also used by some of these rich women as a way to show off their husband’s affection, Bhandari says: “ Not only from the point of view of money, because obviously this bag is extremely expensive, but also because it is difficult to procure.” The harder your husband tries to help you get the bag, the more getting one is a testimony of conjugal love.
Manufactured scarcity
Named after the British actress Jane Birkin, Hermès’s signature bag can cost tens of thousands of dollars, or more on the resale market for those made in rare colours or out of rare leathers. But you can’t just walk into any Hermès store to buy one, as Aarushi Bhandari, a sociologist at Davidson College in the US who studies the internet – and is no relation to Parul – explains.
You need to have a record of spending tens of thousands of dollars even before you’re offered to buy one. But spending that money doesn’t automatically mean you get a bag. You have to develop a relationship with a sales associate at a particular Hermès store and the sales associate really gets to decide, if there’s availability, whether or not you get offered a bag.
Bhandari became intrigued by online communities where people discuss the best strategies for obtaining an Hermès. So when US retailer Walmart launched a bag in late 2024 that looked very similar to a Birkin, and the internet went wild, Bhandari was fascinated.
She began to see posts on TikTok discussing the bag. First it was fashion accounts talking it up, but then a backlash began, with some users criticising those who would spend thousands on a real Birkin and praising the “Wirkin” as a way to make an iconic design accessible to regular people. Bhandari sees this as an example of an accelerating form of anti-elitism taking hold within parts of online culture.
In February, the chief executive of Hermès, Axel Dumas, admitted that he was “irritated” by the Walmart bag and that the company took counterfeiting “very seriously”.
The Walmart bag quickly sold out and no more were put on sale. It has since entered into a partnership with a secondhand luxury resale platform called Rebag, meaning customers can buy real Birkins secondhand through Walmart’s online marketplace.
The Conversation approached Hermès for comment on the Walmart bag, and to confirm how the company decides who is eligible to buy a Birkin. Hermès did not respond.
Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear our conversation with Parul Bhandari and Aarushi Bhandari, plus an introduction from Nick Lehr, arts and culture editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.
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.
Parul Bhandari and Aarushi Bhandari do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Peter Dutton, now seriously on the back foot, has made an extraordinarily big “aspirational” commitment at the back end of this campaign.
He says he wants to see a move to indexing personal income tax – an assault on the “bracket creep” that sees people pushed into higher tax brackets when their income rises due to inflation.
He suggests this would be a task for after a Coalition government had the budget back in shape, so he puts no timing on it.
If Dutton is serious, this is the most radical proposal we’ve heard for the election, apart from the nuclear policy.
The opposition leader produced the indexation idea, out of the blue, in an interview with The Australian, saying, “I want to see us move as quickly as we can as a country to changes around personal income tax, including indexation, because bracket creep, as we know, is a killer in the economy”.
When there are widespread calls from business and experts for an overhaul of the taxation system, but apparent deafness from most politicians, dealing with bracket creep would be one major step forward.
Economist Richard Holden from the University of New South Wales, is a strong advocate. “The current system has been built on tax increases on every working Australian all the time,” he says. An indexed system would be “more honest”, as well as forcing fiscal discipline on governments.
The latter constraint is one big reason governments shy away from it. Bracket creep provides a huge amount of revenue automatically, and indexing tax brackets would be very costly. The spending discipline the system would then require is probably beyond any modern government, given the enormous demands from voters.
There’s another point. Governments like to make good fellows of themselves by handing back some of this bracket creep in tax cuts at times of their choosing, particularly at elections – as we’ve seen this time.
Ken Henry, former treasury secretary and lead author of the major taxation review commissioned by the Rudd government, urged indexation in a February speech outlining a blueprint for tax change.
Henry is particularly concerned with intergenerational equity. “Young workers are being robbed by a tax system that relies increasingly upon fiscal drag,” he said. “Fiscal drag forces them to pay higher and higher average tax rates, even if their real incomes are falling.”
A conservative government did index income tax, way back in Malcolm Fraser’s day, when the then-prime minister described it as a “great taxation reform”.
Fraser argued: “Perhaps the single most important feature of the reform, is that it is not a once-and-for-all measure. It will continue to have significant beneficial effects in personal income tax payments from year to year”.
The change, however, didn’t last long – after introducing it in 1976, Fraser cut it back in 1979 and then scrapped it in 1982.
But, accepting the potential upsides of the idea, the fact that Dutton has come out with this ambitious, “aspirational” policy in this way, at this time, raises questions about his campaign strategy.
If he means it, this should have been front and centre of his election pitch, advanced much earlier and cast as part of a reform agenda.
Instead, all we got from the Liberals on tax was the weekend commitment to a one-off income tax offset. And that followed the party earlier saying it would not be able, for financial reasons, to produce anything at all. Also, of course, they rejected the modest tax cuts in the budget.
Some Liberal sources say Dutton always intended to float the indexation idea. If so, he and those running the Liberals’ campaign missed a big opportunity.
The other view is to think Dutton could have been freelancing – talking up his commitment to economic reform, going for an easy headline, but knowing he would never have to deliver. Most likely, he would not reach office. If he did win government – well, this was an “aspiration”, whose time would never arrive.
Questioned on Thursday about his idea, Dutton argued the difficulty of writing tax policies from opposition.
He pointed to the example of the Howard government, which unveiled the GST after winning power in 1996, then took it to a subsequent election in 1998.
It is a risky precedent to highlight, however. John Howard promised in opposition he would “never, ever” bring in a GST. Dutton can’t afford to fan any suggestion that we don’t really know his full tax agenda – that he might surprise if he won.
For its part, Labor this week found itself again caught in the weeds of a perennial tax debate – over whether, despite its denials, it might abolish the negative gearing tax break for property investors.
Anthony Albanese kicked an own goal in Wednesday’s debate when he insisted the government hadn’t commissioned Treasury modelling on the impact of negative gearing for the housing market. There was much to-ing and fro-ing last year about this, but it finally became clear Treasurer Jim Chalmers had requested advice.
Chalmers on Thursday made a Jesuitical distinction between asking Treasury for “a view” and commissioning modelling.
“I said last year […] I sought a view. That’s different to commissioning modelling,” Chalmers told a news conference alongside Albanese. “The prime minister was asked about commissioning modelling. I sought a view.
“The view from the Treasury is that a change to negative gearing wouldn’t get the sort of improvement that we desperately need to see in our economy when it comes to supply and that’s why our focus is not on changing that.”
Pressed to “rule out” any changes to negative gearing, Chalmers said “we’re not proposing any changes in this area”.
Dutton claimed Chalmers was “an advocate for the abolition of negative gearing”, and was “at war” with Albanese.
Once again, the opposition is trying to sow doubt about what Labor might do, regardless of what it might say, on this thorny issue. Or, as the government claims, it is trying to distract from its own problems.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Operation Gomorrah may have been the most cynical event of World War Two (WW2). Not only did the name fully convey the intent of the war crimes about to be committed, it, also represented the single biggest 24-hour murder toll for the European war that I have come across.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
On the night of 27 July 1943, the RAF murdered 35,000, mostly working-class civilian residents living in the most densely populated part of Hamburg; a planned firebombing which started a sequence of events – a holocaust if not The Holocaust – that ended in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. (Note The bombing of Hamburg foreshadowed the horrors of Hiroshima, National Geographic, 23 July 2021.) A holocaust is a “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war” (Oxford Dictionary). [In The Holocaust, 31,000 Jews were shot dead in Kyiv in a single day in 1941; the worst single day of The Holocaust, I understand.]
Hamburg was, literally, a dry run for what came later; the aim was to maximise the number of barbecued civilians by, among other things, choosing perfect weather conditions for an experiment in incendiary murder. (Yes, I am literally using inflammatory language.) While the total death toll of the week-long operation has been estimated to be over 40,000, the toll arising from the night of 27/28 July 1943 represents about 85% of the total.
The Gomorrah chapter of Peter Hitchens’ The Phoney Victory, 2018, gives a documented account of the moral duplicity surrounding Churchill’s bombing campaign. For a full story of the Allies’ firestorm holocaust, see Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, 2022, by James M Scott. (John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, is a survivor of the Tokyo episode, the raid that killed more people – over 100,000 – than any other in a single arsonous assault.)
Sodom and Gomorrah
These twin ‘cities of the plain’, which, if they ever existed, are now either under the Dead Sea or east of there, in modern Jordan. The key chapter in the bible (Genesis, ch.19) mainly emphasises Sodom, though Gomorrah was reputedly as ‘sinful’. The biblical story is ghastly, in its misogyny as well as its extollation of extermination of ‘others’.
Genesis (ch.19) tells us, when Lot (Abraham’s nephew) found himself, in Sodom, hosting two Angels/men, ‘the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.”‘ The secret to understanding this is the biblical meaning of the word ‘know’; in this case the events took place in Sodom, and the guests had the appearance of ‘men’.
Lot replies: ‘”I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men …”.’ While the men of Sodom did not take up the offer – they favoured Lot himself – the angel-men saved Lot and his family. Then ‘When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city.”‘ …
‘When they had brought [the four of] them outside, [the angel-men] said, “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.” … Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.’ …
After the three survivors settled in a cave: ‘the firstborn [daughter] said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, so that we may preserve offspring through our father.” … ‘Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father.’ (Thus, the East Bank [of the River Jordan] was repopulated!!)
Hamburg came to be equated with biblical Sodom, as deserving victims for a particularly barbaric form of mass murder. Neither Churchill, nor his bomber commander Arthur Harris, could know that only 35,000 Hamburgers would die as a result of that night’s operation. There is reason to believe that Churchill and his savants were looking for many more than hundreds of thousands of Germans to be ‘de-housed’ over the incendiary bombing campaign. (Dehousing was the euphemism used by Churchill’s men; compare with ‘resettlement’ for the trip that the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto made to Treblinka.)
Hamburg and the Gomorrah holocaust
Why Hamburg? Basically, because it was there. Though it was/is a large industrial and mercantile port city, the terror target was workers, not the works which employed them. The National Geographic article notes, with gallows-humour irony: “After noticing that Brits whose homes were struck by bombs were less likely to show up to work, analysts determined that destroying Germany’s largest cities and towns would likely cripple Germany’s war efforts.” Hamburg was close to England, and could be reached without flying over occupied land. And Hamburg was defended by a radar system of sorts, though not as sophisticated as British radar. The first British bombing raid on Hamburg was very much a technology test-run; refer The Woman Whose Invention Helped Win a War – and Still Baffles Weathermen, Irena Fischer-Hwang, 28 November 2018, Smithsonian Magazine. The second British raid on Hamburg was the real thing, a particularly dry run to really get the Gomorrah holocaust underway.
Hitchens (p.178) says: “Winston Churchill speculated in a letter of 8 July I940 to his friend and Minister of Aircraft Production, the press magnate Lord (Max) Beaverbrook, that an ‘absolutely devastating exterminating [my emphasis] attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland would help to bring Hitler down’. Arthur Harris, later the chief of RAF Bomber Command, realised the significance of these extraordinary words … he kept a copy of this letter.”
Hitchens (p.181) citing Bishop Bell speaking in February 1944 in the House of Lords: “Hamburg has a population of between one and two million people. It contains targets of immense military and industrial importance. It also happens to be the most democratic town in Germany where the Anti-Nazi opposition was strongest. … Practically all the buildings, cultural, military, residential, industrial, religious – including the famous University Library with its 800,000 volumes, of which three-quarters have perished – were razed to the ground.” While dead and dazed people may have low morale, and therefore have an arguable incentive to wage a civil war against their own government, they – especially the dead – are uniquely unable to overthrow a ruthlessly militarised government.
