Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Blackett, Reader in Physical Geography and Natural Hazards, Coventry University
After a massive earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka, a peninsula in the far east of Russia, on July 30 2025, the world watched as the resultant tsunami spread from the epicentre and across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jet plane.
In some local areas, such as in Russia’s northern Kuril Islands, tsunami waves reached heights of over three metres. However, across the Pacific there was widespread relief in the hours that followed as the feared scenario of large waves striking coastal communities did not materialise. Why was this?
Not all underwater earthquakes result in tsunamis. For a tsunami to be generated, the Earth’s crust at the earthquake site must be pushed upwards in a movement known as vertical displacement. This typically occurs during reverse faulting, or its shallow-angled form known as thrust faulting, where one block of the Earth’s crust is forced up and over another, along what is called a fault plane.
It is no coincidence that this type of faulting movement occurred at a subduction zone on “the Pacific ring of fire”, where the dense oceanic Pacific plate is being forced beneath the less dense Eurasian continental plate.
These zones are known for generating powerful earthquakes and tsunamis because they are sites of intense compression, which leads to thrust faulting and the sudden vertical movement of the seafloor. Indeed, it was the ring of fire that was also responsible for the two most significant tsunami-generating earthquakes of recent times: the 2004 Indonesian Boxing Day and March 2011 Tohoku earthquakes.
Why did the Indonesian and Japanese earthquakes generate waves over 30 metres high, but the recent magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Kamchatka (one of the strongest ever recorded) didn’t? The answer lies in the geology involved in these events.
In the case of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, the sea floor was measured to have risen by up to five metres within a rupture zone of 750,000 sq km.
For the tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011, estimates indicate the seafloor was thrust upwards by nearly three metres within a rupture zone of 90,000 sq km.
Preliminary data from the recent Kamchatka event has been processed into what geologists call a finite fault model. Rather than representing the earthquake as a single point, these models show where and how the crust ruptured, including the length of that rupture in Earth’s crust, its depth and what direction it followed.
The model results show that the two sides of the fault slipped by up to ten metres along a fault plane of 18°, resulting in about three metres of vertical uplift. Think of it like walking ten metres up an 18° slope: you don’t rise ten metres into the air, you only rise about three metres, because most of your movement is forward rather than upward.
However, since much of this occurred at depths greater than 20km (over an area of 70,000 sq km) the seabed displacement would probably have been reduced as the overlying rock layers absorbed and diffused the motion before it reached the surface.
For comparison, the associated slippage for the Tohoku and Indonesian events was as shallow as 5km in places.
An added complication
So, while the size of sea floor uplift is key to determining how much energy a tsunami begins with, it is the processes that follow – as the wave travels and interacts with the coastline – that can transform an insignificant tsunami into a devastating wall of water at the shore.
As a tsunami travels across the open ocean it is often barely noticeable – a long, low ripple spread over tens of kilometres. But as it nears land, the front of the wave slows down due to friction with the seabed, while the back continues at speed, causing the wave to rise in height. This effect is strongest in places where the sea floor gets shallow quickly near the coast.
The shape of the coastline is also important. Bays, inlets and estuaries can act like funnels that further amplify the wave as it reaches shore. Crescent City in California is a prime example. Fortunately however, when the wave arrived in Crescent City on July 30 2025, it reached a height of just 1.22 metres – still the highest recorded in the continental US.
So, not every powerful undersea earthquake leads to a devastating tsunami — it depends not just on the magnitude, but on how much the sea floor is lifted and whether that vertical movement reaches the ocean surface.
In the case of the recent Russian quake, although the slip was substantial, much of it occurred at depth, meaning the energy wasn’t transferred effectively to the water above. All of this shows that while earthquake size is important, it’s the precise characteristics of the rupture that truly decide whether a tsunami becomes destructive or remains largely insignificant.
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Matthew Blackett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura Elin Pigott, Senior Lecturer in Neurosciences and Neurorehabilitation, Course Leader in the College of Health and Life Sciences, London South Bank University
Your dog tilts its head when you cry, paces when you’re stressed, and somehow appears at your side during your worst moments. Coincidence? Not even close.
Thousands of years of co-evolution have given dogs special ways to tune in to our voices, faces and even brain chemistry. From brain regions devoted to processing our speech to the “love hormone” or oxytocin that surges when we lock eyes, your dog’s mind is hardwired to pick up on what you’re feeling.
The evidence for this extraordinary emotional intelligence begins in the brain itself. Dogs’ brains have dedicated areas that are sensitive to voice, similar to those in humans. In a brain imaging study, researchers found that dogs possess voice-processing regions in their temporal cortex that light up in response to vocal sounds.
Dogs respond not just to any sound, but to the emotional tone of your voice. Brain scans reveal that emotionally charged sounds – a laugh, a cry, an angry shout – activate dogs’ auditory cortex and the amygdala – a part of the brain involved in processing emotions.
Dogs are also skilled face readers. When shown images of human faces, dogs exhibit increased brain activity. One study found that seeing a familiar human face activates a dog’s reward centres and emotional centres – meaning your dog’s brain is processing your expressions, perhaps not in words but in feelings.
Dogs don’t just observe your emotions; they can “catch” them too. Researchers call this emotional contagion, a basic form of empathy where one individual mirrors another’s emotional state. A 2019 study found that some dog-human pairs had synchronised cardiac patterns during stressful times, with their heartbeats mirroring each other.
This emotional contagion doesn’t require complex reasoning – it’s more of an automatic empathy arising from close bonding. Your dog’s empathetic yawns or whines are probably due to learned association and emotional attunement rather than literal mind-mirroring.
The oxytocin effect
The most remarkable discovery in canine-human bonding may be the chemical connection we share. When dogs and humans make gentle eye contact, both partners experience a surge of oxytocin, often dubbed the “love hormone”.
In one study, owners who held long mutual gazes with their dogs had significantly higher oxytocin levels afterwards, and so did their dogs.
This oxytocin feedback loop reinforces bonding, much like the gaze between a parent and infant. Astonishingly, this effect is unique to domesticated dogs: hand-raised wolves did not respond the same way to human eye contact. As dogs became domesticated, they evolved this interspecies oxytocin loop as a way to glue them emotionally to their humans. Those soulful eyes your pup gives you are chemically binding you two together.
Beyond eye contact, dogs are surprisingly skilled at reading human body language and facial expressions. Experiments demonstrate that pet dogs can distinguish a smiling face from an angry face, even in photos.
Dogs show a subtle right-hemisphere bias when processing emotional cues, tending to gaze toward the left side of a human’s face when assessing expressions – a pattern also seen in humans and primates.
Dogs rely on multiple senses to discern how you’re feeling. A cheerful, high-pitched “Good boy!” with a relaxed posture sends a very different message than a stern shout with rigid body language. Remarkably, they can even sniff out emotions. In a 2018 study, dogs exposed to sweat from scared people exhibited more stress than dogs that smelled “happy” sweat. In essence, your anxiety smells unpleasant to your dog, whereas your relaxed happiness can put them at ease.
Bred for friendship
How did dogs become so remarkably attuned to human emotions? The answer lies in their evolutionary journey alongside us. Dogs have smaller brains than their wild wolf ancestors, but in the process of domestication, their brains may have rewired to enhance social and emotional intelligence.
Clues come from a Russian fox domestication experiment. Foxes bred for tameness showed increased grey matter in regions related to emotion and reward. These results challenge the assumption that domestication makes animals less intelligent. Instead, breeding animals to be friendly and social can enhance the brain pathways that help them form bonds.
In dogs, thousands of years living as our companions have fine-tuned brain pathways for reading human social signals. While your dog’s brain may be smaller than a wolf’s, it may be uniquely optimised to love and understand humans.
Dogs probably aren’t pondering why you’re upset or realising that you have distinct thoughts and intentions. Instead, they excel at picking up on what you’re projecting and respond accordingly.
So dogs may not be able to read our minds, but by reading our behaviour and feelings, they meet us emotionally in a way few other animals can. In our hectic modern world, that cross-species empathy is not just endearing; it’s evolutionary and socially meaningful, reminding us that the language of friendship sometimes transcends words entirely.
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Laura Elin Pigott 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.
China’s already vast infrastructure programme has entered a new phase as building work starts on the Motuo hydropower project.
The dam will consist of five cascade hydropower stations arranged from upstream to downstream and, once completed, will be the world’s largest source of hydroelectric power. It will be four times larger than China’s previous signature hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtse river in central China.
The Chinese premier, Li Qiang, has described the proposed mega dam as the “project of the century”. In several ways, Li’s description is apt. The vast scale of the project is a reflection of China’s geopolitical status and ambitions.
Possibly the most controversial aspect of the dam is its location. The site is on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau. This is connected to the Brahmaputra river which flows into the Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh as well as Bangladesh. It is an important source of water for Bangladesh and India.
Both nations have voiced concerns over the dam, particularly since it can potentially affect their water supplies. The tension with India over the dam is compounded by the fact that Arunachal Pradesh has been a focal point of Sino-Indian tensions. China claims the region, which it refers to as Zangnan, saying it is part of what it calls South Tibet.
At the same time, the dam presents Beijing with a potentially formidable geopolitical tool in its dealings with the Indian government. The location of the dam means that it is possible for Beijing to restrict India’s water supply.
This potential to control downstream water supply to another country has been demonstrated by the effects that earlier dam projects in the region have had on the nations of the Mekong river delta in 2019. As a result, this gives Beijing a significant degree of leverage over its neighbours.
One country restricting water supply to put pressure on another is by no means unprecedented. In fact in April 2025, following a terror attack by Pakistan-based The Resistance Front in Kashmir, which killed 26 people (mainly tourists), India suspended the Indus waters treaty, restricting water supplies to Pakistani farmers in the region. So the potential for China’s dam to disrupt water flows will further compound the already tense geopolitics of southern Asia.
Concrete titans
The Motuo mega dam is an advertisement of China’s prowess when it comes to large-scale infrastructure projects. China’s expertise with massive infrastructure projects is a big part of modern Chinese diplomacy through its massive belt and road initiative.
This involves joint ventures with many developing nations to build large-scale infrastructure, such as ports, rail systems and the like. It has caused much consternation in Washington and Brussels, which view these initiatives as a wider effort to build Chinese influence at their expense.
The completion of the dam will will bring Beijing significant symbolic capital as a demonstration of China’s power and prosperity – an integral feature of the image of China that Beijing is very keen to promote. It can also be seen as a manifestation of both China’s aspiration and its longstanding fears.
Harnessing the rivers
The Motuo hydropower project also represents the latest chapter of China’s long battle for control of its rivers, a key story in the development of Chinese civilisation.
France 24 report on the construction of the mega dam project.
Such struggles have been embodied in Chinese mythology in the form of the Gun-Yu myth. This tells the story of the way floods displaced the population of ancient China, probably based on an actual flooding at Jishi Gorge on the Yellow River in what is now Qinghai province in 1920BC.
This has led to the common motif of rivers needing human control to abate natural disaster, a theme present in much classical Chinese culture and poetry.
The pursuit of controlling China’s rivers has also been one of the primary influences on the formation of the Chinese state, as characterised by the concept of zhishui 治水 (controlling the rivers). Efforts to control the Yangtze have shaped the centralised system of governance that has characterised China throughout its history. In this sense, the Motuo hydropower project represents the latest chapter in China’s quest to harness the power of its rivers.
Such a quest remains imperative for China and its importance has been further underlined by the challenges of climate change, which has seen natural resources such as water becoming increasingly limited. The Ganges river has already been identified as one of the world’s water scarcity hotspots.
As well as sustaining China’s population, the hydropower provided by the dam is another part of China’s wider push towards self-sufficiency. It’s estimated that the dam could generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year – about the same about produced by the whole UK. While this will meet the needs of the local population, it also further entrenches China’s ability to produce cheap electricity – something that has enabled China to become and remain a manufacturing superpower.
Construction has only just begun, but Motuo hydropower project has already become a microcosm of China’s wider push towards development. It’s also a gamechanger in the geopolitics of Asia, giving China the potential to exert greater control in shaping the region’s water supplies. This in turn will give it greater power to shape the geopolitics of the region.
At the same time, it is also the latest chapter of China’s longstanding quest to harness its waterways, which now has regional implications beyond anything China’s previous dynasties could imagine.
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Tom Harper does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Maha Rafi Atal, Adam Smith Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow
The trade deal between the US and the European Union, squeezed in days before the re-introduction of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, is reflective of the new politics of global trade. Faced with the threat of 30% baseline tariffs from Washington, as well as additional levies on specific sectors, the EU has secured a partial reprieve of a flat 15% tariff on all goods.
Was this the best the bloc could have achieved? In the time available, it may well have been. The 15% rate is higher than the UK secured earlier this year, but it’s significantly below the level applied to China and Mexico, and on par with Japan.
The EU has also managed a “zero-for-zero” tariffs deal on some hi-tech goods, notably semiconductors vital for products like phones and laptops. This is something the UK did not push for or secure in its own framework agreed with the US president.
What’s more, EU leaders have argued that agreeing to the deal has security benefits in protecting dwindling US support for European defence. The urgency of Europe’s security concerns in Ukraine made these talks different from trade negotiations in the first Trump administration, when Europe could afford to be more aggressive.
The biggest winners in this deal are Europe’s carmakers. The US has collapsed various sector-specific duties on goods like aircraft, cars and automotive parts into the 15% ceiling. This effectively reduces tariffs on EU-made cars (from 27.5%).
American automakers, meanwhile, rely heavily on parts from Mexico and China – still subject to higher tariffs at the time of writing. This makes EU vehicles more competitive for US consumers than “American” cars that rely on overseas parts.
Most importantly however, like the UK deal before it, the new EU agreement is a statement of understanding between the White House and the European Commission, rather than a formal treaty. A treaty would be subject to parliamentary ratification on both sides.
But the semi-formal nature of this agreement allows both Trump and European leaders to portray the deal as a “win” by playing fast and loose with what’s actually in it.
For example, the Trump administration will celebrate an EU commitment to buy US$250 billion (£189 billion) in US energy imports annually. Yet the concession holds no legal weight in the EU. The European Commission, which negotiated with Trump, does not buy any energy nor does it manage the power grid inside its 27 member states.
The commission can encourage, but cannot compel, those states to buy American. (Indeed, it might want to do so anyway, since it helps it to pivot away from Russian gas). But ultimately, member states and businesses decide where their energy supply comes from, and they are not direct parties to the deal. Only a formal treaty ratified by the European parliament would compel them.
No guarantees from Trump
The informal nature of this agreement also allows EU member states to protest against what they see as capitulation to Trump’s demands without real consequence. After all, there is not yet a treaty text they would be required to vote on or implement.
The Trump administration similarly imposed its sweeping tariff threats in early spring without a vote from Congress, and has been making ad hoc changes to the rates in the same way.
On the one hand, this means European countries may not ultimately be required to implement some of the deal’s less savoury elements such as the energy purchases or lowering the bloc’s own tariffs on US goods.
On the other hand, this means the Trump administration – notorious for abrupt changes of turn – can also renege at any time. In reality, there is little the EU can do about this. The question of leverage looms large. Trump’s longstanding antipathy towards the EU – seeing it less as an ally and more as a rival – meant that Brussels was never negotiating from a position of strength.
The fact that the EU avoided the worst-case scenario, protected key sectors and secured other sector-specific advantages suggests a deal shaped not by triumph, but by containment of Trump. Since the deal was announced, the picture emerging from many European leaders has been one of gloom. True, the EU didn’t win – but it survived. And that, for now, is probably enough.
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Maha Rafi Atal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation
This article was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email newsletter. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.
It feels as if things are moving at completely different speeds in Gaza and in the outside world. From the embattled Gaza Strip the narrative is depressingly familiar. Dozens more Palestinian civilians have been killed in the past 24 hours as they try to get hold of scarce supplies of food.
Aid agencies report that despite air drops of supplies and “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting, the amount of food getting through to the starving people of Gaza remains pitifully insufficient.
Two more children are reported to have died of starvation, bringing the total number of hunger-related deaths to 159, according to Palestinian sources quoted by al-Jazeera.
US envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Jerusalem for more talks as the US president Donald Trump posted his latest bout of social media diplomacy on his TruthSocial site, a message which appears pretty faithful to the Netanyahu government’s position: “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!”
