In November, Colorado voters will decide whether the state’s constitution should be amended to specify a right to school choice.
But school choice is already guaranteed by state statute and federal courts. So why is this initiative being posed at all?
Even the initiative’s backers acknowledge that Colorado already has “one of the best school choice statutes in the nation.” Moreover, the ability for parents to choose private schools has been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court for at least a century.
I have been studying school choice for almost three decades and can say Amendment 80 raises serious questions about the strategies being used by the school choice advocates who put it on the ballot.
School choice in Colorado
School choice options have expanded rapidly across the U.S. in recent years. Currently, it is estimated that over 3.5 million students now attend charter schools, and in the past three years, nine states have approved new programs that provide public funds for private schooling.
Likewise, Colorado law enables parents to choose public schools outside their district — an open-enrollment option that is also quite common throughout the U.S., permitted in 43 states.
But a new wave of school choice policies is emerging from conservative legislatures. Several red states, like Utah, Iowa and Indiana, recently created policies to fund universal or near-universal private school choice. These programs – vouchers or education savings accounts – use taxpayer funds to pay for private school tuition and, with education savings accounts, other educational expenses as well. Unlike charter schools, which are technically public schools and accountable to public authorities, these programs funding private schools have few if any regulations on the schools receiving taxpayer dollars.
Colorado is in a different category altogether.
Indeed, Colorado voters have repeatedly rejected ballot measures to implement private school choice. That mirrors voters across the country, who tend to reject these intiatives, often resoundingly.
Moreover, Colorado’s original state constitution explicitly prohibits sending public funds to private schools.
In essence, Colorado is a trailblazer when it comes to funding school choice in the public sector – but not the private sector. Like all Americans, Coloradans have every right under federal law to choose a private school at their own expense.
Amendment 80 would give children the ‘right’ to choose from neighborhood, charter, private and home schools, as well as ‘future innovations in education.’ Ed Andrieski/AP Photo
Who supports Amendment 80
Amendment 80 reflects a familiar political divide when it comes to school choice policies.
Republicans largely support more parental prerogatives to choose schools, including private schools, and fewer restrictions on those schools.
Democrats tend to oppose unregulated choice and programs that fund private schools, and support accountability measures for schools that receive public funds.
There are, of course, exceptions to this partisan divide.
Meanwhile, some conservatives, including Christian homeschoolers, have expressed concerns about government involvement in private schooling, which they fear could lead to regulation.
The proposal frames school choice as a child’s right, leading some to worry it will give a student’s wishes legal predominance over their parents’.
Those skeptics may have a point. Rather than push directly for school vouchers, backers of Amendment 80 simply make the seemingly innocuous assertion that school choice is a “right.”
School choice as a ‘right’
The fact that advocates for this measure are framing the issue this way – rather than as an effective taxpayer-funded policy, for example – is telling.
While there are different forms of school choice, like charter and magnet schools, the modern private school choice movement emerged as a way for Southern segregationists to avoid integration.
The movement gained momentum in the 1990s by asserting that choice leads to better educational outcomes, and that it gives low-income students an equitable opportunity to attend better schools.
Additionally, statewide private school choice programs, such as what one might envision arising from Amendment 80, are budget-busters for state treasuries and for rural schools as they channel public funds away from high-need areas to affluent families using these programs.
In light of that track record, it is not surprising to see choice advocates move away from their earlier equity claims and focus instead on “rights” — even when such a right can lead to worse educational outcomes for kids.
But even if the rhetorical strategy around Amendment 80 is clear, the question still stands: Why push to enshrine rights that are already effectively available through both Colorado law and U.S. Supreme Court rulings?
The full text of Amendment 80 that appears on the November 2024 ballot in Colorado. Colorado Secretary of State
Public funds for private schools
Michael Fields, the president of Advance Colorado, the organization that promoted the proposal, noted that the idea is to “preserve” and “protect families’ ability to choose the best educational options for themselves.”
Elsewhere, he said, “It’s really just cementing the school choice laws that we have in Colorado right now into the constitution.”
Essentially he is arguing that Amendment 80 would confirm the status quo in Colorado.
But the actual language of the initiative tells a different story.
Rather than simply affirming an existing right to choose a public, charter or homeschool, the more important issue here is the right to choose a private school.
Of course, this right already exists. Since at least 1925, parents across the U.S. have been guaranteed the right to choose private schools for their children, but at their own expense.
If Amendment 80 passes, I expect we will see the argument that such a right is meaningless without funding to support the choice of private schools. After all, when people talk about the right to public education or health care, the underlying assumption is that there is no cost barrier to exercising that right, which is funded by taxpayers.
Recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court suggest Colorado’s prohibition on the use of public funds for “church or sectarian” schools could be challenged in court. Adding a right to private school choice to the state’s constitution through Amendment 80 appears to be designed to provide the basis for such a challenge.
Christopher Lubienski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Shao Lin, Professor of Public Health, University at Albany, State University of New York
Ultrafine particles stem from a variety of natural and human-made sources, including vehicle exhaust. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Long-term high ultrafine particle concentrations in New York state neighborhoods are linked to higher numbers of deaths. That is the key finding of our new research, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
Our study shows that high levels of ultrafine particles in the atmosphere over long periods of time are significantly associated with increased non-accidental deaths, particularly from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
Ultrafine particles are aerosols less than 0.1 micrometers, or 100 nanometers, in diameter — about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Due to their tiny size, they can be easily inhaled into the distal branches of lungs, quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and even pass through organ barriers.
We also found that certain underserved populations, including Hispanics, non-Hispanic Black people, children under 5, older adults and non-New York City residents, are more susceptible to the adverse effects of ultrafine particles. The disparities our study uncovered underscore the necessity for public health agencies to focus on and protect high-risk populations.
We quantified the long-term health impacts of exposure to these pollutants by combining mortality data from vital records in New York state and using a model that tracks how particles move and change through the air.
Because ultrafine particles are so small, they are difficult to study, and more research is needed to determine how unsafe they are.
Why it matters
Air pollution is now ranked the second-leading risk factor for death, accounting for about 8.1 million deaths globally and about 600,000 deaths in the United States in 2021.
Most air pollution standards and regulations have been focused on larger particulate matter, such as PM2.5 – which includes organic compounds and metal particulates – and PM10, a category that includes dust, pollen and mold.
In comparison, ultrafine particles are typically much greater in number and have a much larger surface area-to-volume ratio, allowing them to carry substantial amounts of hazardous metals and organic compounds. Furthermore, because of their smaller size, ultrafine particles can follow the air flow and get deep into the lungs when inhaled. These unique characteristics make ultrafine particles particularly dangerous, leading to a range of adverse health problems.
As cities continue to expand and urban populations grow, people’s exposure to these harmful particles is likely to increase. Both PM2.5 and ultrafine particles come from similar sources and can also form through chemical reactions in the atmosphere, but their trends diverge.
PM2.5 mass has been declining in many places, including New York, thanks to air quality regulations. However, recent research suggests that ultrafine particle numbers are not going down and have been increasing since 2017.
What still isn’t known
There are currently no large-scale monitoring sites in the U.S. dedicated to tracking ultrafine particles in the environment. This limits the ability of researchers like us to comprehend the extent of ultrafine particle exposure and its impact on public health.
What’s more, the exact biological mechanisms through which ultrafine particles cause harm are not yet fully understood. Increasing research evidence suggests that ultrafine particles can affect heart function, causing hardening of arteries, lung inflammation and systemic inflammation.
There have been few prior studies looking at death rates related to ultrafine particle exposure by demographics and seasonality. By understanding which groups are most vulnerable to ultrafine particle exposure, interventions can be more effectively tailored to lower the risks and protect those who are disproportionately affected. Our study, which is funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, helps fill in these critical knowledge gaps.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
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.
On the verge of the 2024 elections, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are ramping up their campaigns in Arizona and Nevada. Beyond being considered swing states, the two have something else in common: Latter-day Saint voters.
About 5% to 10% of Arizonans and Nevadans belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – among the highest percentages in the country, outside of Utah and Idaho. For decades, a steep majority of Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons, were regarded as reliable Republican voters. But the Trump era has tested that alliance, especially when it comes to many of his backers’ support for Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism is often described as the belief that American identity and Christianity are deeply intertwined and, therefore, the U.S. government should promote Christian-based values. Using questions such as whether “being Christian is an important part of being truly American,” a Public Religion Research Institute poll in 2024 found that about 4 in 10 Latter-day Saints nationwide are at least sympathetic to Christian nationalist ideas, if not clear “adherents.” This was the third-highest rate among religious groups, behind white evangelicals and Hispanic Protestants.
Yet the report also found a seeming contradiction. Utah, home to the church’s headquarters, “is the only red state in which support for Christian nationalism falls below the national average.”
As a scholar of Mormonism and nationalism, I believe the church’s history and beliefs help explain why so many members wrestle with Christian nationalist ideas – and that this complexity illustrates the difficulty of defining Christian nationalism in the first place. America is sacred in Latter-day Saint doctrine: both the land itself and its constitutional structures. But as a minority that has often faced discrimination from other Christians, the church displays profound skepticism about combining religion and state.
Sacred space
The Book of Mormon – one of the church’s key scriptures, alongside the Bible – describes the Americas as “choice above all other lands” and provides an account of Jesus Christ visiting ancient civilizations there after his resurrection.
In addition, Latter-day Saint doctrine considers the United States’ government to be divinely inspired. In 1833 the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, dictated a revelation wherein God declared “I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up for this very purpose.”
In the 1830s, Latter-day Saints migrated from New York and Ohio to western Missouri, where they believed themselves divinely commanded to build a sacred city called Zion. By the end of the decade, however, they had been forced out of Missouri by mob violence and an order from the governor, who called for the group to be “exterminated or driven from the State.”
Church members fled to neighboring Illinois, then began a long trek west after Smith’s death in 1844. The first pioneers reached Utah Territory in 1847, where they set up a society shaped by their beliefs – including, most famously, the practice of plural marriage. But when Utah applied for statehood, tensions with the federal government mounted.
By 1896, church leaders had begun the process of ending plural marriage, and Utah was admitted to the union. Latter-day Saints also adopted the two-party system and embraced free-market capitalism, giving up their more insular and communal system – adapting to dominant ideas of what it meant to be properly American.
Constitutional patriots
These experiences tested Latter-day Saints’ faith in the U.S. government – particularly its failure to intervene as members were forced out of Missouri and Illinois. Nevertheless, church doctrine emphasizes duty to one’s country. One of the church’s 13 Articles of Faith explains that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, and in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
Latter-day Saints have “a unique responsibility to uphold and defend the United States Constitution and principles of constitutionalism,” as Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the church’s highest governing body, said in 2021.
I would argue that beliefs in the country’s divine purpose and potential, and the close relationship between faith and patriotism, may illuminate Latter-day Saint sympathy for Christian nationalist ideas. Yet the church’s previously fraught relations with the federal government, and with wider American culture, help explain why a majority of Latter-day Saints remain skeptical of Christian nationalism.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, hostility against the church was so high and widespread that if the U.S. had declared itself a Christian nation, Latter-day Saints would likely have been excluded – and around one-third of Americans still do not consider them “Christian.” According to a 2023 Pew survey, only 15% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of Latter-day Saints, while 25% report unfavorable views.
Latter-day Saint leaders believe they have a right to exert moral influence on public policy. But the church’s awareness of its own precarious position in U.S. culture has made it wary of policies that put some people’s religious freedom above others.
Church members wait for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ biannual general conference to begin on Oct. 5, 2024, in Salt Lake City, Utah. AP Photo/Hannah Schoenbaum
A step too far
This wariness has also shaped Latter-day Saint culture’s inclination to avoid extremes. After decades of being marginalized for practices considered radical, the modern church and its adherents have walked a delicate tightrope. And for many, Christian nationalism and the candidate many adherents put their hope in – Donald Trump – seem a step too far.
Over the past half-century, Latter-day Saints tended to align politically and culturally with conservative Catholics and evangelicals. On balance, the church remains highly conservative on social issues, especially gender and sexuality, and 70% of its American members lean Republican. However, more younger Latter-day Saints have much more progressive views – and even the leadership has parted ways with the GOP on some issues, such as strict immigration proposals. While the church opposes “elective abortion,” it allows for several exceptions.
During the 2016 election, only about half of the church’s members voted for Trump; 15% voted for Evan McMullin, a Latter-day Saint who positioned himself as a moderate choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump garnered about 7 in 10 Latter-day Saint votes.
During congressional hearings about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers, who resisted pressure from the Trump administration to recall the state’s electors, cited his Latter-day Saint beliefs. “It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired,” Bowers said, explaining his refusal to go along with the scheme.
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, left, is sworn in before testimony at the Capitol on June 21, 2022, alongside Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
In June 2023, church leaders issued a statement against straight-ticket voting, saying “voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy.”
Holy purpose
Ever since the Puritans, many people in what became the United States have believed God has a special plan for their society – part of the same current that drives Christian nationalism today.
Latter-day Saints, however, have a specific vision of that plan. According to the church’s teachings and scriptures, the country’s establishment was a necessary step toward restoring the “only true and living church” – their own. And that church is a global one, not just American. More than half of all Latter-day Saints today live outside the U.S.
Ultimately, Latter-day Saint teachings consider America’s story part of a greater goal: ushering in the second coming of Jesus Christ. As the church’s name suggests, Latter-day Saints believe that they are living in the last days, just before the millennial reign of Jesus – a kingdom where national and political distinctions melt away.
But as with all other churches, its members live in the current day, where political, cultural and social realities shape how they interact with the world around them – and how they vote.
Nicholas Shrum 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.
Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions of immigrants if he is elected to a second term, claiming that, among other things, foreign-born workers take jobs from others. His running mate JD Vance has echoed those anti-immigrant views.
Social scientists and analysts tend to concur that immigration — both documented and undocumented — spurs economic growth. But it is almost impossible to calculate directly how much immigrants contribute to the economy. That’s because we don’t know the earnings of every immigrant worker in the United States.
We do, however, have a good idea of how much they send back to their home countries – more than US$81 billion in 2022, according to the World Bank. And we can use this figure to indirectly calculate the total economic value of immigrant labor in the U.S.
Given that, we estimate that the immigrants who remitted in 2022 had take-home wages of over $466 billion. Assuming their take-home wages are around 21% of the economic value of what they produce for the businesses they work for – like workers in similar entry-level jobs in restaurants and construction – then immigrants added a total of $2.2 trillion to the U.S. economy yearly.
That is about 8% of the gross domestic product of the United States and close to the entire GDP of Canada in 2022 – the world’s ninth-largest economy.
Immigration strengthens the US
Beyond its sheer value, this figure tells us something important about immigrant labor: The main beneficiaries of immigrant labor are the U.S. economy and society.
The $81 billion that immigrants sent home in 2022 is a tiny fraction of their total economic value of $2.2 trillion. The vast majority of immigrant wages and productivity – 96% – stayed in the United States.
