Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stephanie Balkwill, Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles
In sixth-century China, a woman known to history as Empress Dowager Ling ruled over an empire called the Northern Wei. Historians do not know her birth name or in what year she was born, but they do know that she served as empress dowager between 515 and 528. As the spouse of a ruling emperor prior to his death, she retained the title of empress dowager in her widowhood.
She ruled on behalf of her young son, the heir to the throne; however, her regency was interrupted by a coup d’etat from 520 to 525. Although the empress dowager was expected to rule only as a regent, historical records indicate that she administered court in her own name. These same records also reveal that she adopted a personal pronoun – “zhen 朕,” otherwise known as the Chinese “royal we” – that was reserved for the exclusive use of the emperor.
In my recent book, “The Women Who Ruled China,” I offer an overview of these historical sources and records that document her life, including a translation of her biography retained in the official chronicle of the Northern Wei. Using these sources, I argue that even though the Empress Dowager’s rule was problematic and short – resulting in her assassination – she laid the foundation for other, more successful female rulers across medieval East Asia.
Capitalizing on different cultural traditions
In the late fifth century, the capital city of the Northern Wei was moved from its northern location in modern-day Datong, China, to its southern location in Luoyang, a city at the very heart of Han Chinese culture and history; however, the people who ruled the empire were not ethnically Han Chinese.
Known as the Taghbach, this group migrated south from the Mongolian steppe and ruled a multiethnic and multicultural empire from Luoyang, the world’s largest city and the former capital of the Eastern Han dynasty. The Northern Wei empire adopted laws, institutions and policies from both Taghbach and Han Chinese traditions.
This cultural hybridity enabled the empress dowager to rule directly: On one hand, the Chinese court system rooted in the Han dynasty had long included the position of empress dowager, even though none of the women who held it had ruled directly. On the other, Taghbach culture had no formal position of empress dowager prior to its adoption of court ranks in the Northern Wei, but it did have a long tradition of women in public life. These women served in the military and advised on political matters.
Multiple sources of evidence indicate that Taghbach women had a high degree of personal autonomy and political power, with no source suggesting otherwise.
A well-known story about Taghbach woman appears in the legend of Mulan, who is said to have dressed as a man so that she could serve in the military in place of her father. The Mulan legend is widely recounted in Chinese literature and inspired a fictional character in two Walt Disney movies based on the Chinese fable.
As a historian of gender in this period, I believe that the Mulan legend does not accurately depict Taghbach women. Instead, it is a Chinese story that emphasizes a form of gender transgression that makes sense only within Chinese and Confucian culture. Unlike Chinese culture, Taghbach culture had long known women warriors who could ride horses and shoot arrows without concealing their gender.
Empress Dowager Ling was not a warrior, but she embraced martial symbols of her own power that were available to women in Taghbach culture but not in Chinese culture. For example, she was an accomplished archer and famously drove her own horse cart, which was just as splendid and imposing as was the emperor’s cart.
In the Confucian culture of Han China, such actions were considered highly inappropriate for women, but Empress Dowager Ling carried them out while holding the Chinese title of empress dowager. Her rule, like her empire, was culturally hybrid. That blend of cultural traditions enabled her to take power in a way that neither Chinese nor Taghbach women had done before.
A Buddhist ruler
By the time of the reign of the Northern Wei empire, both Taghbah and Chinese cultures had become deeply familiar with Buddhism, a religion that they had inherited from India in a long process of cultural exchange along the Silk Road. The empire had integrated methods of Buddhist statecraft into its own forms of governance.
Simply put, what this meant was that the ruler of the empire legitimized his reign through Buddhism, portraying himself either as a Buddha or as a patron of Buddhists – their texts and institutions. This was a type of governance that was widely practiced in premodern East Asia.
Even though Buddhist statecraft was widespread in the empress dowager’s time, she was the first woman to directly legitimate her independent rule through Buddhism. As a patron of Buddhism, she commissioned majestic Buddhist architecture. Perhaps seen by her populace as a Buddhist figure herself, she symbolized her co-rule with her son by using a Buddhist visual motif of two Buddhas sitting side by side, a representation that came to be known as the rule by “Two Sages,” meaning tandem rulers depicted in the guise of buddhas. The source for the image was the popular Buddhist text, the “Lotus Sūtra.”
She also attempted to put her own granddaughter on the throne after the death of her son. As I argue in my book, she did so by capitalizing on the idea that first her son, and then her granddaughter, were thought of as the bodhisattva Maitreya, a being of infinite compassion who is believed to be the future Buddha.
The empress dowager’s legacy
Empress Dowager Ling was largely unsuccessful in her bid for power. Her rule was short and contested. She was murdered, and her empire was toppled within 13 years of her rule. For five of those years, she was not in power because of a coup d’etat.
However, about 150 years after the assassination of the empress dowager, another woman would rise to rule China independently, this time taking the title of “emperor.” That woman is known as Empress Wu, or Emperor Wu Zhao, and she is undoubtedly the most famous woman in all of Chinese history. Numerous historical sources attest to her life, work and rule.
What those sources tell us, however, is that she ruled using the very same strategies as Empress Dowager Ling. Investing her own family heritage in distant links to the Taghbach, she also positioned herself as a “Two Sage” ruler alongside the emperor in precisely the same way that Empress Dowager Ling did. She was also able to successfully establish herself as the bodhisattva Maitreya by using Buddhist texts known to Empress Dowager Ling and her court.
She patronized the very same Buddhist structures as did Empress Dowager Ling, including the Buddhist caves at Longmen, just outside of Luoyang. However, she accomplished what Empress Dowager Ling could not – holding onto power successfully. I argue her success was possible because Empress Dowager Ling had paved the way.
Stephanie Balkwill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kate Coleman-Minahan, Associate Professor of Nursing, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Since 2022, Colorado and 10 other states have passed voter initiatives to protect or expand abortion access. Yet, seven of these states, including Colorado, require people under the age of 18 to get consent from or notify a parent prior to receiving abortion services.
In January 2025, my colleagues and I published research using in-depth interviews with 33 people ages 15 to 22 in Colorado who considered or obtained abortion care between 2020 and 2023. Our study suggests that Colorado’s parental notification law delays young people’s access to abortion, complicates already complex family relationships, and forces unwanted disclosure of the pregnancy and abortion.
As a nurse, I have provided health care to young people and their families for more than two decades, and as a researcher, I have spent the past 10 years studying young people’s experiences with parental involvement laws.
Expanding abortion access, but not for adolescents
In the U.S., 38 states allow abortion services at some point in pregnancy. Of those,24 states have parental involvement laws. And of those, 12 states require young people to obtain consent from a parent or guardian; seven require young people to notify a parent or guardian; and five require both notification and consent. Three states – Kansas, Missouri and North Dakota – require involvement of both parents.
In 2024, Colorado passed a constitutional amendment that protects the right to abortion and allows funding through Medicaid. Yet, Colorado still requires parental notification for people under 18 to obtain abortion services. There have been no recent state-led efforts to remove this law.
We found that even in a state like Colorado that has expanded abortion access, the law creates barriers to services. It takes time for young people to learn the law exists and figure out how to comply with it. That’s true for both young people who can tell their parents and those who cannot. Delays due to parental involvement laws can increase the cost of abortion services, restrict adolescents’ choice of abortion methods and push adolescents past the gestational limit of the clinic or state.
For some Colorado young people, following the law resulted in unwanted disclosure of their pregnancy and abortion to parents and others, which is associated with negative mental health outcomes and exposes some young people to emotional or physical abuse.
Judicial bypass
In states that mandate parental involvement, young people who feel they cannot involve a parent can try to obtain a judicial bypass. The young person must go to court to prove to a judge that they are mature and well informed or that abortion without parental involvement is in their best interest.
Judicial bypass also delays access to abortion. For one participant in our Colorado study, the two- to three-week delay contributed to her inability to obtain her wanted abortion because it pushed her past the gestational limit of her chosen clinic.
Another participant thought the judicial bypass process would take too long, so she instead tried to end the pregnancy herself. She took vitamin C, which is not effective, and considered but did not take large doses of over-the-counter medications such as ibuprofen, which could have caused organ damage.
The delays and burdens of the judicial bypass process led some study participants’ parents to find out about the pregnancy. This unwanted disclosure breached the privacy that judicial bypass is meant to protect.
Policymakers in some states with abortion bans, such as Idaho, Tennessee and Mississippi, are trying to stop people from traveling out of state for services by targeting young people. These proposed laws would make it a crime to help a young person under 18 leave the state for abortion services without parental consent.
Colorado protects the right to abortion in its state constitution but still requires minors to notify a parent to get an abortion. The Washington Post/Contributor/GettyImages
Our research found that Colorado young people want their parents’ or guardians’ support when considering abortion, yet some felt it was not safe for them to ask for it.
Confirming prior research, we found a number of reasons young people felt unable to disclose their pregnancies to a parent. Those include fearing a parent’s reaction, feeling a parent would not respect their pregnancy decision, and not living with or not having a supportive relationship with a parent.
In addition to those reasons, young people also accurately predicted their parents’ reactions. Young people recounted emotional abuse and abandonment or feeling coerced into either continuing the pregnancy or having an abortion when a parent they did not feel they could tell found out about the pregnancy. Research, including our new study in Colorado, shows we can trust young people to decide who to involve in their pregnancy decision.
The views expressed here are her own and not those of the University of Colorado. Kate Coleman-Minahan receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Society of Family Planning.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his cabinet have been sworn in, ending Justin Trudeau’s time in office and paving the way for a spring election. Canadians are soon heading to the polls as they watch American democracy crumble.
United States President Donald Trump recently argued “he who saves his country does not violate any Law” as he ignores Congress and the courts, governs by executive order and threatens international laws and treaties.
Republican leaders moved dramatically to the right, and the primary system allowed the choice of an extremist. Republican voters then aligned their opinions with his. Trump’s disdain for democratic fundamentals spread quickly. Partisans defending their team slid away from democratic values.
Canada’s more centrist ideological spectrum is not foolproof against this type of extremism. Public opinion can be moved when our leaders take us there.
Decline can start slowly and then accelerate. America’s democratic backsliding in the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency follows the erosion of democratic norms over decades. Republican attacks on institutions, the opposition, the media and higher education corrosively undermined public faith in the truth, including election results.
Trust in government is holding steady in Canada, however. That provides an important guardrail for Canadian democracy.
The dangers of courting the far right
There are also lessons for our political parties. To maximize their seats, Republicans accepted extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but soon needed those types of politicians for key votes.
The so-called Freedom Caucus, made up of MAGA adherents, forced the choice of a new, more extreme, leader of the House of Representatives. This provides a clear lesson that history has shown many times: it is dangerous for the party on the political right to accommodate the far right, which can quickly take control.
Once established within the ruling party, extremists can hold their party hostage.
Austria recently avoided the inclusion of the far right in its new coalition, and now Germany is working to do the same. As Canada’s Conservatives look for every vote, courting far-right voters and candidates risks destabilizing the system.
They clearly did not imagine party loyalty negating the safeguards that protect democracy from an authoritarian-minded president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate and impeach, limits the executive’s power to spend and make appointments, gives the judiciary power to hold an executive accountable and contains the 25th amendment allowing cabinet to remove a president.
But when one party controls the legislative and executive branches during a time of hyper-partisanship, these mechanisms may not constrain an authoritarian. Today, Republican loyalty has eroded these checks and balances and American courts are struggling to step up to their heightened role.
Although counter-intuitive, parliamentary systems like Canada’s are usually less susceptible to authoritarianism than presidential ones because the cabinet or the House of Commons can turn against a lawless leader.
Still, if popular, authoritarian leaders can still retain their party’s support — and then things can slide quickly. The rightward pull of extremists seen in the U.S. House would be more dangerous here since the Canadian House of Commons includes our executive.
Guarding against xenophobia
Lastly, Canada should be wary of xenophobic rhetoric.
“America First” is not simply shopping advice. It began as an isolationist slogan during the First World War but was soon adopted by pro-fascists, American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. These entities questioned who is really American and wanted not only isolationism, but racist policies, immigration restrictions and eugenics.
Trump did not revive the phrase accidentally. It’s a call to America’s fringes. Alienating domestic groups is a sure sign of democratic decline.
“Canada First” mimics that century-long dark theme in America. In combination with contempt for the opposition, it questions the right of other parties to legitimately hold power if used as a message by one party.
Also, asserting that “Canada is broken” — as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre often does — mimics Trump’s talk of American carnage, language and imagery he uses to justify extraordinary presidential authority.
Such language erodes citizens’ trust in democratic institutions and primes voters to support undemocratic practices in the name of patriotism. Canadian parties and politicians should exit that road.
Ultimately, institutions alone do not protect a country from the rise of authoritarianism. Democracy can be fragile. As a federal election approaches in Canada, it’s important to know the warning signs of extremism and anti-democratic practices that are creeping into our politics.
Matthew Lebo 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 Michael Williams, Professor of International Politics, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
In the few weeks since United States President Donald Trump returned to the White House, world leaders and commentators have struggled to make sense of his approach to foreign policy, including tariffs, alliance renegotiations and threats of territorial appropriation.
No one is sure how much is bluff or negotiating tactics, nor how much is deadly serious.
For some, Trump’s foreign policy is simply incoherent, but most try to fit his approach into the familiar choice between isolationism and internationalism.
But there’s a third possibility: Trump’s second presidency marks a contemporary twist on an older form of continentalist geopolitics with important implications for Canada and the world.
‘Great Powers’
Although it has been largely missing from foreign policy debates in the post-Second World War era, continentalist geopolitics has a long and often controversial history.
In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, it envisioned a world divided into “great spaces,” each dominated by a different “Great Power.” According to this perspective, not all regions are equally important, and continentalist geopolitics does not require a choice between internationalism and isolationism.
Instead, continentalism recommends that Great Powers like the U.S. — with its massive financial, natural and industrial resources — concentrate on controlling territory, the regions surrounding it and the crucial transportation routes on its continental fringes.
Pressure is placed on countries whose importance is determined by their geopolitical proximity, and those that are least able to resist due to their dense connections and relative dependence on the U.S.
The objective is not just to gain specific advantages; it’s to force neighbours into even tighter economic and infrastructural connections and dependence. The obvious countries in this scenario are Canada and Mexico, and it’s therefore unsurprising that both have been the targets of Trump’s significant tariff threats and other coercive measures.
Beyond geographically contiguous states, continentalist geopolitics also focuses on areas that command key strategic passages and trade routes, especially those currently controlled by weaker powers.