Both sides continue to reject the other side’s demands, bringing ceasefire negotiations to an effective standstill.
In the outside world, meanwhile, events seem to be gathering pace. A “high-level conference” at the United Nations in New York brought together representatives of 17 states, the European Union and the Arab League, resulting in “a comprehensive and actionable framework for the implementation of the two-state solution and the achievement of peace and security for all”.
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What first catches the eye about this proposal, which was signed by Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Egypt and Jordan, is that it links a peace deal with the disarming and disbanding of Hamas. It also condemns the militant group’s savage attack on southern Israel on October 23 2023, which was the catalyst for the latest and arguably most grievous chapter of this eight-decade conflict. It’s the first time the Arab League has taken either of these positions.
The New York declaration, as it has been dubbed, envisages the complete withdrawal of Israeli security forces from Gaza and an end to the displacement of Palestinians. Government will be the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and a conference to be scheduled in Egypt will design a plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, much of which has been destroyed in the 20-month assault by the Israel Defense Forces.
It is, writes Scott Lucas, a “bold initiative” which, “in theory could end the Israeli mass killing in Gaza, remove Hamas from power and begin the implementation of a process for a state of Palestine. The question is whether it has any chance of success.”
Lucas, an expert in US and Middle East politics at the Clinton Institute of University College Dublin, is not particularly sanguine about the short-term prospects for a ceasefire and the alleviation of the desperate conditions for the people of Gaza. But what it represents more than anything else, is “yet another marker of Israel’s increasing isolation”.
He points to recent announcements that France, the UK (subject to conditions) and Canada will recognise the state of Palestine at the UN general assembly in September. The prospect of normalisation between Israel and Arab states, at the top of the agenda a few short years ago, is now very unlikely. And in the US, which remains Israel’s staunchest ally, a Gallup poll recently found that public opinion is turning against Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
But how important are the declarations by France, the UK and Canada of intent to potentially recognise Palestinian statehood, asks Malak Benslama-Dabdoub. As expert in international law at Royal Holloway University of London, who has focused on the question of Palestinian statelessness, Benslama-Dabdoub thinks that the French and British pledges bear closer examination.
The French declaration was made on July 24 on Twitter by the president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron envisages a “demilitarised” state, something Benslama-Dabdoub sees as a serious problem, as it effectively denies the fundamental right of states to self-determination and would rob a future Palestinian state of the necessary right to self-defence.
The declaration by the UK prime minister that Britain may also recognise Palestinian statehood in September is framed as a threat rather than a pledge. Unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire, allows the UN to recommence humanitarian efforts and engages in a long-term sustainable peace process, the UK will go ahead with recognising Palestine at the UN.
You have to consider that the UK government’s statement said that the position has always been that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people”. So to frame this as a threat rather than a demand is arguably to deny that “inalienable right”.
Paul Rogers also sees serious problems with the pledges to recognise Palestinian statehood. Demands for Hamas to disarm and play no further role in Palestinian government he sees as a non-starter as is the thought of a demilitarised Palestine. “Neither plan has the slightest chance of getting off the ground.”
Rogers, who has researched and written on the Middle East for more than 30 years, also thinks that without the full backing of the US there is very little chance that a peace plan could succeed.
Rogers finds it hard to believe that Washington will change tack on the Palestinian question, “unless the US president somehow gets the idea that his own reputation is being damaged”. There’s always a chance of this. News from the Gaza Strip is relentlessly horrifying and the aforementioned polls suggest many voters are reassessing their views of the conflict. But Trump is heavily indebted for his re-election to the far-right Christian Zionist movement, who wield a great deal of power with the White House.
The other thing that might influence the conflict is if enough of the IDF’s top brass recognise the futility of waging what has always been an unwinnable conflict. This, writes Rogers, is whispered about in Israel’s military circles and one eminent retired general, Itzhak Brik, has come out and said: “Hamas has defeated us.”
These, writes Rogers, are currently the only routes to an end to the conflict.
We mentioned earlier that the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has also pledged to recognise the state of Palestine in September. This was immediately greeted by Trump with the threat that he does so it will derail a trade deal with the US. Whether this will cut any ice with Carney, who had to make concessions to get the trade deal done in the first place, remains to be seen.
But there’s a broader point here, writes Stefan Wolff. As Wolff reports, this week the foreign ministers of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda got together in Washington to sign a ceasefire deal, brokered by the US. Trump also claims to have successfully ended a conflict between India and Pakistan at the end of May and hostilities between Thailand and Cambodia earlier this month.
Meanwhile his efforts to secure peace deals, or even a lasting ceasefire, in Gaza or Ukraine have been unsuccessful.
Wolff considers why some countries respond to Trump’s diplomatic efforts while others don’t. There are a number of reasons, principally the US president’s ability to apply leverage through trade deals or sanctions and the differing complexity of the conflicts.
He also points to the depleted resources of the US state department, Trump’s use of personal envoys with little foreign affairs experience and the US president’s insistence on making all the important decisions himself. He concludes: “The White House simply may not have the bandwidth for the level of engagement that would be necessary to get to a deal in Ukraine and the Middle East.”
One US government department whose resources haven’t been depleted under Donald Trump is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as Ice. Part of the Department of Homeland Security, Ice has been responsible for identifying and detaining non-citizens and undocumented migrants.
Their agents carry guns, wear masks and typically operate in plain clothes, although they often wear military kit. The agency received massive funding via Trump’s One Bzig Beautiful Bill Act earlier this month, which will allow the agency to recruit hundreds, if not thousands, of new agents. The number of arrests is increasing steadily, as is the disquiet their operations are prompting in many American cities, where opposition protests are also growing.
Dafydd Townley, an expert in US politics at the University of Portsmouth, explains how Ice operates and where it sits in Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of illegal migrants from the US.
Simple things like avoiding chemical pesticides and leaving leaves where they fall can help make your garden a more welcoming environment for wildlife and support biodiversity. (Jeffrey Hamilton/Unsplash)
Biodiversity is essential to mitigating and adapting to climate change, enhancing the resilience of ecosystems and safeguarding the ecological functions that all living beings depend on for survival.
Cultivating a garden for biodiversity is not an all-in or nothing task. In fact, there is a wide range of simple actions anyone can take to regenerate and conserve biodiversity right at home.
We are currently organizing a biodiversity public literacy campaign at the National Environmental Treasure, a people’s trust fund devoted to funding Canadian environmental organizations.
Educational, ecologically informed signage can help interpret the garden for visitors. These signs serve as a practical tool to share gardening practices and highlight the garden’s environmental benefits with the community. (Nina Marie Lister)
Together, we’ve created a series of free, fact-based guides to help people learn how to cultivate biodiversity and support for wildlife habitat in private gardens.
This series currently includes four comprehensive booklets, each focusing on key aspects of biodiversity gardening:
While there are plenty of great garden practices out there, these are five easy and impactful ways to boost biodiversity and cultivate a garden safe for urban wildlife, taken directly from our booklets.
Use alternatives to pesticides
Pesticides in your garden can harm beneficial insects and can be detrimental to the environment, wildlife and human health. Instead of using chemical-based pesticides, try natural alternatives like biopesticides, horticultural oils and insecticidal soaps that can be just as effective.
Likewise, attracting predatory insects and wildlife into your garden who will actively feed on the harmful pest is also an effective starting point as this is a process of pest-control that occurs naturally in healthy ecosystems.
There are also DIY pesticides, such as sea salt spray, water-vinegar mixtures and coffee grounds.
A rewilded habitat meadow featuring a selection of native wildflowers and habitat logs left to enrich the soil, support pollinators and offer seating for visitors. (Nina Marie Lister)
Leave the leaves
Decomposing plant litter, like fallen dead leaves, tree bark, needles and twigs, is an important component of maintaining soil health, nutrient cycling and biodiversity.
By choosing to leave the leaves in your garden, you will support the variety of species who overwinter in them, from bees and caterpillars, to butterflies, spiders and more.
Prioritize pollinator-attractive plants
In addition to pollination, insects are beneficial for a variety of other reasons including for pest control, seed dispersal and decomposition.
The best way to attract insects largely depends on which insect you are trying to attract. But as a general rule, it is always a good practice to source plants locally and prioritize native species.
Next best to native plants are benign ornamentals and non-natives. Cultivating a diverse range of flowers, especially native plants and herbs, promotes a resilient ecosystem. It also helps natives out-compete invasive species and to reverse the downward trends of mass species decline.
Birds contribute to healthy ecosystems: they pollinate plants, disperse seeds and prey on insects. Unfortunately, North American bird populations are experiencing a rapid decline due to habitat loss, degradation and other global pressures.
Organic gardening without pesticides or herbicides, keeping cats indoors, removing potential entanglement hazards and using bird-collision prevention markers on reflective surfaces can not only attract birds, but also ensure their safety as well.
Birds contribute to healthy ecosystems: they pollinate plants, disperse seeds and prey on insects. (Unsplash/Richard Bell)
These disputes over the scope and application of bylaws have brought attention to various legal contradictions and outcomes that negatively impact progress on biodiversity recovery, all the while undermining and negating related environmental objectives on private land.
By advocating and encouraging your municipal leaders to adopt science-based biodiversity-supportive bylaws, you help to establish the legal frameworks and political agendas that directly impact long-term ecological health and promote sustainable development and the regeneration of biodiversity.
Ann Dale receives funding from the CRC Secretariat, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Hewlett Foundation.
Sabrina Careri 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.
Summer is popularly imagined as bringing joy to all young people. Yet it is not an equal break or of the same quality for all students.
Learning loss is the decline in academic skills and knowledge that can occur when students are not engaged in structured learning, especially during extended breaks like summer.
Black families face challenges in accessing culturally relevant and affirming summer opportunities. As work by education researcher Obianuju Juliet Bushi and others has documented, for many Black families, the question isn’t just “what will my child do this summer?” It’s “where can my child go to be safe, affirmed and supported?”
As the manager of research with the charitable, Black-led non-profit organization Youth Association for Academics, Athletics and Character Education (YAAACE) in the Jane Finch area of Toronto, I share insights about how culturally responsive community programs can address opportunity gaps, and how parents in Black families can support their kids’ successful transition back to school.
This article draws on insights from conversations I have had with various YAAACE program participants, parents and educators, as well as leadership, including Devon Jones, Nene, and Dave Mitchell.
The opportunity gap refers to the unequal access to resources, supports and learning experiences that affect students’ ability to succeed, often based on race, income and geography.
While these experiences shape the mental health and academic outcomes of students, schools often lack culturally relevant supports or trauma-informed responses.
Summer programs are one important part of countering anti-Black racism in schools. These can support student transitions by mitigating learning loss and helping to close the opportunity gap.
Programs that centre Africentricity and Black excellence led by staff with lived experiences provide culturally responsive and emotionally supportive environments that affirm Black identities.
This builds confidence in Black students and ensures students return to school in the fall better prepared to thrive academically, socially, emotionally and culturally.
YAAACE’s seven-week Summer Institute offers a model that affirms identity, cultivates belonging and accelerates achievement. Each summer, approximately 300 students from grades 3 through 12 attend the institute, which blends literacy and numeracy instruction with culturally responsive learning, arts-based programming, robotics, mentorship and athletics.
Students are taught by Ontario certified teachers and supported by Black staff and practitioners trained in trauma-informed care. For families who can’t afford camp fees, the program is free or subsidized.
YAAACE’s Inspire Academy Mathematics Program provides early access to high school math courses. Grade 8 graduates earn a high school math credit through an intensive summer course led by a team of teachers and teacher assistants in a supportive, inclusive environment. In cases where students are behind provincial standards, they receive additional supports with low staff-to-student ratios.
Summer is a crucial time to support children’s learning and well-being, especially for Black families navigating systems that often overlook their strengths.
Below are three practical ways to support your child during the summer break and when school starts in September.
Create routines that balance learning and Black joy: Set daily routines that include reading, writing or problem solving but just as much make space for rest, play, creativity and movement rooted in Black joy. Learning should be holistic and joyful. It’s important as parents, guardians and community leaders that we not only talk about this but more importantly model it.
‘Refresh, Revive, Thrive: Black Joy in Education’ with Andrew B. Campbell, assistant professor at the University of Toronto.
Stay engaged and be an advocate: Get to know your child’s teachers and school administrators, review school policies to be familiar with how to navigate them (for example, getting accommodations for your child’s needs) and request culturally affirming resources. Don’t hesitate to raise concerns, as your advocacy helps create more supportive learning environments and shows your child that their success is worth fighting for.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duncan Caillard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology
Jason Momoa’s historical epic Chief of War, launching August 1 on Apple TV+, is a triumph of Hawaiians telling their own stories – despite the fact their film and TV production industry now struggles to be viable.
The series stars Momoa (Aquaman, Game of Thrones) as Kaʻaina, an ali’i (chief) who fights for – and later rises against – King Kamehameha I during the bloody reunification of Hawaii.
Already receiving advance praise, the nine-episode first season co-stars New Zealand actors Temeura Morrison, Cliff Curtis and Luciane Buchanan, alongside Hawaiian actors Kaina Makua, Brandon Finn and Moses Goods.
A passion project for Momoa, the Hawaiian star co-created the series with writer Thomas Pa’a Sibbett after years in development. With a reported budget of US$340 million, it is one of the most expensive television series ever produced.
It is also a milestone in Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) representation onscreen. Controversially, however, the production only spent a month in Hawaiʻi, and was mostly shot in New Zealand with non-Hawaiian crews.
Momoa has even expressed an interest in New Zealand citizenship, but the choice of location is more a reflection of the troubled state of the film industry in Hawaiʻi. On the other hand, it is a measure of the success of the New Zealand screen industry, with potential lessons for other countries in the Pacific.
Ea o Moʻolelo – story sovereignty
Set at the turn of the 19th century, Chief of War tells the moʻolelo (story, history) of King Kamehameha I’s conquest of the archipelago.
Hawaiʻi was historically governed by aliʻi nui (high chiefs), and each island was ruled independently. Motivated by the threat of European colonisation and empowered by Western weaponry, Kamehameha established the Hawaiian Kingdom, culminating in full unification in 1810.
The series is an important example of what authors Dean Hamer and Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu have called “Ea o Moʻolelo”, or story sovereignty, which emphasises Indigenous peoples’ right to control their own narrative by respecting the “the inalienable right of a story to its own unique contents, style and purpose”.
Chief of War is also the biggest Hawaiian television series ever produced. Although Hawaiʻi remains a popular setting onscreen, these productions have rarely involved Hawaiians in key decision-making roles.
Sea of troubles
The series hits screens at a time of major disruption in Hollywood, with streaming services upending established business models.
“Linear” network television faces declining viewership and advertising revenue. Movie studios struggle to draw audiences to theatres. The consequences for workers in the the industry have been severe, as the 2023 writers strike showed.
Those changes have had a catastrophic impact on the Hawaiʻi film industry, too.
Long a popular location – Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980, 2010-2020), Magnum P.I. (1980-1988, 2018-2024) and Lost (2004-2010) were all shot on location in Hawaiʻi – it is an expensive place to film.
Actors, crew and production equipment often have to be flown in from the continental United States, and producers compete with tourism for costly accommodation.
Kaina Makua as King Kamehameha and New Zealand actor Luciane Buchanan as Ka’ahumanu in Chief of War. Apple TV+
An industry in transition
These are not uncommon problems in distant locations, and many governments try to attract screen productions through tax incentives and rebates on portions of the production costs.
New Zealand, for example, offers a 20-25% rebate for international productions and 40% for local productions. Hawaiʻi offers a 22-27% rebate.
But this is less than other US states offer, such as Georgia (30%), Louisiana (40%) and New Mexico (40%). Hawaiʻi also has an annual cap of US$50 million on rebates.
To make things even harder, Hawaiʻi offers only limited support for Indigenous filmmakers. Governments in Australia and New Zealand provide targeted funding and support for Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori filmmakers.
By contrast, the Hawaiʻi Film Commission doesn’t provide direct grants to local filmmakers or producers (Indigenous or otherwise). Small amounts of government funding have been administered through the Public Broadcasting Service, but this is now in jeopardy after US President Donald Trump recently cut federal funding.
The Hawaiʻi screen industry faces a perfect storm. For the first time since 2004, film and TV production has ground to a halt. Many workers now doubt the long-term sustainability of their careers.