We might note Hamburg’s anthropological links to England. At a time of high racial – indeed racist – sensibilities, Anglo-Saxon supremacy was a very real thing. The area of Germany around Hamburg is the ‘Hawaiki’ of the Anglo-Saxon people; Lower Saxony is the ancestral motherland of the English. The class-consciousness and revengeful bloodlust of the English political class outweighed their ethnic consciousness. This was not true for the German Nazis, for whom the English were racial equals; Hitler and his crew really did not want to kill English people. Nazi Germany wanted the United Kingdom to become a neutral country, as Ireland was, and as the United States was before December 1941. Nazi Germany’s policy was to enslave, resettle, and murder Slavs and Jews and Gypsies; not to kill or dehouse Englishmen and their families.
The ‘elephant in the room’ was Josef Stalin.
Hitchens (p.191): “There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure to open a second front.”
Hitchens (p.198): “Overy [in The Bombing War 2014] recounts how on 28 March 1945 Winston Churchill, clearly growing sick of the violence he had unleashed as victory approached and the excuses for it grew thinner, referred (in a memorandum) to Harris’s bombing tactics using these exact words. He urged, none too soon, that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no attention, and right up until 24th April 1945, his bombers continued to drop incendiaries and high explosives on German cities, turning many thousands of civilians into corpses.” [Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, and VE Day was 8 May.]
Point of Interest: Churchill contested three elections, all after VE Day, all using Great Britain’s ‘first-past-the-post’ plurality system. He won just one of those three, though even then – in 1951 – his party got fewer votes than a Labour Party seeking re-election at a time of great difficulty for left-wing parties worldwide. Churchill’s Conservative Party got way-fewer votes than Labour in 1945 and 1950. The pressure on Prime Minister Clement Attlee to call the UK snap election of 1951 (one-third of the way through the term of his elected Labour government) can be understood as a successful example of political cunning on the part of the British establishment; literally a King’s coup.
A Scale of ‘Evil’?
While I generally hesitate to use the word ‘evil’, it may still be useful to grade very powerful people on a zero-to-ten scale of malevolence. On zero we might have the pacifist version of Jesus. On ten would be some very powerful person who actively sought nuclear ‘Armageddon’ (which would destroy life, not just humanity). After recently reading some quite difficult literature about World War Two, this is where I would place five powerful leaders:
9: Josef Stalin
8: Adolf Hitler
7: Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill
6: Harry Truman
I need to read more about Truman; though, his legacy seems to have been airbrushed much as Churchill’s has been, and I might decide to upgrade him to a 7.
I would also note that these leaders had their close and powerful henchmen, whose ‘evilness’ can also be rated on such a scale, for example:
9.5: Lavrenty Beria
9: Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler
Overall regimes can be better or worse than their leaders. I would rate both Stalin’s ‘Communists’ and Hitler’s ‘Nazis’ as both 8.5. Thus, Stalin’s regime was not quite as bad as its two most notorious figures. And Hitler’s regime was even worse than Hitler; that’s certainly not being kind to Hitler! (Stalin’s atrocities, the equal of Hitlers, were mostly committed in peacetime; the vast majority of Hitler’s were committed in wartime.)
‘Favourites’ as intimate (though not necessarily sexual) friends of powerful leaders
Churchill’s regime was not as bad as Churchill. Though Churchill had two favourites, both active members of his regime – especially his ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ – who were worse than him (possibly worse in one case, and definitely worse in the other). The ‘possibly worse’ one was Brendan Bracken, Minister for Information. Bracken, the prototype for ‘Big Brother’ in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, was Churchill’s Goebbels. Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ was a conflation of the Ministry of Information and Orwell’s wartime employer, the BBC. (Born in Ireland, Bracken was sometimes rumoured to have been Churchill’s ‘love child’, though that supposition is most likely untrue.) Surprisingly little has been written about BB.
The ‘definitely worse’ favourite was German born (Baden Baden) and educated (Darmstadt and Berlin) scientist, Frederick A Lindemann; who was granted the title Lord Cherwell in 1941. He built his career in Britain at Oxford University, becoming Professor of Physics there in 1919. He also became a bit of a wartime ‘test pilot’, managing to establish his loyalty to the United Kingdom. His close friendship with Churchill lasted decades, beginning in 1921.
Frederick Lindemann, aka Lord Cherwell
In my assessment, Lindemann is the closest individual yet to a ten-out-of-ten on the above-suggested scale of malevolence. Let’s say that, if World War Three comes and someone like Lindemann has as much access to the levers of power as Lindemann actually had, then the world would be a goner. (In Lindemann’s defence, it has been noted that he was fond of children and animals. Likewise, another man; one with a famous moustache.)
Frederick Lindemann exerted a beguiling influence over Churchill. When Churchill was not in power, in the 1930s, Lindemann ran a private think-tank for Churchill. In the 1930s he allegedly undermined the scientific development of radar, which proved critical to the defence of Britain from Luftwaffe attacks; indeed, Lindemann seems to have shown a lack of interest in military defence; his thing was the elimination or dehumanisation of ‘others’. Lindemann “was one of the first to urge the importance of atom bomb research” (Where to Read about Professor Lindemann, The Churchill Project, 6 May 2015); indeed “Following his 1945 return to the Clarendon Laboratory, Lindemann created the [United Kingdom] Atomic Energy Authority”, Wikipedia.)
I will illustrate the Lindemann problem with quotes from these three sources; some may argue that I have made a biased selection, but so be it:
Mukerjee: “Known as the Prof to admirers (because of his academic credentials and his brilliance) and as Baron Berlin to detractors (thanks to his German accent and aristocratic tastes), Lindeman was responsible for the government’s scientific decisions.”
Mukerjee: “Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser.”
Gladwell: “I think that’s the crucial fact about Lindemann. One time he’s asked for his definition of morality and he answers, ‘I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.’ … The man who defined a moral action as ‘One that brings advantage to my friends,’ was best friends with Winston Churchill.”
Gladwell: “Lindemann becomes a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill’s mind.”
Mukerjee: “On most matters Lindemann’s and Churchill’s opinions converged; and when they did not, the scientist worked ceaselessly to change his friend’s mind.”
Mukerjee: “The mission of the S branch [Churchill’s nearest equivalent to DOGE] was to provide rationales for whichever course the prime minister, as interpreted by the Prof, wished to follow.”
Mukerjee: “Department heads ‘began to realize that, like it or not, the Prof was the man whom Churchill trusted most, and that all their refutations, aspersions, innuendos or attempts at exposure would not shift Churchill from his undeviating loyalty to the Prof by one hair’s breadth,’ wrote [economist] Harrod. So it was that the Prof would pronounce judgment on the best use of shipping space, the profligacy of the army, the inadequacy of British supplies, the optimal size of the mustard gas stockpile, the necessity of bombing German houses – and, when the time came, the pointlessness of sending famine relief to Bengal.”
Gladwell: “An argument took place at the highest reaches of British government. The question was what was the best use of the royal air force against the Germans? … One school of thought says, ‘Let’s use our bombers to support military activities, protecting ships against German U-boats, destroying German factories.’ The other school of thought argues that bombing ought to serve a bigger, strategic purpose. In other words, ‘Let’s use bombing to break the will of the German people, let’s make their lives so miserable that they give up.’”
Wikipedia: On dehousing, Lindemann says “bombing must be directed to working class houses. Middle class houses have too much space round them, so are bound to waste bombs”.
Gladwell on Lindemann’s dishonesty: “Lindemann’s memo to Churchill. It’s very matter of fact; it’s all about what the data says except for one thing. That’s not what the data says. The Birmingham-Hull study reached the exact opposite conclusion [about working-class morale] that Lindemann did.”
Gladwell: “Other experts [eg Henry Tizard] in the government, critics of strategic bombing, point out immediately that Lindemann’s numbers are ridiculous, five or six times too high, based on obvious errors.” [Hitchens (p.205) claims that the numbers of civilian casualties were only ten percent of what Lindemann had promised. If you multiply by ten the number of civilians – mostly workers, their families, slaves, and refugees – killed in the totality of the Gomorrah holocaust, you get a number bigger than deaths in The Holocaust; this would be a measure of Lindemann’s intent.]
Gladwell: “One of Lindemann’s friends said, ‘He would not shrink from using an argument which he knew to be wrong if, by so doing, he could tie up one of his professional opponents.’ Lindemann wanted strategic bombing, so Churchill went ahead and ordered the bombing of German cities.”
Gladwell: “Most historians agree that strategic bombing was a disaster. 160,000 US and English airmen and hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed in those bombing campaigns. Many of Europe’s most beautiful cities were destroyed and German morale didn’t crack; the Germans fought to the bitter end. After the war, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote a devastating essay where he said that the war could have been won six months or even a year earlier, if only the British had used their bombers more intelligently.” [Note that the whole Gomorrah holocaust killed more Japanese civilians than German civilians; as noted in Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, the Hamburg dry run led more-or-less directly to the fire-bombings of almost every urban centre in Japan.]
Mukerjee: “‘Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me,’ muttered a furious Churchill in 1941, after a member of the House of Commons had raised questions about the Prof’s influence.” [Gladwell: that “row occurred in 1942 and it occurred over strategic bombing”.]
Mukerjee: “Cherwell believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world. ‘Those who succeed in getting what everyone wants must be the ablest,’ he asserted. The Prof regarded the masses as ‘very stupid,’ considered Australians to be inferior to Britons, advocated ‘harshness’ toward homosexuals, and thought criminals should be treated cruelly because ‘the amount of pleasure derived by other people from the knowledge that a malefactor is being punished far exceeds in sum total the amount of pain inflicted on a malefactor by his punishment.’” [Enjoyment arising from the punishment of the wretched outweighs the suffering of those wretched!]
Mukerjee: “Eugenic ideas also feature in a lecture that Lord Cherwell (then known as Professor Lindemann) had delivered more than once, probably in the early 1930s. He had detailed a science-based solution to a challenge that occupied many an intellect of the time: preserving for eternity the hegemony of the superior classes.”
Mukerjee: “New technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. … ‘Somebody must perform dull, dreary tasks, tend machines, count units in repetition work; is it not incumbent on us, if we have the means, to produce individuals without a distaste for such work, types that are as happy in their monotonous occupation as a cow chewing the cud?’ Lindemann asked. Science could yield a race of humans blessed with ‘the mental make-up of the worker bee.’ This subclass would do all the unpleasant work and not once think of revolution or of voting rights: ‘Placid content rules in the bee-hive or ant-heap.’ The outcome would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, ‘led by supermen and served by helots.’”
Mukerjee: “At least no one would demand votes on behalf of an ape. … To consolidate the rule of supermen – to perpetuate the British Empire – one need only remove the ability of slaves to see themselves as slaves.”
Gladwell: “How can you have a real debate against Churchill’s best friend? Friendship comes first.”
Gladwell: “The US starts sending over so many ships that, by late 1943 when the famine in Bengal is at its height, there’s actually a surplus of boats on the allied side. In fact, in 1943, the British actually start shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just not to India. … British ships full of grain are sailing right past India on the way to the Middle East to be stored for some future, hypothetical need. They might even stop and refuel in Mumbai, but nothing leaves the ship. … Why is Lindemann [as Paymaster General] refusing to help? It doesn’t even make illogical sense. Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, are fighting the Germans in the Middle East and Africa. When other countries like Canada and the United States offered to send food to India, the British say, ‘We don’t want it.’ They turn down help. Lindemann seems completely unmoved by India’s plight.”
Gladwell: “Black people, according to a friend, filled him with a physical revulsion which he was unable to control. But I’m not sure that we’re seeing Lindemann here; I think we’re seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with an issue about India. He’s obsessed with India. In the years leading up to the war, Gandhi is building his independence movement within India and Churchill hates Gandhi. Churchill is furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw materials from India, meaning that the master is running up a debt with its supposed subject. … Why was Lindemann so adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was adamant that England could not help India and Lindemann was a loyal friend.”
CP Snow (1960), cited by Gladwell: “The Lindemann-Churchill relation is the most fascinating example of court politics that we’re likely to see.” [hmmm!]