For the U.S., Panama, with its canal, fits the bill. Danish-administered Greenland, with its natural resources and geographic importance in a rapidly thawing Arctic region, is another. It’s unsurprising that these countries, along with Canada, were a Trump focus in the first weeks of his second administration.
Today, continentalist geopolitics recognizes the multi-polarity and “multi-alignment” in world politics.
It’s not isolationist, but it recognizes that waning American power in an inter-connected world gives more distant states the ability to resist U.S. pressure by making deals with a wide range of other countries. In this setting, an interventionist global role is neither possible nor desirable, and the U.S. should refrain from global commitments.
“It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multi-polar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.”
No commitment to global stability
The continentalist perspective does not require a complete separation from the world economic or security order. Trade, financial and technology flows can be encouraged, but their basis would be a re-industrialized and more self-sufficient core, well-insulated from economic and security threats.
Extended interests, such as European stability, could be minimized by increasing the cost burden to allies and minimizing fixed commitments. A powerful global capacity with a “light” geographic footprint is the preferred posture.
Calls for increased defence spending by NATO allies and for European responsibility in enforcing a post-war settlement in Ukraine logically follow.
The continentalist playbook is content to leave the management of distant regions to other powers, each pre-eminent in their part of the world. That means participation in international organizations is minimized.
Foreign aid should reflect American interests, with involvement depending on the costs and benefits, not any automatic commitment to global stability. Feeding the world’s most extensive development agency, USAID, “into the wood-chipper” — to quote Elon Musk — is a page taken straight from this kind of geopolitician’s handbook.
Unsavoury history
The possibility that a continentalist geopolitics underpins recent U.S. foreign policy initiatives has received too little attention in Canada.
It’s not yet clear that the actions of America’s new administration represent the rise, much less the triumph, of Trumpian geopolitics. Nor is there any guarantee that such a vision would or will succeed.
But there is enough evidence to suggest we should take the possibility seriously. Since 1945, America’s foreign policy options have resided somewhere between internationalism and isolationism. But a geopolitical vision of world politics as a diverse canvas of large territory dominated by different Great Powers have a long, if often unsavoury, history in foreign policy.
A southern neighbour pursuing a such a geopolitical approach would mark a radical transformation in world order and pose huge challenges for Canada. Canadians should at least be prepared for the possibility.
Michael Williams receives funding from the Social Science Research Council of Canada
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Themiya Nanayakkara, Lead Astronomer at the James Webb Australian Data Centre, Swinburne University of Technology
The Big Wheel alongside some of its neighbours. Weichen Wang et al. (2025)
Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It’s a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We’ve dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published today in Nature Astronomy.
This giant disk galaxy existed within the first two billion years after the Big Bang, meaning it formed when the universe was just 15% of its current age. It challenges what we know about how galaxies form.
What is a disk galaxy?
Picture a galaxy like our own Milky Way: a flat, rotating structure made up of stars, gas and dust, often surrounded by an extensive halo of unseen dark matter.
Disk galaxies typically have clear spiral arms extending outward from a dense central region. Our Milky Way itself is a disk galaxy, characterised by beautiful spiral arms that wrap around its centre.
An artist impression of the Milky Way showcasing the dusty spiral structures similar to The Big Wheel.
Studying disk galaxies, like the Milky Way and the newly discovered Big Wheel, helps us uncover how galaxies form, grow and evolve across billions of years.
These studies are especially significant, as understanding galaxies similar to our own can provide deeper insights into the cosmic history of our galactic home.
A giant surprise
We previously thought galaxy disks form gradually over a long period: either through gas smoothly flowing into galaxies from surrounding space, or by merging with smaller galaxies.
Usually, rapid mergers between galaxies would disrupt the delicate spiral structures, turning them into more chaotic shapes. However, the Big Wheel managed to quickly grow to a surprisingly large size without losing its distinctive spiral form. This challenges long-held ideas about the growth of giant galaxies.
Our detailed JWST observations show that the Big Wheel is comparable in size and rotational speed to the largest “super-spiral” galaxies in today’s universe. It is three times as big in size as comparable galaxies at that epoch and is one of the most massive galaxies observed in the early cosmos.
In fact, its rotation speed places it among galaxies at the high end of what’s called the Tully-Fisher relation, a well-known link between a galaxy’s stellar mass and how fast it spins.
Remarkably, even though it’s unusually large, the Big Wheel is actively growing at a rate similar to other galaxies at the same cosmic age.
The Big Wheel galaxy is seen at the centre. In striking contrast, the bright blue galaxy (upper right) is only about 1.5 billion light years away, making the Big Wheel roughly 50 times farther away. Although both appear a similar size, the enormous distance of the Big Wheel reveals its truly colossal physical scale. JWST
Unusually crowded part of space
What makes this even more fascinating is the environment in which the Big Wheel formed.
It’s located in an unusually crowded region of space, where galaxies are packed closely together, ten times denser than typical areas of the universe. This dense environment likely provided ideal conditions for the galaxy to grow quickly. It probably experienced mergers that were gentle enough to let the galaxy maintain its spiral disk shape.
Additionally, the gas flowing into the galaxy must have aligned well with its rotation, allowing the disk to grow quickly without being disrupted. So, a perfect combination.
An illustration of how a massive spiral galaxy forms and evolves over billions of years. This evolutionary path is similar to real-world galaxies like Andromeda, our closest spiral galaxy neighbour, which also developed distinct spiral arms similar to the Big Wheel.
A fortunate finding
Discovering a galaxy like the Big Wheel was incredibly unlikely. We had less than a 2% chance to find this in our survey, according to current galaxy formation models.
So, our finding was fortunate, probably because we observed it within an exceptionally dense region, quite different from typical cosmic environments.
Besides its mysterious formation, the ultimate fate of the Big Wheel is another intriguing question. Given the dense environment, future mergers might significantly alter its structure, potentially transforming it into a galaxy comparable in mass to the largest ones observed in nearby clusters, such as Virgo.
The Big Wheel’s discovery has revealed yet another mystery of the early universe, showing that our current models of galaxy evolution still need refinement.
With more observations and discoveries of massive, early galaxies like the Big Wheel, astronomers will be able to unlock more secrets about how the universe built the structures we see today.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, Associate Professor in Quantitative Political Science, University of Southampton
From a very young age, we’re socialised to view the world as being made up of “goodies” and “baddies”. When you’re a child fooling around with your friends in the playground, nobody ever wants to be the baddy. And when it comes to dressing up, everybody wants to be Luke Skywalker – not Darth Vader.
This oversimplified way of viewing the world as being made up of right and wrong or good people and bad people doesn’t dissipate as we grow older. If anything, it tends to solidify as we form the social identities that define who we are in adult life.
This is particularly the case when it comes to our political identities and, specifically, the partisan identities and loyalties that individuals attach themselves to.
Partisanship is one hell of a powerful force. Not only does sticking a party label under a candidate determine whether we support them or not – often regardless of what the individual candidate actually stands for – but it also shapes how we view the state of the country and economy. Note how Democrats’ view of how the US economy was doing tanked the day Donald Trump took office, while Republicans’ positivity about the same economy spiked.
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Our partisanship can also affect who we choose to socialise with, who we share a beer with, and who we date. There is even evidence that it affects who gets hired and who doesn’t. Knowing who your neighbour votes for and if they vote for “your team” shapes your view of them as good or bad.
In a new study, I show that the reverse is also true. Knowing someone is good or bad shapes if we think they are one of “us” or one of “them”. In other words, partisans project their own political identities onto people they view as good, and project the political identities of their opponents onto those they dislike.
Who do Darth Vader and Cinderella vote for?
The first part of the study involved a social experiment that applied a political twist on a childish game. In a representative survey of thousands of respondents from both the US and UK, participants were shown images of fictional characters. These were heroes like Harry Potter and Spiderman, or villains like Scar from Disney’s The Lion King and Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones.
Participants were then asked to guess each character’s political affiliation. What emerged was a striking pattern: participants thought that heroes voted for the same party as them, and that villains voted for the opposing party.
Essentially, US Democrats consistently thought Harry Potter and his friends Ron and Hermione voted Democrat, whereas Republicans consistently thought they voted Republican. Similar behaviour was expected of heroes (and the opposite of villains) from across a whole host of characters from different film and fiction.
Percentages who thought each character voted for ‘their’ party:
Heroes in pink, villains in blue: how we think fictional characters vote. Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, CC BY-ND
Participants thought Spiderman, Cinderella, Yoda, Aladdin, Brienne of Tarth, Gandalf and Captain America shared their political views. They dismissed Kylo Ren, Ursula the sea witch, Cersei Lannister and Thanos as siding with their political opposition.
Participants were also asked to read a short story about a local politician. In one version of the story, the politician was depicted as a generous figure who donated money to charity. In another, the same politician was shown in a negative light, and as having been accused of corruption. At no point in the story was the partisanship of the politician mentioned.
Despite the absence of any direct mention of partisanship, respondents falsely “remembered” the politician’s party affiliation in a way that aligned with the moral tone of the story. Labour-voting participants who read the generous politician story said they remembered it was about a Labour politician. Conservative-voting participants reading the same story said they remembered it being about a Conservative politician. The reverse pattern was observed among participants who read the corrupt politician story.
These results are striking. Even when there is nothing to be remembered and participants could say that partisanship wasn’t part of the story, voters read what they wanted between the lines based on their own tribal political identities.
These studies demonstrate that partisan identities undermine voter rationality. Politically motivated projection – assuming those who are good must be one of “us” and those who are bad must be one of “them” – doesn’t just shape how we view others; it reinforces and consolidates partisan divisions.
If we assume the person who lives next door is a lousy neighbour because they vote for our political opponents, and simultaneously assume the person who lives down the street votes for our political opponents because they are a lousy neighbour, then we very quickly fall into a scenario where our politically tribal instincts feel increasingly justified.
This cycle of political villainisation deepens divides, making it harder to find common ground. If we continue to let partisanship shape not just how we vote but how we see each other, we risk turning those who don’t share our political views into our enemies.
Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte has received funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust
Thousands of tonnes of plastic pollution could be escaping into the environment every year … from our mouths. Most chewing gum on sale is made from a variety of oil-based synthetic rubbers – similar to the plastic material used in car tyres.
If you find that thought slightly unsettling, you are not alone. I have been researching and speaking about the plastic pollution problem for 15 years. The people I talk to are always surprised, and disgusted, when they find out they’ve been chewing on a lump of malleable plastic. Most manufacturers just don’t advertise what gum is actually made of – they dodge around the detail by listing “gum base” in the ingredients.
There’s no strict definition of synthetic gum base. Chewing gum brand, Wrigley Extra partners with dental professionals around the world to promote the use of sugar-free chewing gum to improve oral health.
The brand’s Wrigley Oral Health Program states that: “Gum base puts the “chew” in chewing gum, binding all the ingredients together for a smooth, soft texture. We use synthetic gum base materials for a consistent and safe base that provides longer-lasting flavour, improved texture, and reduced tackiness.“
It almost sounds harmless. But chemical analysis shows that gum contains styrene-butadiene (the durable synthetic chemical used to make car tyres), polyethylene (the plastic used to make carrier bags and bottles) and polyvinyl acetate (woodglue) as well as some sweetener and flavouring.
The chewing gum industry is big business, worth an estimated US$48.68 billion (£37.7 billion) in 2025. Three companies own 75% of the market share, the largest of which is Wrigley, with an estimated 35%. There are few reliable statistics available about the amount of gum being produced, but one peer-reviewed global estimate states 1.74 trillion pieces are made per year.
I examined several types of gum and found that the most common weight of an individual piece of gum is 1.4g – that means that globally, a staggering 2.436 million tonnes of gum are produced each year. About a third (30%) of that weight, or just over 730,000 tonnes, is synthetic gum base.
If the idea of chewing plastic isn’t disturbing enough, consider what happens after you spit it out. Most people have experienced discarded gum under bench seats, school desks and on street pavements. But, like other plastics, synthetic chewing gum does not biodegrade and can persist in the environment for many years.
In the environment it will harden, crack and breakdown into microplastics but this can take decades. Cleaning it up is not cheap because it is labour intensive. The average cost is £1.50 per square metre and estimates suggest that the annual clean-up cost for chewing gum pollution for councils in the UK is around £7 million.
There have been some efforts to address the problem. In many public locations around the UK, gum collection pots supplied by Dutch company Gumdrop Ltd have been installed to collect and recycle used gum. Signage provided by councils encouraging responsible disposal is also now a regular feature in some UK high streets, and there is a growing number of small producers offering plant-based alternatives.
In the UK, the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy launched the chewing gum task force in 2021. This collaboration involves three major manufacturers who have committed to investing up to £10 million in order to clean up “historic gum staining and changing behaviour so that more people bin their gum”.
The first objective implies that cleaning up gum is a solution to this form of plastic pollution; it isn’t. Manufacturers making a financial contribution to clean-up efforts is like plastic manufacturers paying for litter pickers and bin bags at volunteer beach cleans. Neither addresses the root cause of the problem.
Binning gum is not the solution either. Addressing gum as a plastic pollutant dictates that the prevention of gum pollution should include the well-known tenets, like all plastic pollution, of reduce, reuse, recycle and redesign. It is not only a disposal issue.
Another issue that I have uncovered is definition. In the two annual reports published by the gum litter task force since its inception, there is no mention of the word pollution. The distinction between litter and pollution is important. By calling it chewing gum pollution, the narrative changes from an individual negligence issue to a corporate one. That places an onus for accountability onto the producers rather than the consumers.
Single-use solutions
Like single-use plastic items, chewing gum pollution needs to be tackled from all angles – education, reduction, alternatives, innovation, producer responsibility, and legislation.
Educating people about the contents of gum and the environmental consequences those ingredients have will reduce consumption and encourage better disposal habits. More transparent labelling on packaging would empower shoppers to make informed choices. Stricter regulations can hold manufacturers to account – a levy tax on synthetic gum can help pay for clean ups. In turn, this would incentivise more investment in plant-based gums and other sustainable alternatives.
We can all reduce the environmental consequences of this plastic pollution by kicking the gum habit, calling on councils to enforce stricter pollution penalties and encouraging governments to put a tax levy on manufacturers to fund clean ups and force them to list the contents of gum base.
Throwing away any non-disposable, inorganic products is unsustainable. Chewing gum pollution is just another form of plastic pollution. It’s time we start treating it as such.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
A fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia has killed at least 59 people and injured more than 150. The blaze broke out at the Pulse nightclub in Kočani, where around 500 people were attending a concert.