The economic contributions of U.S. immigrants are likely to be even more substantial than what we calculate.
For one thing, the World Bank’s estimate of immigrant remittances is probably an undercount, since many immigrants send money abroad with people traveling to their home countries.
In prior research, my colleagues and I have also found that some groups of immigrants are less likely to remit than others.
One is white-collar professionals – immigrants with careers in banking, science, technology and education, for example. Unlike many undocumented immigrants, white-collar professionals typically have visas that allow them to bring their families with them, so they do not need to send money abroad to cover their household expenses back home.
Immigrants who have been working in the country for decades and have more family in the country also tend to send remittances less often.
Both of these groups have higher earnings, and their specialized contributions are not included in our $2.2 trillion estimate.
Additionally, our estimates do not account for the economic growth stimulated by immigrants when they spend money in the U.S., creating demand, generating jobs and starting businesses that hire immigrants and locals.
For example, we calculate the contributions of Salvadoran immigrants and their children alone added roughly $223 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023. That’s about 1% of the country’s entire GDP.
Considering that the U.S. economy grew by about 2% in 2022 and 2023, that’s a substantial sum.
These figures are a reminder that the financial success of the U.S. relies on immigrants and their labor.
Ernesto Castañeda does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Angela L. Bos, Dean and Professor, School of Public Service, Boise State University, Boise State University
Voters hold clear and positive stereotypes of women politicians − while they don’t think as positively about men in politics. Artis777/iStock/Getty Images
If U.S. voters elect Kamala Harris – a Black, Asian American woman – president, it would be historic on multiple levels. This is now a real possibility due to voters’ positively evolving stereotypes of women politicians.
Stereotypes have long hindered female candidates, casting them as emotional, weak and sensitive. But now our political science research shows that voters in the U.S. increasingly see women leaders as synonymous with political leadership – and as more effective than men politicians.
This transformation reflects a broader change in what voters expect in political leaders. They are now more likely to see a woman candidate as a better “fit” for public office. This might help pave the way for Harris to break through the highest glass ceiling in U.S. politics.
The classic double bind
Gender stereotypes are the assumptions and expectations people have about men and women. They traditionally present an obstacle for women leaders, including in politics.
Among the many barriers to a woman becoming president in the U.S. are voters’ gender stereotypes. Men are generally assumed to have masculine traits such as being ambitious and competitive, while women are assumed to possess feminine traits such as being warm and compassionate. In applying gender stereotypes to politicians, voters end up with very different expectations for men and women candidates.
This presents a classic double bind for women leaders. If they behave like leaders and act dominantly and assertively, they violate expectations of femininity. But if they behave in a stereotypical way, they are not seen as strong leaders.
The double bind extends to politics. It was long the case that stereotypes of men politicians, but not women politicians, aligned with the leadership qualities that voters desire in political leaders. These traits include competence, strong leadership, empathy and integrity. A 2011 study showed that stereotypes of women politicians lacked clarity, meaning people had no clear expectations. Voters also did not see women politicians in alignment with those same four leadership qualities that voters seek.
But by 2021, prominent women political leaders such as Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi had reshaped the landscape for women seeking office by shaping and solidifying public expectations.
More women politicians in the spotlight
More women have assumed political leadership roles in the U.S. over the past decade than in previous decades. The number of women in Congress increased from 90 to 145 between the 111th Congress, which met from 2009 to 2011, to the 117th Congress, which met from 2021 to 2023.
In addition, high-profile women politicians such as Democrats Pelosi and Clinton, as well as Liz Cheney, a Republican, have received considerable attention from both the media and the electorate. Gender stereotypes about women politicians evolved from being ambiguous to becoming both well defined and positive as voters grew more familiar with them. This has created a political landscape for Harris today that is notably different from the early 2010s.
1. Stereotypes of women politicians are increasingly positive
A decade ago, people did not agree on the traits that defined women politicians. While some people described them as tough, others thought they were weak. Similarly, some reported them as rational, while others saw them as unable to separate feelings from ideas. There were no traits that large groups of people agreed upon to describe women politicians.
When asked about the traits they associate with women politicians, respondents listed positive traits such as intelligent, rational, analytical, ambitious and moral. At the same time, women politicians are least associated with negative traits such as being weak and spineless.
While stereotypes of women politicians have become more positive, stereotypes of male politicians are now much more negative. Image Source/Getty Images
2. Stereotypes of men politicians have shifted to increased negativity and distrust
Male politicians were previously seen as confident, well educated, charismatic and driven. But there’s bad news for men in politics: This perception has shifted. Our study revealed that stereotypes of male politicians became much more negative over the decade we studied.
Today, male politicians are more commonly viewed as power-hungry, selfish, manipulative and self-interested. They are least associated with traits such as being sympathetic or caring about “people like me.” This indicates that voters have become more negative and distrustful toward male politicians.
3. Women politicians have gained ground on leadership perceptions, surpassing men politicians
In the past, stereotypes of women politicians were incompatible with leadership stereotypes. But our study shows that this mismatch has subsided. In fact, between 2011 and 2021, scores for women politicians increased on all four leadership traits valued by voters: competence, leadership, empathy and integrity.
Men politicians, in contrast, have lost ground on all four leadership traits. Women politicians now surpass men politicians in three out of the four leadership traits: competence, empathy and integrity. Expectations of men politicians concerning the fourth trait, strong leadership, are now equal to those of female politicians.
Kamala Harris may benefit
Gender stereotypes have long hindered women seeking political office, but more women in prominent leadership positions have fostered positive stereotype change.
Granted, highly visible women leaders such as Pelosi and Clinton excite both admiration and intense dislike. But seeing them and many other examples in their wake has familiarized voters with women holding power in politics. Voters are thus now more likely to view women candidates like Harris as fitting into leadership roles such as the presidency.
With growing distrust in politics, and of male politicians specifically, women political leaders – who are viewed as agents of change – may have an opportunity to restore trust in politics.
Daphne Joanna van der Pas receives funding from the Dutch Research Council.
Loes Aaldering receives funding from the Dutch Research Council. She is a member of Groenlinks, the Green party in the Netherlands.
Angela L. Bos 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.
Stories define people – they shape our relationships, cultures and societies. Unlike other skills replaced by technology, storytelling has remained uniquely human, setting people apart from machines. But now, even storytelling is being challenged. Artificial intelligence, powered by vast datasets, can generate stories that sometimes rival, or even surpass, those written by humans.
Creative professionals have been among the first to feel the threat of AI. Last year, Hollywood screenwriters protested, demanding – and winning – protections against AI replacing their jobs. As universityprofessors, we’ve seen student work that seems suspiciously AI-generated, which can be frustrating.
Beyond the threat to livelihoods, AI’s ability to craft compelling, humanlike stories also poses a societal risk: the spread of misinformation. Fake news, which once required significant effort, can now be produced with ease. This is especially concerning because decades of research have shown that people are often more influenced by stories than by explicit arguments and entreaties.
We set out to study how well AI-written stories stack up against those by human storytellers. We found that AI storytelling is impressive, but professional writers needn’t worry – at least not yet.
The power of stories
How do stories influence people? Their power often lies in transportation – the feeling of being transported to and fully immersed in an imagined world. You’ve likely experienced this while losing yourself in the wizarding world of Harry Potter or 19th-century English society in “Pride and Prejudice.” This kind of immersion lets you experience new places and understand others’ perspectives, often influencing how you view your own life afterward.
When you’re transported by a story, you not only learn by observing, but your skepticism is also suspended. You’re so engrossed in the storyline that you let your guard down, allowing the story to influence you without triggering skepticism in it or the feeling of being manipulated.
Given the power of stories, can AI tell a good one? This question matters not only to those in creative industries but to everyone. A good story can change lives, as evidenced by mythical and nationalist narratives that have influenced wars and peace.
Storytelling can be powerfully influential – especially if people sense the human behind the words. georgeclerk/E+ via Getty Images
Studying whether AI can tell compelling stories also helps researchers like us understand what makes narratives effective. Unlike human writers, AI provides a controlled way to experiment with storytelling techniques.
Head-to-head results
In our experiments, we explored whether AI could tell compelling stories. We used descriptions from published studies to prompt ChatGPT to generate three narratives, then asked over 2,000 participants to read and rate their engagement with these stories. We labeled half as AI-written and half as human-written.
Our results were mixed. In three experiments, participants found human-written stories to be generally more “transporting” than AI-generated ones, regardless of how the source was labeled. However, they were not more likely to raise questions about AI-generated stories. In multiple cases, they even challenged them less than human-written ones. The one clear finding was that labeling a story as AI-written made it less appealing to participants and led to more skepticism, no matter the actual author.
Why is this the case? Linguistic analysis of the stories showed that AI-generated stories tended to have longer paragraphs and sentences, while human writers showed more stylistic diversity. AI writes coherently, with strong links between sentences and ideas, but human writers vary more, creating a richer experience. This also points to the possibility that prompting AI models to write in more diverse tones and styles may improve their storytelling.
These findings provide an early look at AI’s potential for storytelling. We also looked at research in storytelling, psychology and philosophy to understand what makes a good story.
We believe four things make stories engaging: good writing, believability, creativity and lived experience. AI is great at writing fluently and making stories believable. But creativity and real-life experiences are where AI falls short. Creativity means coming up with new ideas, while AI is designed to predict the most likely outcome. And although AI can sound human, it lacks the real-life experiences that often make stories truly compelling.
Closing in?
It’s too early to come to a definitive conclusion about whether AI can eventually be used for high-quality storytelling. AI is good at writing fluently and coherently, and its creativity may rival that of average writers. However, AI’s strength lies in predictability. Its algorithms are designed to generate the most likely outcome based on data, which can make its stories appealing in a familiar way. This is similar to the concept of beauty in averageness, the documented preference people have for composite images that represent the average face of a population. This predictability, though limiting true creativity, can still resonate with audiences.
For now, screenwriters and novelists aren’t at risk of losing their jobs. AI can tell stories, but they aren’t quite on par with the best human storytellers. Still, as AI continues to evolve, we may see more compelling stories generated by machines, which could pose serious challenges, especially when they’re used to spread misinformation.
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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dominic Wilkinson, Consultant Neonatologist and Professor of Ethics, University of Oxford
The declaration of Helsinki recently turned 60, but don’t feel bad if you missed the celebrations. It probably passed unnoticed by most people not working in the medical field – and possibly even a good few in the field.
If you’re not familiar with the declaration – adopted by the World Medical Association on October 19 1964 – here is an explainer on this highly influential document: how it emerged, how it evolved and where it may be heading.
Agreed at a meeting in Finland in 1964, the first version of the declaration included principles that have become the cornerstone of global research ethics. These include the importance of carefully assessing the risks and benefits of research projects, and seeking informed consent from those taking part in research.
The declaration has been hugely influential and has been incorporated into national guidelines relating to medical research around the world. (For example, in the UK it is cited in legislation and policy relating to research.)
However, it is not legally binding. It has also, at times, been the focus of controversy. For example, following an intense debate in the early 2000s – about the use of placebos in drug trials and the ethics of conducting research in low-income countries – the US Food and Drug Administration removed reference to the declaration in its own guidance.
The declaration updated
It has been revised several times (the new version is the eighth edition), reflecting an evolving understanding of medical ethics, contemporary debates about when research would be ethical, as well changes in the nature and landscape of research.
Some of these reflect important shifts in values and language. In 1964, the declaration stated that clinical research “should be conducted … under the supervision of a qualified medical man” – sexist language that has long since gone by the wayside.
The 2024 version refers to “research participants” rather than “research subjects” – in response to a wider shift to greater inclusion of patients and research volunteers as partners in research. There are also new references to concern for the environment and sustainability, as well as attention to issues relating to stored data and biomaterial, such as tissue samples.
Continuing uncertainty
Some questions remain. One change in the recent document emphasises the importance of including participants from different backgrounds in research, including those who are potentially “vulnerable” in one or more ways.
Older versions of the declaration emphasised avoiding research wherever possible involving children, older patients, pregnant women, those with mental illness and prisoners. This came from a need to learn from past scandals and avoid exploiting vulnerable groups.
However, more recently, it has been recognised that excluding these groups can cause even greater harm, since it leads to a lack of evidence on how best to treat some patients. This then leads to disparities in health. For example, a large proportion of medicines commonly used for children lack high-quality evidence to support them.
The 2024 declaration tries to balance the priority to include vulnerable groups in research with the need to protect and avoid research that could be feasibly performed in other groups.
However, this highlights a deeper problem. Ethical problems arise when research is inhibited or discouraged.
Regulation of research (as encouraged by the declaration) is hugely important, but it can also make it extremely difficult, time consuming and resource intensive to perform. Doctors may change practice based on experience, intuition or inspiration. If they do so outside of a trial, they are not required to seek the approval of any review body.
As noted by a British paediatrician Richard Smithells in the 1970s: “I need permission to give a drug to half of my patients [to find out whether it does more good than harm], but not [if I want] to give it to them all.”
One particular form of research that can be important to drive improvements in care are so-called comparative effectiveness trials. Within many areas of medicine, there are variations in practice, where some professionals will take one approach, while others will take another.
Depending on which doctor you happen to see, (perhaps which clinic you attend, or which day of the week you become unwell), you might receive one treatment or the other.
Since variations like this affect many patients, it would be important to determine which is the better option, potentially involving a randomised controlled trial, where one group of patients is randomly selected to receive the treatment and another group (the control group), a placebo. These trials take years to conduct and are very expensive to run.
However, the declaration seems to encourage a one-size-fits-all approach and potentially implies that such trials should go through a formal and lengthy research ethics approval process, with participants providing explicit informed consent. However, many ethicists and researchers have argued in favour of a more slimmed-down regulatory approach focusing on what matters: do trials meaningfully add risk or burden to those that patients would have encountered outside the trial. And would taking part in research restrict patients’ ability to make meaningful decisions, and to make choices that would ordinarily have been offered?
For example, imagine a trial of two different antiseptics that are commonly used for surgery. Being involved in the trial wouldn’t impose additional risk (since patients ordinarily receive those antiseptics), and it wouldn’t remove an ordinary choice, since it would be rare for medical professionals to ask patients which antiseptic they would like.
The Declaration of Helsinki may be 60 years old, but it continues to both stimulate debate and inspire ethical practice in medical research. It has been newly revised but it is likely that innovations in research, such as the growing use of AI in medicine, will require further changes in the years ahead. It isn’t time to retire it yet.
Dominic Wilkinson receives funding from The Wellcome Trust. He is a member of the British Medical Association Medical Ethics Committee (the views in this article are his own).
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rob Flint, Senior Lecturer Nottingham in the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University
Audiovisual art is changing rapidly. Increasingly powerful projectors, screens and lighting rigs with integrated control systems, pervade the interwoven worlds of cinema, gallery and concert halls. These changes blur the borders of the art form with gaming, club and gig visuals, semi-permanent immersive experiences, and giant outdoor screens and projection-mapped buildings.