Gladwell: “The best guess of how many died in the Bengal famine of 1943 is three million people. Three million. After the war, the British government held a formal inquiry into what happened, but the investigation was forbidden to consider, and I’m quoting, ‘Her Majesty’s government’s decision in regard to shipping of imports.’ In other words, they were asked to investigate the cause of the famine without investigating the cause of the famine.”
Hitchens (p.197): “Gas attacks were contemplated by Winston Churchill. … Overy writes ‘The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated – deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted. This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945’.”
It also paved the way for the potentially devastating anthrax attacks on Germany which would have taken place in 1944 had the American-led D-day offensive been unsuccessful; contamination from such attacks would have rendered parts of Germany uninhabitable for a human lifetime. (See my Invoking Munich, ‘Appeasement’, and the ‘Lessons of History’ 13 March 2025, which mentions both the Bengal famine and the anthrax program as well as the Hamburg holocaust.) The anthrax program bears the hallmark of Lindemann; the abandoned anthrax operation was dubbed Operation Vegetarian, in part a likely reference to Lindemann’s famed dietary obsessions.
Hitchens (pp.200-201): “It is surprising that Sir Max Hasting’s Bomber Command (first published in 1979) has not begun to change opinions. … Sir Max deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt [south of Frankfurt] on 11 September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way, a military target). Hastings: ‘The first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity’.” (Lindemann went to school in Darmstadt. Victims most likely included his former classmates, teachers and their families.)
Hitchens (p.206), on the battle between Frederick Lindemann and Henry Tizard (the scientist who stood up to Lindeman, and paid a price): “Why is the only considerable account of this battle trapped inside [a] small, obscure volume that the reader must retrieve from deep in a few impenetrable scholarly libraries? Why is it not taught in schools? Why has nobody written a play about it? I suspect it is because this story, if well known, would undermine the shallow, nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill as the infallible Great Leader, a cult to which, surely, an adult country no longer needs to cling.”
Hitchens (p.205): “Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. He was supported by Patrick Blackett, a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day. He would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and be ennobled as Lord Blackett. Blackett independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high. ‘Both were slightly out. But they were nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was. Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact ten times too high, as the postwar bombing survey revealed.” [The actual destruction of German cities was only one-tenth of what Lindemann had hoped and argued would be the case. Given the actual hundreds of thousands of barbecued German civilians, Lindemann had been arguing for millions.]
CP Snow (1960), cited by Hitchens (p.205): “It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing. … Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.” [Strikingly, although the post-war years have generally been regarded as ‘more benevolent’, the Gomorrah holocaust continues to ‘fly under the radar’. Indeed, so much so that Churchill’s speeches have been nominated as part of New Zealand’s schools’ draft English curriculum! (And that matter of Churchill was not raised by the New Zealand media; they were more interested in the ‘controversial’ possibility that Shakespeare might be compulsory.)]
Winston Churchill was not a nice man. His ‘favourite’ – Frederick Lindemann – was rather less nice.
Lessons
War itself is the problem, and the first casualty of war is truth. Drumbeating for war is cheap, and sabres are easily rattled. We stumble into wars without having any realistic idea how they might end; casual war becomes forever war. Wars involve multiple nasty people from the outset, and other similarly nasty people come to the fore during war, sometimes completely behind the scenes.
War changes much but solves little. World War Two was the first war in which civilians were targeted on an industrial scale. It ended, in Europe at least, in a Pyrrhic manner, with Josef Stalin’s USSR as the annihilist of Nazi Germany.
War in the modern age of globalisation means this and more. In a twenty-first century World War, while targeted civilians will be high on the murder list, the biggest death-counts are likely to be of untargeted civilians – residents of semi-belligerent and non-belligerent countries – and of completely guiltless non-human life forms.
If the Americans hadn’t successfully prosecuted D-Day (Operation Overlord) in 1944, I believe that Winston Churchill would have used the RAF to unleash his anthrax bombs. The Scottish island of Gruinard is only now becoming habitable, after eighty years of anthrax contamination. Imagine parts of Germany becoming uninhabitable – for nearly a century – had Operation Vegetarian been executed.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
A New South Wales Senate inquiry into public toilets is underway, looking into the provision, design and maintenance of public toilets across the state.
Whenever I mention this inquiry, however, everyone nervously laughs and the conversation moves on. It’s not something people feel comfortable talking about.
Yet, a public toilet goes to the heart of what a city provides for its inhabitants and visitors. It is a critically important piece of public infrastructure that sets the tone for public behaviour, expectations and conduct.
And we could be doing so much better with our public toilets.
An important first impression
Public toilets communicate social values. They show how we provide for our citizens and what we expect of them in return.
A public toilet is often the first thing someone new to a place sees and wants; it creates an important first impression.
As communication theorist Paul Watzlawick said, “One cannot not communicate.” Infrastructure is no exception.
So public toilets play an important social role and, through their design, help communicate and shape relationships between citizens.
As one person’s submission put it: ‘It’s important that public toilets don’t look like prisons’. ThatHolisticMom888/Shutterstock
They not only provide relief for our urgent bodily needs; in them, we are equal humans. External hierarchies are largely removed.
Their appearance and design influences whether we feel cared for, trusted and appreciated, seen and acknowledged.
This is reflected in what members of the public have said to the current NSW senate inquiry. One submission, for instance, noted:
It’s important that public toilets don’t look like prisons.
If they are perceived as such, then the message is we can’t be trusted. We are assumed to damage or destroy them and behave like criminals.
Access to adequate public toilets is a basic right. But they are also used to administer medication, breastfeed, care for children, access drinking water and find a quiet place to rest. Public toilets are often the only private space in public.
So, how can a communal space like the public bathroom evolve accordingly? One issue emerging in several inquiry submissions so far is the issue of public toilets being routinely locked at night.
We don’t have a curfew, we are aloud (sic) out at night. If you don’t want people pissing in the street, then leave them open.
Cost is the greatest concern. Councils know how much their toilet blocks cost, but not how many people use them.
A submission from Blacktown City Council states their 218 public toilets cost more than A$15 million annually, involving six staff and three vehicles to service these facilities.
This equals more than $68,800 per toilet per year.
On the other hand, good public toilets could help grow the economy. A submission by Guide Dogs Australia quotes Deloitte Access Economics estimates that inclusive public spaces could add $12.7 billion to Australia’s economy annually and boost GDP by about $1.2 billion through increased workforce participation.
And a submission by Bathurst Regional Access Committees notes:
The disability tourism trade is worth well over $8 billion dollars annually. Tourism is what keeps many regions alive.
Decent and accessible toilets may even help attract more people to a local area, activating public spaces and building community.
Flipping the toilet script
We need to flip the way we think about public toilets and those who clean them.
They must radiate thoughtful care, pride, civic engagement and delight.
Australian urban designer David Engwicht’s community consultation approach to public space provides a great blueprint. He advocates recognising that place making is similar to home making; it can create memorable and potentially transformative experiences. It can help bring us into the present, creating a feeling of rootedness and connection.
This stunning public toilet in Tokyo was designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Tada Images/Shutterstock
The toilet can transcend its shameful, dirty, grimy image and last resort status. It can become a privilege to maintain, clean and keep in pristine condition for the public good.
The public toilet could become a valuable asset, an attraction, a sought after destination, a jewel in the crown of the government’s public offering.
They could be pieces of enchanting infrastructure sponsors line up to support.
In this project, 17 toilets were designed by world-leading Japanese architects and designers and their cleaners’ uniforms by a famous fashion designer.
The toilets were equipped with custom high quality toilet paper, cleaned three times a day, and given their own stunning interactive website.
German filmmaker Wim Wenders even made a feature film, Perfect Days, about a man who cleans these toilets.
Credit: The Match Factory/YouTube.
These toilets, sponsored by the non-profit Nippon Foundation in collaboration with Shibuya City government and Shibuya Tourism Association, represent a highly innovative approach.
Here, the public toilet is celebrated as an international attraction, while providing an excellent service to the public.
Christian Tietz 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.
Shrinking budgets and job insecurity means there are fewer opportunities for young journalists, and that’s bad news, especially in regional Australia, reports 360info
ANALYSIS:By Jee Young Lee of the University of Canberra
Australia risks losing a generation of young journalists, particularly in the regions where they face the closure of news outlets, job insecurity, lower pay and limited career progression.
Ironically, it is regional news providers’ audiences who remain among the most engaged and loyal, demanding reliable, trustworthy news.
Yet it’s exactly the area where those closures, shrinking newsroom budgets and a reliance on traditional print-centric workflows over digital-first strategies are hitting hardest, making it difficult to attract and retain emerging journalists.
And in an industry where women make up a substantial portion of the workforce and of those studying journalism, figures show the number of young females in regional news outlets declined by about a third over 15 years — a much greater decline than experienced by their male colleagues.
Without meaningful and collaborative efforts to invest in young professionals and sustain strong local newsrooms, the future of local journalism could be severely compromised.
Reversing the trend requires investing in new talent, which might be achieved through targeted funding initiatives, newsroom-university collaborations and regional innovation hubs that reduce costs while supporting emerging journalists. It also requires improved working conditions and fostering innovation.
Why it matters Local journalism is the backbone of Australian news media, playing a crucial role in keeping communities informed and connected.
The Australian News Index shows community and local news outlets made up 88 percent of the 1226 news organisations operating across print, digital, radio and television in 2024.
These community-driven publications and broadcasters play a critical role in covering stories that matter most to Australians, reporting on councils, regional issues and everyday stories that affect people.
Yet local newsrooms face growing challenges in sustaining their workforce and attracting new talent, raising concerns about the future of journalism beyond metropolitan centres.
Fewer opportunities Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows the proportion of journalists working full-time has steadily declined in both major cities and regional Australia.
In major cities, the proportion of journalists working full-time dropped from 74 percent in 2006 to 67 percent in 2021. In regional areas, the decline was even more pronounced — falling from 72 percent to 62 percent over the same period.
This widening gap suggests that regional journalists are increasingly shifting to part-time or freelance work, largely due to economic pressures on local news organisations.
Newspaper and periodical editors are more likely to work full-time in major cities (68 percent) compared with regional areas (59 percent). Similarly, a smaller proportion of print journalists are fulltime in regional areas.
In contrast, broadcast journalism maintains a more stable employment in regional areas.
Television and radio journalists in regional Australia are slightly more likely to work fulltime than their counterparts in major cities.
The pay gap Regional journalists earn less than their metropolitan counterparts. The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows median weekly pay for full-time journalists in major cities is $1737 compared to $1412 for their regional counterparts.
The disparity is slightly greater for parttime regional journalists.
Lower salaries, combined with fewer full-time opportunities, make it difficult for regional outlets to attract and retain talent.
Fewer young journalists Aspiring to become (and stay) a journalist is increasingly difficult, with many facing unstable job prospects, low pay and limited full-time opportunities.
This is particularly true for young journalists, who are forced to navigate freelance work, short-term contracts or leave the profession altogether.
The number of journalists aged 18 to 24 has steadily decreased, falling by almost a third from 1425 in 2006 to 990 in 2021. The decline is even steeper in regional areas, falling from 518 in 2006 to just 300 in 2021.
Young journalists are also less likely to have a fulltime job. In 2006, 92 percent of journalists aged 18 to 24 held a fulltime job but this had fallen to 85 percent in 2021, although they are significantly more likely to be employed fulltime compared to those in major cities.
This demonstrates that regional newsrooms can offer greater job security temporarily but the overall decline in young journalists entering the profession — particularly in regional areas — signals a need for targeted recruitment strategies, financial incentives and training programmes to sustain local journalism.
Data also reveals an overall decline in journalism graduates entering the news industry. The number of journalists aged 20 to 29 with journalism qualifications has dropped significantly, from 1618 in 2011 to 1255 in 2021.