Witnesses reported that pyrotechnics used during the performance ignited the ceiling, causing flames to spread rapidly.
Authorities have arrested 20 people so far, including the club’s manager. Investigations continue. The North Macedonian government has declared a seven-day mourning period.
While building fires are not limited to nightclubs, many of the most devastating building fires in history have happened in nightclubs around the world. So why are nightclubs such a risky place for deadly fires?
A long history of nightclub fires
A look at past nightclub fires shows just how common and deadly they’ve been in the past 100 years. We identified at least 24 nightclub fires where ten or more people died since 1940.
Collectively, these 24 incidents account for at least 2,800 deaths, with nearly 1,300 in the 21st century alone.
Now, North Macedonia’s Pulse nightclub joins this long list.
Why are nightclubs so risky for fires?
A review of past nightclub fires we’ve collated in our database reveals common patterns. Two key factors have contributed to the frequency and severity of these fire disasters.
1. Pyrotechnics, fireworks and flammable materials
One of the most common causes of nightclub fires has been the use of pyrotechnics in enclosed spaces. Pyrotechnics are controlled chemical reactions designed to produce flames, smoke, or light effects.
They have been involved in at least six of the deadliest nightclub fires, including the recent Pulse nightclub fire in North Macedonia, as well as The Station (United States, 2003), Kiss (Brazil, 2013), Colectiv (Romania, 2015), Lame Horse (Russia, 2009) and República Cromañón (Argentina, 2004).
In some cases, fireworks – which are different from stage pyrotechnics and sometimes illegally used indoors – have played a role. The Lame Horse nightclub fire, which killed 156 people in Russia in 2009, was caused by a spark from fireworks igniting a low ceiling covered in flammable plastic decorations.
Foam insulation, wooden panelling, plastic decorations and carpeted walls have all been key factors in past nightclub fires. In Cocoanut Grove (Boston, 1942), artificial palm trees and other flammable decorations accelerated the blaze.
2. Overcrowding and blocked or insufficient exits
Evacuation failures have been a factor in nearly every major nightclub fire.
In some instances, crowds may not immediately recognise the severity of the situation, especially if they mistake alarms for false alarms or special effects (for example, smoke machines, loud music).
Further, patrons could be intoxicated due alcohol or other drugs. Intoxication combined with potential disorientation due to dim lighting can further reduce judgement during an evacuation.
Clearly, the best way to protect patrons is to prevent a fire from breaking out in the first place. But in settings where fire risks are inherently high, the ability to evacuate people swiftly is crucial.
Nightclubs are among the most crowded indoor spaces. While crowd density is part of a nightclub’s design and atmosphere, overcrowding beyond legal capacity is common.
A crowd that has gradually gathered over several hours must suddenly evacuate in seconds or minutes to survive a fire. This is made more difficult by narrow hallways and limited exits, which quickly become bottlenecks when hundreds of people attempt to escape at once.
What’s more, not all exits are always accessible during a fire. In several past nightclub disasters, locked or obstructed emergency exits have significantly worsened the death toll.
Minimising the risks
Nightclubs are uniquely vulnerable to fires due to a combination of structural risks, unsafe materials, overcrowding and regulatory failures.
While human behaviour plays a role in how fires unfold in confined spaces such as nightclubs, people should be able to go for a night out and expect to come home safely.
Regulatory oversight must ensure strict compliance with fire codes. Venues should have fire suppression systems (such as sprinklers, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors) to control or contain fires before they spread, and adequate exits.
Nightclubs should ban indoor pyrotechnics and fireworks, as history has repeatedly shown their deadly consequences.
Capacity limits must be enforced, and emergency exits should always be accessible.
Public awareness is also key. Patrons need to understand the real risk of fires in nightclubs, and be prepared to evacuate swiftly but calmly if danger arises.
Ruggiero Lovreglio receives funding from Royal Society Te Apārangi (NZ) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA).
Milad Haghani 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 Fijian academic believes Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s failed attempt to garner enough parliamentary support to change the country’s 2013 Constitution “is only the beginning”.
Last week, Rabuka fell short in his efforts to secure the support of three-quarters of the members of Parliament to amend sections 159 and 160 of the constitution.
The prime minister’s proposed amendments also sought to remove the need for a national referendum altogether. While the bill passed its first reading with support from several opposition MPs, it failed narrowly at the second reading.
Jope Tarai, an indigenous Fijian PhD scholar and researcher at the Australian National University, told RNZ Pacific Waves that “it is quite obvious that it is not going to be the end” of Rabuka’s plans to amend the constitution.
However, he said that it was “something that might take a while” with less than a year before the 2026 elections.
“So, the repositioning towards the people’s priorities will be more important than constitutional review,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A second man has died from Japanese encephalitis virus in New South Wales on March 6, the state’s health authorities confirmed on Friday. Aged in his 70s, the man was infected while holidaying in the Murrumbidgee region.
This follows the death of another man in his 70s in Sydney last month, after holidaying in the same region in January.
Japanese encephalitis is one of the most serious diseases that spreads via mosquitoes, with around 68,000 cases annually across Southeast Asia and Western Pacific regions.
The virus is thought to be maintained in a cycle between mosquitoes and waterbirds. Mosquitoes are infected when they feed from an infected waterbird. They then pass the virus to other waterbirds. Sometimes other animals, and people, can be infected.
Pigs are also a host, and the virus has spread through commercial piggeries in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. (But it poses no food safety risk.)
People with mild cases may have a fever, headache and vomiting.
In more serious cases – about one in 250 people infected – people may have neck stiffness, disorientation, drowsiness and seizures. Serious illness can have life-long neurological complications and, in some cases, the infection can be life-threatening.
There had been no evidence of activity on the mainland since 2004 but everything changed in the summer of 2021–22. Japanese encephalitis virus was detected in commercial piggeries in southeastern Australia during that summer.
This prompted the declaration of a Communicable Disease Incident of National Significance. At the time, flooding accompanying the La Niña-dominated weather patterns and a resulting boom in mosquito numbers, and waterbird populations, was thought responsible.
The virus has spread in subsequent years and has been detected in the mosquito and arbovirus surveillance programs as well as detection in feral pigs and commercial piggeries in most states and territories. Only Tasmania has remained free of Japanese encephalitis virus.
Human cases of infection have also been reported. There were more than 50 cases of disease and seven deaths in 2022.
Due to concern about Japanese encephalitis virus and other mosquito-borne pathogens, health authorities around Australia have expanded and enhanced their surveillance programs.
In Queensland, this includes mosquito monitoring at a number of locations, including urban areas of southeast Queensland. Mosquitoes collected in this monitoring program tested positive for Japanese encephalitis virus, promoting the current health warnings.
Why is its detection in Brisbane important?
Up to now, scientists have thought the risk of Japanese encephalitis was likely greatest following seasons of above-average rainfall or flooding. This provides ideal conditions for waterbirds and mosquitoes.
But the activity of Japanese encephalitis virus over the summer of 2024–25 has taken many scientists by surprise. Before Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred arrived, there had been somewhat dry conditions with less waterbird activity and low mosquito numbers in many regions of eastern Australia.
However there has still been widespread Japanese encephalitis virus activity in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.
To date, Japanese encephalitis virus activity hasn’t extended to the coastal regions of southeast Queensland. The detection of the virus in suburban Brisbane may require authorities to rethink exactly where the virus may turn up next. Authorities are ramping up their surveillance to see just how widespread the virus is in the region.
Health authorities and scientists are also trying to understand how the virus moved from western areas of the state to the coast and what drives virus transmission in different regions.
There is currently no evidence the virus is active in coastal regions of northern NSW.
Mosquitoes collected in Brisbane have tested positive for Japanese encephalitis virus. A/Prof Cameron Webb (NSW Health Pathology)
What can people do to protect themselves?
Avoiding mosquito bites is the best way to reduce the risk of Japanese encephalitis virus.
Cover up with long-sleeved shirts and long pants for a physical barrier against mosquito bites.
Use topical insect repellents containing DEET, picaridin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus. Be sure to apply an even coat on all exposed areas of skin for the longest-lasting protection.
Ensure any insect screens on houses, tents and caravans are in good repair and reduce the amount of standing water in the backyard. The more water there is around your home, the more opportunities for mosquitoes there are.
It may take many weeks following vaccination to achieve sufficient protection, so prioritise reducing your exposure to bites in the meantime.
Cameron Webb and the Department of Medical Entomology, NSW Health Pathology and University of Sydney, have been engaged by a wide range of insect repellent and insecticide manufacturers to provide testing of products and provide expert advice on medically important arthropods, including mosquitoes. Cameron has also received funding from local, state and federal agencies to undertake research into various aspects of management of various medically important arthropods.
Andrew van den Hurk has received funding from local, state and federal agencies to study the ecology of mosquito-borne pathogens, and their surveillance and control. He is an employee of the Department of Health, Queensland government.
Australian workers have to overcome some significant barriers in navigating their careers.
Some may lack the training or work experience opportunities needed to make themselves stand out and take the next step. Others may be extensively qualified, but face limited new job or promotional opportunities relevant to their skill set.
But there’s another common barrier that’s often overlooked: post-employment restraints. Among the most well-known are non-compete clauses, but these aren’t the only kind.
These tools are designed to protect employer interests. But their widespread use has far-reaching consequences for job mobility, wages and innovation across Australia.
Our new research, which was commissioned by the Department of Treasury and conducted by researchers at Queensland University of Technology, set out to examine how these agreements are impacting Australia’s workforce.
We zeroed in on two very different occupational groups – hairdressers and IT professionals. Our findings point to an urgent need for regulatory reform in Australia. But we also offer solutions that could better balance business needs with worker rights.
What are post-employment restraints?
Post-employment restraints are contractual clauses that restrict what workers can do after leaving their jobs.
One common type are non-compete clauses, which prevent workers from joining competitors or starting their own businesses, usually (though not always) in the same industry.
Signing a non-compete agreement often prevents you from working for a competing business. G.Tbov/Shutterstock
There are also non-solicitation agreements, which restrict them from approaching former clients or colleagues.
And non-disclosure obligations can limit the use of confidential information concerning the employer’s business – even when created by workers themselves.
Businesses argue these clauses help them safeguard their proprietary interests, such as hard-won client relationships, trade secrets and intellectual property.
However, their application is not limited to high-level executives or sensitive roles. Such restraints are more common than many realise.
Data cited in our report from businesses with 200 employees or less confirms previous Australian research: at least one in five businesses use non-compete, non-solicitation of clients and non-solicitation of co-workers clauses. The number is even higher if non-disclosure agreements are included in the list of restraints.
Overall, half of all Australian workers are reported to have post-employment restraints – including many in low-paid jobs.
As former Fair Work Commission President Iain Ross has pointed out, this raises critical questions about fairness and the broader impacts on the labour market.
A tangle of restrictions in hairdressing
Hairdressing is a predominantly female, low-wage profession. Our interviews with hairdressers reveal the outsized impact that post-employment restraints can have on vulnerable workers.
Restrictions typically include bans on working within a certain radius of their former salon, taking clients to a new employer, or starting their own business.
Many interviewees only learned about these restrictions after accepting a position or deciding to leave. Some reported being barred from telling clients of their departure or facing demands to pay penalties if clients followed them to a new salon.
The personal relationships hairdressers form with their clients are central to their work and professional identity. However, these relationships often become battlegrounds when employment ends.
Hairdressers explained the difficulties that often arose from becoming “friends” with clients. As one put it:
As soon as you leave, it’s almost harder than a breakup.
Financially, these restrictions exacerbate the already precarious conditions in the hairdressing industry.
With limited opportunities for wage growth, many hairdressers establish their own businesses or rent chairs in salons for greater independence.
Yet, non-compete clauses often delay these plans. Hairdressers are then forced to accept lower-paying positions or leave the profession entirely.
Social media has added a whole new layer of complexity. Hairdressers are often required to use their personal social media accounts to promote their employer’s business, only to have their posts deleted or accounts locked when they leave. This can erase years of professional work and connections.
Many young hairdressers we spoke to expressed particular frustration that their social media presence, cultivated under the salon’s brand, could not be carried forward to new roles.
Holding back innovation
Our study found while hairdressers face restrictions on their mobility and client relationships, IT professionals face obstacles that limit their ability to innovate.
IT professionals often develop new technologies, software or processes, sometimes in their own time. However, contracts often claim ownership of these innovations for the employer.
We found non-disclosure agreements, non-compete clauses and intellectual property ownership terms are all common in the industry.
This environment discourages entrepreneurial ventures and independent projects, even as the industry demands agility and creativity.
As one participant explained:
It’s made me pause multiple times, made me think about not developing a code that you’re interested in just for your own development.
Professionals reported feeling “locked in” to roles, unable to pursue side projects or start their own businesses without risking legal action.
Non-compete clauses in IT contracts also restrict job mobility when professionals cannot join competitor companies or use their expertise in new roles.
This impacts not only individual workers but also the broader industry, as firms struggle to recruit skilled talent.
Paradoxically, some employers actively poach talent from competitors while enforcing non-compete clauses against their own staff.
Intellectual property restrictions can discourage IT professionals from working on their own innovative projects. Jacob Lund/Shutterstock
The way forward
By limiting job mobility, post-employment restraints contribute to wage stagnation and reduce workers’ bargaining power.
Australia’s regulatory approach to this issue lags behind other countries. There are no formal limits on the length or breadth of restraints, just a vague test of “reasonableness” that makes it hard to know what is permissible, without costly litigation.
In the United States, California has banned non-compete clauses outright, fostering a thriving tech industry. In Europe, companies like Germany impose strict limits on the duration of restraints and require employers to compensate workers during the restricted period.
These models demonstrate that balancing employer interests with worker rights is possible and can yield positive outcomes.
One option for policymakers in Australia would be to impose new restrictions on the scope and duration of restraints to ensure they serve legitimate business interests without unduly restricting workers.
Employers could be required to provide plain-language explanations around these restrictions at the time of hiring and compensate workers for the duration of any restraint, as seen in some European models.
Post-employment restraints are a double-edged sword. While they may protect legitimate business interests, their overuse undermines job mobility, innovation and worker wellbeing.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has announced a Coalition government would introduce legislation, based on an American law used to pursue the Mafia, to enable police to target the “kingpins” of criminal organisations such as outlaw motorcycle gangs.