I’m fascinated by electronic light and sound in art, music and cinema, and so was curious to experience Eclipse, “a spatial light and sound experience” by Japanese art studio Nonotak (Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto).
You enter the exhibition into a darkened lounge bar that features the first of three separate experiences: a flat, wall-based light work titled Highway that gives a powerful sense of horizontal motion from the stepped sequence of flashing white bands of light.
The next, Dual, is a large sound and light space that uses the kind of directional lighting seen onstage at concerts to make deep spatial patterns with beams of light against a soft haze.
The third, Hidden Shadow, returns us to an image-based experience with directional seating and a large flat LED wall, on which shifting and dissolving points continually redefine a circle, linked to powerful overhead strobe-type lights in a way that seems to reference the installation title.
These are all monochrome, programmed in sequences, with continuous repetition. Although the timed-entry system seems to encourage the viewer’s movement through the spaces, roughly corresponding to their duration, ending again in the lounge and bar area.
Immersed in pulsing light and sound, I look for coordinates to ground my experience. There’s a long history of artists making light and sound do things simultaneously. Psychedelia seems an obvious ancestor.
Even before Hoppy Hopkins made liquid light swirl to the sound of Pink Floyd at London’s UFO club in the 1960s, pioneers in the US and Europe had constructed “colour organs” to play coloured lights in a musical way and painted glass slides for theatre projection, to access the synaesthesia (a neurodivergent condition that links the senses in unexpected ways) which was believed by some to be buried deep in all of us.
Animated film is part of this story, with Disney’s Fantasia the best-known union of music and visual movement in early popular film history, though modernists like Oskar Fischinger (who contributed to Fantasia) and Viking Eggeling made more austere abstract combinations of rhythm and graphic object for avant-garde audiences.
Nearby the Eclipse venue, the Tate Modern shows Anthony McCall’s 1970’s Solid Light installation works. Originally developed on clattering 16mm celluloid film for dusty and cigarette-smoke-filled social spaces, they play quietly and continually now on digital projectors with programmed haze machines in a clean, purpose-built gallery.
Closer in appearance (and in time) to the work of Nonotak are audiovisual artists like Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda. They reconfigured the “visual music” tradition with a stripped-down and often monochromatic union of sound and light, bringing the precision of post-digital graphics to minimal techno and dub or the spookiness of glitch electronica to what is often now referred to as “a/v performance”.
Ikeda’s 2017 installation test pattern explored a similar aesthetic across the river at London’s 180 Strand Studios, home of another organisation dedicated to expanded audiovisual art.
Lumen Studios, who curated and presented the show, are aiming Eclipse at programmers, graphic designers and “edgy people”, literate in gaming, coding, NFTs, cryptocurrencies and other screen-based worlds and objects.
These are not necessarily the same people who would connect McCall’s lines of “solid light” to 1970s Materialist Cinema’s highly political demand to reject the “illusionistic” conventions of mainstream realist film. Nor should they have to.
The human eye is trained differently than it was when television ended before midnight and cinemas were not rivalled by streamed media on demand. This space could have entirely different reference points to those I am evoking. Set design, for example. On their website, Nonotak cites scenography, theatre, film, dance, architecture, and drawing among their areas of practice.
So maybe now it’s me that is the performer, on, or inside, a virtual stage or film set. Standing in the largest of the three installations, Dual, I feel as though I might be running from an alien on a giant transport ship heading for Mars.
I could also be in a more earth-bound comparison, standing at the back of a giant warehouse party, or a rave, away from the crush of dancing bodies while still in the synchronised cocoon of sensory electronics. It is visual, but also physical, and it creates a powerful kinetic dislocation from the space in which it is situated.
This last comparison highlights the “in-between” nature of the Eclipse installations in its temporary accommodation in Bermondsey. The cocktail bar points gently (and legally) towards the hedonism of gigs and raves, but the regulated entry system suggests a more institutional mode of attention, closer to the time-stamped immersive museum experience or even a live-action gaming environment, like an upmarket Laserquest.
Similarly, the audio, filled with effectively light-synchronised rhythmic pulsing, doesn’t have the gut-level bass of a contemporary club or music venue sound system. And while the slightly disembodied vitality of Dual made me think about dancing and moving in a slightly different way, it isn’t a dance floor.
Nor did it make promises of that kind. So this is less a criticism of the work than a recognition that my coordinates will always need updating, as the spaces we move through adapt to different forms of attention. If our species is fortunate enough to continue devoting time, technology, materials and labour to human sensory curiosity in the decades that follow, there will be more hybrid collisions of light, sound, image, rhythm, music, in real and imaginary, actual and virtual, space. I very much hope so.
Eclipse by Nonotak is on until December 8 2024 at 47 Tanner St, London
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Rob Flint does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The current US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, appears to have nudged ahead of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in the race to the White House.
A poll of polls, which combines polls from different agencies, published on the website FiveThirtyEight on October 22 shows that Harris leads Trump by 48.1% to 46.3% in national voting intentions. So the race remains very tight.
There is naturally a lot of attention being paid to what is happening in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina. However, the polling in these states is not very helpful since it currently predicts a dead heat in practically all of them.
In the key swing state of Pennsylvania, for example, 47.8% of people intend to vote for Trump compared to 47.6% for Harris. This gap is well within the margin of error, so FiveThirtyEight calls it an even contest.
One of the surveys in the poll of polls was conducted by YouGov for the Economist newspaper. It shows that 19% of respondents have already voted in the election and a further 72% say they will definitely vote. When registered voters were asked which candidate they think is likely to win, the replies were a dead heat – 38% of them chose Harris and 38% Trump (24% are not sure).
Another way of judging the contest is to look at who has the advantage in the key drivers of the vote in the election. In an earlier article, I argued that Harris leads Trump in the presidential race in three of the four key measures that explain voting behaviour.
She is ahead in likeability, and is favoured by more moderates than Trump. Harris also has more support from Republican identifiers than Trump has among voters who identify as Democrats. However, in relation to the fourth driver, which is the issues voters care about, she is at a clear disadvantage.
The Economist/YouGov poll shows that 96% of respondents think that jobs, inflation and the economy are important issues in the election. In the same poll 84% think immigration is important and 75% think this about abortion.
Harris’s problem is that polling indicates she is well behind Trump on the issue of the economy. When asked if Harris or Trump would do the best job dealing with inflation, for example, 39% preferred Harris and 46% Trump. This is despite the fact that the most recent inflation rate is relatively low at 2.4%, and has been falling for some time.
On the issue of abortion she does much better. Some 50% of Americans approve her pledge to restore the right to abortion enshrined in the Roe v Wade case from 1973, which was reversed by a Supreme Court ruling in 2022. In comparison, only 33% of Americans approve of Trump’s position to uphold the court ruling.
The economy and voting
Does it really matter if Harris is behind on the economy? There is historical evidence to suggest that, if we look at the actual performance of the economy as opposed to polls, Harris may have an advantage.
The graph below shows the relationship between voting for an incumbent Democratic or Republican president (or his party’s nominee) and the state of the economy over a century of presidential elections from 1920 to 2020.
In the chart, the performance of the economy is captured by two measures. The first is economic growth in real terms and the second is the misery index (the sum of inflation and unemployment). Both are measured in the year of the elections.
There is a strong positive correlation between growth and voting for the incumbent president or his party’s nominee (+0.55). When growth is buoyant, the incumbent or his successor does well. And when it is weak, they do badly.
There is also a negative relationship between the misery index and presidential voting. But, in this case, the correlation is very weak (-0.05). This means that, while voters may complain about inflation and unemployment and blame the incumbent president’s administration, economic growth is the real driver of voting in these elections.
Economic growth is the real driver of voting in US elections
The Biden administration’s record on growth since 2020 has been very strong. Policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act have boosted investment, particularly in high-tech industries. This fact may give Harris the edge in the election.
That said, Harris can still lose, and the odds that bookmakers are giving currently favour Trump to win. However, it is the American people who will decide the outcome, not betting markets, many of whom who live outside the US, who are trying to disrupt the process.
Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ilaria Di Gioia, Senior Lecturer in American Law and Associate Director of the Centre for American Legal Studies, Birmingham City University
With just two weeks to go until election day, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC), requesting “an immediate investigation” into what it termed “blatant foreign interference” in the election by none other than the UK’s Labour party.
In the letter to the FEC’s acting general counsel, the Trump campaign accused the Labour party of “apparent illegal foreign national contributions” to Harris for President. This is the principal campaign committee of Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The contributions listed in the complaint are: meetings with Harris’ campaign team “to brief Ms Harris’ presidential campaign on Labour’s election-winning approach”, and Labour members’ trips to battleground states to help with the Harris campaign.
Put simply: members of the UK’s Labour party have been travelling to the US to help Harris, the Democratic party candidate, campaign for the presidency.
FEC rules state that foreign nationals “may participate in campaign activities as an uncompensated volunteer”. To that end, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, has said that Labour volunteers are helping the Harris campaign in their spare time, and are funding their own trips.
Indeed, there is a long history of volunteers from both the Labour and Conservative parties supporting their respective “sister” parties in the US, and vice versa.
What does US law say?
To understand the US legal landscape, we must refer both to statutes (laws on the books) and the judicial cases that have put these statutes to the test.
From a statutory point of view, foreign interference into elections is regulated by three main federal laws. These laws, enacted by Congress since 1938, came in response to various scandals involving foreign financing.
They are: the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Federal Election Campaign Act and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, all consolidated in the United States Code.
The law explicitly prohibits foreign nationals (excluding permanent residents) from making contributions or donations to elections. It reads:
It shall be unlawful for:
A foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make –
(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election;
(B) a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or
(C) an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication.
The question is, therefore, whether the Labour engagement with the US election falls under the definition of “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value”.
A key legal case
It would seem, looking at judicial precedent, that “contribution or donation” amounts to financial contributions only.
The law was interpreted in 2011 by the US District Court for the District of Columbia (a federal court) in Bluman v FEC.
In this case, the plaintiffs Benjamin Bluman and Asenath Steiman were foreign citizens who lived and worked in the US on temporary visas. They wanted to donate money to candidates in elections and challenged the constitutionality of the law barring them from doing so.
The decision was authored by then Judge Brett Kavanaugh (who, seven years later, was appointed by Trump as Supreme Court justice). Kavanaugh argued that political contributions in the form of expenditure – so, financial contributions – were an integral part of the elections process. As such, it was right that foreign nationals be prohibited from making financial contributions.
He emphasised, however, that this decision was limited to expenditure, and that it should not be read as support for bans on other types of engagement with elections. These would be protected by First Amendment free speech protections, which apply to foreign nationals within the US.
We do not decide whether Congress could prohibit foreign nationals from engaging in speech other than contributions to candidates and parties, express-advocacy expenditures, and donations to outside groups … Plaintiffs … express concern that Congress might bar them from issue advocacy and speaking out on issues of public policy. Our holding does not address such questions, and our holding should not be read to support such bans.
This decision was affirmed by the Supreme Court and so constitutes a convincing precedent.
In a nutshell, US law prohibits foreign nationals from financing domestic election activity, but this is limited to financial contributions. The Labour campaign “contribution” so far does not appear to amount to financial contributions, so as long as this remains the case, it is not illegal.
Ilaria Di Gioia received research funding from the Eccles Centre at the British Library.
Naked protests are a form of public demonstration where individuals, often women, use the symbolic power of their naked bodies to challenge injustices. These protests have become an increasingly visible form of resistance, particularly in response to state violence, economic exploitation, and the oppression of women by men.
While naked protests might seem provocative or shocking, they have a long and storied history in Africa. They are not only a powerful statement but also a direct challenge to norms in society around decency, control and vulnerability.
As a research psychologist, I was drawn to the study of naked body protests because of their profound affective power. That’s to say I study how emotions like anger, fear, joy and empowerment are expressed and experienced by both the protester and the observer. I’ve interviewed numerous South African women who have taken part in naked protests in the past decade.
My studies, which take an African feminist approach, show that these protests are not just acts of desperation or shock tactics. They’re rooted in a long tradition of resistance and decolonisation, drawing on generational power and emotional expressions. They are a feminist tactic that embodies both vulnerability and strength, using the body as a site of resistance and empowerment.
Naked protests are complex – and, I argue, a powerful tool for reclaiming African women’s agency, dignity and voices.
Colonialism and nakedness
During colonialism, European countries ruled over African nations. Colonisers imposed their values, laws and social systems – including strict ideas about how women should behave and dress. These replaced many traditional African practices and beliefs. African women were required to cover their bodies because nakedness was seen as shameful or improper according to European moral standards.
By protesting naked, African women are rejecting these colonial ideas and reclaiming their bodies as a form of resistance. They’re saying they refuse to be controlled by these outdated beliefs. So, naked protests are a decolonial action.
African feminism sheds further light. It highlights the unique historical and social conditions that shape African women’s struggles. It recognises that African women’s bodies have been sites of both oppression and resistance for a long time, subjected to patriarchal and colonial control.
Naked body protests in South Africa
In South Africa, colonialism was followed by white minority rule. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation and discrimination, made law from 1948 to 1994. Black South Africans were denied political rights, restricted from owning land in white areas, and subjected to pass laws that controlled their movement. Black women bore the brunt of this oppression.
In Durban in 1959, South African women protested against the 1908 Native Beer Act, which banned them from brewing traditional beer. Protesters attacked state beerhalls and, in a bold act of defiance, exposed their bodies as they faced police barricades. The police were often hesitant to confront or harm the women.
In 1990, during the Dobsonville housing protest, women in Soweto stripped and protested against the demolition of their shacks by municipal police. They successfully drew media attention to their demands.
This form of protest has endured, even in the country’s democratic era. As recently as 2024, women from the South African Cleaners, Security and Allied Workers’ Union staged a naked protest against the sudden termination of their contracts by private security companies.
Psychology study
But a primary focus of my research was the South African student protests that began in 2015. The #FeesMustFall movement saw students protesting against sexual violence and the high cost of education. Naked protests took place at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and related #RUReferenceList protests against rape at Rhodes University in Makhanda.
My PhD study set out to understand naked body protests and contribute to their psychological understanding. I wanted to find out why women in particular use this form of decolonialist protest and what its emotional and social role is during and after the actions.
I interviewed 16 women who participated in the protests, as well as drawing from podcast interviews with two other participants and a video of the 1990 Dobsonville protests.
Anger and confrontation
I found that anger and confrontation played a central role. During the #FeesMustFall protests, women’s decision to use their naked bodies was a deliberate, transgressive act aimed at disrupting structures that wanted to silence them.
They weaponised their vulnerability and exposed the contradictions within these systems – where women’s bodies are often sexually objectified but deemed unacceptable when used as instruments of protest. By baring their bodies, these women confronted the state, universities, and society at large by placing their physical bodies in direct opposition to deeply ingrained social hierarchies.