Lessons from Aotearoa NZ
While there are lessons Hawaiʻi legislators and industry leaders could learn from New Zealand’s example, there should also be a measure of caution.
The Hawaiʻi tax credit system is out of date. But despite industry lobbying, legislation to update it failed to reach the floor of the legislature earlier this year. New tax settings would help make local production viable again.
Secondly, decades of investment in Māori cinema have seen it become diverse, engaging and creatively accomplished. Hawaiʻi could benefit from greater direct investment in Hawaiian storytelling, respecting its cultural value even if it doesn’t turn a commercial profit.
On the other hand, New Zealand has a favourable currency exchange rate with the US which can’t be replicated in Hawaiʻi. And New Zealand film production workers have seen their rights to unionise watered down compared to their American peers.
But if Hawaiʻi can get its settings right, a possible second season of Chief of War may yet be filmed there, which could mark a genuine rejuvenation of its own film industry.
Duncan Caillard 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.
As the cool nights continue, it’s the perfect time to cozy up with a new batch of captivating films and series.
This month’s streaming highlights bring a little bit of everything, from gripping true crime, to thought-provoking political drama, and a nostalgic music documentary on the life and times of piano man Billy Joel.
So grab a blanket (and maybe a snack or two). Your next binge-watch awaits.
One Night in Idaho: The College Murders
Prime Video
I remember seeing the gruesome 2022 murder of four college students in Moscow, Idaho, splashed all over the news in Australia. The world seemed momentarily gripped by the brutality of the killings, which happened in off-campus housing, while two other roommates slept downstairs.
The ensuing investigation was given significantly less attention, though. So when Prime Video dropped this four-episode limited series, well, that was my weekend sorted.
The docuseries features exclusive interviews with the friends and families of the victims, so it doesn’t feel gratuitous. It respectfully recounts the tragedy and explores its continued impact, while honouring the victims. It also builds the kind of tension and disquiet that is so beloved in the true crime genre, but not in a way that makes you feel gross watching it.
Notably, legal proceedings for the case were still underway when One Night in Idaho was released. And the series made it clear there was more to the story which couldn’t be shared with, or by, the producers.
However, the trial has since concluded, with more information now available for anyone wanting to dive deeper into the case. This makes the series an absorbing watch.
– Alexa Scarlata
The Night of the Hunter
Various platforms
In 1955, director Charles Laughton crafted The Night of the Hunter: one of the darkest, strangest fairy tales ever to come out of Hollywood.
Shortly before Ben Harper is hanged for robbing a bank and killing two men, he hides the $10,000 loot in the toy doll of his young daughter Pearl. Only Pearl and her brother John know the secret – until the deranged serial killer-priest Harry Powell hears about the money and sets out to recover it.
Harry marries Willa, Harper’s widow, and then, after killing her, pursues John and Pearl relentlessly across West Virginia.
Robert Mitchum’s depiction of pure evil is one of cinema’s most vivid creations, with LOVE and HATE tattooed on the fingers of each hand.
The film did not align with the mainstream tastes of the era. Audiences and reviewers didn’t know what to make of this abnormal mix of fairy tale logic, nightmarish imagery and biblical allegory.
Successive generations of critics and filmmakers have caught on to its brilliance. Critic Roger Ebert said it was “one of the greatest of all American films”. In 2008, French film magazine Cahiers du cinémavoted it as the second-best film of all time, behind only Citizen Kane (1941).
The Night of the Hunter remains unsettlingly modern, 70 years on.
The highest point in Denmark, Mollehoj, is 171 metres above sea level, so it is plausible to imagine the whole country being overrun by water due to rising sea levels, leading to mass evacuation. This is the basic premise of the Danish series Families Like Ours.
The cleverness of this premise is that it turns comfortable middle-class Danes into refugees, facing hostility, poverty and violence as they seek to resettle. Given Denmark’s hard line on refugees, this makes the series politically powerful, equally so for us in Australia.
The central figure is a young woman, Laura (Amaryllis August), who creates disaster for her family through what she believes is an act of huge empathy. The same is true of Henrik (Magnus Millang), who shoots an innocent man in what he believes is an act of self-defence.
Families Like Ours is not a comfortable series to watch, but it manages to raise central issues of our time, without ever seeming didactic or preachy. It succeeds in combining the personal and the political in a six-part show that is powerful – and leaves enough loose ends for a potential second season.
– Dennis Altman
The Man from Hong Kong
Various platforms
A cinematic firecracker of a film exploded onto international screens 50 years ago, blending martial arts mayhem, Bond-esque set pieces, casual racism – and a distinctly Australian swagger.
From its audacious visual style; to its complex, life-threatening stunts; to its pioneering status as an international co-production, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s The Man from Hong Kong has solidified its place as a cult classic.
A Sydney-based crime lord’s activities come under the scrutiny of a determined Hong Kong detective, Inspector Fang Sing Leng. A fiery East-meets-West martial arts showdown explodes across the Australian landscape, pushing both sides to their limits.
The movie is a playful pastiche that confidently combines martial arts action, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and Westerns, all filtered through a distinctly Australian “crash-zoom” lens.
The film was an influence to Quentin Tarantino and paved the way for films such as Mad Max (1979), particularly in what Trenchard-Smith and his partner in film, stunt legend Grant Page, might call its “cunning stunts”.
The elaborate car chases and explosive stunt setups in The Man from Hong Kong served as prototypes for iconic sequences that would inspire the Mad Max films, among others, a testament to a bygone era of practical effects and thrill seeking audacity.
The Man from Hong Kong remains an exhilarating piece of pure cinema, despite its relatively small budget. It’s an exemplar (and occasional cautionary tale) for filmmakers in terms of international co-production, its cunning stunts, and genre blending.
Based on the book series by Jussi Adler-Olsen, Dept Q is a gripping television adaptation for fans of Nordic noir and British crime drama.
In Edinburgh, Scotland, Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) has returned to work after a shooting which left him physically and psychologically wounded, his colleague partially paralysed, and another colleague dead.
With the dregs of a budget assigned to cold cases, and a team of misfit officers, Morck sets out to solve the four-year-old case of missing Crown prosecutor, Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie).
We follow Merritt’s story across various stages of her life. We see her as a teenager in the lead-up to a devastating crime that left her brother with a traumatic brain injury, as well as later in life, when she loses a major case involving a wealthy man on trial for his wife’s death.
Shortly after the devastating verdict, Merritt went missing on a ferry ride to her childhood home, on the fictionalised island of Mhòr. Returning to the present, we see she has been held captive inside a hyperbaric chamber for the past four years.
The pressure under which Merritt is kept makes Morck’s investigation high stakes from the start, while the movement between past and present highlights the impacts of past traumatic events on both characters.
Dept Q is a fast-paced, breathless thriller which will leave viewers craving its rumoured second season.
– Jessica Gildersleeve
Billy Joel: And So It Goes
HBO Max
Produced by Tom Hanks, this two-part documentary about singer/songwriter Billy Joel covers more than five decades of music. Created very much from Joel’s perspective, who is also the main narrator, the archival content is fascinating, and the music difficult to deny.
Discussion of Joel’s early suicide attempts are a shocking and terrible reminder of how different things might have been. From here, the role of the women in his life – his wives, daughters, and mother (“his champion”) – becomes vital. Beyond the headlines (particularly with his second wife Christie Brinkley), are partners who were muses, business supporters and emotional support pillars – some of whom gave Joel ultimatums when the time came to battle his alcohol addiction.
Brinkley, as well as Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, are particularly moving interviewees. They would wait at home, or stand nervously backstage as Joel “went to work” to earn, repair and rebuild against the odds. No spoilers, but let’s just say Joel ended up in trouble more than once.
On the other hand, the men in Joel’s life are often distant: Jewish grandparents who escaped Nazi Germany; a father who left when Joel was small; a half-brother discovered later in life. These losses are never really healed.
Billy Joel: And So It Goes is a five-hour epic, a story of survival and ultimately, of peace. It is, of course, also a reminder of an incredible catalogue of music – joyful, ordinary and wonderful – and the extraordinary life behind it.
– Liz Giuffre
If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14
Gardening Australia, season 36
ABC iView
Since it first aired in 1990, Gardening Australia has offered tips and inspiration from every state and territory on a weekly basis. A perennial favourite, the show seems to possess perpetual appeal for world-weary viewers open to slowing down by growing plants.
The no-nonsense host Peter Cundall helmed the series until 2008 (Cundall died in 2021 at the age of 94). The honour of “King of Compost” now rests with the gregarious Costa Georgiadis, and a wider cast of presenters that has expanded to be more diverse and engaging. One stalwart from the start, Jane Edmanson, is still flourishing in season 36: her episode 4 segment titled “Fronds with Benefits” certainly caught my eye.
Topics covered this season range from small-space innovation and passion projects, to Indigenous knowledge and bush foods, through to permaculture and climate change. Episodes 6 and 20 – specials on native plants and NAIDOC Week, respectively – are both worth a watch.
While the series can distance renters, and might not be edgy enough for younger audiences, it has managed to stake out ground in the digital realm – with a blooming online presence for budding green thumbs.
One of the longest-running Australian shows still on air, it doesn’t look as though Gardening Australia will be pulling up roots anytime soon.
– Phoebe Hart
The Buccaneers, season two
Apple TV
Loosen your corsets, The Buccaneers is back for a second season of feminist sisterhood and fabulous gowns.
Adapted from Edith Wharton’s unfinished final novel, the series follows a group of outspoken young American women navigating the marriage market in 1870s Victorian England. Gleefully anachronistic with feisty girl power speeches and a contemporary pop music soundtrack, The Buccaneers is equal parts Bridgerton and Gossip Girl (complete with a character played by Leighton Meester).
Season two picks up where the first left off, with Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) and Guy (Matthew Broome) fleeing the country to escape Jinny’s violent husband Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick).
Meanwhile, sister Nan (Kristine Froseth) is busy back home leveraging her position as Duchess of Tintagel to help facilitate Jinny’s return – a campaign that includes wearing a showstopping red gown to a black and white ball. In keeping with the series’ M.O., this might be narrative nonsense, but it looks exquisite.
While trysts and love triangles continue to provide escapist entertainment, Jinny’s abusive marriage dominates later episodes. If season one sought to expose the isolation and entrapment Jinny endured in her marriage, season two foregrounds her resistance in the face of it, intent on highlighting how perpetrators of violence manipulate legal and medical systems to tighten the noose around victims’ necks.
Season two’s veering between frothy excess and melodrama arguably results in some tonal patchiness. Nonetheless, it should be commended for its careful treatment of the corrosive impacts and dangers of coercive control. This – more than the downloadable soundtrack and dazzling costumes – makes it good viewing.
– Rachel Williamson
Dangerous Animals
Prime Video
Dangerous Animals is perhaps the most original and entertaining shark horror film we have seen since Jaws – incorporating traditional elements of the shark thriller genre, while challenging them at the same time.
The film starts with the primal fear of being eaten alive by monstrous sharks, with gruesome shock-thrill scenes of tourists being torn apart in a blood red ocean.
But later, the narrative reminds us it is the boat captain, not the great white, who is the real sadistic killer. Predictably, we see a young bikini-clad woman who gets horribly dismembered (just like the first unforgettable victim in Jaws).
However, it is also a fearless bikini-clad woman, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) who turns the tables on the boat captain, outwits him, rescues her boyfriend and even makes friends with the shark.
Dangerous Animals includes some interesting subtext and commentary, such as when it compares women to fish – creatures hunted for sport – and when it highlights the inherent cruelty of fishing, and the hook that impales the prey.
The film delivers sophisticated special effects and gruesome eco-horror entertainment. It is a fun, self-aware and postmodern watch that will leave you thinking.
The Australian influence is delightfully evident in the irreverent humour. And for anyone who has been to the Gold Coast, there is much pleasure in seeing the film play out across its iconic locations.
This film will trigger your childhood fear of Jaws – but with a twist.
– Susan Hopkins
Shark Whisperer
Netflix
In Shark Whisperer, the great white shark gets an image makeover – from Jaws villain to misunderstood friend and admirer.
However the star of the documentary is not so much the shark, but the model and marine conservationist Ocean Ramsey (yes, that’s her real name).
The film centres on Ramsey’s self-growth journey, with the shark co-starring as a quasi-spiritual medium for finding meaning and purpose (not to mention celebrity status).
Whisperer and the Ocean Ramsey website tap into the collective fascination with dangerous sharks fuelled by popular culture. Many online images show Ramsey in a bikini or touching sharks – she’s small, and vulnerable in the face of great whites. As with forms of celebrity humanitarianism, what I have dubbed “sexy conservationism” leaves itself open to criticism about its methods – even if its intentions are good.
Globally at least 80 million sharks are killed every year. Thanks in part to the hashtag activism of Ocean Ramsey and her millions of fans and followers, Hawaii was the first state in the United States to outlaw shark fishing.
So, Ramsey may be right to argue her ends justify the means.
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.
Late in the evening, the Antarctic sky flushes pink. The male leopard seal wakes and slips from the ice into the water. There, he’ll spend the night singing underwater amongst the floating ice floes.
For the next two months he sings every night. He will sing so loudly, the ice around him vibrates. Each song is a sequence of trills and hoots, performed in a particular pattern.
In a world first, we analysed leopard seal songs and found the predictability of their patterns was remarkably similar to the nursery rhymes humans sing.
We think this is a deliberate strategy. While leopard seals are solitary animals, the males need their call to carry clearly across vast stretches of icy ocean, to woo a mate.
Solitary leopard seals want their call to carry. Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Leopard seals are especially vocal during breeding season, which lasts from late October to early January. A female leopard seal sings for a few hours on the days she is in heat. But the males are the real showstoppers.
Each night, the males perform underwater solos for up to 13 hours. They dive into the sea, singing underwater for about two minutes before returning to the water’s surface to breathe and rest. This demanding routine continues for weeks.
Within a leopard seal population, the sounds themselves don’t vary much in pitch or duration. But the order and pattern in which the sounds are produced varies considerably between individuals.
Our research examined these individual songs. We compared them to that of other vocal animals, and to human music.
Listening to songs from the sea
The data used in the study was collected by one author of this article, Tracey Rogers, in the 1990s.
Rogers rode her quad bike across the Antarctic ice to the edge of the sea and marked 26 individual male seals with dye as they slept. Then she returned to record their songs at night.
The new research involved analysing these recordings, to better understand their structure and patterns. We did this by measuring the “entropy” of their sequences. Entropy measures how predictable or random a sequence is.
What stood out was the similarity between the predictability of human nursery rhymes and leopard seal calls. Nursery rhymes are simple, repetitive and easy to remember — and that’s what we heard in the leopard seal songs.
The range of “entropy” was similar to the 39 nursery rhymes from the Golden Song Book, a collection of words and sheet music for classic children’s songs, which was first published in 1945. It includes classics such:
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Frère Jacques
Ring Around a Rosy
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
Humpty Dumpty
Three Blind Mice
Rockabye Baby.
For humans, the predictable structure of a nursery rhyme melody helps make it simple enough for a child to learn. For a leopard seal, this predictability may enable the individual to learn its song and keep singing it over multiple days. This consistency is important, because changes in pitch or frequency can create miscommunication.
Like sperm whales, leopard seals may also use song to set themselves apart from others and signal their fitness to reproduce. The greater structure in the songs helps ensure listeners accurately receive the message and identify who is singing.
Male leopard seals produce high-pitched cricket-like trills.
An evolving song?
Leopard seals sound very different to humans. But our research shows the complexity and structure of their songs is remarkably similar to our own nursery rhymes.
Communication through song is a very common animal behaviour. However, structure and predictability in mammal song has only been studied in a handful of species. We know very little about what drives it.
Understanding animal communication is important. It can improve conservation efforts and animal welfare, and provide important information about animal cognition and evolution.
Technology has advanced rapidly since our recordings were made in the 1990s. In future, we hope to revisit Antarctica to record and study further, to better understand if new call types have emerged, and if patterns of leopard seal song evolve from generation to generation.
Tracey Rogers receives funding from ARC.
Lucinda Chambers 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 Marlee Bower, Senior Research Fellow, Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney
Without even realising it, your world sometimes gradually gets smaller: less walking, fewer days in the office, cancelling on friends. Watching plans disintegrate on the chat as friends struggle to settle on a date or place for a catch-up.
You might start to feel a bit flat or disconnected. Subtle changes in habit and mood take hold. Could you be … lonely?