This follows new allegations by Nine newspapers and 60 Minutes about the rogue union the CFMEU. The allegations include “the employment of ‘baseball-twirling violent people’ on the [Victorian government’s] Big Build, where women have been bashed and then black-banned after they complained”.
The Nine investigation further alleged that “gangland and bikie-linked figures are receiving large payments from companies on publicly funded projects looking to gain favour with union insiders, leaving state and federal taxpayers in effect underwriting payments to the underworld.”
The Coalition said Monday the proposed new offences would “be based on the highly effective Mafia takedown laws in the US”. Dutton and shadow ministers Michaelia Cash and James Paterson said in a statement:
By targeting groups that engage in a pattern of criminal behaviour, these offences will put police in the position where they can target the criminal organisation and its leadership.
This means the bosses and kingpins of groups such as outlaw motorcycle gangs can be jailed even if they distance themselves from the crimes their organisations commit.
Dutton described the CFMEU as “a modern-day mafia operation”. He added:
The culture of criminality and corruption is so entrenched, and it will never change – especially under the weak and incompetent Albanese Labor government.
Dutton claimed the CFMEU affair was the “biggest corruption scandal in our country’s history”.
The opposition said it would also set up an Australian Federal Police-led taskforce that would bring together federal law enforcement agencies and state and territory police forces to target criminal behaviour.
After the latest revelation surfaced in Nine media at the weekend, Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt said on social media he would refer the allegations to the police.
On Monday, Watt condemned Dutton’s proposal for a new law.
We don’t need to import an American racketeering law – we already have our own laws to go after ‘kingpins’, such as section 390.6 of the Criminal Code, which already deals with directing criminal organisation.
He also condemned the opposition’s long-standing policy to deregister the union, saying this would mean there was no regulation.
Peter Dutton’s reckless desire for a headline puts at risk the investigations and crime-fighting that the Coalition never bothered to commence in their decade in office.
Victoria police is undertaking an investigation into the fresh allegations.
The US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act, dating from 1970, enables prosecutors to take down whole mob-related organisations rather than having only the power to deal with figures individually. It is intended to deal with mob bosses who could not be directly connected to the crimes.
Its use, however, has extended well beyond mob prosecutions to a range of targets, from street gangs to politicians.
US President Donald Trump was charged under Georgia’s RICO act for “knowingly and willfully joining a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the [2020] election”.
The construction and general division of the CFMEU has been in administration since last August.
The union’s national secretary, Zach Smith, said on Facebook: “We cannot let our union or our industry be a safe haven for criminality of corruption”.
He also said that “violence against women is completely unacceptable to our union”.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor & Principal Fellow in Urban Risk & Resilience, The University of Melbourne
A fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia has killed at least 59 people and injured more than 150. The blaze broke out at the Pulse nightclub in Kočani, where around 500 people were attending a concert.
Witnesses reported that pyrotechnics used during the performance ignited the ceiling, causing flames to spread rapidly.
Authorities have arrested 20 people so far, including the club’s manager. Investigations continue. The North Macedonian government has declared a seven-day mourning period.
While building fires are not limited to nightclubs, many of the most devastating building fires in history have happened in nightclubs around the world. So why are nightclubs such a risky place for deadly fires?
A long history of nightclub fires
A look at past nightclub fires shows just how common and deadly they’ve been in the past 100 years. We identified at least 24 nightclub fires where ten or more people died since 1940.
Collectively, these 24 incidents account for at least 2,800 deaths, with nearly 1,300 in the 21st century alone.
Now, North Macedonia’s Pulse nightclub joins this long list.
Why are nightclubs so risky for fires?
A review of past nightclub fires we’ve collated in our database reveals common patterns. Two key factors have contributed to the frequency and severity of these fire disasters.
1. Pyrotechnics, fireworks and flammable materials
One of the most common causes of nightclub fires has been the use of pyrotechnics in enclosed spaces. Pyrotechnics are controlled chemical reactions designed to produce flames, smoke, or light effects.
They have been involved in at least six of the deadliest nightclub fires, including the recent Pulse nightclub fire in North Macedonia, as well as The Station (United States, 2003), Kiss (Brazil, 2013), Colectiv (Romania, 2015), Lame Horse (Russia, 2009) and República Cromañón (Argentina, 2004).
In some cases, fireworks – which are different from stage pyrotechnics and sometimes illegally used indoors – have played a role. The Lame Horse nightclub fire, which killed 156 people in Russia in 2009, was caused by a spark from fireworks igniting a low ceiling covered in flammable plastic decorations.
Foam insulation, wooden panelling, plastic decorations and carpeted walls have all been key factors in past nightclub fires. In Cocoanut Grove (Boston, 1942), artificial palm trees and other flammable decorations accelerated the blaze.
2. Overcrowding and blocked or insufficient exits
Evacuation failures have been a factor in nearly every major nightclub fire.
In some instances, crowds may not immediately recognise the severity of the situation, especially if they mistake alarms for false alarms or special effects (for example, smoke machines, loud music).
Further, patrons could be intoxicated due alcohol or other drugs. Intoxication combined with potential disorientation due to dim lighting can further reduce judgement during an evacuation.
Clearly, the best way to protect patrons is to prevent a fire from breaking out in the first place. But in settings where fire risks are inherently high, the ability to evacuate people swiftly is crucial.
Nightclubs are among the most crowded indoor spaces. While crowd density is part of a nightclub’s design and atmosphere, overcrowding beyond legal capacity is common.
A crowd that has gradually gathered over several hours must suddenly evacuate in seconds or minutes to survive a fire. This is made more difficult by narrow hallways and limited exits, which quickly become bottlenecks when hundreds of people attempt to escape at once.
What’s more, not all exits are always accessible during a fire. In several past nightclub disasters, locked or obstructed emergency exits have significantly worsened the death toll.
Minimising the risks
Nightclubs are uniquely vulnerable to fires due to a combination of structural risks, unsafe materials, overcrowding and regulatory failures.
While human behaviour plays a role in how fires unfold in confined spaces such as nightclubs, people should be able to go for a night out and expect to come home safely.
Regulatory oversight must ensure strict compliance with fire codes. Venues should have fire suppression systems (such as sprinklers, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors) to control or contain fires before they spread, and adequate exits.
Nightclubs should ban indoor pyrotechnics and fireworks, as history has repeatedly shown their deadly consequences.
Capacity limits must be enforced, and emergency exits should always be accessible.
Public awareness is also key. Patrons need to understand the real risk of fires in nightclubs, and be prepared to evacuate swiftly but calmly if danger arises.
Ruggiero Lovreglio receives funding from Royal Society Te Apārangi (NZ) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA).
Milad Haghani 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.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, JOAN. Landscape still.Courtesy of the artist.
Virtuosic digital artistry is on show in Serwah Attafuah’s installation The Darkness Between the Stars, currently showing at ACMI.
The work fiercely challenges stereotypes of black femininity and draws upon the history and culture of the Ashanti people of modern-day Ghana, one of the countries most affected by the Atlantic slave trade and the site of remembrance and pilgrimage for many descendants of the people trafficked as slaves.
Serewah is part of a generation of video artists like Melbourne’s Xanthe Dobbie, British artist Rachel Maclean, and Paris based, French Guianese artist Tabita Rezaire. These artists all channel the moving image culture of gaming and the internet, rather than the cinematic or televisual references of their forebears.
Each of these artists uses exuberant humour and a tough-minded politic to challenge the reductive construction of female and queer identities.
As we pass through the arch at the entry to the gallery, we are greeted by a 3D animation of an ocean reflecting a sky that cycles from starlit to slowly emerging dawn. We are told the arch references the entry to the Elmina castle built by the Portuguese: one of two major points from which enslaved African people were cast into the hell of the Atlantic passage and life in bonds.
African warriors
Beyond the entrance we are faced by a series of five screens in portrait format. Each shows short loops of African warriors, suggesting the idealised – and, here, heroic – forms of game avatars a la Fortnite.
Each of the images is framed in gold e-waste. This brings to mind Congolese street art costumes, similarly made of waste which blend cultural traditions and an Afrofuturist resistance that dares to imagine a better future.
The first portrait is a furred, horn helmeted, and neck ringed warrior woman. Armed with a laser and an automatic pistol, she has further weapons adorning her back ready to be deployed.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, ANANSI, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist
Behind and around her are malfunctioning computer screens. One scrolls through an online dating text exchange which evokes the idealised and reductive self-curation of the online profile. This chat is between Jenny and Mark, a FIFO worker on an offshore oil rig in Western Australia. This ties to the images of oil rigs found elsewhere in the show, evoking the plundering of African resources: human and otherwise; historical and ongoing.
The second screen pictures an armoured woman (or cyborg?) atop a rearing tiger. The tiger is an intriguing choice given it is an Asian animal but potentially points to a pan exoticism rooted in the confusion of cultures.
She wields a curved blade amid a savannah populated with umbrella thorn acacia and what appear to be comfortingly homely (and amusing) ground-hugging waratahs in the foreground.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, JOAN, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist.
Complicating fetishes
Moving around the room, floating robots accompany another warrior who props against a sword supported by a fragmented classical column.
She stands beneath an oversized moon, evoking an off-world setting, a reading compounded by her protective headwear.
Alongside a writhing snake, we catch sight of her Betty Davis (no, the Black one) super heels: a clear link to the under-remembered pioneer of Afrofuturism.
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, KING, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist.
Continuing this play of sexual provocation and power is the addition of a techno tutu which further accentuates her already thrusting buttocks.
The problematisation of sexualised imagery is one of the exhibition’s central themes. Attafuah toys with the Western fetishisation and fear of Black women’s sexuality.
Occasionally borrowing cliches from the gaming and pornographic worlds, Attafuah forcefully complicates such fetishes by arming four of her five warriors to the teeth. They take aim at us, challenging their construction as passive objects for our visual consumption.
A further figure, singularly unarmed apart from her thorny armbands, appears in the next frame. She runs through a series of coquettish modelling poses in her mesh bodysuit as she stands amid buzzing screens and computer detritus.
In yet another confusingly (and amusingly) stereotyped African landscape she is pictured among palm trees and sand, in what I took to be an evocation of a North African environment complete with desert fortress, oil rig and passing container ship.
In the final of the five portraits a young, braided, and fantastically eyelashed woman takes aim at us with a pistol straight from Star Wars (Rebel Alliance issue, naturally).
Serwah Attafuah, The Darkness Between The Stars, VENUS, 2025. Still courtesy of the artist.
She stands hip deep in a lagoon of water lilies and floating CDs. A futuristic city fills the background with a slowly turning wind turbine that sports yellow and black radiation colouring – yet another paradoxical meeting in an exhibition characterised by mixed messages that contradict easy readings.
In The Darkness Between the Stars, Attafuah proves herself to be a powerful, uncompromising and most welcome voice in contemporary Australian art. She proves herself capable of generating sophisticated, nuanced and playful reflections on complex problems that we carry from past to present.
Serwah Attafuah: The Darkness Between the Stars is at ACMI, Melbourne, until June 1.
Dominic Redfern works at RMIT with, and previously taught, Xanthe Dobbie.
The US government has sent a 36-point questionnaire to some Australian researchers who are working on joint projects with US colleagues.
ABC Radio National reports at least eight Australian universities are involved. Their research areas include foreign aid, medicine, vaccines and defence. The New York Times reports a similar document has also been sent to other overseas organisations with US funding links.
The questions are wide-ranging and cover academics’ links to China as well as their projects’ focus on topics such as diversity, inclusion and gender identity, as well as climate change.
Some of the specific questions include:
Can you confirm that your organisation has not received ANY funding from PRC People’s Republic of China, Russia, Cuba or Iran?
Can you confirm that this is no DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] project or DEI elements of the project? [sic]
Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below Executive Order?
Can you confirm this is not a climate or “environmental justice” project or include such elements?
The survey also covers issues such as secure borders with Mexico, ending government waste, terrorism, the war on opioids, and “eradicating anti-Christian bias”.
Concern and anger
In response, the Group of Eight (which represents Australia’s top research universities) and Australian Academy of Science have separately raised concerns with the Australian government about the survey and its impact on Australian research.
The Group of Eight says the US has already suspended or terminated research grants with six of its eight member universities.
The National Tertiary Education Union also labelled the survey “blatant foreign interference”.
A spokesperson for Education Minister Jason Clare says Australia is
“engaging with the US government to understand what these measures mean for future funding and collaboration”.
Are Trump’s orders legal?
Trump’s executive orders are currently the subject of numerous lawsuits in the US. Plaintiffs say Trump’s orders violate the First and Fifth Amendments – those dealing with protection of free speech, equal protection and “due process of law” when depriving a citizen of property.
Whether Trump’s orders are legal or not is a tricky question, and will likely come down the judges hearing each case.
US involvement in Australian research is significant. According to the Academy of Science, US government research funding involving Australian research organisations was $A386 million in 2024.
It is arguable Trump’s orders infringe Australian sovereignty. But the US has always had the capacity to interfere in Australian university research – it just hasn’t actually done it until now.
Research contracts signed between universities and funding bodies can contain all kinds of requirements, so US law can end up applying to Australian researchers. When the AUKUS deal was announced in 2021, a huge question was how universities would comply with notoriously harsh US export control laws.
The survey indicates it was issued by the US Office of Management and Budget and appears to be supported by the US CHIPS and Science Act (which authorises certain research investments) and National Science Foundation policies. So, while Australian researchers could potentially ignore these questionnaires, that would legally give a US funding body grounds to cancel the funding contract.
Our foreign interference laws also weren’t designed for situations like this. Even if they did, Trump is the current head of the US government, and is likely to be immune from prosecution
Statutory tests for foreign interference – including criteria that such acts are covert, and/or involve threats of harm – simply don’t apply to a US president like Trump.
So legally, it doesn’t look like there is much Australia can do about Trump’s orders.
What can Australia do?
Some newly unemployed researchers are now poised to leave the US, taking their research with them. This poses a potential security risk, with countries such as China and Russia both keen to capitalise on Trump’s decisions.
But other nations are also aware of the possibilities. The European Union has already offered displaced US scientists a more “sympathetic place to work”. South Korea and Canada are also marketing themselves as attractive options. Australia could follow suit.
The federal government is currently doing a strategic review of Australia’s research and development system. This could make diversifying our research partners a national priority.
Either way, given such radical changes in the US, Australia needs to seriously reconsider how it is funding and structuring research.
Brendan Walker-Munro has consulted for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, and is also an Adjunct Expert Associate of the National Security College. He has received funding from the Social Cyber Institute and Active Cyber Defence Alliance.