The anger expressed in these protests is not random; it’s rooted in a collective and historical sense of injustice. The women told me they were responding to both the immediate issue of being excluded from higher education facilities and also broader, generational experiences of gender-based violence, racism and economic disenfranchisement. Anger became a way to assert control over their bodies in spaces where their presence had been marginalised, ignored or actively suppressed.
By channelling their anger, these women redefined their relationship to both their own bodies and the public spaces they occupied. Their protests highlighted the connection between personal anger and systemic oppression.
Joy in struggle
Joy is another important affect in these protests. Women often experience a sense of joy and empowerment when they achieve the goals of their protests.
This joy is not just a personal feeling but a collective one that binds women together. Joy is a form of resistance in itself because it defies the narrative of women as passive victims.
Empowered and powerful
When women take part in naked protests, they show that they have the power to make their own decisions. They feel more confident and in control.
Participants made it clear that being part of these protests can deeply change how women feel about themselves. They discover their strength and ability to fight back.
The #IAmOneInThree hashtag was based on the United Nations estimate that one in three women around the world will be sexually abused in their lifetime. A #IAmOneInThree naked protest took place at the University of the Witwatersrand in solidarity with #RUReferenceList protests at Rhodes University. Sibu, who took part, shared how carrying a sjambok (a whip) and singing struggle songs with other women made her feel:
For me that moment was affirming … I felt powerful somehow. Because when you … have been raped … it made me feel weak … It made me feel like an object and not a person. And so I remember that moment feeling empowered, right, I have my sjambok, I have my sisters around me.
Naked body protests in South Africa are a powerful form of feminist resistance that draws on deep historical and cultural traditions. These protests are strategic and affective forms of resistance that challenge patriarchy, sexism and colonialism.
Mpho Mathebula does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The violence wrought by the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23 Movement is often narrowly framed as intended to control eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s resource-rich mining sites. The rebel group launched its most recent offensive in 2021 and currently controls vast territories in the south-east of North Kivu province, surrounding and cutting off the main city of Goma.
Eastern DR Congo mines produce crucial raw materials such as tin, tantalum and tungsten, as well as abundant quantities of gold. It therefore seems logical to reduce explanations of conflict to the ambition by M23, and Rwanda behind it, to control the mines directly.
We belong to a team of researchers who examine the various dimensions of conflict from different perspectives. Our findings, based on fieldwork and conducted in collaboration with in-country experts, show that this popular analysis does not paint the full picture.
Conflict analysis often ignores historical and local dimensions. Our investigation with the Goma-based civil society organisation Association pour le Développement des Initiatives Paysannes therefore explored the local stakes and impacts of the M23 crisis. We interviewed more than 55 people in North Kivu (DR Congo), including members of M23, as well as soldiers and armed groups fighting them, local chiefs, state agents, teachers, taximen, traders and farmers who live on the frontline of the conflict.
Our research reveals that M23 employs a more profound strategy to boost its position and military strength (through Rwandan support) in local struggles over land, authority and rents. M23’s disruptive strategy aims to replace Congolese authorities and overhaul local governance in areas it controls in eastern DR Congo. Key to this strategy is:
undermining and replacing local (customary) authorities
taking over strategic trade routes
the installation of an elaborate taxation regime.
These strategies also allow M23 – and Rwanda – to generate revenues from the local economy, including rents from DR Congo’s mineral wealth, without necessarily directly controlling mines.
Historical struggles over land
Interviewees attached great importance to the historical context of the M23 conflict, explaining how struggles over land date back to independence in 1960. Going back to the 1930s and 1940s, the Belgian colonial administrators already organised large movements of migrant workers from Rwanda to work on plantations in DR Congo. The Rwandophone migrants and their descendants settled in North Kivu, becoming part of the local population.
After independence, Hutu and Tutsi (Rwandophone) communities began to jostle for control over North Kivu’s fertile farmland with the Hunde and Nyanga communities there. As grievances over access to land and property rights increased, Rwandophone communities were stigmatised as “non-indigenous” and their land claims as illegitimate.
As the Congo Wars broke out in the 1990s, people began seeking recourse to armed groups to settle land conflicts. Before the rise of M23 in 2012, two other groups (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie and later Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple) rose to protect the Rwandophone population in eastern DRC. They also grabbed and sold vast concessions of land – held by the state or other communities – to allied farmers and business people. These were typically from the Tutsi community.
Given the country’s complex and under-enforced land laws, land claims became exceedingly difficult to verify or prove. This has strengthened the belief that the only way to secure access to land is by resorting to armed groups. Thus, M23 is perceived as the guardian of the Tutsi community’s access to land.
This perception is well illustrated by a testimony of a local leader in Masisi territory:
The wars of the last three decades have been motivated by a struggle for control over land … Indigenous people are driven out, dispossessed of their land in favour of others who are considered foreigners and refugees. … the M23 is made up of (Tutsi) pastoralists … and there are fields that their rivals had seized … it was one of their (M23) first concerns to start exploiting them.
Most Congolese Tutsi have not asked for this “protection” by M23. But the ensuing grievances and ethnic tensions will haunt the relations between communities for years to come.
Struggles over customary authority
In DR Congo, customary chiefs play an important role in local land governance. They also adjudicate conflicts, bind people together through rituals, and represent the symbolic claim by a specific community to a given place.
Many Congolese we spoke to perceive M23’s main aim to be control of power at the local level — undermining the existing authorities. The group has indeed sought to replace customary authorities with M23-appointed ones, at times assassinating Congolese chiefs. Local sources said M23 even burnt chiefdom archives, destroying evidence of claims to customary authority.
M23’s economic grip
Wherever M23 has a foothold, it installs an elaborate taxation regime. This involves checkpoint tolls, household taxes, dues on business, harvest taxes and forced labour. In doing so, the group generates the revenues to sustain the conflict. But this also strengthens its politico-administrative hold on the population, as taxation is a symbolic interface of public authority.
Local armed groups that joined with the Congolese army to combat M23 deepen the problem. Called wazalendo (“patriots”), they are often unpaid and therefore rely on payments from the population to sustain their counter-offensive. As a result, taxation in eastern Congo has become heavily “militiarised”. Taxed by government forces, wazalendo and M23, civilians pay a heavy toll.
The military nature of local governance could jeopardise future efforts to bring peace to eastern DRC.
What about minerals?
M23 has an impact on all aspects of local governance in eastern DR Congo. It has found ways to control and profit from the local economy in North Kivu, including mineral supply chains. It operates checkpoints along arteries and taxes minerals smuggled to Rwanda, alongside other trade flows.
Having M23 control strategic trade routes in DR Congo, including those crossing into Uganda, is a benefit for Rwanda. From Kigali’s perspective, the resurgence of M23 in 2021 came at a perfect time to block Uganda’s efforts to improve the road network in eastern DR Congo towards its own territory. Rwanda and Uganda are locked in intense competition for Congolese informal trade, re-exporting its timber and minerals as their own, gaining taxes and foreign earnings that ought to benefit the Congolese treasury and population.
What must be done?
DR Congo’s resources play a large role in the M23 conflict, but our study underscores the historical roots of the conflict and its profound local impacts. These findings should inform locally meaningful and sustainable conflict resolution strategies.
Since the M23 revival, land access, trade and security have become increasingly mediated by armed actors. Even after a possible M23 defeat, it will take years of local dialogue and mediation to undo this involvement of militia in local governance, resolve land issues, repair inter-community relations and remake customary authority. But that’s the only way to reach sustainable peace in North Kivu.
Ken Matthysen works for the International Peace Information Service (IPIS)
This publication has been produced with the financial assistance of the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD). The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of IPIS and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the Belgian Development Cooperation.
A white-browed sparrow weaver looks up at a neighbouring roost. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
From afar, the acacia trees look like they have been decorated with grass pom-poms. The birds have been busy, building shelters of straw and grass. Up close the real shape of the “pom-poms” becomes clear: grass tubes in the form of an upside down “U”, with an opening at each end.
White-browed sparrow weavers are cooperative breeders. Within a multi-generational family group, only one dominant pair will reproduce; all other birds, which are mostly kin (related), will help with the rearing of chicks. These birds do everything together: forage, defend their territory, feed new chicks – and build each of the many roosts that decorate the acacia trees they live in. The birds are found throughout central and north-central southern Africa.
Year after year, family groups get bigger and, as they do, the number of roosts they build increases. Families might have as many as 14 individuals, so the birds need to build multiple roosts, including a few “spares”.
There’s something intriguing about these roosts. Sometimes different families set up territories next to each other, in trees as close together as 10 metres.
How do you tell families apart? By their roosts. Some families build roosts that are very long, with long entrance and exit tubes; others will build roosts that are much shorter, with hardly any tubes. Essentially, it looks like different white-browed sparrow weaver families have different architectural styles. Why?
To find out, we studied more than 400 roosts built by 43 families in the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. We confirmed that the roosts and nests built by groups that live next to each other have their own architectural style, and that environmental, physical or genetic attributes of these different family groups do not influence the structures’ configuration.
We think that the birds’ building behaviour and the shape of the structures might be the result of social interactions. Animals often learn from each other how to do things, whether it is how to use tools (chimpanzees), how to sing the correct song (some bird species, humpback whales), or how to exploit new food resources (cockatoos). Learning from others within a group often results in animals showing group-specific behaviours, or animal cultures. In this sense animals, like humans, develop their own cultures.
Measuring various factors
There is a lot of diversity in the nests different bird species build, both in the shapes and the materials used, as well as the number of nests an individual might build.
For example, sociable weavers (Philetairus socius) build massive multiple occupant “apartment buildings” made out of grass. Cape penduline tits (Anthoscopus minutus) build nests that look like satchels made out of vegetable fibres with the texture of a wool sweater. Male southern mask weavers (Ploceus velatus) will weave thousands of grass leaves to build multiple nests at one time, and swallows collect and stack together one mud pellet at a time to build their pottery nests.
To better understand the lack of uniformity among different white-browed sparrow weaver families’ roosts, we measured 400 roosts, all still on the trees, built by 43 families in the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. Some were new – less than a year old – and others were at least two years old. (All structures that we measured were also identified with a small ring. We did this for three years in a row, so we could tell if a structure was there before we started measuring and marking the structures or if it was built during our time there.)
Those measurements confirmed that different families build roosts with different sizes and that, across years, families maintain their own architectural style.
At the same time, we measured the temperature and wind speed at each of the families’ territories, the size of the birds, the height of the trees, how genetically related different families were to each other, and how far away the different families lived from each other.
This allowed us to determine whether any of these factors could explain why different families build different roosts. For instance, maybe families living in hotter territories build roosts with shorter tubes than in cooler areas, since they would not need much material to insulate them from the cold at night. The similarity in their environment, we reasoned, might explain why weaver families living in close proximity to each other created similar roosts. Or perhaps families that were more closely related to each other (something like cousins and second cousins) would build similar structures?
However, one by one, we excluded all environmental and genetic explanations for the differences in the structures built by different families.
So what happens next?
We plan to continue documenting the architectural styles of different white-browed sparrow weaver families and to record their building behaviour so we can determine how these birds coordinate their behaviour when building together.
Looking in more detail at how the roosts built by these birds across Africa might differ could help us understand to what extent the environment, material availability, individual experiences, and social interactions between individuals affect the building behaviour of these birds.
Maybe, like humans, some species of birds have their own architectural traditions passed on across generations through social interactions.
Coffee is a drink that punctuates many of our lives. Millions of us depend on this dark liquid to start the morning, or to break up the day.
It has also become quite an expensive habit. But before we baulk at paying £5 for a flat white, it’s worth thinking about the price paid by the coffee farmers who provide its base ingredient.
For behind every latte and espresso lies the toil and stress of coffee farmers, who face serious challenges to bring their popular product to the rest of the world. Harvests can be devastated by extreme weather events or pests and plant diseases, while volatile market prices add another layer of worry, making future income uncertain.
This volatility exists in other crops, but especially so for coffee, the price of which is extremely unpredictable. It can rise and fall frequently because of the weather, market demand and the state of the global economy.
Coffee trees take up to four years to grow and produce beans, and cutting them down is expensive, so farmers can’t easily change how much coffee they produce based on price changes.
But price volatility means that farmers can’t be sure about their income at harvest time, which can be incredibly stressful. And our research shows just how much that unpredictability affects farmers’ mental health.
Our work focused on farmers in Vietnam, a country where coffee production has soared over the last three decades. From accounting for just 1.2% of world output in 1989, Vietnam is currently the second largest producer in the world (after Brazil) producing just under 30 million 60kg bags a year. Vietnam produces mainly “robusta” coffee beans, grown by small farmers in the central highlands region of the country.
Using data from a long-running observational survey to assess mental health, we looked at how Vietnamese coffee farmers experienced symptoms of depression including sadness, hopelessness, lack of concentration and poor sleep – and how these were linked to monthly international robusta coffee prices.
Using a range of techniques to interpret the data, we found clear evidence that being exposed to coffee price fluctuations increased depressive symptoms among farmers of the crop. They also had lower overall wellbeing because of greater mental stress and worry over their economic future – and drank more alcohol.
The impact of all of this uncertainty is significant. According to the World Health Organization, poor mental health is a major contributor to the global burden of disease, especially in low-income countries where mental illness and poverty are closely linked.
Estimates suggest that as much as 80% of the world’s depressive disorder burden is borne by low and middle income countries. But these issues are often overlooked, even though they are crucial to addressing poverty.
What can coffee drinkers do?
There are ways to tackle the mental health effects of coffee price volatility. Initiatives to promote price stability in the global coffee markets and financial literacy among farmers, would be worth pursuing. So too would work to improve mental health support within farming communities, providing resources for coping with stress and building resilience.
Coffee lovers around the world can also play their part by choosing the their drink carefully. Fairtrade certification for example, was set up to help reduce coffee price volatility and the resulting poverty it caused.
It guarantees a minimum price for certified coffee, covering the average cost of sustainable production and reducing the financial risks farmers face. Fairtrade-certified farmers also receive a premium to invest in projects that improve the quality of life for their communities.
And research suggests it is succeeding. A 2005 study of coffee farmers in Nicaragua revealed that Fairtrade farmers are less concerned about the possibility of losing their farm in the coming year compared to conventional farmers. And using data from Costa Rica, research from 2022 has found fair trade certification was effective in increasing farmers’ income.
So the next time you savour your morning cup of coffee, take a moment to consider the people who cultivated the beans which made the drink. Coffee farmers deserve our appreciation – but also our help in establishing fairer, more stable market conditions which safeguard their livelihoods and mental health.
Saurabh Singhal received funding from the University of Copenhagen.