It’s not a label many of us identify with easily, especially if you know you’ve got friends, or are in a happy relationship.
But loneliness can happen to us all from time to time – and identifying it is the first step to fixing it.
So, what is loneliness?
Loneliness is the distress we feel when our relationships don’t meet our needs – in quality or quantity.
It’s not the same as being objectively alone (otherwise known as “social isolation”).
You can feel deeply lonely even while surrounded by friends, or totally content on your own.
Loneliness is subjective; many people don’t realise they’re lonely until the feeling becomes persistent.
What are some of the signs to look for?
You may feel a physicalcoldness, emptiness or hollowness (I’ve heard it described as feeling like you are missing an organ). Some research shows social pain is experienced similarly in the brain to physical pain.
In the past, being separated from your tribe meant danger and risk from predators, so our brains developed a way to push us back towards connection.
The pain of loneliness is designed to keep us connected and safe.
Why is it often hard to recognise loneliness?
Sadly, there’s still a lot of stigma around admitting loneliness, especially for men.
Many people resist identifying as lonely, or feel this marks them as a “loser”.
But this silence can make the problem worse.
When no one talks about it, it becomes harder to break the cycle of loneliness, and the stigma remains.
While passing loneliness is normal, chronic or persistent loneliness can hurt our health.
Research shows chronic loneliness is associated with:
depression
anxiety
weakened immunity
heart disease
earlier death.
Loneliness can also become self-reinforcing. When loneliness feels normal, it can start to shape how you see the world: you expect rejection, withdraw more and the cycle deepens.
The earlier you notice you’re lonely, the easier it is to break.
But I’m in a relationship, have loads of friends and a rewarding job
Yes, but you can still be lonely.
Most of us need different kinds of relationships to thrive. It’s not about how many people you know, but whether you feel connected and have a meaningful role in these relationships.
You may feel lonely even with strong friendships if you are lacking deeper connection, shared identity or a sense of community.
This doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful, or a bad friend.
It just means you need more or different kinds of connection.
OK, I’ve realised I am lonely. Now what?
Start by asking yourself: what kind of connection am I missing?
Is it one-to-one friendships? A partner? Casual social interactions? A shared purpose or community?
Then reflect on what’s helped you feel more connected in the past. For some, it’s joining a choir, a book club or a sports group. For others, it may be volunteering or just saying “yes” to small social moments, like chatting with your local barista or learning the name of the local butcher.
If you’re still struggling, a psychologist can help with tailored strategies for building connection.
The structural causes of loneliness
It’s also important to remember loneliness is often not because of personal failings or overall mental health.
We are also learning more about how climate change can disrupt social connection and worsen loneliness due to, for example, higher temperatures or bushfires.
Loneliness is normal, common, human and completely solvable.
Start by noticing it in yourself and reach out if you can.
Let’s start talking about it more, so others can feel less alone too.
Marlee Bower receives funding from the Henry Halloran Urban and Regional Research Initiative, the BHP Foundation, AHURI and NHMRC. She is affiliated with the University of Sydney Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use and Australia’s Mental Health Think Tank.
Imagine an area larger than the Australian Capital Territory, nearly twice the size of London and four times that of New York City covered in coca plantations.
Colombia produces an estimated 2,664 metric tonnes of cocaine annually. That is enough to fill 20 Boeing 747 cargo planes per year.
Not even during the darkest days of Pablo Escobar’s infamous empire did Colombia cultivate as much coca or produce as much cocaine as it does today.
In the past year alone, coca crops expanded by 10% and production capacity soared more than 50%.
So how did it come to this?
A worrying mix
Colombia did not arrive at this point overnight, nor by chance. A complex mix of radical and failed policy shifts, scientific innovation and global demand, among other factors, has shaped this trajectory.
For example, in 2015, Colombia’s Constitutional Court suspended aerial fumigation and banned the use of glyphosate. Despite the herbicide’s effectiveness in killing coca plants, the court cited concerns over its health risks and environmental impact.
Aerial spraying had allowed the government to reduce the risk that manual eradication brigades were exposed to over large areas.
In 2016, then-president Juan Manuel Santos introduced a scheme to substitute coca with non-illicit plants. Incentives were offered to farmers. However, it ended up encouraging many peasants who had never grown coca before to begin cultivating it, simply to qualify for the new subsidies.
It is no surprise that during Santos’ second term (2014–18), Colombia’s coca crops nearly doubled, from 96,000 hectares to more than 170,000.
More recently, in 2022, President Gustavo Petro announced his Paz Total (Total Peace) policy. This was designed to bring trafficking organisations – including Colombia’s second largest narco-terrorist group, the National Liberation Army (ELN) – to the negotiation table.
What happens in Colombia matters to Australia because criminal innovation is fuelling greater cocaine volumes and higher purity. This means more is flowing towards Australian shores.
Colombia’s coca production is being reshaped by enhanced cultivation techniques, more secure and autonomous smuggling methods, and an increasingly fragmented criminal landscape.
Production is now more efficient and profitable than ever. Growers are planting improved coca leaf varieties and achieve more harvest cycles per year with higher alkaloid yields per kilo.
Some networks are also transitioning from manned to unmanned operations.
Also, the growing presence and operational influence of Mexican cartels in Colombia has amplified the scope and scale of alliances between transnational organised crime groups across Europe, Asia and Oceania. International police investigations are even more complex.
Despite record-high seizure numbers and total volumes intercepted, Australia is still among the most attractive destination markets for drug trafficking organisations because of the high price users pay for the drugs.
Unless something radically changes in Colombia, Australia continues to face growing risks from maritime trafficking routes. There is also an increased threat of being used as a transit and money laundering hub in the global drug economy.
Some possible solutions
Even if conditions in Colombia were to change swiftly and drastically, supply-focused strategies alone are insufficient to mitigate the risks facing Australia.
After all, Colombia cannot simply fumigate its way out of this cocaine crisis, just as Australia cannot arrest its way out of it.
However, continued collaboration between the Australian Federal Police and the National Police of Colombia remains essential to keep drugs at bay.
The appointment of Colombia’s first police attaché to Australia will be a welcome and meaningful step forward. (While not yet formally announced, the Colombian embassy in Australia has informed me and several other experts the country is appointing the attaché.)
Both countries must deepen this relationship and collectively engage meaningfully and frequently to help solve the problem.
Cesar Alvarez 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.
In 2024, the problem of deepfakes became a crisis in South Korea: more than 500 schools and universities were targeted in a coordinated wave of deepfake sexual abuse.
AI-generated sexualised images of students — mostly girls — were circulated in encrypted Telegram groups. The perpetrators were often classmates of the victims.
A new report from global child-protection group ECPAT with funding from the UK-based Churchill Fellowship takes a close look at what happened in Korea, so other countries can understand and avoid similar crises. Here’s what Australia can learn.
A glimpse into our future?
The events in South Korea were not just about deepfake technology. They were about how the technology was used.
Perpetrators created groups on the Telegram messaging platform to identify mutual acquaintances in local schools or universities. They then formed “Humiliation Rooms” to gather victims’ photos and personal information so they could create deepfake sexual images.
Rooms for more than 500 schools and universities have been identified, often with thousands of members. The rooms were filled with deepfake imagery, created from photos on social media and the school yearbook.
Bots within the app allowed users to generate AI nudes in seconds. One such bot had more than 220,000 subscribers. The bot gave users two deepfake images for free, with additional images available for the equivalent of one Australian dollar.
Telegram screenshots show an automated deepfake bot that charges users to produce images. Telegram
This wasn’t the dark web. It was happening on a mainstream platform, used by millions.
And it wasn’t just adult predators. More than 80% of those arrested were teenagers. Many were described as “normal boys” by their teachers — students who had never shown signs of violent behaviour before.
The abuse was gamified. Users earned rewards for inviting friends, sharing images, and escalating the harm. It was social, yet anonymous.
Could this happen in Australia?
We have already seen smaller, less organised deepfake incidents in Australian schools. However, the huge scale and ease of use of the Korean abuse system should be cause for alarm.
The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation recorded 58,503 reports of pictures and videos of online child abuse in the 2023–24 financial year. This is an average of 160 reports per day (4,875 reports a month), a 45% increase from the previous year.
This increase is likely to continue. In response to these risks, the Australian government, through the eSafety Commissioner, is applying the existing Basic Online Safety Expectations to generative AI services. This creates a clear expectation these services must work proactively to prevent the creation of harmful deepfake content.
Internationally, the European Union’s AI Act has set a precedent for regulating high-risk AI applications, including those that affect children. In the United States, the proposed Take It Down Act aims to criminalise the publication of non-consensual intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.
These are a start, but a lot more work remains to be done to provide a safe online environment for young people. The Korean experience shows how easily things can escalate when these tools are used at scale, especially in peer-to-peer abuse among adolescents.
5 lessons from Korea
The South Korean crisis holds several lessons for Australia.
1. Prevention must start early. Korea’s crisis involved children as young as 12 (and even younger in some primary schools targeted). We need comprehensive digital ethics and consent education in primary schools, not just in high schools.
2. Law enforcement needs AI tools of their own to keep up. Just as offenders are using AI to scale up abuse, police must be equipped with AI to detect and investigate it. This may include facial recognition, content detection, and automated triage systems, all governed by strict privacy protocols.
3. Platforms must also be held accountable. Telegram only began cooperating with South Korean authorities after immense public pressure. Australia must enforce safety-by-design principles and ensure encrypted platforms are not safe havens for abuse.
4. Support services must be scaled up. Korea’s crisis caused trauma for entire communities. Victims often had to continuing going to school with perpetrators in the same classrooms. Australia must invest in trauma-informed support systems that can respond to both individual and collective harm.
5. We must listen to victims and survivors. Policy must be shaped by those who have experienced digital abuse. Their insights are crucial to designing effective and compassionate responses.
Joel Scanlan 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 – Global Perspectives – By Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, Australian National University; and Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Fellow, Victoria University
When it comes to dealing with two of the biggest current crises in the Muslim world – the devastation of Gaza and the Taliban’s draconian rule in Afghanistan – Arab and Muslim states have been staggeringly ineffective.
Their chief body, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in particular, has been strong on rhetoric but very short on serious, tangible action.
The OIC, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, is composed of 57 predominantly Muslim states. It is supposed to act as a representative and consultative body and make decisions and recommendations on the major issues that affect Muslims globally. It calls itself the “collective voice of the Muslim world”.
Yet the body has proved to be toothless in the face of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza, triggered in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023.
The OIC has equally failed to act against the Taliban’s reign of terror in the name of Islam in ethnically diverse Afghanistan.
Many strong statements
Despite its projection of a united umma (the global Islamic community, as defined in my coauthored book Islam Beyond Borders), the OIC has ignominiously been divided on Gaza and Afghanistan.
True, it has condemned Israel’s Gaza operations. It’s also called for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the starving population of the strip.
It has also rejected any Israeli move to depopulate and annex the enclave, as well as the West Bank. These moves would render the two-state solution to the long-running Israeli–Palestinian conflict essentially defunct.
Further, the OIC has welcomed the recent joint statement by the foreign ministers of 28 countries (including the United Kingdom, many European Union members and Japan) calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as well as France’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine.
The OIC is good at putting out statements. However, this approach hasn’t varied much from that of the wider global community. It is largely verbal, and void of any practical measures.
What the group could do for Gaza
Surely, Muslim states can and should be doing more.
For example, the OIC has failed to persuade Israel’s neighbouring states – Egypt and Jordan, in particular – to open their border crossings to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza, the West Bank or Israel, in defiance of Israeli leaders.
Nor has it been able to compel Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to suspend their relations with the Jewish state until it agrees to a two-state solution.
Further, the OIC has not adopted a call by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for Israel to be suspended from the UN.
Nor has it urged its oil-rich Arab members, in particular Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to harness their resources to prompt US President Donald Trump to halt the supply of arms to Israel and pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war.
Stronger action on Afghanistan, too
In a similar vein, the OIC has failed to exert maximum pressure on the ultra-extremist and erstwhile terrorist Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Since sweeping back into power in 2021, the Taliban has ruled in a highly repressive, misogynist and draconian fashion in the name of Islam. This is not practised anywhere else in the Muslim world.
In December 2022, OIC Secretary General Hissein Brahim Taha called for a global campaign to unite Islamic scholars and religious authorities against the Taliban’s decision to ban girls from education.
But this was superseded a month later, when the OIC expressed concern over the Taliban’s “restrictions on women”, but asked the international community not to “interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs”. This was warmly welcomed by the Taliban.
In effect, the OIC – and therefore most Muslim countries – have adopted no practical measures to penalise the Taliban for its behaviour.
It has not censured the Taliban nor imposed crippling sanctions on the group. And while no Muslim country has officially recognised the Taliban government (only Russia has), most OIC members have nonetheless engaged with the Taliban at political, economic, financial and trade levels.
Why is it so divided?
There are many reasons for the OIC’s ineffectiveness.
For one, the group is composed of a politically, socially, culturally and economically diverse assortment of members.
But more importantly, it has not functioned as a “bridge builder” by developing a common strategy of purpose and action that can overcome the geopolitical and sectarian differences of its members.
In the current polarised international environment, the rivalry among its member states – and with major global powers such as the United States and China – has rendered the organisation a mere talking shop.
This has allowed extremist governments in both Israel and Afghanistan to act with impunity.
It is time to look at the OIC’s functionality and determine how it can more effectively unite the umma.
This may also be an opportunity for its member states to develop an effective common strategy that could help the cause of peace and stability in the Muslim domain and its relations with the outside world.
Amin Saikal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dafydd Townley, Teaching Fellow in US politics and international security, University of Portsmouth
There are masked men, and some women, on the streets in American cities, sometimes travelling in unmarked cars, often carrying weapons and wearing military-style kit. They have the power to identify, arrest, detain non-citizens and deport undocumented immigrants. They also have the right to interrogate any individual who they believe is not a citizen over their right to remain in the US.
These are agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, known as Ice. This is a federal law enforcement agency, which falls under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and is playing a significant and contentious role in the implementation of Donald Trump’s tough immigration policy.
On the campaign trail Trump promised “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”. And he is giving Ice more power to deliver his plans.
Since Trump took office in January, Ice funding has been significantly increased. Trump’s “big beautiful bill”, passed by Congress in July 2025, gave Ice US$75 billion (£55 billion) of funding for the next four years, up from around US$8 billion a year.
This funding boost will allow the agency to recruit more agents as well as adding thousands more beds plus extensions to buildings to increase the capacity of detention centres. There is also new funding for advanced surveillance tools including AI-assisted facial recognition and mobile data collection. There’s another US$30 billion going to frontline operations, covering removing immigrants and transport to detention centres.
The president has committed to deporting everyone who is in the US illegally, that is estimated by the Wall Street Journal to be about 4% of the current US population. For the past five months, the numbers of people being picked up by Ice agents has been ticking up fast.
Average daily arrests were up 268% to about 1,000 a day in June 2025, compared with the same month a year earlier. This was also a 42% rise on May 2025, according to data analysis from the Guardian and the Deportation Data Project. However, this is still considerably short of the 3,000 a day ordered by secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Ice’s tactics have already attracted significant criticism. Right-leaning broadcaster Fox News has reported on how masked agents are not showing ID or naming their agency when picking up people in raids. Other reporting has highlighted allegations that American citizens are also sometimes being swept up in the raids.
The agency, currently led by acting director Todd M. Lyons, has three main divisions: the Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which identifies and deports undocumented immigrants as well as manages detention centres. The Homeland Security Investigations, which investigates criminal activities with an international or border nexus such as human trafficking, narcotics, and weapons smuggling. The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor provides legal advice to Ice and prosecutes immigration cases in court.
Lyons claimed that mask wearing was necessary because of Ice agents being “doxed” – when a person’s personal information such as names and home addresses are revealed online without their permission. Assaults on Ice agents have risen, he claimed. DHS data suggested that there were 79 assaults on Ice agents from January to June 2025, compared to ten in the same period in 2024.
Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries compared mask wearing by Ice agents to secret police forces in authoritarian regimes. “We’re not behind the Iron Curtain. This is not the 1930s.”
The Ice agency was established in 2003 by the George W. Bush administration, partly as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and was part of a broader reorganisation of federal agencies under the then newly created DHS. It incorporated parts of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and some elements of the US Customs Service.
