Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kerrie Sadiq, Professor of Taxation, QUT Business School, and ARC Future Fellow, Queensland University of Technology
Large companies paid the Australian government a record A$100 billion in tax in the last year, a 17% increase on the previous year. But, over the same period, there were still 31% of large companies, operating here but not paying any tax.
The Australian Taxation Office’s annual corporate tax transparency report released last week includes data on nearly 4,000 of Australia’s largest corporations.
In its tenth year, the report is lauded by the government and ATO as a way to increase corporate accountability and reduce tax avoidance. But there is no detail on the tax practices of multinational entities, including how they interact with their offices around the world.
In particular, there is little information about how 1,200 companies paid no tax.
What the report tells us
The transparency report provides data on corporations with income of $100 million or more and businesses which pay the petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT). This includes Australian public and foreign-owned corporate tax entities, as well as Australian-owned resident private companies.
The report details the total income, taxable income, tax payable, and PRRT payable for all entities that meet the reporting threshold. Taxable income is simply assessable income minus deductions. Tax payable as a percentage of taxable income, can then be used to calculate an effective tax rate. The statutory corporate tax rate is 30%.
A variation between an effective tax rate and the statutory tax rate is not evidence of tax avoidance. However, questions need to be asked about how profitable companies reduce their tax liability to zero.
Zero liability can be achieved by deducting offsets and credits. For example, companies that conduct significant research and development are given tax breaks which reduce the amount of tax payable.
Where a company has accounting losses or a tax loss because it has incurred more expenses than income, tax will be zero. These are legitimate reasons for paying no tax.
But the limited information provided simply tells us how profitable a company is, the amount of tax deductions claimed against that profit, and the tax payable.
What the report doesn’t tell us
The transparency report reveals little about tax practices of multinational entities.
The question remains what deductions are being claimed by corporations and tax entities. The ATO has this information but can only publish what the law allows them, which is limited.
For multinationals, deductions will include dealings with overseas parts of the global entity, such as subsidiaries or the parent entity. These transactions create legitimate tax deductions.
Common transactions include payments to overseas subsidiaries for services, royalty payments for intellectual property, and interest on overseas borrowings.
In the case of petrol company Chevron, money was borrowed in the United States at around 1.2% and on lent to a related Australian entity at 9%.
After a long court battle, about 5% of interest was allowed as a deduction, an amount significantly above the original interest rate. This gave Chevron in Australia a large tax deduction.
It is through these types of transactions profits earned in Australia are shifted overseas. Current tax law allows this but requires the transaction, known as the transfer price, to be at arm’s length – that is, the price is agreed to between independent parties entering the same transaction.
What is transfer pricing?
Multinationals are global by nature and therefore logically maximise worldwide profits. Tax systems do not operate in the same way.
Tax comes under domestic law which means transactions between parts of a global entity are recognised for tax purposes.
If goods or services are sold by one part of the entity to another, an internal transaction occurs. For tax purposes the transaction is recognised as a deduction in one location and income in another. An Australian entity would pay a foreign party for things like marketing, and get a deduction for the expense.
In recent years the ATO has settled marketing disputes with large multinationals including Google, BHP, Apple, Rio Tinto, ResMed and Microsoft.
Where a deduction is allowed in a high tax jurisdiction, such as Australia, and income is included in the profits of a low tax jurisdiction, such as Singapore, the result is larger overall global profits.
The tax system recognises the incentive for multinational entities to shift profits this way and requires transactions to be at a commercial or negotiated price. Determining the price however can be fraught and has led to numerous court cases and tax disputes.
The tax transparency report reveals nothing about these types of transactions.
Taxing multinationals in Australia
In the last decade there have been moves to tax income in the location of the economic activity. The OECD has tried to stop profit shifting by companies, which erodes the tax base of high taxing jurisdictions, through its tax reform agenda.
Further complicating the issue of transfer pricing is the question of whether there is any real activity in the countries where different parts of a multinational are located.
Singapore is recognised for what are known as service hubs. These are places where various services such as sales negotiations are conducted and marketing occurs. Singapore also happens to have a headline corporate tax rate of 17%. This is often reduced to single digits after deals are entered into between taxpayers and the Singapore revenue authority.
These are increasingly valuable assets for multinational entities as they provide a unique edge in the market. We only need to think of Apple, Microsoft and Google to understand how valuable names, logos and designs are.
By its very nature intellectual property has no physical location and can be owned anywhere in the world. Often, intellectual property is held in low or no tax countries.
The transparency report includes no details about how much is transferred to these locations. This is where Australia’s proposed public country-by-country reporting may assist.
Is the ATO’s corporate tax transparency report worthwhile?
Australia should continue to strive to be a leader in corporate tax transparency.
A two-step approach is required to eliminate corporate tax avoidance. Information is valuable and public transparency measures are an important first step.
A second step, however, is to reform substantive tax laws to tax profits where they are genuinely being generated.
Kerrie Sadiq is the recipient of a four year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship Grant.
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
Crossbench independents Allegra Spender, Helen Haines and Kate Chaney have declared they are pulling out of the elite lounges run by Qantas and Virgin, amid the ongoing spotlight on privileges politicians receive from the airlines.
Allegra Spender, the member for the Sydney seat of Wentworth, also said she’d write to ask Qantas and Virgin not to give free upgrades to parliamentarians. It was “time to end the upgrades”.
She said all sides of politics enjoyed the perks, and both major parties had blocked greater competition from Qatar Airways.
Airlines operated under government policy and ministerial decisions, she said. “The public is understandably losing trust in politicians to make those decisions impartially when they’re being given free upgrades from the companies they’re supposed to regulate.”
Spender urged a review of the ministerial code of conduct. Tighter rules were needed about what politicians could accept. The code should also be extended to shadow ministers. There should as well be much more transparency over the diaries of ministers, she said.
“This is the only way to deal with the perception – and potential reality – of decisions being influenced by perks.”
But Labor MP Luke Gosling, from the Darwin seat of Solomon, accused her of grandstanding. “It’s a bit rich from the people with harbour views who either drive or have less than a one-hour flight,” he told the ABC.
Haines, from the Victorian regional seat of Indi, said she was quitting the lounges because she wanted “to remove any possibility of an actual or perceived conflict of interest” in her work as an MP.
“The reality that airlines offer these kinds of perks because ultimately they want to get something in return does not sit well with me and I want to continue to contribute to creating a culture of transparency and accountability through my actions as well as my words.”
Haines said she wanted “to see more rigorous rules around MP disclosures of upgrades and I think a ban on soliciting free flight upgrades is more than reasonable”.
Chaney, who holds the Western Australian seat of Curtin, said with the media attention on the issue “we need to do everything we can to rebuild trust in politicians making decisions in the public interest”.
Another crossbencher, Monique Ryan, from the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, who dropped her Qantas chairman’s lounge membership last year on integrity grounds, said she welcomed the discussion about the impact of corporate largesse on MPs’ decision-making.
“I am deeply concerned about lobbying and its potential to impact government decision making. Free upgrades and airline hospitality are lobbying practices that we have taken for granted for a long time, and it is important that we re-examine them — especially given public concerns about conflicts of interest.”
Meanwhile there is no indication of when opposition transport spokeswoman Bridget McKenzie, who was leading the charge against the prime minister over his upgrades, will produce a list of her own. She has said she has written to three airlines to check what upgrades she has had.
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.
I took a walk through the beautiful campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island recently, as I was in the city for the annual gathering of the various editions of The Conversation.
This project follows a devolved model, providing local leadership and engagement with the higher education and research sectors that support it in different parts of the world. Alongside me on this sunny stroll through one of the world’s great educational neighbourhoods was Alfred Hermida, Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism.
Alf and I don’t see a huge amount of each other, but when we do it tends to be pretty productive. We first met in July 2014 at an event at the University of Amsterdam, where I stood in for The Conversation founder Andrew Jaspan, and delivered a speech on the establishment of the project – then it only existed in Australia and the UK. Alf was pretty taken with the story, and the unique model. Less than a week later he was in our newsroom at City, University of London, talking to our editors about his research into social media and news.
But something else was going on in Alf’s head – something about discussions he’d had previously with his colleague Professor Mary Lynn Young that Canada could have its own edition of The Conversation. And for the next couple of years he and Mary-Lynn together built the case within the country’s higher education sector for a membership-supported Conversation Canada. It launched in 2017 under the remarkable leadership of Scott White and now forms one of the most important and valued parts of the global network.
So it was great to see Alf and note the edition’s success. But it was also fascinating to hear about his ongoing research and insights into the changing media landscape, both in Canada and internationally. Among the trends Alf and colleagues have noticed recently is that many students no longer arrive harboring ambitions of working for big media players. In part, he feels, this is down the decline of such full-career opportunities. But he also hears from students that they don’t see themselves reflected in the legacy news outlets. Instead it is the small independent players and even solo operations now excite many aspiring journalists more than traditional newsrooms.
Brown university campus in Providence, Rhode Island. Author provided, CC BY
“I have a global cohort of journalism students in class,” said Alf. “Many are driven by a sense of mission, looking to address the way journalism has historically marginalized or mispresented diverse communities. They look to journalism as a way of making the world a better place and are drawn to new journalism start-ups that are looking to reimagine what journalism is and could be.”
Alf views the Conversation as part of this shift in how journalism is done. As I’ve written before, we are sometimes asked if what we do really is journalism. I’ve suggested that it may not matter, so long as our content is valuable, trusted and accessible. Alf goes further though, arguing that the production method deployed by The Conversation and pursuit of informed, evidence-based reporting
that drives it, makes it fundamentally journalism, albeit of a different style to that which typified the newspaper era.
Alf explained: “The scholars who write for The Conversation are taking on journalistic practices, guided and mentored by our team of professional journalists. While the authors are not journalists in the traditional sense, they are producing journalism that seeks to explain and interpret the world around us to help the public lead better lives. This is what journalism is all about.”
As for the route ahead for The Conversation Canada, and the network more broadly, Alf, as you might expect (and hope), grounds some of his thoughts in research. Indeed, in research conducted by one of his graduate journalism students.
Savannah Parsons considered traffic to The Conversation Canada late in 2023 as part of her study, and sought to ascertain what type of content drew readers in, and what kept them there. The picture is of course mixed, but there is a clear pattern that illustrates that expert engagement with news and events is a central factor in bringing readers to the website and our content more broadly. However, Parsons’ study also indicated that content we might traditionally describe as “more featurey”, that is, less tied to events, perhaps more narrative and perhaps even taking the form of audio rather than – or as well as – text, plays a vital role in building a loyal audience that will return to Conversation content, time after time.
So, as was ever the case, there is a mix to be considered. And it will be for edition leads to decide exactly how that mix is deployed, and in what form, to suit individual markets. But it is clear to Alf, and I think to most of us at The Conversation, that news-relevance, timeliness and, of course, research, will be the central factors driving the project through its second decade.
Forgetting is part of our daily lives. You may walk into a room only to forget why you went in there – or perhaps someone says hi on the street and you can’t remember their name.
But why do we forget things? Is it simply a sign of memory impairment, or are there benefits?
One of the earliest findings in this area highlighted that forgetting can occur simply because the average person’s memories fade away. This comes from 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose “forgetting curve” showed how most people forget the details of new information quite rapidly, but this tapers off over time. More recently, this has been replicated by neuroscientists.
Forgetting can also serve functional purposes, however. Our brains are bombarded with information constantly. If we were to remember every detail, it would become increasingly difficult to retain the important information.
One of the ways that we avoid this is by not paying sufficient attention in the first place. Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel, and a host of subsequent research, suggest that memories are formed when the connections (synapses) between the cells in the brain (the neurons) are strengthened.
Paying attention to something can strengthen those connections and sustain that memory. This same mechanism enables us to forget all the irrelevant details that we encounter each day. So although people show increased signs of being distracted as they age, and memory-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease are associated with attention impairments, we all need to be able to forget all the unimportant details in order to create memories.
Handling new information
Recalling a memory can sometimes also lead to it changing for the purposes of coping with new information. Suppose your daily commute involves driving the same route every day. You probably have a strong memory for this route, with the underlying brain connections strengthened by each journey.
But suppose one Monday, one of your usual roads is closed, and there’s a new route for the next three weeks. Your memory for the journey needs to be flexible enough to incorporate this new information. One way in which the brain does this is by weakening some of the memory connections, while strengthening new additional connections to remember the new route.
Ever reach the office and barely even remember driving there? Twinster Photo
Clearly, an inability to update our memories would have significant negative consequences. Consider PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), where an inability to update or forget a traumatic memory means an individual is perpetually triggered by reminders in their environment.
From an evolutionary standpoint, forgetting old memories in response to new information is undoubtedly beneficial. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have repeatedly visited a safe water hole, only to one day discover a rival settlement, or a bear with newborn cubs there. Their brains had to be able to update the memory to label this location as no longer safe. Failure to do so would have been a threat to their survival.
Reactivating memories
Sometimes, forgetting may not be due to memory loss, but to changes in our ability to access memories. Rodent research has demonstrated how forgotten memories can be remembered (or reactivated) by supporting the synaptic connections mentioned above.
Rodents were taught to associate something neutral (like a bell ringing) with something unpleasant (like a mild shock to the foot). After several repetitions, the rodents formed a “fear memory” where hearing the bell made them react as though they expected a shock. The researchers were able to isolate the neuronal connections which were activated by pairing the bell and the shock, in the part of the brain known as the amygdala.
They then wondered if artificially activating these neurons would make the rodents act as if they expected their foot to be shocked even if there was no bell and no shock. They did this using a technique called optogenetic stimulation, which involves using light and genetic engineering, and showed that it was indeed possible to activate (and subsequently inactivate) such memories.
One way that this might be relevant to humans is through a type of transient forgetting which might not be due to memory loss. Return to the earlier example where you see someone in the street and can’t remember their name. Perhaps you believe you know the first letter, and you’ll get the name in a moment. This is known as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
When this was originally studied by American psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeill in the 1960s, they reported that people’s ability to identify aspects of the missing word was better than chance. This suggested that the information was not fully forgotten.
One theory is that the phenomenon occurs as a result of weakened connections in memory between the words and their meanings, reflecting difficulty in remembering the desired information.
However, another possibility is that the phenomenon might serve as a signal to the individual that the information is not forgotten, only currently inaccessible.
This might explain why it occurs more frequently as people age and become more knowledgeable, meaning their brains have to sort through more information to remember something. The tip of the tongue phenomenon might be their brain’s means of letting them know that the desired information is not forgotten, and that perseverance may lead to successful remembering.
In sum, we may forget information for a host of reasons. Because we weren’t paying attention or because information decays over time. We may forget in order to update memories. And sometimes forgotten information is not permanently lost, but rather inaccessible. All these forms of forgetting help our brain to function efficiently, and have supported our survival over many generations.
This is certainly not to minimise the negative outcomes caused by people becoming very forgetful (for example, through Alzheimer’s disease). Nonetheless, forgetting has its evolutionary advantages. We only hope that you’ve found this article sufficiently interesting that you won’t forget its contents in a hurry.