This decline is marginally more pronounced in regional journalism, where the number of young, qualified journalists fell from 486 in 2006 to 367 in 2021.
Loss of opportunity for women In Australia, women make up a significant portion of the journalism workforce, likely reflecting the growth in young women studying journalism at universities.
Yet the decline in young female qualified journalists, particularly in regional areas, further highlights the challenges faced by the regional news industry.
The number of female journalists aged 20 to 29 with journalism qualifications fell by 29 percent to 803 between 2006 and 2021, while the number of male journalists in the same age group declined by just 8 percent.
The decline of young female journalists was an even more dramatic 33 percent in regional areas falling from 354 in 2006 to 236 in 2021, while the number of male journalists in regional areas increased slightly in the same period, from 132 in 2006 to 137 in 2021.
Time for a reset There is a need to rethink how journalism education prepares students for the workforce.
Some researchers argue that journalism students should be taught to better understand the evolving news landscape and its labour dynamics, ensuring they are prepared for the realities of the profession.
This practical approach, integrating training on labour rights and the economic realities of journalism into the curriculum, offers critical insights into the future of local journalism.
Pursuing a degree in arts, including journalism or media studies, is now among the most expensive in Australia. Many young and talented students still pursue journalism, even in the face of industry instability.
However, if the industry continues to signal to young talent that journalism offers little job security, low pay, and limited career progression — particularly in the regions — it risks losing a generation of passionate and skilled journalists.
Investing in new talent, improving working conditions and fostering innovation is critical for the industry to build resilience and strengthen community news coverage.
Dr Jee Young Lee is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. Her research focuses on the social and cultural impacts of digital communication and technologies in the media and creative industries.Originally published underCreative Commonsby360info™.
Could someone take you to court over an agreement you made – or at least appeared to make – by sending a “👍”?
Emojis can have more legal weight than many people realise. A search of the Australasian Legal Information Institute database reveals emojis have been part of evidence in at least 240 cases in the past few years.
Their use in texts and emails has been considered in unfair dismissals, wills, family law and criminal cases.
Australian law does not explicitly address the use of emojis in contracts. And although emojis have been accepted in evidence, the context in which they are used is always a crucial part of the picture.
Here’s what you need to know about what makes a contract under the law – and why you might want to be especially cautious with the “🤝” button.
Is it a casual agreement or a contract?
Contracts don’t have to be printed on paper and signed in a lawyer’s office.
In Australia, a contract is generally considered legally binding if it meets certain requirements. There has to be:
an intention to create legal relations
a clear unequivocal offer
certainty and completeness of terms
“consideration” – the price exchanged for the promise made
clearly communicated acceptance
no “vitiating factors” – things that could spoil the contract such as unconscionable conduct or duress.
Indeed, case law supports the notion that contracts can be partly oral and partly written. But the oral terms cannot contradict the terms of the written agreement.
Contracts can also incorporate graphics. The former chief justice of the High Court of Australia, Robert French AC, said in December 2017:
There is no reason in principle why pictorial contracts explained orally or supplemented textually or contextually could not be enforceable in the same way as any other contract.
In contract cases, courts often use what’s called an objective test to consider whether a reasonable person would conclude the parties intended to create a binding contract.
In Australian law, parties to a contract must clearly communicate that they accept its terms.
Social and domestic agreements are presumed not to create legal intent, unless proven otherwise. But with extensive use of texts and emails with emojis now, there is less clarity about what is a social and domestic agreement.
Commercial and business contracts are presumed to have contractual intent. However, even in business contracts, emojis may be deemed to amount to acceptance, depending on the past behaviour of the parties.
That’s because many emojis are ambiguous.
In one situation, a thumbs up (👍) might mean “I have something”, but in another it could mean “I agree to it”. A smiley face is the same so context is crucial. The least ambiguous is arguably the handshake emoji – 🤝.
Careful of the handshake emoji – it generally signals agreement. Yuri A/Shutterstock
The experience overseas
A number of cases from overseas show how emojis sent in response to an offer can lead to unintended contracting.
They can induce what the law calls “reasonable reliance” of one party on the other, more than “bare hope” an agreement can be relied upon. This can subject the sender to liability if that reliance is misplaced.
One 2023 case in Canada centred on a thumbs-up emoji sent in response to a proposal for the purchase of flax.
Here, the court ruled that the emoji did signify agreement to the terms, similar to a written signature. It had been habitually used between the buyer and seller in a longstanding business relationship.
Because of this repeated use, the court ruled, a reasonable bystander would conclude the emoji response created a binding agreement.
Borrowing a big boat
A subsequent case, in the United Kingdom, centred on an alleged four-year “charterparty” agreement to hire a large crude oil tanker called the “Aquafreedom” between Southeaster, its owners and the logistics company Trafigura.
Trafigura claimed a binding agreement to charter the ship had been reached, following a period of offers and counteroffers. But the vessel’s owner Southeaster disagreed. Trafigura claimed it had suffered about US$15 million in lost business as a result.
The evidence in this case was principally a bundle of written communications between the parties, including email, telephone and WhatsApp communications.
While the court ultimately ruled no contract had been entered into, it found that more informal communications used in evidence, including WhatsApp messages containing emojis, shouldn’t be given less weight than email communications.
The court found WhatsApp messages – including those with emojis – shouldn’t be disregarded. BigTunaOnline/Shutterstock
What can you do?
Here are some helpful hints for navigating the use of emojis, especially when buying or selling anything, running your own business or sending messages at work:
be careful when discussing services or purchase of goods over text
when acknowledging receipt of a contract, it’s safest to clearly state that you will review the terms and get back to the sender
do not use an emoji on its own
do not use the handshake emoji
keep business-like arrangements on a more formal footing.
Remember, context remains important and past behaviour is critical.
The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Mark Giancaspro, senior lecturer in law at the University of Adelaide, for assistance in the preparation of this article.
Jennifer McKay receives research funding from CRC Race 2030.
Located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the border of France and Switzerland, the LHC is expected to run for another 15 years. Nevertheless, physicists are already planning what will come after it.
One of the most favoured proposals for CERN’s next step is the 70-year Future Circular Collider (FCC) project. More than three times the size of the LHC, this enormous proposed machine promises to resolve some mysteries of the universe – and undoubtedly reveal some new ones.
What will the Future Circular Collider do?
The LHC, which occupies a circular tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference, is currently the largest machine in the world. The FCC would be housed in a much larger 91km tunnel in the Geneva basin between the Jura mountains and the Alps.
The first stage of the FCC would be the construction and operation of a collider for electrons (the lightweight particles that make up the outer shell of atoms) and positrons (the antimatter mirror images of electrons). This collider would allow more precise measurements of the Higgs boson.
The planned Future Circular Collider would occupy a tunnel 91 kilometres long, dwarfing the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider. CERN
The second stage would be a collider for protons (heavier particles found in the cores of atoms). The LHC already collides protons, but the new collider would accelerate the protons up to more than seven times as much energy.
This increase in collision energy allows for the discovery of particles never produced by humanity before. It also brings with it technical challenges, such as the development of high-powered superconducting magnets.
Known unknowns
The most high-profile result from the LHC has been the discovery of the Higgs boson, which lets us explain why particles in the universe have mass: they interact with the so-called Higgs field which permeates all of space.
This was a great victory for what we call the Standard Model. This is the theory that, to the best of our current knowledge, explains all the fundamental particles in the universe and their interactions.
However, the Standard Model has significant weaknesses, and leaves some crucial questions unanswered.
The FCC promises to answer some of these questions.
Collisions between high-energy particles may shed light on several unanswered questions of physics. CERN
For example, we know the Higgs field can explain the mass of heavy particles. However, it is possible that a completely different mechanism provides mass to lighter particles.
We also want to know whether the Higgs field gives mass to the Higgs boson itself. To answer these Higgs questions we will need the higher energies that the FCC will provide.
The FCC will also let us take a closer look at the interactions of very heavy quarks. (Quarks are the tiniest components of protons and some other particles.) We hope this may shed light on the question of why the universe contains so much more matter than antimatter.
And the FCC will help us look for new particles that might be dark matter, a mysterious substance that seems to pervade the universe.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the FCC will provide the answers to these questions. That is the nature of curiosity-driven research. You know the journey, but not the destination.
Competing colliders
The FCC is not the only major particle physics project under consideration.
Another is a proposed 20-kilometre machine called the International Linear Collider, which would likely be built in Japan.
The US has several projects on the go, mainly detectors of various kinds. It also supports an “offshore Higgs factory”, located in Europe or Japan.
One project that may concern the FCC’s backers is the planned 100 kilometre Chinese Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), which has significant similarities to the FCC.
This poses a dilemma for Europe: if China goes ahead with their project, is the FCC still worthwhile? On the other hand, CERN chief Fabiola Gianotti has argued that the FCC is necessary to keep up with China.
High costs
The decision on the FCC won’t be taken lightly, given the large cost associated with the project.
CERN estimates the first stage will cost 15 billion Swiss francs (around US$18 billion or A$28 billion at current exchange rates), spread out over 12 years. One third of this cost is the tunnel construction.
The size of the sum has attracted criticism. However, a CERN spokesperson told the Agence France-Press that up to 80% of the cost would be covered by the organisation’s current annual budget.
The second stage of FCC, which would reuse the 91km tunnel as well as some existing LHC infrastructure, is currently estimated to cost 19 billion Swiss francs. This costing carries a large uncertainty, as the second stage would not be commissioned until 2070 at the earliest.
Benefits beyond science
Pure science has not been the only benefit of the LHC. There have been plenty of practical technological spinoffs, from medical technology to open and free software.
One specific example is the Medipix chips developed for a detector at the LHC, which are now used across multiple areas in medical imaging and material science.
For the past 70 years, CERN has served as a fantastic model for peaceful and efficient international collaboration. Beyond its astonishing scientific output, it has also produced significant advances in engineering that have spread through society. Building the FCC will be an investment in both technology and curiosity.
Tessa Charles has previously received funding through an EU Horizon 2020 project, the FCC Innovation Study (FCCIS).
Ulrik Egede receives funding from the Australian Research Council to carry out research at the Large Hadron Collider. He is representing southeast Asia and Australia/NZ on the International Committee of Future Accelerators.
Australians waste around 7.68 million tonnes of food a year. This costs the economy an estimated A$36.6 billion and households up to $2,500 annually.
Much of this food is wasted at home. So while consumers are increasingly aware of sustainability issues, awareness does not always translate into better food management in practice.
Our latest study takes a closer look at two groups who care deeply about food, for different reasons. It exposes a paradox: people who prioritise healthy eating waste less food, while those focused on sustainability do not necessarily follow through with waste reduction.
This suggests encouraging healthier eating habits might be a better way to cut household food waste than sustainability messaging alone.
Sustainability awareness doesn’t always mean less waste
To understand how food values influence waste, we surveyed 1,030 Australian consumers living in Adelaide between April and May 2021. We set quotas for age, sex and household income to match national demographics.
We wanted to find out who wasted more food: nutrition-conscious or sustainability-conscious consumers?
We asked each person how they plan meals and shop, what they value when buying food, and how much food they throw away each week.
Our results show nutrition-conscious consumers tend to plan meals in advance, use shopping lists and avoid over-purchasing. These behaviours contribute to both a healthier diet and less food waste.
We found consumers who make more nutrition-conscious food choices tended to waste less edible food. A one-point increase on our nutrition scale corresponded to a 17.6% reduction in food waste, compared to people with lower scores on the nutrition scale.
On the other hand, those who prioritise sustainability over nutrition did not show any significant reduction in edible food waste.
These consumers tend to choose environmentally friendly products. They typically prefer to shop locally, buy organic produce and avoid excessive food packaging. But that does not necessarily translate into waste-reducing behaviours.
Those concerned with sustainability tend to buy more food than they need. They have good intentions, but lack strategies to manage and consume the food efficiently. Unfortunately this means sustainably sourced food often ends up in landfill.