According to the agency’s website, Ice’s core mission is “to protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety”.
News coverage of Ice agents wearing masks and not identifying themselves.
What’s changed?
At the start of the administration in January, the White House gave Ice the authority to hasten the deportation of immigrants that had entered the country with government authorisation during the previous administration. This “expedited removal” authority allowed Ice to deport individuals without requiring an appearance before an immigration judge.
As arrests have grown in the past months, Lyons told CBS News that Ice would detain any undocumented immigrant, even if they did not have a criminal record.
And the Trump administration has also allowed Ice agents to make arrests at immigration courts, which had previously been off limits. This restriction was introduced by the Biden administration in 2021 to ensure witnesses, victims of crimes and defendants would still appear in court without fear of arrest for immigration violations, unless the target was a national security threat.
Protests over Ice raids have spread across California.
However, Lyons rescinded those restrictions in May, part of a broader shift towards aggressive enforcement.
Much of the time, Ice has targeted illegal immigrants. But the agency has also arrested and detained some individuals who were residents (green card holders) or tourists – and, in some cases, citizens.
In recent weeks, according to the Washington Post, Ice has been ordered to increase the number of immigrants shackled with GPS-enabled ankle monitors. This would significantly increase the number of immigrants that are under surveillance. Ankle monitors also restrict where people can travel.
Sparking protests
There have been numerous public protests about Ice raids, most notably in California. This peaked on June 6 after Ice had conducted numerous raids in Los Angeles, resulting in clashes between agents and protesters. This led to the White House sending around 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, despite opposition from California governor Gavin Newsom.
Part of the friction between the Trump administation and the state is that Los Angeles and San Francisco have adopted local policies to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities including Ice. California has sanctuary laws, such as SB 54, that prohibit local police and sheriffs from assisting Ice with civil immigration enforcement.
However, Trump shows every sign of pushing harder and faster to crack down on illegal immigrants, and Ice agents are clearly at the forefront of how he aims to do it.
Dafydd Townley 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.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are pushing to get Rupert Murdoch deposed, and quickly.
The US president is suing the billionaire media owner, alongside the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and others, for libel after it published an article alleging that Trump once wrote a “bawdy” birthday letter to the convicted sex offender, the late Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump and Murdoch have a transactional friendship that goes back decades. Despite past tensions, this rupture is something new in a relationship that has continued to serve both men’s interests.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, professor of journalism Andrew Dodd at the University of Melbourne takes us back to where their relationship began in 1970s New York, to understand how Murdoch helped to build brand Trump.
Murdoch was already a very successful media magnate in Australia and the UK before he made his move to America. In 1976, after dabbling in two newspapers in Texas, he bought the New York Post.
“ Murdoch wanted to make it big in the US and to do that he really needed to break into New York,” says Dodd. US television networks were all based in US, he explains, “so by influencing what was going on in Manhattan, he was influencing the entire country’s media.”
Meanwhile, Trump was a young property developer from Queens. “ He’s wanting to develop and build, and he’s also wanting a profile because the profile will help him along the way,” says Dodd. “But he’s also an egomaniac. He needs publicity for its own sake, and so he’s attracted to the media.” Trump became easy and frequent fodder for the new Page Six gossip column of Murdoch’s New York Post.
Dodd says that both men saw in each other “opportunities for their own advancement”. For Trump, it was about access to notoriety. For Murdoch, a newcomer and foreigner in New York, he needed to make friends quickly and start establishing relationships. “He’s becoming ingratiated with power in the city, and so they’re all using one another,” he says.
Listen to the conversation with Andrew Dodd about Trump and Murdoch and the power they now wield over each other, on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with assistance from Ashlynne McGhee. 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. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Andrew Dodd 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 Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
Labor is well-placed to win three seats in the electorate of Bass at the Tasmanian election, although its party totals imply it deserves only two. This would give left-leaning MPs a total of 20 of 35 seats. Interstate, New South Wales Labor has surged to a large lead in a Resolve poll.
The postal receipt deadline for the July 19 Tasmanian state election passed at 10am Tuesday. Final statewide vote shares
were 39.9% Liberals (up 3.2% since the March 2024 election), 25.9% Labor (down 3.2%), 14.4% Greens (up 0.5%), 2.9% Shooters, Fishers and Farmers (up 0.6%), 1.6% Nationals (new) and 15.3% independents (up 5.7%).
Tasmania uses the proportional Hare-Clark system to elect its lower house. There are five electorates corresponding to Tasmania’s five federal seats, and each electorate returns seven members, for a total of 35 lower house MPs.
Under this system, a quota for election is one-eighth of the vote or 12.5%, but half of this (6.2%) is usually enough to give a reasonable chance of election. There’s no above the line section like for the federal Senate. Instead, people vote for candidates not parties, with at least seven preferences required for a formal vote.
Robson rotation means that candidates for each party are randomised across ballot papers for that electorate, so that on some ballot papers a candidate will appear at the top of their party’s ticket and on others at the bottom.
This means parties can’t control the ordering of their candidates. Independents can be listed in single-candidate columns.
Leakage occurs when party candidates with more than one quota are elected and their surplus distributed, or when minor candidates are excluded and their preferences distributed. In the federal Senate, the large majority of votes are cast above the line, and these votes cannot leak from the party that received a first preference vote.
The consequence of leakage is that parties will lose votes from their totals during the distribution of preferences when their own candidates are elected or excluded. Single-candidate tickets can’t lose votes, and will only gain as other candidates are excluded.
Unlike other states and federally, the Tasmanian distribution of preferences is done manually. Before the distributions, analyst Kevin Bonham had called 14 of the 35 seats for the Liberals, ten for Labor, five for the Greens and four for left-leaning independents, leaving two undecided (the final seats in Bass and Lyons).
Labor well-placed to win three seats in Bass
Final primary votes in Bass gave the Liberals 3.34 quotas, Labor 2.20, the Greens 1.32, the Shooters 0.32 and independent George Razay 0.27. The Shooters and Razay had single-candidate tickets that can’t leak votes.
After three days of preference distributions, vote shares in Bass are 3.30 quotas for the Liberals, 2.25 for Labor, 1.31 for the Greens, 0.40 for the Shooters and 0.37 for Razay.
On quota fractions, the final seat in Bass looks as if it should go to the Shooters or Razay. However, with one Labor candidate already elected, the two leading Labor candidates (Jess Greene and Geoff Lyons) each have about 0.37 quotas with two Labor candidates still to be excluded.
If the remaining Labor votes divide roughly evenly between Greene and Lyons, they would each have about 0.62 quotas. Greens preferences will then favour Labor whether their final opponent is the Shooters or the Liberals. So Labor is well-placed to win three seats in Bass despite their party total implying they only deserve two.
If Labor wins the final Bass seat, Labor, the Greens and left-leaning independents would have a total of 20 of the 35 seats, making any Labor attempt to form government easier.
In Lyons, final primary votes gave the Liberals 3.36 quotas, Labor 2.27, the Greens 1.08, the Shooters 0.53 and the Nationals 0.33. The Shooters had a single-candidate ticket.
The Liberals now have 3.36 quotas, Labor 2.44, the Greens one, the Shooters 0.68 and the Nationals 0.34. Neither Labor nor the Liberals have any chance of pulling off an even split across candidates, so the Shooters will win the final Lyons seat.
NSW Resolve poll: Labor surges to large lead
A New South Wales state Resolve poll for The Sydney Morning Herald, conducted July 13–18 from a sample of 1,054, gave Labor 38% of the primary vote (up five since April), the Coalition 32% (down four), the Greens 13% (up two), independents 8% (down six) and others 10% (up four).
Resolve does not usually give a two-party estimate for its state polls, but The Poll Bludger estimated a Labor lead by 57–43. Despite the strong voting intentions for Labor, Labor incumbent Chris Minns’ lead over Liberal Mark Speakman as preferred premier narrowed from 40–15 to 35–16. This indicates that Labor’s surge is due to the federal election result.
Resolve polls taken well before an election have overstated the independent vote as they give independent as an option in all seats, when many seats don’t have viable independents. The six-point drop for independents in this poll suggests a different method is now being used.
By 32–25, respondents expected their personal outlook in the next year to get better rather than worse, but by 25–21 they expected the NSW state outlook to get worse.
Additional questions from federal Resolve poll
I previously covered a national Resolve poll for Nine newspapers that gave Labor a 56–44 lead. On reforms, 36% thought the government should take the opportunity from its landslide re-election to undertake reforms, while 32% thought it should restrict itself to policies put forward at the election.
By 47–20, respondents opposed raising the GST rate even if it would reduce other taxes. By 31–26, they supported reducing or ditching negative gearing concessions. By 36–27, they supported reducing or ditching capital gains tax concessions on properties.
By 57–18, respondents thought the opposition should work with the government to negotiate changes, rather than just oppose major reforms.
By 53–18, respondents thought Donald Trump’s election as United States president last November a bad outcome for Australia (68–11 bad in April, after Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs).
By 46–22, they thought Australia becoming more independent from the US on foreign policy and national security would be good. By 38–26, voters blamed Trump more than Albanese for the lack of a meeting.
Adrian Beaumont 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.
Espionage cost Australia $12.5 billion in 2023-24, according to a study by ASIO and the Australian Institute of Criminology.
The figure includes the direct costs of known espionage incidents, including state-sponsored theft of intellectual property, as well as the indirect costs of countering and responding.
Details of the Cost of Espionage report were released by the head of ASIO, Mike Burgess, in delivering the annual Hawke Lecture on Thursday night. Espionage is defined as “the theft of Australian information by another country that is seeking an advantage over Australia”.
Burgess said the Institute estimated foreign cyber spies stole nearly $2 billion from Australian companies and businesses in trade secrets and intellectual property in 2023-24.
In one instance, spies hacked into a major Australian exporters computer network, stealing commercially sensitive information.
“The theft gave the foreign country a significant advantage in subsequent contract negotiations, costing Australia hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Burgess pointed to another espionage incident several years ago when an overseas delegation visited a sensitive Australian horticultural facility.
A delegation member entered a restricted area and photographed a rare, valuable variety of fruit tree. A staff member intervened and deleted the image but it later turned out several of the tree’s branches had been stolen and smuggled out of Australia.
“Almost certainly, the stolen plant material allowed scientists in the other country to reverse engineer and replicate two decades of Australian research and development.”
In another instance, an Australian defence contractor invented and sold a world-leading innovation.
At first sales boomed but then they collapsed, and “customers began flooding the company’s repair centre with faulty products. While the returns looked genuine, closer examination revealed they were cheap and nasty knock offs.
“An investigation uncovered what happened.
“One year earlier, a company representative attended a defence industry event overseas and was approached by an enthusiastic local. She insisted on sharing some content via a USB, which was inserted into a company laptop. The USB infected the system with malware allowing hackers to steal the blueprints for the product.
“Almost certainly, the ‘enthusiastic local’ worked for a foreign intelligence service. The blueprints were given to a state-owned enterprise which mass-produced the knock-offs and deprived the Australian company millions of dollars in lost revenue – the tangible cost of espionage.”
Burgess said many entities do not realise their secrets have been stolen by espionage.
He stressed the institute was deliberately conservative, only modelling costs it could confirm and calculate.
“That means many of the most serious, significant and cascading costs of espionage are not included in the 12.5 billion dollar figure. The potential loss of strategic advantage, sovereign decision-making and warfighting capacity hold immense value, but not a quantifiable dollar value.”
“The Institute estimates Australia prevented tens of billions of dollars of additional costs by stopping or deterring spying,” Burgess said.
He said ASIO estimated the espionage threat “will only intensify. It is already more serious and sophisticated than ever before, so our response must also be more serious and sophisticated than ever before.”
Russian spies booted out in 2022
Burgess confirmed that in 2022 a number of “undeclared Russian intelligence officers” were removed from Australia.
“The decision followed a lengthy ASIO investigation that found the Russians recruiting proxies and agents to obtain sensitive information, and employing sophisticated tradecraft to disguise their activities.”
Last year, two Russian born Australian citizens were charged with an espionage related offence.
Russian remained a persistent and aggressive espionage threat, Burgess said. “But Russia is by no means the only country we have to deal with.
“You would be genuinely shocked by the number and names of countries trying to steal our secrets.
“The obvious candidates are very active – I’ve previously named China, Russia and Iran – but many other countries are also targeting anyone and anything that could give them a strategic or tactical advantage, including sensitive but unclassified information.”
Burgess said increasingly foreign intelligence services were broadening their collection efforts beyond traditional categories. They were aggressively targeting science and technology, and public and private sector projects, negotiations and investments. This includes Antarctic research, green technology, critical minerals and rare earths extraction and processing.
‘A very unhealthy’ interest in AUKUS
Burgess said foreign intelligence services were “taking a very unhealthy interest in AUKUS and its associated capabilities.”
“Australia’s defence sector is a top intelligence collection priority for foreign governments seeking to blunt our operational edge, gain insights into our operational readiness and tactics, and better understand our allies’ capabilities.
“Targets include maritime and aviation-related military capabilities, but also innovations with both commercial and military applications.
“And with AUKUS, we are not just defending our sovereign capability. We are also defending critical capability shared by and with our partners.”
He said foreign intelligence services were “proactive, creative and opportunistic” in targeting present and former defence employees.
There was relentless cyber espionage, in-person targeting and technical collection.
“In recent years, for example, defence employees travelling overseas have been subjected to covert room searches, been approached at conferences by spies in disguise and given gifts containing surveillance devices.”
Two dozen major disruptions in the last three years
Burgess said that ASIO had detected and disrupted 24 major cases of foreign interference in the last three years alone.
This was more than in the previous eight years combined. They were just the major disruptions – there were many other cases. Among the examples he gave were:
spies recruited a security clearance holder who handed over official documents on free trade negotiations
foreign companies connected to intelligence services sought to buy access to personal data sets; sought to buy land near sensitive military sites, and sought to collaborate with researchers developing sensitive technologies
foreign intelligence services tried to get someone employed as a researcher in a media outlet, aiming to shape reporting and receive early warning of critical stories
spies convinced a state bureaucrat to login to a database to obtain details of people considered dissidents by a foreign regime
nation state hackers compromised a peak industry body’s network getting sensitive information
a foreign intelligence service had multiple agents and their family members apply for Australian government jobs to get access to classified information.
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.
As any leader of a political party knows, when you demote people they can become difficult, or worse.
Among Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s multiple problems are two very unhappy former frontbenchers. Sarah Henderson, who was opposition education spokeswoman last term, and Jane Hume, who had a high profile in finance, were dumped to the backbench in Ley’s reshuffle.
There were mixed views about Ley’s judgement. But it was clear neither would take the relegation lying down.
Henderson at the time declared she found it regrettable that “a number of high-performing Liberal women have been overlooked or demoted”. Hume said, ominously, “there is something very liberating about being on the backbench and being able to speak without having to stick to the party line and without having to stick to talking points”.
This week, both women used their freedom to freelance.
On the government’s student debt legislation, Henderson made her presence felt by moving an amendment designed to cap indexation. It got only a handful of votes from the crossbench. The opposition abstained.
Also in the Senate, Hume put down her marker, on a motion moved by One Nation repudiating the net zero target. Predictably, Matt Canavan (Nationals) and Alex Antic (right-wing South Australian Liberal) voted for the motion. The Liberals’ official position – given they’re in no-man’s land, reviewing their policy – was to abstain. But Hume and Andrew McLachlan (a moderate from South Australia), voted against the motion.
Hume has kept a regular spot on Sky News Australia, an opportunity to use her “liberated” voice.
Then there’s Andrew Hastie who, despite being a frontbencher, doesn’t feel under collective discipline. Hastie, whom some see as a possible future leader, didn’t get his wish for a non-security portfolio in the reshuffle. Instead, the former defence spokesman was moved to home affairs, a broad job that presents many opportunities.
When the Western Australian Liberal council passed a motion rejecting net zero at the weekend, Hastie gave his enthusiastic backing.
He then got stuck into state Liberal leader Basil Zempilas, who had said the WA parliamentary party supported “the status quo on the net zero targets”.
Hastie fired off a newsletter to supporters declaring, “This motion – moved and supported by my division of Canning – reflects a growing concern from mainstream Australians about our expensive energy bills, unreliable supply, and the erosion of our national sovereignty.
“I was therefore disappointed to see [Zempilas] publicly dismiss those concerns.”
