On April 2 the United States is set to implement a new wave of tariffs under its Fair and Reciprocal Trade Plan. Details of the plan that will impact all US trading partners are not yet known, but the US administration has suggested these tariffs will target any rules it considers “unfair”.
This means the April 2 tariffs may take aim at a range of Australian domestic policies, such as biosecurity rules that govern food imports, and the government’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
The size of the hit is uncertain. One report indicates a relatively modest tariff between 2% and 8% is being considered, below the 25% rate imposed on steel and aluminium on March 12. But it will apply to a much larger set of exports.
Australia and the US have been allies for over a century. The two nations celebrated a “century of mateship” in 2018. More formally, the two countries have a current free trade agreement, Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA).
The agreement was negotiated in good faith, and entered into force on January 1, 2005. It called for the elimination of tariffs between the two nations over time, and until now both parties have upheld their respective bargains. The so-called “reciprocal” tariff plan would breach that agreement.
What sectors are likely to be targeted?
The Trump reference to non-tariff barriers raises two main concerns for Australian products: meat and pharmaceuticals.
In Australia, domestic beef products are subject to strict traceability rules. Similarly, imported beef has rigid biosecurity requirements as it is classified as a high-risk food.
This is because of the potential risk of mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). This disease was detected in the US in 2002 and triggered an Australian ban on US beef products.
The ban was partially lifted in 2018, but some restrictions remain, which the US says are a barrier to trade. This was also raised by the Biden administration in a 2024 report on trade barriers.
The US cannot force Australia to change its laws on the basis of tariffs – but they can make products coming from Australian suppliers more expensive and therefore restrict market access to the US, which many Australian producers rely on.
A tariff on Australian-sourced beef products would also push up prices for American consumers. Trade Minister Don Farrell has warned the price of a McDonald’s burger may increase.
If tariffs are placed on Australian beef, the government has warned that McDonalds burgers in the US will become more expensive. Shutterstock
Medicines are also in the line of fire
Turning to pharmaceuticals, the Australian PBS has been a sticking point between US and Australian trade negotiators for the past 20 years.
The PBS, which has been in place since 1948, ensures Australians have affordable access to essential medicines. It formed part of discussions during the free-trade negotiations and has been raised as a potential barrier to trade.
The US argues innovation and unfettered market access for American drug companies should be prioritised over Australia’s reference pricing arrangements. Reference pricing means medicines with similar outcomes should have similar pricing.
The reason the US has a problem with this scheme is because some of their companies are not able to charge higher prices for medicines.
Although these are the categories of most concern, there is no assurance the “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” will be limited to beef and pharmaceuticals.
For instance, there are no barriers imposed on the import of wine into Australia. But there has been some concern tariffs could be introduced regardless.
Wine is often the target of trade wars and President Donald Trump has threatened the European Union with a 200% tariff on all wine and spirits entering the US. As Australian wine makers have only recently recovered from Chinese and Canadian tariffs, any US tariffs would deal a harsh blow to the industry.
An old clip of the former Republican President Ronald Reagan went viral this week, highlighting his quite different view:
Is there any avenue for appeal?
There is one thing that is clear about these tariffs. Their imposition will be in violation of both the WTO rules and the free-trade agreement.
Both have provisions to settle disputes and Australia does have options for filing complaints. However, the rule of law and existing norms of the international order do not appear to be persuasive to the Trump administration.
Despite this, it is important to note the US cannot force Australia to change its longstanding laws that protect consumers and ensure accessibility to medicines. This remains the choice of the Australian government.
If the tariffs are introduced in the range of 2% to 8%, there may not be a significant direct economic impact. But they will have other consequences. Trade negotiations, and international agreements, are largely based on goodwill. These acts of the US will erode much of what has been built up over the past century.
The downturn we are seeing in financial markets has so far been dismissed by the Trump administration as necessary. But if the correction turns into a crash, it may give President Trump pause. Given his lack of interest in negotiating, this may be the only thing that could change his mind.
Felicity Deane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The reality of shorter working hours could be one step closer for many Australians, pending the outcome of the federal election.
The Greens, who could control crucial cross bench votes in a hung parliament, have announced plans for a four-day working week, with no loss of pay. They say the policy would alleviate stress and burn out, and increase women’s participation in the workforce.
Earning the same money for fewer hours would appeal to most workers. But is it too good to be true? Could it really be rolled out cost free to all workplaces, especially to “client facing” companies and service providers?
Or does research suggest the Greens could be onto something?
The Greens’ plan
The Greens’ policy would involve a new National Institute for the Four Day Work Week and a test case through the Fair Work Commission.
A series of national trials would be set up in a number of different industries, whereby workers would work 80% of their normal hours, while maintaining 100% of their pay.
According to Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, it’s a win-win for everyone:
It can increase productivity, reduce absenteeism, improve recruitment and retention and give employees more time to manage their home life. This change will allow workers to create a working week that works for them.
The 100:80:100 model
The four-day work week being proposed in this instance is commonly regarded as the 100:80:100 model.
It delivers 100% of the pay, for 80% of the hours, in return for maintaining 100% of productivity.
This is unlike other forms of shorter working weeks, which compress five days’ worth of work into four longer days. This obviously disadvantages some employees.
Recent research conducted by Swinburne University of Technology involved interviews with ten Australian firms that have already adopted the 100:80:100 model.
They were a mixture of small and medium sized private sector businesses, including management consulting firms, a shipping and logistics company, and recruitment and marketing agencies.
The research underlined the potential for a range of positive outcomes for both employers and employees.
Workers reported having better work-life balance, more time to complete “life administration” tasks, and more time to invest in hobbies, exercise, wellness and self-care. Bosses cited productivity gains, reduced sick days, and significant improvements in recruitment and retention rates.
However, the 100:80:100 model is viewed with scepticism in some quarters. There is still doubt that productivity and output would be maintained, or in some cases improved, when workers are working one day fewer per week.
Also, there could be costs associated with the implementation of this work model for front-line roles, such as retail, schools, hospitals and nursing homes. Additional workers may need to be hired, at extra expense, to cover the hours dropped by the existing workforce.
100 years of working 5 days a week
The year 2026 will mark the 100th anniversary of the five-day work week.
It was car maker Henry Ford who reduced the working week in the United States from six days to five. Other sectors and countries followed suit. This was at a time when the average life expectancy of Australian workers was just 55 and households typically only had one bread-winner.
Despite the time saved by the many technological breakthroughs in the past 100 years – from the photocopier, desktop computer and fax machine, to the internet, mobile phones and AI – the average Australian is now working longer hours in paid and unpaid labour than ever before.
The Greens point out Australian society is changing. More women and carers are either in the workforce or would be encouraged into the workforce by more flexible arrangements:
yet we are constrained by archaic labour laws that see the fruits of our efforts swallowed up in profits for bosses and shareholders.
The role of generative AI technologies in the workplace may also deliver benefits to workers. Separate Swinburne research has revealed an increasing expectation among workers that they will receive a share in the time saved by future technologies in the form of improved work-life balance and wellbeing gains.
Time to enter the 21st century
Earlier this year, 200 UK companies signed up to the 100:80:100 model, as part of a campaign to “reinvent Britain’s working week”. Large scale trials are also underway in Canada and several European countries.
The global interest in a shorter working week is not surprising, and has likely been fuelled by the COVID pandemic, which has caused workers and employers to re-imagine their working lives.
If the Greens are in a position to leverage any balance of power after the coming election, it could be Australia’s turn to recognise the conventional five-day working week is no longer fit for purpose.
John L. Hopkins 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.
From May 1, the oral contraceptive Slinda (drospirerone) will be listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). This means the price will drop for the more than 100,000 Australian women who currently use it – from around $A320 a year to around $94.
It’s the third contraceptive pill the federal government has added to the PBS this year, after Yaz and Yasmine. But these two are combined oral contraceptives – meaning they contain both the hormones oestrogen and progestogen – whereas Slinda is progestogen-only.
So, Slinda is a little bit different – here’s how it works and what it will cost.
What is Slinda and how does it work?
Oral contraceptive pills contain active ingredients based on the female sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone to prevent pregnancy.
Contraceptive pills with both hormones are known as combined-contraceptive pills. Progesterone only pills are often referred to as mini-pills.
The active ingredient in Slinda is a progestogen, which is a synthetic derivative of progesterone, which makes the medication a mini-pill.
Slinda works by stopping ovulation (the ovary doesn’t release an egg) and making the mucus in the cervix thicker so sperm cannot get into the uterus from the vagina.
Both combined contraceptive pills and mini pills effectively prevent pregnancy, but their suitability varies for different women. Mini-pills, including Slinda, can be 99% effective if used perfectly – but with typical day-to-day use, they provide only around 93% protection.
Who will find Slinda useful?
Slinda may be a particularly beneficial alternative for people who can’t use contraceptives containing oestrogen.
This may include women who are older, overweight, or prone to migraines. This is because oestrogen is known to increase the risk of blood clots which lead to deep vein thrombosis – already a higher risk for older and overweight women.
Similarly, combined pills containing oestrogen aren’t appropriate for those who’ve had a baby in the last 21 days or are breastfeeding. Lower levels of oestrogen are needed in a woman’s body post-birth as it stimulates prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production. Taking an oestrogen-based pill can potentially interfere with that.
Slinda can be taken at any time after childbirth, including while breastfeeding, and generally remains a safer option for people with a history of blood clots or migraines.
Slinda also has advantages over other, older generations of progestogen-based contraceptive pills. Mini-pills such as Microlut and Noriday have no pill-free days, whichs means if a woman misses taking the pill by even a few hours it can increase her chance of becoming pregnant.
The pill-free window for Slinda is 24 hours. This means if you are less than 24 hours late it’s considered a late pill, not a missed pill. If you take the late pill as soon as you remember, and then the next pill at the normal time, you should have effective protection from unwanted pregnancy.
The potential side effects for Slinda are similar to other contraceptive pills. Women may find that their period may stop altogether, or they may experience bleeding irregularities or spotting, as well as breast tenderness.
The pill may also not work effectively if it’s not taken correctly every day, or if it is taken with other drugs, such as the anti-viral ritonavir and anti-seizure medication phenytoin.
If a woman is suffering from vomiting or severe diarrhoea, Slinda may not be effective and she should use back-up contraception such as condoms.
There are other progesterone-only contraceptive options available on the PBS, such as levonorgestrel pills and implants, including the intrauterine devices, Mirena and Kyleena.
Why was Slinda added to the PBS?
Slinda has been available in Australia since at least 2004, but not at a subsidised price.
In November 2024, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee recommended Slinda’s listing on the PBS. The committee cited several reasons, including advice from doctors, the need to provide women with more contraceptive options and Slinda’s longer pill-free window.
At a stakeholder meeting in October 2024, doctors stressed the need for more choice for women, when choosing a pill.
They highlighted women starting an oral contraceptive pill for the first time will often first use PBS-subsidised medications, even though a non-PBS product may be more suitable for them. Slinda’s listing makes it a more accessible first choice for women.
As Slinda is a prescription-only medication, if you wish to change pills or start on the drug you will need to consult your doctor. If you do change, from May 1 and based on similar PBS medications, you can expect to pay around $31 for a four-month supply.
Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and was previously a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design, and testing.
Jasmine Lee and Shoohb Alassadi do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The 72 hours after the sexual assault of a child can be a crucial window for police to collect biological evidence and document signs of bruising or injury.
But this procedure – known as a forensic medical examination – can be scary and invasive.
In new research published with colleagues, I interviewed ten children (aged 4-16) and their parents about their experiences attending a Melbourne paediatric hospital in the hours after an alleged assault.
This was a small group, but their stories shed light on wider concerns. Addressing them can help put children first in what may be the most traumatic time of their lives.
Its purpose is to gather biological evidence from the victim to help police identify an offender and prosecute them.
At a hospital crisis care suite, the child will speak to a specialist doctor (a forensic paediatrician) alongside another clinician, usually a psychologist or social worker. Police also attend.
The doctor will take the child’s medical history, as well as asking for an account of the assault.
The doctor swabs relevant areas – such as the child’s vulva, vagina or anus – to collect biological materials that may be present, including saliva or semen. They will also look for injuries or bruising.
This examination can be uncomfortable and can take hours. It may also be emotionally harrowing, for the child as well as their carer.
In the following days, children often need to give another statement to police and are referred for counselling.
A child usually attends a forensic medical examination alongside their parent. fizkes/Shutterstock
A trauma-informed approach means prioritising a sense of safety for children who have experienced trauma, building trust and sharing control, to avoid retraumatisation.
This means explaining to children and their carers what is going to happen next, gaining their consent and giving them some control over the timing and pace of any interventions (such as being swabbed).
Children and families have different – sometimes traumatic – experiences of dealing with health services and police. So considering a child’s personal history and culture is important.
However there is still little research examining children and young people’s experience of crisis care.
My study involved seven girls, two boys and one non-binary child, aged between four and 16. In the days or weeks after their examination, I interviewed the child and the parent who attended hospital with them, both individually and together (in child-parent pairs).
The interviews uncovered four areas that were important to children and their parents.
1. Repeating their story but not feeling heard
After they first report their experience, children need to tell their story several times to various strangers.
This means sharing highly personal details while distressed to people who often don’t have the time to get to know them, their context, family, previous trauma history or culture.
Fiona* (16) found this aspect of the process “very, very, very stressful.”
Some said repeating their story felt like they had to convince professionals it was true.
Layla (14) commented:
I felt like I was the one in trouble.
2. Being treated with care matters
Several young participants discussed feeling “traumatised,” “intimidated” and “ashamed” during the examination itself.
Seven-year-old Sasha told us about the doctor who examined her:
She kept saying, ‘Lie still,’ and it was hard for me to just lie still. Then she just, when she did the examination […] I was crying on the bed, and it hurt me […]. And she just looked at me. Because she’s seen me crying and she just looked at me.
But when the doctor, or the clinician was caring – and took time to understand them and their individual needs – it helped ease some of the distress.
One parent, Kaye, felt the clinician “had this incredible demeanour and heart about her” and helped her child “understand what was going to happen.”
Other young people appreciated the clinician helped them with panic attacks and “made us feel relaxed.”
The youngest participant Ava (4) said she liked that she was given a teddy bear.
Children told us caring gestures – such as providing a teddy bear – made the experience less scary. fizkes/Shutterstock
3. Unpleasant surroundings made the experience worse
Some participants described the space where the forensic medical examination took place as small and unwelcoming.
Dylan (16) felt it was “unsafe”, while Ava said it was “a bit scary”.
Examination spaces need to be kept forensically clean. In the hospital where these examinations took place, that meant there were no windows, pictures on the walls or soft furnishings.
Several young participants felt it showed what had happened to them was somehow shameful. As Felicity explained:
it was frightening. […] You’re just walking down a really long corridor, all these white […] ceilings and walls. And it was kind of just like a bit […] not welcoming, not nice and hidden away.
Parents often felt sidelined or unheard before, during and after the examination.
Samira (a parent) said she didn’t feel like her concerns were understood:
I come from a different background, I don’t know what is happening and I don’t know what to ask. I’m not very trusting of police.
Children themselves worried about their parent. As Layla said:
it’s not just me that’s going through this, it’s my mum. […] I feel like she should be able to have that support too. None of it was offered to her.
One parent said they’d been “sent home without any support”. Another had a sense of being “just left there and wondering what to do”.
Responding to the whole child
The children and adults I interviewed made clear they wanted a holistic approach.
They wanted professionals (including doctors, clinicians and police) to not only pursue justice on their behalf, but also listen and respond to their physical, emotional and social needs and take into account their particular context and culture.
The response needs to make children and their families feel safer – not more scared.
It also needs to help them recover from the trauma, including counselling for both parents and children without long waitlists.
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
*Names have been changed.
Caroline Whitehouse is employed by the Northern Centre Against Sexual Assault, which is affiliated with the peak body Sexual Assault Support Services Victoria (SASVic). She was previously employed by the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, where this study took place. The Royal Children’s Hospital, along with LaTrobe University, gave ethics approval for the study.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Former ambassador Phil Goff is the latest (so far) and (probably) the least of many ‘statesmen’ who have invoked Munich and the ‘resolute’ Winston Churchill (a backbench MP in 1938) in the cause of good-war mongering. (Refer Winston Peters sacks Phil Goff as UK High Commissioner RNZ 6 March 2025, and What Was Actually Wrong With What Phil Goff Said?, Giles Dexter, RNZ and Scoop, 7 March 2025.)
The Munich narrative is central to the ‘Good War’ morality trope, through which democracies (especially the United States) justified wars of aggression; what used to be called ‘gunboat-diplomacy’ in the British days of empire. It’s the now-commonplace narrative that frames any putative war to be fought by a ‘liberal democracy’ against an ‘autocracy’ (ie fought by us against them) as a contest between Good and Evil; and if we don’t “stand up to” Evil – anywhere and everywhere – then Evil goes on to ‘win’, and subsequently to dominate and exact tribute as a regional or global hegemon.
The corollary of the Munich narrative is that Good should never give up, even if Evil is winning on the battlefield; Good neither surrenders to Evil nor negotiates with Evil. Not ‘at any cost’. The logical conclusion of this is that, if that’s what it requires for Good to prevail, life on Planet Earth could be forfeit; better Dead than Red or Black. Earth’s tombstone, left for a future intergalactic explorer to discover, might read: “At Least ‘Atila the Hun’ [substitute any Eurasian ‘Devil’] Did Not Win”. Peter Hitchen (see below, p.27) notes: “one day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all [through our rulers’ vanity]”.
Phil Goff is an example of persons who know just enough fragments of popular history to think they can use a historical argument to substantiate their rhetoric. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, meaning that superficial knowledge may be more problematic than ignorance. On the Munich question, Phil Goff is in good company. Peter Hitchens, in The Phoney Victory (p8, p20), cites the former Prince of Wales (now King) as making the same mistaken views about World War Two and the Ukraine-Russia War, as moral crusades.