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.
Following a campaign marred by widespread and credible allegations of massive interference by Russia and pro-Russian proxies, Moldova’s incumbent president, Maia Sandu, has won another term in the second round of presidential elections.
According to preliminary results published by the country’s central electoral commission on November 3, Sandu beat her second-round challenger, Alexandr Stoianoglo, with 55% of the vote and on a higher turnout than in the first round of elections on October 20.
There were more than 180,000 votes between the incumbent and her challenger. In a country with an electorate of just over three million people, this is a significant margin, especially when compared with the razor-thin yes vote in the EU referendum that was on the same day as the first round of the presidential election two weeks ago. In that election, Sandu came first with 42%, compared to Staionoglo’s 26%, but in the EU poll, just 10,000 votes separated the yes and the no votes.
Sandu, who campaigned on a strongly pro-European platform, prevailed despite pro-Russian interference and fearmongering and a campaign by Stoianoglo that emphasised the importance of good relations with both Moscow and Brussels.
Moldova’s election result will certainly have come as a relief not only to Sandu and her supporters but also to Moldova’s western partners. It is the first time that a popularly elected president has won a second term in the tiny landlocked former Soviet satellite. The country borders Romania and Ukraine and has a small but significant Russian breakaway region, Transnistria, as a constant reminder of Moscow’s influence in the region.
Moldova’s election presents a clear difference to the Georgian parliamentary election results on October 26, which saw an openly pro-Russian Georgian Dream party win an election considered as neither particularly free nor fair, in results that the Georgia’s opposition-aligned president and western pollsters allege have been rigged.
Sandu’s win, by contrast, demonstrates both the appeal of the idea of a European future and the limits of Russian interference. Yet the understandable enthusiasm about the result in Moldova also needs to be tempered by a more careful analysis of some of the deeply entrenched societal cleavages that the elections have all but confirmed and the difficulties that lie ahead.
Deep divisions
Sandu’s win overall looks impressive. But she did not win the vote in Moldova itself, where Stoianoglo beat her by some 30,000 votes. What saved Sandu, like the EU referendum, was the strong support for her among voters in the diaspora, where she captured almost five times as many votes as Stoianoglo.
Just over 270,000 votes (83%) of the votes cast by Moldovans living abroad, predominantly in western Europe and north America, saw her comfortably across the finishing line. There may be good reasons not to distinguish between votes from inside and outside Moldova – but the optics are not good.
Nor can the overall margin of Sandu’s victory gloss over the fact that her supporters inside the country are predominantly concentrated in the capital and the centre of the country. In the capital Chisinau, in the centre of Moldova, Sandu won with 57%, representing almost one-third of her total vote inside the country. In the north and south of the country, Stoianoglo generally took the largest vote share.
In the country’s second-largest city, Balti in the north, he won 70% of the vote, compared to Sandu’s 30%. In the southern autonomous region of Gagauzia, a hotbed of pro-Russian, anti-European activism, Sandu obtained less than 3%. In Transnistria, Sandu came away with just 20% of the vote.
Map of Moldova showing the breakaway regions of Transnistria and Gaugazia. Institute for the Study of War
These results are not surprising, given the outcome of the first round of the elections. But they represent fall in support for Sandu compared to in 2020, when she beat the then incumbent, socialist party leader Igor Dodon. Four years ago, Sandu obtained over 250,000 votes more than Dodon, winning almost 58% of the total vote. While she took the overwhelming share of the diaspora vote then as well, she also bested Dodon in most constituencies in the south.
Dodon campaigned for Stoianoglo in this election, but much of the challenger’s support was very probably due to a massive pro-Russian interference campaign that capitalised on many Moldovans’ fears and frustrations. Pro-Moscow messages aimed to capitalise on fears about being dragged into Russia’s war against Ukraine.
But there was also frustration with a government that has made little progress on much needed anti-corruption reforms and presided over a serious cost-of-living crisis in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and made worse by the war on Moldova’s eastern neighbour. Sandu’s party, the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) won a commanding majority in the 2021 elections – so failures of the government are seen as failures of Sandu and her agenda.
Challenges ahead
That Sandu won the presidency again, and against these odds, demonstrates her resilience. But it can’t be taken for granted that her party will similarly prevail in parliamentary elections due by the autumn of 2025. She may well be forced into a difficult cohabitation with a potentially socialist-led government next year. In a parliamentary democracy, in which the powers of the government by far exceed those of the president, this could significantly slow down Moldova’s EU accession negotiations.
But there are also some silver linings on the horizon. That Sandu won clearly demonstrates the limits of Russian interference. There is a core part of the Moldovan electorate that cannot be swayed by Russian misinformation or vote buying. This is a basis on which Sandu and PAS can build.
Perhaps more importantly, Sandu and Stoianoglo both sent conciliatory signals on election eve. Stoianoglo emphasised the importance of respecting the outcome of the democratic process and expressed the hope that Moldovans would now move beyond hatred and division. Sandu acknowledged the concerns of those who had not voted for her and promised to serve as the president of all Moldovans and to work for the country’s further development.
If they both stay true to their word, Moldova may finally break with a past of repeated political crises and economic stagnation.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
The Fortune-Teller by Caravaggio (1595-8).Louvre Museum
In the late 1740s, Samuel Meadwell arrived in London. A “raw country fellow” from Northamptonshire, he had come to work as a distiller’s apprentice and hoped to make his fortune.
When a pair of women told him there was “something very particular in [his] face”, he was intrigued. They introduced him to a widow called Mary Smith, who allegedly practised “the art of astrology, before very great people, princes, and the like”. She persuaded Meadwell to wrap all his money in a handkerchief with two peppercorns, some salt and a little mould. After waiting three hours, she explained, he would discover a great fortune.
Meadwell discovered only that his money had been replaced with scraps of metal. Smith was deported for fraud, while Meadwell learned a lesson about city life. He bemoaned his naivety – but he was not alone in believing in the power of astrologers, or the potential for magical methods to reveal weighty secrets.
In early modern Britain (1500-1750), divination was widespread. People consulted diviners to find stolen goods, learn about the next harvest, or scrutinise their marriage fortunes. Sometimes they wanted to know what diseases or disasters loomed, and several nobles exhibited an unwholesome interest in the monarch’s date of demise.
The sex of unborn children was another topic of speculation: when Anne Boleyn gave birth to the future Elizabeth I in 1533, she disappointed not only Henry VIII, but also a whole host of “astrologers, sorcerers, and sorceresses” who had assured the couple that a male heir was forthcoming.
Diviners came from across the social spectrum. Learned astrologers could command audiences with kings and queens. Most people, however, relied on the services of a local cunning-man or woman.
There were also so-called “Egyptian” fortunetellers who roamed the country reading palms. These travellers probably did not have African origins. A hostile 1673 work claimed that they were “great pretenders” who sought to dupe “the ignorant” by associating themselves with Egyptians, “a people heretofore very famous for astronomy, natural magic, [and] the art of divination”.
The authorities did not approve. In 1530, an act passed by Henry VIII’s parliament sought to expel “Egyptians” from the country, complaining that they conned people using “great, subtle, and crafty means” such as fortunetelling.
Underpinning many divinatory methods was the belief that God’s divine plan was encoded in the patterns of the natural world. Palmistry relied on interpreting the marks God had traced on the body. Astrologers, meanwhile, focused on the movements of the planets.
Between 1658 and 1664, a woman called Sarah Jinner published almanacks containing astrological readings for the forthcoming year. She ranged from predicting “desperate and unreconciliable wars” to cautioning women that: “We find Mercury in Pisces retrograde in the 6th House, [which] denoteth that servants will generally be cross, vexatious, and intolerable, especially maidservants.”
Meeting a Swine. From Dr Solman’s translation of Aristotle’s Golden Cabinet of Secrets (c. 1690).
The behaviour of animals was also considered portentous. A pamphlet from circa 1690 declared that “to meet a swine the first thing in a morning, carrying straw in its mouth, denotes a maid, or widow, shall soon be married, and very fruitful in children”. On the other hand, magpies flying around you signified “much strife and brawling in marriage”.
When a great murmuration of starlings was spied battling in the air above Cork in 1621, people whispered that it signified divine anger. Eight months later the city was devastated by a fire.
Other divination practices relied on chance. Cheap pamphlets outlined ways of divining with dice, the idea being that God determined the outcome. Another practice was to open a Bible randomly and consult the first passage that caught the eye. Bibles could alternatively be used to catch thieves. The usual method was to insert a key into the Bible, recite the names of the suspects, and wait for the Bible or the key to move.
A similar technique involved suspending a sieve from a pair of shears. The sieve would rotate when a thief’s name was mentioned.
Divination and the authorities
These practices were viewed with suspicion by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, especially after the 16th-century Reformation.
Divination by the sieve and shears in Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia (1567). Opera Omnia
Most dangerous of all was divination by consulting spirits. The Scottish cunning-man Andrew Man claimed to have an angelic adviser, Christsonday, who told him whether upcoming years would be good or bad. He was also in a sexual relationship with the Fairy Queen, who had promised to teach him to “know all things”. Leading local figures concluded that Man had really been cavorting with devils. He was tried for witchcraft, and executed in 1598.
In general, however, cunning-folk enjoyed good standing within their communities. Currents of scepticism flowed faster during the 18th-century Enlightenment. A 1762 work expressed a common view when it blamed belief in divination on the “ignorance and darkness” that “covered the minds of mankind”. But divinatory practices were themselves a quest for enlightenment, and the prospect of unravelling the mysteries of the future has remained compelling up to the present day.
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Martha McGill receives funding from the British Academy.
Increasing rights for Indigenous people and local communities was one of the few steps forward at Cop16. Philipp Montenegro, CC BY-NC-ND
Progress at the UN’s biodiversity summit, Cop16, in Cali, Columbia, has been slow. Frustratingly so.
There were high hopes that the Colombian hosts could coordinate action between developed and developing countries towards reaching the landmark global biodiversity agreement reached in Montreal, Canada at Cop15 two years ago. But after two weeks and one long night, negotiations ended abruptly. Many delegates had to leave to catch flights home with key issues unresolved.
This conference started with alarming news that the latest edition of the red list – the official record of threatened species – shows that more than one third of tree species face extinction in the wild. That’s more than the number of threatened birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians combined.
Urging negotiators to recognise the seriousness of this nature crisis, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro warned they were facing “the battle for life”.
There was certainly no shortage of people seeking solutions.
In the heart of the city, Cop16’s green zone hosted vibrant music, film screenings, indigenous arts and crafts. Local people, businesses and conference delegates discussed creative and collaborative ways to address the nature crisis.
Over in the blue zone, the official conference space, there was a notable increase in the diversity of communities participating across side events and pavilions. The links between biodiversity and human health were highlighted. So too was the importance of nature for water and food security.
In his opening video message, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged countries gathered to “engage all of society” as “la Cop de la gente” (a Cop of the people).
So protests from Indigenous people and local communities were particularly powerful. Including greater recognition for these groups in the final decisions from the meeting was a rare sign of progress. A new fund to ensure that these groups would receive a share of the profits from the commercial use of digital sequence information – genetic information from native plants and animals – was another victory.
A new set of principles developed by the UK government to prioritise gender issues in conservation and ensure fair access to the benefits biodiversity action for all marginalised groups received widespread support.
The focus on economic resilience was more prominent than ever, with two days dedicated to business and finance. In 2018, only 300 businesses attended Cop14 in Egypt. In Cali, this number was 3,000.
Delegates assemble for the negotiations at Cop16. Philipp Montenegro, CC BY-NC-ND
Private investors, pension funds, the insurance industry and public banks stressed the importance of creating robust measures of biodiversity improvement. Business sectors focused on transition plans that could support fair and transparent means of reporting progress. The nature tech sector is growing too, with start-ups expected to attract up to $2 billion (£1.5 billion) in investments by the end of 2024.
Back in the negotiating halls, delegates faced an uphill struggle. Only 44 out of 196 national plans to protect biodiversity have been updated to reflect the new targets. So, it’s no surprise that a gap is widening between current reality and the ambitious set of 23 targets which governments must reach by 2030. While countries agreed to a progress review in 2026, no consensus was reached on the indicators to be used. Progress was painfully slow.
Negotiators debated how the global agreement on biodiversity should interact with its sister conventions on climate and desertification. Further discussions next year might identify how this could work but this probably won’t lead to drastic change. Some countries, including India and Russia, still seemed unwilling to accept the critical risks posed to nature and society of exceeding the 1.5°C global target for climate change.
Many developing nations were concerned that greater integration between the climate crisis and biodiversity would lead to “double counting” of funding with the danger that developed countries could backtrack on their promises to support dedicated action on nature. Others, including the EU, argued that action to conserve and restore nature was an essential part of tackling all environmental and societal global challenges.
The deadlock between these positions continued for days. In the final hours of Cop16, negotiators reached a compromise that sets out a more integrated pathway for bringing action on climate and nature together. While the effects of climate change directly exacerbate biodiversity loss, restoring nature can be a powerful tool in the fight to mitigate the climate crisis and benefit biodiversity. Nature-based solutions – measures like restoring peatlands and wetlands, planting trees and mangroves – help build that resilience.
Heads of state and ministers joining at the midpoint of the meeting pointed out the need to ensure that nature is protected both for its own sake and for the communities that depend on healthy ecosystems for their livelihood and wellbeing.
But at the end of a long final night, these words were not accompanied by concrete plans for action or the financial commitments about how nature protection should be paid for that many at Cop16 were hoping for.
Whole of society, all of government?
The global biodiversity agreement set in 2022 called for a whole of society approach to address the nature crisis. Cop16 certainly delivered. From local communities to huge businesses, there was a spirit of rolling up sleeves and putting investment and innovation to work using nature-based solutions to restore and conserve biodiversity.
One of many packed side-events which bought the ‘whole of society’ together at Cop16. Philipp Montenegro, CC BY-NC-ND
The same energy and commitment was clear from many of the local and sub-national governments assembled at Cop16. The first gathering of Mayors for Nature demonstrated significant commitment to action.
Leaders from California and Quebec set the tone by investing in large-scale programmes, with Quebec not only committing to fund their own biodiversity action but also contributing to the global biodiversity fund – the first regional government to do so.
But national governments struggled to move forward. The complexity of addressing biodiversity and its necessary interactions with sectors such as agriculture, transport and mining, as well as concerns over historic injustices between developing and developed countries, was perhaps too much for Cop16 to resolve.
The risk is that, as governments navigate these challenges, the private sector could accelerate action without scrutiny. I worry that the lack of policy coordination could deter investors and slow the pace of action that local communities and regional governments want to make. Rather than waiting for global consensus, groups can catalyse change while holding each other accountable to make swift progress to save nature.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Harriet Bulkeley receives funding from the European Commission and currently serves as an advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vanessa Newby, Assistant Professor, Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University
After a month of heavy bombardment, and despite continuing its military campaign and clearing border villages in south Lebanon, Israel is reportedly indirectly negotiating a peace deal with Hezbollah leaders. The terms of a ceasefire require the full implementation of UN resolution 1701, with a presence of around 10,000 Lebanese armed forces (LAF) soldiers stationed along the “blue line” which divides Israel from Lebanon and the Golan Heights. But making 1701 work has always proved a challenge.