The government was quick to exploit this, with Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen telling parliament on Thursday Hastie “will undermine any opposition leader he can find. He’s taking a practice run in Perth for what he intends to do in Canberra, some time in the next 12 months as we all know. He loves undermining leaders of the opposition.”
Peter Dutton was a disaster for the Liberals, as the election drubbing showed. But he was (mostly) able to impose substantial unity on the parliamentary party.
That was seen as a big achievement. But it had two downsides. At the time, it stifled what might have been useful internal debate, or warnings, that could have helped the opposition. And now it has left some Liberals who felt they held their tongues last time determined not to do so again. Even those not aggrieved for specific reasons are likely to be more inclined to be outspoken this term.
Ley will not be able to impose the degree of discipline that Dutton did.
Meanwhile, as the aggrieved Liberals were stamping their feet, their colleague James Paterson, new to his post of finance spokesman, was seeking to repair some of the political damage the opposition did by its attacks on the public service.
The hostility to the public service goes back a long way – some might argue it’s ingrained in the Liberals’ DNA. It was strong during Scott Morrison’s prime ministership.
Dutton promised massive cuts to the Canberra-based public service, which even the Liberals admit would have been unattainable. Hume’s plan to force public servants back into the office five days a week, a policy the opposition had to drop midway through the election campaign, has also left deep suspicion.
For the Liberals, attacking the public service has always appeared a ready road to savings. But the political dangers are obvious. It is not the seats directly affected – the ACT always votes Labor. But assaults on the public service can be readily segued by the Coalition’s opponents into code for attacks on government services.
Paterson, who’s also shadow minister for the public service, told an Australian Financial Review summit on government services, “It is not lost on me that promising significant cuts to the size of the APS or changing the way public servants work from home was poorly received and not just here in Canberra.”
Paterson said, “I have great respect for public servants, and I recognise the significant contributions they make to our democracy.
“The Coalition aspires to have a respectful, constructive relationship with the APS. We want a motivated, high-performing public service that works in genuine partnership with government to deliver the services Australians rely on. And we want it to do so as a trusted steward of taxpayer dollars.”
On the basis of history, the public servants will remain suspicious of the Liberals; Paterson’s aim will be to mitigate that as much as possible.
In a twist on the working-from-home debate, the secretary of the health department, Blair Comley, this week expressed some concern about the implications of the trend.
“I don’t think anyone is suggesting we go back to a rigid five days a week and no flexibility,” Comley told the AFR summit. But he was worried about what was happening to “learning, development, mentoring, and what’s happening to the social capital”.
Knowing the sensitivities of the issue, Comley was extremely careful with his words. Hume, having been burned once, was not putting her hand into this particular fire again. “That is not a policy that the Coalition has now, not a policy that we took to the election”, she said. There is a limit to being liberated.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell
An Israeli soldier prays in the Evyatar outpost in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on July 7, 2024. AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg
Since Oct. 7, 2023, as Israel’s war against Hamas drags on in the Gaza Strip, a quieter but escalating war has unfolded in the West Bank between Israelis and Palestinians.
Attacks include harassment of Palestinian villagers trying to access their crops or work outside their villages, as well as more extreme and organized violence, such as raiding villages to vandalize property. While many of the attacks are unprovoked, some are what settlers call “price tag” actions: retaliation for Palestinian violence against Israelis, such as car-rammings, rock-throwing and stabbings.
Mourners attend the funeral of three Palestinians who were killed when Jewish settlers stormed the West Bank village of Kafr Malik, on June 26, 2025. AP Photo/Leo Correa
As a scholar who has studied Jewish religious extremism for over two decades, I contend this campaign is not merely a result of rising tension between the settlers and their Palestinian neighbors amid the Gaza conflict. Rather, it is fueled by a confluence of ideological fervor, opportunism and far-right Israelis’ political vision for the region.
Religious redemption
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967’s Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, transforming this small region of around 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers) to an amalgam of Jewish and Palestinian enclaves. Most countries other than Israel consider Jewish settlements illegal, but they have rapidly expanded in recent decades, becoming a major challenge for any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The ideological roots of violence lie within religious Zionism: a worldview embraced by about 20% of Israel’s Jewish population, including most West Bank settlers.
The great majority of the leaders of the early Zionist movement held strong secular views. They pushed for the creation of a Jewish state over the objections of Orthodox figures, who argued that it should be a divine creation rather than a human-made polity.
Religious Zionists, on the other hand, view the creation of modern-day Israel and its military victories as steps in a divine redemption, which will culminate in a Jewish kingdom led by a heaven-sent Messiah. Adherents believe contemporary events, particularly those asserting Jewish control over the entire historical land of Israel, can accelerate this process.
In recent decades, influential religious Zionist leaders have argued that final redemption requires Israel’s total military triumph and the annihilation of its enemies, particularly the Palestinian national movement. From this perspective, the devastation of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war are a divine test – one the nation can only pass by achieving a complete victory.
The violence in the West Bank reflects an extension of the same beliefs. Extreme groups within the settler population aim to solidify Jewish control by making Palestinian communities’ lives in the region unsustainable.
Opportunistic violence
Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, which killed over 1,200 Israelis, traumatized the nation. It also hardened many Jewish Israelis’ conviction that a Palestinian state would be an existential threat, and thus Palestinians cannot be partners for peace.
This shift in sentiment created a permissive environment for violence. While settler attacks previously drew criticism from across the political spectrum, extremist violence faces less public condemnation today – as does the government’s lack of effort to curb it.
This increase in violence is also enabled by a climate of impunity. Israeli security forces have been stretched thin by operations in Gaza, Syria, Iran and beyond. In the West Bank, the military increasingly relies on settler militias known as “Emergency Squads,” which are armed by the Israeli military for self-defense, and army units composed primarily of religious Zionist settlers, such as the Netzah Yehuda Battalion. Such groups have little incentive to stop attacks on Palestinians, and at times, they have participated.
Together, violence from below and policy from above advance a clear strategic goal: the coerced depopulation of Palestinians from rural areas to solidify Israeli sovereignty over the entire West Bank.
Instead, such policies seem to entrench many Israelis’ perception of international bias and double standards: the sense that critics are antisemitic, or that few outsiders understand the country’s challenges – particularly in light of threats from entitles like Iran, Hamasand Hezbollah, which openly seek Israel’s elimination.
More targeted policies aim specifically at the Israeli far right, including sanctions – economic, political or cultural – directed at settler communities and their infrastructure. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and the U.K. have imposed travel bans on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and frozen their assets in those countries. Similarly, I believe decisions to ban goods produced in the West Bank settlements, as Ireland has recently debated, would be more effective than banning all Israeli products.
This targeted approach, I would argue, would allow the international community to cultivate stronger alliances with the many Israelis concerned about the settlements and Palestinians’ rights in the West Bank.
Arie Perliger 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.
As Thomas Friedman pointed out in The New York Times on June 3, 2025, “In Trump I, the president surrounded himself with some people of weight who could act as buffers. In Trump II, he has surrounded himself only with sycophants who act like amplifiers.”
As a scholar of Greco-Roman antiquity, I have spent many years studying the demise of truth-telling in periods of political upheaval. Spanning the period from 27 B.C.E. to 476 C.E., the Roman Empire still offers insights into what happens to political leaders when they interpret possibly helpful advice as dissent.
Particularly telling is the case of Nero, Rome’s emperor from 54 to 68 C.E., who responded to a disastrous fire in 64 with extreme cruelty and self-worship that did nothing to help desperate citizens.
Suppressing honest advice under Nero
Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, established a handpicked circle of advisers – called the consilium principis in Latin, meaning emperor’s council – to give a republican look to his autocratic regime. Augustus became the emperor of Rome in 27 B.C.E. and ruled over the empire, which stretched from Europe and North Africa to the Middle East at its peak, until his death in 14 C.E.
Augustus wanted to hear what others thought about the empire’s needs and his policies. At least some of Augustus’ advisers were bold enough to assert themselves and risk incurring his displeasure. Some, such as Cornelius Gallus, paid for their boldness with their lives, Gallus apparently took his own life, so that might not be the best example – unless it was a forced suicide while others, such as Cilnius Maecenas, managed to push their political agendas in softer ways that allowed them to maintain their influence.
But the Roman emperors who came after Augustus were either less skilled at maintaining a republican facade, or less interested in doing so.
Nero was the last of the emperors from the noble Julio-Claudian dynasty in ancient Rome at its peak of power. Historians who describe Nero’s rise and fall from power describe the first five years of his reign, or the quinquennium neronis in Latin, as a period of relative calm and prosperity for the empire.
Because Nero was just 16 years old when he acceded to power, he was assigned advisers to guide his policies. Their opinions carried significant weight.
But five years into his reign, chafing at their continued oversight, Nero began to purge these advisers from his life, via execution, forced suicide and exile.
Nero instead collected a small cadre of self-interested enablers who derived power for themselves by encouraging their leader’s delusions, such as his desire to project himself as the incarnation of the sun god, Apollo.
The single most unspeakably corrupt and nefarious of these preferred advisers was Ofonius Tigellinus. Tigellinus had caught Nero’s eye early in 62 by urging the senate to convict a Roman magistrate of treason for having composed poems that he deemed insulting to the emperor. Later that year, Tigellinus was appointed the head of the emperor’s personal army.
As praetorian prefect, Tigellinus was charged not only with protecting Nero from physical harm, but also with crafting and guarding the leader’s public image. Tigellinus urged Nero to stage an ongoing series of public spectacles – like theatrical performances and athletic competitions – that featured him as a divine ruler and a god on Earth.
The Roman Emperor Nero surveys the city of Rome after the disastrous fire in 64 C.E. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Up in flames
It was likely at Tigellinus’ urging that, in the aftermath of the great fire of 64 that raged for six days in Rome, Nero staged an exorbitant garden party where Christians were soaked in flammable oils and lit as human torches to illuminate a decadent late-night feast.
But, try as he might, Nero couldn’t outrun the fire and its aftermath by indulging in clever cruelties. Huge swathes of the city had been razed by the fire. Thousands of citizens lacked clothing. They were hungry, displaced and homeless.
For answers, the fire’s countless victims looked to Nero, their earthly Apollo, for help. But they did not encounter a sympathetic leader sweeping in to address their needs. Instead, they found a man desperate to place blame on others – in this case, foreigners from the east.
In order to squelch rumors that Nero had lit the fire, Tigellinus’ army unit rounded up Christians, falsely blamed them for starting the fire and executed them.
But this move just showcased Nero’s failure to focus on the dire needs of the poor, the very people who worshipped him. Instead, he sought to rise above the ashes by doubling down on his divine pretensions.
Once the rubble left by the fire was cleared away, Nero built a magnificent new home for himself. This palace, called the domus aurea in Latin, meaning house of gold, covered more than 120 acres in the heart of Rome. It featured spectacular water fountains, elaborate works of art and, standing tall in the entryway, a 120-foot bronze statue of Nero as the sun god, Apollo.
No truth-teller was there to tell Nero that maybe he shouldn’t rub his people’s noses in their suffering. (can we say ‘Maybe he shouldn’t exploit his people’s suffering in this way’?) this suggestion needs either accepted or rejected
Nero’s delusional response to the fire did not put an end to his career, but it did much to hasten its end.
Less than four years later, with armies bearing down on the city, Nero committed suicide. Rome tumbled into civil war.
President Donald Trump appears at an Independence Day event at the Mount Rushmore national monument near Keystone, S.D., in 2020. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Self-worship in the Trump era
Trump has long expressed a desire to have his face carved on Mount Rushmore, a national memorial in South Dakota that features the likenesses of legendary American presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
As far away as the Roman Empire might seem, Nero’s rise and fall offers a lesson in what can happen when honest criticism of a political leader is sidelined in favor of idolatry.
Instead of honest solutions to real problems, what Romans got was a colossal statue that portrayed their leader as a god on Earth.
Kirk Freudenburg 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.
Imagine this: You’re at your doctor’s office with a sore throat. The nurse asks, “Any allergies?” And without hesitation you reply, “Penicillin.” It’s something you’ve said for years – maybe since childhood, maybe because a parent told you so. The nurse nods, makes a note and moves on.
But here’s the kicker: There’s a good chance you’re not actually allergic to penicillin. About 10% to 20% of Americans report that they have a penicillin allergy, yet fewer than 1% actually do.
I know from my research that incorrectly being labeled as allergic to penicillin can prevent you from getting the most appropriate, safest treatment for an infection. It can also put you at an increased risk of antimicrobial resistance, which is when an antibiotic no longer works against bacteria.
The good news? It’s gotten a lot easier in recent years to pin down the truth of the matter. More and more clinicians now recognize that many penicillin allergy labels are incorrect – and there are safe, simple ways to find out your actual allergy status.
A steadfast lifesaver
Penicillin, the first antibiotic drug, was discovered in 1928 when a physician named Alexander Fleming extracted it from a type of mold called penicillium. It became widely used to treat infections in the 1940s. Penicillin and closely related antibiotics such as amoxicillin and amoxicillin/clavulanate, which goes by the brand name Augmentin, are frequently prescribed to treat common infections such as ear infections, strep throat, urinary tract infections, pneumonia and dental infections.
Penicillin antibiotics are a class of narrow-spectrum antibiotics, which means they target specific types of bacteria. People who report having a penicillin allergy are more likely to receive broad-spectrum antibiotics. Broad-spectrum antibiotics kill many types of bacteria, including helpful ones, making it easier for resistant bacteria to survive and spread. This overuse speeds up the development of antibiotic resistance. Broad-spectrum antibiotics can also be less effective and are often costlier.
Figuring out whether you’re really allergic to penicillin is easier than it used to be.
Why the mismatch?
People often get labeled as allergic to antibiotics as children when they have a reaction such as a rash after taking one. But skin rashes frequently occur alongside infections in childhood, with many viruses and infections actually causing rashes. If a child is taking an antibiotic at the time, they may be labeled as allergic even though the rash may have been caused by the illness itself.
Some side effects such as nausea, diarrhea or headaches can happen with antibiotics, but they don’t always mean you are allergic. These common reactions usually go away on their own or can be managed. A doctor or pharmacist can talk to you about ways to reduce these side effects.
People also often assume penicillin allergies run in families, but having a relative with an allergy doesn’t mean you’re allergic – it’s not hereditary.
Finally, about 80% of patients with a true penicillin allergy will lose the allergy after about 10 years. That means even if you used to be allergic to this antibiotic, you might not be anymore, depending on the timing of your reaction.
Why does it matter if I have a penicillin allergy?
Believing you’re allergic to penicillin when you’re not can negatively affect your health. For one thing, you are more likely to receive stronger, broad-spectrum antibiotics that aren’t always the best fit and can have more side effects. You may also be more likely to get an infection after surgery and to spend longer in the hospital when hospitalized for an infection. What’s more, your medical bills could end up higher due to using more expensive drugs.
Penicillin and its close cousins are often the best tools doctors have to treat many infections. If you’re not truly allergic, figuring that out can open the door to safer, more effective and more affordable treatment options.
A penicillin skin test can safely determine whether you have a penicillin allergy, but a health care professional may also be able to tell by asking you some specific questions. BSIP/Collection Mix: Subjects via Getty Images
How can I tell if I am really allergic to penicillin?
Start by talking to a health care professional such as a doctor or pharmacist. Allergy symptoms can range from a mild, self-limiting rash to severe facial swelling and trouble breathing. A health care professional may ask you several questions about your allergies, such as what happened, how soon after starting the antibiotic did the reaction occur, whether treatment was needed, and whether you’ve taken similar medications since then.
These questions can help distinguish between a true allergy and a nonallergic reaction. In many cases, this interview is enough to determine you aren’t allergic. But sometimes, further testing may be recommended.
One way to find out whether you’re really allergic to penicillin is through penicillin skin testing, which includes tiny skin pricks and small injections under the skin. These tests use components related to penicillin to safely check for a true allergy. If skin testing doesn’t cause a reaction, the next step is usually to take a small dose of amoxicillin while being monitored at your doctor’s office, just to be sure it’s safe.
A study published in 2023 showed that in many cases, skipping the skin test and going straight to the small test dose can also be a safe way to check for a true allergy. In this method, patients take a low dose of amoxicillin and are observed for about 30 minutes to see whether any reaction occurs.