(Meanwhile, as well as trying to cut disability benefits as a result of boxing itself into a corner, Keir Starmer UK government – unlike the political leadership of Canada and the European Union – is doing everything it can to appease Donald Trump on international trade and other matters.)
For readers’ interest, Stevan and Hugh Eldred-Grigg have written a New Zealand take on World War Two that does not follow the ‘Good War’ trope: Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society during the Second World War, Otago University Press 2017.
Were Neville Chamberlain’s actions at the September 1938 Munich Conference wrong?
No, neither with foresight nor hindsight. If Britain and/or France had signed a pact with Czechoslovakia similar to the one they signed with Poland in 1939, they would have been committed to declaring at most a phoney war. Neither had the capacity to wage war on Germany nor to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid. At best, British hostilities against Germany in 1938 would have been as ineffective as they were in Archangel, Russia, in 1918.
Popular sentiment was absent in 1938 in the United Kingdom towards war with Germany. That situation had changed by March 1939 after Germany fully annexed Bohemia and Moravia, the territories that make up twenty-first century Czechia. Due in part to changed popular sentiment, the British and French responded differently when Poland was similarly threatened in 1939. The western ‘powers’ declared war on Germany following the first attack on Poland, but did almost nothing to fight Germany or to protect Poland during what became known as the ‘Phoney War’. (The phoney war ended with the German conquest of France in May 1940.)
The 1939 declaration of war was arguably more duplicitous than the 1938 declaration of peace. Poland’s half-century-long tragedy – far worse than anyone today, except for a few professional and amateur historians, realise – began to unfold. (France briefly invaded Germany’s Saarland in 1939, southeast of Luxembourg, before withdrawing. Nowhere near Poland.) The war in 1939 in Poland, remote to the United Kingdom, was far from ‘phoney’.
Examples of invoking or evoking ‘appeasement’ and /or ‘Munich’ and/or Churchill on behalf of ‘democracy’:
Peter Hitchens gives these post-WW2 examples (pp.13-17):
President Harry S Truman, in December 1950, re the continuation of the Korean War
Anthony Eden, 1956, to justify the Suez War (which first brought Israel into an external war of aggression)
President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965, justifying the escalation of the Vietnam War
US Secretary of State George Shultz in February 1984, re conflict in Nicaragua
US Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, in August 1989, before the US invasion of Panama
George Bush (senior) in June 1990, re the first war against Iraq (noting that the initial response to the immanent invasion of Kuwait was not unlike Churchill’s lesser-known response in 1938, to the German reoccupation of the Rhineland [“more talks”])
Bill Clinton’s 1999 comparison of Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler, in the context of the probable secession of Kosovo from Milosevic’s Serbia
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, in 2003, justifying the second invasion of Iraq
President Trump’s aids in June 2017, referring to Barack Obama’s Cuba initiative
Winston Churchill’s worst Appeasement, and Atrocities
The worst act of appeasement that I can think of was Winston Churchill’s kowtowing to Joseph Stain at Yalta (Crimea) in the second week of February 1945 (ref Hitchens p.6 and Wikipedia citing Leo McKinstry, “Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace”, Atlantic Books, 2019, Ch 22). According to McKinstry “When Churchill arrived at Yalta on 4 February 1945, the first question that Stalin put to him was: ‘Why haven’t you bombed Dresden?’.”
Ten days later, Churchill did indeed firebomb Dresden, immolating 25,000 people – mostly civilians and refugees. Stalin (metaphorically) said “jump”, Churchill said “how high?”. And Churchill delivered.
Dresden was far from Churchill’s only actual or intended atrocity. Operation Gomorrah, on Hamburg at the end of July 1943, was a worse 24-hour atrocity than Dresden. The malevolent intent of that ‘raid’ lies in the biblical name given to the operation. While it was largely a test-run and forerunner for later bombings – including a forerunner of the firebombing of Tokyo exactly 80 years ago – it killed more than 35,000 mostly civilians “in their homes”.
(As a single event the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 – Operation Meetinghouse – caused easily more deaths [100,000] than Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima [70,000] or Nagasaki [35,000]. In the mainstream media, I saw no 80th-anniversary commemoration stories of this ‘worst-ever in the history of the world’ attack on civilians. Now is a timely time for us to be reminded about this kind of aerial megadeath.)
The third Churchill atrocity to mention was the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. Encyclopedia Britannica says that “the 1942 halt in rice imports to India did not cause the famine, and the 1943 crop yield was actually sufficient to feed the people of Bengal. It was ultimately special wartime factors that caused this difficult situation to become a disastrous famine. Fearing Japanese invasion, British authorities stockpiled food to feed defending troops, and they exported considerable quantities to British forces in the Middle East”. Churchill’s atrocities have been justified on the basis that the casualties were to them while saving some of our lives. But the people of Bengal were, at least notionally part of us, citizens and civilians of the British Empire.
In Wikipedia: “Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: “The War Cabinet’s shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India.” Indeed, Bengal was required to export rice to Ceylon to support British naval operations there. Of Churchill’s major atrocities, this was the only one to be mentioned in Netflix’s recent over-the-top account Churchill at War.
The Netflix ‘docuseries’ does at least mention Churchill being sidelined by the Americans in late 1943 and 1944. Churchill was sidelined from the top table of war-command largely on the basis of his penchant for atrocities and his unwillingness to confront Germany head-on (an unwillingness that could have been interpreted as ‘appeasement’, and probably was understood as such by the Americans). Churchill indulged in a number of side-wars, including a successful invasion of Madagascar in 1942; an invasion that put paid forever to the 1940 German fantasy of resettling Eastern European Jews there.
The Americans took much longer than Churchill to become convinced about the merits of holocaust-scale bombing than did the British. It would seem that the British burning of Hamburg – which was bombed because it was there, easily accessible from Britain – left quite a bad taste upon some American commanders, and indeed upon President Roosevelt himself. (We note that the atrocious American incendiary bombings of Japan in March 1945 were undertaken after Harry Truman became Vice President, and in the context that Roosevelt was seriously ill, and died soon after the February Yalta ‘Peace’ Conference.)
Churchill’s final atrocity to mention here never actually happened, except to create an environmental disaster on a Scottish Island (Gruinard, Britain’s mysterious WW2 ‘island of death’ Myles Burke, BBC, 22 April 2024). It partly explains some of Churchill’s reticence towards the D-Day invasion of Occupied France. Churchill had another plan, which he seems to have kept secret from his Allies: biological warfare, Anthrax.
“The plan was to infect linseed cakes with Anthrax spores and drop them by plane into cattle pastures around Germany. … The proposed plan would have decimated Germany’s meat supply, and triggered a nationwide anthrax contamination, resulting in an enormous [civilian] death toll. … The secret trials carried on until 1943, when the military deemed them a success, and scientists packed up and returned to Porton Down. As a result, five million linseed cakes laced with Anthrax were produced but the plan was ultimately abandoned as the Allies’ Normandy invasion progressed, leading the cakes to be destroyed after the war.” The test programme on Gruinard was cynically called ‘Operation Vegetarian’. “Gruinard was not the only site where the UK conducted secret biological warfare tests, but it was the first. The consequences of what happened there stand as a grim testament to both the dangers of biological warfare and humanity’s capacity for destruction.”
Have Bill Clinton and subsequent US presidents drawn inspiration from Brezinski’s 1997 essay as a clarion call for world domination?
Zbigniew Brezinski’s call for US world hegemony seems not much different to what Richard Evans claims was Hitler’s aim: “Hitler’s obvious drive for European and eventually world conquest.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997; review of Peter Hitchens’s Eurosceptic take on the Second World War, by Richard J Evans, New Statesman, 26 Sep 2018.)
Evans’ claim about Hitler is obvious hyperbole; Germany never could have had the capacity to “conquer” the world. (Think of the socio-geographic limits to the Roman Empire.) But the Nazi imperial vision for Germany was to create a mega-state in Central Eurasia that would have hegemony over the rest of the world. Is there any country in the twentieth or twenty-first century which has sought such ‘unipolarity’; sought to be the world’s one-and-only superpower, which expects other countries to say “how high?” whenever it says “jump”?
Perhaps there is? Did Brezinski – Henry Kissinger’s 1970s’ foreign policy rival – spell it out in 1997?
Finally
‘Appeasement’ is like ‘Antisemitism’; the powers-that-be only have to say either word to silence commonsense debate about peace and war and genocide. As Hitchens points out (p.27): “We have mythologised the experience so completely that [politicians] only have to say the word ‘appeasement’ to silence opponents and bring legislators and journalists to their side, on any wild adventure.” Phil Goff is a hapless victim of what Joseph Mali and Shlomo Sand have called “mythistory”.
Wars since the 1930s are no more ‘moral’ than were wars before that time. (Indeed, if we wish to personalise it, WW2 at its core was a war between Hitler and Stalin; neither men are commonly described as ‘moral’.) In fact, recent wars are less moral. WW2 became the first major war in which civilians were actively targeted as a predominant military gambit. This approach to war is now becoming entrenched, with drones replacing soldiers, and civilians evermore in the firing line.
We should not be coerced into supporting wars on the basis of narratives by powerful know-not-much persons or cliques dropping words like ‘appeasement’, ‘Munich’, ‘Churchill’ or ‘Hitler’. Wars are very costly, but the costs are not usually paid – at least in the short term – by those elites who promote them from far away.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
As most of us appreciate, there is a whole geopolitical world that overlays the formal political world of about 200 ‘nation states’ (aka ‘polities’). Geopolitical fractures – a result of the ‘big games’ over and above the ‘rules-based order’ – occur in all sorts of places, sometimes through provinces, even counties. Their significances wax and wane, as geopolitics itself is a dynamic game of changing exceptions and allegiances, and the expansions or contractions of ‘real estate assets’.
How about this one, given the apparent detaching of the United States of America from the liberal democratic western alliance? (Is the western alliance – which includes Canada – in the process of becoming a set of American proxies, like certain Latin American countries, rather than a partnership? Or is it a process of divorce?) Point Roberts is a United States enclave within the Greater Vancouver urban area. Should Canada – or British Columbia – file for Point Roberts? It would be the tidy thing to do, as part of the divorce settlement.
Geopolitics operates on at least two levels. There are the big fractures, where potential world wars – hot and cold – are simmering. Then there are the smaller fractures, such as those between the European Union and its neighbours: Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Cyprus. And those within the world’s mini-empires: Denmark vis-à-vis Greenland; Australia vis-à-vis Norfolk Island; New Zealand vis-à-vis Cook Islands; France vis-à-vis New Caledonia.
At an intermediate level are boundary disputes between Japan and Russia (Kuril Islands), India and Pakistan (Kashmir), India and China (Himalayas), and Rwanda and the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Then there are new hot-fractures being created through civil wars; such as that between the Arabic and African worlds within Sudan, Islamic and Buddhist populations within Myanmar, and different ethno-cultural minorities within (and on the edges of) Syria and in the west of China.
There’s also a growing north-south sectarian divide in Nigeria (reflecting complex geopolitical game-playing in the Sahel, to Nigeria’s north and northwest), Africa’s most populous country. And there are geopolitical pushes and pulls in the non-EU Balkans. Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina (European countries with majority Islamic populations) have become effective proxies of the United States; the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina is fractured almost fifty-fifty, the other part being the autonomous though unrecognised Russian-aligned Republika Srpska. (China is currently building a north-south railway through the Balkans from Piraeus in Greece to Budapest in Hungary, while the European Union is sponsoring a new railway from Albania in the Adriatic Sea to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.)
Finally, there’s a big geopolitical tension within the core Islamic world, which has led to the long-running civil war in Yemen; the two sides being proxies for Iran and for Saudi Arabia; for Tehran and for Riyadh.
The players – the ‘Great Powers’
At present, it would seem, the United States of America, which sees itself as the world’s preeminent geopolitical player, is impatient for conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine to end, so that it can get on with its ‘game of choice’, namely the ‘new cold war’ conflict with China.
We should note that, in Geopolitics, the players are typically identified by the countries’ capital cities. Thus, the United States becomes Washington, the United Kingdom becomes London, and the European Union becomes Berlin or Brussels. Sometimes the players are or have been referred to by power-centres within cities, such as the Kremlin (Moscow), or the Quai d’Orsay (Paris). (The New Zealand equivalent might be ‘Bowen Street’!)
Beijing and Taiwan; and Washington
I saw this Daily Telegraph story in the New Zealand Herald last weekend: Chinese navy practices amphibious landings with new barges in South China Sea. To this end Taiwan is the American proxy through which the conflict may be waged; just as Ukraine and Israel are American proxies; proxies in the most visible of the world’s current geopolitical hot wars.
From the story: ‘Emma Salisbury, a sea power research fellow at the Council on Geostrategy’ says “The fact Beijing has permitted details of these barges to become public signals the threat China poses in the region.” No, it doesn’t. It indicates that China is – had has been for decades – playing the geopolitical game of ‘optics’. Beijing is saying to Washington “don’t mess with us”, rather than “we are going to mess with you”.
Kinmen and Lienchiang Counties, Fujian. But what country?
Is this the world’s least understood geopolitical faultline?
The central piece of geography in the New Cold War is understood to be the Taiwan Strait; indeed we routinely see pictures of that Strait on our news bulletins. Usually, they look like these BBC versions:
The clear tale being told here in these maps is that there is a simple border in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and China, and that there are two countries, Taiwan and China. The constitutional reality is that there are two regimes claiming constitutional sovereignty over a single estate. We may call these regimes China-Taipei and China-Beijing. (In the Olympic Games and other sports, Taiwan competes as Chinese-Taipei.) The official name of the two regimes are Republic of China (RoC), and Peoples Republic of China (PRC). (I once watched a story on TV3 News involving some Beijing-Chinese people in New Zealand. TV3 mistakenly showed pictures of a China Airlinesaircraft, when it should have been Air China.)
The BBC’s two-country optics are neat and tidy (compared to the one-territory two-regime reality), but is negated by the presence of two Taiwanese counties in the territory of Fujian province, PRC; Kinmen and Lienchiang (although Kinmen is sometimes called Jinmen or Quemoy, and in China Lienchiang is spelt ‘Lianjiang’). At its closest point, Kinmen (Taiwan) is 4km from the large Chinese city of Xiamen (and 190 km from the Taiwanese mainland); indeed Kinmen is located in Xiamen harbour, just as Rangitoto Island is in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. (Xiamen has the same population size as New Zealand, just over five million people.) Lienchieng is the Taiwanese portion of Lianjiang county, a subdivision of Fujian. (We note that Taiwan still uses the ‘postal’ style of anglicisation of Chinese names that was generally used before the 1970s; eg Peking instead of the Pinyin form, Beijing.)
From the inception of the United nations in 1945, until 1971, China-Taipei (aka Taiwan) held a permanent seat on the Security Council, with the right of veto). This only changed in 1971 after US President Nixon, committing to reality over narrative, moved towards rapprochement towards China (although the United States was not ready for the UN recognition switch in 1971); while at the same time fudging the issue of the status of Taiwan. That fudge remains the official status quo in the international ‘rules-based-order’.
We should also note that Taiwan (RoC) withdrew from the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games, due to its erosion of status as a recognised nation-state, with particular note that Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada, had led the realpolitik move, recognising China in 1970.
This map correctly shows all of Taiwan, noting the black dashed lines. And this shows Taiwanese Fujian. This huge geopolitical boundary between West and East passes through the Chinese province of Fujian.
Geopolitical Implications
Presumably the people in these counties, for the most part, prefer the status quo and hope that it can be maintained indefinitely, and without military hostilities.
If there was a push for Taipei to repudiate its constitutional claim to all of China – for example as a means to de jureindependence as its own sovereign state – it is difficult to see how this could happen without Taipei ceding Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to Beijing. That would indeed be the minimum price Taipei would have to pay for Beijing to abandon its claim over all of Taiwan.
In effect, these two counties are hostages to both regimes. If the United States or any other United States’ aligned nation-state invaded China, then it would be realistic to expect that Kinmen and Lienchiang would be snaffled-up by Beijing; maybe one county immediately and, for leverage, the other staying on as a hostage.
On the other hand, if the United States was to escalate its optical war against Beijing into a fully-fledged ‘cold war’, it might install threatening military equipment into Kinmen or Lienchiang, much as the Soviet Union did in Cuba in 1962. Thus these counties represent leverage of Taipei (acting as a proxy for the United States) over China.
It would be hard to see China not-responding to such provocation. Further, in such a hostile context, China would be tempted to activate its claim over the whole of Taiwan, and not just the two counties in Fujian.
So, the untidy one-country two-regime status quo should be simply left as it is. Speculative political rhetoric against Beijing or Taipei should be treated by the international community as tantamount to diplomatic ‘hate-speech’. And simplistic media stories which represent Taiwan only as an island 100 kilometres away from China, should be corrected. Responsible media – unlike the BBC or the Daily Telegraph – do not distort the known truth.
We don’t want to end up in a major geopolitical conflict as a result of politicians and political journalists not even knowing or understanding the location of the China/Taiwan border. The border anomalies result from the pragmatic settlement of a military conflict between the two Chinese regimes; a conflict that took place in the decade after 1949.
Lessons for the Ukraine-Russia conflict
The present military boundary between Ukraine and Russia passes inside three recognised provincial boundaries of Ukraine: Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. (The provinces of Luhansk and Crimea should be off the negotiating table; the world has to accept that they are now, for better or worse, de facto or de jure, territories of Russia; albeit unrecognised in the same way that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are Russian territories unrecognised by the United Nations. (And Northern Cyprus for that matter, as an unrecognised Turkish territory inside the European Union nation of Cyprus; a territory which untidily passes through the Cyprus’s capital, Nicosia.)