Finn Tarp has over the years received funding from a variety of donors and research funding agencies for work in Vietnam on on development issues . This is relevant only in the sense that is has helped inform about living conditions in the country.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jesica Lopez, PhD Candidate, Centre for Environmental and Climate Research, Lund University
Colombia hosts 18% of the world’s bird species – more than any other country.Ariboen / shutterstock
The city of Cali, in Colombia, is hosting the UN’s 16th biodiversity summit, known as Cop16. The summit, which runs until Friday, November 1, is focused on how countries will fulfil previous pledges to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and water and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.
It’s a noble aim, yet Colombia itself shows just how far we have to go.
If you travel south east from Cali, over the Andes mountains, you drop into the Amazon basin. From there, rainforest stretches for hundreds of kilometres to the border with Brazil – and far beyond. This rainforest is the main reason Colombia ranks as the fourth most biodiverse country in the world. Nowhere else has as many species of birds. Only Brazil and China have more trees.
But the region is experiencing an environmental crisis. I recently completed a PhD on the northern Colombian Amazon, in which I tracked how the rainforest is fast being deforested and turned into pastures for cattle ranches. I particularly looked at how this affects hotspots of plant and animal life in rugged valleys on the Amazonian side of the Andes – spectacularly biodiverse places even by Colombian standards – and looked at what can be done to protect them.
This is not an easy part of the world in which to do such work – the NGO Global Witness ranks Colombia as the single most dangerous country for environmental defenders. While documenting legal and illegal cattle ranching, I was often reminded to be aware of exactly who I was contacting and to be wary of which questions I was asking.
Activists and researchers often face violence from those who profit from deforestation, and I had to work closely with organisations and authorities that secured own safety. Very harrowing experiences are not uncommon.
Despite these risks, many continue their efforts, driven by a deep commitment to protecting the Amazon and its biodiversity. Their bravery only underscores the urgent need for stronger protections and enforcement.
Peace led to more deforestation
For decades, the region was mostly controlled by the Farc guerrilla army. The Farc was largely funded by kidnappings and the drug trade, and wasn’t interested in large-scale farming.
All this changed after the government of Colombia signed a peace agreement with the Farc in 2016. Since then, deforestation has increased, as both legal and illegal land tenants have acquired land for farming through what they call “sustainable development” practices. This mostly involves turning forest into pasture for cattle, the main driver of deforestation across Latin America.
Cattle ranches are the main driver of deforestation. Jordi Romo / shutterstock
Things peaked in 2018, when 2,470 square kilometres of forest was lost in Colombia – equivalent to a circular area more than 50 kilometres across. Rates of deforestation have reduced slightly since then (though the data isn’t very reliable), but appear to be increasing once again in 2024.
The recent increase might be attributed to the demand to produce more coca or rear more cattle, along with pressure from extractive industries like mining. The spread of roads and other infrastructure further into the rainforest have also opened up new opportunities.
Billions more needed to stop deforestation
In its 2018 Living Forest Report, the WWF included Colombia’s Chocó-Darién and Amazon forests in its list of 11 “deforestation fronts” across the planet. These fronts are where it projected the largest concentrations of forest loss or severe degradation would occur in the period till 2030.
No wonder then that Colombia’s environmental crisis has drawn international attention. Countries like Germany, Norway and the UK have supported its efforts to reduce deforestation, pledging about €22 million under the UN’s reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation scheme (known as REDD+). This is a good start, but much more is needed.
The Amazon winds through dense forest on the border between Colombia and Peru. Jhampier Giron M / shutterstock
Indeed, the Global Biodiversity Framework, the international treaty that underlies the Cop16 negotiations in Cali, estimates we’ll need an extra US$700 billion each year to protect biodiversity.
An important issue at the summit is therefore how to mobilise sufficient financial resources, particularly for developing countries. The previous global biodiversity summit, held in Canada in 2022, established that wealthy countries should provide US$30 billion annually to low-income countries by 2030.
Ahead of this year’s summit, countries were expected to submit new national biodiversity plans detailing how they’ll meet the 30% protection goals. Most failed to do so – including Colombia. Despite this setback, delegates in Cali will hopefully develop robust mechanisms to monitor progress and ensure countries are held accountable for meeting their targets.
Other critical issues include reforms to benefit small-scale farmers in the Amazon. The region’s current economic model is centred on reshaping the land and extracting resources, but it has not generated prosperity for these more sustainable farmers. That same economic model has also failed to protect the forest itself.
The summit should also work towards recognising indigenous peoples’ rights and traditional knowledge, and including their voices in policy decisions, and must address violence against environmental defenders.
These are all huge issues in Colombia and indeed any country where cattle farmers are eyeing up pristine rainforest. The summit in Cali represents a great opportunity for the world to seriously tackle the dual biodiversity and climate crisis.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX recently made history by catching a Starship rocket booster as it careened back to Earth, wants you to vote for Donald Trump for many reasons. That includes not just what Trump will do here on this planet, but also for what he’ll achieve that’s outside this world. “Vote for @real DonaldTrump,” Musk recently tweeted, “if you want humanity to be a spacefaring civilization”.
Back inside the Earth’s orbit, the CEO of Tesla and X, and one of the richest men in the world, makes an odd foil for Democrats. In a parallel universe, his work in commercial space flights, inventing the most advanced electric cars on the planet, advocacy for sustainable energy, and long record of voting “100 percent Dem until a few years ago” would seem make him a hero of the left. Instead, Musk has taken on the role of comic book supervillain whose full-throated support for Trump has turned him into a pariah among progressives.
Musk purports to be baffled by the backlash, since he insists that nothing that he represents is particularly controversial. He considers himself a political “moderate” who, in backing Trump, is simply standing up for common-sense, middle-of-the-road positions: belief in free speech, deference to the US Constitution, and the right of countries to control their borders. “I’ve been told at times that they are like right-wing values,” Musk said. “These are the fundamental values that made America what it is today.”
Of course, Musk knows better. In between burning the midnight oil at his multiple corporate enterprises, Musk finds the time to tweet dozens of times a day, often trolling critics, heralding Trump, and only rarely apologising for outlandish, crass, conspiracy-laden and sometimes even false posts. Musk has acknowledged that some of his tweets are “extremely dumb”, though he refuses to apply a filter.
In describing Musk, one journalist fretted what could happen when “the world’s richest man runs a communications platform in a truly vengeful, dictatorial way … to promote extreme right-wing agendas and to punish what he calls brain-poisoned liberals”.
Elon Musk owns SpaceX.
Musk’s power lies in his willingness to say just about anything — backstopped by his ownership of part of the internet’s de facto public square. In a now-deleted tweet, Musk pondered sarcastically that “no one is trying to assassinate” Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. Outside of X, Musk admits he’s been “trashing Kamala nonstop” and that, if Harris wins, he’s “fucked”.
Throwing money and power around
Musk is a Maga convert. In 2022, the same year that he bought Twitter and reinstated Trump’s privileges, Musk said that it was “time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset”. Pulling no punches, Trump once called Musk “another bullshit artist”.
Musk claims to have supported Democrats in recent elections, including Joe Biden in 2020. In July of this year, however, Musk announced that he was endorsing Trump, in large part because of how the former president’s reacted after an assassination attempt on his life. “This is a man who has courage under fire!” Musk said.
Musk represents a new crop of politically charged billionaires who aren’t content to stay on their mega-yachts, and instead want to throw their money — and power — around in support of conservative causes.
While critics have called the move illegal, pointing to federal election law that bars paying “or offer[ing] to pay … for registration to vote or for voting”. Musk insists there’s a loophole: he isn’t technically tying his giveaways to voting – and the US Justice Department has said this could violate federal electoral law.
Musk has changed his short-term residency to mobilise support for Trump. As of October, Musk has hunkered down in Pennsylvania, the swing state he calls the “linchpin” in the 2024 US election, where his campaigning has included giving a surprise speech for Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania – where there was previously an assassination attempt on Trump.
Musk has painted doomsday scenarios of what could happen if the election doesn’t turn out how he likes. In a just-released interview with former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson, Musk surmised that “if Trump doesn’t win this election, it’s the last election we’re going to have”. The comment comes as Republicans have pilloried Democrats’ dialled-up rhetoric that democracy is “at stake” in 2024.
Beyond the election, there’s more than speculation that Musk could be tapped for a role in a potential Trump 2.0 administration. He’s openly campaigned to serve as the new head of a department for government efficiency. Trump has already announced that, if elected, Musk will direct a task force to conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and offer “recommendations for drastic reforms”.
True to form, Musk promises that his public service won’t stop at the edge of Earth’s outer orbit. “Washington DC has become an ever-increasing ocean of brake pedals stopping progress,” he says. “Let’s change those brake pedals to accelerators, so we can get great things done in America and become a spacefaring civilization!” One thing’s for sure: Musk’s politics are, quite literally, out of this world.
Thomas Gift 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.
Americans will soon elect their next president after a race for the White House that is essentially tied. From a marketing perspective, think of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris as each holding 45 per cent market share. The remaining 10 per cent includes undecided voters and people disinclined to vote.
My political marketing class at the University of Windsor is using a marketing lens to understand the variables that will influence the outcome on Nov. 5. My recent road trip to the battleground state of Pennsylvania gave me insight into the strength of both the Democratic and Republican brands.
I am viewing the parties as long-established brands. There is brand loyalty to both parties. Those brands’ current success, however, is influenced by the ongoing campaign.
In terms of the Democratic Party, voters obviously aren’t being asked to buy it, but they are being asked to buy the party as augmented or diminished by Harris, its current presidential candidate. The same can be said for Trump’s Republican party.
From a marketing perspective, we can monitor promotional efforts that include traditional media, social media, debates, interviews and rallies, and we receive updates on the parties’ fundraising efforts — essentially a promotional budget. We’ll see the results of these efforts on Nov. 5.
Predicting results
This is the third time I’ve offered a political marketing course based on an American presidential election. The class focuses on understanding the core party brands, and the impact of candidates, debates, media coverage and Political Action Committees. Students forecast the election results the day before the election.
The presidency is not decided by the national popular vote. It is a state-by-state competition, with each state assigned votes in the Electoral College. There are 538 Electoral College votes, so 270 are needed to win.
Most states are predictable. California will undoubtedly vote Democrat (54 votes); Texas will more than likely vote Republican once again (40 votes). The election therefore comes down to seven swing states: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The Democrats, with 226 safe Electoral College votes, have 20 possible routes to 270 — and 19 of them require a Pennsylvania win. Republicans, with 219 safe Electoral College votes, have 21 possible routes to 270 — 19 also require a Pennsylvania win. That’s why I decided to drive through Pennsylvania and speak to voters.
First I went to Erie, a bellwether county with a long history of having the same voting pattern as the full state of Pennsylvania, so it’s a strong predictor of statewide results. I went to a Pittsburgh suburb, and then to the borough of State College, home of Penn State University. I periodically left the interstate to drive through other towns to see the signs, grab lunch and talk.
Each time, my introduction was simple:
“I’m a marketing professor from Canada running a class about the U.S. presidential election. Would you mind explaining to me how you think Pennsylvania will vote? I do not need to know how you will vote.”
The university students I spoke to were juniors and seniors. Other than the students, the people I spoke to would be considered working class, a mix of blue collar and white collar. The non-students were 35 to retirement age. Everyone I spoke said they’d voted in the 2022 mid-term election and intended to vote this year.
At an Erie car show, voters I interviewed were evenly split between a group of 50-plus men with vintage cars and male university students with newer vehicles. I heard from both groups that Pennsylvania was divided, but that the mood between the parties differed.
Both argued that people voting Democrat were brand-loyal or rejecting the Trump brand. Both age groups, including Democratic voters, noted that Trump supporters were primarily focused only on him as the current Republican brand offering.
Economic concerns
Most said the biggest issue that will most influence undecided voters is the economy, followed closely by a more narrow economic concern — inflation.
One Democrat conveyed a simple message that was representative. Asked who would take Erie County: “Democrats.” Asked why they would win, he replied: “I’m just hoping.”
Contrast that with a visit to a diner in Erie. One woman explained that she supports Harris because of reproductive rights. Everyone else backed Trump because of his policies on the economy, the southern border, international wars and crime.
One diner patron had been to a recent Trump rally in Erie. He described it as a rock concert and spoke of the excitement, and hearing Trump say the exact same lines he always says. “It was your favourite rock band playing their hits,” he said.
I left Erie understanding that Democrats were brand loyal or voting to avoid Trump. Republicans, however, never referenced past voting or leaders. They were simply Trump supporters.
The Pittsburgh scene
Pittsburgh was a bust. I chose the wrong town outside Pittsburgh. While I spoke to dozens of voters in Erie, I found only two people to speak to in Smithton.
State College was different. My hotel was close to Penn State University, and there was a restaurant/sports bar on the hotel property.
I entered at 4 p.m. The bartender asked why I was in town. A nearby patron said that he would answer questions. Then another person volunteered. I left seven hours later. People were asking to be next.
I spoke to people from all political spectrums. Of the 40-plus people I spoke with, one couple illustrated the mood in the state particularly well. She is a Republican. He is a Democrat. He explained: “There is too much going on — inflation, the hurricanes, the Longshoremen strike, steel and fracking, illegal immigration. Too much.”
He shrugged his shoulders, discouraged. She smiled, eager for Election Day.
Conclusions from talking to voters
If the election were held today, I believe Republicans would win Pennsylvania based on my conversations with voters. But that could change if there is a change in one of the key topics: strong or unanticipated positive economic news, perhaps, or if a new issue or story develops that has not yet impacted the race.
The road trip provided insights into voter decision-making. It highlighted the importance of brand loyalty and enthusiasm. A substantial portion of voters indicated they wished both parties had different leaders. This could impact voter turnout.
It also illuminated a key difference between traditional consumer decision-making and voter decision-making. If, on Black Friday, I prefer Walmart’s offering over Amazon’s, I am not impacted by my neighbour’s purchase decision.
In politics, however, how my neighbour votes will influence my life for the next four years.
Dave Bussiere does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Hill, Associate Professor (Research and Development), Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of South Wales
Nuclear detonations were the backdrop to Teeua and Teraabo’s childhood. By the time the sisters were eight and four, the Pacific island on which they grew up, Kiritimati, had hosted 30 atomic and thermonuclear explosions – six during Operation Grapple, a British series between 1957 and 1958, and 24 during Operation Dominic, led by the US in 1962.
The UK’s secretary of state for the colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd, had claimed the Grapple series would put Britain “far ahead of the Americans, and probably the Russians too, in super-bomb development”. Grapple, the country’s largest tri-service operation since D-Day, also involved troops from Fiji and New Zealand. It sought to secure the awesome power of the hydrogen bomb: a thermonuclear device far more destructive than the atomic bomb.
Britain’s seat at the top table of “super-bomb development” was emphatically announced in April 1958 with Grapple Y: an “H-bomb” 200 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. This remains Britain’s largest nuclear detonation – one of more than 100 conducted by the UK, US and Soviet Union in 1958 alone.
More than six decades later, the health effects on former servicemen based on Kiritimati, as well as at test locations in South and Western Australia, remain unresolved. Greater Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, has called the treatment of UK nuclear test veterans “the longest-standing and, arguably, the worst” of all the British public scandals in recent history.