There can be no doubt that since its inception in 2006, resolution 1701 has never been fully implemented in south Lebanon. Adopted unanimously in 2006, the purpose of the resolution was to end hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, with the UN security council calling for a permanent ceasefire.
A key objective of 1701 is to ensure the area south of the Litani River in south Lebanon is free from any weapons other than those of the Lebanese state and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil)
It is on this issue that Unifil has received the most opprobrium. International observers and politicians have criticised Unifil’s inability to locate and remove Hezbollah’s weapons. The IDF blames Unifil for failing to prevent the rearmament of Hezbollah and for allegedly not doing enough to prevent Hezbollah attacks on Israel.
But the question of why resolution 1701 was not fully implemented is not a simple one. Multiple actors are involved, of which one key player is the LAF. A large part of fulfilling resolution 1701 means ensuring that LAF are deployed in southern Lebanon as the only legitimate provider of force representing the Lebanese government. Understanding their role and the constraints they face is an important part of the puzzle.
Prior to the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, south Lebanon was sparsely populated and regarded as strategically unimportant. When civil war broke out, political and operational factors meant the LAF could not deploy to the south.
These factors included the defection of LAF officers to sectarian militia and a lack of sufficient resources. The influence of neighbouring Syria and the heavy presence of militia groups, plus the occupation of the “zone of security” in south Lebanon by the IDF and its proxy militia the South Lebanon Army complicated matters.
After the 2006 war, LAF became an important official party to resolution 1701 and Unifil worked closely with them to fulfil three main objectives: first, to assist with their re-introduction into the area of operations; second, to improve their operational capabilities; and third, to seek international funding for the LAF to improve their technical capabilities.
Hunting for Hezbollah
Unifil is mandated to assist LAF in taking steps towards the establishment of an area free from armed personnel between the blue line and the Litani River.
Map of sourthern Lebanon showing the blue line which covers the Lebanese-Israeli border and extends to cover the Lebanese-Golan Heights border. Striving2767, CC BY-NC-SA
Until recently LAF and Unifil often conducted joint patrols to search for unexploded ordinance and unauthorised weapons. If Unifil independently discovered an illegal weapons cache, it would notify the LAF, which handled the weapons’ recovery.
This approach helped Unifil sidestep confrontations with the local population, on whose support they depend to patrol safely and execute the mandate. But while this policy was supportive of the goals of 1701, ultimately it proved ineffective.
There were a number of reasons for this. First, the LAF faces legal restrictions on entering private property. If it suspects illegal weapons are stored on private land, the LAF needs a court order to enter the property. This takes time, which gives the owner of the property the opportunity to remove the weapons. To fully implement 1701, this legal barrier would need to be removed.
The LAF also has to walk a political tightrope between different political factions in Beirut, and is also sensitive to the need for local support in the south. While LAF is undoubtedly popular in Lebanon, many in the south are Shia Muslims with strong loyalties to Hezbollah and the Amal movement (a Shia militia which now operates as a political party in Lebanon). These groups offer both a degree of security and material help in the form of social services.
While conducting field research in southern Lebanon from 2012 to 2018, I discovered that civilians in the region understand that it is difficult for LAF to hunt aggressively for weapons. This is because they need to retain a working relationship with Hezbollah which – with its allies – constitutes the political majority in Beirut. Ridding south Lebanon of Hezbollah weapons will require political cover from Beirut.
Another problem the LAF has faced is getting hold of modern weaponry due to Israeli opposition, despite the LAF enjoying strong international support. Israel’s “qualitative military edge” strategy, supported by the US, means that it campaigns internationally against any of its border states obtaining weapons deemed to pose a threat to its security. This has on occasion prevented LAF from accepting essential defensive equipment, such as armoured vehicles and air defence systems, from its European friends.
Preventing LAF from getting defensive equipment contradicts the EU and US stated goal of strengthening LAF. It also supports Hezbollah’s claim that it can only hand over national security to LAF when it is properly equipped to defend Lebanon. A civilian I interviewed in south Lebanon in 2013 summed up the paradox: “We would prefer that the international community made a decision to allow the military to be armed properly, and then we don’t need the resistance.”
Ultimately the political and legal tightrope the LAF walks in Lebanon is deeply implicated in why resolution 1701 has never been fully implemented. Neither a national army nor a peacekeeping force are capable of enforcing a Hezbollah withdrawal in the absence of political and legal agreement in Beirut, or local support in south Lebanon.
Any calls for the full implementation of 1701 will require the unqualified support of all parties to 1701. This is not just those involved in the conflict – Israel, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government – but also various international stakeholders including the US, EU and all countries with UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. It will be a delicate balance.
Vanessa Newby 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.
To say that Paddington Bear is a beloved British icon would be something of an understatement. The Peruvian bear, who arrived at Paddington station with nothing but his suitcase, a love of marmalade sandwiches and a luggage tag reading “please look after this bear”, was created by Michael Bond in the 1958 classic A Bear Called Paddington.
Bond went on to write 29 Paddington books, and the bear has appeared in TV adaptations for nearly 50 years. The 2014 Paddington film was launched to much acclaim, leading to a sequel in 2017. Paddington even appeared with Queen Elizabeth II during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022, cementing his status as a quintessential symbol of British identity.
In the third film, premiering November 8, Paddington will visit Peru in search of his dear Aunt Lucy. As part of the marketing campaign for the new film, the UK Home Office has granted Paddington his own British passport.
What can Paddington Bear’s citizenship journey teach our leaders?
Join The Conversation UK and migration experts in London on November 16 for a screening of Paddington Peru and a discussion on migration, citizenship and belonging.
“We wrote to the Home Office asking if we could get a replica, and they actually issued Paddington with an official passport,” one of the film’s producers said. “You wouldn’t think the Home Office would have a sense of humour, but under official observations, they’ve listed him as Bear.”
Arriving from Peru in need of help, Paddington is often afforded the status of refugee-in-chief – even immortalised in Banksy artwork. Bond was inspired by Jewish refugees arriving in the UK from Europe during the second world war when he created the character.
In being granted British citizenship, Paddington has fared far better than most people arriving in the UK in need of help. Under the current system, asylum seekers must navigate a complex process, often over many years, in which they are disbelieved, excluded and stigmatised. A third of all people seeking asylum in the UK are refused at their initial application.
Should they manage to be granted refugee status, after five years they may apply for indefinite leave to remain. Should that be granted, after another year they may apply for citizenship status. For this to be granted, the applicant must be able to prove language skills, have passed the “life in the UK” test and be shown to be of “good character”.
Giving Paddington a passport is an unsettling display of double standards from the same Home Office that has overseen the hostile environment and other harsh asylum policies. The Home Office has made conditions in the UK as difficult as possible for people settling from overseas and has subjected people arriving in the UK to seek asylum – much like Paddington – to delays, detention, destitution and deportation.
In its treatment of the Windrush generation, the Home Office has deported people who have legally lived and worked all their lives in the UK – and has failed to compensate victims. For the Home Office then to issue a passport to a fictional character as a publicity stunt is, to put it mildly, problematic.
At the same time, the whole episode is a very clear reflection of how access to British citizenship really works. Access to British citizenship for people arriving in need of safety depends on proving yourself to be deserving of refugee status, and then of citizenship status.
Research has shown that people tend to see child refugees (like those who inspired Bond to create Paddington) as the most deserving of help. Paddington has also shown himself to integrate into the British way of life, sipping tea and eating marmalade sandwiches in a cosy duffel coat and wellies.
This supposedly deserving refugee contrasts against those seen as undeserving – most often men of colour who are seen as “invading” in “swarms”. Until recently, anyone who arrived in the UK on a boat (as Paddington did) to claim asylum would be at risk of being sent to Rwanda to have their claims processed. Keir Starmer has indicated his openness to similar offshoring deals.
The stunt also highlights how valuable a commodity British citizenship has become. While people from the Windrush generation and their descendants worked and paid taxes in the UK all their lives, only to be told that they weren’t really British, citizenship is far easier to acquire for those on investor visas, which require a £2 million investment in the UK.
The citizenship acquisition process itself is also expensive, costing upwards of £5,000 per application. While most refugees will struggle to get British citizenship, for Paddington it came relatively easily as an investment in the UK film industry.
I won’t begrudge Paddington his passport. He’s waited long enough for the security and stability of a status denied to so many non-citizens around the world. However, this stunt has highlighted both the double standards of a hostile Home Office attempting to create the illusion of benevolence, and the realities of a citizenship acquisition process which continually fails the vulnerable.
Katie Tonkiss receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
Traditionally, Britain was regarded as the class society. And class was pre-eminent among the factors used to explain political party allegiance. In broad terms, working-class voters chose Labour, the party set up to represent them. Middle-class voters chose the Conservatives, the party that represented homeowners and business owners.
Since the 1960s, there has been a decline in class-based voting. Our social background is no longer such a good predictor of our party.
That may be because there are more parties to choose from, or because the big two have changed their offering to appeal to a wider audience, but it’s also about class-based abstention. In the 1960s, most working-class people voted in elections, and when they did so they tended to vote for Labour. Now, many more working-class people do not vote at all. And when they do, they are less drawn to any party in particular.
Class differences with respect to turnout have thus become greater than class differences with respect to vote choice. Or put another way, class is now more important as a participatory divide than it is as a partisan divide.
According to the long-running British Election Study (BES), the difference in reported turnout between people with working-class occupations and middle-class occupations was less than 5 percentage points in 1964. In 2024, it was 16 percentage points.
Put into context, the difference in reported turnout between the under-30s and the over-60s in 2024 was 20 percentage points. This age gap is the subject of great concern and much discussion. We worry a lot about why young people are not voting. Numerous initiatives have been launched to try and get young people more involved in politics. Yet the class gap, of a very similar magnitude, has received almost no attention at all.
BES data over the years shows us that the working class has generally been somewhat less likely to vote than the middle class. But from 1964 to 2001, the difference in turnout rates was fairly modest. Turnout bumped along, up and down, but the relative difference did not change much, and turnout among both groups tended to increase and decrease in tandem.
However, since 2001, the turnout patterns between the two classes have sharply diverged. In the election of 2001, overall turnout was the lowest since 2018 at just 59.4%. The middle-class vote bounced back after that nadir but the working-class vote did not, remaining instead at historically low levels. Before 2001, the average class gap in turnout was 6 percentage points. So today’s 16 percentage-point gap is nearly three times greater than the pre-2001 level.
The widening class gap in turnout, 1964-2024:
The chart below shows how the size of this class gap on turnout compares with the size of the class gap on support for Labour, the party which was originally founded to represent working-class interests.
In 1964, among people with working-class occupations, 11% did not vote, 55% voted for Labour, and the remaining 34% voted for the Conservatives or another party. Among people with middle-class occupations, 7% did not vote, just 18% voted for Labour, and the remaining 75% voted for the Conservatives or another party. The class gap on turnout was therefore just 5 percentage points, compared with the class gap on Labour support of 37 percentage points.
The class gap in turnout has overtaken the class gap in support for Labour, 1964-2024:
Over time, Labour has become a less distinctively working-class party. This has particularly been the case since the New Labour period, when Tony Blair famously rebranded the party to project a more middle-class image.
The result has been that the size of the class gap on Labour support has declined, while the size of the class gap on turnout has increased – to the point in the early 2000s where class differences on turnout overtook class differences on support for Labour.
These findings have important implications. There is a widespread belief that class has become less important in British politics, and so does not merit as much attention as it once did. This belief is false.
While it is certainly true that class divisions are not as evident as they once were in terms of structuring vote choice, this is because class has been pushed outside the political system. Whereas previously the middle class and working class were divided on who to vote for, now they are divided on whether to bother voting at all.
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.
The neglect of working-class voters in the past few decades has had profound consequences for British political life. Disillusioned with the two main parties, many have turned to Nigel Farage’s Reform and others are simply not voting at all.
With the next election likely to be a tight race in many key constituencies, something must be done to win these voters back.
But as we find out in the fifth and final part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, the relationship between class and voting could be about to become even more complicated. So it’s difficult for any party to know how to put an electoral coalition together.
Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, has identified what she calls cross-pressured voters as a key demographic in post-Brexit British politics. These are people who are probably economically left wing – they want better public services and wealth redistribution – but who are more right wing on social issues such as immigration and crime and punishment.
In a system like we have in Britain, where we’ve got first past the post and two big parties to choose from, that creates lots of swing voters who, when economics is their priority as we saw in 2024, they might lean more to Labour. When immigration or Brexit or something along that dimension is their priority, they might lean towards the Conservatives or a party like Reform.
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Appealing to such voters is therefore a real challenge. And while the perception is that they’ve flocked to Farage, Surridge says that’s not the full picture at all.
Many working-class voters were prioritising economic issues, public services. They don’t, on the whole, vote Reform for that reason. The voters for whom immigration was absolutely their most important issue, which are a much smaller group, they were very likely to vote Reform.
Reform came second in 98 constituencies – 89 of which ended up going to Labour. A lot of those constituencies were won on wafer-thin majorities, and they should be considered highly at risk in the next election. So working out how to appeal to cross-pressured voters is key.
The bigger challenge, however, is winning voters back from the sofa. The truth is that there is a more salient class divide in Britain: who actually votes at all.
According to Oliver Heath, professor of politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has tracked the history of turnout and class over the past 20 years, working-class voters are staying away from the ballot box. The first real signs of this were in 2001, when Tony Blair won a second term with a turnout of 59%, one of the lowest in British history.
2001 was when turnout fell off a cliff … and it dropped across all segments of society. But since then, turnout has rebounded quite a large extent amongst middle-class voters, but stayed very low amongst working class voters.
For decades working-class communities were assumed to vote Labour, and so Labour gave them relatively little political attention. Now, the tables have turned and its Labour constituencies in the Red Wall that are some of the most competitive in the country. But it won’t be easy for Labour to bring these voters back on side, says Heath.
Even after the great implosion of the Conservatives, the votes haven’t gone back to Labour. So, it’s hard to rebuild those connections once they’ve come undone.
Meanwhile, Rosie Campbell, professor of politics at King’s College London, warns that we can’t presume to know what middle-class voters will do either.
The backlash of the middle class in some areas against the Conservatives in what you would expect to be traditional Conservative heartlands is really interesting. And I think what it’s showing is that social change and demographic change are shifting our political landscape.
Pay attention to the middle-class vote in the next election. Shutterstock/William Barton
All this means that British politics is more fractured than ever, according to John Curtice, senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research.
It looks as though our politics isn’t two-party politics now, and it’s never looked less like two-party politics at any stage since 1945 … therefore there are many potential options as to how things might play out.