Successful negotiations to end wars have to take account of military realities. China’s 1950s’ concessions to Taiwan over Kinmen and Lienchiang show that such splits need not impede a long-lasting and workable peace. What does impede a transition to peace is the insistence on substantial one-sided deviations from the military reality at the time of a ‘cease-fire’; certainly, the side that is at a military disadvantage should not be demanding one-sided concessions from the other side.
Lessons for Palestine-Israel conflict
In 1967 and 1973, there were major wars between, in essence, Israel and Egypt. The lands most under contention were those that we call ‘Occupied Palestine’ (and ‘Occupied East Jerusalem’) today; though other lands were captured (especially the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria). The 1967 War was started by Israel under the pretext that Egypt was about to invade Israel. Israel unambiguously won this war. (In 1967, Israel even attacked – deliberately – an American naval vessel: USS Liberty.)
Israel had not thought-through the strategic consequences of its annexation (from Egypt and Jordan) of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel was working towards an acceptable way of incorporating Palestinian Israelis into the ‘Jewish State’. Now, all of a sudden, they found themselves with an enlarged country with a majority (or near-majority) Palestinian population. A legal fiction – replacing the language of ‘annexation’ with that of ‘occupation’ – enabled the non-Jewish populations of the ‘occupied territories’ to be treated as, at best, third -class citizens.
The 1973 War – started by Egypt, principally to regain its Sinai territory – triggered changes to the global architecture of capitalism. After the advantage switched from Egypt to Israel, Israeli troops crossed the Suez Canal and were heading towards Cairo when the cease-fire was called. Subsequent negotiations, over six years, saw Israel’s military successes eroded into something like the present situation in which Palestinians living in Palestine are citizens of nowhere.
After two military victories, through the 1978 Camp David Accords, Israel found that it had forfeited almost all its military gains; for Israel it felt like they had won the war but lost the peace. The result of the process was a substantial and unfortunate switch to the Right in Israeli politics. Since then, especially since the 1990s, Israel has been looking for ways to annex a Palestine free of Palestinians; to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians as part of an unapologetic annexation process undertaken with the full blessing of its geopolitical patron.
Proxy Warfare
Most wars today, including ‘civil wars’, are proxy-wars funded (on one side at least) by external patrons. While Ukraine has been a proxy of the United States for most of this century, Ukraine is now morphing into a proxy of Brussels and London; of the barely-elected Starmer (one-third of the vote in a low turn-out election) and an unelected Ursula von de Leyen (a bureaucrat who’s not even a Member of the European Parliament).
On Al Jazeera News (6am New Zealand summer time, 18 March 2025), it was reported that Donald Trump posted this message on his favoured social-media platform: “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” (See this quote on U.S. Air Campaign Against Houthis Continues Into Third Day, TWZ, The War Zone.)
This is a clear statement that the United States President, at least, believes that the patrons of proxies are the real antagonists, and should be deemed responsible – indeed ‘criminally responsible’ for misdeeds of aggression – for acts performed by their proxies. It should be quite easy to apply this dictum, at least allegorically, to the big hot wars of the moment: Ukraine and Palestine.
Conclusion
We can avoid most wars by finding pragmatic solutions to geopolitical conflicts, accepting realities as they stand, and avoiding inflammatory rhetoric towards others. We have avoided violent conflict in and around the Fujian geopolitical faultline by not, so far, trying to find and impose final tidy solutions.
Likewise, to find peace in the world’s current military hotspots, we have to accept and negotiate around the current realities of those situations. Most importantly, we follow the ‘first law of holes’: ‘if you are in a hole, stop digging’. Inflaming sensitive situations through speculative assertions about the other side’s escalating malevolence are unhelpful.
In today’s wars the western ‘liberal democratic’ side is not even close to being the ‘good guys’ in wars framed as good-versus-evil. The conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine demonstrate that these wars – like most past wars – represent the ‘hot’ phases of geopolitical game playing; wars are ‘bad guys’ versus ‘bad guys’, and such wars end through transactional deals. (The antagonists may be different shades of bad; and there are always good victims, though many of these are not ‘perfect victims’.) The ‘bad guys’ include the patrons of the proxies. Further, contemporary warfare targets civilians rather than soldiers.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
The Removalists was first performed in 1971 at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, by the Australian Performing Group, an ensemble of young graduates, artists and friends.
A beacon of the New Wave of Australian drama, David Williamson was part of a new generation of theatre artists who were interested in reflecting Australia back to its audiences. Now one of Australia’s most prolific playwrights, Williamson’s early plays are part of the repertoire of modern Australian classics.
The Removalists was just his fourth play. A brutal commentary on Australian masculinity, it was a dark turn for the young artist.
A crooked cop, an easily corruptible young constable, a boozy husband and father who beats his wife and demands his dinner, and a removalist who sees no evil, does no evil. A new production by the Melbourne Theatre Company, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, celebrates the enduring appeal of the play.
A suburban police station
We begin in a police station. Young constable Neville Ross (William McKenna) is being inducted into the force by a bitter, manipulative, rule-bending sergeant, Dan Simmons (played with menace by the moustachioed Steve Mouzakis).
When middle class sisters Kate (Jessica Clarke) and Fiona (Eloise Mignon) enter to report domestic violence, Simmonds asks invasive questions about Fiona’s relationship to her beer-swilling loudmouth husband Kenny (Michael Whalley).
Fiona initially expressed uncertainty about making the complaint. Kate insisted on going to the police. The action that follows exposes the humiliation that accompanies reports of domestic violence.
The production exposes the humiliation that accompanies reports of domestic violence. Pia Johnson/MTC
In an excruciating moment, Kate stands by watching while Simmonds asks Fiona to show him the bruises on her back and upper thigh. Fiona is unsure as she turns her back to the auditorium, slowly pulls up her jumper and exposes the bruises on her bare back.
Under Sarks’ direction, it is a moment filled with empathy.
Enter the removalist
The action shifts in act two to Fiona’s place. Expecting Kenny to be out drinking, Simmonds – who is expecting sexual favours from Kate – and Ross arrive to help Fiona move into her new flat. But Kenny is home, and sprays a string of obscenities at the policemen. Simmonds cuffs him – and lands a few quiet punches.
The removalist (Martin Blum) interrupts the action, while turning a blind eye to the mayhem. The entrances and exits of the removalist and Ross and the moving of furniture, punctuate the drama with comic effect, injecting a light touch in the midst of the play’s violence.
The removal of furniture injects a light touch in the midst of the play’s violence. Pia Johnson/MTC
When the sisters and the removalist leave, the cops beat Kenny in an orgy of violence that is so relentless and brutal, it descends into farce.
The bloody ending has something of the Grand Guignol to it – the 19th century theatre of revenge that descends into comic horror but also raises serious questions about violence in the contemporary real life world.
Critiquing white Australia
Clever balancing of humour and social commentary is the key to Williamson’s critique of the law in relation to violence against women.
In an era of diverse casting, Sarks has cast The Removalists with an all white cast, laying the violence of the play at the feet of white Australian culture.
Matilda Woodroofe’s costumes contribute to the play’s critique of Australian culture. Kenny wears a pair of footy shorts and a t-shirt, Blundstone boots and short black socks, evoking the unoffical uniform of the ocker male Australian.
Onstage seating echos the intimate space of the original theatre, La Mama. Pia Johnson/MTC
In a novel touch, Dale Ferguson’s set adds rows of onstage seating for those who would like a much closer view of the action. Not only do they get a stronger sense of the onstage actors’ energy and presence, they experience the play as the original audience did in the tiny La Mama theatre.
Just as playwright Williamson targeted a conservative macho ocker culture in the early 1970s, this revival can be understood as its contemporary counterpart. Sarks highlights the particular kinds of violence that is systemic within Australian culture that continues today.
Sarks accords the female characters more dignity and independence than earlier versions. They deliver the same lines, but with confidence that speaks of their self-assurance. Kate uses her gaze to put Simmonds, the disgusting older cop, in his place. After her humiliation at the police station, Fiona rejects Kenny’s appeals.
Sarks accords the female characters dignity and independence. Pia Johnson/MTC
These subtle and not so subtle changes in the delivery of the women’s lines show how directing an historical play can resist the ideologies that determined more passive roles for women in the past.
The Removalists is at Melbourne Theatre Company until April 17.
Denise Varney received funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Scheme.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Following the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to USAID funding last month, the online international disaster database EM-DAT (normally funded by USAID) went dark for a week.
EM-DAT collates data on the occurrence and impacts of thousands of mass disasters worldwide and records both human and economic losses in a publicly available dataset. It relies on various sources, including United Nations agencies and non-governmental organisations, but also news reports.
The vulnerability of this database to the Trump administration’s cuts highlights the need for New Zealand to take charge of its own data on the damage caused by extreme events.
Currently, New Zealand has no dedicated disaster loss database. This means we don’t know how much extreme weather events and other types of disasters are costing us.
Two events in 2023 – Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods – illustrate this problem. They were by far the costliest weather disasters in New Zealand’s modern history and we know they were exceptionally damaging.
But we don’t know the aggregate financial losses they caused, and the different sources shown in the table below provide conflicting numbers, none of them comprehensive.
Without understanding the magnitude of the problem, our ability to prevent damage or recover from extreme weather is diminished. It is indeed difficult to manage what we don’t measure.
In the face of these unknowns, most other countries, including Australia, are investing in the collection, collation and analysis of their own data to make informed decisions about disaster risk management. It is high time New Zealand did the same.
The limits of New Zealand’s data on loss and damage
Currently, data on extreme weather costs have come primarily from the Insurance Council of New Zealand (ICNZ) or from EM-DAT, whose data sometimes come from less reliable sources. New Zealand’s reliance on a private source and an international organisation leaves us with data that could charitably be described as fragmented, incomplete and unreliable.
ICNZ figures showing insurance payouts for disasters are commonly used by the government and media as a proxy for total cost. But private insurance accounts for only a small share of the losses resulting from some extreme weather. Roads, bridges and many other parts of public infrastructure are not insured; many private assets are not insured either.
Furthermore, wealthier communities tend to be better insured and hence receive higher payouts. The ICNZ data imply they experience more damages than poorer, less insured communities, even when that is not the case.
As climate change brings more extreme weather, more homes will likely be under-insured. Phil Walter/Getty Images
Globally, insurance tends to retreat when the risks become too high to be covered affordably. We expect that in the future a higher number of homes and businesses will be under-insured. Relying solely on data on insured damages will hence provide us with an increasingly partial picture of damages caused by extreme weather.
The second main source of disaster loss data is EM-DAT. In principle, it aims to include all damage costs (not just insured ones), but the approach does not necessarily result in more accurate numbers.
As the graph below shows, ICNZ can be counted on to provide reliable data for all large events, but there are frequent gaps in EM-DAT’s data for New Zealand. It is also clear that the difference between ICNZ private insurance payouts and total cost estimates from EM-DAT is too small to accurately reflect uninsured losses.
In previous research (co-authored with Rebecca Newman) we identified other gaps in the EM-DAT international estimates of extreme-weather costs, most notably for wildfires, droughts and heatwaves.
Damages from these events are largely uninsured and so are not included in the ICNZ data either. Yet their likelihood is increasing because of dramatic changes in our climate.
We only have a partial picture, and a potentially very misleading one at that – both in terms of the size of the problem and how the problem is changing.
Nevertheless, the data from the ICNZ and EM-DAT are still the best we have for understanding what is happening.
When EM-DAT temporarily went offline last month following the termination of its funding from USAID, we received a crude reminder of how critical this resource is in the global context. How can we talk about disaster risk management and risk reduction when we have no idea what is going on?
Effective policy relies on accurate data
There are myriad ways in which a disaster-loss database for New Zealand could be used effectively by central and local government, insurance and banking companies, weather-exposed industries such as agriculture, community organisations and by individuals.
Policies about flood protection, planned relocation (managed retreat), climate adaptation, insurance pricing, banking regulation, home loans and infrastructure maintenance should all be informed by knowledge of the risks from extreme-weather events and other hazards.
A concrete example of how useful this data would be is for planned relocations. We need a clear perspective of the history of flood events in different communities and comprehensive assessments of past damages in order to quantify the future costs of relocations. Without these data, how can we decide which financial arrangements for relocation are fiscally sound?
A comprehensive New Zealand disaster-loss database is possible. As a nation we have the datasets we need, but these are held within different government agencies and other organisations, with no centralised collection or reporting.
Hidden there is everything we need to understand the current situation and plan better for the future. We just have to make the decision to invest in collecting and curating this data.
Stats NZ would be the data’s logical host, given the agency’s extensive experience in collecting and posting data to help us organise our society. Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods should have convinced us we need this. Maybe EM-DAT going dark, and thus obscuring a worldwide risk, should convince us even more.
I am grateful for the contribution of Jo-Anne Hazel (writing) and Tom Uher (data collection).
Ilan Noy is a member of the scientific committee of EM-DAT (pro bono).
It’s annoying to open your dishwasher after the cycle is finished only to find half of the dishes still wet. Instead of being able to stack them away, you end up with a full drying rack.
And you’ve probably noticed it’s always plastic items that end up the most wet. What’s going on?
The answer is a bit convoluted and requires some materials and physics knowledge, but bear with me.
Plastics have very different properties to ceramics and metals – the stuff your plates and cutlery are most likely made out of. Two key things play a role: one is how the materials store heat, and the other is what happens on their surfaces.
How dishes store heat
If you take your dishes out of the dishwasher promptly after the cycle ends, you’ve likely noticed that plates, glasses and ceramic mugs are still hot, while plastic containers don’t feel warm at all.
This relates to their heat capacity, sometimes also referred to as the “thermal mass” of these materials. Ceramics, glass and metals can store more heat, and it takes longer for them to give it away to their surroundings than it does for plastics. In other words, ceramics and metals cool down more slowly.
Since evaporating water takes energy and cools the surface – which is also how your body cools down on a hot day as you sweat – plastics cool down faster, leaving much of the water on the surface.
Ceramic, metal and glass items retain heat better than plastics – so they dry faster. Velik/Shutterstock
How water behaves on different surfaces
The other part of the problem is in surface energy, which tells us how water wets different surfaces.
You’ve probably seen water droplets bead up on things like high-end rain jackets or non-stick frying pans. These surfaces are called hydrophobic, meaning they “fear” water. This is also the case for most plastics, although not always to such a dramatic effect.
On the other end of the spectrum, surfaces like many ceramics and metals are coated with water easily. That’s because they are more hydrophilic or “water-loving”.
On a hydrophobic material such as a rain jacket, water will bead into droplets. Ondra Vacek/Shutterstock
But there’s another factor here – and it has to do with dishwashers, in particular. Dishwasher detergent contains a mixture of chemicals, mainly surfactants – substances that lower the surface tension of water.
Surface tension is the property of the material’s interface (for example, between solid and liquid, or liquid and gas) that tells us how much energy it takes to create a larger surface. By adding detergent to water, we reduce its surface tension. This makes it easier for the water to spread over surfaces it encounters (even over these hydrophobic plastics), in turn making it easier to wash your dishes.
More importantly, the surfactants in detergent are molecules that have both hydrophobic and hydrophilic chemical groups. This makes them a kind of link between water and fats. Since oil and water don’t like to mix, a surfactant helps to “blend” the latter and have it float in water, helping remove any oily residues from your dishes.
This happens in the main washing cycle. After rinsing, the chemicals get removed and your dishes are sprayed with clean water so you don’t have to taste the detergent in your tea.
So, at the end, water beads up on your hydrophobic plastic dishes and spreads all over your more hydrophilic ceramic plates, cups and metal pots. A large bead of water evaporates more slowly than when the same amount of water is spread more thinly over your plates and pots.
On top of that, ceramic dishes retain more heat, which makes them dry more quickly – the water that’s already spread more thinly just evaporates faster.
Is there anything I can do to make plastics dry faster?
You’ve probably heard about rinse aids that are added to the rinse cycle. Their key ingredients are different types of low-foaming surfactants and chemicals that make water softer. Some “all in one” dishwasher tablets may already contain a small amount of rinse aid and the makers provide instructions on how to use them in a safe and efficient way.
Rinse aids also lower the surface tension of water, making it easier for water to wet and run off the surfaces, preventing it from beading up and reducing streaks.
This also works on plastic dishes, leaving much less water behind. Some dishwasher manufacturers recommend using rinse aids because in addition to drying dishes faster, they can prevent corrosion of dishwasher parts from detergent residues.
Is there anything else you can do to dry the dishes faster?
There is one thing that is really simple: just crack the door open as soon as the cycle is finished and it’s safe to do so, so that water vapour can escape. If hot air and moisture instead remain trapped in the dishwasher, the water vapour will condense on all surfaces, like dew before dawn.
At the end, you have a way to make most of your dishes drier after the cycle, although you may still end up with a first-world problem in the form of some wet plasticware. There will be less water on it if you use a rinse aid according to instructions, and open the dishwasher when safe, after the cycle is completed.
Kamil Zuber 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.
New Zealand’s National-led coalition government’s policy on Gaza seems caught between a desire for a two-state diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and closer alignment with the US, which supports a Netanyahu government strongly opposed to a Palestinian state
In the last 17 months, Gaza has been the scene of what Thomas Merton once called the unspeakable — human wrongdoing on a scale and a depth that seems to go beyond the capacity of words to adequately describe.
The latest Gaza conflict began with a horrific Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 that prompted a relentless Israel ground and air offensive in Gaza with full financial, logistical and diplomatic backing from the Biden administration.
During this period, around 50,000 people – 48,903 Palestinians and 1706 Israelis – have been reported killed in the Gaza conflict, according to the official figures of the Gaza Health Ministry, as well as 166 journalists and media workers, 120 academics,and more than 224 humanitarian aid workers.