Our research reveals a disconnect between purchasing choices and what actually happens to the food at home.
This highlights an opportunity for policymakers and campaigns aimed at reducing food waste. Rather than focusing solely on sustainability, including messages about improving nutrition can boost health and reduce food waste at the same time.
Some successful interventions already demonstrate the potential of this approach. For example, an Australian school-based program found children involved in preparing their own meals wasted less food than they did before the program began.
These students learned about food waste and healthy eating, participated in workshops on meal preparation and composting, and helped pack their own lunches – with less food waste as a result.
5 ways to reduce food waste
So, what can households do to reduce food waste while maintaining a healthy diet? Our research suggests the following key strategies:
plan ahead – creating a weekly meal plan and shopping list helps prevent impulse purchases and ensures food is consumed before it spoils
buy only what you need – over-purchasing, even of sustainable products, can lead to unnecessary waste
store food properly – understanding how to store fresh produce, dairy, and leftovers can significantly extend their shelf life
prioritise nutrition – choosing foods that fit into a balanced diet naturally leads to better portion control and mindful consumption, reducing waste
use what you have – before shopping, check your fridge and pantry to incorporate existing ingredients into meals.
The Great Unwaste is a nationwide movement to end food waste.
Reducing waste is a bonus
People are often more motivated by personal health benefits than abstract environmental concerns. Our research suggests this is the key to reducing household food waste.
Encouraging meal planning for a balanced diet, careful shopping to avoid over-purchasing, and proper food storage, can make a big difference to the amount of food being wasted. This will not only help households save thousands of dollars each year, but also promote healthy eating habits.
Ultimately, developing a more sustainable food system is not just about buying the right products. It’s about how we manage, prepare and consume them.
Trang Nguyen receives funding from the End Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre and the Australian Government.
Jack Hetherington receives funding from the End Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre and the Australian Government and is a member of the Landcare Association of South Australia volunteer Management Committee.
Patrick O’Connor receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Agrifutures and the Commonwealth and State Governments
Starting high school is one of the most significant transitions young people make in their education. Many different changes happen at once – from making new friends to getting used to a new school environment and different behaviour and academic expectations.
What do young people think about this crucial time in their lives?
In our new research we spoke to ten students in Year 7 at a co-educational school in Perth, Western Australia in 2023. Students were interviewed in Term 3 and asked to share their thoughts about what the move to high school was like. We used a focus group to allow young people to explore their thoughts in a supportive environment.
Our current study is on a small scale. But it contributes to the growing body of research showing the importance of supporting students’ emotional wellbeing during school transitions.
Big changes take time
One of the key things students discussed was how it took time to adjust to high school.
This included managing their time to fit in new study commitments, such as homework for multiple subjects. They also had to locate new classrooms: “trying to go around the school and find them was hard”.
They noted how “different teachers have different rules […] so you gotta remember that and where you’re going”. Other students explained how there was “too much stuff for my brain to handle”.
As another student talked about the pressure to be organised:
It’s hard work going in from Year 6 primary school to Year 7. I can tell you that much. […] we’ve been expected from the first week to remember our timetable, be organised, not forget anything and know our classes […] it’s a lot of pressure and stress on you because we also get bucketloads of homework as well because we don’t get enough time to finish our work.
Students spoke about needing time to adjust. Rawpixel.com
Adjusting to new friendship dynamics
Previous research has found when students start high school they are “more focussed on building new relationships and maintaining old friends”. They will then shift their focus to academic matters “later on”.
Students in our study certainly discussed the importance of friends. Some students had looked forward to making new friends and were enjoying being able to “make some proper friends that you can actually have a proper relationship with”.
Others spoke about their worries about not knowing anyone or having any friends (“I was always questioning myself. Am I going to make any friends?”). Others found their friendship groups changed from primary school (“I don’t talk to them as much […] it’s kind of not the same with them).
Students also talked about how working out new friendships took time.
you’ll find that yes, you might be friends […] but then you might find that they’re not the person who you thought they would be and you might not really want to be with them.
A lot more work
All students observed there was an increased workload of Year 7. Many students said they did not feel prepared for the volume of work and the time frames in which they were expected to complete it.
Some students “found it stressful to keep on top of work”. For some “the homework load and the amount of tests that we have and assessments” were the least enjoyable features of high school. They said it felt like in Year 7, “everything is about academics”.
But students also said they enjoyed being able to do a wider range of subjects. And the hands-on subjects such as cooking and design and technology helped them balance out more intense, academic subjects.
Going from primary school to high school means friendships change – and it is a lot to navigate. Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock
What can help Year 7s?
While students outlined challenges about moving from Year 6 to Year 7, they also identified three things to help make the transition easier.
1. A support network: students stressed it was important to have a support network, whether informally through fellow students, staff or a parent or formally with counselling. This is something schools can encourage with buddy groups or peer support.
2. Extra time: students talked about the importance of teachers giving them extra time to complete work and to get used to new places and processes at high school. They were grateful to teachers who “let you develop in the classroom”.
3. Transition programs: students said specific Year 7 transition programs – that prepare students for the new logistics and expectations – would also help. One student suggested a term in Year 6 should “replicate what it feels like to be in Year 7”.
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.
Do you ever feel like you can’t stop moving after you’ve pushed yourself exercising? Maybe you find yourself walking around in circles when you come off the pitch, or squatting and standing and squatting again when you finish a run.
Sometimes the body knows what’s best for us, even if we’re not aware of the science.
Moving around after intense exercise actually helps the body recover faster. Here’s how it works – plus a tip for if you feel exactly the opposite (and just want to lie down).
What is ‘intense’ exercise?
There are different ways to measure exercise intensity. One is simply how hard it feels to you, known as the “rating of perceived exertion”.
This takes into account how fast you’re breathing, how much you’re sweating and how tired your muscles are. It also considers heart rate.
The average resting heart rate when you’re not exerting yourself is around 60–80 beats per minute, although this can vary between people.
The maximum healthy heart rate is based on subtracting your age from 220. So, if you’re 20 years old, that’s 200 beats per minute when you’re exercising as hard as you can.
This decreases as you age. If you’re 50 years old, your maximum heart rate would be around 170 beats per minute.
An increased heart rate helps pump blood faster to deliver fuel and oxygen to the muscles that are working hard. Once you stop exercising your body will begin its recovery, to return to resting levels.
Let’s look at how continuing to move after intense exercise helps do this.
Removing waste from the muscles
Whenever the body converts fuel into energy it also produces leftover substances, known as metabolic byproducts. This includes lactate (sometimes called lactic acid).
During intense exercise we need to burn more fuel (oxygen and glucose) and this can make the body produce lactate much more quickly than it can clear it. When lactate accumulates in the muscles it may delay their recovery.
We can reuse lactate to provide energy to the heart and brain and modulate the immune system. But to do this, lactate must be cleared from the muscles into the bloodstream.
After intense exercise, continuing to move your body – but less intensely – can help do this. This kind of active recovery has been shown to be more efficient than passive recovery (meaning you don’t move).
Intense exercise can mean your muscles produce more metabolic byproducts. Tom Wang/Shutterstock
Returning blood to the heart
Intense exercise also makes our heart pump more blood into the body. The volume pumped to the muscles increases dramatically, while blood flow to other tissues – especially the abdominal organs such as the kidneys – is reduced.
Moving after intense exercise can help redistribute the blood flow and speed up recovery of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. This will also clear metabolic byproducts faster.
After a long run, for example, there will be much more blood in your leg muscles. If you stand still for a long time, you may feel dizzy or faint, thanks to lowered blood pressure and less blood flow to the brain.
Moving your legs, whether through stretching or walking, will help pump blood back to the heart.
In fact around 90% of the blood returning from the legs via veins relies on the foot, calf and thigh muscles moving and pumping. The calf muscle plays the largest role (about 65%). Moving your heels up and down after exercising can help activate this motion.
What if you don’t feel like moving?
Maybe after exercise you just want to sit down in a heap. Should you?
If you’re too tired to do light movement such as stretching or walking, you may still benefit from elevating your legs.
You can lie down – research has shown blood from the veins returns more easily to the heart after exercise when you’re lying down, compared to sitting up, even if you’re still. Elevating your legs has an added benefit, as it reverses the effect of gravity and helps circulation.
Ken Nosaka does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Senior Lecturer and General Dentist, School of Dentistry, The University of Queensland
After decades of Hollywood showcasing white-picket-fence celebrity smiles, the world has fallen for White Lotus actor Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth.
Wood was bullied for her looks in her youth and expressed gratitude for the positive comments she received about her teeth since appearing on White Lotus. She also joked that people shouldn’t take to drastic measures like filing teeth to copy her famous gap.
But social media influencers are promising that teeth filing is a quick way to achieve a straight smile. Some influencers even use electric nail drills to cut gaps between their front teeth.
A few of my patients admit to taking a nail file to “buff” or file jagged edges off their teeth. Many do this without understanding what they are cutting away.
Here’s why you should think twice about filing your teeth at home, and why we as dentists or orthodontists occasionally resort to this.
When might a dentist file a tooth?
Dentists and orthodontists occasionally file a tooth’s enamel, known as enameloplasty, to conservatively smooth-down a chipped tooth, or even-out a smile.
But adjustments to a person’s smile are minute, and always limited to the superficial enamel layer of the tooth.
Why don’t dentists routinely file teeth?
Dentists and orthodontists are particular about what and when we cut because teeth don’t grow back like fingernails or hair.
So what is a tooth? A tooth is like an egg, with an outer diamond-like lustrous crystal enamel coat that envelops the hard yet springy dentine.
The enamel and dentine envelop a central chamber – containing blood vessels, cells and nerves – called the pulp.
The outer periphery of the pulp is surrounded by and nourishes special dentine-making cells called odontoblasts.
Our enamel-making cells die when our teeth cut through our gums as children, which means we can no longer make new, or repair damaged, enamel.
So damaged enamel or dentine on the outer surface of the tooth cannot self-repair.
Cutting your teeth without sealing and filling them can leave the tooth exposed, destroying the previously well-insulated pulp and causing sensitivity and pain.
Infections can occur because the bacteria from the plaque inside your mouth travels into the tooth and inflames the pulp.
And just like a cut on your skin, the pulp inflames and swells as part of the healing process. But your pulp is encased in a hard enamel-dentine chamber, so it has no room to expand and swell, leading to a throbbing toothache.
What can you do if you want to change your teeth?
You can change your smile without compromising the integrity of your teeth. Dentists can even create or close gaps.
And we will always offer conservative options, including “no treatment”, to keep as many of your teeth whole and healthy as possible.
Sometimes, your dentists and or orthodontists may offer options to:
use braces to move teeth. Moving teeth can create a different smile, and sometimes change the shape and position of your jaws, lips and cheeks
whiten teeth to remove superficial stains to make your smile look more visually even
adapt white resin fillings or veneers to add and change the shape of teeth, with little or no tooth cutting required.
If you’re concerned about the look of your teeth, talk to your dentist or orthodontist about options that won’t damage your teeth and make them last the distance.
Don’t forget that Aimee Lou Wood’s iconic smile makes her stand out from the crowd. Your smile is what makes you special, and is part of who you are.
Arosha Weerakoon is a member of the Australian Dental Association and Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons. She is the Deputy Chair of the Country to Coast Queensland Clinical Advisory Council. Arosha is a Colgate Advocate for Oral Health. In this role, she promotes professionalism to her peers. She is the principal and owner of a general dental practice.
However, against the backdrop of these successes, women and girls continue to participate in community sport at lower rates than boys and men, a phenomenon known as the “gender play gap”.
What is the ‘gender play gap’?
The gender play gap is the difference between the number of women and girls participating in sport compared to the number of men and boys.
The gap exists from a very young age, with Australian government data showing nearly 30% more boys aged 0–14 participate in club or association sport than girls.