Over the past year, the life stories of British nuclear test veterans have been collected by researchers, including myself, for an oral history project in partnership with the British Library. Whether from a vantage point of air, land or sea, the veterans all recall witnessing nuclear explosions with startling clarity, as if the moment was seared on to their memories. According to Doug Herne, a ship’s cook with the Royal Navy:
When the flash hit you, you could see the X-rays of your hands through your closed eyes. Then the heat hit you, and it was as if someone my size had caught fire and walked through me. To say it was frightening is an understatement. I think it shocked us into silence.
British servicemen describe their nuclear test experiences. Video: Wester van Gaal/Motherboard.
But what of the experiences of local people on Kiritimati? I have recently interviewed two sisters who are among the few surviving islanders who witnessed the nuclear tests. This is their story.
‘A mushroom cloud igniting the sky’
At the start of Operation Grapple in May 1957, around 250 islanders lived on Kiritimati – the world’s largest coral reef atoll, slap bang in the centre of the Pacific Ocean, around 1,250 miles (2,000km) due south of Hawaii. The island’s name is derived from the English word “Christmas”, the atoll having been “discovered” by the British explorer James Cook on Christmas Eve 1777.
In May 2023, I visited Kiritimati for a research project on “British nuclear imperialism”, which investigated how post-war Britain used its dwindling imperial assets and resources as a springboard for nuclear development. I sought to interview islanders who had remained on the atoll since the tests, including Teeua Tekonau, then aged 68. In 2024, I visited her younger sister, Teraabo Pollard, who lives more than 8,000 miles away in the contrasting surroundings of Burnley, north-west England.
Far from descriptions of fear and terror, both Teeua and Teraabo looked back on the tests with striking enthusiasm. Teraabo recalled witnessing them from the local maneaba (open-air meeting place) or tennis court as a “pleasurable” experience full of “excitement”.
She described having her ears plugged with cotton wool before being covered with a blanket. As if by magic, the blanket was then lifted to reveal a mushroom cloud igniting the night sky – a sight accompanied by sweetened bread handed out by American soldiers. So vivid was the light that Teraabo, then aged four, described “being excited about it being daytime again”.
An Operation Grapple thermonuclear test near Kiritimati, 1957-58. Video: Imperial War Museums.
In view of the violence of the tests, I was struck that Teeua and Teraabo volunteered these positive memories. Their enthusiasm seemed in marked contrast to growing concerns about the radioactive fallout – including those voiced by surviving test veterans and their descendants. As children, the tests seem to have offered the sisters a spectacle of fantasy and escapism – glazed with the saccharine of American treats and Disney films on British evacuation ships.
Yet they have also lived through the premature deaths of family members and, in Teraabo’s case, a malignant tumour dating from the time of the tests. And there have been similar stories from other families who lived in the shadow of these very risky, loosely controlled experiments. Teraabo told me about a friend who had peeked out from her blanket as a young girl – and who suffered from eye and health problems ever since.
‘Only a very slight health hazard’
Kiritimati forms part of the impossibly large Republic of Kiribati – a nation of 33 islands spread over 3.5 million square kilometres; the only one to have territory in all four hemispheres and, until 1995, on either side of the international date line. Before independence from Britain in 1979, Kiribati belonged to the Gilbert and Ellice Island Colony, which in effect made Kiritimati a “nuclear colony” for the purpose of British and American testing.
In 1955, Teeua and Teraabo’s parents, Taraem and Tekonau Tetoa, left their home island of Tabiteuea, a small atoll belonging to the Gilbert group of islands in the western Pacific. They boarded a British merchant vessel bound for Christmas Island nearly 2,000 miles away. Setting sail with new-born Teeua in their arms, the family looked forward to a future cutting copra on Kiritimati’s British coconut plantation.
The scale of this journey, with four young children, was immense. Just how the hundred or so Gilbertese passengers “managed to live [during the voyage] was better not asked”, according to one royal engineer who described a similar voyage a few years later. “There were piles of coconuts everywhere – perhaps they were for both food and drink.”
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Within two years of their arrival, the family faced more upheaval as mother Taraem and her children were packed aboard another ship ahead of the first three sets of British nuclear tests in the Pacific. Known as Grapple 1, 2 and 3, they were to be detonated over Malden Island, an atoll some 240 miles to the south of Kiritimati – but still too close for the comfort of local residents.
According to Teeua, the evacuation was prompted by disillusioned labourers brought to Kiritimati without their families, who went on strike after learning how much the British troops were being paid. But the islanders’ perspectives do not feature much in the colonial records, which give precedence to British disputes about logistical costs and safety calculations.
The Grapple task force resolved that the safe limit set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection should be reduced, to limit the cost of evacuations. A meeting in November 1956 noted that “only a very slight health hazard to people would arise from this reduction – and that only to primitive peoples”.
Shocking as this remark sounds, it is typical of the disregard that nuclear planners appear to have had, both for Indigenous communities and the mostly working-class soldiers. These lives did not seem to matter much in the context of Britain’s quest for nuclear supremacy. William Penney, Britain’s chief nuclear scientist, had bemoaned how critics during tests in Australia were “intent on thwarting the whole future of the British Empire for the sake of a few Aboriginals”.
Tekonau, Teeua’s father, was one of the 30 or so I-Kiribati people to stay behind on Kiritimati during the Malden tests in May and June 1957. As one of the only labourers to speak English, he had gained the trust of the district commissioner, Percy Roberts, who invited Tekonau to accompany him during inspections of villagers’ houses in Port London, then the island’s only village. On one occasion, Teeua said, the islanders did not recognise her father as he had been given a “flat top” haircut like the Fijian soldiers. “This means he had a nice relationship with the soldiers,” she told me. “Thank God for giving me such a good and clever dad.”
Since the initial tests did not produce a thermonuclear explosion, the task force embarked on further trials between November 1957 and September 1958, known as Grapple X, Y and Z. In view of expense and time, these were conducted on Kiritimati rather than Malden Island – and this time, the residents were not evacuated to other islands. Rather, families were brought aboard ships in the island’s harbour and shown films below deck.
After these tests, the islanders returned to find the large X and Y detonations had cracked the walls of their homes and smashed their doors and furniture. One islander found their pet frigate bird, like so many of the wild birds on Kiritimati, had been blinded by the flash of Grapple Y. No compensation was ever paid to the islanders, although the Ministry of Supply did reimburse the colony for deterioration of “plantation assets”, including £4 for every damaged coconut tree (equivalent to £120 today).
A month before Grapple Y, Teraabo was born. Her earliest and most vivid childhood memories are of the US-led Operation Dominic four years later, by which time evacuation procedures had been abandoned altogether.
This series of tests was sanctioned by Britain in exchange for a nuclear-powered submarine and access to the Nevada Proving Grounds in the US – regarded as pivotal to the future of British weapons technology ahead of the signing of the Test Ban Treaty in October 1963, which would prohibit atmospheric testing.
Dominic’s 24 detonations on Kiritimati – which usually took place after sunset around 6pm, between April and November 1962 – were “awesome”, according to Teraabo. Recalling the suspense as the “tannoy announced the countdown”, she described “coming out of cover [and] witnessing the bomb [as] an amazing experience … When the bomb set off, the brilliance of the light was tremendous.”
Each explosion’s slow expiration would re-illuminate the Pacific sky. One, Starfish Prime, became known as a “rainbow bomb” because of the multi-coloured aurora it produced over the Pacific, having been launched into space where it exploded.
So spectacular were these descriptions that I almost felt I had to suspend disbelief as I listened. At one point in my interview with Teraabo, she leaned in to reassure me that she had no interest in exaggerating these events: “I’m a very proud person,” she whispered, “I would never lie.”
‘In our blood’
More than six decades on from the Grapple tests, I was sitting in Teeua’s kitchen in the village of Tabwakea (meaning “turtle”), near the northern tip of Kiritimati. I had driven here in a Subaru Forester, clapped-out from the many potholes on the island’s main road, itself built by royal engineers over 60 years ago.
Teeua Tekonau in her kitchen during the author’s visit to Kiritimati in 2023. Christopher R. Hill., CC BY
Teeua’s home, nestled down a sand track, had a wooden veranda at the front where she would teach children to read and write under shelter from the hot equatorial sun. Handcrafted mats lined the sand and coral floor, fanning out from the veranda to the kitchen at the back.
The house felt full of the sounds of the local community, from the chatter of neighbours to the laughter of children outdoors. No one could feel lonely here, despite the vastness of the ocean that surrounds Kiritimati.
As Teeua cooked rice and prepared coffee, we discussed the main reason for my visit: to understand the impacts of the nuclear tests on the islanders, their descendents, and the sensitive ecosystem in which they live. Teeua is chair of Kiritimati’s Association of Atomic Cancer Patients, and one of only three survivors of the tests still living on Kiritimati. She pulled up a seat and looked at me:
Many, many died of cancer … And many women had babies that died within three months … I remember the coconut trees … when you drank [from the coconuts], you [were] poisoned.
Both Teeua’s parents and four of her eight siblings had died of cancer or unexplained conditions, she said. Her younger brother, Takieta, died of leukaemia at the age of two in November 1963 – less than a year after Operation Dominic ended. Her sister Teraabo, who discovered a tumour in her stomach shortly after the trials, was only able to have her stomach treated once she moved to the UK in 1981, by which time the tumour had turned malignant.
Teeua’s testimony pointed to the gendered impacts of the nuclear tests. She referred to the prevalence of menstrual problems and stillbirths, evidence of which can be inferred from the testimony of another nuclear survivor, Sui Kiritome, a fellow I-Kiribati who had arrived on Kiritimati in 1957 with her teacher husband. Sui has described how their second child, Rakieti, had “blood coming out of all the cavities of her body” at birth.
A rare military hospital record from 1958 – stored in the UK’s National Archives at Kew in London – also refers to the treatment of a civilian woman for ante-partum haemorrhage and stillbirth, though it is unclear whether this was a local woman or one of the soldier’s wives on the passenger ship HMT Dunera, which visited briefly to “boost morale” after Grapple X.
Members of the Kiritimati Association of Atomic Cancer Patients. Courtesy: Teeua Taukaro., CC BY-ND
Having re-established the Association of Atomic Cancer Patients in 2009, Teeua has continued much of the work that Ken McGinley, first chair of the British Nuclear Tests Veterans Association, did after its establishment in 1983. She has documented the names of all I-Kiribati people present during the tests, along with their spouses, children and other relatives. And she has listed the cancers and illnesses from which they have suffered.
In the absence of medical records at the island hospital, these handwritten notes are the closest thing on the atoll to epidemiological data about the tests. But according to Teeua, concerns about the health effects of the tests date back much longer, to 1965 when a labourer named Bwebwe spoke out about poisonous clouds. “Everyone thought he was crazy,” Teeua recalled.
But Bwebwe’s speculations were lent credibility by Sui Kiritome’s testimony, and by the facial scars she bore that were visible for all to see. In an interview with her daughter, Sui explained how she was only 24 when she started to lose her hair, and “burns developed on my face, scalp and parts of my shoulder”.
In a similar manner to claims made by British nuclear test veterans, Sui attributed her health problems to being rained on during Grapple Y – which may have been detonated closer to the atoll’s surface than the task force was prepared to admit.
When I asked Teeua why her campaigning association was only reformed in 2009, she explained it had been prompted by a visit from British nuclear test veterans who “told us that everyone [involved in the tests] has cancer – blood cancer”. They had been told this in the past but, she said, “we did not believe it. But after years … after our children [also] died of cancer, then we remembered what they told us.”
After some visiting researchers explained to Teeua and the community that the effects of the tests were “not good”, she concluded that “our kids died of cancer because of the tests … That’s why we start to combine together … the nuclear survivors, to talk about what they did to our kids”.
I found Teeua’s testimony deeply troubling: not only because of the suffering she and other families have been through, but in the way that veterans had returned to Kiritimati as civilians, raising concerns among locals that may have lain dormant or been forgotten. The suggestion that radiation was “in her blood” must have been deeply disturbing for Teeua and her community.
But I reminded myself that the veterans who came looking for answers in 2009 were also victims. They made the long journey seeking clues about their health problems, or a silver bullet to prove their government’s deception over the nuclear fallout.
As young men, they were unwittingly burdened with a lifetime of uncertainty – compounded by endless legal disputes with the Ministry of Defence or inconclusive health studies that jarred with their personal medical histories. And, like the islanders, some of these servicemen died young after experiencing agonising illnesses.
The scramble for the Pacific
My research on British nuclear imperialism also sheds light on how imperial and settler colonial perceptions of “nature” shaped how these nuclear tests were planned and operationalised.
British sites were selected on the basis of in-depth environmental research. When searching the site for Britain’s first atomic bomb (the Montebello Islands off the west coast of Australia), surveyors discovered 20 new species of insect, six new plants, and a species of legless lizard.
Monitoring of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests fed into the rise of ecosystem ecologies as an academic discipline. In the words of one environmental specialist on the US tests, it seemed that “destruction was the enabling condition for understanding life as interconnected”.
Since H-bombs would exceed the explosive yield deemed acceptable by Australia, Winston Churchill’s government in the mid-1950s had been forced to look for a new test site beyond Western and South Australia. British planners drew on a wealth of imperial knowledge and networks – but their proposal to use the Kermadec Islands, an archipelago 600 miles north-east of Auckland, was rejected by New Zealand on environmental grounds.
So, when Teeua and her family landed on Kiritimati in 1955, their journey was part of “the scramble for the Pacific”: a race between Britain and the US to lay claim to the sovereignty of Pacific atolls in light of their strategic significance for air and naval power.
The British government archives include some notable environmental “what ifs?” Had the US refused the UK’s selection of Kiritimati because of its own sovereignty claim, then it would have been probable, as Lennox-Boyd, Britain’s colonial secretary, admitted, that “the Antarctic region south of Australia might have to be used” for its rapidly expanding nuclear programme.
Instead, this extraordinary period in global history recently took me to a Victorian mansion in the Lancashire town of Burnley, where I interviewed Teeua’s younger sister, Teraabo, about her memories of the Kiritimati tests.
‘No longer angry’
Teraabo’s home felt like the antithesis of Teeua’s island abode 8,300 miles away: ordered instead of haphazard, private instead of communal, spacious instead of crowded. And our interview had a more detached, philosophical tone.
Teraabo Pollard with her father’s nuclear test veteran medal. Christopher R. Hill., CC BY-ND
Like her sister, Teraabo has worked to raise awareness about the legacy of the nuclear tests, including with the Christmas Island Appeal, an offshoot of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association that sought to publicise the extent of the waste left on Kiritimati from the nuclear test period.