Moreover, a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, signed in mid-January, seems to be hanging by a thread.
Israel has resumed its blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza and cut off electricity after Hamas rejected an Israeli proposal to extend phase 1 of the ceasefire deal (to release more Israeli hostages) without any commitment to implement phase 2 (that envisaged ending the conflict in Gaza and Israel withdrawing its troops from the territory).
Hamas insists on negotiating phase 2 as signed by both parties in the January ceasefire agreement
Over the weekend, Israel reportedly launched air-strikes in Gaza and the Trump administration unleashed a wave of attacks on Houthi rebel positions in Yemen after the Houthis warned Israel not to restart the war in Gaza.
New Zealand and the Gaza conflict Although distant in geographic terms, the Gaza crisis represents a major moral and legal challenge to New Zealand’s self-image and its worldview based on the strengthening of an international rules-based order.
New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, emphasised partnership and cooperation between indigenous Māori and European settlers in nation-building.
While the aspirations of the Treaty have yet to be fully realised, the credibility of its vision of reconciliation at home depends on New Zealand’s willingness to uphold respect for human rights and the rule of law in the international arena, particularly in states like Israel where tensions persist between the settler population and Palestinians in occupied territories like the West Bank.
New Zealand’s declaratory stance towards Gaza In 2023 and 2024, New Zealand consistently backed calls in the UN General Assembly for humanitarian truces or ceasefires in Gaza. It also joined Australia and Canada in February and July last year to demand an end to hostilities.
The New Zealand Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, told the General Assembly in April 2024 that the Security Council had failed in its responsibility “to maintain international peace and security”.
He was right. The Biden administration used its UN Security Council veto four times to perpetuate this brutal onslaught in Gaza for nearly 15 months.
In addition, Peters has repeatedly said there can be no military resolution of a political problem in Gaza that can only be resolved through affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
The limitations of New Zealand’s Gaza approach Despite considerable disagreement with Netanyahu’s policy of “mighty vengeance” in Gaza, the National-led coalition government had few qualms about sending a small Defence Force deployment to the Red Sea in January 2024 as part of a US-led coalition effort to counter Houthi rebel attacks on commercial shipping there.
While such attacks are clearly illegal, they are basically part of the fallout from a prolonged international failure to stop the US-enabled carnage in Gaza.
In particular, the NZDF’s Red Sea deployment did not sit comfortably with New Zealand’s acceptance in September 2024 of the ICJ’s ruling that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza) was “unlawful”.
At the same time, the National-led coalition government’s silence on US President Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to “own” Gaza, displace two million Palestinian residents and make the territory the “Riviera” of the Middle East was deafening.
Furthermore, while Wellington announced travel bans on violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank in February 2024, it has had little to say publicly about the Netanyahu government’s plans to annex the West Bank in 2025. Such a development would gravely undermine the two-state solution, violate international law, and further fuel regional tensions.
New Zealand’s low-key policy On balance, the National-led coalition government’s policy towards Gaza appears to be ambivalent and lacking moral and legal clarity in a context in which war crimes have been regularly committed since October 7.
Peters was absolutely correct to condemn the UNSC for failing to deliver the ceasefire that New Zealand and the overwhelming majority of states in the UN General Assembly had wanted from the first month of this crisis.
But the New Zealand government has had no words of criticism for the US, which used its power of veto in the UNSC for more than a year to thwart the prospect of a ceasefire and provided blanket support for an Israeli military campaign that killed huge numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
By cooperating with the Biden administration against Houthi rebels and adopting a quietly-quietly approach to Trump’s provocative comments on Gaza and his apparent willingness to do whatever it takes to help Israel “to get the job done’, New Zealand has revealed a selective approach to upholding international law and human rights in the desperate conditions facing Gaza
Professor Robert G. Patman is an Inaugural Sesquicentennial Distinguished Chair and his research interests concern international relations, global security, US foreign policy, great powers, and the Horn of Africa. This article was first published by The Spinoff and is republished here with the author’s permission.
What was left unsaid is that the individuals would be knowingly placed into a prison system in which a range of sources have reported widespread human rights abuses at the hands of state forces.
A first transfer of U.S. deportees from Venezuela has now arrived into that system. On March 16, the U.S. government flew around 250 deportees to El Salvador despite a judge’s order temporarily blocking the move. Bukele later posted a video online showing the deportees arriving in El Salvador with their hands and feet shackled and forcibly bent over by armed guards.
We have also heard firsthand of the human rights abuses that deportees and Salvadorans alike say they have suffered while incarcerated in El Salvador, and we have worked on hundreds of asylum cases as expert witnesses, testifying in U.S. immigration court about the nature and scope of human rights abuses in the country. We are deeply concerned both over the conditions into which deportees are arriving and as to what the U.S. administration’s decision signals about its commitments to international human rights standards.
For the past three years, Bukele has governed with few checks and balances under a self-imposed “state of exception.” This emergency status has allowed Bukele to suspend many rights as he wages what he calls a “war on gangs.”
The crackdown manifests in mass arbitrary arrests of anyone who fits stereotypical demographic characteristics of gang members, like having tattoos, a prior criminal record or even just “looking nervous.”
As a result of the ongoing mass arrests, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The proportion of its population that El Salvador incarcerates is more than triple that of the U.S. and double that of the next nearest country, Cuba.
Safest country in Latin America?
Bukele’s tough-on-gangs persona has earned him widespread popularity at home and abroad – he has fostered an immediate friendship with the new U.S. administration in particular.
But maintaining this popularity has involved, it is widely alleged, manipulating crime statistics, attacking journalists who criticize him and denying involvement in a widely documented secret gang pact that unraveled just before the start of the state of exception.
Bukele and pro-government Salvadoran media insist that the crackdown on gangs has transformed El Salvador into the safest country in Latin America.
But on the ground, Salvadorans have described how police, military personnel and Mexican cartels have taken over the exploitative practices previously carried out by gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18. One Salvadoran woman whose son died in prison just a few days after he was arbitrarily detained told a reporter from Al Jazeera: “One is always afraid. Before it was fear of the gangs, now it’s also the security forces who take innocent people.”
Bukele has ordered a communication blackout between incarcerated people and their loved ones. This means no visits, no letters and no phone calls.
Such lack of contact makes it nearly impossible for people to determine the well-being of their incarcerated family members, many of whom are parents with young children now cared for by extended family.
Despite the blackout, scholars, international and national rights’ groups and investigative journalists have been able to build up a picture of conditions inside El Salvador’s prisons through interviews with victims and their family members, medical records and forensic analysis of cases of prison deaths. What they describe is a hellscape.
Incarcerated Salvadorans are packed into grossly overcrowded cells, beaten regularly by prison personnel and denied medicines even when they are available. Inmates are frequently subjected to punishments including food deprivation and electric shocks. Indeed, a U.S. State Department’s 2023 country report on El Salvador noted the “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
The human rights organization Cristosal estimates that hundreds have died from malnutrition, blunt force trauma, strangulation and lack of lifesaving medical treatment.
Often, their bodies are buried by government workers in mass graves without notifying families.
Although El Salvador is a signatory to the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture, Amnesty International concluded after multiple missions to the country and interviews with victims and their families that there is “systemic use of torture” in Salvadoran prisons.
Likewise, a case-by-case study by Cristosal, which included forensic analysis of exhumed bodies of people who died in prison, determined in 2024 that “torture has become a state policy.”
‘At risk of irreparable harm’
What makes this all the more worrying is the scale of potential abuse.
El Salvador now houses a prison population of around 110,000 – more than three times the number of inmates before the state of exception began.
To increase the country’s capacity for ongoing mass incarceration, Bukele built and opened the Terrorism Confinement Center mega-prison in 2023. An analysis of the center using satellite footage showed that if the prison were to reach its full supposed capacity of 40,000, each prisoner would have less than 2 feet of space in their cells.
It is to this prison that deportees from the U.S. have been taken.
There are serious concerns over both the process and the legality of transferring U.S. prisoners to a nation that has not protected the human rights of its detained population.
Moreover, the agreement through which the Trump administration is seeking to moving migrants detained in the U.S. to El Salvador faces scrutiny under international law, given what is known about the country’s prison conditions.
International human rights is governed by laws that prohibit nations from transferring people into harm’s way, be it returning foreign nationals to countries where “there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm,” or transferring detainees to jurisdictions in which they are at risk of being tortured or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
The efforts of human rights organizations, journalists and scholars to document prison conditions point to an unequivocal conclusion: El Salvador does not meet the terms necessary to protect the human rights of deported and incarcerated migrants.
Mneesha Gellman received funding from Emerson College’s Faculty Development Fund. She is the Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative.
Sarah C. Bishop has received research funding from the Fulbright Organization, The Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society at Villanova University, the Robert Bosch Stiftung Foundation, and the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York. She serves on the board of directors of the nonprofit organization Mixteca.
Freedom of the press — a bedrock principle of American democracy — is under threat in the United States.
Here at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism we are witnessing and experiencing an alarming chill. We write to affirm our commitment to supporting and exercising First Amendment rights for students, faculty, and staff on our campus — and, indeed, for all.
After Homeland Security seized and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs, without charging him with any crime, many of our international students have felt afraid to come to classes and to events on campus.
They are right to be worried. Some of our faculty members and students who have covered the protests over the Gaza war have been the object of smear campaigns and targeted on the same sites that were used to bring Khalil to the attention of Homeland Security.
President Trump has warned that the effort to deport Khalil is just the first of many.
These actions represent threats against political speech and the ability of the American press to do its essential job and are part of a larger design to silence voices that are out of favour with the current administration.
We have also seen reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport the Palestinian poet and journalist Mosab Abu Toha, who has written extensively in the New Yorker about the condition of the residents of Gaza and warned of the mortal danger to Palestinian journalists.
There are 13 million legal foreign residents (green card holders) in the United States. If the administration can deport Khalil, it means those 13 million people must live in fear if they dare speak up or publish something that runs afoul of government views.
There are more than one million international students in the United States. They, too, may worry that they are no longer free to speak their mind. Punishing even one person for their speech is meant to intimidate others into self-censorship.
One does not have to agree with the political opinions of any particular individual to understand that these threats cut to the core of what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy. The use of deportation to suppress foreign critics runs parallel to an aggressive campaign to use libel laws in novel — even outlandish ways — to silence or intimidate the independent press.
The President has sued CBS for an interview with Kamala Harris which Trump found too favourable. He has sued the Pulitzer Prize committee for awarding prizes to stories critical of him.
He has even sued the Des Moines Register for publishing the results of a pre-election poll that showed Kamala Harris ahead at that point in the state.
Large corporations like Disney and Meta settled lawsuits most lawyers thought they could win because they did not want to risk the wrath of the Trump administration and jeopardize business they have with the federal government.
Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided that the paper’s editorial pages would limit themselves to pieces celebrating “free markets and individual liberties.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration insists on hand-picking the journalists who will be permitted to cover the White House and Pentagon, and it has banned the Associated Press from press briefings because the AP is following its own style book and refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
The Columbia Journalism School stands in defence of First Amendment principles of free speech and free press across the political spectrum. The actions we’ve outlined above jeopardise these principles and therefore the viability of our democracy. All who believe in these freedoms should steadfastly oppose the intimidation, harassment, and detention of individuals on the basis of their speech or their journalism.
The price of eggs has risen dramatically in recent years across the US. A dozen eggs cost US$1.20 (92p) in June 2019, but the price is now around US$4.90 (with a peak of US$8.17 in early March).
Some restaurants have imposed surcharges on egg-based dishes, bringing even more attention to escalating costs. And there are also shortages on supermarket shelves.
In the coming months, the US plans to import up to 100 million of this consumer staple. Government officials are approaching countries from Turkey to Brazil with enquiries about eggs for export.
Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously said that one option to the crisis was for people to get a chicken for their backyard, suggested in the Wall Street Journal that prices are unlikely to stabilise for some months. And Donald Trump recently shared an article on Truth Social calling on the public to “shut up about egg prices”.
The main cause of the problem is an outbreak of avian flu that has resulted in over 166 million birds in the US being slaughtered. Around 98% of the nation’s chickens are produced on factory farms, which are ripe for contagion.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the flu has already spread to several hundred dairy cattle and to one human. The USDA recently announced a US$1 billion plan to counter the problem, with funding for improved bio-security, vaccine research and compensation to farmers.
In January 2025, Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, blamed the previous administration for high egg prices. It is true that birds were slaughtered on President Joe Biden’s watch, but this was and remains standard practice at times of bird flu outbreaks and had also been the case during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
However, this points to the way the rising price of eggs has become a political touchstone. It was referred to regularly in campaign speeches and press briefings as a sign of things going wrong and a symbol of the US economy faced. Donald Trump promised to fix the price of eggs swiftly if elected, but so far the issue shows no sign of going away.
Prices are still trending up. Even when prices suddenly drop, as they have this week, the public know how much cheaper they used to be until recently, and do not tend to feel better.
There are a number of reasons why egg prices have become an important to US politicians. First, almost everyone buys eggs. So the shortage and subsequent price rise is newsworthy and affects consumers in all income brackets.
Secondly, they are a measure of broader economic vulnerabilities, so egg-related problems tend to be part of a larger story about how weak the economy is. And thirdly, egg prices are political because of Trump’s promise to bring them down.
Polls showed that the economy and inflation were key factors in voter choice on election day 2024. In February 2025, Donald Trump did an interview with NBC News in which he said he won the election on the border and groceries.
On immigration, voters often base their opinions on what they perceive to be true. For example, tough rhetoric on building a wall may equate with a sense of feeling that the president is taking strong action, whether anything tangible actually materialises or not.
With groceries, reality trumps perception. The price of eggs is printed on the box and the cost is paid directly by voters.
Donald Trump on what he’s doing on egg prices and the economy.
Then there are the egg producers. US farmers tended to overwhelmingly support Trump on election day, so it is prudent for him to feel their pain, or at least appear to. Farming areas voted for him increasingly in his three election efforts, even increasing their support for him in 2020 after trade wars and price increases which would have negatively impacted them.
Another factor that may push up egg prices is that an estimated 70% of the factory farm workforce is immigrant labour, and as many as 40% are undocumented. Should the administration’s plans for high tariffs and mass deportations come to fruition, the industry would struggle to function.
Further food price increases will be inevitable, with potential exacerbation via the funding freezes for some USDA programmes that Trump has enacted. As of March 2025, US$1 billion in cuts has been announced, the consequences of which are already being felt by farmers. The “pain now for gain later” message is a tricky political sell.
Even in the current era of international turbulence, elections are largely won on more pedestrian matters. Specifically, “kitchen-table” economics is relatable to every voter, regardless of how grand, or not, their table is.
Americans will be aware that in neighbouring Canada, egg prices have not risen dramatically and there have not been shortages. But prices in Canada have been traditionally higher than the US, this is in part at least because farming standards differ.
The US does not have high welfare standards for agricultural workers or animals, and this shortcoming needs to be addressed in order to help reduce future risk of flu, but this is likely to also raise prices.
Blaming the previous incumbent is not a durable stance for Donald Trump. As former president Harry Truman might remind him: “The buck stops here.” Right at his desk.
Clodagh Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jonathan Cazabonne, Doctorant en mycologie et écologie des vieilles forêts, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)
Fungi are among the most important organisms on Earth. Even though most of the world’s described 157,000 fungal species are only visible with a microscope, these organisms are essential to our ecosystems, our societies and economies.
Fungi are also important to human cultures — including as a source of food, medicine and art. Economically, fungi also support a growing economy centred around mycotourism — with a growing number of travellers visiting Canada and Spain each year to forage for wild mushrooms.
All the benefits fungi provide to humans are estimated to be worth the equivalent of US$54.57 trillion. This is why it’s an understatement to say that the world’s ecosystems and human societies are shaped by fungi.
And yet fungi continue to be an important but overlooked element of conservation strategies.
Why fungi are forgotten
Conservation efforts have long focused on protecting well-studied animals and plants. This is reflected in the number of species that have been assigned a conservation status by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Around 84 per cent of known species of vertebrates have received an IUCN conservation status. But just 0.5 per cent of all described fungi — 818 fungal species — are currently present on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Considering scientists estimate that there could be around 2.5 million fungal species in the world — of which we currently only know about six per cent of them — this means just 0.03 per cent of all fungi have been assigned a conservation status.
Several factors explain this alarming reality.
Fungi are difficult to study in both nature and under experimental conditions. This is because of many species’ microscopic size, their short lifespan and the hidden habitats they call home — such as soils, the tissues of other organisms and dung deposits.
Many species of fungi are difficult to study because of their microscopic size. (Shutterstock)
Fungi are also considered “uncharismatic” — meaning they don’t have the level of human appeal that some other species have. Much of their diversity is cryptic, as well. This means that while many fungi were once considered to be a single species, in reality they’re made up of multiple species that may look similar but are genetically distinct from one another. Because of this, conservation projects for fungi are poorly funded and do not easily capture public interest.
Protecting the unknown
In recent years, there’s been momentum within the scientific community to recognise fungi as a distinct kingdom within conservation strategies — one that’s on equal footing with animals and plants.
A significant milestone in this movement has been the adoption of the term “funga,” which mirrors “fauna” and “flora”. This designates the fungal diversity within a given environment or habitat.
Another important advancement was the recent pledge for fungal conservation that was presented at the 2024 Conference of Parties (COP16) in Colombia. This pledge urged parties to make fungal conservation a priority given fungi are central to achieving the biodiversity targets set out by the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework.
More local initiatives are also emerging. In Québec, over 70 mycologists and biologists signed an opinion letter encouraging the government to integrate fungi into its legislative framework.