The gap closes to just 2% between the ages of 15–17, but then explodes to 43% for those aged 18–24.
Although the gap grows and shrinks at various points, it is consistently in favour of more men and boys participating in organised sport than women and girls.
Trying to find answers
Together with colleagues at Flinders University, we are currently working with the South Australian government to research how to close this gap.
The first stage found there isn’t enough research attention to this area. Of the 3,000+ studies included in a global literature search, only five focused on increasing rates of sport participation in young women.
We then conducted a large-scale qualitative study which uncovered the following reasons why young women drop out of sport, and often do not re-engage.
1. Sport stops being fun
Social experiences in sport are central to girls’ enjoyment and long-term participation. While friendships keep them engaged, negative team dynamics, exclusion and club politics can push them away.
2. A lack of genuine equality
Although progress in gender equality has been made, young women still struggle to have the same access to facilities and quality coaching as males. Typically, women and girls prefer women coaches who can relate to their experiences, yet women remain underrepresented in these roles.
3. They have too much on their plates
Schoolwork, part-time jobs and social lives compete for young women’s time, and many feel overwhelmed by increasing training commitments and school demands. In addition, girls as young as 13 are promoted to senior-age teams, which adds pressure and can break the social bonds with their peers.
4. They lose competitive opportunities
Although some young women enjoy a more relaxed, social approach to sport, others really value structured training and competition. Many girls end up dropping out because the competitive opportunities for them are not of the same standard as those available to boys. Some sports have fewer games per season for girls, or a shorter finals series than for boys.
How can we close the gap?
Sport participation efforts have typically focused on recruitment of new participants and retention of existing participants.
With so many young women dropping out of sport during adolescence, a renewed focus on re-engaging these previous participants may help to close the gender play gap.
Dropout is often considered a failure and a negative endpoint of a sport participation journey. However, there is a growing sentiment in sport research that transitioning out of sport temporarily may be necessary for some adolescents’ development.
It is okay for anyone to take a break from sport, but the sport needs to make it easier for them to return when they are ready. The key is to make re-engagement easy and appealing.
Re-engagement programs should be distinctly different from those aimed at new participants, and should revolve around the following key areas:
1. Targeted promotion and communication
Often, young women do not return to sport because they’re not aware of available opportunities if they return. Sport organisations should highlight programs that cater to those who want to start playing again, as well as those aimed at new participants.
2. Strengthen social connection
Young women are more likely to return to sport if they feel a sense of belonging and connection and have opportunities to create friendships outside of school. Programs that can foster strong social bonds while maintaining a focus on competition and skill development are most likely to be effective.
3. Champion equity and inclusion
Gender equity must be a priority for all sport organisations, with all genders having equitable access to high-quality training and competition.
4. Future-proofing
To achieve long-term gender equality in sport, organisations must actively future-proof their programs by encouraging women’s and girl’s leadership and providing young women with same-gender role models. By embedding gender equity into policies, coaching pathways and community engagement, sport organisations can create a more sustainable and welcoming environment for young women.
What’s next?
Despite the success of women’s sport in recent years, we have a long way to go to achieve genuine gender equality in sport.
Rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches to participation, sport organisations should adopt a targeted approach that may narrow the gender play gap and progress towards a more equitable sport participation landscape.
James Kay receives funding from the Office for Recreation, Sport and Racing, South Australia.
Sam Elliott receives funding from the Australian Sports Commission, the Office for Recreation, Sport and Racing, the South Australian National Football League, and the MRFF.
Disabled people encounter all kinds of barriers to accessing healthcare – and not simply because some face significant mobility challenges.
Others will see their symptoms not investigated properly because it’s assumed a problem is related to their disability rather than another medical condition. Or they will have decisions made for them rather than with them.
This often means they experience worse – and avoidable – outcomes compared to others. But despite this, health research – which is meant to reduce these disparities – frequently excludes disabled people.
For instance, a 2023 global review of 2,710 clinical trials found 35% reported excluding disabled individuals specifically. Researchers sometimes assume (without a good ethical or scientific reason) that disabled people can’t give consent, don’t meet the study criteria, or will struggle to follow instructions and collaborate.
Even when researchers are more inclusive, their plans can fail to account for the difficulties disabled people face with travel, communication and physical access. All of which makes it harder for them to participate.
This creates a vicious circle. Health research is vital for shaping the policies, treatments and community interventions that underpin modern healthcare. However, for disabled people, who make up one-sixth of the national and global population, too much research does not reflect their experiences and needs.
Beyond clinical and scientific research
The active participation by disabled people in health research is good science, good economics and the right thing to do. When people with lived experience contribute to the design and delivery of health care and research, it means services are used more and fairer outcomes are achieved.
But this is far from the reality in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world. Scientific and clinical research is still often viewed as being more important than research addressing the needs of patients and people, as prioritised by them.
There is increasing interest in public and patient involvement in health services, and to a lesser extent health research. But this is not sufficiently embedded or formalised. Research priorities are still set primarily by clinicians and medical researchers.
Most funding still goes to research investigating the causes, genetics and treatment of health conditions. And while these are important to study, there is still too little research focused on how people can live well with disability.
A recent review of research funding for autism, for example, found the most money and number of grants were awarded to biological research. But a survey of about 500 people from New Zealand’s autistic and autism communities found people wanted more research into their mental health, wellbeing and practical skills development.
If research aims to improve health outcomes for everyone, it must involve all populations – particularly those most at risk of poorer health outcomes.
This extends beyond people with disability to include all marginalised and often excluded communities. But this kind of change will need action at different levels of research, and to be led by researchers themselves. The rules and funding systems must also support a more inclusive approach.
Practical steps to make a difference
Some of the key strategies needed to ensure health research becomes more representative, ethical and effective have been outlined by the Disability Inclusion in Research Collaboration, a global network of researchers:
Making sure disabled people are visible in research grant applications: funding bodies must actively require and reward the inclusion of disabled participants in health research studies.
Including disability perspectives from the very start: disabled people should be involved in formulating research questions, designing studies and advising on accessibility measures.
Ensuring disabled people are research participants whenever possible: researchers must clearly explain and justify any exclusion criteria related to disability, which need to be grounded in legitimate safety or ethical concerns rather than mere assumptions.
Making it routine to report on disability status: research studies should use data to identify, track and report on participants’ disability status, so it is easier to monitor inclusion efforts and outcomes.
By committing to these basic measures, health research can become more representative, ethical and effective. It will also help the research produce insights relevant to a broader range of people, ultimately leading to stronger and fairer healthcare systems.
This is about more than justice for disabled people. It is about ensuring medical research achieves its true purpose: to improve health for everyone.
Rachelle A Martin receives funding from the NZ Health Research Council.
Kaaren Mathias receives funding from the Health Research Council and CURE Kids.
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North stands as some of the most visceral and moving television produced in Australia in recent memory.
Marking a new accessibility and confidence to director Justin Kurzel, it reunites him with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Having produced some of the most compelling and confronting cinema on Australia’s darker history, this latest collaboration is no exception.
Their previous features Snowtown (2011), True History of the Kelly Gang (2020) and Nitram (2021) focused on disturbed psychopaths wanting to unleash their fury onto a society they blame for their own wrongs and injustices.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the World War II five episode miniseries, continues their exploration of Australia’s violent past while navigating a new direction in how they depict confused and damaged men.
Trauma of survival
Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi/Ciarán Hinds) is a doctor sent to World War II. Captured during the Battle of Java he is taken as a prisoner of war (POW), where he is forced to lead his Australian soldiers on the building of the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Rather than an executor of violence, he is a pacifist and victim. Ultimately he has to make peace with his own trauma and guilt of survival when many around him perished – some of whom he knowingly sent to their inevitable death to ensure his own survival.
Faithfully adapted from Richard Flanagan’s novel, this production effectively creates interchanging timelines (seamlessly edited by Alexandre de Francesch) including prewar, war and postwar, and then flashes forward to Dorrigo in his mid-70s.
Elordi’s younger depiction of Dorrigo is filled with nuance and subtleties, often exuded through his stillness. This is harmoniously taken up by Hinds, who has to carry the weight of Dorrigo’s trauma and guilt decades later, with a worn and damaged quietness. Hinds is remarkable when faced to confront his celebrity as a war hero, desperate to give the truth over the expected yarns of mateship and heroism.
How do we tell the truth?
The Narrow Road to the Deep North has been scheduled to be released close to ANZAC Day, which always provokes broader conversations around the mythmaking and truth-telling of our war service and human sacrifice.
This production arrives as a thought-provoking essay on how military history continues to be told. Does the public really want accurate accounts, or more stories on mateship and heroism? Such questions filter dramatically across each episode and up to the final shot leaving us with much to consider.
As a war drama, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is almost entirely static. The combat the battalion engages in is eclipsed by the soldiers held as starving and malnourished prisoners, brutally forced in several graphic scenes to continue as slaves on the building of the railway at all costs.
The brutal and endless beating of Darky Gardiner (Thomas Weatherall), who crawls to the latrine full of excrement to drown himself, rather than endure more beating, is horrific but necessary to see the endless torture these skeletal and sick POWs are subjected to.
90,000 Asian civilians and 2,800 Australian prisoners of war died constructing the Burma Railway. Prime
One misleading depiction Grant and Kurzel disappointingly do not amend from Flanagan’s novel is the view that the Burma Railway was constructed almost entirely by the bloody hands of Australian soldiers. In reality more than 90,000 Asian civilians died, and 16,000 POWs from several nations, including 2,800 Australians.
Moving across time
Cinematogropher Sam Chiplin brings a sense of gothic dread. The framing of every shot is masterful.
Odessa Young as Amy, Dorrigo’s true love, is a standout. She gives us someone struggling in a loveless marriage and desiring her husband’s nephew while she watches him sent to war. Her sense of entrapment in the quiet seaside Tasmanian coastal town is quite brilliantly realised.
Elordi’s Dorrigo is filled with nuance and subtleties. Odessa Young as Amy, Dorrigo’s true love, is a standout. Prime
Other performances worthy of mention are the Japanese soldiers tasked with the project of building the leg of the Burma-Thailand Railway. Major Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu) is compelling as the scared and conflicted guard who ultimately spends his post-war years hiding among the ruins of Shinjuku to avoid capture as a war criminal.
Moving across the scenes and contrasting time frames is the haunting, unsettling and dissonant score by Jed Kurzel. Like the memories and trauma of the past, the music follows the characters across time and space.
Immaculate
Structurally immaculate, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not defined by its brutal torture of the POWs or comradeship of the starving soldiers (though they are powerful to watch). Instead, it points us towards the quieter visions of characters having to sit alone with their distorted memories.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a deeply compelling contribution to the Australian war genre. Prime
The tonal inspiration may be drawn from earlier literary anti-war novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and The Naked and the Dead (1948), but The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a work of its own depth and beauty. It will deserve its place as one of the most compelling contributions to the Australian war genre.
The final moments of cutting between the faces of Elordi and Hinds left me silent and reaching for a reread of Flanagan’s novel.
Contemporary television is rarely this good.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is on Prime from April 18.
Stephen Gaunson 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.
No one goes into the legal profession thinking it is going to be easy. Long working hours are fairly standard, work is often completed to tight external deadlines, and 24/7 availability to clients is widely understood to be a norm, particularly in commercial and international practice.
But too often, the demands of law can create an unhealthy workplace environment. In 2021, the stress of high workloads, low job control, and risks of secondary trauma led SafeWork NSW to categorise legal work as “high risk” for fatigue hazards – putting it alongside night shift work, emergency services, and fly-in, fly-out roles.
To investigate this problem, we surveyed about 1,900 lawyers across Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia in March and April last year.
We asked them about their workplace culture and its impact on wellbeing, about their levels of psychological distress, and whether they had experienced disrespectful behaviours at work.