One of those options is a radical disruption to the class system itself, potentially triggered by artificial intelligence. A question that Curtice is asking himself:
Will class inequality still be articulated through the difference between people in working-class jobs and those in middle-class jobs, or those people who are very much at the creative end of middle-class jobs, who AI are probably not going to be able to replace, and those who are not quite in the same position?
In other words, AI has the potential to split the middle class and redefine the entire occupational structure of the UK. What will that do to our political preferences? It’s all to play for.
For more analysis on what else could shape the way class and politics interact in the future, listen to the full episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics on The Conversation Documentaries.
A transcript is available on Apple Podcasts.
Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics is produced and mixed by Anouk Millet for The Conversation. It’s supported by the National Centre for Social Research.
Listen to The Conversation Documentaries via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.
Rosie Campbell receives funding from the ESRC, the UKRI andThe Leverhulme Trust. John Curtice receives funding from UKRI-ESRC. Vladimir Bortun, Geoffrey Evans, Paula Surridge and Oliver Heath 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Griffiths, Director of the International Gaming Research Unit and Professor of Behavioural Addiction, Nottingham Trent University
Hollywood actor Armie Hammer was accused of sending messages detailing cannibalistic fantasies in 2021.DFree/Shutterstock
After allegedly sending messages detailing cannibalistic fetishes, Hollywood actor Armie Hammer hopes to relaunch his career with a new podcastand movie.
Now, it seems, Hammer is laughing off the cannibalism allegations. Speaking to his first podcast guest, Tom Arnold, Hammer says, “I’m not gonna lie. I’m just like, Hey, I’m a cannibal!”
But being sexually aroused by the fantasy – or reality – of cannibalism is real. I should know, as it’s one of the subjects I discuss in my latest book Sexual Perversions and Paraphilias: An A-Z
Paraphilias are uncommon types of sexual expression often described as sexual deviations, sexual perversions or disorders of sexual preference.
They are typically accompanied by intense sexual arousal to unconventional or non-sexual stimuli such as enemas (klismaphilia), statues (agalmatophilia), teeth (odontophilia) and vomit (emetophilia).
To many people paraphilias may seem bizarre or socially unacceptable, representing the extreme end of the sexual continuum – and in some cases, such as zoophilia (having sex with animals) and necrophilia (having sex with dead people), may be illegal.
Paraphilias may be laughed off, dismissed or leave some people disgusted, but there’s a pressing need for more research into uncommon sexual behaviour given how little we know.
Sexual fantasies and behaviour are a fundamental part of the human experience. What is considered immoral or even illegal changes according to the social and temporal context. But whatever sexual desires are considered illicit or depraved in a particular time and place are also stigmatised.
Researching paraphilias, even the most distasteful or criminal, is essential to help safeguard vulnerable groups. Research can also help minimise the discrimination faced by those with uncommon sexual interests, helping ensure their access to sexual health care and psychological support, which can be lacking.
Vorarephilia
Vorarephilia – or “vore” – refers to being sexually aroused by the idea of being eaten, eating another person or observing this process for sexual gratification.
Most of the fantasies of vorarephiliacs involve being the ones eaten. Devouring someone could be viewed as the ultimate act of dominance by a predator and the ultimate act of submission by the prey.
The most infamous vorarephiliac is arguably Armin Meiwes from Germany.
Meiwes had allegedly been fantasising about cannibalism since his childhood and frequented cannibal fetish websites. He posted around 60 online adverts asking if anyone would like to be eaten by him.
In March 2002, Bernd Jürgen Brandes responded to Meiwes. They met up only once. Meiwes bit off Brandes’ penis, which the two of them cooked and ate.
Brandes was videotaped being stabbed to death by Meiwes in his bath. The body was then stored for Meiwes to eat.
Meiwes was eventually convicted of murder and imprisoned for life. However, it’s worth nothing that although some paraphilias are illegal, most cause no psychological or behavioural problems when they are engaged by consenting adults.
Dacryphilia
Dacryphilia is getting sexual arousal from seeing someone cry.
It showed there were sub-types of dacryphilia, even among such a small group. Based on the interviews, I identified three types of dacryphile.
Compassionate dacryphiles are sexually aroused by the compassion of comforting a crier.
Dominant or submissive dacryphiles are sexually aroused by either causing tears in a consenting submissive partner or by being made to cry by a consenting dominant partner.
“Curled lip” dacryphiles are sexually aroused by the curling of a protruded bottom lip during crying.
Eproctophilia
Eproctophilia involves being sexually aroused by flatulence.
In 2013, I published the first case study of an eproctophile. The case concerned a 22-year-old single man, Brad*, an American from Illinois.
Brad recalled that in middle school he had a crush on a girl who had farted in the class. Brad said:
This blew my mind [I] knew by simple biology that girls farted, but hearing that the girl I had been fawning over was capable of such a thing sparked a strange interest in me.
Brad first engaged in an eproctophilic act with a male friend in his mid-teens. Up to that point he had considered himself heterosexual. However, this changed when he heard his male friend fart.
Brad said it was “appealing in sound” and that he began fixating on it. He set up a bet with the wager being the right to fart in the loser’s face for a week. He continued to lose such bets once every few weeks for about two years.
Apotemnophilia
Apotemnophilia refers to being sexually aroused by the fantasy or reality of being an amputee.
Some apotemnophiles may pretend to be amputees but, for a minority, the behaviour involves obsessive scheming to convince a surgeon to perform a medically unnecessary amputation.
To most people, this might seem like a type of masochism, but case studies suggest that there is no erotisation of pain – only of the healed amputated stump.
Salirophilia
Salirophilia is sexual arousal from soiling or dishevelling someone attractive, which can include tearing or damaging the desired person’s clothing, covering them in mud or filth or messing up their hair or make-up.
My 2019 case study involved Jeff*, a 58-year-old Australian heterosexual. Jeff recounted that when he was young he wanted to masturbate in strange places such as lying under a cabinet in a dirty garage.
Jeff said that he engaged in solitary salirophilic practices regularly but very infrequently with female partners because it was difficult to find like-minded women.
He was also a fan of the television show Fear Factor in which contestants perform revolting tasks for prize money, such as eating rotting food or being submerged in foul fluids. These were a source of sexual arousal for Jeff. He told me: “I just find the defilement of an attractive woman’s body erotic.”
*The names of case study participants in this article have been changed.
Dr. Mark Griffiths has received research funding from a wide range of organizations including the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. He has also carried out consultancy for numerous gambling companies in the area of player protection, social responsibility and responsible gaming.. Views expressed here are his own and not those of these funding bodies.
But I assume the awkwardness in conversations about work is related to stereotypes of hip-hop culture. Among many, one of those assumptions is that hip-hop is only made for and by young people.
It’s no surprise that ageism exists in and about hip-hop culture; in the U.S., ageism is everywhere. But I would argue that ageism in hip-hop is especially strong because the first generation of rappers is only now reaching their golden years.
In response to 9th Wonder, legendary hip-hop artist Q-Tip warned on the social platform X that hip-hop fans might be turned off by a category with “adult” in the name. He suggested “Traditional Hip-Hop” instead, arguing that the music should all appear in “one pot,” lest it turn off younger listeners.
Whether it’s called Adult Contemporary or Traditional Hip-Hop, several hip-hop legends have recently released new music that could fit into this category. In July 2024, the legendary lyricist Rakim, who’s 56 years old, released “G.O.D.’S NETWORK (REB7RTH),” his first album in 15 years. Two months later, 54-year-old MC Lyte released “1 of 1,” her ninth studio album, and 56-year-old LL Cool J released “The Force,” his 14th studio album and his first in 11 years.
Growing pains
Since hip-hop emerged as a cultural force more than 50 years ago, people still seem to pigeonhole rap as music made by and for young people.
And it’s true that in hip-hop’s early days, teenagers were at the forefront of the fledgling movement.
A 1973 back-to-school party organized by a 15-year-old girl from the Bronx named Cindy Campbell is often credited with birthing hip-hop. Grand Wizzard Theodore was just 12 years old when he invented record scratching in 1977. The hip-hop careers of artists like Roxanne Shanté, Run-DMC and Ice Cube all began when they were teens.
Being closely intertwined with the perception of youth culture isn’t necessarily a good thing. It can compel critics to treat the music and its practitioners less seriously.
Rappers, no matter their age, can be dismissed or treated as childish or immature.
Call it growing pains: Unlike, say, classical or country, 50 years is a blip in the history of music. And for much of that time, critics regarded hip-hop as a passing fad. Then it was seen as an emergent subculture.
Nowadays, equating hip-hop with youth culture confines it to an arena it has long outgrown.
Imposter syndrome grows
Nonetheless, as rappers age, some can seem uncomfortable about participating in a form that can be so easily dismissed.
In 2015, filmmaker Paul Iannacchino Jr. released a documentary, “Adult Rappers,” about working-class rap artists.
All the people interviewed for the film rap professionally but aren’t famous. They are mostly men. Most of them admit that they sidestep questions about what they do for a living. One unshakable takeaway is the embarrassment about their age.
Even famous rappers aren’t immune to this feeling. Before his move to instrumental flute music, André 3000, one of the greatest rappers of all time, lamented becoming the old rapper still making music beyond his prime.
“I remember, at like 25, saying, ‘I don’t want to be a 40-year-old rapper,’” he told The New York Times in 2014. “I’m 39 now, and I’m still standing by that. I’m such a fan that I don’t want to infiltrate it with old blood.”
André 3000 has been a gifted lyricist for decades, and remains so. If he feels this way, I can imagine that many other artists might feel that, at a certain age, they don’t belong to the culture anymore.
Despite the fact that audiences have aged alongside the artists, it can still feel like there’s pressure to stay tapped in to youth culture, lest they create music that, to quote André 3000 more recently, lacks “fresh ingredients.”
This might encourage some aging artists to attempt to maintain a youthful sheen that will resonate with young audiences. Think of it as a pop culture version of Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
In the novel, a man sells his soul for youth. Rather than physically aging, a painting of him ages instead, taking on the physical signs of his transgressions and pleasures.
It’s still easy to think of hip-hop as confined to a frame that bears all the marks of youthful longings, rebellion and sins: juvenile vitality, sprightly beauty and vigorous hedonism.
The expectations lead audiences to assume all artists have similar youthful aims and concerns. They can also lead artists to perform like they’re young and write about the concerns they had as youngsters, despite their respective ages. The hip-hop artists who can’t or choose not to pretend to be “forever young” are expected to “evolve” into moguls, actors, podcasters or reality TV personalities.
Of course, those assumptions only end up limiting what artists of all ages can accomplish.
Rappers at whatever level of celebrity you observe, famous and not famous, continue to create while embracing the inevitability of age. Nas, whose debut album, “Illmatic,” was released in 1994, has had an outstanding run of albums in the 2020s.
Jay-Z’s “4:44” showcased the rapper’s changing sensibilities that have seemingly evolved as he has aged.
North Carolina duo Little Brother’s entire catalog displays awareness of the absurdity of avoiding adulthood – outstandingly so, I might add, on their 2019 album, “May the Lord Watch.”
Even emerging rappers like Conway the Machine and 7xvethegenius seem to be able to balance burgeoning careers without caving to youth-obsessed pretenses.
Creating new, cleverly named musical categories to sidestep biases against aging probably won’t solve the issue. In hip-hop, as in so many American industries, ageism isn’t going away.
But I’d rather have that conversation than pretend I’m something I’m not.
A.D. Carson 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.
Partisan squabbling isn’t just annoying – it’s also bad for business.
That’s what my colleagues and I found in a recent study on how uncertainty in environmental policy affects business investment.
First, we analyzed more than 300 million newspaper articles, looking for keywords related to environmental policy uncertainty. We found that this uncertainty spikes around election seasons and has nearly doubled over the past decade.
Then we looked at business investment rates – a common way to gauge a company’s financial health – at companies in affected sectors, such as those in the agriculture, mining, energy and automotive industries. We found that environmental policy uncertainty lowered those companies’ business investment rates by 0.010%.
That might not sound like a lot, but as economists like me know, small sums add up over time.
For example, the rise in environmental policy uncertainty in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election was linked with a one-time drop of the investment rate of 25% for companies affected by environmental policy, we found. This effect was larger than the uncertainty associated with defense, health and finance policy.
But my team also found a silver lining. Policy uncertainty had much less of an effect on business investment when control of Congress was divided and policy changes required bipartisan support, we discovered.
When the same political party controlled both chambers of Congress, environmental policy uncertainty was associated with a 0.013% decrease in investment rates. But when Congress was split, this decrease shrank to a much smaller 0.002%.
Why it matters
Because policy uncertainty tends to spike around elections, our results suggest that the current political environment is creating headwinds for business investment.
Our study also suggests that policies designed to spur business investment may be less effective than previously thought, because of the uncertainty they introduce.
Take, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2021, and the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2022. Both were crafted to encourage investment in clean-energy technologies.
But uncertainty over whether these packages would pass in the first place – and, if so, what these policies would include – may have deterred investment before they went into effect. And uncertainty about what aspects of the laws will continue after the election could also depress business investment.
A degree of uncertainty may be built into the democratic process. After all, the faster and more secretive a government is, the less accountable it is to the public. If you think of it that way, some uncertainty is an unavoidable cost of a healthy policymaking process.
Our study puts a price tag on these costs and reminds policymakers that political infighting is a drag on the economy. Our results do suggest one promising path forward: bipartisanship.
What’s next
Because there’s so much variety in environmental policies, our team is now doing research to see whether businesses respond differently to uncertainty in “carrot” policies – such as subsidies or tax breaks – versus “stick” policies, such as fines or other punishments.
Answering this question will help policymakers minimize the effects of uncertainty.
It’s also an open question whether newspaper articles convey information to business leaders or simply reflect the information they already have. If it’s the latter, media coverage may not be a great measure of the uncertainty businesses face.
To address this concern, we’re working to develop ways to measure uncertainty based on earnings call transcripts instead of newspaper articles. These could be a more direct way to gauge the uncertainties influencing business decisions.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
Charles Sims 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.
Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of crop varieties around the world. This biodiversity protected agriculture from crop losses caused by plant diseases and climate change.
Today, seed banks around the world are doing much of the work of saving crop varieties that could be essential resources under future growing conditions. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway supports them all. It is the world’s most famous backup site for seeds that are more precious than data.
Tens of thousands of new seeds from around the world arrived at the seed vault on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, in mid-October 2024. This was one of the largest deposits in the vault’s 16-year history.
And on Oct. 31, crop scientists Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin, who played key roles in creating the Global Seed Vault, received the US$500,000 World Food Prize, which recognizes work that has helped increase the supply, quality or accessibility of food worldwide.
The Global Seed Vault has been politically controversial since it opened in 2008. It is the most visible site in a global agricultural research network associated with the United Nations and funders such as the World Bank.