Such progress is not trivial and may help correct misconceptions about fungi that continue to be present among the public, economic sectors and policymakers. For example, the misconception that fungi are plants is something that still persists to this day. Allowing this misconception to continue being perpetuated is harmful to the field of mycology, and may be preventing it from becoming a standalone discipline that deserves dedicated funding and specialists.
Still, there’s much we don’t know about these unique, important organisms. And in order for us to be able to protect and preserve the planet’s fungi, we need to begin by formally identifying areas where knowledge is lacking and close these gaps.
Last year, researchers used Laboulbeniomycetes — a class of poorly understood microfungi — as a case study to understand what biodiversity and conservation shortfalls continue to affect funga. This group of fungi includes species that rely on arthropods to disperse their spores or act as hosts for them. Many of these fungi live as minute parasites on the surface of insects such as cockroaches and ladybirds.
The case study uncovered four major biodiversity shortfalls that are undermining the conservation of funga. These include knowledge gaps in species diversity, distribution, conservation assessments and species persistence.
Part of conservation
Failing to protect fungi means, by extension, failing to protect the roles they play in our ecosystems and daily lives.
This is especially timely, as fungi, like animals and plants, are also facing numerous threats. Habitat degradation, pollution, invasive species and climate change may all increase their risks of extinction.
And, as recently exemplified in vertebrates, many undescribed species of fungi may be even more at peril than we might know. This is because they’re most likely to be found in remote geographical regions — such as tropical rainforests — and thus heavily susceptible to human-induced changes.
A key priority to better integrate fungi into conservation biology is to accumulate data on species diversity. But in order to accumulate data and understand how we can better protect fungal species worldwide, we need to fund research on fungi and make mycology a more attractive field for young scientists.
One thing remains certain: the more we explore, the more we realise just how little we know.
Jonathan Cazabonne is financially supported by a B2X doctoral research fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT).
Danny Haelewaters receives funding from the Czech Academy of Sciences (Lumina Quaeruntur Fellowship LQ200962501).
A federal judge swiftly blocked the deportations and ordered the planes carrying Venezuelans heading to El Salvador to return. But the White House, which has appealed the ruling, said that the court order came too late on a Saturday night, after it had already sent the Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador.
Legal analysts were trying to determine where the planes carrying the Venezuelans were shortly before 7 p.m. on March 15, when the judge issued the order stopping their removal, in an attempt to determine if the Trump administration had violated the judge’s order.
The Alien Enemies Act empowers presidents to apprehend and remove foreign nationals from countries that are at war with the United States. U.S. presidents have issued executive proclamations and invoked thislaw three times: during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. All three instances followed Congress declaring war.
Why bother dusting off a 227-year-old law?
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act could make it far easier for the Trump administration to quickly apprehend, detain and deport immigrants living without legal authorization in the U.S. That’s because the law lets presidents bypass court review of the deportation.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele at his residence at Lake Coatepeque in El Salvador, on Feb. 3, 2025. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool
Repressive origins and populist backlash
The Alien Enemies Act traces back to the late 1700s, when the Federalists, an early political party, controlled Congress. The Federalists wanted strong national government as well as harmonious diplomatic and trade relations with Great Britain.
The opposing Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson, supported France in its fight against Great Britain.
The Federalists in Congress considered Jefferson’s pro-France position to be against U.S. interests. They also were troubled that the Democratic-Republicans were backed by thousands of French and Irish immigrants who had some political clout in big cities such as Philadelphia and New York.
So in 1798, the Federalists tried to quell domestic opposition by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, a series of controversial laws that banned political dissent by limiting free speech. The laws also made it harder for immigrants to become citizens.
One of these laws was the Alien Enemies Act, which gave presidents broad authority to control or remove noncitizens ages 14 or older if they had ties to foreign enemies during times of a declared war.
The Alien and Sedition Acts elicited a firestorm of criticism soon after they were passed, including from Jefferson and James Madison, who asserted that states have the right and duty to declare some federal laws unconstitutional. The populist backlash against the Alien and Sedition Acts helped propel Jefferson and Democratic-Republicans to victory in the 1800 presidential election. Nearly all of the Alien and Sedition Acts were then either repealed or allowed to expire.
Only the Alien Enemies Act, a law enacted without an expiration date, survived.
History of the Alien Enemies Act
Madison, the fourth U.S. president, first invoked the Alien Enemies Act during the War of 1812 with Great Britain, which was sparked for several reasons, including trade and territorial control of North America.
Madison invoked the act in 1812 by proclaiming that “all subjects of His Britannic Majesty, residing within the United States, have become alien enemies.”
But rather than imposing mass deportations, Madison’s administration simply required British nationals living in the U.S. to report their age, home address, length of residency and whether they applied for naturalization.
Wilson used the Alien Enemies Act to impose sweeping restrictions on the residency, work, possessions, speech and activities of foreign nationals from places that the U.S. was at war with – Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. U.S.-born women married to any people born in these places were also deemed “enemy aliens.”
Two decades later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt notoriously used the Alien Enemies Act in World War II.
In 1941, Roosevelt authorized special restrictions on German, Italian and Japanese nationals living in the U.S. More than 30,000 of these foreign nationals, including Jewish refugees from Germany, spent the war imprisoned at internment camps because the government considered them potentially dangerous. The U.S. government released these detainees after World War II ended.
The Trump administration wrote in its order that the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua is “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and another legal nonprofit, Democracy Forward, filed a lawsuit on March 15, the same day the Trump administration announced it was invoking the act.
The Alien Enemies Act’s text and history present formidable legal hurdles for the Trump administration proving that Tren de Aragua is at war with the U.S. While the organization is primarily based in Venezuela, Tren de Aragua members in the U.S. have been arrested in Pennsylvania, Florida, New York, Texas and California for crimes including shooting New York police officers.
The 1798 law is clear that an “invasion or predatory incursion” must be undertaken by a “foreign nation or government” in order for it to be invoked.
Yet Congress has not declared war on any country, including Venezuela, in over 80 years, nor has another government launched an invasion against U.S. territory.
And drug cartels are not actual national governments running Latin American countries, so they don’t meet the criteria in the Alien Enemies Act.
In the past, Trump’s senior advisers have said with no clear evidence that the administration can justly claim that some Latin American governments, such as Mexico and Venezuela, are run by drug cartels that are attacking U.S. security.
Whatever the argument, the tenacious problem that the Trump administration will face is that neither the letter of the law nor historical precedents support peacetime use of the Alien Enemies Act.
None of these textual and historical realities will matter, however, if the courts ultimately decide that a president – simply saying that the country is being invaded by a foreign nation – is sufficient to legally invoke the act and is not subject to judicial review.
This makes it impossible to automatically dismiss blueprints for using an 18th-century law, however dubious, and it appears the Venezuelan deportations case appears headed for the Supreme Court. If Trump succeeds at invoking the Alien Enemies Act, I believe it would add another chapter to the Alien Enemies Act’s sordid history.
Daniel Tichenor 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.
Your cells constantly generate and conduct electricity that runs through your body to perform various functions. One such example of this bioelectricity is the nerve signals that power thoughts in your brain. Others include the cardiac signals that control the beating of your heart, along with other signals that tell your muscles to contract.
As bioengineers, we became interested in the epithelial cells that make up human skin and the outer layer of people’s intestinal tissues. These cells aren’t known to be able to generate bioelectricity. Textbooks state that they primarily act as a barrier against pathogens and poisons; epithelial cells are thought to do their jobs passively, like how plastic wrapping protects food against spoilage.
To our surprise, however, we found that wounded epithelial cells can propagate electrical signals across dozens of cells that persist for several hours. In this newly published research, we were able to show that even epithelial cells use bioelectricity to coordinate with their neighbors when the emergency of an injury demands it. Understanding this unexpected twist in how the body operates may lead to improved treatments for wounds.
Discovering a new source of bioelectricity
Don’t laugh: Our interest in this topic began with a gut feeling. Think of how your skin heals itself after a scratch. Epithelial cells may look silent and calm, but they’re busy coordinating with each other to extrude damaged cells and replace them with new ones. We thought bioelectric signals might orchestrate this, so our intuition told us to search for them.
Almost all the vendors we contacted to obtain the instrument we needed to test our idea warned us not to try these experiments. Only one company agreed with reluctance. “Your experiment won’t work,” they insisted. If we made the attempt and found nothing worthwhile to study, they feared it would make their product look bad.
But we did our experiments anyway – with tantalizing results.
We grew a layer of epithelial cells on a chip patterned with what’s called a microelectrode array – dozens of tiny electric wires that measure where bioelectric signals appear, how strong the signals are and how fast they travel from spot to spot. Then, we used a laser to zap a wound in one location and searched for electric signals on a different part of the cell layer.
Several hours of recording confirmed our intuition: When faced with the emergency need to repair themselves, bioelectrical signals appear when epithelial cells need a quick way to communicate over long distances.
We found that wounded epithelial cells can send bioelectric signals to neighboring cells over distances more than 40 times their body length with voltages similar to those of neurons. The shapes of these voltage spikes are also like those of neurons except about 1,000 times slower, indicating they might be a more primitive form of intercellular communication over long distances.
Powering the bioelectric generator
But how do epithelial cells generate bioelectricity?
We hypothesized that calcium ions might play a key role. Calcium ions show up prominently in any good biology textbook’s list of major molecules that help cells function. Since calcium ions regulate the forces that contract cells, a function necessary to remove damaged cells after wounding, we hypothesized that calcium ions ought to be critical to bioelectricity.
To test our theory, we used a molecule called EDTA that tightly binds to calcium ions. When we added EDTA to the epithelial cells and so removed the calcium ions, we found that the voltage spikes were no longer present. This meant that calcium ions were likely necessary for epithelial cells to generate the bioelectric signals that guide wound healing.
We then blocked the ion channels that allow calcium and other positively charged ions to enter epithelial cells. As a result, the frequency and strength of the electrical signals that epithelial cells produce were reduced. These findings suggest that while calcium ions may play a particularly crucial role in allowing epithelial cells to produce bioelectricity, other molecules may also matter.
Further research can help identify those other ion channels and pathways that allow epithelial cells to generate bioelectricity.
Our discovery that epithelial cells can electrically speak up during a crisis without compromising their primary role as a barrier opens doors for new ways to treat wounds.
Previous work from other researchers had demonstrated that it’s possible to enhance wound healing in skin and intestinal tissues by electrically stimulating them. But these studies used electrical frequencies many times higher than what we’ve found epithelial cells naturally produce. We wonder whether reevaluating and refining optimal electric stimulation conditions may help improve biomedical devices for wound healing.
Further down the road of possibility, we wonder whether electrically stimulating individual cells might offer even more healing potential. Currently, researchers have been electrically stimulating the whole tissue to treat injury. If we could direct these electrical signals to go specifically to where a remedy is needed, would stimulating individual cells be even more effective at treating wounds?
Our hope is that these findings could become a classic case of curiosity-driven science that leads to useful discovery. While our dream may carry a high risk of failure, it also offers potentially high rewards.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
What if you could listen to music or a podcast without headphones or earbuds and without disturbing anyone around you? Or have a private conversation in public without other people hearing you?
Our newly published research introduces a way to create audible enclaves – localized pockets of sound that are isolated from their surroundings. In other words, we’ve developed a technology that could create sound exactly where it needs to be.
The ability to send sound that becomes audible only at a specific location could transform entertainment, communication and spatial audio experiences.
What is sound?
Sound is a vibration that travels through air as a wave. These waves are created when an object moves back and forth, compressing and decompressing air molecules.
The frequency of these vibrations is what determines pitch. Low frequencies correspond to deep sounds, like a bass drum; high frequencies correspond to sharp sounds, like a whistle.
Controlling where sound goes is difficult because of a phenomenon called diffraction – the tendency of sound waves to spread out as they travel. This effect is particularly strong for low-frequency sounds because of their longer wavelengths, making it nearly impossible to keep sound confined to a specific area.
Certain audio technologies, such as parametric array loudspeakers, can create focused sound beams aimed in a specific direction. However, these technologies will still emit sound that is audible along its entire path as it travels through space.
The science of audible enclaves
We found a new way to send sound to one specific listener: through self-bending ultrasound beams and a concept called nonlinear acoustics.
Ultrasound refers to sound waves with frequencies above the human hearing range, or above 20 kHz. These waves travel through the air like normal sound waves but are inaudible to people. Because ultrasound can penetrate through many materials and interact with objects in unique ways, it’s widely used for medical imaging and many industrial applications.
In our work, we used ultrasound as a carrier for audible sound. It can transport sound through space silently – becoming audible only when desired. How did we do this?
Normally, sound waves combine linearly, meaning they just proportionally add up into a bigger wave. However, when sound waves are intense enough, they can interact nonlinearly, generating new frequencies that were not present before.
This is the key to our technique: We use two ultrasound beams at different frequencies that are completely silent on their own. But when they intersect in space, nonlinear effects cause them to generate a new sound wave at an audible frequency that would be heard only in that specific region.
Crucially, we designed ultrasonic beams that can bend on their own. Normally, sound waves travel in straight lines unless something blocks or reflects them. However, by using acoustic metasurfaces – specialized materials that manipulate sound waves – we can shape ultrasound beams to bend as they travel. Similar to how an optical lens bends light, acoustic metasurfaces change the shape of the path of sound waves. By precisely controlling the phase of the ultrasound waves, we create curved sound paths that can navigate around obstacles and meet at a specific target location.
The key phenomenon at play is what’s called difference frequency generation. When two ultrasonic beams of slightly different frequencies, such as 40 kHz and 39.5 kHz, overlap, they create a new sound wave at the difference between their frequencies – in this case 0.5 kHz, or 500 Hz, which is well within the human hearing range. Sound can be heard only where the beams cross. Outside of that intersection, the ultrasound waves remain silent.
This means you can deliver audio to a specific location or person without disturbing other people as the sound travels.
Advancing sound control
The ability to create audio enclaves has many potential applications.
Audio enclaves could enable personalized audio in public spaces. For example, museums could provide different audio guides to visitors without headphones, and libraries could allow students to study with audio lessons without disturbing others.
In a car, passengers could listen to music without distracting the driver from hearing navigation instructions. Offices and military settings could also benefit from localized speech zones for confidential conversations. Audio enclaves could also be adapted to cancel out noise in designated areas, creating quiet zones to improve focus in workplaces or reduce noise pollution in cities.
This isn’t something that’s going to be on the shelf in the immediate future. For instance, challenges remain for our technology. Nonlinear distortion can affect sound quality. And power efficiency is another issue – converting ultrasound to audible sound requires high-intensity fields that can be energy intensive to generate.
Despite these hurdles, audio enclaves present a fundamental shift in sound control. By redefining how sound interacts with space, we open up new possibilities for immersive, efficient and personalized audio experiences.
Yun Jing receives funding from NSF.
Jiaxin Zhong 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.
During Donald Trump’s first term as US president, he regularly referred to rising stock markets as evidence of the success of his economic policies. “Highest Stock Market EVER”, Trump wrote on social media in 2017 after record gains. “That doesn’t just happen!”
And after securing a second term in November 2024, some of Trump’s close advisers told the New York Times that the president “sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices”.
This, in addition to a broader economic policy agenda committed to lower regulation and significant tax cuts, had Wall Street investors bullish about their prospects under the new Trump administration.
But fears of an escalating trade war have seen the S&P 500, an index of the leading 500 publicly traded companies in the US, drop more than 10% from its February 2025 high. A decline of this magnitude in a major index is what professional traders refer to as a “correction”. In less than a month, roughly US$5 trillion (£3.9 trillion) has been wiped off the value of US stocks.
So, what exactly is driving down stock prices? Economists cite the president’s brinkmanship, as well as his start-stop approach to tariffs with Canada and Mexico, as having rattled global investors. Some commentators believe this “chaotic” trade agenda has created huge uncertainty for consumers, investors and businesses.
In view of such policies, a recent JP Morgan report said that US economic policy was “tilting away from growth”, and put the chances of a US recession at 40%, up from 30% at the start of the year. Moody’s Analytics has upped the odds of a US recession from 15% to 35%, citing tariffs as a key factor driving the downturn in its outlook.
Any economic downturn would have an adverse impact on the profitability of US corporations, and the declining share prices reflect the negative outlook from investors.
So far, the Trump administration appears unfazed by the US stock market decline. In an address to Congress on March 4, Trump declared his use of tariffs was all about making America rich again. “There will be a little disturbance, but we’re okay with that,” he said.
The White House has, since then, announced that some short-term pain may be necessary for Trump to implement his trade agenda successfully, which is designed to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
So, should we read this economic turbulence as a temporary blip? Or is it symptomatic of a more fundamental shift in the US economy?
Change of strategy
Stephen Miran, who was recently confirmed as chairman of Trump’s council of economic advisers, wrote a paper in November 2024 titled: A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. The paper gives us an insight into the Trump administration’s wider economic strategy.
It sets out Trump’s desire “to reform the global trading system and put American industry on fairer ground vis-a-vis the rest of the world”. Miran cites persistent US dollar overvaluation as the root cause of economic imbalances.
Miran does not believe that tariffs are inflationary, and argues that their use during Trump’s first presidential term had little discernible macroeconomic consequences. He does concede that tariffs may eventually lead to an appreciation – or further overvaluation – of the US dollar. However, Miran sees the extent of that appreciation as “debatable”.
He sees tariffs as a tool for leverage in trade negotiations. The administration could, for example, agree to a reduction in tariffs in exchange for significant investment is the US by key trading partners. China investing in car manufacturing in the US is specifically mentioned in his analysis.
Miran also states his belief that tariffs can be used to raise tax revenues from foreigners in order to retain low tax rates on American citizens.
Some economists agree that the US dollar is overvalued. A combination of its role as the world’s reserve currency, as well as the attractiveness of the US economy as an investment destination, fuels demand for the US dollar and makes it stronger.