With the right questions, testing and expertise, many people can safely reclaim penicillin as an option for treating common infections.
Elizabeth W. Covington 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 – USA (3) – By Nicole Amoyal Pensak, Researcher of Caregiver Stress Management and Clinical Psychologist, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Panel members discussed adding a so-called black box warning to the drugs – which the agency uses to indicate severe or life-threatening side effects – about the risk they pose to developing fetuses. Some of the panelists who attended had a history of expressing deep skepticism on antidepressants.
SSRIs include drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and are the most commonly used medicines for treating clinical depression. They are considered the first-line medications for treating depression in pregnancy, with approximately 5% to 6% of North American women taking an SSRI during pregnancy.
The panel did not address the safety of SSRIs following delivery, but numerous studies show that taking SSRI antidepressants while breastfeeding is low risk, usually producing low to undetectable drug levels in infants.
Clinical depression interferes with brain plasticity, such that the brain becomes “stuck” in patterns of negative thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
This leads to impairment in brain functions that are essential to motherhood. New mothers with depression have decreased brain activity in regions responsible for motivation, regulation of emotion and problem-solving. They are often withdrawn or overprotective of their infants, and they struggle with the relentless effort needed for tasks that arise with child-rearing like soothing, feeding, stimulating, planning and anticipating the child’s needs.
Prescription drugs like SSRIs are just one aspect of treating pregnant women struggling with mental illness. Evidence-based psychotherapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, can also induce adaptive brain changes. But women with severe symptoms often require medication before they can reap the benefits of psychotherapy, and finding properly trained, accessible and affordable psychotherapists can be challenging. So sometimes, SSRIs may be the most appropriate treatment option available.
The FDA-convened panel heavily focused on potential risks of SSRI usage, with several individuals incorrectly asserting that these drugs cause autism in exposed youth, as well as birth defects. At least one panelist discussed clinical depression as a “normal” part of the “emotional” experience during pregnancy and following birth. This perpetuates a long history of of women being dismissed, ignored and not believed in medical care. It also discounts the rigorous assessment and criteria that medical professionals use to diagnose reproductive mental health disorders.
Compared with these very serious risks, the risks of using SSRIs in pregnancy turn out to be minimal. While women used to be encouraged to stop taking SSRIs during pregnancy to avoid some of these risks, this is no longer recommended, as it exposes women to a high chance of depression relapse. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that all perinatal mental health treatments, including SSRIs, continue to be available.
Many women are already reluctant to take antidepressants during pregnancy, and given the choice, they tend to avoid it. From a psychological standpoint, exposing their fetus to the side effects of antidepressant medications is one of many common reasons for women in the U.S. to feel maternal guilt or shame. However, the available data suggests such guilt is not warranted.
Taken together, the best thing one can do for pregnant women and their babies is not to avoid prescribing these drugs when needed, but to take every measure possible to promote health: optimal prenatal care, and the combination of medications with psychotherapy, as well as other evidence-based treatments such as bright light therapy, exercise and adequate nutrition.
The panel failed to address the latest neuroscience behind depression, how antidepressants work in the brain and the biological rationale for why doctors use them in the first place. Patients deserve education on what’s happening in their brain, and how a drug like an SSRI might work to help.
Should the FDA, as a result of this recent panel, decide to place a black-box warning on antidepressants in pregnancy, researchers like us already know from history what will happen. In 2004, the FDA placed a warning on antidepressants describing potential suicidal ideation and behavior in young people.
I receive royalties for the sales of my book RATTLED, How to Calm New Mom Anxiety with the Power of the Postpartum Brain.
Dr Novick has a career development award from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (K23HD110435) to study the neurobiology of hormonal contraception. This funding was not used to support the preparation or publication of this article. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent those of the National Institutes of Health or the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Customized pricing – where each customer receives a different price for the same product – is a holy grail for businesses because it boosts profits. With customized pricing, free-spending people pay more while the price-sensitive pay less. Just as clothes can be tailored to each person, custom pricing fits each person’s ability and desire to pay.
For much of history, customized pricing was the normal way things happened. In the past, business owners sized up each customer and then bargained face-to-face. The price paid depended on the buyer’s and seller’s bargaining skills – and desperation.
An old joke illustrates this process. Once, a very rich man was riding in his carriage at breakfast time. Hungry, he told his driver to stop at the next restaurant. He went inside, ordered some eggs and asked for the bill. When the owner handed him the check, the rich man was shocked at the price. “Are eggs rare in this neighborhood?” he asked. “No,” the owner said. “Eggs are plentiful, but very rich men are quite rare.”
Custom pricing through bargaining still exists in some industries. For example, car dealerships often negotiate a different price for each vehicle they sell. Economists refer to this as “first-degree” or “perfect” price discrimination, which is “perfect” from the seller’s perspective because it allows them to charge each customer the maximum amount they’re willing to pay.
Set prices have several advantages for businesses. For one thing, they allow stores to hire low-paid retail workers instead of employees who are experts in negotiation.
Historically, they also made it easier for stores to decide how much to charge. Before the advent of AI pricing, many companies determined prices using a “cost-plus” rule. Cost-plus means a business adds a fixed percentage or markup to an item’s cost. The markup is the percentage added to a product’s cost that covers a company’s profits and overhead.
The big-box retailer Costco still uses this rule. It determines prices by adding a roughly 15% maximum markup to each item on the warehouse floor. If something costs Costco $100, they sell it for about $115.
The problem with cost-plus is that it treats all items the same. For example, Costco sells wine in many stores. People buying expensive Champagne typically are willing to pay a much higher markup than customers purchasing inexpensive boxed wine. Using AI gets around this problem by letting a computer determine the optimal markup item by item.
So much information is collected when you pay electronically that in 2024 the Federal Trade Commission issued civil subpoenas to Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase and other financial companies demanding to know “how artificial intelligence and other technological tools may allow companies to vary prices using data they collect about individual consumers’ finances and shopping habits.” Experiments at the FTC show that AI programs can even collude among themselves to raise prices without human intervention.
There are ways to get around customized pricing. All depend on denying AI programs data on past purchases and knowledge of who you are. First, when shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, use paper money. Yes, good old-fashioned cash is private and leaves no data trail that follows you online.
Third, many computer pricing algorithms look at your location, since location is a good proxy for income. I was once in Botswana and needed to buy a plane ticket. The price on my computer was about $200. Unfortunately, before booking I was called away to dinner. After dinner my computer showed the cost was $1,000 − five times higher. It turned out after dinner I used my university’s VPN, which told the airline I was located in a rich American neighborhood. Before dinner I was located in a poor African town. Shutting off the VPN reduced the price.
Last, often to get a better price in face-to-face negotiations, you need to walk away. To do this online, put something in your basket and then wait before hitting purchase. I recently bought eyeglasses online. As a cash payer, I didn’t have my credit card handy. It took five minutes to find it, and the delay caused the site to offer a large discount to complete the purchase.
The computer revolution has created the ability to create custom products cheaply. The cashless society combined with AI is setting us up for customized prices. In a custom-pricing situation, seeing a high price doesn’t mean something is higher quality. Instead, a high price simply means a business views the customer as willing to part with more money.
Using cash more often can help defeat custom pricing. In my view, however, rapid advances in AI mean we need to start talking now about how prices are determined, before customized pricing takes over completely.
Jay L. Zagorsky 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.
In a 2023 study, our team looked at 145 countries, including the U.S., to understand the link between labor rights and inequality. We found evidence that strengthening collective labor rights may reduce economic inequality.
Empowering workers
Collective labor rights include the rights to form and join a union, bargain collectively for higher pay and better working conditions, go on strike, and get justice if employers punish workers who exercise these rights.
Through negotiations on behalf of their members, unions can pressure employers to provide fair wages and benefits. If negotiations break down, the union can call for a strike – sometimes winning better benefits and higher wages as a result.
Some U.S. unions don’t have the right to strike, including air traffic controllers, teachers and those working on national security issues. But most unions have some ability to implement work stoppages and impose costs on employers to negotiate for raises and better benefits and conditions.
Reducing inequality
For our study, we analyzed the human rights in the CIRIGHTS dataset, which uses human rights reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International and other sources to measure government respect for 24 human rights, including the rights to unionize and bargain collectively. The dataset is produced by the University of Rhode Island, Binghamton University and the University of Connecticut. One of us, Skip Mark, serves as a co-director of the project.
Using a scoring guide, a team of researchers reads human rights reports and gives each country a score of zero if they have widespread violations, one point if they have some violations, or two if they have no evidence of violations. The team has assigned scores for all 24 rights from 1994 through 2022.
Using this data, we created a measure of collective labor rights by adding scores for the right to workplace association and the right to collective bargaining. The resulting collective labor rights score ranges from zero to four.
Countries where workers’ rights are routinely violated, such as Afghanistan, China and Saudi Arabia, scored a zero. The United States, Macedonia and Zambia, three countries with little in common, were among those that tended to get two points, placing them in the middle. Countries with no reported violations of the rights to workplace association and collective bargaining, including Canada, Sweden and France, got four points.
According to the CIRIGHTS dataset, the strength of respect for collective labor rights around the world declined by 50%, from 2.06 in 1994 to 1.03 in 2022.
At the same time, according to the World Inequality Dataset, the share of income earned by the 1% with the biggest paychecks increased by 11%.
We used advanced statistical methods to figure out whether better worker protections actually reduce inequality or are just associated with it.
Gaps between individuals and ethnic groups
We also measured what’s been happening to economic inequality, using two common ways to track it.
One of them is vertical inequality, the gap between what people earn within a country – the rich versus the poor. The more unequal a society becomes, the higher its vertical inequality score gets. We measured it using the disposable income measure from the Gini index, a commonly used indicator of economic inequality that captures how much money individuals have to spend after taxes and government transfers.
We found that a one-point increase in collective labor rights on our four-point scale reduces vertical inequality by 10 times the average change in inequality. For the U.S., a one-point increase in collective labor rights would be about enough to undo the increase in inequality that occurred between 2008 and 2010 due to the Great Recession and its aftermath. It would also likely help stem the growing wealth gap between Black and white Americans. That’s because income disparities compound over time to create wealth gaps.
We also assessed the connection between horizontal inequality, which measures income inequality between ethnic or other groups, and collective labor rights.
Negative horizontal inequality measures the amount of a country’s income held by the poorest ethnic group. Higher scores for this metric indicate that the lowest-earning ethnic group has less income relative to the rest of society. Black Americans have the lowest median income of any racial or ethnic group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Positive horizontal inequality measures the income earned by the richest ethnic group. When positive horizontal inequality rises, that means the richest ethnic group has more income relative to the rest of society. According to the same Census Bureau report, Asian Americans had the highest median earnings.
We found that stronger collective labor rights, both in law and in practice around the world, also reduce both types of horizontal inequality. This means they raise the floor by helping to improve the income of the poorest ethnic groups in society. They also close the gap by limiting the incomes of the richest ethnic group, which can reduce the likelihood of conflicts.
That is, our findings suggest that when workers are free to advocate for higher wages and better benefits for themselves, it also benefits society as a whole.
Stephen Bagwell is a researcher with the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, a charitable trust registered in New Zealand
Skip Mark 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.
Zikia, a 12th grader in Philadelphia, was stressing over where she would attend college in the fall. Her charter school’s college decision ceremony was the next day, and she was torn between her two top choices.
At a crossroads, she reached out to her favorite teacher, the only Black educator on her course schedule. “I texted him at nighttime,” she recalled. “I didn’t feel like I could do that with my other teachers.”
In my research
on college and career readiness, I did not initially set out to study the impact of Black teachers, but students like Zikia readily brought up the topic.
In interviews, students insisted on the importance of having Black educators. They consistently named their Black teachers and counselors as the most influential adults in their planning for life after graduation.
Black educators, though, are severely underrepresented in the local teaching workforce. At Zikia’s school, over 75% of students are Black compared to only about 15% of teachers.
The picture is just as striking in Pennsylvania as a whole. Statewide, the share of Black students is four times the share of Black teachers – 14.5% of students are Black, while only 3.7% of teachers are. A majority of public schools in Pennsylvania do not employ a single teacher of color despite serving racially diverse communities.
These statistics are particularly concerning because strong evidence suggests that minority students benefit greatly from working with same-race teachers.
To answer this latter question, I went directly to the source.
I conducted interviews with roughly 100 Philadelphia 12th graders, asking them how they came to trust and depend on Black educators when weighing one of the most consequential decisions of their lives: whether and where to go to college. I spoke with students at five city high schools, including district-run and charter schools, as well as some of the teachers and counselors involved in their college decisions.
Zikia and the other names used in this story are pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of research participants.
Inspiration, empathy and insight
The presence of Black educators mattered to students for several reasons.
Some of my respondents felt inspired by seeing Black people in school leadership positions. LaMont, for instance, said that taking classes from Black teachers motivated him: “Just to see success is achievable. A teacher is something in life. And it shows that people that look like me are able to overcome something. Having Black teachers gives you a sense of confidence.”
LaMont’s seeing his own identity and background reflected in his teachers is what sociologists and political scientists call descriptive representation. His classmates agreed that it was important to have teachers who looked like them. Their connection, they insisted, was more than skin deep. Most of them gravitated to Black teachers because of how those teachers did their jobs and advocated for minority students, a concept called substantive representation.
For instance, many students felt most comfortable asking for help from Black teachers because they regarded them as more empathetic listeners and felt they were invested in their holistic well-being, not just in their grades or academic performance.
When I asked Ramir to tell me about the teachers he had strong relationships with, he offered a typical answer: “Most of them are African American,” he said. “But it’s not even just about that. I like a teacher who tries to understand you for who you are. Not look at you as a student but as a human being and build with you.”
Students also credited Black teachers with making them feel like they belonged at school. They sought out advice from teachers who believed in their potential and held them to high academic and behavioral standards. These qualities were by no means unique to Black teachers, but white teachers sometimes found it difficult to balance authority with warmth in their relationships with students.
“There are some teachers that act like siblings and some that act like parents,” said Emily, a white social studies teacher. “And it’s very rare that a white teacher can act like a parent and have the kids still like them.”
Black educators also had culturally relevant insights into college that students valued highly. They often had deeper knowledge of local historically Black colleges and universities, or they could speak to the experience of being a racial minority at a predominantly white institution. Students valued guidance more when it came from a source they felt was relatable.
These findings suggest that Black educators are effective not only because of shared identity or experiences, but also because of the skills and dispositions they bring into the classroom: proactively building relationships, coupling high expectations with high levels of support, and bringing schoolwork to life. As a result, minority students held out hope not only for more representation in the classroom but also that all their teachers – regardless of race – would integrate these practices into their tool kits.
Joseph Sageman 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.
The nation has a long history of similar efforts, including a wildly unpopular 1980 attempt by Reagan administration Interior Secretary James Watt to promote development and expand private concessions in the parks. But debate over using public national park land for private profit dates back more than a century before that.
As I explain in my forthcoming book, no park has played a more central role in that debate than Yosemite, in California.
Early concerns
In early 1864, Central American Steamship Transit Company representative Israel Ward Raymond wrote a letter to John Conness, a U.S. senator from California, urging the government to move swiftly to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees to prevent them from falling into private hands. Five months later, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, ceding the valley and the grove to the state of California, “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.” This was years before Yellowstone became the first federal land designated a national park in 1872.
California said their businesses threatened the state’s ability to develop roads and trails in Yosemite by competing for tourist dollars. A legal battle ensued and was not resolved until an 1872 U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that the men’s land claims had not been fully validated according to the procedures of the time. The California legislature paid both men compensation for their land, and both left the park.
Yet, as my research has found, the role of private interests in the park remained unsolved. Private companies under contract to the National Park Service have long provided needed amenities such as lodging and food within the national parks. But questions over what is acceptable in national parks in the pursuit of profit have shaped Yosemite’s history for generations.
In 1925, I found, the question centered on the right to build the first gas station inside the park, in Yosemite Valley. Two private businesses, the Curry Camping Company and the Yosemite National Park Company, had long competed for tourist dollars within the park. Each wanted to build a gas station to boost profits.
Frustrated over the need to decide, National Park Service Director Horace Albright ordered the rival firms to simplify management of the park’s concessions. The companies merged, and the newly formed Yosemite Park and Curry Company was granted the exclusive rights to run lodges, restaurants and other facilities within the park, including the new gas station.