It took thousands of years to develop the world’s extraordinary range of domesticated farm animals – an estimated 8,800 livestock breeds across 38 farmed species.
But this diversity is dwindling fast. Advances in selective breeding and artificial insemination have fuelled the global spread of a small number of profitable livestock types. Their popularity has left ever more heritage breeds at risk of extinction.
Why does this matter? Each breed represents vital genetic diversity for the livestock species on which we rely, known as agrobiodiversity. As the number of breeds shrink, we lose their genetics forever.
There are bright spots amid the decline. Hundreds of passionate farmers are working hard to keep heritage breeds alive around Australia. As my new book shows, they do it primarily for love.
Which livestock breeds are disappearing – and why?
Cattle have experienced the highest number of extinctions, with at least 184 breeds lost globally.
Of all chicken breeds, one in ten is now extinct, and a further 30% are endangered.
The fleece of Elliotdale sheep has been used to make woollen carpets. Sue Curliss, CC BY-NC-ND
Pigs fare little better. Australia’s 2.5 million pigs are predominantly Large White, Landrace and Duroc crossbreeds, while none of the eight remaining purebred pig breeds in Australia currently has more than 100 sows registered with the Rare Breeds Trust. While not all sows are registered, we know breeds such as Tamworths are at dangerously low numbers.
How did this happen? Over the past century, the goal of animal husbandry has shifted from breeding hardy, multipurpose animals to increasing performance for economic gain. For livestock, performance means more of what humans value, such as pigs with extra ribs, prolific egg-laying hens and sheep with finer wool.
Huge sums have been spent on selective breeding and artificial insemination technologies. This, in turn, has made it possible for a small number of profitable livestock types to be farmed globally.
For instance, when you buy a roast chicken, it will likely be one of just two types of fast-growing broilers (meat chickens), the Ross or the Cobb. Their genetics are developed and trademarked by two multinational agribusinesses who dominate the global broiler market.
Chicken breed numbers have shrunk too, risking rare breeds such as Transylvanian naked neck cockerel bantams. Scott Carter, CC BY-NC-ND
It’s hard to overstate how big the increases in production have been from reproductive technologies. In the dairy industry, for instance, milk yield per cow has doubled in the past 40 years. These volumes are around six times greater now than a century ago.
Holsteins, the top dairy breed, have become globally dominant. Almost 1.4 million of Australia’s 1.65 million dairy cows are Holsteins. But as Holstein numbers soar, other breeds dwindle. Many farmers have simply stopped rearing other breeds, leading to many becoming endangered or extinct.
For Holsteins themselves, this has come with a cost. Selective breeding for high milk volume has meant Holsteins suffer more medical issues such as metabolic diseases and frequent mastitis. They also have reduced fertility and longevity.
Researchers have found 99% of Holstein bulls produced by artificial insemination in the United States are descended from just two sires. This wide dissemination of limited bloodlines has led to the spread of genetic defects.
Our food systems face growing threats. Genetic diversity provides a safeguard for livestock species against lethal animal diseases such as H5N1 bird flu and African swine fever.
If we rely on just a few breeds, we risk a wipe out. The Irish potato famine is a catastrophic example. In the 1800s, Irish farmers took up the “lumper” variety of potatoes to feed a growing population. But when fungal rot struck in the 1840s, it turned most of the crop to mush – and led to mass starvation.
Some breeds have very useful traits, such as resistance to particular pests and diseases.
Chickens and other birds die in swathes if infected by Newcastle disease, one of the most serious bird viruses. But breeds such as the hardy Egyptian Fayoumi survive better, while the European Leghorn – whose genetics are used in commercial egg-laying breeds – is highly susceptible.
Local breeds can also have better resistance to endemic pests. The Indian zebu humped cattle breed, for example, is less prone to tick infestation than crossbreeds.
Climate change is also making life harder for livestock, and some breeds are better adapted to heat than others.
For different cultural groups, local heritage breeds also have unique symbolic and culinary value.
While it’s well-known eating less meat would benefit ecosystems, animal welfare and human health, eating meat remains entrenched in our diets and the economy. Pursuing more sustainable and higher-welfare approaches to livestock production is crucial.
Some Aussie farmers love heritage breeds
A cohort of Australian farmers is working hard to conserve dozens of endangered livestock breeds such as Large Black pigs, Shropshire sheep and Belted Galloway cattle.
A rare Belted Galloway cow with a one week old calf. Scott Carter, CC BY-NC-ND
But these farmers are hampered by our reluctance as consumers to pay more to cover the cost of raising slower-growing breeds in free-range environments. Not only that, but meat processors are increasingly closing their doors to small-scale producers.
Why persevere? For four years, I’ve conducted ethnographic research with Australia’s heritage breed farmers. I found they were motivated by one of the most powerful conservation tools we have: love.
Of his endangered English Leicester sheep, one farmer told me:
I consider them to be family; they have been our family for over 150 years. I talk to them, and the rams in particular talk to me. Sorry if I sound like a silly old man, but you must talk to them. I gave myself a 60th birthday present by commissioning a large portrait of an English Leicester head, which hangs in our kitchen (I do not have a painting of my wife).
Love doesn’t often feature in agricultural research. But it is an important force. We know from wildlife conservation that humans will act to save what they love. This holds for livestock, too.
Catie Gressier receives funding from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project scheme as well as the European Research Council. She is affiliated with the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance.
Some have said Christopher Luxon’s pledge to get a free trade deal between New Zealand and India over the line in his first term as prime minister was overly optimistic. But not all trade deals are the same, and Luxon may yet get to claim bragging rights.
Already he is managing expectations, saying a “good” deal will be better than waiting a long time for a “perfect” one. And with formal negotiations confirmed not long after Luxon touched down in New Delhi, we can perhaps expect genuine movement.
At the same time, India’s negotiating style is notoriously rigid, with its bilateral investment treaty model having proved a stumbling block to deals with many other nations or blocs, including the United Kingdom and European Union.
New Zealand first held formal negotiations with India over a decade ago. But talks derailed in 2015 over the inclusion of dairy products in any agreement. We can be fairly sure this will be the compromise Luxon’s government is ready to make now.
Beyond the economic implications, of course, lie domestic political calculations. Luxon needs a win to counter flatlining poll numbers and speculation about his leadership future. Good news in India offers just that.
Playing the Indo-Pacific card
Using diplomatic language that plays up New Zealand being part of the Indo-Pacific region – rather than the traditional Western alliance – will be essential.
New Zealand – despite its relatively small size – is still a significant regional player, with the Indo-Pacific’s fourth highest GDP per capita.
In the context of an imminent “Asian Century”, and the region becoming a crucial zone for economic and military power, New Zealand also provides a strategic pathway into the Pacific, where India is becoming increasingly involved.
All of this will influence Luxon’s keynote address today at the 10th Raisina Dialogue, India’s flagship multilateral conference on global politics and economics. He is the first leader not governing a European country to make such a speech, and is also the chief guest at the dialogue.
Luxon is already on the record as saying New Zealand and India are “very aligned” on Indo-Pacific security and concerns over Chinese regional influence, with scope for more joint defence exercises. This linkage between security and trade mirrors Wellington’s recent relations with Beijing, which have become increasingly difficult to navigate.
Solid foundations
But there is a long way to go. In 2024, India-New Zealand trade was worth a combined NZ$3.14 billion – a fraction of the $208.46 billion generated by trade with China in the same year.
Nevertheless, Luxon and his ministers have made undeniable progress. His “recalibration of a relationship that has long been neglected” bore fruit in October last year when he met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the ASEAN summit, and the countries announced their intention to take the relationship to “greater heights”.
The previous Labour government helped set the scene with a succession of high-level diplomatic visits and parliamentary exchanges. In 2023, the Indian government described relations with New Zealand as having “an upward trajectory”.
And there are clearly good foundations to build on – especially the 292,000 people of Indian ethnicity in New Zealand, who contribute US$10 billion to the New Zealand economy.
Great expectations
Trade is ripe for expansion, too. New Zealand primarily exports wool, iron and steel, aluminium, fruits and nuts, wood pulp and recovered paper, and imports Indian pharmaceuticals, machinery, precious metals and stones, textiles, vehicles and clothing.
There were 8,000 Indian students in New Zealand last year, a number that may well grow given a relative drop in student numbers from China. With the US and UK becoming more hostile to immigration, New Zealand can offer a relatively safe and tolerant alternative.
As such, while Luxon has momentum on a trade deal, he is also part of a long queue. Given the relative power imbalance between the two countries, the weight of expectation sits squarely on his shoulders.
Chris Ogden is a Senior Research Fellow with The Foreign Policy Centre, London.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia
Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.
As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.
Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.
He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.
“The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .
Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”
To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”
If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.
Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.
And from the very start the official facts became slippery.
Our latest investigation –
AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE: NAVIGATING US-CHINA TENSIONS
We investigate a significant intelligence failure to detect live-firing by Chinese warships near Australia, has exposed Defence weaknesses, and the fact that when it counts, we are all alone.
— Declassified Australia (@DeclassifiedAus) March 7, 2025
What did they know and when did they know it The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.
The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.
We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.
The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.
“At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . .. the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”
But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.
The Chinese Navy’s stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, sailing south in the Coral Sea on February 15, 2025, in a photograph taken from a RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane. Image: Royal Australian Air Force/Declassified Australia
Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.
“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”
Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.
Eyes and ears on ‘every move’ It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.
Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.
The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.
“We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.
“Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . . we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”
Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.
Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.
Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.
“Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.
“We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”
The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.
This map indicates the routes taken by the three Chinese Navy ships on their “right to freedom of navigation” voyage in international waters circumnavigating Australia, with dates of way points indicated — from 3 February till 6 March 2025. Distances and locations are approximate. Image: Weibo/Declassified Australia
As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.
With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.
“From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.
As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.
The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.
There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.
Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.
The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.
Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.
Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.
The spy base – Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) – showing the north-eastern corner of the huge base with some 18 of the base’s now 45 satellite dishes and covered radomes visible. Image: Felicity Ruby/Declassified Australia
The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.
A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:
“Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . . Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”
The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.
It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.
Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.
These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.
Alliance priorities The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.
For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.
However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.
Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.
But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.
The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.
Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.
The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.
Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.
It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.
Who knew and when did they know If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.
Inside an operations room at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra. Image: ADF/Declassified Australia
Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.
As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.
The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.
Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.
If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.
A final word In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.
The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.
Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.
Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.
Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
A national Freshwater poll for The Financial Review, conducted March 13–15 from a sample of 1,051, gave the Coalition a 51–49 lead by respondent preferences, a one-point gain for Labor since the late February Freshwater poll.
Primary votes were 39% Coalition (down two), 31% Labor (steady), 14% Greens (up one) and 16% for all Others (up one). By 2022 election preference flows, this would be about a 50–50 tie.
Anthony Albanese’s net approval improved one point to -10, while Peter Dutton’s slid four points to -12. In the last two months, Albanese is up eight and Dutton down eight. It’s the first time since May 2024 that Albanese has had a better net approval than Dutton in this poll.
Albanese led Dutton by 45.9–42.5 as preferred PM, his best lead in this poll since last September. By 42–40, respondents thought Dutton better suited to negotiate with US President Donald Trump than Albanese (47–36 in November).
The Coalition leads on important issues, but Labor has gained seven points on economic management and three points on cost of living since February.
There has been improvement for Labor across a range of polls in the last few weeks, and the graph below has Labor leads in three of the last five national polls (two YouGovs and a Morgan), with the Coalition still ahead in Newspoll and Freshwater.
In analyst Kevin Bonham’s aggregate, Labor now leads by 50.5–49.5 using 2022 election flows, while it’s a 50–50 tie adjusting for a likely pro-Coalition shift in One Nation preferences.
Last Wednesday Trump imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, including on Australia. I believe this will assist Labor as the tariff imposition will appear unjustified to most Australians, and the Coalition is the more pro-Trump party. If the stock market continues to fall, this will undermine support for Trump’s economic agenda.
Trump has been threatening Canada with tariffs for much longer than Australia, and the centre-left governing Liberals have surged back in the polls to a near-tie with the Conservatives from over 20 points behind, and have taken the lead since Mark Carney’s March 9 election as Liberal leader.
Labor retains lead in YouGov
A national YouGov poll, conducted March 7–13 from a sample of 1,526, gave Labor a 51–49 lead, unchanged from the February 28 to March 6 YouGov poll. YouGov is conducting weekly polls, and the previous poll was the first Labor lead in YouGov since July 2024.
Primary votes were 36% Coalition (steady), 31% Labor (steady), 13.5% Greens (up 0.5), 7.5% One Nation (up 0.5), 1% Trumpet of Patriots (steady), 9% independents (down one) and 2% others (steady). YouGov is using weaker preference flows for Labor than occurred in 2022, and by 2022 flows Labor would have a lead above 52–48.
Albanese’s net approval improved three points to -6, with 49% dissatisfied and 43% satisfied, while Dutton’s net approval slid two points to -6. Albanese led Dutton as better PM by an unchanged 45–39.
Since the first weekly YouGov poll in late February, Albanese has gained six points on net approval while Dutton has slid four points. This is the first time Dutton has not had a better net approval than Albanese in YouGov since March 2024.
On the ongoing conflict caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 69% of Australians thought we should stand with Ukraine President Zelensky, while 31% wanted us to stand with Trump.
Labor regains lead in Morgan poll
A national Morgan poll, conducted March 3–9 from a sample of 1,719, gave Labor a 51.5–48.5 lead by headline respondent preferences, a two-point gain for Labor since the February 24 to March 2 poll. This is Labor’s second lead in the last three Morgan polls, after they had trailed in this poll since November.
Primary votes were 37% Coalition (down three), 30% Labor (up 1.5), 13.5% Greens (steady), 5% One Nation (up one), 10.5% independents (steady) and 4% others (up 0.5). By 2022 election flows, Labor led by 52–48, a two-point gain for Labor.
By 51.5–33, respondents said the country was going in the wrong direction (52–31.5 previously). Morgan’s consumer confidence index was down 0.8 points to 86.9.
Poll of teal-held seats has the teals struggling
Freshwater took a poll for the News Corporation tabloids of six seats held by teal independents. These are Curtin in WA, Goldstein and Kooyong in Victoria and Mackellar, Warringah and Wentworth in NSW. The poll was conducted March 5–7 from an overall sample of 830.
Across the six seats polled, the Liberals had a 51–49 lead, representing a 5% swing to the Liberals since the 2022 election. On these figures, the Liberals would gain four of these teal seats (Curtin, Goldstein, Kooyong and Mackellar).