A strong US dollar has made American manufacturing exports less competitive. This has cost American jobs. The “rust belt” states of the north-eastern and mid-western US have experienced a decline in manufacturing employment over the past 40 years, which is evidence of this.
However, it is worth noting that the many US manufacturers who import manufactured parts or components to make their products do benefit from a stronger dollar. This is because it makes the parts and materials they are importing cheaper. US mortgage holders and investors also benefit from a stronger dollar through lower interest rates on loans.
Steven Englander, the head of research and strategy at Standard Chartered bank, believes there are some contradictions in the Trump administration’s approach.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Englander said: “The problem for the new administration is that it simultaneously wants a weaker dollar, a reduced trade deficit, capital inflows, and the dollar to remain the key currency in international reserves and payments.”
Reduced trade deficits and capital inflows would typically strengthen the US dollar, as does its position as the world’s reserve currency.
As Miran says in his paper: “There is a path by which the Trump administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit. But it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimise adverse consequences.”
Only time will tell whether the Trump administration can successfully navigate this “narrow” path. In the meantime, the recent turbulence in US stock prices appears to be acceptable to the Trump administration in their pursuit of reforming the global financial system.
Conor O’Kane 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.
If spy films have taught us anything, it’s that the people chosen for a career in espionage are special. They are the cream of the crop selected because they exhibit unique skills: high levels of intelligence and certain emotional traits that made them perfect for spying.
During the second world war, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British agency tasked with training spies to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and in east Asia. Active from 1940 to 1946, SOE was a pioneering British secret service. This is because it employed civilians, from all backgrounds, including women, which was unusual at a time where most spies were recruited from the army.
The women hired by the agency were the only ones allowed to take on a combatant role by the British Army during the second world war. However, many have been unjustly forgotten.
These women were active throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, but most women worked in France. They were not French, but French speakers who tried to pass for local. On paper, this might seem impossible, since being fluent in a language does not make you a spy.
SOE recruited prospective agents on the basis of their language skills, and trained most of them in England before sending them into the field. Despite their lack of experience, many SOE women successfully duped German soldiers. Here are some of the simple but effective ways they managed such deception.
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Emotional control
First, women spies sometimes fooled people simply by appearing calm. Irish agent Maureen Patricia “Paddy” O’Sullivan had grown-up in Belgium and was renowned for her daring personality. In a post-war interview, she described how she avoided a thorough search while carrying compromising documents. O’Sullivan acted confident and friendly to divert the soldier’s attention from her bag:
As she laughed and joked with the German, he was distracted from making a closer examination.
The spies’ cool was frequently praised in post-war commendations. Remaining calm was no mean feat, especially since most SOE recruits had never worked undercover. In France, they could be questioned by Nazis at any time and nervousness made them look suspicious.
Agent Yvonne Cormeau joined SOE after losing her husband during a bombing at the beginning of the war. In a 1989 interview, she summarised the situation perfectly: “We learned to live with fear.”
Physical appearance
SOE spies did alter their appearance in order not to be recognised, but for most, this merely involved picking clothes which matched their cover. Yvonne Cormeau was sent to a farm in southern France, where the pro-Allied owners gave her new clothes and an apron. She was supposed to pass as their assistant and needed to look like one.
A few agents went a step further and dyed their hair. This was the case of Noor Inayat Khan (code name Madeleine), a Sufi Muslim of royal lineage born to Indian and American parents. Betrayed to the Germans, she was executed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944.
Inayat Khan’s contribution to SOE proved invaluable. For several months in 1943, she was the sole radio operator still active in Paris amid the growing Gestapo presence.
However, her constant hair dyeing was less effective. To try and escape the notice of the Gestapo, she regularly bleached her hair blonde, but this actually brought her to the attention of the Germans.
They questioned Alfred and Emilie Balachowsky, her contacts who lived near Paris and led a local resistance network, about the presence of a woman “sometimes blonde and sometimes brunette”. The agent was not arrested on that occasion, but her efforts had backfired.
Everyday habits
Locals like the Balachowskys provided crucial support for SOE women, who could be given away by any small gesture. Despite having grown up near Paris, Inayat Khan threatened her cover just by pouring tea.
Shortly after her arrival, Mrs Balachowsky invited neighbours to a tea party, during which the SOE agent poured the milk first into her cup, leading a neighbour to comment that she behaved like a Brit. Emilie Balachowsky quickly corrected Inayat Khan, who was not the only spy to make errors based on cultural differences.
While at the farm, Yvonne Cormeau was asked to watch the owner’s cows. She was about to bring her knitting kit, until her contact explained that this would give her away: “I was forbidden from knitting, as we Englishwomen knit differently.”
These anecdotes are a testament to the importance of everyday habits and of the agents’ local contacts. For SOE women, espionage in France was very much about teamwork.
While Inayat Khan was compromised and executed, for the most part the SOE’s civilian programme for women was a success. The SOE paved the way for other agencies which gradually started to recruit civilians of all genders after the second world war.
Some of its methods are also used by modern secret services, such as the illegals programme, a Russian initiative which involves sending Russian operatives fluent in English undercover in the US.
Despite this success, the contribution of women like Patricia O’Sullivan, Yvonne Cormeau and Noor Inayat Khan has remained widely overlooked. They deserve to be remembered along with the period’s male spies.
Josephine Durant des Aulnois receives funding from the Clarendon Fund, managed by Oxford University.
The price of eggs has risen dramatically in recent years across the US. A dozen eggs cost US$1.20 (92p) in June 2019, but the price is now around US$4.90 (with a peak of US$8.17 in early March).
Some restaurants have imposed surcharges on egg-based dishes, bringing even more attention to escalating costs. And there are also shortages on supermarket shelves.
In the coming months, the US plans to import up to 100 million of this consumer staple. Government officials are approaching countries from Turkey to Brazil with enquiries about eggs for export.
Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously said that one option to the crisis was for people to get a chicken for their backyard, suggested in the Wall Street Journal that prices are unlikely to stabilise for some months. And Donald Trump recently shared an article on Truth Social calling on the public to “shut up about egg prices”.
The main cause of the problem is an outbreak of avian flu that has resulted in over 166 million birds in the US being slaughtered. Around 98% of the nation’s chickens are produced on factory farms, which are ripe for contagion.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the flu has already spread to several hundred dairy cattle and to one human. The USDA recently announced a US$1 billion plan to counter the problem, with funding for improved bio-security, vaccine research and compensation to farmers.
In January 2025, Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, blamed the previous administration for high egg prices. It is true that birds were slaughtered on President Joe Biden’s watch, but this was and remains standard practice at times of bird flu outbreaks and had also been the case during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
However, this points to the way the rising price of eggs has become a political touchstone. It was referred to regularly in campaign speeches and press briefings as a sign of things going wrong and a symbol of the US economy faced. Donald Trump promised to fix the price of eggs swiftly if elected, but so far the issue shows no sign of going away.
Prices are still trending up. Even when prices suddenly drop, as they have this week, the public know how much cheaper they used to be until recently, and do not tend to feel better.
There are a number of reasons why egg prices have become an important to US politicians. First, almost everyone buys eggs. So the shortage and subsequent price rise is newsworthy and affects consumers in all income brackets.
Secondly, they are a measure of broader economic vulnerabilities, so egg-related problems tend to be part of a larger story about how weak the economy is. And thirdly, egg prices are political because of Trump’s promise to bring them down.
Polls showed that the economy and inflation were key factors in voter choice on election day 2024. In February 2025, Donald Trump did an interview with NBC News in which he said he won the election on the border and groceries.
On immigration, voters often base their opinions on what they perceive to be true. For example, tough rhetoric on building a wall may equate with a sense of feeling that the president is taking strong action, whether anything tangible actually materialises or not.
With groceries, reality trumps perception. The price of eggs is printed on the box and the cost is paid directly by voters.
Donald Trump on what he’s doing on egg prices and the economy.
Then there are the egg producers. US farmers tended to overwhelmingly support Trump on election day, so it is prudent for him to feel their pain, or at least appear to. Farming areas voted for him increasingly in his three election efforts, even increasing their support for him in 2020 after trade wars and price increases which would have negatively impacted them.
Another factor that may push up egg prices is that an estimated 70% of the factory farm workforce is immigrant labour, and as many as 40% are undocumented. Should the administration’s plans for high tariffs and mass deportations come to fruition, the industry would struggle to function.
Further food price increases will be inevitable, with potential exacerbation via the funding freezes for some USDA programmes that Trump has enacted. As of March 2025, US$1 billion in cuts has been announced, the consequences of which are already being felt by farmers. The “pain now for gain later” message is a tricky political sell.
Even in the current era of international turbulence, elections are largely won on more pedestrian matters. Specifically, “kitchen-table” economics is relatable to every voter, regardless of how grand, or not, their table is.
Americans will be aware that in neighbouring Canada, egg prices have not risen dramatically and there have not been shortages. But prices in Canada have been traditionally higher than the US, this is in part at least because farming standards differ.
The US does not have high welfare standards for agricultural workers or animals, and this shortcoming needs to be addressed in order to help reduce future risk of flu, but this is likely to also raise prices.
Blaming the previous incumbent is not a durable stance for Donald Trump. As former president Harry Truman might remind him: “The buck stops here.” Right at his desk.
Clodagh Harrington 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.
A proposed reform to the way electricity is priced in Britain could see households pay a different bill based on their postcode.
Presently, Britain’s electricity system operates as a single market across England, Wales and Scotland. Around 30% of electricity is traded through half-hourly auctions, known as the spot market, while the remaining 70% is traded in forward markets via contracts covering weeks, months, or even years of demand in advance.
The price of electricity is, broadly speaking, determined by the spot market, as forward market contracts are hedged on the basis of current and expected future spot market prices.
“Zonal pricing” would divide the British market into multiple separate zones instead, each with its own spot and forward markets to serve demand within it. In effect, zonal pricing would split one large market into a series of smaller, interconnected markets.
Whether it is the right approach depends on what you expect it to achieve, and where your interests lie. The UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, tasked with the decision, has three main objectives: decarbonising the country’s power sector, securing the supply of power and lowering the prices consumers pay.
I’m an academic investigating the factors that influence the UK’s ability to decarbonise the housing sector, in particular, the way people heat their homes. I’m most concerned with the affordability of electricity, since I take the view that the lower the price of electricity, the easier our journey to net zero emissions will be – and vice versa.
A lower electricity price would make clean heating systems (such as heat pumps, which run on electricity) more attractive to consumers and reduce the scale of insulation and draughtproofing required to make the running cost of these systems competitive with gas boilers. My research suggests that the UK’s high electricity price is behind the country’s comparably low rate of heat pump adoption.
Zonal pricing, as an electricity market reform, seems unlikely to lower electricity prices and drive decarbonisation on its own. Closer scrutiny of the electricity system and its mechanisms suggests it may only make things more complicated.
The root cause of high bills
At €0.321 (£0.27) per kilowatt-hour (kWh), the UK has the second-highest electricity price when compared to European Union countries. The EU average is €0.218 per kWh, meaning UK electricity costs around 47% more than it does for most of our EU neighbours.
Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which triggered a spike in energy prices) starting more than three years ago now, electricity prices across the UK remain about 53% higher than pre-crisis levels. If the UK is generating more electricity from renewables each year — and renewable electricity is the cheapest on the market — why do prices keep rising instead of falling, as one might expect?
The UK’s high electricity prices are the result of system marginal pricing, which lies at the heart of the spot market. At the end of each half-hourly auction, all electricity that is bid into the market is purchased at the price of the last unit required to meet demand.
Since total demand is rarely met by renewables, the much more expensive gas generators typically set the price. It’s like going to a fruit market to buy ten apples, finding the first nine for £1 each, the last one for £3, and then having to pay £30 for the lot, rather than the expected £13.
Because forward markets follow the spot market, and the spot market operates under system marginal pricing, UK consumers end up paying gas-generated electricity prices 98% of the time.
Will zonal pricing lower these prices? On its own, no. This is because all zones under the scheme will still have spot markets operating under the marginal pricing model. Zonal pricing doesn’t address the fundamental problem that’s keeping electricity prices in Britain so high.
Advocates of zonal pricing argue that it will encourage investment in the infrastructure required to lower electricity prices – namely, storage and transmission.
Grid-scale and home batteries, pumped hydro and thermal energy storage help reduce final electricity prices by storing excess renewable energy for use when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, so grid operators don’t have to rely on expensive gas-generated electricity to fill supply gaps. Meanwhile, transmission lines and cables ensure that renewable electricity is delivered where it is needed.
By creating price differences between zones, so the argument goes, the market receives clear signals about where such investments would be most profitable.
This argument, however, assumes that electricity prices will fall in some zones, and that the market has a strong incentive to invest in high-price areas.
I’m compelled to ask two questions. What prevents zones that generate a lot of renewable electricity from selling their supply at higher prices in other zones, which could prevent renewables from meeting total demand and lead to the same price distortions currently seen due to marginal pricing?
And if investments in storage and transmission are underwhelming when electricity prices are high everywhere, why would they suddenly become more likely when prices are only high in specific areas?
Overall, I think the argument in favour of zonal pricing is unconvincing as it doesn’t address the structural issue underlying the UK’s high electricity prices: spot markets that operate according to system marginal pricing.
If zonal pricing neither lowers consumer electricity prices nor significantly stimulates investment in storage and transmission on its own — and does not alter the geographic and planning factors that determine wind and solar farm locations — then it is unclear what it would achieve beyond adding complexity to an already complex electricity system.
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The war in Gaza has been a notoriously controversial and difficult story to cover as a journalist. The Israeli government banned international journalists from the territory. At least 171 journalists and media workers in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank have been killed since the war began.
The BBC has faced relentless accusations of bias from all sides. You would think, then, that when it commissioned the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, billed as a “vivid and unflinching view of life” in Gaza seen through the eyes of children, it would have been meticulous in its commissioning and oversight.
Yet almost as soon as the programme was broadcast on February 17, a journalist outside the BBC revealed that one of the children featured in the film, 13-year-old Abdullah, who also acted as its narrator, was the son of a Hamas official. His father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, is a deputy minister of agriculture and therefore, as Hamas runs the government of Gaza, a Hamas official.
No major investigation was required to find out who this man was – an expert on wastewater treatment, in particular on the removal of heavy metals from industrial wastewater, who received degrees from UK universities. No evidence has emerged that he is linked to Hamas’s militant operations. But getting someone with any link to what is classified as a terrorist organisation by western governments to narrate the film was inevitably going to be criticised – especially because the link wasn’t explained to viewers.
The BBC pulled the film four days after its premiere and said it would investigate the matter. Where it really went wrong was that, for 12 days, the BBC tried to pin the blame elsewhere. It dumped on the production company, Hoyo Films, stating: “The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.” T
I argue this is a weak defence. A broadcaster can’t blame someone else when a mistake appears in a film.
Under Ofcom regulations, the broadcaster has full editorial responsibility, regardless of whether a freelance or independent crew carried out filming. Any mistake is the BBC’s mistake.
I was head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 for 17 years. We sometimes made mistakes. It happens. But the key is not to make things worse by trying to wriggle out of blame.
As it happens, Channel 4 also featured this child in some of its news coverage without initially disclosing his father’s role. “As international media access is restricted, Abdullah was sourced through an established journalist who has also worked for other major global media outlets,” Channel 4 News said in a statement.
Ofcom regulations
The BBC’s second excuse was even weaker. It said that filmmakers were asked in writing a number of times whether this child had any connection with Hamas.
Here is a journalistic tip for the BBC’s news bosses: if you ask someone a question and they don’t answer, you don’t just keep asking. You demand answers or you go and get the answer yourself. As a former news boss myself, I would have demanded to see the boy’s entire family tree.
Finally, after 12 days, the BBC took responsibility and issued an apology.
BBC chair Samir Shah told MPs that people “weren’t doing their job” when it came to oversight of the production. Shah described it as “a dagger to the heart of the BBC claim to be impartial and to be trustworthy”.
A child of 13 should arguably not have narrated the film at all. He was not narrating his own words but a script written by the programme makers, which included facts about the history and geopolitics of Gaza. I would point the BBC to Ofcom guidance that children under 16 should not be asked for views on matters likely to be beyond their capacity to answer properly without the consent of a responsible adult.
On a subject like this, I would not have had a child narrate a film – especially not when one of the responsible adults in his life was a Hamas official.
This was a powerful and beautifully shot film. It’s hard to see how any of its content could be described as pro-Hamas propaganda. The strongest moment was when a child said he hated Hamas because they had caused the war and all the misery being suffered now. But it’s almost certainly politically impossible for an amended version of the documentary to now be shown, which is a great loss.
This debacle even resulted in a bizarre decision by the Royal Television Society to drop an award recognising the brave and brilliant work of journalists in Gaza (it has since reversed this after backlash from journalists). We have relied on journalists in Gaza to show us what is happening.
They have continued filming when their own families have been killed. Their reports have been powerful and moving and true. Why should they be punished for a BBC cock-up?
Falling trust
I have never worked for the BBC, but I have always admired it for two things. First, for the brilliance of its journalists. Second, for its ability to turn a mistake into a PR catastrophe.
The film contained editorial errors, but in my view the outrage built over days, resulting in calls not just for a public inquiry, but even a police inquiry, because the BBC wouldn’t take the rap. My journalistic heart went out to the great people who work at the BBC.
This ghastly incident sits alongside other (quite different) recent scandals about the BBC: the bad behaviour (whether alleged or proven) of powerful presenters and figures Huw Edwards, Russell Brand, Tim Westwood and Gregg Wallace. In each case, it turned out that BBC bigwigs had received complaints over long periods of time before the stories went public.