These organizations supported the Green Revolution – a concerted effort to introduce high-yielding seeds to developing nations in the mid-20th century. This effort saved millions of people from starvation, but it shifted agriculture in a technology-intensive direction. The Global Seed Vault has become a lightning rod for critiques of that effort and its long-term impacts.
I have visited the vault and am completing a book about connections between scientific research on seeds and ideas about immortality over centuries. My research shows that the Global Seed Vault’s controversies are in part inspired by religious associations that predate it. But these cultural beliefs also remain essential for the vault’s support and influence and thus for its goal of protecting biodiversity.
The Global Seed Vault gives scientists the tools they may need to breed crops that can cope with a changing climate.
Backup for a global network
Several hundred million seeds from thousands of species of agricultural plants live inside the Global Seed Vault. They come from 80 nations and are tucked away in special metallic pouches that keep them dry.
The vault is designed to prolong their dormancy at zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius) in three ice-covered caverns inside a sandstone mountain. The air is so cold inside that when I entered the vault, my eyelashes and the inside of my nose froze.
The Global Seed Vault is owned by Norway and run by the Nordic Genetic Resources Centre. It was created under a U.N. treaty governing over 1,700 seed banks, where seeds are stored away from farms, to serve as what the U.N. calls “the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply.”
This network enables nations, nongovernmental organizations, scientists and farmers to save and exchange seeds for research, breeding and replanting. The vault is the backup collection for all of these seed banks, storing their duplicate seeds at no charge to them.
The seed vault’s cultural meaning
The vault’s Arctic location and striking appearance contribute to both its public appeal and its controversies.
In fact, however, the archipelago of Svalbard has daily flights to other Norwegian cities. Its cosmopolitan capital, Longyearbyen, is home to 2,700 people from 50 countries, drawn by ecotourism and scientific research – hardly a well-hidden site for covert activities.
Because of its mission to preserve seeds through potential disasters, media regularly describe the Global Seed Vault as the “doomsday vault,” or a “modern Noah’s Ark.” Singled out based on its location, appearance and associations with Biblical myths such as the Flood, the Garden of Eden and the apocalypse, the vault has acquired a public meaning unlike that of any other seed bank.
The politics of seed conservation
One consequence is that the vault often serves as a lightning rod for critics who view seed conservation as the latest stage in a long history of Europeans removing natural resources from developing nations. But these critiques don’t really reflect how the Global Seed Vault works.
The vault and its sister seed banks don’t diminish cultivation of seeds grown by farmers in fields. The two methods complement one another, and seed depositors retain ownership of their seeds.
Another misleading criticism argues that storing seeds at Svalbard prevents these plants from adapting to climate change and could render them useless in a warmer future. But storing seeds in a dormant state actually mirrors plants’ own survival strategy.
Dormancy is the mysterious plant behavior that “protects against an unpredictable future,” according to biologist Anthony Trewavas. Plants are experts in coping with climate unpredictability by essentially hibernating.
Seed dormancy allows plants to hedge their bets on the future; the Global Seed Vault extends this state for decades or longer. While varieties in the field may become extinct, their banked seeds live to fight another day.
Storing more than seeds
In 2017, a delegation of Quechua farmers from the Peruvian Andes traveled to Svalbard to deposit seeds of their sacred potato varieties in the vault. In songs and prayers, they said goodbye to the seeds as their “loved ones” and “endangered children.” “We’re not just leaving genes, but also a family,” one farmer told Svalbard officials.
The farmers said the vault would protect what they called their “Indigenous biocultural heritage” – an interweaving of scientific and cultural value, and of plants and people, that for the farmers evoked the sacred.
People from around the world have sought to attach their art to the Global Seed Vault for a similar reason. In 2018, the Svalbard Seed Cultures Ark began depositing artworks that attach stories to seeds in a nearby mine.
Pope Francis sent an envoy with a handmade copy of a book reflecting on the pope’s message of hope to the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Japanese sculptor Mitsuaki Tanabe created a 9-meter-long steel grain of rice for the vault’s opening and was permitted to place a miniature version inside.
Seeds sleeping in Svalbard are far from their home soil, but each one is enveloped in an invisible web of the microbes and fungi that traveled with it. These microbiomes are still interacting with each seed in ways scientists are just beginning to understand.
I see the Global Seed Vault as a lively and fragile place, powered not by money or technology but by the strange power of seeds. The World Food Prize once again highlights their vital promise.
Adriana Craciun 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.
Because there are typically no symptoms until the first fracture occurs, osteoporosis is considered a silent disease. Some call it a silent killer.
Osteoporosis is a bone disease characterized by decreased bone density and strength, leading to fragile, brittle bones that increase the risk of fractures, especially in the spine, hips and wrists.
The reasons for the increase include lifestyle issues, particularly smoking, lack of physical activity and alcohol abuse. Our aging population, along with the insufficient attention paid to this disease, are also why osteoporosis is on the rise.
If you are older, it may be discouraging to read those statistics. But as orthopedic specialistswho have studied this disease, we know that osteoporosis is not inevitable. The key to having healthy bones for a lifetime is to take some simple preventive measures – and the earlier, the better.
Although the symptoms are not obvious early on, certain signs will indicate your bones are becoming weaker. The most serious complications of osteoporosis are fractures, which can lead to chronic pain, hospitalization, disability, depression, reduced quality of life and increased mortality. Worldwide, osteoporosis causes nearly 9 million fractures annually. That’s one osteoporotic fracture every three seconds.
Height loss, back pain
Minor bumps or falls may lead to fractures, especially in the hip, wrist or spine. These types of fractures are often the first sign of the disease.
If you notice that you’re getting shorter, the cause could be compression fractures in the spine; this too is a common symptom of osteoporosis.
Although it’s typical for most people to lose height as they age – about 1 to 1½ inches (2.5 to 3.8 centimeters) over a lifetime – those with osteoporosis who have multiple spinal fractures could lose 2 to 3 inches or more in a relatively rapid time frame.
Curved posture, or noticeable changes in posture, may lead to a hunched back, which could be a sign that your spine is weakening and losing density.
A healthy diet and exercise are two ways to build up bone density.
Calcium and vitamin D
Osteoporosis cannot be completely cured, but certain lifestyle and dietary factors can lower your risk.
Calcium and vitamin D are essential for bone health. Calcium helps maintain strong bones, while vitamin D assists in calcium absorption. Women over age 50 and men over 70 should consume at least 1,200 milligrams of calcium daily from food and, if necessary, supplements.
The easy way to get calcium is through dairy products. Milk, yogurt and cheese are among the richest sources. One cup of milk provides about 300 milligrams of calcium, one-fourth of the daily requirement. If you are vegan, calcium is in many plant-based foods, including soy, beans, peas, lentils, oranges, almonds and dark leafy greens.
Adults should aim for two to three servings of calcium-rich foods daily. Consuming them throughout the day with meals helps improve absorption.
Vitamin D is obtained mostly from supplements and sunlight, which is the easiest way to get the recommended dose. Your body will produce enough vitamin D if you expose your arms, legs and face to direct sunlight for 10 to 30 minutes between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., two to three times a week.
Although it’s best to wear short-sleeve shirts and shorts during this brief period, it’s okay to wear sunglasses and apply sunscreen to your face. Sunlight through a window won’t have the same effect – glass reduces absorption of the UV rays needed for vitamin D production. People with darker skin, or those living in less sunny regions, may need more sunlight to get the same effect.
If a doctor has given you a diagnosis of osteoporosis, it’s possible the calcium and vitamin D that you’re getting through food and sun exposure alone is not enough; you should ask your doctor if you need medication.
Chickpeas, sesame seeds and dark green vegetables, such as kale, arugula and broccoli, are good sources of calcium.
Aim for 30 minutes of weight-bearing exercise at least four days a week, combined with muscle-strengthening exercises at least twice a week.
Particularly for women, who lose bone density during and after menopause, regular exercise is critical. Working out prior to menopause will reduce the risk of osteoporosis in your later years.
Medical imaging such as a bone density scan and spinal X-rays can help confirm osteoporosis and detect compression fractures. These basic tests, combined with age and medical history, are enough to make a clear diagnosis.
Managing osteoporosis is a long-term process that requires ongoing commitment to lifestyle changes. Recognizing the early warning signs and making these proactive lifestyle changes is the first step to prevent the disease and keep your bones healthy.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
My three daughters and I arrived in Michigan from Pakistan in 2000.
Moving here was my choice, and I followed the legal process. Before the move, I had often been to the United States. I was familiar with the culture and spoke fluent English, so I thought I was prepared.
Resuming my career as a physician in the U.S. was arduous, but I finally passed all the qualifying exams and completed a psychiatry residency at Michigan State University in 2006. After finishing my studies, I stayed on as faculty.
Of course, there is nothing new or particularly unique about my family’s experience. Immigration, whether it is out of choice or forced by conflict, has always been part of the American experience. After all, the U.S. Constitution was signed by seven first-generation immigrants.
I teach cultural psychiatry to medical students and residents, specifically how to provide culturally appropriate care to Muslim patients. After more than 20 years in Michigan, I’m deeply rooted in the Muslim and immigrant community, and I’ve seen firsthand how anxious and uncertain my community is about the 2024 presidential election.
In the first half of 2024, the Michigan Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations documented 239 complaints of discrimination against Muslims, an 81% increase over the same period in 2023. In the report, CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid attributed the uptick to “policies of elected officials, rhetoric of candidates running for office, along with victim blaming by some political pundits.”
A key Arab American political action committee based in Michigan refused to endorse either candidate this cycle. Although the PAC typically backs Democrats, this year it said “neither candidate represents our hopes and dreams as Arab Americans.”
In late September, a national group of three dozen Muslim American scholars and imams signed an open letter calling on Muslims not to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
“We want to be absolutely clear,” the letter reads, “don’t stay home and skip voting. This year, make a statement by voting third party for the presidential ticket.”
I know my vote is my voice, and I fully intend to participate in the electoral process. But I can’t trust any of the candidates to create a safe haven for my family – a place where my daughters and I can thrive and live our American dream.
Farha Abassi 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.
Why does Jupiter look like it has a surface – even though it doesn’t have one? – Sejal, age 7, Bangalore, India
The planet Jupiter has no solid ground – no surface, like the grass or dirt you tread here on Earth. There’s nothing to walk on, and no place to land a spaceship.
But how can that be? If Jupiter doesn’t have a surface, what does it have? How can it hold together?
Jupiter’s mass is two-and-a-half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined.
First, some facts
Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, is between Mars and Saturn. It’s the largest planet in the solar system, big enough for more than 1,000 Earths to fit inside, with room to spare.
While the four inner planets of the solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – are all made of solid, rocky material, Jupiter is a gas giant with a composition similar to the Sun; it’s a roiling, stormy, wildly turbulent ball of gas. Some places on Jupiter have winds of more than 400 mph (about 640 kilometers per hour), about three times faster than a Category 5 hurricane on Earth.
Start from the top of Earth’s atmosphere, go down about 60 miles (roughly 100 kilometers), and the air pressure continuously increases. Ultimately you hit Earth’s surface, either land or water.
Compare that with Jupiter: Start near the top of its mostly hydrogen and helium atmosphere, and like on Earth, the pressure increases the deeper you go. But on Jupiter, the pressure is immense.
As the layers of gas above you push down more and more, it’s like being at the bottom of the ocean – but instead of water, you’re surrounded by gas. The pressure becomes so intense that the human body would implode; you would be squashed.
Go down 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers), and the hot, dense gas begins to behave strangely. Eventually, the gas turns into a form of liquid hydrogen, creating what can be thought of as the largest ocean in the solar system, albeit an ocean without water.
Go down another 20,000 miles (about 32,000 kilometers), and the hydrogen becomes more like flowing liquid metal, a material so exotic that only recently, and with great difficulty, have scientists reproduced it in the laboratory. The atoms in this liquid metallic hydrogen are squeezed so tightly that its electrons are free to roam.
Keep in mind that these layer transitions are gradual, not abrupt; the transition from normal hydrogen gas to liquid hydrogen and then to metallic hydrogen happens slowly and smoothly. At no point is there a sharp boundary, solid material or surface.
An illustration of Jupiter’s interior layers. One bar is approximately equal to the air pressure at sea level on Earth. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Scary to the core
Ultimately, you’d reach the core of Jupiter. This is the central region of Jupiter’s interior, and not to be confused with a surface.
Scientists are still debating the exact nature of the core’s material. The most favored model: It’s not solid, like rock, but more like a hot, dense and possibly metallic mixture of liquid and solid.
But pressure wouldn’t be your only problem. A spacecraft trying to reach Jupiter’s core would be melted by the extreme heat – 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit (20,000 degrees Celsius). That’s three times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
An image taken of Jupiter by Voyager 1. Note the Great Red Spot, a storm large enough to hold three Earths. NASA/JPL
Jupiter helps Earth
Jupiter is a weird and forbidding place. But if Jupiter weren’t around, it’s possible human beings might not exist.
That’s because Jupiter acts as a shield for the inner planets of the solar system, including Earth. With its massive gravitational pull, Jupiter has altered the orbit of asteroids and comets for billions of years.
Without Jupiter’s intervention, some of that space debris could have crashed into Earth; if one had been a cataclysmic collision, it could have caused an extinction-level event. Just look at what happened to the dinosaurs.
Maybe Jupiter gave an assist to our existence, but the planet itself is extraordinarily inhospitable to life – at least, life as we know it.
Could something be living in Europa’s water? Scientists won’t know for a while. Because of Jupiter’s distance from Earth, the probe won’t arrive until April 2030.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Benjamin Roulston 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.
Contemporary economic challenges in Africa appear to be shifting the continent into a new era of development. From COVID-19 to war-induced inflation, many countries in Africa are facing significant economic challenges. The crises of recent years come on top of longer-term increases in debt, especially after the 2014 commodity price shock.
These circumstances have been the backdrop to recent conflicts, coups, and regime changes. But these contemporary crises follow a period of relatively successful state-led development in the first two decades of the 21st century, resulting in a hype about the new “African lions” and the emergence of an “Africa rising” narrative.
Two cases stand out as emblematic of this era: Rwanda’s vision of a Dubai-style financial and service hub, and Ethiopia’s rapid manufacturing and infrastructure ambitions.
Much has been written about the international factors behind this era of state-led development. The focus has been on the extension of private finance and the growth of “new” lenders such as China, India and Brazil. But these perspectives often overlook important questions. What has inspired ambitious African national plans over the last two decades? What assumptions were made about how development happens and how it should look?
In new research published in a special issue of a journal, we analyse these modernising visions. We unpick their differences and commonalities using cases from multiple countries.
Our emphasis is on understanding ideas, beliefs, and norms in shaping development plans. Such perspectives are often overlooked in the study of Africa. Scholars have often presumed that ruling elites are primarily interested in narrow material power or self-enrichment. We argue that ideas and beliefs underpin the goals and content of development plans.
The research covered in the special issue covers Angola, Eritrea and Tanzania, but in this article we will unpack our analysis of Ethiopia and Rwanda.