Primary votes were 41% Liberals (up two since 2022), 33% teals (steady), 7% Labor (down six), 7% Greens (down two) and 12% others (up six). Albanese and Dutton were tied at 39–39 on better PM. By 47–42, respondents opposed their local MP backing an Albanese Labor minority government.
The YouGov MRP poll that was conducted between late January and mid-February from a sample of over 40,000 had all the teals holding their seats. At the March 8 Western Australian election, swings to the Liberals were lowest in affluent Perth seats.
WA election late counting
With 70% of enrolled voters counted for the WA election, the ABC is calling 43 of the 59 lower house seats for Labor, six for the Liberals, four for the Nationals and six seats remain undecided. The Poll Bludger has Labor ahead in 47 seats, with the Liberals and Nationals ahead in six seats each.
On election night, it had appeared likely that an independent would win Labor-held Fremantle. However, the independent has performed badly on absent and postal votes, and Labor will retain.
In the upper house, all 37 seats are elected by statewide proportional representation with preferences, and a quota for election is just 2.63%. With 63% of enrolled counted, Labor has 15.8 quotas, the Liberals 10.5, the Greens 4.1, the Nationals 2.1, One Nation 1.35, Legalise Cannabis and the Australian Christians 1.0 each, an independent group 0.48 and Animal Justice 0.43.
On current figures, Labor will win 16 seats, the Liberals ten, the Greens four, the Nationals two, One Nation, Legalise Cannabis and the Christians one each and two seats are unclear (Liberals, independent group and Animal Justice contesting). Counting of absents in the lower house has hurt the Liberals, so their vote is likely to drop further. Labor and the Greens will have a combined upper house majority.
Liberals hold Port Macquarie at NSW byelection
A byelection occurred on Saturday in the New South Wales Liberal-held state seat of Port Macquarie. Labor did not contest after finishing third behind the Nationals and Liberals at the 2023 NSW election with 19.2%.
With 59% of enrolled counted, The Poll Bludger is projecting that the Liberals will defeat the Nationals by 52.8–47.2, a 7.9% swing to the Nationals since 2023. Current primary votes are 34.2% Liberals (down 4.1%), 31.2% Nationals (up 5.5%), 12.8% for an independent (new), 10.7% Greens (up 3.7%) and 7.9% Legalise Cannabis (up 3.4%).
Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Including pronouns in introductions, your email signature or your social media bio may seem like a minor detail. Pronouns are just small words we use in place of names all the time. But, like names, pronouns have personal significance. They say something about who we are.
Linguistic shifts towards gender inclusivity are occurring worldwide, and the use of gender-neutral or inclusive pronouns is not a new nor exclusively Western phenomenon.
Chinese, one of the world’s oldest languages and spoken by more than one billion people, illustrates how languages adapt to reflect shifting understanding of gender. Its pronoun system may be on the cusp of significant change.
The modern Chinese pronoun system is fascinating for two reasons.
First, gendered pronouns have only been part of the Chinese language for 100 years: the feminine pronoun 她 (she) was only adopted in the 1920s.
Second, although there are now distinct Chinese characters for “he”, 他, and “she”, 她, these are both pronounced tā in Mandarin. You can have a whole conversation about someone without revealing their gender.
The lack of gender-distinct pronouns in spoken Mandarin has prompted calls for written Chinese to follow suit. Queer Chinese speakers have proposed several gender-inclusive pronouns that would be pronounced tā, just like 他 (he) and 她 (she).
Queer Chinese speakers have proposed several gender-inclusive pronouns. Mogome01/Shutterstock
These include the romanised form “TA” and new Chinese characters 「⿰无也」 and 「⿰㐅也」. These new characters might look strange: they are written like this to clarify that they should be read as one Chinese character. Currently, they take up the space of two Chinese characters because they are not yet in Unicode and cannot be typed properly.
Other people hope to see the now-masculine 他 regain its original function as an ungendered pronoun.
What pronouns do queer Chinese speakers use?
To understand how Chinese pronouns are changing, I surveyed more than 100 queer Chinese speakers across 12 countries. I asked survey respondents, a third of whom were nonbinary or otherwise gender-diverse, about their pronoun preferences and perceptions. I also analysed how pronouns are used in a large database of contemporary Chinese texts.
My research found gender-inclusive pronouns accounted for about a quarter of first-choice pronouns, and nearly half of all pronouns used by survey respondents. TA was overwhelmingly preferred by gender-diverse individuals (70%), with the English “they” (20%) the next most popular option.
While cisgender and transgender men almost exclusively used masculine pronouns, cis and trans women showed significant openness to using gender-inclusive pronouns alongside feminine ones. After 她 (she), TA was the second most common pronoun for women (40%) and second most common overall (17%).
Notably, 他 (he) was not used by any women or gender-diverse people, except one who considered it gender-neutral. This suggests reviving its original ungendered usage may be difficult.
Survey participants were overwhelmingly positive about TA. Chay_Tee/Shutterstock
TA emerged as the most recognised gender-inclusive pronoun, with nearly all respondents (97%) familiar with it regardless of their age, gender, region or language background. In contrast, fewer than 8% had encountered the new character-based pronouns 「⿰无也」 or「⿰㐅也」 and no one reported using them.
What makes TA so popular?
Survey participants were overwhelmingly positive about TA, with 63% expressing favourable views. As one respondent explained:
The look and feel is good, it suits people’s everyday pronunciation habits, and doesn’t create issues with having to specify someone’s gender.
TA functions similarly to English singular “they”. It works in two ways: as a gender-neutral pronoun when gender is unknown (like saying “someone left their umbrella”), and as a gender-inclusive pronoun specifically including gender-diverse people.
Many survey respondents called TA “respectful” and “inclusive” but also simply “convenient”.
However, some respondents were concerned TA is “untraditional” and “pollutes the Chinese language”.
Practical considerations for using emerging Chinese pronouns also extend to the technical challenges of typing new Chinese characters. Before a new character can be typed on computers or phones, it needs to be officially encoded in Unicode, the global standard for digital text.
My research shows this requirement is strongly influencing which emerging Chinese pronouns can gain traction.
While some survey respondents hoped to see a gender-inclusive Chinese character adopted, they weren’t optimistic about 「⿰无也」or 「⿰㐅也」 becoming mainstream.
As one noted:
「⿰无也」is good, but it’s hard to type and it takes a long time to explain.
User-friendly and easily understandable
TA is currently the most popular emerging Chinese gender-inclusive pronoun, crucially because it mimics how people use tā in spoken Mandarin.
It is already part of people’s vocabulary, and already used (at least as a gender-neutral pronoun) by mainstream Chinese media and on online platforms.
This 2023 TEDxSuzhouWomen talk is titled ‘We are all gender misfits’ (你我ta都是”性别酷儿)
Unlike other recently proposed pronouns, TA is versatile, user-friendly and easily understandable for queer and non-queer Chinese speakers alike. This makes TA a strong contender for widespread adoption into contemporary Chinese.
Like the introduction of a Chinese feminine pronoun 她 (she) in the 1920s, the emergence of TA as a gender-inclusive pronoun in the 2020s is about recognising a wider spectrum of identities.
Pronouns are not a political statement, just a personal statement. When you use someone’s correct pronouns, you’re saying, “I see you, and I respect who you are”. That’s something worth talking about, in any language.
Janet Davey is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
Casino operator Star Entertainment has been under financial pressure for some time. The company’s share price has tanked, and the business, with its three casino properties, has been bleeding money.
Last year’s opening of a new riverside casino in Queen’s Wharf, Brisbane, was seen as a way to revitalise the business. But Star has swung from one lifeline to another.
Just as it was set to run out of cash on Friday March 7, Star announced a last-minute rescue package. This centred on selling its 50% stake in the Queens Wharf casino to Hong-Kong-based joint venture partners for $53 million.
Star has also started documentation for a $250 million bridging loan but still needs to finalise a proposal for long-term refinancing.
All of this remains subject to details being finalised, and regulatory approvals. An alternative $250 million takeover offer from US casino operator Bally’s currently isn’t Star’s preference because it is considered too low.
But Star is far from out of the woods yet. Whatever happens to it and its casino assets, there are bigger questions about whether the age of unfettered gambling revenue for casinos may have already ended.
Elsewhere, gambling is booming
If Australian casinos are struggling, it’s not because punters are giving up gambling. Whereas most of the gambling market recovered rapidly after the end of pandemic restrictions, casinos floundered.
Between 2018–19 and 2022–23, before and after pandemic restrictions were in place, total Australian gambling expenditure (in other words, gamblers’ losses) grew by 6.8% in real terms (adjusted for inflation).
Real wagering losses grew by 45%. This segment has clearly emerged as the second-biggest gambling market in the country, with gambling expenditure of $8.4 billion.
But over the same period, expenditure at casinos declined by more than 35% nationally, and by 42% in New South Wales.
Both Star and Australia’s other major casino operator, Crown, have emerged from a range of high-profile scandals in recent years.
Media reporting, inquiries, and royal commissions into Crown, and then Star, give some insight into how the casino business used to be run in Australia.
Star’s (and Crown’s) business model appears to have previously relied on two major revenue streams: benefiting from the proceeds of crime (by operating as a cash laundry for organised criminal gangs), and exploiting every vulnerable person who walked onto their premises.
Both casinos facilitated money laundering, particularly via junket operators, organisers of casino visits by high rollers. Unfortunately, many of these people had strong links to organised crime gangs keen to launder their illegally acquired money.
This wasn’t just high rollers. Ordinary people were also encouraged to use poker machines for hours without any attempt at encouraging a break, as mandated by “responsible gambling” codes.
The Victorian Royal Commissioner, investigating Crown, regarded its “responsible gambling” failures as particularly heinous.
Although neither casino chain closed its doors, regulatory breaches led to appointment of special managers to oversee the business and hold the licences. Further change included beefing up regulators’ powers and resources.
Turning a page
Without significant funds from the proceeds of crime, or exploitation of the vulnerable, casinos are clearly struggling.
In NSW and Victoria, the casinos have been required to introduce “cashless gaming” systems.
This takes cash out of the system, deterring money launderers. Gamblers must also set a limit on their gambling spend, and adhere to it. The system is in the process of being introduced in Queensland.
Competition from online wagering and pokie venues may also be playing a part. These businesses are not currently regulated as effectively as casinos.
Precommitment systems for online wagering would be relatively easy to introduce. They would require punters to set a limit on deposits or bets, or indeed the time they spend gambling, and enforce these technically.
Getting these in place, however, may be as formidable a task as getting gambling ads banned from sporting broadcasts, if not more so.
The gambling industry understandably opposes this. After all, these measures would reduce the amount that people lose. From a public health perspective, however, they provide an effective system to prevent harm in the first place, rather than simply picking up the pieces.
Without effective reform of local gambling venues and online wagering, casinos may try to mount an argument for less effective regulation. That would be an admission that their “tourism” attractiveness has waned. It’s also a powerful argument to speed up the transition of effective regulation to all gambling operators.
Charles Livingstone has received funding from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, the (former) Victorian Gambling Research Panel, and the South Australian Independent Gambling Authority (the funds for which were derived from hypothecation of gambling tax revenue to research purposes), from the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and from non-government organisations for research into multiple aspects of poker machine gambling, including regulatory reform, existing harm minimisation practices, and technical characteristics of gambling forms. He has received travel and co-operation grants from the Alberta Problem Gambling Research Institute, the Finnish Institute for Public Health, the Finnish Alcohol Research Foundation, the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Committee, the Turkish Red Crescent Society, and the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. He was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project researching mechanisms of influence on government by the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries. He has undertaken consultancy research for local governments and non-government organisations in Australia and the UK seeking to restrict or reduce the concentration of poker machines and gambling impacts, and was a member of the Australian government’s Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling in 2010-11. He is a member of the Lancet Public Health Commission into gambling, and of the World Health Organisation expert group on gambling and gambling harm. He made a submission to and appeared before the HoR Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on those experiencing gambling harm.
One of the most enduring questions humans have is how long we’re going to live. With this comes the question of how much of our lifespan is shaped by our environment and choices, and how much is predetermined by our genes.
A study recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine has attempted for the first time to quantify the relative contributions of our environment and lifestyle versus our genetics in how we age and how long we live.
The findings were striking, suggesting our environment and lifestyle play a much greater role than our genes in determining our longevity.
What the researchers did
This study used data from the UK Biobank, a large database in the United Kingdom that contains in-depth health and lifestyle data from roughly 500,000 people. The data available include genetic information, medical records, imaging and information about lifestyle.
A separate part of the study used data from a subset of more than 45,000 participants whose blood samples underwent something called “proteomic profiling”.
Proteomic profiling is a relatively new technique that looks at how proteins in the body change over time to identify a person’s age at a molecular level. By using this method researchers were able to estimate how quickly an individual’s body was actually ageing. This is called their biological age, as opposed to their chronological age (or years lived).
The researchers assessed 164 environmental exposures as well as participants’ genetic markers for disease. Environmental exposures included lifestyle choices (for example, smoking, physical activity), social factors (for example, living conditions, household income, employment status) and early life factors, such as body weight in childhood.
They then looked for associations between genetics and environment and 22 major age-related diseases (such as coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes), mortality and biological ageing (as determined by the proteomic profiling).
These analyses allowed the researchers to estimate the relative contributions of environmental factors and genetics to ageing and dying prematurely.
What did they find?
When it came to disease-related mortality, as we would expect, age and sex explained a significant amount (about half) of the variation in how long people lived. The key finding, however, was environmental factors collectively accounted for around 17% of the variation in lifespan, while genetic factors contributed less than 2%.
This finding comes down very clearly on the nurture side in the “nature versus nurture” debate. It suggests environmental factors influence health and longevity to a far greater extent than genetics.
Not unexpectedly, the study showed a different mix of environmental and genetic influences for different diseases. Environmental factors had the greatest impact on lung, heart and liver disease, while genetics played the biggest role in determining a person’s risk of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers, and dementia.
The environmental factors that had the most influence on earlier death and biological ageing included smoking, socioeconomic status, physical activity levels and living conditions.
Interestingly, being taller at age ten was found to be associated with a shorter lifespan. Although this may seem surprising, and the reasons are not entirely clear, this aligns with previous research finding taller people are more likely to die earlier.
Carrying more weight at age ten and maternal smoking (if your mother smoked in late pregnancy or when you were a newborn) were also found to shorten lifespan.