The appeal succeeded in persuading Tony Blair’s UK government to tackle the remaining waste in Kiritimati – most of which was non-radiological, according to a 1998 environmental assessment. The island was “cleaned up” and remediated between 2004 and 2008, at a cost of around £5 million to the Ministry of Defence. Much of the waste was flown or shipped back to the UK, where 388 tonnes of low-grade radioactive material were deposited in a former salt mine at Port Clarence, near Middlesbrough.
Yet Teraabo’s views have evolved. She told me she is “no longer angry” about the tests, a stark contrast to her position 20 years ago, when she told British journalist Alan Rimmer how islanders had “led a simple life with disease virtually unknown. But after the tests, everything changed. I now realise the whole island was poisoned.”
Whereas the Teraabo of 2003 blamed “the British government for all this misery”, she has since become more reflective. In the context of the cold war and the nuclear arms race, she even told me she could understand the British rationale for selecting Kiritimati as a test site. This seemed a remarkable statement from a survivor who had lost so much.
Over the course of the interview, it became clear Teraabo had grown tired of being angry – and that she had felt “trapped” by the tragic figure she was meant to represent in the campaigns of veterans and disarmers. Each time Teraabo rehearsed the doom-laden script of radiation exposure, she admitted she was also suppressing the joy of her childhood memories.
A turning point for Teraabo seems to have come in 2007, when she last visited Kiritimati and met her sister Teeua. By this time, the atoll’s population was 4,000 – quite a leap from the 300 residents she grew up with. “It is no longer the island I remember,” she said.
The Kiritimati of Teraabo’s memory was neat and well-structured. The one she described encountering in 2007 was chaotic and unkempt. She had come to the realisation that the Kiritimati she had been campaigning for – the pristine, untouched atoll of her parents – had long since moved on, so she should move on with it. The sorrow caused by the test operations would not define her.
Radioactive colonialism
Not long after I left Kiritimati in June 2023, the global nuclear disarmament organisation Ican began researching the atoll ahead of a major global summit to discuss the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Descendants of Kiritimati’s nuclear test survivors were asked a series of questions, with those who provided the “right” answers being selected for a sponsored trip to UN headquarters in New York.
The chosen representatives included Teeua’s daughter, Taraem. I wondered if the survivors of Kiritimati are doomed to forever rehearse the stories of their nuclear past – a burden that Teeua and Teraabo have had to carry ever since they stood in awe of atomic and thermonuclear detonations more than 60 years ago.
They have had to deal with “radioactive colonialism” all their adult lives – the outside world demanding to see the imprint of radioactivity on their health and memories. But the sisters’ fondness for British order, despite all they have been through, prevails.
Their positive memories of Britain may in part reflect the elevated role of their father, Tekonau Tetoa – a posthumous recipient of the test veteran medal – within the British colonial system. During my visit, I happened upon an old photo of Tekonau, looking immaculate as he hangs off the side of a plantation truck in a crisp white shirt. Knowing Teeua did not possess a photo of her parents, I took a scan and raced to her house down the road.
“Do you recognise this man?” I asked, holding up my phone.
She flickered with recognition. “Is that my father?”
I nodded, and she shed a tear of joy.
Tekonau Tetoa, father of Teeua and Teraabo, hangs off the door of a coconut plantation truck in Kiritimati. Courtesy: John Bryden., CC BY-ND
Memories of Teeua and Teraabo’s father are preserved in the island landscape of their youth: pristine, regimented by the ostensible tidiness of colonial and military order.
But such order masked contamination: an unknown quantity that would only become evident years later in ill-health and environmental damage. It was not only the nuclear tests: from 1957 to 1964, the atoll was sprayed four times a week with DDT, a carcinogenic insecticide, as part of attempts to reduce insect-borne disease. In the words of one of the pilots: “I had many a wave from the rather fat Gilbo ladies sitting on their loos as I passed overhead, and gave them some spray for good measure!” British tidiness concealed a special brand of poison.
Today, the prospect of a meaningful response from the UK to the concerns raised by the islanders and servicemen alike seems slim. In October 2023, the UK and France followed North Korea and Russia in vetoing a Kiribati and Kazakhstan-proposed UN resolution on victim assistance and environmental remediation for people and places harmed by nuclear weapons use and testing.
Over in Kiritimati, meanwhile, Teeua still tends to a small plot where Prince Philip planted a commemorative tree in April 1959, shortly after the British-led nuclear tests had ended. It is rumoured he did not drink from the atoll’s water while he was there.
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Christopher Hill receives funding from the Office for Veterans’ Affairs, UK Cabinet Office. The research for this article was also supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UKRI. The author wishes to thank the following for their support with this article: Fiona Bowler, Ian Brailsford, Joshua Bushen, John Bryden, Jon Hogg, Brian Jones, Rens van Munster, Wesley Perriman, Maere Tekanene, Michael Walsh, Rotee Walsh and Derek Woolf. Sincere thanks to Teeua Tekonau and Teraabo Pollard for sharing their family stories.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Philip Murphy, Director of History & Policy at the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of British and Commonwealth History, School of Advanced Study, University of London
That the recent visit of King Charles to Australia – his first as the country’s sovereign – attracted protests will have come as a surprise to very few people.
But the message from the most prominent protester was, perhaps, less expected. At the end of a speech by the king at Parliament House in Canberra on October 21, he was heckled by Lidia Thorpe, an independent senator of Aboriginal (Djab Wurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara) origin.
She told him: “You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.”
Earlier in the day, Thorpe had issued a statement outlining her position. In it, she claimed:
As First Peoples, we never ceded our Sovereignty over this land. The crown invaded this country, has not sought treaty with First Peoples, and committed a genocide of our people. King Charles is not the legitimate sovereign of these lands. Any move towards a republic must not continue this injustice. Treaty must play a central role in establishing an independent nation. A republic without a treaty must not happen.
Historic treaties
The recognition of the rights of Aboriginal peoples through a formal treaty has been a demand of Australian indigenous rights campaigners for decades. Indeed, Australia is unusual among British settler colonies in the failure of the crown to forge treaties with Indigenous peoples in the process of imperial occupation. In New Zealand and Canada these treaties continue to be invoked as an historical underpinning of indigenous rights.
The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between Māori leaders and the crown as well as the rights and principles that followed from it are certainly politically contentious in New Zealand. Yet the Treaty is still widely regarded as the country’s founding document and a key symbolic basis for inclusion and reconciliation.
In Canada, the treaties signed by the crown with First Nations peoples are explicitly referenced in the country’s 1982 constitution and are cited by the Canadian government as “a framework for living together and sharing the land Indigenous peoples traditionally occupied.”
It should not come as much of a surprise that the issue of the the absence of similar treaties in Australia has been raised during the king’s visit. The rather dull itineraries of royal visits provide activists with a perfect opportunity to have their voices heard by journalists desperate for something interesting to write about. There is a history of Aboriginal protesters using them in this way.
In 1972, the Larrakia people, the traditional owners of the Darwin region in the Northern Territory, used a visit by Princess Margaret to draw attention to a petition asking Queen Elizabeth II to assist them in their demand for land rights and political representation.
The palace and the governments of the Realms are keenly aware of these sensitivities and plan royal tours accordingly. During his visit to Canada in 2022, for example, while he was still Prince of Wales, Charles made a point of meeting the survivors of the country’s notorious residential schools where thousands of indigenous children suffered abuse.
Ironically, indigenous treaties with the crown have complicated the republican issue, forcing campaigners for a republic in both New Zealand and Canada to offer assurances that the rights and obligations in those treaties would not be lost if the monarchy was to be abolished.
The question of reparations
Charles has followed his Australia visit by flying to Samoa for the summit of the Commonwealth Heads of Government. Again, the UK press sensed trouble ahead, predicting that as head of the Commonwealth Charles might be caught up in a row between the British government and Caribbean nations over the call for reparations for slavery.
The UK is not the only government in the Commonwealth having to wrestle with colonial legacy issues. But there is no avoiding them.
Britain has a monarchy steeped in imperial history, with a king who is quite separately sovereign of 14 other realms. Its government continues to profess a belief in the value of the Commonwealth, when its members have little else in common except that most of them were colonised by Britain.
A recent report by the UK thinktank Policy Exchange, which imagined the Commonwealth playing a greater role in British diplomatic, defence and trade policy, seemed blithely unaware of the tensions within the organisation and the barriers to collective action.
In a similar vein, UK prime minister Keir Starmer has claimed that he wants to “look forward” and focus on issues such as climate change and boosting prosperity rather than reparations.
But the Commonwealth is simply not a logical framework for the discussion of these matters. On the other hand, it is uniquely qualified to debate the impact of colonialism and the question of reparatory justice. And even if Britain doesn’t want to have that conversation, other Commonwealth countries certainly do.
Philip Murphy has received funding from the AHRC. He belongs to the European Movement UK.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Frederick John Packer, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Global freedom has been in decline for nearly two decades, according to Freedom House, an American non-profit organization devoted to supporting democracy around the world.
That means the role of high-profile freedom activists, including activists in exile — people who are displaced from their countries of origin due to their activism but continue to affect change through various means — has become ever more crucial.
A recent incident involving Alexander Lapshin, a Soviet-born Israeli travel journalist turned human rights advocate, at Armenia’s Yerevan airport highlights the ongoing persecution faced by activists even in seemingly secure environments.
On Sept. 21, during Armenia’s Independence Day celebrations, Lapshin said he was detained at the request of Belarusian authorities, accused of insulting the honour and dignity of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko by highlighting the authoritarian nature of his regime in social media posts.
Though not formally expelled from any one country, Lapshin’s circumstances have effectively left him with no safe or stable place to settle. He says legal and political pressures in both Ukraine and Israel prevent him from returning.
Armenia ultimately refused to arrest him, but Lapshin and his family were forced to endure four hours of distressing uncertainty at the Yerevan police station before his release was formally registered by Armenia’s Prosecutor General’s Office.
This provocation underscored the persistent threats activists face even in countries offering relative safety.
Extradited to Azerbaijan
Just weeks before his arrest in Yerevan, we met with Lapshin in Ottawa to learn about his odyssey, and by extension, the suffering of his family resulting from his work as a travelling journalist.
It’s not the first time Lapshin had been targeted by authoritarians. In 2016, while in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Lapshin was detained by the authorities at the request of the Azerbaijani government. He was subsequently extradited to Azerbaijan on charges related to his travel in 2012 to the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh — an area claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijani government accused Lapshin of violating its laws by entering the enclave without permission and promoting its independence. However, at that point Lapshin had never been involved in politics nor called for the region’s independence. The Azerbaijani court dropped this charge, though convicted him of taking an unauthorized journalistic trip.
The story of Lapshin’s arrest and extradition drew widespread condemnation from human rights organizations and various governments, who viewed it as a blatant violation of his rights to freedom of movement and expression.
Lapshin was nevertheless found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. However, following significant international pressure and diplomatic negotiations, he was pardoned and released in September 2017.
Lapshin’s Azerbaijani ordeal
In his subsequent testimony to the Centre for Truth and Justice, a U.S.-based non-profit organization, Lapshin detailed the severe abuse he endured during his imprisonment in Azerbaijan.
Upon arrival at Kurdakhani prison — known for holding political prisoners — Lapshin was subjected to humiliating strip searches and invasive medical checks. For seven months, he was confined to a small, windowless cell, kept under constant artificial light and allowed only one hour of exercise in a similarly confined yard. His diet was minimal and of poor quality, leading to significant physical and psychological distress.
Lapshin testifies about how he was treated in Azerbaijan. (The Centre for Truth and Justice YouTube channel)
The most harrowing part of his imprisonment came on Sept. 10, 2017, when four masked men brutally assaulted him in his cell. Lapshin described the attack in detail:
“I felt three of them holding my legs and chest while one strangled me. They punched my ribs, my head and my genitals. I lost consciousness within seconds.”
He sustained severe injuries, including broken ribs, a broken wrist and multiple broken teeth. Azerbaijani authorities maintained that he had attempted suicide.
Lapshin’s further testimony about how he was treated in Azerbaijan. (The Centre for Truth and Justice YouTube channel)
According to Lapshin, Azerbaijan released him not because of the European Court’s decision, but due to his near death following an attempted murder in custody. He believes the president of Azerbaijan decided to release him without formalities to avoid international tension if he’d died in prison.
Broader implications
Lapshin’s recent detention in Armenia is part of a continued pattern of harassment against him as he’s morphed from a travel blogger to a human rights advocate.
Despite the ordeal, Lapshin sees these provocations as an opportunity to create greater public awareness. The media coverage generated from such incidents often works to his advantage, drawing more attention to the plight of political prisoners and the excesses of authoritarian regimes.
Lapshin sees his ordeals as helping to raise public awareness about authoritarians. (WikiMedia), CC BY
Lapshin’s collaboration with Jivan Avetisyan, a prominent film director focusing on human rights issues, exemplifies his strategic approach to advocacy — turning personal trauma into powerful narratives that reach a global audience.
Such collaborations contribute significantly to keeping human rights abuses in the spotlight.
Activists like Lapshin are crucial figures in the global struggle against authoritarianism. Despite enduring harsh persecution, they persist in their advocacy efforts from the relative safety of democracies, and work to raise awareness among policymakers and the public.
Lapshin’s recent trip to Ottawa is one example of this. He met with Global Affairs Canada officials and presented them with a sanctions list targeting Azerbaijani officials he alleges are responsible for war crimes and abuses, including those involved in his prison mistreatment.
Impact and challenges
Activists like Lapshin employ diverse strategies to advance their causes, such as social media engagement and public mobilization, as well as partnerships with global human rights organizations.
These efforts often result in positive changes, including the release of detained activists and the imposition of sanctions on oppressive governments. Lapshin’s resilience, along with that of notable exiled activists like Chinese-born Chen Guangcheng and Belarus’ Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, demonstrates the power and influence that individuals can wield against repressive regimes from afar.
Activists, in particular those in exile, face numerous challenges, including transnational repression and a lack of resources. Authoritarian regimes employ measures like surveillance, intimidation, physical assaults and even murder to target activists beyond their borders. These activists must also navigate legal, financial and cultural barriers in foreign countries when they seek asylum, find work and try to integrate into new societies, all while continuing their advocacy.
Lapshin’s experiences illustrate these challenges. The ongoing threats and harassment against him continue even today. Nonetheless, his dedication to human rights advocacy remains unwavering.
I am a member of various professional / academic associations and some human rights NGOs including (pro bono) the Canada Committee of Human Rights Watch. None of these would be affected by this article nor would I gain any benefit as a result.
Philip Leech-Ngo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The royal office said as well as attending CHOGM, the King’s programme in Samoa would be supportive of one of the meeting’s key themes, “a resilient environment”, and the meeting’s focus on oceans.
The King and Queen were to be formally welcomed by an ‘Ava Fa’atupu ceremony before meeting people at an engagement to highlight aspects of Samoan traditions and culture.
As we head towards Apia, we can’t wait to visit Samoa for the first time together and to experience the warmth of ancient traditions with your remarkable people. Feiloa’i ma le manuia! 🇼🇸
Charles will also attend the CHOGM Business Forum to hear about progress on sustainable urbanisation and investment in solutions to tackle climate change.