20th century modernist development
Many of the elements of development this century look like resurgent 20th century “high modernism”. This is a term coined by scholar James Scott to describe top-down, state-led, authoritarian programmes of economic development. These programmes typically used infrastructure and technology to engineer supposedly “backward”, “traditional” people and landscapes into efficient, modern, rational alternatives.
Perhaps the chief examples here are large dams. Historically, dams were viewed as the hallmark projects of modernisation. They could tame nature and deploy technology, whether electricity or irrigation, to found modern economies and workers. Ghana’s Akosombo Dam is one such project.
But building dams paused from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s as the World Bank and other major funders withdrew. Dam projects were seen as having too-high social and economic costs and as not performing well. Such negative impacts also generated significant protests.
Rwanda’s case
Underpinning Rwanda’s model is a concentrated Leninist-style power structure. The president and associated elites chart the path to progress. The party, with its affiliated companies and investment funds, is all powerful – not solely the state. Rwanda also revived mid-century plans, from dams to an east African railway corridor. Electricity was deemed central, resulting in a rapid, but overambitious five-fold increase in over 15 years.
This recent period was not just a reproduction of the 1960s, however. It had new elements. A Dubai-style aesthetic is central to the reinvented capital, Kigali, where the goal is to create a new corporate service hub, replete with skyscraper, conference centres, shopping malls and a new international airport. This replaces the 20th century obsession with industrial sites and brutalist concrete.
Rather than the state-led programmes of the 20th century, pro-market reforms have been incorporated. There’s an embrace of private enterprise, a stock market and investment. The country’s electricity boom was largely enacted by private firms and Rwanda consistently ranks as one of the top countries in the Ease of Doing Business index. It takes hours, not weeks, to set up a company and there’s a speedy regulatory bureaucracy.
In some cases, “neoliberal” reforms have been brought in, with private enterprise and investment in previously state-controlled domains. Rwanda embraced corporate investment and ownership while making business-friendly, low-tax reforms. The private sector was given a big role in Rwanda’s boom to build over 40 microhydro plants in 15 years.
New public management techniques, with individual incentives and civil service targets, were adopted.
Ethiopia’s case
Ethiopia focused on investments in large agricultural plantations and industrial parks. The result evoked 20th century modernisation drives. A broad-based infrastructure boom and an industrialisation strategy that moved agricultural produce up the value chain would transform the structure of the economy. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the Addis-Djibouti Railway and other megaprojects became symbols of this vision. The aim was to maintain state control of the commanding heights of the economy (electricity, water, telecommunications and aviation, among others), while building an industrial base that would absorb the surplus agricultural labour.
This was coupled with investments in education and health. In 2016, Ethiopia had the third highest ratio of public investment to GDP, but also one of the fastest economic growth rates globally.
Unlike Rwanda, this ideology has not survived. Progress in health, education and income was achieved but political tensions grew. By the mid 2010s, the material reality of people’s livelihoods could no longer keep up with the promises the ruling party had evoked. Dissent was not tolerated and led to mass protests, riots, and the eventual demise of the party. Since 2018, there has been a dramatic shift in ideology and vision with an openness to liberalisation, and a focus away from industrialisation to the service sector.
Continuity and change
Overall, our analysis reveals a combination of continuity and change during this period. It marks the triumph of an “African left”, with old titans like Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi or Mozambique’s Frelimo joined by new revolutionary parties also inspired by Marxism.
The language of communism or socialism is not used explicitly. But a belief endures that top-down schemes and mega-infrastructure can catapult people into an “enlightened” future. Structural economic barriers are surmountable through technology and engineering.
Simultaneously, one cannot escape the language of the Davos establishment about the supremacy of markets, importance of foreign investment and pledges to tackle climate change and poverty. This illustrates the degree to which these illiberal modernisers are connected to international policymaking.
Our publication conceptualises this pattern of continuity and change, as a 10-point “illiberal modernisers” manifesto. Although holding considerable variation between countries, we argue that these these hegemonic ruling parties shared common goals of transforming society through an elite-defined programme.
Ultimately, the pattern of continuity and change demonstrates the importance of analysing ideas, beliefs, and values. Elites in Africa, just as elsewhere, are not only interested in power but are influenced by ideas about development.
Barnaby Joseph Dye receives funding from the Economic and Social Science Research Council (UK).
Biruk Terrefe received funding from the Heinrich Böll Foundation (Germany).
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria
The former liberation movement South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) has been in firm political control of Namibia since independence in 1990.
Itula, contesting as an “independent candidate” without party nomination, managed to snatch 30% of the votes from Geingob. Swapo’s downward trend was confirmed by a dramatic decline in support in the 2020 regional and local elections.
Despite these shifting grounds, democracy stood the test of time. The smooth transition following the death of Geingob in February 2024 was a sign of political stability. Previous vice-president Nangolo Mbumba became interim president.
But Swapo faces a new quality of opposition.
I have followed and analysed policy in Namibia since independence. In my view, the national assembly and presidential elections of 27 November 2024 signify a new political scenario. For the first time a clear victory for Swapo seems less certain.
Swapo
The Swapo election manifesto pays tribute to Geingob. But it doesn’t mention his Harambee Prosperity Plan. Nor does it feature his metaphor of the “Namibian house”, in which nobody is left behind.
This signifies an abrupt closing of a chapter. Mbumba declared himself a caretaker, not interested in the position for a long term. He therefore does not feature prominently in the election manifesto.
As decided by the party congress in December 2023 the Swapo presidential candidate is Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, also known as “NNN”. Born in 1952, she was a Swapo Youth League activist from her school days and joined Swapo in exile in the mid-1970s. As a liberation struggle veteran she became part of the party leadership and has been a cabinet member since independence.
Nandi-Ndaitwah would be the first female Namibian head of state if elected. But she faces strong competition from Itula.
Namibia’s president is directly elected by a 50% + 1 vote from the electorate. There are several presidential candidates nominated by parties with notable followings. This raises the possibility of no candidate achieving an absolute majority in the first round, for the first time. There would then be a second-round presidential election between the two candidates with most votes.
While not yet in parliament, Itula’s party, Independent Patriots for Change, made inroads in the 2020 regional and local government elections. In 2019, the Popular Democratic Movement won 16 out of the 96 parliamentary seats, becoming the official opposition. The newcomer Landless People’s Movement won four seats, making it the third strongest party.
Despite all these recent gradual shifts, hopes for visible transformation were largely unfulfilled. Namibian politics remained business as usual. As Rui Tyitende, a political scientist at the University of Namibia, recently wrote:
Namibia’s opposition parties are marred by political promiscuity, factionalism, internal conflicts and a perennial struggle for power … Even though Swapo is dysfunctional, the opposition needs to earn the right to govern.
The manifestos
This year’s election campaigns started much earlier than usual, testifying to new dynamics. While often lacking substance beyond personalised insults, electioneering remained peaceful. Notably, since independence, Namibia has not recorded a single politically motivated killing.
Despite early campaigning, party manifestos were released only from mid-September. These kept the media watching out for often dubious promises. Swapo wants to allocate about N$85.7 billion (U$4.9 billion) over five years for mass employment. It does not explain where the funds will come from. But it projects this will create 256,538 jobs.
The Landless People’s Movement claims to be Marxist, but includes a commitment to promoting a free market economy, and investment by multinationals. It also wants to send the first Namibian satellite into space.
Arguably, election manifestos have no serious impact on voting behaviour. For example, among the older generation, political party loyalties remain influenced to some extent by the liberation struggle history, and regional and ethnic identities.
In contrast, Namibians who were born after independence make up more than half of the country’s three million people, with an average age of 21 years. Many of the younger electorate live in urban areas, and have become an increasingly decisive factor. For them, the anti-colonial struggle and ethnicity provide little influence. This might be a factor in voting behaviour.
It seems that Swapo continues to attract the biggest crowds at rallies. However, it remains a matter of speculation if this signals huge electoral support, or is due to the entertainment by popular artists. Entertainment has always played a role in Namibian elections.
Free T-shirts, food and drinks are also incentives for people attending rallies, many of whom are not yet of voting age. While facing financial constraints, Swapo still has the most funds and donors. Another advantage is that it has a functioning operational structure throughout the country, with a regional and local presence of activists.
Something new or more of the same?
Swapo has comparative advantages but there is growing frustration among voters. Its dominance since independence has resulted in a form of democratic authoritarianism or authoritarian democracy. But voter support has still declined.
Similarly authoritarian leadership in the opposition parties and factional in-fighting provide no hope of alternative policies or political culture. Their political coalitions ended in disarray. This might come to Swapo’s rescue.
An unlikely but possible scenario would be an elected president coming from outside Swapo, while Swapo dominates the national assembly. The head of state has far-reaching executive powers. But he or she would then have to work with ministers and deputy ministers drawn from a parliament dominated by Swapo.
Such a constellation would complicate governance. It risks making a non-Swapo president a lame duck. It would be the biggest test for Namibia’s constitutional democracy and rule of law since independence.
As South Africa’s case shows, a former liberation movement can still have a future despite losing its outright majority.
Swapo could get beyond the nostalgic liberation struggle mindset and reinvent itself as a modern political party. This could – as happened in South Africa – pave the way to enter coalition politics in the best interest of the people.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Message, Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the ANU Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University
Visual images often last in historical and popular memory. This is especially the case in presidential campaigns in the United States, which offer a vast mix of spectacle, surprise and drama.
An historian of political visual culture can no more predict which images are likely to last the test of time than we can know who will win. But we can explain why some historical images from presidential campaigns resonate.
This election season has produced the most media savvy and diverse campaign imagery of all time. Cable news, social media and artificial intelligence have created a whole new universe of image-based narratives.
In this rich visual landscape, here are three images likely to last the test of time.
1. Trump’s ‘fight!’ photo
The uncontroversial front-runner for defining image has to be Evan Vucci’s photograph of Donald Trump being led off the stage in Pennsylvania after surviving an assassination attempt in July.
Both are photographed from below and feature the national flag above Americans working against adversity to reach a common goal. Both fit squarely into the tradition of wartime photojournalism.
Both photographs enjoyed instantaneous popularity: Trump’s image went viral and the Iwo Jima image was featured on a US postage stamp before the war’s end.
But their greatest similarity resides in the cultural symbolism of the images.
Both accurately represent an historical moment; a specific point in time. But the point in time has been actively selected to fit a narrative. The narratives projected are deeply held mythologised symbols of aspirational patriotism.
Visual literacy prompts us to think about which images were discounted in the selection of these historically powerful two. Historical legacies and the national mythologies that fuel these lean toward images of success over pictures of wartime death and suffering.
This image of Trump fits all the criteria we would typically and probably unconsciously apply when assessing if an image is likely to have long-term significance.
The baseline characteristic of iconic images is a general bipartisan understanding of what an image “says”. Regardless of whether you agree with the message being conveyed, you understand its social context, why the image is provocative, dramatic or funny (or not), as well as its historical references.
However, contemporary images are not always so straightforward to read – and in a post-truth AI world, it is harder than ever to decipher the visual culture of politics.
2. Brat summer and coconut memes
Kamala Harris’s youth and vision for the future headlined her campaign’s creation of “Kamala HQ”. The strategy adopted the bright green branding and font of Charli XCX’s smash album Brat after the pop star posted on X: “kamala IS brat”.
Social media has been a critical tool in introducing Harris to voters, especially those of voting age for the first time in 2024. The campaign’s use of social media represented young people as engaged and respected decision makers.
Voters have had more than a century to become accustomed to photojournalism. In contrast, a lot of social media representation has arisen from community activism over the past few years. Reporting from women’s marches this past weekend showed links to the visual culture of the protests that followed Trump’s 2016 election.
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
This moment went viral during the 2024 election, and it was not long before people started signalling their support for Harris by adding a coconut emoji to their profile or comments.
The popularity of the coconut meme by Harris supporters indicates a rejection of the derogatory use of the term “coconut” against people of colour “acting white”.
The production and reception of memes by younger voters demonstrates a media literacy and sophistication that also requires continuous fact-checking.
This point was made in Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris, which urged her followers to do their own “reliability” checking of information in their feeds after Trump and other conservative figures shared AI-generated images of Swift and her fans allegedly supporting Trump.
3. The televised debate handshake
A key image from the debate between Harris and Trump came in the first few minutes, when Harris crossed the stage to offer her hand. It was the first debate handshake in eight years.
This was a bold action given Trump’s prowling movement on the 2016 debate stage against Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and his well documented predilection for firm handshakes.
The handshake is representative of the campaign, which has been called “a referendum on gender”. It evoked the image of strong and confident leadership – a central theme as Harris spoke passionately about reproductive rights and abortion.
Televised presidential debates are one of the most keenly watched and analysed moments of the presidential election season. Image is everything.
Their importance is perhaps best indicated by Justin Sullivan’s photograph of President Joe Biden, mouth agape and looking frail beneath the word “presidential” during the June debate this year.
While they rarely lead to an outcome as extreme as a candidate exiting the race, as ended up happening with Biden, the images and soundbites they generate can resonate for decades.
During the first ever nationally televised presidential debate in 1960, Republican candidate Richard Nixon was said to be unwell and refused to wear makeup. Compared to his opponent, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy, he sweated profusely on stage, creating an image that was disastrous to his eventually unsuccessful campaign.
Between the staged and “gotcha” moments of every presidential campaign, debates provide a unique – and, in 2024, a singular – window into how the candidates relate to each other as humans across an ever-widening ideological divide.
Kylie Message has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Warburton, Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne
These include wiping 20% off debts, increasing the income threshold for compulsory repayments, and changing the amounts people have to repay.
As well as encouraging Australians to study, the changes aim to provide cost-of-living relief – or, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday:
putting more dollars in the pockets of people who feel, justifiably, that they’re getting the rough end of the pineapple.
The changes are certainly an improvement. Unfortunately, they are not as good as they should be – particularly if you have a HELP debt and a family to support.
What is the point of HELP?
My analysis of the most recently released tax statistics indicates more than 70% of those required to make a HELP repayment in 2021–22 earned between A$60,000 and A$120,000. Only 20% earned more than $120,000 and less than 10% earned less than $60,000.
The HECS (now HELP) system was conceived in the 1980s as a way to generate revenue to help the government pay for an expansion of university places.
It doesn’t matter if people do not repay all of their loans. The primary purpose is to have students who have benefited, and can afford to contribute to the cost of their education, give something back.
While fairness has always been a key plank of HECS/HELP, there are some major problems with the system. And the changes announced over the weekend continue to ignore them.
The HECS/HELP system was designed so students would only repay loans if they had the capacity to do so. Enrico Della Pietra/ Shutterstock
What about families?
Student loan arrangements have never taken account of other government payments and obligations such as social security, taxation rates, taxation rebates and Medicare levies.
As I have shown in this analysis, for some family types, HELP repayments combine to produce ridiculous effective tax rates.
Imagine the following scenarios for someone with a HELP debt, earning between $60,000 and $100,000 and who had a pay increase in this income range.