For many reasons beyond the BBC’s control, trust in the broadcaster is falling. It is constantly being attacked by the right-wing press, and undermined by conspiracy theorists who say you can’t trust the so-called mainstream media and that there is no such thing as truth.
In a 2023 YouGov survey on trust in media, only 44% of Britons said they trust BBC journalists to tell the truth. That was nearly half the level of trust in the BBC 20 years earlier, yet it still made the BBC the most trusted media outlet in the UK. Other surveys by Ofcom of people who actually watch TV news put trust in its accuracy much higher – something like 70%.
There is a general fall in trust in all institutions in the UK. The politicians and tabloids who attack the BBC are trusted far less than BBC journalists. But their unfair assaults make it all the more essential that the BBC avoids errors like this, and is transparent when those errors are revealed.
Dorothy Byrne was formerly Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel Four, and Editor at Large at Channel Four.
There are many home-grown problems on Earth, but there’s still time to worry about bad things arriving from above. The most recent is the asteroid 2024 YR4, which could be a “city killer” if it hits a heavily populated area of our planet in the early years of the next decade.
The chances of that happening are now estimated to be around 0.001%. But there was a brief moment after the asteroid’s discovery last year when the estimated danger of a direct hit crossed the 1% threshold of comfortable risk.
There’s a need to worry about planetary defence if we are to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs. But there are many other things that could kill us, including climate change and wars. So what is it about space that grabs our attention? And how do these fears affect us – individually and as a society?
In the long run, something big will hit us, unless we can redirect it. The responsibility for preparation begins with us.
Yet preparation also carries risks. Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in the US, has warned that the technologies used for planetary defence can not only guide asteroids away from Earth – they can also guide them towards it as a tool in a military conflict.
As explained in his book Dark Skies, Deudney’s solution is to reverse, regulate and relinquish most of our human activities in space for several centuries to come. The more we do in space, he believes, the greater the likelihood that states will end up in catastrophic conflict. “The avoidance of civilisation’s disaster and species extinction now depends on discerning what not to do, and then making sure it is not done,” he writes.
He ultimately argues space expansion has come too soon, and we must reverse the process until we are ready. That said, he thinks we may still need some form of planetary defence, but that it can be limited.
Holding off for centuries is an unlikely option though. The chances of an asteroid strike may well be too high. And the political interest in space expansion is, at this point, irreversible.
Fear of space has grown alongside space programs. Worries about asteroid strikes and over-militarisation lean into deeper fears about space as the unknown. Yet they also lean into worries about the self-destructive side of humanity.
Both fears are very old. One of our earliest traceable human tales, the story of the Cosmic Hunt dating back at least 15,000 years, combines the two.
An indigenous Sami version, surviving in Scandinavia, describes how a great hunt in the skies would go wrong if the hunter is impatient and fires an arrow which misses its target and accidentally strikes the pole star. This would bring the canopy of the night sky crashing down to Earth. Again, fears about misguided human actions and the threat from above fuse.
We can see this in modern technologically driven fears such as UFOlogy. Some hard-core believers in UFOs are not only concerned about hostile visitors, but about secret collaborations among scientists on Earth, or, an entire conspiracy to keep the truth from the public.
Without belief in a conspiracy to suppress the evidence, the whole idea falls apart. But without belief that there is actually something to fear from space, there is nothing for the conspiracy to be about. Fear of space is a necessary part of this picture.
This is an idea neatly captured in recent times by the Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu, who compares space to a “dark forest” in which alien civilisations are trying to hide from each other.
All of this presupposes something of a bunker mentality, an over-separation of Earth and space, or sky and ground. This is something I have referred to as ground bias. The bias allows space to appear as a threatening outside, rather than something that we, too, are part of.
Alien viruses
The rationalisation for such fear shifts about and is not restricted to asteroids, aliens, meteors and runaway military conflict. There is even a theory that viruses come from space.
When COVID sceptics went looking for an idea to explain why mask wearing was pointless, what many of them struck upon was an obscure theory put together by the astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe in 1979.
The duo ultimately had a good idea which they followed up with a bad idea. The good idea was that the components for the emergence of life may have come from space. The bad idea was that they came ready formed, as viruses and bacteria, and that they are still coming.
According this theory, well known pandemics of the past (such as the lethal 1918 flu pandemic and even epidemics in antiquity) were apparently the result of viruses from space and could not be the result of person-to-person transmission – least of all from asymptomatic carriers.
The COVID version involved a meteor exploding over China. In an interview, Wickramsinghe claimed “a piece of this bolide containing trillions of the COVID-19 virus broke off from the bolide as it was entering the stratosphere” releasing viral particles which were then carried by prevailing winds.
The idea illustrates the way in which fears about space are used to drive anxiety about human failings or wrongdoing. COVID scepticism has since gone all the way into the White House.
But fears about space can also be used to critique those in power. In our own times, they are used to fuel narratives about billionaires with private space agendas and presidential access, wealthy space tourists and even wealthier prospective colonisers of Mars and beyond. It is a tempting narrative, but one that sees Earth as closed system, which should not be opened to the outside.
We may, at some level, be afraid of space itself. We certainly have an exaggerated sense our our Earthly separateness from it. And there are some particular things that we do have cause to worry about. But there is also the risk that a fear of space can combine with suspicions about governments, leading us to embrace conspiracy theories as a way to consolidate different kinds of worries into a single, manageable, set of beliefs.
Tony Milligan receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 856543).
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marc C-Scott, Associate Professor of Screen Media | Deputy Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching, Victoria University
Shutterstock
This month marks a decade since Netflix – the world’s most influential and widely subscribed streaming service – launched in Australia.
Since then the media landscape has undergone significant transformation, particularly in terms of how we consume content. According to a 2024 Deloitte report, Australians aged 16–38 spent twice as much time watching subscription streaming services as free-to-air TV (both live and on-demand).
Part of the success of streaming services lies in their ability to provide content that feels handpicked. And this is made possible through the use of sophisticated recommender systems fuelled by vast amounts of user data.
As streaming viewership continues to rise, so too do the risks associated with how these platforms collect and handle user data.
Changing methods of data collection
Subscription streaming platforms aren’t the first to collect user data. They just do it differently.
Broadcasters have always been invested in collecting viewers’ information (via TV ratings) to inform promotional schedules and attract potential advertisers. These data are publicly available.
In Australia, TV data are collected anonymously via the OzTam TV ratings system, based on the viewing habits of more than 12,000 individuals.
Each television in a recruited household is connected to a metering box. Members of the household select a letter that corresponds to them, after which the box records their viewing data, including the program, channel and viewing time. But this system doesn’t include broadcasters’ video-on-demand services, which have been around since the late 2000s (with ABC iView being the first).
In 2016 a new system was launched to measure broadcast video-on-demand data separately from OzTam ratings.
However, it collected data in a rolling seven-day report, in the form of total minutes a particular program had been watched online (rather than the number of individuals watching, as was the measurement for TV). This meant the two data sources couldn’t be combined.
In 2018, OzTAM and Nielsen announced the Virtual Australia (VoZ) database which would integrate both broadcast TV and video-on-demand data. It took six years following the announcement for the VoZ system to become the industry’s official trading currency.
Streamers’ approach
Streaming platforms such as Netflix have a markedly different approach to acquiring data, as they can source it directly from users. These data are therefore much more granular, larger in volume, and far less publicly accessible due to commercial confidence.
In recent years, Netflix has shared some of its viewing data through a half-yearly report titled What We Watched. It offers macro-level details such as total hours watched that year, as well as information about specific content, including how many times a particular show was viewed.
Netflix also supplies information to its shareholders, although much of this focuses on subscriber numbers rather than specific user details.
The best publicly accessible Netflix data we have is presented on its Tudum website, which includes global Top 10 lists that can be filtered by country.
The main data Netflix doesn’t share are related to viewer demographics: who is watching what programs.
Why does it matter?
Ratings and user data offer valuable insights to both broadcasters and streaming services, and can influence decisions regarding what content is produced.
User data would presumably have been a significant factor in Netflix‘s decision to move into live content such as stand-up comedy, the US National Football League (NFL) and an exclusive US$5 billion deal with World Wrestling Entertainment.
Streaming companies also use personal data to provide users with targeted viewing suggestions, with an aim to reduce the time users spend browsing catalogues.
Netflix has an entire research department dedicated to enhancing user experience. According to Justin Basilico, Netflix’s Director of Machine Learning and Recommender Systems, more than 80% of what Netflix users watch is driven by its recommender system.
As noted in its privacy statement, Netflix draws on a range of information to provide recommendations, including:
the user’s interactions with the service, such as their viewing history and title ratings
other users with similar tastes and preferences
information about the titles, such as genre, categories, actors and release year
the time of day the user is watching
the language/s the user prefers
the device/s they are watching on
how long they watch a particular Netflix title.
If a user isn’t happy with their recommendations, they can try to change them by editing their viewing and ratings history.
Personalised or predetermined?
The rise of streaming hasn’t only transformed how we watch TV, but also how our viewing habits are tracked and how this information informs future decisions.
While traditional broadcasters have long relied on sample anonymised data to measure engagement, streaming platforms operate in a landscape in which detailed user data can be used to shape content, recommendations and business decisions.
While personalisation makes streaming more appealing, it also raises important questions about privacy, transparency and control. How much do streaming platforms really know about us? And are they catering to our preferences – or shaping them?
Marc C-Scott 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 Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne
Late last week, corporate watchdog the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) issued a warning to lenders that provide high-fee small-amount loans – known as payday lenders – that they may be breaching consumer-lending laws.
Trying to provide effective protections to borrowers of these small loans is fiendishly difficult. People in financial hardship turn to payday loans, even though they are expensive. Lenders can charge high fees for such loans but may change products to avoid regulation.
If access to payday loans dries up, borrowers in need are likely to turn to other products. And so the cycle begins again.
The regulator’s report might be a prompt to government to think about other strategies.
What is payday lending and why is it a concern?
Payday lending is the name commonly given to loans of small amounts (under A$2,000) for short periods of time (16 days to one year) that promise quick credit checks and don’t require collateral.
They are called payday loans because the original idea was borrowers would pay them back when they got their next pay cheque. But often that is not how it works, and borrowers struggle to repay.
Payday lenders offer fast cash, but there are strings attached.
ASIC said the total value of small and medium loans provided to consumers in 2023–24 was $1.3 billion. An earlier study by Consumer Action Law Centre found 4.7 million individual payday loans were written over three years to July 2019.
Why do borrowers use (expensive) payday loans?
Small, short-term loans like payday loans have been around for a long time – and in part, they respond to a reality that, for many people, their income is not sufficient to give them buffers.
Payday loans can be used by borrowers who don’t have savings or credit cards to pay for one-off unexpected bills – a broken fridge, an emergency medical appointment or even utilities bills. But they can also be used to meet daily living expenses.
There are limited other practical options – for some types of bills, there are hardship schemes, but these are not always well-known. For one-off expenses, there are low and no-interest loan schemes but they can be quite restrictive. Free financial counselling may also help, but knowledge and access can be an issue.
Payday lenders have been moving customers into bigger loans that are harder to repay. Doucefleur/Shutterstock
Why were new laws dealing with payday loans introduced?
Payday lenders have typically charged very high fees. In 2013, concerns about the high cost of payday loans led to specific provisions to limit the fees that could be charged.
Nonetheless, regulators and consumer advocates remain concerned these kinds of loans lock borrowers into debt spirals because they keep accumulating and that lenders manage to avoid many of the restrictions.
Further reforms in 2022 introduced a presumption a loan is unsuitable if the borrower has already taken out two payday loans in the preceding 90 days. The reforms also prohibit payday lenders from offering loans where the repayments would exceed a prescribed proportion of a borrower’s income.
What did ASIC say?
ASIC said it found a trend of payday lenders moving borrowers who previously might have borrowed relatively small amounts ($700 to $2,000) to medium-sized loans ($2,000 to $5,000), which are not subject to the same consumer protections.
The regulator said small loan credit contracts fell from 80% of loans in the December quarter of 2022 to less than 60% of loans by the August 2023 quarter.
It said it was concerned by this approach and reminded lenders they were still subject to the reasonable lending regime. This effectively means not lending amounts that would be unsuitable for borrowers.
Why are payday lenders moving consumers to larger loans?
It’s a concern that lenders change products to avoid restrictive rules. But it is not altogether surprising.
One response from increasing restrictions on one form of credit might be that lenders decide to focus on other, less restricted, products like medium-sized loans – this is what ASIC seems to have found.
This is problematic if those larger loans are not meeting consumers’ needs and objectives (for instance, if they only needed a smaller amount), or complying with the loan would cause substantial hardship. It’s important to remind lenders that the responsible lending obligations apply to medium size loans, and for ASIC to take enforcement action where appropriate.
What might be a better approach?
The ASIC report highlights the increasing complexity of the National Consumer Credit Act regime – with the standard obligations complemented by specific and unique rules for a range of credit products. These include small amount credit, standard home loans, credit cards, reverse mortgages, and Buy Now Pay Later.
It’s worth thinking about whether a better strategy might be to go back to a simpler approach, where one set of rules applied to all consumer credit products. Regulatory exceptions and qualifications are minimised.
If access to payday loans becomes more restrictive, borrowers are likely to turn to other products. This means ASIC should also be looking at other products that are used to provide short-term small loans. These are likely to include buy now pay later schemes and pawn broking.
Buy now pay later products are subject to their own regulations, including responsible lending obligations. But pawn brokers aren’t covered by the Consumer Credit laws and are subject to little regulatory scrutiny. This is also something that should change.
We also need to consider whether there are financial inclusion options not dependent on lenders out to make a profit from borrowers struggling with the cost of living.
Jeannie Marie Paterson receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a project on Treating Consumers Fairly.
Nicola Howell receives funding from funding from the Australian Research Council for a project on Treating Consumers Fairly. She is affiliated with the Consumers’ Federation of Australia, as a member of the CFA Executive.
Australia’s energy policy would take a sharp turn if the Coalition wins the upcoming federal election. A Dutton government would seek to build seven nuclear power plants at the sites of old coal-fired power stations.
So is there another option? Yes: pumped hydro storage plants. This technology is quicker and cheaper to develop than nuclear power, and can store solar and wind rather than curtail it. It’s better suited to Australia’s electricity grid and would ultimately lead to fewer emissions. Drawing on our recent global analysis, we found the technology could be deployed near all but one of the seven sites the Coalition has earmarked for nuclear power.
Building pumped hydro storage systems near old coal-fired power generators has some advantages, such as access to transmission lines – although more will be needed as electricity demand increases. But plenty of other suitable sites exist, too.
It involves pumping water uphill from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation for storage. Then, when power is needed, water is released to flow downhill through turbines, generating electricity on its way to the lower reservoir.
Together with battery storage, pumped hydro solves the very real problem of keeping the grid stable and reliable when it is dominated by solar and wind power.
By 2030, 82% of Australia’s electricity supply is expected to come from renewables, up from about 40% today.
But solar panels only work during the day and don’t produce as much power when it’s cloudy. And wind turbines don’t generate power when it’s calm. That’s where storage systems come in. They can charge up when electricity is plentiful and then release electricity when it’s needed.
Grid-connected batteries can fill short-term gaps (from seconds to a few hours). Pumped hydro can store electricity overnight, and longer still. These two technologies can be used together to supply electricity through winter, and other periods of calm or cloudy weather.
Two types of pumped-storage hydropower, one doesn’t require dams on rivers. NREL
Finding pumped hydro near the Coalitions’s proposed nuclear sites
Australia has three operating pumped hydro systems: Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains, Wivenhoe in Queensland, and Shoalhaven in the Kangaroo Valley of New South Wales.
We previously developed a “global atlas” to identify potential locations for pumped hydro facilities around the world.
More recently, we created a publicly available tool to filter results based on construction cost, system size, distance from transmission lines or roads, and away from environmentally sensitive locations.
In this new analysis, we used the tool to find pumped hydro options near the sites the Coalition has chosen for nuclear power plants.
Mapping 300 potential pumped hydro sites
The proposed nuclear sites are:
Liddell Power Station, New South Wales
Mount Piper Power Station, New South Wales
Loy Yang Power Stations, Victoria
Tarong Power Station, Queensland
Callide Power Station, Queensland
Northern Power Station, South Australia (small modular reactor only)
Muja Power Station, Western Australia (small modular reactor only).
We used our tool to identify which of these seven sites would instead be suitable for a pumped hydro project, using the following criteria:
low construction cost (for a pumped hydro project)
located within 85km of the proposed nuclear sites.
We included various reservoir types in our search:
new reservoirs on undeveloped land (“greenfield” sites)
Exactly 300 sites matched our search criteria. No options emerged near the proposed nuclear site in Western Australia, but suitable sites lie further north in the mining region of the Pilbara.
One option east of Melbourne, depicted in the image below, has a storage capacity of 500 gigawatt-hours. Compared with Snowy 2.0, this option has a much shorter tunnel, larger energy capacity, and larger height difference between the two reservoirs (increasing the potential energy stored in the water). And unlike Snowy 2.0, it is not located in a national park.
Of course, shortlisted sites would require detailed assessment to confirm the local geology is suitable for pumped hydro, and to evaluate potential environmental and social impacts.
More where that came from
We restricted our search to sites near the Coalition’s proposed nuclear plants. But there are hundreds of potential pumped hydro sites along Australia’s east coast.
Developers can use our free tool to identify the best sites.
So far, the Australian electricity transition has mainly been driven by private investment in solar and wind power. With all this renewable energy entering the grid, there’s money to be made in storage, too.
Large, centralised, baseload electricity generators, such as coal and nuclear plants, are becoming a thing of the past. A smarter energy policy would balance solar and wind with technologies such as pumped hydro, to secure a reliable electricity supply.
Timothy Weber receives funding from the Australian government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics.