Probably the most surprising finding in this study was a lack of association between diet and markers of biological ageing, as determined by the proteomic profiling. This flies in the face of the extensive body of evidence showing the crucial role of dietary patterns in chronic disease risk and longevity.
But there are a number of plausible explanations for this. The first could be a lack of statistical power in the part of the study looking at biological ageing. That is, the number of people studied may have been too small to allow the researchers to see the true impact of diet on ageing.
Second, the dietary data in this study, which was self-reported and only measured at one time point, is likely to have been of relatively poor quality, limiting the researchers’ ability to see associations. And third, as the relationship between diet and longevity is likely to be complex, disentangling dietary effects from other lifestyle factors may be difficult.
So despite this finding, it’s still safe to say the food we eat is one of the most important pillars of health and longevity.
What other limitations do we need to consider?
Key exposures (such as diet) in this study were only measured at a single point in time, and not tracked over time, introducing potential errors into the results.
Also, as this was an observational study, we can’t assume associations found represent causal relationships. For example, just because living with a partner correlated with a longer lifespan, it doesn’t mean this caused a person to live longer. There may be other factors which explain this association.
Finally, it’s possible this study may have underestimated the role of genetics in longevity. It’s important to recognise genetics and environment don’t operate in isolation. Rather, health outcomes are shaped by their interplay, and this study may not have fully captured the complexity of these interactions.
This study found environmental factors influence health and longevity to a far greater extent than genetics. Ground Picture/Shutterstock
The future is (largely) in your hands
It’s worth noting there were a number of factors such as household income, home ownership and employment status associated with diseases of ageing in this study that are not necessarily within a person’s control. This highlights the crucial role of addressing the social determinants of health to ensure everyone has the best possible chance of living a long and healthy life.
At the same time, the results offer an empowering message that longevity is largely shaped by the choices we make. This is great news, unless you have good genes and were hoping they would do the heavy lifting.
Ultimately, the results of this study reinforce the notion that while we may inherit certain genetic risks, how we eat, move and engage with the world seems to be more important in determining how healthy we are and how long we live.
Hassan Vally 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 Shamit Saggar, Executive Director, Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success and Professor of Public Policy, Curtin University
Two months out from an Australian federal election, the polling is pointing to a very tight race between the two major parties. This means, if the polls are correct, neither party will likely win enough seats to command a parliamentary working majority.
Australia’s most recent experience of a hung parliament was the Gillard-Rudd government of 2010–13. Many still see that as an unhappy era, with internal division within Labor’s party room in Canberra, and yet another leadership coup, as the lasting, bitter memory.
So, it is time to reassess whether – or how well – Australia might be governed in similar circumstances.
Building a stable coalition
The answer depends on us being open to the meaning of a stable, inter-party coalition. This is particularly tricky in Australia for three reasons. First, although the political parties themselves are coalitions of philosophies and factions, this is often masked by high levels of party discipline. With very few exceptions, MPs elected through the major parties pretty much do as they are told when they go to Canberra.
Second, the popular vote share that goes to the two major parties has been in long-term decline, from about 90% 40 years ago, to about 70% of late. The drift hasn’t just gone towards populist insurgents and protests, but increasingly to the benefit of the Greens and, more recently, the Teals. The national preferential voting system pushes candidates to compete in the traditional left-right middle ground. But this overlooks the fact that some voters’ sympathies lie in single-issue campaigns.
Third, and most importantly, our model of minority government is conspicuously one-dimensional. For instance, party leaders and managers think purely in terms of confidence and supply agreements. These are important, of course, but they provide artificial stability by limiting disagreement in parliament that might bring down a government.
One eye-catching proposition for stable minority government involves Labor and the Coalition coming together to agree not to topple the other for an arbitrary period of half a parliamentary term.
There are several better options. The UK’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats ran a joint government from 2010–15, with some distinction. A big party and small party formed a coalition, and once they had agreed to disagree, they ringfenced specific policy areas as belonging to one party and the other party signed up to it as a policy priority of the whole government. This resulted in the full implementation of their respectively most prized policies.
And just two months ago, Ireland’s centre-right Fianna Fáil and Fine Gail parties, working with unaligned independents and a more formal Independent Ireland, came up with similar coalition agreement.
The inference is that stable multi-party government involves a mature negotiation on the issues, priorities and policies that can unite across party lines. It also requires a readiness to prioritise policy issues within parties.
Of course, this is an indirect way of asking if the Teals can and wish to operate as a de facto party. And while the Greens are a political party to begin with, the extent of their party discipline has not been tested to the full.
Meanwhile, there is evidence of pressure to keep both the Teals and Greens at a distance from any such agreement, with reports that lobby groups for the hospitality and coal sectors respectively will fund major party candidates to help defeat hostile crossbenchers.
As politicians mull these challenges, we should consider the likely “safe” issues – as against the “tricky” ones – in the coming parliament that a stable minority government or coalition would face. Their appetite to govern will be affected accordingly.
‘Safe’ and ‘tricky’ issues in a minority government
From Labor’s perspective, the nucleus is around a disparate set of economic and social modernisation policies. Since many of these have begun in this parliament, the focus in the next will be on pursuing them to full implementation.
For the Coalition, reshaping tax and spending, increasing housing affordability checking workplace employee rights and a bold nuclear power proposal sit at the core. This is accompanied by wariness of immigration and identity politics. Survey research points to its broad appeal certainly but less is known about the depth of this support.
Finding a middle path on these issues that would satisfy enough crossbenchers to help one of the major parties form government will be the challenge. It is not necessarily a bad outcome for the nation. But it means all MPs will have to take into account the greatly enhanced premium on stable government before any serious horse-trading happens.
Shamit Saggar 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 Olga Boichak, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, Australian Research Council DECRA fellow, University of Sydney
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a 30-day ceasefire between the two warring countries may be imminent. But much more needs to happen before a just and lasting peace is achieved.
The Russian-Ukraine war is one of the most visible, analysed and documented wars in human history. Since the night of February 24 2022, millions of Ukrainian citizens, military personnel, journalists, officials and civil society activists have shared first-hand eyewitness accounts, updates, commentaries and opinions on the war.
Around the world, many online communities have also sprung into action to counter Russian propaganda and raise awareness of what is happening inside Ukraine.
We have been studying these communities for the past three years, conducting hours of interviews with members and observing their activity on social media. To conduct much of this research and connect with members, we had to join some of these communities – a common requirement for researchers working in online settings.
Our work reveals a range of skills and strategies activists use in the online fight against Russia. More broadly, it shows how social media users can mobilise during times of war and other international crises and have a material impact offline.
In some cases, social media platforms have aided the Russian cause. At the same time, they have suppressed evidence of war crimes.
For example, in the first year of the Russian invasion, independent investigative journalism organisations such as Disclose documented thousands of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians. These crimes included murder, torture, physical and sexual violence, forced relocation, looting, and damage to civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals.
Much of this content included graphic imagery, violence and offensive language. As a result, it was permanently removed from platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.
On the other hand, content containing disinformation evaded moderation. For example, a 2023 investigation by the BBC revealed thousands of fake TikTok accounts created as part of a Russian propaganda campaign spreading lies about Ukrainian officials.
This often led to a distorted information environment online. Russian disinformation was visible, while the true extent of Russian violence against Ukrainians was hidden.
Boosting Ukrainian voices
In this context, thousands of internet users formed online communities to creatively support Ukraine without attracting the attention of content moderators.
This isn’t new or unique to the war in Ukraine. For example, in 2019, US TikToker Feroza Aziz shared a makeup tutorial in which she subtly raised awareness of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs – a topic that is often suppressed on the Chinese-owned platform.
It started in May 2022 when a young man with the online name Kama mashed up a Reddit meme of a Shiba Inu dog nicknamed Cheems and a picture of a dilapidated Russian tank. This was a celebration of a Ukrainian battlefront victory. It was only intended to mock Russia.
But as Kama changed his profile picture to the meme, the trend started spreading quickly to his followers on X (formerly Twitter). They quickly grew into an online collective dedicated to fighting Russia online. Members – or “fellas”, as they are known – from many regions around the world were brought together by its rituals using internet and popular culture memes.
Calls to action
In many similar posts across Facebook, X and TikTok, users share selfies or other images to achieve high visibility while calling followers to action. In most cases, this involves raising funds for urgent military or humanitarian efforts to benefit Ukraine.
Another common strategy is storytelling. Some users share amusing or ridiculous anecdotes from their lives before closing with a donation request.
These requests often have a clear target and beneficiary. They are also often time-sensitive. For example, they may be aimed at purchasing a particular model of a drone for a particular brigade of Ukraine’s armed forces that will be delivered to the battlefront within days.
Through collaborations with Ukraine’s official fundraising platform, the North Atlantic Fella Organisation has collected more than US$700,000 towards Ukraine’s defence.
Combatting propaganda
Members of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation also try to combat Russian propaganda and disinformation.
Instead of arguing in good faith with highly visible disinformation-spreading accounts (often controlled by the Russian government), members try to derail the disinformation campaigns. They highlight their ridiculousness by responding with memes and jokes. They call this practice “shitposting”.
People spreading Russian disinformation often find themselves annoyed by the swarms of “meme dogs” in their replies. This has led some to respond aggressively. In turn, this has allowed North Atlantic Fella Organisation members to report them for violation of X’s terms of service and have their accounts suspended, as our forthcoming research documents.
However, from late 2022 onward, North Atlantic Fella Organisation members we interviewed as a part of our research reported decreased effectiveness of X’s response to problematic user conduct. This was soon after tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform.
Despite this, members continue to support each other and develop playful tactics to ensure they remain visible on the platform.
It seems war will continue online for as long as Russia wages its war on Ukraine’s territory.
Olga Boichak has received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a director of the Ukrainian Studies Foundation in Australia and an executive committee member of the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand. She has been a member of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation since 2022 for research purposes.
Kateryna Kasianenko has been a member of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation since 2022 for research purposes.
When two junior employees bump into each other in the corridor and start chatting about their manager’s overbearing manner, it’s typically considered gossip. But what about when two managers have an off-record catch-up to discuss an under-performing employee?
Both scenarios meet traditional definitions of gossip – the information being shared is about other people, the people it’s about are absent, the information is shared in a way that casts judgement on those people, and it’s informal. Yet the two situations are viewed very differently.
What counts as gossip is much more slippery than we might think. I reviewed 184 academic articles to understand what really constitutes workplace gossip.
The key, I found, is not any set of objective criteria, but rather people’s shared agreement that a situation counts as gossip.
This understanding of gossip helps us make sense of the “workplace gossip paradox” – the idea that gossip can be considered both a reliable source of social information (“the inside word”) and an unreliable information source (“just gossip”).
My work also provides insights into how businesses can manage gossip before it becomes a scandal.
Knowledge is power – but power controls knowledge
How does recognising the slipperiness of gossip help us understand the workplace paradox? The answer has to do with the role of power in legitimising information.
Leaders and managers need information to justify action. If a manager is going to investigate a sexual harassment claim, they can’t do so based solely on a hunch. They need to hear about from it someone.
If the victim of sexual harassment complains directly to their manager, an investigation is automatically justified. But what if the manager hears about harassment indirectly and unofficially (for example, through “gossip”), with the added complication that the alleged perpetrator is another manager?
If the manager does something about what they’ve heard and the source turns out to be unreliable, they could face negative consequences for acting on what was essentially “just gossip.” But if they don’t act, and the information turns out to be credible, they could face repercussions for ignoring the “inside word.”
There is evidence that such paradoxical situations play out quite frequently in real-world workplaces. For example, inside information about negligence towards patient safety in healthcare settings has, in the past, been dismissed as “just gossip” until it provoked a public scandal.
One case study from the United States found managers tended to keep an ear out for information passing through the grapevine and selectively use it to further their own interests.
If gossip threatened their power, they repressed it as “just gossip”. But if gossip provided “useful” information – ammunition against a subversive employee, for example – management legitimised gossip as “official information”.
To avoid workplace scandals when gossip is ignored, managers should co-opt the information and make it safe to address anti-social behaviour. La Famiglia/Shutterstock
How to manage the workplace gossip paradox
To avoid scandals stemming from when gossip is ignored, managers might consider “co-opting” gossip, bringing it into official communication channels.
But there’s a problem with this approach. Gossip gains its credibility as the inside word because it takes place outside official communication channels. Therefore, if managers try to co-opt gossip into formal management processes, it’s likely to have the unintended consequence of discrediting the shared information.
Instead, “managing gossip” requires a better understanding of its functions and motivations.
One function is to reduce uncertainty. Research suggests gossip often arises to fill information gaps. For example, people might speculate about a manager’s salary by gossiping about their expensive car or holiday.
Such gossip is likely to be exaggerated and counterproductive. However, it could be managed simply by being transparent about staff salaries, filling the information gap before gossip does.
Another key function of gossip is to warn against antisocial behaviours like bullying. But if employees feel comfortable speaking up about such behaviour — even when it’s perpetrated by those with official power – managers will not face the dilemma of whether to act on information that could turn out to be “just gossip.”
Gossip is a slippery and paradoxical form of communication. Some would say it’s unmanageable. But what can be managed are the workplace behaviours and hierarchical relationships that gossip loves to sink its teeth into.
The author would like to acknowledge Trish Corner, Helena Cooper-Thomas and Rachel Morrison for their contributions to developing this research.
James Greenslade-Yeats 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 Joshua M. Pearce, John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and Professor, Western University
A recent study has shown that the environmental and human mortality impacts of modern information technology — especially email infrastructure — are significant.(Shutterstock)
My recent study explored the environmental impact of lengthening email signatures, focusing specifically on two types of information: gender pronouns and land acknowledgements because both are relatively new additions to email signatures.
In both cases, the extra carbon emissions for each email for the extra characters is estimated and aggregated over the population that uses them.
The environmental consequences of minor digital habits are often overlooked. (Shutterstock)
The results showed that in Canada, where about 15 per cent of people include gender pronouns in emails, the resulting carbon emissions from this small change (three extra words) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year, according to the 1,000-ton rule.
The environmental harm and human mortality caused by this seemingly minor digital habit is evident. Large blocks of text like legal disclaimers and land acknowledgements cause even more harm. Images and logos, which contain even larger amounts of data, cause more emissions and deaths still.
Doing away with email signatures
Most of the content in email signatures is redundant, as we tend to email the same people repeatedly. The environmental and human cost of using email signatures clearly outweighs the benefits. One solution to this issue is to replace email signatures with a hyperlinked name to additional information.