We also asked whether they intended to leave either their employer or the legal profession in the near future.
Their answers allowed us to identify the type of workplace culture that is harmful to lawyers’ wellbeing. Here’s why fixing this problem matters to us all.
Unhealthy environments
Among the professionals we surveyed, about half found themselves in a workplace culture with negative effects on wellbeing.
A third of this group said their workplaces were characterised by poor working relationships, self-interest and pressure to cut corners or bend rules.
Alarming numbers of lawyers currently want to leave their current employer or quit the profession entirely. Pormezz/Shutterstock
These poorer workplace cultures involved higher levels of psychological distress and more disrespectful behaviours from superiors and coworkers.
They were also characterised by a lack of effective wellbeing supports such as mental health leave arrangements or workload allocation practices.
Long working hours were common. More than half of participants (53%) said they worked more than 40 hours per week and 11% said they put in more than 60 hours.
About a third of the lawyers we surveyed wanted to quit their firm, while 10% planned to leave the profession, within a year.
Society can’t afford to ignore this problem. Lawyer wellbeing can directly affect the quality of legal services and may even lead to disciplinary action against individual lawyers. All of this can undermine public trust and confidence in the justice system.
Workload ‘cannot be sustained’
We invited participants to explain why they intended to leave the profession. Their answers are telling.
One mid-career lawyer at a large firm said:
I am in my 11th year of practice working as a Senior Associate at a top-tier firm. To put it bluntly, the work rate at which I am currently operating, which is required to meet the billable targets and budgets set for us, cannot be sustained for my whole working life – it’s too much.
A small-firm junior lawyer talked of the workload issues described by many:
The pay is not worth the stress. I can’t sleep because I’m constantly worried about deadlines or making mistakes, and I got paid more when I was a bartender. I love the work, but it’s a very tough slog and damaging my own wellbeing – for what?
Our data showed junior lawyers take a lot of the pressure, reflected in higher-than-average levels of psychological distress. Equally concerning was the extent to which senior lawyers with practice management responsibilities also reported above average distress.
Our research also showed the challenges extended beyond private practice and into government, legal aid and corporate “in-house” settings.
As one mid-career legal aid lawyer put it:
Lack of debriefing and supports, lack of formal mentoring and supervision, mental health toll, high workload and poor workplace culture, lack of training and supports to deal with clients in crisis, [mean it’s] not [a] family-friendly profession.
The positives
There was also good news. Three themes stood out in the responses from the 48% who told us they worked in positive workplace cultures. This suggests where support should be targeted.
For nearly two thirds of our sample, having good colleagues was the most important wellbeing support. As one mid-career lawyer put it:
Informal support such as debriefing with colleagues has been most beneficial for me.
Good flexible working and (mental health) leave arrangements came across as the most important practical support employers could provide.
Good workload allocation practices – and a willingness from managers to “reach out to discuss work-life balance” – make a real difference to peoples’ experience.
Support from colleagues was the most important wellbeing support. UM-UMM/Shutterstock
It matters to the rest of us
The legal profession and its regulators have been engaging with the wellbeing problem for a while now. Our findings suggest there is still more to be done.
For the profession as a whole we felt that there was still a need to develop greater understanding of the specific wellbeing needs of both junior lawyers and those managing them, as these are the two groups experiencing the most distress.
Legal regulatory bodies should work to better understand how economic drivers of legal practice, such as high workloads and billing expectations, can have negative consequences for wellbeing, and whether any regulatory levers could lessen these impacts.
The authors would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Stephen Tang, clinical psychologist, in undertaking data analysis and coauthoring the original report.
This research was supported by the Victorian Legal Services Board + Commissioner (VLSB+C), the Law Society of New South Wales, and the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia. Matched funding for the data analysis was provided by the VLSB+C and industry research seed funding from the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne.
China has placed curbs on exports of rare germanium and gallium which are critical in manufacturing.Shutterstock
In the escalating trade war between the United States and China, one notable exception stood out: 31 critical minerals, including rare earth elements, were strategically exempted from tariffs.
This was not a gesture of goodwill. It was a tacit acknowledgment of the United States’ deep dependence on China for materials essential to its technological competitiveness, clean energy transition and national defence.
Beijing’s response was swift and calculated. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced expanded export controls and a shift in pricing principles. The move reflects China’s long-standing effort to shift rare earth pricing from market supply and demand to pricing based on their strategic value.
The impact was immediate. Rare earth exports from China effectively ground to a halt, as exporters awaited approvals under a new, opaque licensing regime.
The announcement prompted President Trump to issue a new executive order directing a review of national security risks stemming from the US reliance on imported, processed critical minerals.
As global supply chains reel from these disruptions, Australia finds itself in a unique strategic position. As a trusted US ally, it possesses the resources, partnerships and political capital to step into the breach. But can Australia seize this opportunity – or will it come with strings attached?
China’s new playbook
China’s latest restrictions target seven rare earths – such as dysprosium and terbium – crucial for electric vehicles, wind turbines, fighter jets and missile systems.
While stopping short of a full export ban, the policy functions as a chokepoint. It leverages China’s near-total global control of rare earth refining (around 90%) and its monopoly on heavy rare earth processing (98%).
Domestically, China’s rare earth sector is dominated by two state-owned giants which together control nearly 100% of national mining quotas.
These measures have exposed the vulnerability of Western supply chains. The US has only one operational rare earth mine – Mountain Pass in California – and minimal domestic refining capacity. A new processing facility in Texas owned by Australia’s Lynas is under development, but it will take years to establish a self-sufficient supply chain.
Rare earths have become a source of contention in the tariff war. Shutterstock
Europe faces similar challenges. While rare earths are vital to the EU’s green transition, domestic production remains limited. Efforts to diversify through partners like Australia and Canada show promise but are hindered by high production costs and continued reliance on Chinese technology.
China is also working to redefine how rare earths are priced. One proposal would tie the value of key elements like dysprosium to the price of gold, elevating them from industrial inputs to geopolitical assets. Another would settle rare earth transactions in yuan rather than US dollars, advancing Beijing’s broader ambition to internationalise its currency.
For China, this strategy goes beyond economics. It is a deliberate national resource policy comparable to OPEC’s management of oil, designed to link pricing to the strategic significance of critical minerals.
Australia’s window?
Investors
are closely watching Australian producers. Strategic deposits such as Mt Weld in Western Australia have drawn renewed interest from Japan, Europe and the US.
Industry observers argue Australia is better positioned than the US to develop secure supply chains, due to its rich geological endowment and transparent regulatory environment.
To seize this opportunity, the government has begun to act.
Under its Future Made in Australia initiative, the federal government is considering measures such as strategic stockpiling, production tax credits and expanded support for domestic processing. Iluka Resources has secured A$1.65 billion to build a rare earth refinery, due to be operational by 2026.
Emerging projects like Browns Range and Lynas’s Malaysian refinery already serve as alternative nodes in the global rare earth supply chain network.
However, structural barriers remain. The Western allies, including Australia, still lack key processing technologies and have potentially high environmental compliance costs. Lynas’s Texas plant was intended to expand allied capacity but has faced delays due to environmental approvals.
Walking a diplomatic tightrope
Geopolitical tensions add another layer of complexity. Australia’s dual role – as a major upstream supplier to China and a strategic ally of the US – places it on a diplomatic tightrope.
Aligning too closely with the US could invite Chinese retaliation. Appearing overly aligned with China may provoke scrutiny from Washington.
Ownership concerns are also rising. The government has blocked or forced divestment of Chinese stakes in rare earth and lithium companies including Northern Minerals.
Market volatility compounds these challenges. Prices are currently buoyed by geopolitical risk, but have been volatile. Moreover, China’s ability to undercut global prices could erode the competitiveness of Australian exports.
A strategic opportunity – but with strings attached
Australia stands at the centre of a rare strategic inflection point. It is both a beneficiary of China’s retreat and a potential casualty of intensifying great power competition.
In a world where resources confer influence, the question for Australia is not simply whether it has the mineral deposits but whether it has the strategy to match.
If the government can capitalise on this moment – diversifying partnerships, investing in capabilities, and navigating allies and rivals with strategic care – it could emerge as a leader in a more diverse critical minerals landscape.
In the era of mineral geopolitics, possessing the resources is no longer enough. The real test is whether Australia has the foresight and the will to lead.
Marina Yue Zhang 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.
Despite the challenges faced by local democratic activists, Thailand has often been an oasis of relative liberalism compared with neighbouring countries such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
Westerners, in particular, have been largely welcomed and provided with a measure of protection from harassment by the authorities. Thailand’s economy is extremely dependent on foreign tourism. Many Westerners also work in a variety of industries, including as academics at public and private universities.
That arrangement now seems under pressure. Earlier this month, Paul Chambers, an American political science lecturer at Naresuan University, was arrested on charges of violating the Computer Crimes Act and the lèse-majesté law under Section 112 of Thailand’s Criminal Code for allegedly insulting the monarchy.
Chambers’ visa has been revoked and he now faces a potential punishment of 15 years in jail.
The lèse-majesté law has become a common tool for silencing Thai activists. At least 272 people have been charged under the law since pro-democracy protests broke out in 2020, according to rights groups.
Its use against foreigners has, until now, been limited. No foreign academic has ever been charged with it. Because of the law, however, most academics in Thailand usually tread carefully in their critiques of the monarchy.
The decision to charge a foreign academic, therefore, suggests a hardening of views on dissent by conservative forces in the country. It represents a further deterioration in Thailand’s democratic credentials and provides little optimism for reform under the present government.
Thailand’s democratic deficit
Several other recent actions have also sparked concerns about democratic backsliding.
Following a visit by Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra to China in February, the government violated domestic and international law by forcibly returning 40 Uyghurs to China.
The Uyghurs had fled China a decade earlier to escape repression in the western Xinjiang region and had been held in detention in Thailand ever since. They now potentially face worse treatment by the Chinese authorities.
Then, in early April, Thailand welcomed the head of the Myanmar junta to a regional summit in Bangkok after a devastating earthquake struck his war-ravaged country.
Min Aung Hlaing has been shunned internationally since the junta launched a coup against the democratically elected government in Myanmar in 2021, sparking a devastating civil war. He has only visited Russia and China since then.
In addition, the military continues to dominate politics in Thailand. After a progressive party, Move Forward, won the 2023 parliamentary elections by committing to amend the lèse-majesté law, the military, the unelected Senate and other conservative forces in the country ignored the will of the people and denied its charismatic leader the prime ministership.
The party was then forcibly dissolved by the Constitutional Court and its leader banned from politics for ten years.
In February, Thailand’s National Anti-Corruption Commission criminally indicted 44 politicians from Move Forward for sponsoring a bill in parliament to reform the lèse-majesté law. They face lifetime bans from politics if they are found guilty of breaching “ethical standards”.
Even the powerful former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who is also the uncle of the current prime minister, is not immune from the lèse-majesté law.
He was indicted last year for allegedly insulting the monarchy almost two decades ago. His case is due to be heard in July.
This continued undermining of democratic norms is chipping away at Thailand’s international reputation. The country is now classified as a “flawed democracy” in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, with its ranking falling two years in a row.
The lèse-majesté law has always represented something of a challenge to academic freedom in Thailand, as well as freedom of speech more generally. Campaigners against the law have paid a heavy price.
The US State Department has provided a statement of support for Chambers, urging the Thai government to “ensure that laws are not used to stifle permitted expression”. However, given the Trump administration’s attacks on US universities at the moment, this demand rings somewhat hollow.
Academic freedom is a hallmark of democracies compared with authoritarian regimes. With the US no longer so concerned with protecting academic freedom at home, there is little stopping flawed democracies around the world from stepping up pressure on academics to toe the line.
The undermining of democracy in the US is already having palpable impacts on democratic regression around the world.
With little international pressure to adhere to democratic norms, the current Thai government has taken a significant and deleterious step in arresting a foreign academic.