But as I found in my research, the park service and the concessions company did not always see eye to eye on the purpose of the park. The conflict between profit and preservation is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the construction of a ski area within the park in the early 1930s. The park service initially opposed the development of Badger Pass Ski Area as not conducive to the national park ideal, but the Yosemite Park and Curry Company insisted it was key to boosting winter use of the park.
In 1973, the Music Corporation of America, an entertainment conglomerate, bought the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. The company already had a tourist attraction operating near Hollywood, where visitors could pay to tour movie sets, but had not yet changed its name to Universal Studios or launched major theme parks in Florida and California. Its purchase of the park’s concessions set off a firestorm of controversy over fears of turning Yosemite into a theme park.
That didn’t happen, but annual park visitor numbers climbed from 2.5 million to 3.8 million over the 20 years MCA ran the concessions, which sparked concerns about development and overcrowding in the park. Conservationists argued the park service had allowed the corporate giant to promote and develop the park in ways that threatened the very aspects of the park most people came to enjoy.
With three restaurants, two service stations with a total of 15 gas pumps, two cafeterias, two grocery stores, seven souvenir shops, a delicatessen, a bank, a skating rink, three swimming pools, a golf course, two tennis courts, kennels, a barbershop, a beauty shop, Badger Pass Ski Area and three lodges, the Yosemite Valley was a busy commercial district. Critics argued that such development contradicted the park service’s mandate to leave national parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
Falling profits and consolidation within the music industry led MCA to sell its concessions rights in Yosemite in 1993. The Delaware North Companies, a global hospitality corporation, took over and ran the park’s concessions until 2016, when it sold the rights to Aramark.
But in that sale, the question of public resources and private profits arose again. Delaware North demanded $51 million in compensation for Aramark continuing to use the names of several historic properties within the park, such as the Ahwahnee, a hotel, and Curry Village, another group of visitor accommodations. The company claimed those names were a part of its assets under its contract with the park service.
The park service rejected the claim, saying the names, which dated back more than a century, belonged to the American people. But to avoid legal problems during the transition, the agency temporarily renamed several sites, including calling the Ahwahnee the Majestic Yosemite Hotel and changing Curry Village to Half Dome Village. Public outrage erupted, denouncing the claim by Delaware North as commercial overreach that threatened to distort Yosemite’s heritage. In 2019, the park service and Aramark agreed to pay Delaware North a total of $12 million to settle the dispute, and the original names were restored.
Protesters unfurl an upside-down U.S. flag from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in February 2025, protesting Trump administration changes to the National Park Service.
Renewed interest in commercial efforts
In June 2025, Yosemite again took center stage in the dispute over the role of federal funding versus private interests at the start of the second Trump administration when a group of climbers unfurled an American flag upside down off El Capitan in protest of the administration’s cuts in personnel and slashing of the park service’s budget.
Whichever side prevails in the short term, the debate over the role of private interests within national parks like Yosemite will undoubtedly continue.
Michael Childers 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 (Au and NZ) – By Alex Robson, Deputy Chair, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Professor, Queensland University of Technology
Productivity growth is a key driver of improvements in living standards. But in Australia over the last decade, output per hour worked grew by less than a quarter of its 60-year average.
We urgently need to turn this around.
That’s why the government has asked the Productivity Commission – where I am deputy chair – to conduct five inquiries and identify priority reforms.
As a first step to boost productivity growth, we need business to expand and invest in the tools and technology that help us get the most out of our work.
Unfortunately, some of our most important policy settings are holding us back.
Business investment has slumped
Capital expenditure by all non-mining firms is down 3.2 percentage points as a share of the economy since the end of the global financial crisis in 2009.
And the ever-growing thicket of rules and regulations faced by business is a significant handbrake on growth.
Lower company tax rates are likely to attract more overseas firms to invest in Australia and help people start and grow businesses. They may strengthen the ability of smaller firms, which contribute the bulk of capital investment, to compete with larger ones.
Our draft recommendations include:
Cutting the company tax rate to 20% from 25% or 30% for businesses with revenue under A$1 billion – the vast majority of companies
Introducing a new 5% net cash-flow tax on all firms. This supports companies’ capital expenditure by allowing them to immediately deduct the full value of their investments.
The company tax rate would remain at 30% for firms earning over $1 billion. This would affect about 500 companies.
In line with other developed nations
The reduction in Australia’s headline company tax rate would move Australia from having one of the highest to one of the lowest rates for small and medium-sized firms among developed economies.
And if the net cashflow tax is effective, it could be expanded over time and fund broader reductions in company income tax.
Our modelling indicates these two changes would increase investment in the economy by $8 billion and boost Australia’s GDP by $14 billion, with no net cost to the budget over the medium term.
An abundance of red tape
The interim report also notes regulation can enhance productivity and protect against harms. But too much, or inappropriate, regulation can disproportionately inhibit economic dynamism and resilience.
Australia’s regulatory burden has grown. Businesses report spending more and more on regulatory compliance.
Regulators and policymakers have a broad mandate to further the public interest. But they can face incentives to be overly risk-averse and to downplay the burden that regulations place on businesses. They may pursue narrow goals at the expense of broader economy-wide goals.
There are many practical examples that illustrate the problem.
In the Australian Capital Territory, for example, the average time a house builder must wait for a planning decision is nearly six months. In New South Wales, it takes an average of nine years to get approval to build a wind farm.
This kind of unnecessary and costly over-regulation ultimately benefits nobody.
More scrutiny needed
Simply put: Australia’s regulatory culture needs to change. And cultural change starts at the top.
As a first step, the government needs to make a clear, whole-of-government public commitment to reducing regulatory burdens, and ensure new regulatory proposals face greater cabinet and parliamentary scrutiny.
Regulators need to look for ways to promote economic growth, while continuing to ensure Australians are protected against avoidable harms.
Ministers could issue statements of expectations to regulators and regulatory policymakers that clearly indicate how much risk they should tolerate in pursuit of business dynamism.
To improve the evaluation of cumulative regulatory burdens, the Productivity Commission should be tasked with a regular and systematic stream of reviews. These would focus on sectors or regulatory systems where complex and enduring thickets of regulation have emerged.
The draft recommendations on tax and regulation set out in the interim report are clear, actionable and ambitious reforms. They will support governments in delivering a meaningful and measurable boost to Australia’s lagging productivity.
Alex Robson is deputy chair of the Productivity Commission.
The earthquake in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula on July 30 2025 may have been one of the most severe on record, with a magnitude of 8.8. But innovations in science and technology gave governments vital time to warn and evacuate their people from the resulting tsunami.
Millions of people escaped to higher ground before the tsunami hit.
The 2004 Boxing Day 9.3 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra, which caused approximately 230,000 deaths, some as far away as Somalia on the other side of the Indian Ocean, shows how important these warnings are.
The 2004 tsunami was particularly tragic because tsunami waves travel at a steady speed in the open ocean, about as fast as a jet plane. This means they can take several hours to reach shore across an ocean, with plenty of time for warning.
An early warning system for the Pacific Ocean, based in Hawaii, was created in 1948 following a deadly tsunami two years before. On April 1 1946, the magnitude 8.6 Aleutian Islands earthquake in the northern Pacific Ocean generated a tsunami that devastated parts of Hawaii hours later, leading to 146 fatalities.
The death toll was exacerbated by the leading wave being downwards. This happens in around 50% of tsunamis, and exposes the seashore in a similar way to when the tide goes out, but exposing a larger area than normal. People sometimes investigate out of curiosity, bringing them closer to the danger.
The accuracy and response times of early tsunami warnings have significantly improved since 1948.
How tsunamis happen
To understand the work involved in protecting coastal communities, first you need to understand how tsunamis are generated.
Tsunamis are caused by displacement of mass on the sea floor after an earthquake, landslide or volcanic eruption. This provides an energy source to set off a wave in the deep sea, not just near the surface like in the ocean waves we see whipped up by the wind and storms. Most are small. The Japanese word tsunami translates somewhat innocuously as “harbour wave”.
Detailed global mapping of the sea floor, pioneered by US geologist Marie Tharpe between 1957 and 1978, helped establish the modern theory of plate tectonics. It also improved the physical models for how the tsunami will travel in the ocean.
Wave height increases as it approaches the shore, and the topography of the sea floor can result in a complicated pattern of wave interference and concentration of the energy in stream-like patterns. The establishment of sea-floor observatories led to better data for the pressure at the sea floor (related to wave height) and satellite networks now directly monitor wave height globally using radar signals from space.
One of the factors that has helped scientists predict the range of a tsunami includes the setting up of the worldwide standard station network of seismometers in 1963, which allowed better estimations of earthquake location and magnitude.
These were superseded by the digital broadband global network of seismometers in 1978, which allowed more detail on the source to be calculated quickly. This includes a better estimate of earthquake size, the source rupture area and orientation in three dimensions.
It also tells scientists about the slip, which controls the pattern of displacement on the sea floor. This data is used to forecast the time of landing, the amplitude of the wave on the shoreline, and its height in areas where the wave travels further inland.
The Pacific Ocean warning system now has 46 countries contributing data. It also uses physical and statistical models for estimating tsunami height. The models developed as scientists learnt more about earthquake sources, mapped features on the sea floor and tested model forecasts against outcomes.
Today’s technology
The early warning systems we have today are due to a decades-long commitment to global research collaboration and open data. Scientists have also improved their forecast methods. Recently they started using trained AI algorithms which could improve the timeliness and accuracy.
Pioneered by the US Geological Survey, rapid data sharing is now used routinely to estimate earthquake parameters and make them available to the public soon after the rupture stops. This can be within minutes for an initial estimate then updated over the next few hours as more data comes in.
However, the forecast wave height is inherently uncertain, variable from place to place, and may turn out to be more or less than expected. Similarly, large earthquakes are rare, making it hard to estimate how likely they are on average, and therefore to design appropriate mitigation measures.
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan destroyed or overtopped the eight-metre high protective sea walls that had been put in place based on such hazard estimates. There were over 19,000 fatalities. As a consequence, their height has been increased to 12-15 metres in some areas.
Early warning systems also rely on rapid communication to the public, including mass alerts communicated by mobile phone, coordination by the relevant authorities across borders, clear advice, and advance evacuation plans and occasional alarm tests or drills. Although tsunami waves slow down to the speed of a car as they approach the shore, it is impossible to outrun one, so it is better to act quickly and calmly.
The effectiveness of warnings also means accepting a degree of inconvenience in false alarms where the tsunami height is less than that forecast, because this is inevitable with the uncertainties involved. For good reason, authorities issuing alerts will err on the side of caution.
To give an example, nuclear power plants on Japan’s eastern seaboard were shut down on July 30.
So far it looks like the Pacific early warning system – combined with effective levels of preparedness and action by service providers and decision makers – has worked well in reducing the number of casualties that might have happened without it.
There will always be a level of uncertainty we will have to live with. On balance, it is a small price to pay for avoiding a catastrophe.
Ian Main is professor of Seismology and Rock Physics at the University of Edinburgh. He receives funding from UK Research and Innovation Research Council, a member of the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation Expert panel on external hazards, and acts as an independent reviewer for the Energy Industry-funded SeIsmic hazard and Ground Motion Assessment research program SIGMA3.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kevin Pimbblet, Professor and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Data Science, AI and Modelling, University of Hull
Vasectomy has long been regarded as a permanent, safe and effective form of contraception. Its benefits are often summarised as minimally invasive and largely risk-free.
But that may not be the full story.
In recent years, vasectomy rates in the UK have declined significantly. It’s a puzzling trend, given that the procedure’s efficacy hasn’t changed. What has arguably shifted is how men talk about it. Not in doctors’ offices, but online.
As an AI researcher working with large-scale public data, I led a 2025 study using natural language processing (NLP) – a branch of artificial intelligence that analyses patterns in human language – to examine thousands of posts from r/vasectomy and r/postvasectomypain, which are subreddits (topic-specific discussion forums) on Reddit, a social media platform where users share and comment on content in themed communities.
My goal wasn’t to weigh in on urology (I’m not that kind of doctor), but to explore the emotional tone and self-reported outcomes in digital spaces where users speak candidly and in real time.
The findings are revealing and raise important questions about informed consent, online health discourse and the growing influence of social data on healthcare communication.
Fear, regret and pain?
The most common emotional response to vasectomy, whether being considered or already undergone, is fear. To assess this, we used a tool called NRClex, a crowd-trained emotion classifier. This is an AI model trained on thousands of labelled examples to detect emotional tone in text. It found that “fear” dominated more than 70% of user-generated content.
This isn’t surprising. Men on Reddit ask questions like “How bad is the pain?” “How long does it last?” and “Will I regret this?” These are not rare concerns: they’re central to the conversation.
While overall sentiment analysis shows that most users report positive outcomes, a significant minority express deep regret and ongoing pain – sometimes lasting for years after surgery.
This pain is often described as post-vasectomy pain syndrome (PVPS), a relatively little-known condition defined by new or chronic scrotal pain that continues for more than three months after the procedure.
PVPS is poorly understood and may have multiple causes, some anatomical, some neurological and some still unclear. Though some health authorities describe it as “rare,” our Reddit data suggests it could be more common, or at least more disruptive, than currently acknowledged.
We analysed more than 11,000 Reddit posts and found that the word “pain” appeared in over 3,700 of them; roughly one-third. In many cases, the pain described persisted well beyond the expected recovery period. The word “month” appeared in nearly 900 pain-related posts, while “year” appeared in over 600.
This is noteworthy. Post-surgical pain is typically expected to resolve within days or weeks. Yet our dataset suggests that 6%–8% of Reddit users discussing vasectomy report longer-term discomfort – a rate that aligns with the upper estimates in the urological studies. More recent research, including a large-scale postoperative study, argues that the incidence is likely much lower, perhaps under 1%.
Of course, we must emphasise that these are self-reported experiences. Not all mentions of “pain” equate to a formal PVPS diagnosis. It’s also important to acknowledge that people who are dissatisfied with a medical procedure are generally more likely to post about it online – a well-recognised bias in social data. Even so, the volume, consistency and emotional intensity of these posts suggest the issue warrants closer attention from clinicians and researchers alike.
Even more strikingly, around 2% of posts mention both “pain” and “regret”, implying serious, potentially life-altering consequences for a small but significant group of people.
On r/postvasectomypain – a subreddit specifically dedicated to discussing PVPS – the tone is even more sobering. Unsurprisingly, 74% of posts describe persistent, long-term pain. Additionally, 23% mention pain during sex and 27% report changes in sensitivity.
Posts on this forum also frequently reference vasectomy reversal surgery far more often than more specialised interventions such as microsurgical denervation: a complex nerve-removal procedure used in severe cases of chronic testicular pain, typically when other treatments have failed.
From AI to andrology: an ethical crossroads
Why is a professor of AI and physics analysing pain in urology forums?
Because in today’s digital world, people increasingly turn to online platforms like Reddit for health advice, peer support and decision-making – often before speaking to a clinician. As an AI researcher, I believe we have a responsibility to examine how these discussions shape public understanding, and what they can teach us about real-world healthcare challenges.
In this case, it’s possible that the drop in vasectomy uptake is linked, at least in part, to the open and emotional sharing of negative outcomes online. These posts are not scaremongering. They’re detailed, candid and often highly specific. They represent a type of real-world evidence that clinical trials and formal studies don’t always capture.
So, what should we take from all this?
Terms like “rare”, often used in consent forms and clinical conversations, can obscure the complexity and variability of patient outcomes. Pain following vasectomy, whether mild, temporary, chronic or debilitating, appears common enough to warrant more transparent and nuanced communication.
This is not an argument against vasectomy. It remains a safe, effective, and empowering option in reproductive planning. But truly informed consent should reflect both the clinical literature and the experiences of those who undergo the procedure, especially when such experiences are now publicly available in large volumes.
In a world where online forums double as health diaries, support networks and informal research registries, we must take them seriously. Medical language matters. Terms like “rare”, “uncommon” or “low risk” carry real emotional and moral weight. They shape expectations and influence decisions.
If even a small percentage of men experience long-term pain after vasectomy, that risk should be communicated clearly, in plain English – ideally with a range of percentages drawn from published studies.
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Kevin Pimbblet currently receives funding from STFC, EPSRC, The British Academy, The Royal Astronomical Society, The British Ecological Society, and The Office for Students. None are in direct relation to this work.