Another simple way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions is by eliminating email signatures entirely, since emails already identify senders in the header. After all, we don’t sign our texts, so why do we feel the need to sign our emails?
If you receive an email with a long signature, you might consider asking the sender to switch to a hyperlink instead, or eliminate their signature all together.
Additionally, you can encourage others to use free, open-source ad blockers to reduce unnecessary data from ads while browsing or emailing. Ads, especially on websites, generate an enormous amount of unnecessary data and energy consumption.
While these steps may seem small on their own, collectively, they can make a significant difference in reducing digital waste and unnecessary emissions.
It also gives pause for the far more damaging impacts of other forms of digital communications, particularly email spam.
Already more than half of all emails are spam. (Shutterstock)
Spam accounts for over half of all emails and, despite having lower carbon emissions per email (since many are deleted without being opened), spam accounts for far more emissions-producing data. Beyond its environmental toll, spam also wastes the time of every email user.
In response, several proposals and laws have been put forward to reduce this digital waste, from including taxes on emails, opt-in or opt-out systems to even outlawing spam entirely. While these efforts are a step in the right direction, we all still suffer through an enormous amount of spam.
The environmental impact of our online habits is far larger than most realize, and as digital communication continues to evolve, we must consider its long-term consequences on the environment and human life. We should take the easy steps of cutting wasteful energy use in our communications and it can start with eliminating email signatures.
Joshua M. Pearce 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.
Yet, despite this widespread patriotism, some Canadians may have a relative or friend in the contrarian 10 per cent of citizens who welcome annexation.
From peacekeepers to politicians to ordinary civilians, I have seen how cognitive biases can cause rational, intelligent people to ignore valuable evidence, even at great peril.
Humans often react to unsettling evidence by denying, minimizing or re-interpreting the information to restore their cognitive ease. Everyone in a conflict-prone part of the world experiences cognitive distortions and denial at some point. Psychological security often overrides physical security.
The tricky part is that challenging a person’s denial can provoke defensiveness, even rage. But allowing denial to persist leaves them dangerously unprepared to face real-world threats.
On balance, the safer choice is to rip off these psychological Band-aids.
Denial through confirmation bias
Except for a small percentage of extremists, the 10 per cent who are in favour of American annexation are ordinary Canadians. What makes them different are two interrelated cognitive biases: confirmation bias and belief perseverance.
For Canadians who hold Trump in high esteem, acknowledging his threats creates cognitive dissonance. Some people find dissonance so distressing that it feels easier to reject or reinterpret the contrary information in a way that protects prior-held ideas and restores cognitive ease.
These confirmation biases allow the 10 per cent to redefine the word “annexation” to mean something else, such as peaceful political unification. That imagined definition turns Trump’s threat into a friendly proposal leading to greater prosperity and security.
That reinterpretation may reduce psychological distress, but it’s delusional.
Many of the 10 per cent are simply unaware of what “annexation” truly means, and could rationally change their position once they understand the facts. But a smaller subset of that group may reject the evidence entirely.
Belief perseverance causes some people to aggressively hold their original position, even when presented with disconfirming evidence.
While denial helps them feel safe in the moment, it also makes them dangerously unprepared to deal with real threats.
Denial through normalcy bias
Patriotic “elbows up” Canadians must also be wary of denial. For them, the issue is not identifying the threats, but comprehending their full implications.
Even among informed citizens, NATO, NORAD and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance are not easy to relate to. Trade wars show up on grocery bills, but these defence organizations keep peace in the background, which is harder to notice.
Canadians may intellectually understand that North American security is deteriorating, but that crisis may not seem as real as tariffs.
For the majority of Canadians who already take Trump’s threats seriously, the first step in countering the normalcy bias is to pay attention to new risks and fractures in existingsecurity co-operation.
There is no time to argue with people who remain cognitively confused. The majority of Canadians are ready to have a laser-focused discussion about the real security challenges on the horizon.
The good news is that Canada can fortify its security and deter threats in this perilous new world.
The rangeofoptions may not be as comfortable as the bygone era of friendly alliances and NATO supremacy. But through intelligentdebate, Canadians can develop realistic new approaches to national defence, and quickly.
Acceptance and adaptation are the keys to survival.
Aisha Ahmad receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Stacy L. Lorenz, Vice Dean and Professor, Physical Education and History, Augustana Campus, University of Alberta
When Canadian ice hockey centre Connor McDavid scored in overtime to lead Canada to victory over the United States in the National Hockey League’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in February, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted on social media, “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.”
Since the 4 Nations Face-Off ended, hockey analogies and imagery continue to dominate the conversation around Canada-U.S. relations. This time the focus is on Gordie Howe (or “Mr. Hockey” as he was widely known), whose strategic use of elbows on the ice has become a political rallying cry for Canadians.
A CBC News report on ‘Elbows Up’ becoming a rallying cry against Trump.
In particular, Howe’s practice of keeping his “elbows up” in the corners to ward off belligerents on the opposing team has become a focal point for Canadians’ actions against Trump’s aggression.
“We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. So the Americans, they should make no mistake: In trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.”
While it may be surprising to see such enthusiasm for an “elbows up” approach and for “dropping the gloves” as one would in a hockey fight, this kind of strategic employment of violence fits perfectly with Howe’s longstanding brand of hockey manhood.
“Mr. Elbows” and the “Bashful Basher”
Although Howe’s early nickname of “Mr. Elbows” has received the bulk of the public’s attention recently, his other moniker used extensively by the Detroit media during his first season in the NHL — the “Bashful Basher” — captures even more effectively the style of masculinity that Canadians are currently calling upon in their clash with Trump.
“Howe not only had proven himself an exceptionally promising rookie, but he also had established the fact that while he might be a malted milk devotee off the ice, he positively was no milk-sop on a hockey rink.”
Howe’s brand of violence was careful and calculated, rather than reckless or emotional. Even when he used his fists to batter an opponent — such as in his famous 1959 fight with New York Rangers enforcer Lou Fontinato — Howe presented himself as a reluctant and reasonable fighter who conformed to the idealized, manly “code” of hockey.
He resorted to fighting only to defend smaller teammates and to deter even more harmful forms of violence, such as stick attacks or overly aggressive hits. Far from a wild brawler, Howe was a calm protector, governed by a sense of honest accountability for his actions.
O’Reilly contrasts “the mild-mannered, smiling, innocent-faced Howe, the clean-cut All-Canadian-American boy” with his more ruthless counterpart: “The guy who excels with his elbows as weapons, a man who, his opponents say, is skilled with the illegal high stick and so devious that the officials often fail to see the offense.”
“When Howe gets knocked down, he looks like he doesn’t care. But when he’s getting up, he looks for the other guy’s number. A little later, the guy will have four stitches in his head.”
Howe’s strategic use of fighting also normalized the high level of violence in hockey by showing that it could be measured and purposeful, in accordance with the informal code of expectations that governed the game.
Although critics of fighting and violence have become more outspoken in recent years, these values remain integral to hockey culture at the highest level and an influential point of reference for what it means to be a “true” hockey fan and a patriotic Canadian.
In the current political climate, it is perhaps the title of the story that appeared in Life magazine in 1959 that resonates most clearly: “Don’t mess around with Gordie. Hockey’s tough guy (Lou Fontinato) discovers that the game’s best player (Gordie Howe) is a rough man in a fight.”
With their “elbows up,” Canadians are counting on a Gordie Howe-style response — rational, expert and effective — in a trade war with the United States that may just be getting started.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Across its nearly 250-year history, the United States has never had an official language. On March 1, U.S. President Donald Trump changed that when he signed an executive order designating English as the country’s sole official language. The order marks a fundamental rupture from the American goverment’s long-standing approach to languages.
“From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language,” Trump’s order states. “It is in America’s best interest for the federal government to designate one — and only one — official language.”
This new order also revokes a language-access provision contained in an earlier executive order from 2000 that aimed to improve access to services for people with limited English. Federal agencies now seem to have no obligation to provide vital information in other languages.
Despite some reactions in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere, it remains unclear whether Trump’s executive order will face legal or political challenges. Amid continual attacks from the Trump administration on established norms, this decree may pass with relatively little resistance, despite a deeper meaning that extends far beyond language.
Multilingual realities and monolingual fantasies
The U.S. has a long multilingual history, beginning with the hundreds of Indigenous languages indelibly linked to these lands. The secondary layer are colonial languages and their variants, including French in Louisiana and Spanish in the Southwest. In all historical periods, immigrant languages from around the world have added substantially to the linguistic mix that makes up the U.S.
Today, New York is one of world’s most linguistically diverse cities, with other U.S. coastal cities not far behind. According to data from the Census Bureau, one-fifth of all Americans can speak two or more languages. The social, economic and cognitive benefits of bilingualism are well-established, and there is no data to support the assertion that speaking more than one language threatens the integrity of the nation state.
A building in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, which hosts speakers of diverse South Asian languages and their associations, April 17, 2017. (Ross Perlin)
The March 1 executive order is a crowning achievement for the “English-only movement.” Trump has tapped directly into this sentiment and its xenophobic preoccupations, rooted in white fragility and white supremacy.
In 2015, during his first bid for the Oval Office, Trump reprimanded Jeb Bush, the bilingual former governor of Florida, during a televised debate, stating: “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language…These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
Beyond the brazen untruths and intentional exaggerations, such statements only reflect weakness and fear. The March 1 executive order states that “a nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society.”
It is in fact a sign of strength that Americans have not needed such a mandate until now, effectively navigating their complex multilingual reality without top-down legislation.
English around the world
It’s instructive to compare the language policy of the U.S. with other settler colonial contexts where English is dominant.
In neighbouring Canada, the 1969 Official Languages Act grants equal status to English and French — two languages that were brought European migrants — and requires all federal institutions to provide services in both languages on request. Revealingly, only 50 years later did Canada finally pass an Indigenous Languages Act granting modest recognition to the original languages of the land.
While Australia’s constitution specifies no official language, the government promotes English as the “national language,” and then offers to translate some web pages into other languages.
Navigating the distinction between de facto and de jure, New Zealand has taken a more considered approach. Recognizing that English is unthreatened and secure, even without legal backing, New Zealand legislators have focused their attention elsewhere. Te reo Māori was granted official language status in 1987, followed by New Zealand Sign Language in 2006.
Even the colonial centre and origin point for the global spread of English, the United Kingdom assumes a nuanced position on language policy. Welsh and Irish have both received some official recognition, while in Scotland, the Bòrd na Gàidhlig continues to advocate for official recognition of Gaelic.
Principle and practice
Trump’s recent executive order is both practical and symbolic.
Practically, it remains unclear what the order means for Spanish in Puerto Rico, the Indigenous languages of Hawaii and Alaska — which have received official recognition — for American Sign Language and for all the multilingual communities that make up the nation.
Interpretation in courts, hospitals and schools is a fundamental human right. No one should be barred from accessing vital services simply because they don’t speak English, whether that’s when dealing with a judge, a doctor or a teacher. The consequences of government agencies abandoning their already limited efforts at translation and interpretation could have huge ramifications.
Symbolically, Trump’s order is red meat for his MAGA followers. Associating national integrity with the promotion of one language above others might seem to reflect American exceptionalism, but it in fact destroys the cultural and linguistic diversity that makes the U.S. exceptional.
Ironically, this executive order brings the U.S. into alignment with most of the world’s other nation-states — albeit not the ones that speak English as their first language — which seek to impose the standardized language of an ethnic majority on all of their citizens. The consequences can be both polarizing and homogenizing.
Most of the world’s people are resolutely multilingual and are only becoming more so. Americans will not stop speaking, writing and signing in languages other than English because of an executive order. The linguistic dynamism of the U.S. is essential to the country’s social fabric. It should be nurtured and defended.
Mark Turin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo.
Ross Perlin has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nicole Rosen, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions, University of Manitoba
United States President Donald Trump has recently been commenting on accents while meeting foreign leaders and taking questions from foreign journalists. Trump praised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “beautiful” accent, saying he would have been president 20 years ago if he’d had that accent.
What is a “beautiful” accent, and what makes one hard to understand? There is much evidence showing that opinions on language are not based in any objective standards of beauty or aesthetics, but rather on our attitudes about the people speaking them.
Accent attitudes reflect our biases
Consider long-standing attitudes regarding the southern American accent. Some might automatically assess an accent from Tennessee or Kentucky as sounding less smart than one from Michigan or California. However, there is no scientific relationship between accent and intelligence; these stereotypes are learned behaviour.
Research shows young children of about five or six, for example, do not discriminate between U.S. northern and southern accents. As they get older, they start to develop the same attitudes of the adults around them, and by age 10 they start to find that northern-accented speakers sound “smarter” and more “in charge” than southern-accented speakers.
“French, which had taken centuries to develop into a most subtle intricate form — the height of sophistication — was far too complex for these simple savages to learn. So they did their poor, primitive best and contrived a queer, simplified ‘pidgin’ French dialect of their own.”
It is quite clear this judgment is not based in scientific fact, but rather on racist attitudes toward Black people. Today, language attitudes may be more subtle in their racism or classism, but they persist, using our biases about a group of people to affect how we feel about their way of speaking.
When speakers are familiar with an accent or dialect, however, they use their social knowledge to make judgments about the esthetics, determining which is more pleasing than another. This means that it’s not always the actual phonetic aspects of the language that drive our preferences, but rather social knowledge about the people who speak with that accent that we are assessing.
In terms of foreign accents in particular, our native language shapes the way we categorize the sounds of other languages. When languages have unfamiliar sounds, our brains need a little more time to process the correspondences between the foreign accent and our own so we can accurately categorize the sounds in the foreign-accented speech. Understanding different accents is a skill that develops over time, and greater exposure to speakers with a particular accent helps us understand that accent more easily.
The attitude we have about foreign accents is affected by our social knowledge of a person, their accent and where they come from. Having more frequent and positive associations with people from a particular region will make us more likely to find the accent pleasing and worth deciphering. Our ability to understand reflects the cognitive load that our brain is put through in order to categorize the different sounds that we are hearing.
Putting these two together, it is easy to see how the historical prestige associated with European accents, as well as the political power of leaders like Emmanuel Macron of France, Starmer from the United Kingdom or Modi of India would be reflected in Trump’s positive attitude towards them.
Similarly, he might consider a foreign journalist’s position on the world stage to be far less worth doing the cognitive work necessary to understand them.
Fundamentally, there is no objective criteria for determining the “beauty” of someone’s accent. Our attitudes towards particular accents are often much more rooted in our biases and how we see others in our world.
Nicole Rosen 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.