In 2022-23, if you were single with no kids, the average effective tax rate on the extra earnings was 51%.
If you were single with two kids aged four and seven, the average effective tax rate on the extra earnings was 77%. If those children were ten and 13, it was 73%.
The situation is similar in a couple family with two children where only one parent is able to work. The working parent has little incentive to increase their earned income and this won’t change much under the new proposals.
The reason people in these situations keep so little of their extra earnings is because as family incomes increase, they lose family tax benefits, they pay more tax and their Medicare levy increases.
There is not enough attention paid to how all these arrangements interact and how they affect people overall.
We need to know many families are paying HELP
The government’s plan to increase the HELP repayment threshold to those with an annual income of $67,000 is a welcome improvement. The system was never intended to take money off people with virtually no capacity to pay.
The government’s plan to simplify the repayment arrangements is also a positive step. The current system has 18 different repayment rates applied to total income, which means people are repeatedly going backwards when they earn extra money. The new plan to only calculate repayments on dollars over the threshold (the marginal rate approach) stops this from happening.
But the system continues to disregard how people with HELP debts can be in different family circumstances.
In my work on HELP, I often get asked how many HELP debtors have dependent children. The answer is I do not know and neither does the government.
None of the data which the government releases provides any information on family circumstances, despite the fact around $4.6 billion was collected from 1.2 million individuals in 2021-22 (the most recent year we have for this data).
This is vital information to make good policy and fair decisions but we do not have it.
Could these problems be fixed?
We could reduce many of the worst impacts here with a single marginal rate for calculating HELP repayments and thresholds which varied depending on the number of children and partner’s income.
The repayment rate and thresholds could be adjusted to deliver an acceptable repayment level for individuals and sufficient revenue for government to support university funding.
There is no point in pretending the current system is one in which people have an insignificant level of debt that is repaid quickly after university.
It is time we had a system that truly recognised this.
Mark Warburton is a member of the Australian Labor Party and occasional provider of consultancy services to groups such as Universities Australia and the Australian Technology Network.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC L3 Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney
The United States Department of Agriculture last week reported that a pig on a backyard farm in Oregon was infected with bird flu.
As the bird flu situation has evolved, we’ve heard about the A/H5N1 strain of the virus infecting a range of animals, including a variety of birds, wild animals and dairy cattle.
Fortunately, we haven’t seen any sustained spread between humans at this stage. But the detection of the virus in a pig marks a worrying development in the trajectory of this virus.
How did we get here?
The most concerning type of bird flu currently circulating is clade 2.3.4.4b of A/H5N1, a strain of influenza A.
Since 2020, A/H5N1 2.3.4.4b has spread to a vast range of birds, wild animals and farm animals that have never been infected with bird flu before.
While Europe is a hotspot for A/H5N1, attention is currently focused on the US. Dairy cattle were infected for the first time in 2024, with more than 400 herds affected across at least 14 US states.
Bird flu has enormous impacts on farming and commercial food production, because infected poultry flocks have to be culled, and infected cows can result in contaminated diary products. That said, pasteurisation should make milk safe to drink.
While farmers have suffered major losses due to H5N1 bird flu, it also has the potential to mutate to cause a human pandemic.
Birds and humans have different types of receptors in their respiratory tract that flu viruses attach to, like a lock (receptors) and key (virus). The attachment of the virus allows it to invade a cell and the body and cause illness. Avian flu viruses are adapted to birds, and spread easily among birds, but not in humans.
So far, human cases have mainly occurred in people who have been in close contact with infected farm animals or birds. In the US, most have been farm workers.
The concern is that the virus will mutate and adapt to humans. One of the key steps for this to happen would be a shift in the virus’ affinity from the bird receptors to those found in the human respiratory tract. In other words, if the virus’ “key” mutated to better fit with the human “lock”.
A recent study of a sample of A/H5N1 2.3.4.4b from an infected human had worrying findings, identifying mutations in the virus with the potential to increase transmission between human hosts.
Why are pigs a problem?
A human pandemic strain of influenza can arise in several ways. One involves close contact between humans and animals infected with their own specific flu viruses, creating opportunities for genetic mixing between avian and human viruses.
Pigs are the ideal genetic mixing vessel to generate a human pandemic influenza strain, because they have receptors in their respiratory tracts which both avian and human flu viruses can bind to.
This means pigs can be infected with a bird flu virus and a human flu virus at the same time. These viruses can exchange genetic material to mutate and become easily transmissible in humans.
In the recent case in Oregon, A/H5N1 was detected in a pig on a non-commercial farm after an outbreak occurred among the poultry housed on the same farm. This strain of A/H5N1 was from wild birds, not the one that is widespread in US dairy cows.
The infection of a pig is a warning. If the virus enters commercial piggeries, it would create a far greater level of risk of a pandemic, especially as the US goes into winter, when human seasonal flu starts to rise.
How can we mitigate the risk?
Surveillance is key to early detection of a possible pandemic. This includes comprehensive testing and reporting of infections in birds and animals, alongside financial compensation and support measures for farmers to encourage timely reporting.
Strengthening global influenza surveillance is crucial, as unusual spikes in pneumonia and severe respiratory illnesses could signal a human pandemic. Our EPIWATCH system looks for early warnings of such activity, which can speed up vaccine development.
If a cluster of human cases occurs, and influenza A is detected, further testing (called subtyping) is essential to ascertain whether it’s a seasonal strain, an avian strain from a spillover event, or a novel pandemic strain.
Early identification can prevent a pandemic. Any delay in identifying an emerging pandemic strain enables the virus to spread widely across international borders.
Australia’s first human case of A/H5N1 occurred in a child who acquired the infection while travelling in India, and was hospitalised with illness in March 2024. At the time, testing revealed Influenza A (which could be seasonal flu or avian flu), but subtyping to identify A/H5N1 was delayed.
This kind of delay can be costly if a human-transmissible A/H5N1 arises and is assumed to be seasonal flu because the test is positive for influenza A. Only about 5% of tests positive for influenza A are subtyped further in Australia and most countries.
In light of the current situation, there should be a low threshold for subtyping influenza A strains in humans. Rapid tests which can distinguish between seasonal and H5 influenza A are emerging, and should form part of governments’ pandemic preparedness.
A higher risk than ever before
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the current risk posed by H5N1 to the general public remains low.
But with H5N1 now able to infect pigs, and showing worrying mutations for human adaptation, the level of risk has increased. Given the virus is so widespread in animals and birds, the statistical probability of a pandemic arising is higher than ever before.
The good news is, we are better prepared for an influenza pandemic than other pandemics, because vaccines can be made in the same way as seasonal flu vaccines. As soon as the genome of a pandemic influenza virus is known, the vaccines can be updated to match it.
Partially matched vaccines are already available, and some countries such as Finland are vaccinating high-risk farm workers.
C Raina MacIntyre receives funding from NHMRC (L3 Investigator grant and Centre for Research Excellence) and MRFF (Aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 experimentally and in an intensive care setting) currently. She currently receives funding from Sanofi for research on influenza and pertussis. She is the director of EPIWATCH®️, which is a UNSW, Kirby Institute initiative. She has been an invited speaker at the 2024 Options for The Control of Influenza at four symposia organised by Moderna, Pfizer, Sanofi and Seqirus respectively.
Haley Stone receives funding from The Balvi Filantropic Fund. Haley Stone would like to acknowledge the support through a University International Postgraduate Award from the University of New South Wales.
Both major parties in Australia see a significant role for gas as the world shifts to clean energy in a bid to avert dangerous climate change.
The Albanese government says new sources of gas are needed to meet demand during the energy transition. And the Coalition, if elected, would expand gas use as it prepares for nuclear power.
Of course, some people argue that the grave threat of climate change means we should not burn any gas. Others say the strong growth in renewable energy generation and storage means Australia won’t need gas into the future.
So who is right? As I explain below, renewable energy is a huge part of the solution but doesn’t solve every problem. So keeping some gas-fired generators in the electricity mix, and using them only when necessary, is a sensible compromise.
Getting to grips with gas
There are almost 40 large natural gas-fired generators in Australia, and they are an important part of the National Electricity Market.
According to Open Electricity — a platform for tracking Australia’s electricity transition – the gas facilities generate around 4% of the electricity we consume and comprise about 17% of overall generation capacity.
The data also shows gas plants in Australia run at just 9% of their overall capacity, meaning they are idle much of the time. Some gas plants get used quite a lot, others only rarely. But when the plants are called on – during times of peak electricity use – their services are vital.
Overnight, our demand for electricity dips. But when we wake in the morning and start toasting bread and boiling kettles and the like, electricity demand picks up.
Demand eases off in the middle of the day as the sun rises high in the sky and Australia’s booming rooftop solar reaches its peak electricity output. But when the sun sets and rooftop solar is no longer producing, electricity use peaks. This early-evening demand creates a big challenge to the system.
That’s why we need technologies that can produce electricity at any time of day or night – and do it quickly. That’s where gas-fired generation – and other “dispatchable” forms of electricity – come in.
How do gas fired generators work?
Gas generators come in two main types.
An “open cycle generator”, also known as a Brayton cycle turbine, is essentially a jet engine. It combusts gas in a chamber to create enormous pressure that spins large fans. This drives a shaft that spins in the generator to produce electricity.
This technology is relatively cheap to build and can start up very quickly – but it’s also quite inefficient to operate. It uses a lot of expensive fuel, and creates a lot of waste heat.
The second type is known as a “combined cycle generator”. It also uses a Brayton cycle gas turbine. But it captures exhaust heat from the turbine and uses it to create steam, which in turn powers a second turbine (known as a Rankine cycle). This significantly increases the amount of electricity produced for the same amount of gas burned.
So while this technology is relatively efficient, it’s also more expensive to build and takes longer to ramp up and down.
Other types of gas generators exist, but they’re a relatively small part of Australia’s fleet.
A video explaining how gas turbines work.
Gas is not the only option
Gas plants are not the only facilities capable of firming up Australia’s electricity grid as the share of renewables increases.
Hydro power can also quickly ramp up to meet the evening peak. However the potential for building new conventional hydro in Australia is very limited due to the lack of large river systems and the significant environmental impact on rivers and surrounding areas.
Coal-fired generators have potential to ramp up production, but are generally not designed to do this every evening. Plus, Australia’s fleet of old coal plants is on a fast path to retirement.
To maintain the delicate balance of supply and demand, more will be required of gas and hydro, to produce electricity, and batteries and pumped hydro, to store it.
Pumped hydro works by using excess renewable energy to pump water up a hill. When electricity demand is high, the water is released and passes through a turbine, producing power.
The potential for pumped hydro energy storage in Australia is large, and some projects are likely to be economically viable. But the projects can face challenges, as demonstrated by delays and cost blowouts facing Snowy 2.0 in New South Wales.
Large-scale lithium-ion batteries are relatively easy to install. Many projects have been built or are in the pipeline. But batteries are not great for long-duration energy storage.
All this means gas-fired power generation is likely to have a future in Australia in coming decades.
The downsides of gas
Methane is the main component of natural gas. It’s also a potent contributor to global warming.
During natural gas production and transport, gas leaks inevitably occur. This is a problem for climate change.
So too is the carbon dioxide produced when the gas is burned to produce electricity.
To tackle climate change, we must dramatically reduce the amount of gas we use in our electricity system. Gas use should also be eliminated for heating and cooking in our homes and, where possible, in industry.
So where does that leave us?
Unfortunately, no perfect solution exists to Australia’s electricity supply-demand conundrum.
The most likely, most economic and most environmentally acceptable approach is to use a “portfolio” of technologies: lots of batteries and pumped hydro but also some gas.
Because to keep the system stable and reliable, we need some capacity that will mostly sit idle, getting used on only a few occasions. For that reason, the technologies should be relatively cheap to build and able to run for extended periods when wind and solar generation are abnormally low.
Gas-fired power – especially open cycle generators – meets that requirement. Pumped hydro and batteries do not.
The gas plants we keep in the grid will not often be used, and so will produce relatively low amounts of carbon dioxide.
Nuanced questions remain. What will it cost to keep a gas network operating to serve a fleet of gas generators that run only for a few days a year? Gas pipelines have to be kept pressurised, and the cost of running a gas extraction network for small demand may also be uneconomical.
Non-fossil options such as biogas, hydrogen or synthetically produced methane are possible longer term options. But they are also expensive. And new technologies – such as flow batteries, thermal energy storage and cryogenic energy storage – are on the horizon.
So, keeping some gas-fired generators on standby, and using them sparingly as needed, is a reasonable approach. It allows us to reduce emissions as much as possible, and keep our electricity system secure and affordable.
Roger Dargaville receives funding from the Woodside-Monash Energy Partnership, RACE for 2030 CRC, and he consults for industry and government bodies.
“In his message for the day, the secretary-general underscores that a free press is fundamental to human rights, to democracy and to the rule of law,” Dujarric said.
‘Alarming rate of fatalities’ “Recent years have seen an alarming rate of fatalities in conflict zones, particularly in Gaza, which has seen the highest number of killings of journalists and media workers in a war in decades.
“In his message, he warned that journalists in Gaza have been killed at a level unseen by any conflict in modern times.
“The ongoing ban preventing international journalists from Gaza suffocates the truth even further,” he said.
Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown has returned from New Caledonia saying it is not a simple “black and white situation”.
Brown returned from a three-day Pacific fact-finding mission in the French Pacific territory alongside the Prime Ministers of Solomon Islands, Tonga and Fiji.
New Caledonia has been going through a period of turmoil with violence and arson since May, resulting in 13 deaths and the destruction of many businesses.
“There’s no doubt there is a call and a need for the easing of tensions in the country,” Brown said.
“This would enable more dialogue to take place between the various vested groups to find a pathway forward for New Caledonia.”
Brown said Kanaky New Caledonia’s population was diverse, made up of indigenous Kanak, French, and Pacific diaspora.
Almost all of these groups want greater autonomy from France with some also wanting full independence or to remain a French territory, he said.
“But you have quite a large group between those two extremes that want a way forward that enables New Caledonians, all of them, to be able to determine their own future.”
Pacific policing France ‘may wish to consider’ Brown said Australia’s newly proposed regional policing initiative is “an option that New Caledonians may wish to consider”.
“At the moment that’s being done by the state government through France through its gendarmes and police force.”
The last time regional policing was used was in Solomon Islands after ethnic unrest in the 2000s, he said.
When asked whether France had “militarised” New Caledonia, Brown said France sent a lot of support “to help maintain law and order” but the focus now was on the reduction of tensions and dialogue.
France’s Ambassador to the Pacific Véronique told the ABC she doubted French authorities would see the need for Pacific police to be deployed to New Caledonia.
Brown said the other issue was the need for an urgent financial package.
“Unlike most other Pacific countries in cases of disaster whether they be natural disaster or other sorts, Pacific countries have the likes of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, development partners that would support and assist.
Relying solely on France “In the case of New Caledonia, it doesn’t have the association with any of those financial institutions and would rely solely on France for its support.”