Andrew Blakers receives funding from the Australian government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and other organisations.
Many of us, however, hesitate to seek help or testing for our hearing. Perhaps you’re afraid you’ll be told to wear hearing aids, and envision the large and bulky hearing aids you might have seen on your grandparents decades ago.
In fact, hearing aids have changed a lot since then. They’re often now very small; some are barely noticeable. And hearing aids aren’t the only option available for people experiencing hearing loss.
The earlier you do something about your hearing, the greater the likelihood that you can prevent further hearing decline. PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock
Why you shouldn’t ignore hearing loss
Acquired hearing loss can have a serious impact on our life. It is associated with or can contribute to:
social isolation
loneliness
not being able to work as much, or at all
memory problems
trouble thinking clearly
conditions such as dementia.
Hearing loss has also been associated with depression, anxiety and stress. A systematic review and meta-analysis found adults with hearing loss are 1.5 times more likely to experience depression than those without hearing loss.
A large population study in the US found self-reported hearing loss was associated with:
higher levels of psychological distress
increased use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, and
greater utilisation of mental health services.
The good news is that doing something about your hearing loss can help you live a happier and longer life.
So why don’t people get their hearing checked?
Research has found adults with hearing loss typically wait ten years to seek help for their hearing.
Less than a quarter of those who need hearing aids actually go ahead with them.
Hearing declines slowly, so people may perceive their hearing difficulties aren’t concerning. They may feel they’re now used to not being able to hear properly, without fully appreciating the impact it’s having on their life.
Others may have overheard their partner, family or friends say negative things or make jokes about hearing aids, which can put people off getting their hearing checked.
People often associate hearing loss with negative stereotypes such as ageing, weakness and “being different”.
Our recent research found that around one in four people never tell anyone about their hearing loss because of experiences of stigma.
Adults with hearing loss who experience stigma and choose not to disclose their hearing loss were also likely not to go ahead with hearing aids, we found.
The first step in helping your hearing is to have a hearing check with a hearing care professional such as an an audiologist. You can also speak to your GP.
If you’ve got hearing loss, hearing aids aren’t the only option.
Others include:
other assistive listening devices (such as amplified phones, personal amplifiers and TV headphones)
doing a short course or program (such as the Active Communication Education program developed via University of Queensland researchers) aimed at giving you strategies to manage your hearing, for instance, in noisy environments
monitoring your hearing with regular checkups
strategies for protecting your hearing in future (such as wearing earplugs or earmuffs in loud environments, and not having headphone speakers too loud)
a cochlear implant (if hearing loss is severe)
Hearing care professionals should take a holistic approach to hearing rehabilitation.
That means coming up with individualised solutions based on your preferences and circumstances.
What are modern hearing aids like?
If you do need hearing aids, it’s worth knowing there are several different types. All modern hearing aids are extremely small and discrete.
Some sit behind your ear, while others sit within your ear. Some look the same as air pods.
Some are even completely invisible. These hearing aids are custom fitted to sit deep within your ear canal and contain no external tubes and wires.
Some types of hearing aids are more expensive than others, but even the basic styles are discrete.
In Australia, children and many adults are eligible for free or subsidised hearing services and many health funds offer hearing aid rebates as part of their extras cover.
Despite being small, modern hearing aids have advanced technology including the ability to:
reduce background noise
direct microphones to where sound is coming from (directional microphones)
use Bluetooth so you can hear audio from your phone, TV and other devices directly in your hearing aids.
When used with a smartphone, some hearing aids can even track your health, detect if you have fallen, and translate languages in real time.
Modern hearing aids use Bluetooth so you can hear audio from your phone. Daisy Daisy/Shutterstock
What should I do next?
If you think you might be having hearing difficulties or are curious about the status of your hearing, then it’s a good idea to get a hearing check.
The earlier you do something about your hearing, the greater the likelihood that you can prevent further hearing decline and reduce other health risks.
And rest assured, there’s a suitable option for everyone.
Katie Ekberg has previously received funding from the Hearing Industry Research Consortium, which funded research into stigma associated with hearing loss and hearing aids.
Barbra Timmer is a part-time employee of Sonova AG, a global hearing care company. She was a Chief Investigator on a Hearing Industry Research Consortium grant that investigated the experiences of stigma for adults with hearing loss. She is the president of Audiology Australia.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Galyna Piskorska, Associate Professor, Faculty of Journalism, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University (Ukraine) and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Advanced Centre for Journalism, The University of Melbourne
Three years into Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, Ukrainian journalists are facing enormously difficult challenges to continue their work.
Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, 40% of Ukrainian media outlets have been forced to close down, mostly due to the Russian occupation or financial difficulties caused by the war. Many of these are in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian journalists and media outlets have also become targets. More than 100 media workers have been killed since the full-scale war began.
Some, like 28-year-old journalist Viktoriya Roshchyna, were captured by Russian forces and died in brutal conditions in captivity. More than 30 media workers are still in Russian captivity.
Others were killed by Russian missile and drone attacks, like Tetiana Kulyk, who died alongside her husband, a surgeon, after her home was hit by a drone in late February.
For those journalists that remain, fatigue is a major issue. Many are emotionally exhausted. Some cannot cope and leave their jobs. The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) helps with seminars and psychological support.
Despite the dangers, local media remains in high demand near the front lines of the war. These outlets have lost so much – advertising, subscribers and staff – but their journalists still have the passion and determination to continue their work documenting history.
The role of local media on the front lines
According to researchers who interviewed 43 independent local media outlets last year, the key challenges for newsrooms have not changed since the start of the war:
a shortage of employees (22% of respondents said this was a challenge in 2023, compared to 16% in 2022);
psychological stress (18% in 2023, 16% in 2022)
lack of funds (16% in both years).
Often, journalists must perform different roles in their work, including being a driver, mail carrier and even a psychotherapist.
Without working telephones or internet in areas near the front lines, print newspapers remain the only source of trusted information for many people. This includes up-to-date information on evacuation plans and humanitarian aid, as well as content not related to the war, such as public transport schedules and how to access medicines and necessary items for home repairs.
Tetiana Velika, editor in chief of the Voice of Huliaipillia in southeastern Ukraine, was one of about 120 journalists who took part in a recent online conference organised by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine to discuss the state of Ukraine’s media.
She said media have remained connected with readers through both openness and authenticity. This includes having active social media networks, publishing journalists’ mobile phone numbers and allowing people to reach out anytime.
Vasyl Myroshnyk, the editor in chief of Zorya, a newspaper in eastern Ukraine, described how he travelled 400 kilometres each week to deliver copies of his newspaper to even the most dangerous places.
Svitlana Ovcharenko, editor of the newspaper Vpered in the city of Bakhmut, which was destroyed by Russian forces in the opening weeks of the war, said the paper has remained a lifeline for a displaced population.
We have a unique situation — we don’t have a city. It’s virtual, it’s only on the map, it doesn’t physically exist. Not only is it destroyed, but it’s also been bombed with phosphorus bombs, and no one lives there.
Ovcharenko, who now lives in the city of Odesa, said her newspaper’s readers are scattered all over the world. (There are 6,000 printed copies distributed each week across Ukraine.) The coverage focuses on how former Bakhmut residents have restarted their lives elsewhere, while also paying homage to the city’s past.
Independent media is now at stake
Funding remains a formidable challenge. Advertising revenue has dried up for many outlets, leaving international donors as the primary journalism funding source.
Now, the Trump administration in the United States is gutting much of this funding through its dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). According to one estimate, 80% of Ukrainian media outlets received funding through USAID. As Oksana Romaniuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information, said:
The problem is that almost everyone had grants. The question is that for some, these grants amounted to 100% of their income and they could only survive thanks to grants. These grants amounted to 40–60% for some, less for others.
According to media researchers, without donor aid or state budget support in 2025, newspapers and magazines may decrease by a further 20% in Ukraine, while subscription circulation could drop by 25–30%.
The heavy reliance on such funding has already led to the closure of some outlets, while others have been forced to launch public fundraising campaigns.
Donor funding has also given Ukrainian outlets a measure of independence, allowing them to report on corruption within the Ukrainian government, for example. Many independent outlets are now vulnerable to being taken over by commercial or political entities. When these groups gain control, they can influence media coverage to benefit their own interests. This is known as “media capture”.
Research shows how this has occurred in other post-conflict and developing countries where independent media outlets have been transformed into business entities more focused on profits and maintaining good relations with authorities than on producing quality journalism.
This is a critical time for the future of Ukrainian media, to ensure it remains financially self-sufficient and free from the influence of both Russian propaganda and Ukrainian oligarchs. Without this funding, the preservation of Ukraine’s independent media and democracy remain under dire threat.
Galyna Piskorska 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.
German anaesthesiologist Joachim Boldt has an unfortunate claim to fame. According to Retraction Watch, a public database of research retractions, he is the most retracted scientist of all time. To date, 220 of his roughly 400 published research papers have been retracted by academic journals.
Boldt may be a world leader, but he has plenty of competition. In 2023, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted globally – more than any previous year on record. According to a recent investigation by Nature, a disproportionate number of retracted papers over the past ten years have been written by authors affiliated with several hospitals, universities and research institutes in Asia.
Academic journals retract papers when they are concerned that the published data is faked, altered, or not “reproducible” (meaning it would yield the same results if analysed again).
Some errors are honest mistakes. However, the majority of retractions are associated with scientific misconduct.
But what exactly is scientific misconduct? And what can be done about it?
From fabrication to plagiarism
The National Health and Medical Research Council is Australia’s primary government agency for medical funding. It defines misconduct as breaches of the Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.
In Australia, there are broadly eight recognised types of breaches. Research misconduct is the most severe.
These breaches may include failure to obtain ethics approval, plagiarism, data fabrication, falsification and misrepresentation.
This is what was behind many of Boldt’s retractions. He made up data for a large number of studies, which ultimately led to his dismissal from the Klinikum Ludwigshafen, a teaching hospital in Germany, in 2010.
In another case, China’s He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 for creating the world’s first genetically edited babies using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. His crime was that he falsified documents to recruit couples for his research.
But it still represented a case of image duplication and misrepresentation of data. This lead to the journal retracting the paper and launching an investigation. The investigation concluded the breach was unintentional and resulted from the pressures of academic research.
Fewer than 20% of all retractions are due to honest mistakes. Researchers usually contact the publisher to correct errors when they are detected, with no major consequences.
The need for a national oversight body
In many countries, an independent national body oversees research integrity.
In the United Kingdom, this body is known as the Committee on Research Integrity. It is responsible for improving research integrity and addressing misconduct cases. Similarly, in the United States, the Office of Research Integrity handles allegations of research misconduct.
In contrast, Australia lacks an independent body directly tasked with investigating research misconduct. There is a body known as the Australian Research Integrity Committee. But it only reviews the institutional procedures and governance of investigations to ensure they are conducted fairly and transparently – and with limited effectiveness. For example, last year it received 13 complaints, only five of which were investigated.
Instead Australia relies on a self-regulation model. This means each university and research institute aligns its own policy with the Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Although this code originated in medical research, its principles apply across all disciplines.
For example, in archaeology, falsifying an image or deliberately reporting inaccurate carbon dating results constitutes data fabrication. Another common breach is plagiarism, which can also be applied to all fields.
But self-governance on integrity matters is fraught with problems.
Investigations often lack transparency and are carried out internally, creating a conflict of interest. Often the investigative teams are under immense pressure to safeguard their institution’s reputation rather than uphold accountability.
A 2023 report by the Australia Institute called for the urgent establishment of an independent, government-funded research integrity watchdog.
The report recommended the watchdog have direct investigatory powers and that academic institutions be bound by its findings.
The report also recommended the watchdog should release its findings publicly, create whistleblower protections, establish a proper appeals process and allow people to directly raise complaints with it.
Research credibility is on the line
The consequences of inadequate oversight are already evident.
One of the biggest research integrity scandals in Australian history involved Ali Nazari, an engineer from Swinburne University. In 2022 an anonymous whistleblower alleged Nazari was part of an international research fraud cartel involving multiple teams.
Investigations cast doubt on the validity of the 287 papers Nazari and the other researchers had collectively published. The investigations uncovered numerous violations, including 71 instances of falsified results, plagiarism and duplication, and 208 instances of self-plagiarism.
If Australia had a independent research integrity body, there would be a clear governance structure and an established and transparent pathway for reporting breaches at a much earlier stage.
Timely intervention would help reduce further breaches through swift investigation and corrective action. Importantly, consistent governance across Australian institutions would help ensure fairness. It would also reduce bias and uphold the same standards across all misconduct cases.
The call for an independent research integrity watchdog is long overdue.
Only through impartial oversight can we uphold the values of scientific excellence, protect public trust, and foster a culture of accountability that strengthens the integrity of research for all Australians.
Nham Tran has received funding from Australian Research Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Randall Wayth, SKA-Low Senior Commissioning Scientist and Adjunct Associate Professor, Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, Curtin University
The first image from an early working version of the SKA-Low telescope, showing around 85 galaxies.SKAO
Part of the world’s biggest mega-science facility – the SKA Observatory – is being built in outback Western Australia.
After decades of planning, countless hours of work, and more than a few setbacks, an early working version of the telescope has captured its first glimpse of the sky.
Using 1,024 of what will eventually be 131,072 radio antennas, the first SKA-Low image shows a tiny sliver of sky dotted with ancient galaxies billions of light-years from Earth.
This first snapshot shows the system works, and will improve dramatically in the coming months and years – and starts a new chapter in our exploration of the universe.
A glimpse of the universe
The SKA-Low telescope is currently under construction on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia, around 600 kilometres north of Perth. Together with the SKA-Mid telescope (under construction in South Africa), the two telescopes will make up the world’s largest and most sensitive radio observatory.
SKA-Low will consist of thousands of antennas spread across a vast area. It is designed to detect low-frequency radio signals from some of the most distant and ancient objects in the universe.
The first image, made using just 1,024 of the planned 131,000 antennas, is remarkably clear, confirming that the complex systems for transmitting and processing data from the antennas are working properly. Now we can move on to more detailed observations to analyse and verify the telescope’s scientific output.
Bright galaxies, billions of years old
The image shows a patch of the sky, approximately 25 square degrees in area, as seen in radio waves.
Twenty-five square degrees is an area of sky that would fit 100 full Moons. For comparison, it would be about the area of sky that a small apple would cover if you held it at arm’s length.
The first image from an early working version of the SKA-Low telescope, showing around 85 galaxies. SKAO
The dots in the image look like stars, but are actually some of the brightest galaxies in the universe. These galaxies are billions of light-years away, so the galaxies we are seeing now were emitting this light when the universe was half its current age.
They are so bright because each of these distant galaxies contains a supermassive black hole. Gas orbiting around black holes is very hot and moves very quickly, emitting energy in X-rays and radio waves. SKA-Low can detect these radio waves that have travelled billions of light years across the universe to reach Earth.
The world’s largest radio telescope
SKA-Low and SKA-Mid are both being built by the SKAO, a global project to build cutting-edge telescopes that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe and deliver benefits to society. (SKA stands for “square kilometre array”, describing the initial estimated collecting area of all the antennas and radio dishes put together.)
My own involvement in the project began in 2014. Since then I, along with many local and international colleagues, have deployed and verified several prototype systems on the path to SKA-Low. To now be part of the team that is making the first images with the rapidly growing telescope is extremely satisfying.
A complex system with no moving parts
SKA-Low will be made up of 512 aperture arrays (or stations), each comprised of 256 antennas.
Unlike traditional telescopes, aperture arrays have no moving parts, which makes them easier to maintain. The individual antennas receive signals from all directions at once and – to produce images – we use complex mathematics to combine the signals from each individual antenna and “steer” the telescope.
The SKA-Low telescope uses arrays of radio antennas (called stations) to create images of the universe. SKAO / Max Alexander
The advantages and flexibility of aperture arrays come at the cost of complex signal processing and software systems. Any errors in signal timing, calibration or processing can distort the final image or introduce noise.
For this reason, the successful production of the first image is a key validation – it can only happen if the entire system is working.
The shape of the universe and beyond
As SKA-Low grows, it will see more detail. Simulations show the full telescope may detect up to 600,000 galaxies in the same patch of sky shown in the first test image. SKAO
Once completed, SKA-Low promises to transform our understanding of the early universe.
The antennas of the full telescope will be spread across an area approximately 70 kilometres in diameter, making it the most sensitive low-frequency radio array ever built.
This unprecedented sensitivity to low-frequency radio signals will allow scientists to detect the faint signals from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang – the so-called “cosmic dawn”. SKA-Low will be the first radio telescope capable of imaging this very early period of our universe.
It will also help map the large-scale structure of the universe. We expect the telescope will also provide new insights into cosmic magnetism, the behaviour of interstellar gas, and the mysterious nature of dark matter and dark energy.
The sensitivity and resolution of SKA-Low gives it a huge discovery potential. Seven out of the top 10 discoveries from the Hubble Space Telescope were not part of the original science motivation. Like the HST, SKA-Low promises to be a transformative telescope. Who knows what new discoveries await?
What’s next
SKA-Low’s commissioning process will ramp up over the course of the year, as more antenna arrays are installed and brought online. With each additional station, the sensitivity and resolution of the telescope will increase. This growth will also bring greater technical challenges in handling the growing complexity and data rates.
By the end of 2025, SKA-Low is expected to have 16 working stations. The increased volume of output data at this stage will be the next major test for the telescope’s software systems.
By the end of 2026, the array is planned to expand to 68 working stations at which point it will be the the most sensitive low-frequency radio telescope on Earth.
This phase will be the next big test of the end-to-end telescope system. When we get to this stage, the same field you see in the image above will be able to comprehensively map and detect up to 600,000 galaxies. I’m personally looking forward to helping bring it together.
Randall Wayth 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.