In the future, universities in Thailand, as in the US, will find it harder to attract international talent. Universities – and the broader society – in both countries will be worse off for it.
Adam Simpson 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.
This gap in knowledge is concerning. For one, these bees play a crucial role in ecosystems. For another, ground-nesting bee habitats are threatened by land degradation, urbanisation, pesticides and agricultural expansion.
Our recent study addresses this research gap. Published this week in Austral Entomology, it examines the soil type preferences of ground-nesting bees and provides a simple, practical approach to enhancing their habitats.
Lasioglossum (Homalictus) dotatum is a small, ground-nesting bee species native to Australia. It measures approximately 3–4 mm.
Unlike the introduced European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which lives in large, highly organised colonies with complex social structures, L. dotatum exhibits an “apartment living” social structure, with independent nests situated close to one another. This aggregation behaviour indicates certain environmental or habitat features that are necessary for the species to thrive.
This species is widely distributed across mainland Australia. It nests in a range of sandy soil types. Because of this, it offers a valuable opportunity to examine how different environmental conditions shape its nesting preferences.
A key feature of the nests of this species is the presence of small conical mounds of excavated soil, known as tumuli, which surround the entrance. These mounds can resemble small ant hills. As a result, the nests are sometimes mistaken for ant nests, leading to accidental pesticide application and destruction of the bees’ habitats.
Lasioglossum dotatum has also been observed in avocado orchards, a crop of significant economic value in Western Australia.
While it remains uncertain whether L. dotatum is a major crop pollinator, its presence in these orchards suggests it could play a supplementary role in pollination. This potentially makes it an intriguing subject for research exploring native alternatives to honey bees (Apis mellifera) for crop pollination.
Our research focused on understanding the nesting preferences of L. dotatum. The study sought to explore how environmental features, such as soil type and surface cover, influenced where these bees chose to nest.
Specifically, the study tested whether L. dotatum preferred bare sand or rock gravel as a nesting substrate.
The study also examined whether the cleanliness of the sand – whether steam-treated or left untreated — impacted the bees’ nesting decisions.
The study used artificial nesting pots filled with sand from the Swan Coastal Plain, a region known for its sandy soils, to simulate nesting conditions around active bee aggregations. During the summer nesting season of February 2022, researchers monitored how the bees interacted with these artificial nesting sites, using the number of nest entrances (or tumuli) as a measure of nesting activity.
Getting into the gravel
Our study found L. dotatum strongly preferred nesting in pots covered with rock gravel over those with bare sand. This preference likely arises from the benefits provided by rock gravel, such as improved moisture retention, temperature regulation, and protection from predators.
The experimental pots with rock gravel had significantly more nest entrances. This indicated that rock cover helps create a more stable and favourable microhabitat for nesting.
The bees also showed a preference for steam-treated sand, suggesting that factors such as microbial contaminants or organic residues in untreated soil may deter nesting.
Interestingly, when the rock gravel was removed, many nests were found concealed beneath the gravel. This highlights the importance of rock cover in enhancing nest stability and reducing the risk of disturbance.
Lasioglossum dotatum preferred nesting in pots covered with rock gravel over those with bare sand. Freya Marie Jackson, CC BY-NC-ND
A simple, practical approach to conservation
These findings have important implications for native bee conservation, particularly in urban and agricultural areas.
The preference for rock gravel suggests that incorporating this material into urban landscapes could improve nesting conditions for ground-nesting bees such as L. dotatum.
By creating spaces for these ground nesting bees, we can better support these vital pollinators.
As native bees continue to face habitat loss and degradation, these findings provide a simple, practical approach to enhancing their habitats, ultimately contributing to more sustainable pollinator populations in urban and rural settings alike.
Freya Marie Jackson received funding from the Australian Entomological Society (AES) through their “Small Grant Award”, which supported some of this research on native bees. Additionally, she has received a Research and Innovation Seed Grant Award from Murdoch University.
Wei Xu received funding from the Australian Entomological Society (AES) through their “Small Grant Award”, which supported some of this research on native bees. Additionally, he has received a Research and Innovation Seed Grant Award from Murdoch University.
Giles Hardy and Kit Prendergast 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.
In the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, the driving time between Napier and Wairoa stretched from 90 minutes to over six hours, causing major supply chain delays. Retail prices rose and shoppers faced empty shelves.
Natural hazards such as earthquakes and flooding can wreak havoc on Aotearoa New Zealand’s freight system. These crises can cause extensive road damage, isolating communities and creating disruptions in supply chain operations.
Cyclone Gabrielle was by no means a one-off. The 2021 flooding in Canterbury, for example, forced trucks to travel nearly 900 extra kilometres between Christchurch and Timaru, extending the travel time from two to 13 hours.
Severe weather events, the pandemic and the ongoing dispute about replacing the Cook Strait ferries have made the fragility of the freight system more apparent than ever.
To be fair, natural hazards are beyond our control. But resilience can be increased. Our new research identified the main vulnerabilities in the country’s freight system and analysed the factors leading to post-disaster disruptions and shortages on shelves.
The key to reducing freight disruptions, we found, is embracing and investing in the different ways goods can be moved around the country. In particular, using the thousands of kilometres of coastline offers another way to get items from one region to another.
Rather than relying almost exclusively on the road network to move products, the government should invest in shipping infrastructure. Rachel Moon/Shutterstock
But as they are currently organised, other potentially useful forms of transport such as rail and coastal shipping are not great alternatives. Non-road options run on timetables, for example, resulting in longer transit times.
And unlike road transport, which can move products directly between two points, rail and coastal shipping require multiple points of contact from where the goods are produced through to where they are sold.
As a result, when a disaster hits, alternative road routes are typically used to maintain freight deliveries. The limited alternatives in the road network and the lack of roads that can withstand heavy freight can cause problems for trucking companies. Both travel distances and transit times can increase.
When this happens, more trucks and drivers are needed, but these are already in short supply. The transport industry has been struggling to fill positions, with an estimated shortfall of thousands of drivers across the country.
This is compounded by the shortage of trucks, particularly specialised vehicles such as refrigerated units, which are essential for transporting perishable goods.
NZ’s long coastlines offer options
Government policy has a key role to play in addressing these problems and the lack of resilience in the national infrastructure system. In a country with long coastlines, reducing reliance on road transport and developing coastal shipping should be considered.
By shifting a portion of freight to coastal shipping, the demand for trucks and drivers can be reduced. This would also ensure reliable freight movements between the North and the South Islands when the ferry services are disrupted.
Finally, investing in coastal shipping would create a more flexible and resilient transport system where goods can shift rapidly from road to sea after a disaster.
Achieving this would require infrastructure improvements at our domestic seaports and additional vessels to increase the frequency of service. There would also need to be operational integration between road, rail and sea, with synchronised timetables for shorter transit times.
There will inevitably be another natural disaster that disrupts the freight system, causing delays, empty shelves and increased prices. Diversifying the transport options would increase resilience and keep those goods moving.
Cécile L’Hermitte receives funding from Te Hiranga Rū QuakeCoRE, a Centre for Research Excellence funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Cassandra Burke Robertson, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Professional Ethics, Case Western Reserve University
A judge’s opinion moves the nation closer to a collision between the executive branch and the courts.Xand, iStock / Getty Images Plus
A battle between the Trump administration and federal courts over the deportation of more than 100 immigrants to a prison in El Salvador intensified on April 16, 2025. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg released an opinion saying that he had “probable cause” to hold members of the administration in criminal contempt. That potentially dramatic action was in response to the White House disobeying Boasberg’s March 15 order to halt flights taking those immigrants to El Salvador.
Amy Lieberman, a politics editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Cassandra Burke Robertson, a legal scholar at Case Western Reserve University, to better understand Boasberg’s decision.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg attends a panel discussion in Washington on April 2, 2025. Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images
What exactly did Judge Boasberg do in this memorandum opinion?
Boasberg is saying there is evidence that the Trump administration has not complied with the court’s order to return the deportees, and that it may have intentionally flouted that order. He is making a finding of probable cause, meaning that the court needs to dig a little deeper to find out what happened and why the government, in this case, apparently did not comply with the court order.
If the administration does that, there will not be any further contempt proceedings. Normally, that would be attractive to the government in this position.
If the government chooses not to bring the detainees back into U.S. custody, then the probable cause finding means there is going to be an investigation overseen by the court.
But nobody has been found in contempt, yet.
The next step is taking evidence about what happened, including declarations from government officials. If needed, the court may also order, Boasberg wrote, “hearings with live witness testimony under oath or to depositions conducted by Plaintiffs.” The goal is to find out who ordered what, when and why. Then the court can decide whether someone within the government is responsible for flouting the court order.
Boasberg is giving the administration until April 23 to respond. By that date, the government must either, first, explain the steps it has taken to seek to return the individuals to U.S. custody. Or, second, it can identify the individuals who decided not to halt the transfer of the detainees out of U.S. custody, after the court ruled that they should not be transferred.
If Boasberg holds government officials in contempt, what happens next?
It is definitely not clear who Boasberg would hold in contempt. Part of what Boasberg is doing is figuring out who the relevant decision-makers are and what they might have ordered. The next step is to take discovery on those issues and to make a finding about who is responsible.
With rare exceptions, a contempt case is prosecuted in the same court whose order was violated. Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a prosecutor is responsible for charging the defendants, once identified, with contempt. Those charges, like any criminal case, would need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Issuing sanctions isn’t something Boasberg can just decide – there is a process.
Normally, a prosecutor in a case like this would be from the Department of Justice. In Boasberg’s opinion, he acknowledged that the Department of Justice might decline to prosecute. Federal rules allow the judge to appoint a different prosecutor if the government declines to prosecute or if “the interest of justice requires the appointment of another attorney.”
One big question is, can the president pardon contempt? Notably, Trump has done so before, when he pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio for defying a court order requiring him to stop his immigration patrols. However, some scholars have argued that such pardons may violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
What is the punishment for contempt?
The two most common punishments would typically be a term of incarceration, or monetary sanctions. I suspect monetary sanctions are easier to enforce here than jail time.
It is so uncommon to hold any government official in contempt. Usually, the government would very quickly change direction to come into compliance to avoid the risk of any government official being sent to jail or any financial penalties being levied.
There aren’t a lot of cases where a judge has tried to enforce sanctions against a member of the government. In fact, only two federal officials – in 1951 – have ever been incarcerated for contempt, and they only spent a few hours in jail.
The Supreme Court found that the deportees’ case was not supposed to be heard in Boasberg’s court. Does Boasberg still have the authority to hold the government in contempt?
Boasberg had to address this, because the government also raised the issue. Boasberg points out the Supreme Court has historically said that when a party is faced with a court order, it has to comply with that court order until it gets relief on appeal. It cannot just ignore an order it believes a court should not have issued.
Here, the government had an obligation to comply with the order to return the Venezuelan immigrants sent to prison in El Salvador, even as it appealed the case to a higher court. And that is what is the issue here – that it failed to comply.
Have government officials ever been held in contempt of court before, and does this case differ from other cases?
It’s not a rare remedy in general–every year, many litigants are held in contempt and even jailed for refusing to comply with court orders. It’s especially common in child support and custody proceedings.
But it’s very rare for government officials to be held in contempt of court. One was the Arpaio case. Another case involved a Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples and was held in contempt. She spent six days in jail before she was released on the condition that she wouldn’t interfere with her deputies granting the licenses.
There has been talk of the U.S. edging into a constitutional crisis with this development. Does this order show that a crisis is already happening?
Any time the government fails to comply with a court order, I think we risk a constitutional crisis. But I believe that contempt proceedings are a way to show the strength of the Constitution. The contempt power has been around for as long as federal courts in the U.S. have been around, since 1789. This is fundamental to our constitutional system. If a litigant does not obey a court order, courts have power to enforce those orders.
Cassandra Burke Robertson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