There needed to first be a reduction of tensions so that any rebuild would not be under threat from more civil unrest, he said.
Brown said Pacific nations had taken different decolonisation paths — with the exception of Tonga which had never been colonised.
Fiji became a republic after a number of coups and Cook Islands is self-governing in free association with New Zealand.
“Each of us took a different path to where we are today to gain our autonomy and our sovereignty and it’s something that we were able to share with New Caledonia.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Palau’s largest newspaper is being sued for defamation by the company of President Surangel Whipps Jr’s father, just days ahead of general elections in the Pacific nation.
Surangel and Sons alleges “negligence and defamation” by the Island Times and its editor Leilani Reklai for an article published on Tuesday with “false and unsubstantiated allegations,” owner Surangel Whipps Sr said in a press release on Thursday.
Reklai has rejected the company’s allegations and said the “lawsuit is trying to control how media here in Palau tells a story”, a news article about the case in the Island Times reported on Friday.
“I feel like we are being intimidated, we are being forced to speak a certain narrative rather than present diverse community perspectives,” said Reklai, who is also a stringer for BenarNews.
The Micronesian nation of 17,000 people — 650 km north of Papua New Guinea — goes to the polls on November 5. Whipps Jr’s rival is his brother-in-law Tommy Remengesau Jr, who was president from 2001 to 2009 and 2013 to 2021.
The controversy comes after Palau was top of the inaugural 2023 Pacific Media Freedom Index of 14 island countries that highlighted the region’s media facing significant political and economic pressures, bribes and corruption, as well as self-censorship.
Island Times editor Leilani Reklai . . . fears the lawsuit could have serious consequences for the media in Palau and bankrupt the newspaper. Image: Stefan Armbruster
Island Times reported on Friday the suit is seeking compensation and punitive damages and that the company asserts the “monetary awards should be substantial enough to prevent similar conduct from the newspaper and Reklai in future”.
Surangel and Sons financial details — leaked from the country’s tax office — were posted on social media last weekend, prompting heated online debate over how much it paid.
A new corporate and goods and services tax system introduced by Whipps Jr’s government is currently being rolled out in Palau and its merits have been a focus of election campaigning.
The company in a statement said its “privacy rights had been violated,” the tax details were obtained illegally, posted online without consent, and some of the figures had been altered.
Motivation ‘confusing voters’ “The motivation behind the circulation of this document is clearly for misinformation and disinformation to confuse voters. In the end Surangel and Sons is not running for office. Unfortunately, it has been victimised by this smear campaign,” the company posted on social media.
Island Times in a 225-word, front-page story headlined “Surangel & Sons condemns tax report leak as privacy violation” reported the company’s statement on Tuesday. It also quoted financial details from the leaked documents and accompanying commentary.
Whipps Jr. in a press conference on Wednesday accused the Island Times of publishing disinformation.
“Island Times continues to print political propaganda, it’s not accurate,” Whipps Jr said, calling for a correction to be published.
The lawsuit against the paper and its editor was served the next day.
Whipps Jr’s spokesperson told BenarNews any questions related to the lawsuit should be directed to the parties involved.
Eightieth birthday celebrations for Surangel Whipps Sr (left) with his son Surangel Whipps Jr in February 2020. Image: Diaz Broadcasting Palau screenshot BenarNews
Surangel and Sons was founded in 1980 by Whipps Sr, who also served as Palau’s president briefly in 2005 and for two years from 2007.
Business ‘offers everything’ The privately-owned business “offers everything from housing design and automotive repair to equipment rentals, groceries, and scuba gear” through its import, sales, construction and travel arms, the company’s website says.
Previously as CEO, Whipps Jr transformed the company from a family store to one of Palau’s largest and most diversified businesses, employing more than 700 people.
His LinkedIn profile states he finished as CEO in January 2021, after 28 years in the position and in the month he became president. His spokesperson did not respond to questions from BenarNews about if he still retains any direct financial or other links to the company.
Surangel and Sons said the revelation of sensitive business information threatens their competitive advantage and puts jobs at risk.
Palau’s Minister of Finance Kaleb Udui Jr told the president’s press conference on Wednesday an investigation was underway, a special prosecutor would be appointed and apologized for the leak to the company.
“I would hope the media would make extra effort to help educate the public and discourage misinformation and breaches of privacy of the tax office and any other government office,” Udui said, confirming the tax documents had been altered before being posted on social media.
He said tax office staff have previously been warned about leaks and ensuring data confidentiality, as breaches negatively impact the confidence of foreign investors in Palau.
Explanation rather than leak Whipps Jr added that the newspaper should have explained the tax system instead of reporting the leaked information.
He also accused Island Times of failure to disclose a paid advertisement in this week’s edition of the paper for his political opponent.
“I’m disappointed in the Island Times, because there was an article that was not an article, a paid advertisement,” Whipps Jr said about a colourful blue and yellow election campaign graphic.
Island Times told BenarNews it was not usual practice to put “Paid Advertisement” on advertisements but it would review its policy for political campaign material.
Reklai fears the lawsuit could have serious consequences for the media in Palau and bankrupt Island Times, the paper reported.
“If I don’t stand up to this, it sends a signal to all journalists that they risk facing claims for damages for powerful companies and government officials while carrying out their work,” she said.
Palau has two newspapers and four radio stations and enshrined in its constitution are protections for journalists, including a guarantee they cannot be jailed for refusing to disclose sources.
Surangel and Sons said they would no longer sell Island Times through their outlets.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Griffiths, Director of the International Gaming Research Unit and Professor of Behavioural Addiction, Nottingham Trent University
Hollywood actor Armie Hammer was accused of sending messages detailing cannibalistic fantasies in 2021.DFree/Shutterstock
After allegedly sending messages detailing cannibalistic fetishes, Hollywood actor Armie Hammer hopes to relaunch his career with a new podcastand movie.
Now, it seems, Hammer is laughing off the cannibalism allegations. Speaking to his first podcast guest, Tom Arnold, Hammer says, “I’m not gonna lie. I’m just like, Hey, I’m a cannibal!”
But being sexually aroused by the fantasy – or reality – of cannibalism is real. I should know, as it’s one of the subjects I discuss in my latest book Sexual Perversions and Paraphilias: An A-Z
Paraphilias are uncommon types of sexual expression often described as sexual deviations, sexual perversions or disorders of sexual preference.
They are typically accompanied by intense sexual arousal to unconventional or non-sexual stimuli such as enemas (klismaphilia), statues (agalmatophilia), teeth (odontophilia) and vomit (emetophilia).
To many people paraphilias may seem bizarre or socially unacceptable, representing the extreme end of the sexual continuum – and in some cases, such as zoophilia (having sex with animals) and necrophilia (having sex with dead people), may be illegal.
Paraphilias may be laughed off, dismissed or leave some people disgusted, but there’s a pressing need for more research into uncommon sexual behaviour given how little we know.
Sexual fantasies and behaviour are a fundamental part of the human experience. What is considered immoral or even illegal changes according to the social and temporal context. But whatever sexual desires are considered illicit or depraved in a particular time and place are also stigmatised.
Researching paraphilias, even the most distasteful or criminal, is essential to help safeguard vulnerable groups. Research can also help minimise the discrimination faced by those with uncommon sexual interests, helping ensure their access to sexual health care and psychological support, which can be lacking.
Vorarephilia
Vorarephilia – or “vore” – refers to being sexually aroused by the idea of being eaten, eating another person or observing this process for sexual gratification.
Most of the fantasies of vorarephiliacs involve being the ones eaten. Devouring someone could be viewed as the ultimate act of dominance by a predator and the ultimate act of submission by the prey.
The most infamous vorarephiliac is arguably Armin Meiwes from Germany.
Meiwes had allegedly been fantasising about cannibalism since his childhood and frequented cannibal fetish websites. He posted around 60 online adverts asking if anyone would like to be eaten by him.
In March 2002, Bernd Jürgen Brandes responded to Meiwes. They met up only once. Meiwes bit off Brandes’ penis, which the two of them cooked and ate.
Brandes was videotaped being stabbed to death by Meiwes in his bath. The body was then stored for Meiwes to eat.
Meiwes was eventually convicted of murder and imprisoned for life. However, it’s worth nothing that although some paraphilias are illegal, most cause no psychological or behavioural problems when they are engaged by consenting adults.
Dacryphilia
Dacryphilia is getting sexual arousal from seeing someone cry.
It showed there were sub-types of dacryphilia, even among such a small group. Based on the interviews, I identified three types of dacryphile.
Compassionate dacryphiles are sexually aroused by the compassion of comforting a crier.
Dominant or submissive dacryphiles are sexually aroused by either causing tears in a consenting submissive partner or by being made to cry by a consenting dominant partner.
“Curled lip” dacryphiles are sexually aroused by the curling of a protruded bottom lip during crying.
Eproctophilia
Eproctophilia involves being sexually aroused by flatulence.
In 2013, I published the first case study of an eproctophile. The case concerned a 22-year-old single man, Brad*, an American from Illinois.
Brad recalled that in middle school he had a crush on a girl who had farted in the class. Brad said:
This blew my mind [I] knew by simple biology that girls farted, but hearing that the girl I had been fawning over was capable of such a thing sparked a strange interest in me.
Brad first engaged in an eproctophilic act with a male friend in his mid-teens. Up to that point he had considered himself heterosexual. However, this changed when he heard his male friend fart.
Brad said it was “appealing in sound” and that he began fixating on it. He set up a bet with the wager being the right to fart in the loser’s face for a week. He continued to lose such bets once every few weeks for about two years.
Apotemnophilia
Apotemnophilia refers to being sexually aroused by the fantasy or reality of being an amputee.
Some apotemnophiles may pretend to be amputees but, for a minority, the behaviour involves obsessive scheming to convince a surgeon to perform a medically unnecessary amputation.
To most people, this might seem like a type of masochism, but case studies suggest that there is no erotisation of pain – only of the healed amputated stump.
Salirophilia
Salirophilia is sexual arousal from soiling or dishevelling someone attractive, which can include tearing or damaging the desired person’s clothing, covering them in mud or filth or messing up their hair or make-up.
My 2019 case study involved Jeff*, a 58-year-old Australian heterosexual. Jeff recounted that when he was young he wanted to masturbate in strange places such as lying under a cabinet in a dirty garage.
Jeff said that he engaged in solitary salirophilic practices regularly but very infrequently with female partners because it was difficult to find like-minded women.
He was also a fan of the television show Fear Factor in which contestants perform revolting tasks for prize money, such as eating rotting food or being submerged in foul fluids. These were a source of sexual arousal for Jeff. He told me: “I just find the defilement of an attractive woman’s body erotic.”
*The names of case study participants in this article have been changed.
Dr. Mark Griffiths has received research funding from a wide range of organizations including the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. He has also carried out consultancy for numerous gambling companies in the area of player protection, social responsibility and responsible gaming.. Views expressed here are his own and not those of these funding bodies.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Joseph Patrick Kelly, Professor of Literature and Director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston
If elected, Donald Trump has vowed to demolish what he calls the “deep state” – a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy. A second Trump administration, running mate JD Vance has said, should fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists.
Trump has said he would tap the billionare Elon Musk as the hatchet man to lead his proposed government commission on “efficiency” in government.
For years, conservatives have claimed that taking power from government agencies gives it back to the people. Yet while it might seem counterintuitive, Americans actually exercise their sovereignty through the administrative state.
The American administrative state was established almost 100 years ago by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a historian of American democracy, I think it’s valuable to remember what the old deal looked like while Trump rails against the New Deal.
The Gilded Age
Around 1900, America was not really democratic. The federal government did not rule by the consent of the governed. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently argued, the American government was an oligarchy.
These people were America’s “other half,” as the social reformer Jacob Riis called them in 1890. And they were effectively excluded from the social contract.
Meanwhile, for rich white men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller it was, as Mark Twain quipped, a “Gilded Age.” Robber barons ran their industrial empires with impunity.
When their employees tried to organize or protest, industrialists got sheriffs and police to suppress them. Or they hired private armies of “detectives,” like the Pinkertons, as Carnegie did when steelworkers struck in Homestead, Pennsylvania.
Governors called in the National Guard, as Ephraim Morgan did in 1921 to suppress a labor dispute in West Virginia. Sometimes, it was the regular Army, as in 1919, when soldiers from Camp Pike propped up the peonage system of tenant farming by indiscriminately machine-gunning Black farmers hiding in the woods outside Elaine, Arkansas.
‘We stand at Armageddon’
Forced by popular clamor, Congress decided to act.
It created the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and told its commissioners to compel railroads, which were gouging some customers and favoring others, to charge fair rates to everyone.
This was the start of federal regulation.
In 1895, the New York Legislature passed the Bakeshop Act, making it illegal to force an employee to work more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week.
The Supreme Court, however, was still friendly to business. In its 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York, the court ruled against the Bakeshop Act. No one could regulate the workday or work week. The decision stripped Congress and state legislatures of their nascent regulatory powers. That enraged President Teddy Roosevelt.
“(T)he right of the people to rule,” Roosevelt later thundered, had been usurped by the corporations. With apocalyptic fury he predicted, “We stand at Armageddon!”
That was in 1912. The Lochner era, as historians call this period when workers and the public had few protections from exploitative businesses, lasted another 20 years.
It was, in essence, a revolution. After nearly 60 years of corporate domination, the 1932 election would “return America to its own people,” to use Roosevelt’s words.
Of course, it was not really a “return.” In the precorporation world, most Americans – notably women and Black people – couldn’t participate in their own government. But 1932 was a giant step toward democracy. And the great innovation that would usher in this modern, liberal democracy was the administrative state: a meritocracy of career civil servants dedicated to carrying out the law.
That’s the administrative state in action. It’s how 122 million people cooperated to make complex, modern society work – without surrendering their sovereignty to some dictator like Benito Mussolini or Josef Stalin.
But the Supreme Court kept striking down New Deal laws and regulations.
After a massive electoral victory in 1936, FDR threatened to “pack” the court by raising the number of justices from nine to 15. Finally, the court relented. In a 5-4 decision, it allowed the state of Washington’s Industrial Welfare Committee to establish a minimum wage – $14.50 for a 48-hour work week.
Most history textbooks don’t mention this milestone, but that’s when liberal democracy was secured.
Why does the U.S. have cleaner air and water today than it did in the 1960s? Because in 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, and a new Environmental Protection Agency was empowered to write and perpetually rewrite regulations that execute Congress’ antipollution laws.
The alternative
This system produces the occasional injustice or overreach.
But gutting regulatory agencies and replacing a meritocratic bureaucracy with MAGA loyalists won’t help small farmers or family-owned fishing boats. It will empower big corporations to pollute, exploit their workers, price-gouge customers, cut corners on safety – and to corrupt the political system.
Unlike presidential appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the president, civil servants work for the people. They are empowered by Congress, and the president cannot fire them. At least for now.
Joseph Patrick Kelly has previously volunteered as an officer at the county and precinct level in the Democratic Party.