He will visit a mangrove forest, a National Park, and Samoa’s Botanical Garden, where he will plant a tree marking the opening of a new area within the site, which will be called ‘The King’s Garden’.
Queen Camilla’s engagements include visiting an aoga faifeau to see first-hand how pupils are taught to read and write, and will visiting the Samoa Victim Support Group, an organisation which assists survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Page one: Thursday, 24th October 2024.
Photo: Junior S Ami / Samoa Observer Design: Terry Tovio / Samoa Observer
Since 1969, King Charles III has visited 44 of 53 Commonwealth countries, many of them on several occasions.
His visits to the Pacific — before he was King — included representing his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, at Fiji’s independence celebrations in 1970; and visiting Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand as part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012.
Queen Elizabeth II visited the Pacific multiple times during her reign.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When most people think about caring for their mental health, they may think about getting more exercise, getting more sleep and making sure they’re eating healthy. Increasingly, research is showing that spending time in nature surrounded by plants and wildlife can also contribute to preventing and treating mental illness.
Our research focuses on the importance of birds and trees in urban neighbourhoods in promoting mental well-being. In our study, we combined more than a decade of health and ecological data across 36 Canadian cities and found a positive association between greater bird and tree diversity and self-rated mental health.
The well-being benefits of healthy ecosystems will probably not come as a great surprise to urban dwellers who relish days out in the park or hiking in a nearby nature reserve. Still, the findings of our study speak to the potential of a nature-based urbanism that promotes the health of its citizens.
Across cultures and societies, people have strong connections with birds. The beauty of their bright song and colour have inspired art, music and poetry. Their contemporary cultural relevance has even earned them an affectionate, absurdist internet nickname: “birbs”.
There’s something magical about catching a glimpse of a bird and hearing birdsong. For many urbanites, birds are our daily connection to wildlife and a gateway to nature. In fact, even if we don’t realize it, humans and birds are intertwined. Birds provide us with many essential services — controlling insects, dispersing seeds and pollinating our crops.
People have similarly intimate connections with trees. The terms tree of life, family trees, even tree-hugger all demonstrate the central cultural importance trees have in many communities around the world. In cities, trees are a staple of efforts to bring beauty and tranquility.
Contact with nature and greenspace have a suite of mental health benefits.
Natural spaces reduce stress and offer places for recreation and relaxation for urban dwellers, but natural diversity is key. A growing amount of research shows that the extent of these benefits may be related to the diversity of different natural features.
Finally, we compared both of these data sets to a long-standing health survey that has interviewed approximately 65,000 Canadians each year for over two decades.
We found that living in a neighbourhood with higher than average bird diversity increased reporting of good mental health by about seven per cent. While living in a neighbourhood with higher than average tree diversity increased good mental health by about five per cent.
Importance of urban birds and trees
The results of our study, and those of others, show a connection between urban bird and tree diversity, healthy ecosystems and people’s mental well-being. This underscores the importance of urban biodiversity conservation as part of healthy living promotion.
Protecting wild areas in parks, planting pollinator gardens and reducing pesticide use could all be key strategies to protect urban wildlife and promote people’s well-being. Urban planners should take note.
We’re at a critical juncture: just as we are beginning to understand the well-being benefits of birds and trees, we’re losing species at a faster rate than ever before. It’s estimated that there are three billion fewer birds in North America compared to the 1970s and invasive pests will kill 1.4 million street trees over the next 30 years.
By promoting urban biodiversity, we can ensure a sustainable and healthy future for all species, including ourselves.
Rachel Buxton receives funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, National Institutes of Health, and Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Emma J. Hudgins received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies for this work. She currently receives funding from Plant Health Australia.
Stephanie Prince Ware has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luis M. García Marín, Postdoctoral Researcher, Brain & Mental Health Program, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
The human brain is a marvel of complexity. It contains specialised and interconnected structures controlling our thoughts, personality and behaviour.
The size and shape of our brains also play a crucial role in cognitive functions and mental health. For example, a slightly smaller hippocampus, the structure responsible for regulation of memory and emotion, is commonly seen in depression. In dementia, atrophy of the hippocampus is correlated with memory loss and cognitive decline.
Despite these insights, we have only scratched the surface of understanding the brain and its connection to mental health.
In collaboration with scientists around the world, we have conducted the world’s largest genetic study of the volume of regional structures of the brain. This study is now published in Nature Genetics.
We discovered hundreds of genetic variants that influence the size of structures such as the amygdala (the “processing centre” for emotions), the hippocampus and the thalamus (involved in movement and sensory signals).
We uncovered their potential overlap with genes known to influence the risk of certain developmental, psychiatric and neurological disorders.
More than 70,000 brains
To understand how the brain connects to mental health, scientists like ourselves engage in large-scale scientific studies that span the globe.
These studies, which involve thousands of volunteers, are the bedrock of modern biomedical research. They help us discover genes associated with brain size and mental health conditions. In turn, this can improve diagnostic precision and even pave the way for personalised medicine, which uses a person’s genetic test results to tailor treatments.
We screened the DNA and closely examined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from more than 70,000 people across 19 countries. We wanted to find out if there are specific genetic variants influencing differences in brain size between individuals.
What we found was stunning. Some of these genes seem to act early in life, and many genes also increase the risk for conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Parkinson’s disease.
What did we find out?
Brain-related disorders are common, with an estimated 40% of Australians experiencing a mental health disorder in their lifetime.
Our genetic findings reveal that larger regional brain volumes (the size of specific parts of the brain) are associated with a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease. In comparison, smaller regional brain volumes are statistically linked with a higher risk of ADHD.
These insights suggest that genetic influences on brain size are fundamental to understanding the origins of mental health disorders. And understanding these genetic links is crucial. It shows how our genes can influence brain development and the risk of mental health conditions.
By investigating shared genetic causes, we could one day develop treatments that address multiple conditions simultaneously, providing more effective support for individuals with various conditions. This is especially important in mental health, where it is common for someone to experience more than one disorder at the same time.
Our study also revealed that genetic effects on brain structure are consistent across people from both European and non-European ancestry. This suggests that certain genetic factors have stuck around throughout human evolution.
Bridging the gaps
Our research also lays the groundwork for using genetic data to develop statistical models that predict disease risk based on a person’s genetic profile.
These advancements could lead to population screening, identifying those at higher risk for specific mental health disorders. Early intervention could then help prevent or delay the onset of these conditions.
In the future, our goal is to bridge the gaps between genetics, neuroscience, and medicine. This integration will help scientists answer critical questions about how genetic influences on brain structure affect behaviour and disease outcomes.
Understanding the genetics of brain structure and mental health susceptibility can help us better prevent, diagnose and treat these conditions.
The concept of the “human brain” first appeared in ancient Greece around 335 BCE. The philosopher Aristotle described it as a radiator that prevented the heart from overheating. While we now know Aristotle was wrong, the complexities of the brain and its links to mental health remain largely mysterious even today.
As we continue to unlock the genetic secrets of the brain, we move closer to unravelling these mysteries. This type of research has the potential to transform our understanding and treatment of mental health.
Luis M. García Marín receives funding from The University of Queensland (UQ).
Miguel E. Rentería receives funding from the Rebecca L Cooper Medical Research Foundation, the Shake It Up Australia Foundation, The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research & the Medical Research Future Fund.
When most people think about caring for their mental health, they may think about getting more exercise, getting more sleep and making sure they’re eating healthy. Increasingly, research is showing that spending time in nature surrounded by plants and wildlife can also contribute to preventing and treating mental illness.
Our research focuses on the importance of birds and trees in urban neighbourhoods in promoting mental well-being. In our study, we combined more than a decade of health and ecological data across 36 Canadian cities and found a positive association between greater bird and tree diversity and self-rated mental health.
The well-being benefits of healthy ecosystems will probably not come as a great surprise to urban dwellers who relish days out in the park or hiking in a nearby nature reserve. Still, the findings of our study speak to the potential of a nature-based urbanism that promotes the health of its citizens.
Across cultures and societies, people have strong connections with birds. The beauty of their bright song and colour have inspired art, music and poetry. Their contemporary cultural relevance has even earned them an affectionate, absurdist internet nickname: “birbs”.
There’s something magical about catching a glimpse of a bird and hearing birdsong. For many urbanites, birds are our daily connection to wildlife and a gateway to nature. In fact, even if we don’t realize it, humans and birds are intertwined. Birds provide us with many essential services — controlling insects, dispersing seeds and pollinating our crops.
People have similarly intimate connections with trees. The terms tree of life, family trees, even tree-hugger all demonstrate the central cultural importance trees have in many communities around the world. In cities, trees are a staple of efforts to bring beauty and tranquility.
Contact with nature and greenspace have a suite of mental health benefits.
Natural spaces reduce stress and offer places for recreation and relaxation for urban dwellers, but natural diversity is key. A growing amount of research shows that the extent of these benefits may be related to the diversity of different natural features.
Finally, we compared both of these data sets to a long-standing health survey that has interviewed approximately 65,000 Canadians each year for over two decades.
We found that living in a neighbourhood with higher than average bird diversity increased reporting of good mental health by about seven per cent. While living in a neighbourhood with higher than average tree diversity increased good mental health by about five per cent.
Importance of urban birds and trees
The results of our study, and those of others, show a connection between urban bird and tree diversity, healthy ecosystems and people’s mental well-being. This underscores the importance of urban biodiversity conservation as part of healthy living promotion.
Protecting wild areas in parks, planting pollinator gardens and reducing pesticide use could all be key strategies to protect urban wildlife and promote people’s well-being. Urban planners should take note.
We’re at a critical juncture: just as we are beginning to understand the well-being benefits of birds and trees, we’re losing species at a faster rate than ever before. It’s estimated that there are three billion fewer birds in North America compared to the 1970s and invasive pests will kill 1.4 million street trees over the next 30 years.
By promoting urban biodiversity, we can ensure a sustainable and healthy future for all species, including ourselves.
Rachel Buxton receives funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, National Institutes of Health, and Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Emma J. Hudgins received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies for this work. She currently receives funding from Plant Health Australia.
Stephanie Prince Ware has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Indonesia will offer amnesty to West Papuans who have contested Jakarta’s sovereignty over the Melanesian region resulting in conflicts and clashes with law enforcement agencies, says Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape.
He arrived in Port Moresby on Monday night from Indonesia where he attended the inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto last Sunday.
During his bilateral discussions with the Indonesian President, Marape said Prabowo was “quite frank and open” about the West Papua independence issue.
“This is the first time for me to see openness on West Papua and while it is an Indonesian sovereignty matter, my advice was to give respect to land and their [West Papuans] cultural heritage.
“I commend the offer on amnesty and Papua New Guinea will continue to respect Indonesia’s sovereignty,” Marape said.
“The President also offered a pledge for higher autonomy and a commitment to keep on working on the need for more economic activities and development that the former president [Joko Widodo] has started for West Papua.”
While emphasising that Papua New Guinea had no right to debate Indonesia’s internal sovereignty issues, Marape welcomed that country’s recognition of the West Papuan people, their culture and heritage.
Expanding trade, investment Marape also reaffirmed his intention to work with Prabowo in expanding trade and investment, especially in business-to-business and people-to-people relations with Indonesia.
The exponential growth of Indonesia’s economy currently sits at nearly US$1.5 trillion (about K5 trillion), with the country aggressively pushing toward First World nation status by 2045.
Papua New Guinea was among nations allocated time for a bilateral meeting with President Subianto after the inauguration.
There’s been an increased political and media focus recently on so-called youth crime waves, particularly in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
This has unfortunately led to crackdowns from governments and police. Young people in Alice Springs have been subject to curfews.
Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli (who’s ahead in the polls ahead of this weekend’s election) has suggested young people found guilty of some crimes should be sentenced as adults.
But punitive youth crime policies violate children’s human rights and are an expensive way of making the community less safe. It’s much better to stop youth crime before it starts by supporting children’s positive development in early childhood.
In a new evaluation published today, we found a preschool program reduced the amount of young people before the courts by more than 50%. When the right family support was provided too, the chances of the children committing crimes were even lower.
Scientific evidence has been accumulating for more than 50 years that shows the root causes of serious youth crime can be addressed in early childhood through prevention initiatives. The most famous example is the Perry Preschool Project, implemented in a disadvantaged area of Michigan in the early 1960s.
In Australia, the Pathways to Prevention Project operated in a disadvantaged, multicultural region of Brisbane from 2002 to 2011.
It was a collaboration between Griffith University, the Queensland Department of Education, and national community agency Mission Australia.
The children in the study learned communication skills through reading and games. Shutterstock
The project aimed to improve child and youth outcomes by partnering with local preschools, schools, families and community organisations.
In 2002 and 2003, 214 four-year-old children attending two local preschools received an enhanced program focused on communication skills. This is called an “enriched preschool program”.
It was integrated into the standard curriculum and delivered by specialist teachers working with the children’s classroom teachers and their parents.
Evidence at the time showed communication skills were directly linked to success at school. They were also linked to to success in life through improved behaviour and enhanced social skills.
The communication program brought children together in small groups with similar levels of language competence. The groups were balanced in terms of gender and cultural background. They completed carefully curated activities including games, bookmaking and reading.
Reading was a large part of the enriched preschool curriculum. Shutterstock
These provided children with the opportunity to extend and practice oral language skills in ways that were personally meaningful. These activities were led by the specialist teachers who had postgraduate qualifications in communication and oral language development.
The specialist teachers engaged parents and children in joint activities, and actively supported reading and language activities at home. By year one, children who received the communication curriculum had better language proficiency, social skills, classroom behaviour and academic achievement than children in the other preschools.
The children’s families could also access practical support from community workers from their own cultural background. This included parenting education, advocacy with government agencies and counselling. This continued until 2011.
What’s new?
Earlier evaluations showed the enhanced curriculum helped improve children’s readiness for school, among a range of other benefits. Now we’ve evaluated the success of the program over the long term.
Using anonymised data-linkage procedures, we followed up the students who received the enhanced curriculum back in 2002 to see what’s happened since.
Children who received the enhanced curriculum had improved classroom behaviour throughout primary school. They were also 56% less likely to be involved in serious youth crime by age 17.
Remarkably, our evaluation found none of the children whose families also received support in the preschool years went on to offend.
The full Pathways Program was implemented widely in the community over a ten-year period, so we thought it might have had an impact more broadly.
We looked at the rate of youth offending in the region in the years 2008–16, when members of the 2002–03 preschool cohort were between 10 and 17 years old. It was 20% lower in this region than in other Queensland regions at the same low socioeconomic level.
How does this lead to less youth crime?
Programs like this work by levelling the playing field and improving the lives of children early in their developmental pathways. Developmental pathways are events and experiences that follow on from each other, or cascade, across the course of life.
For instance, a difficult transition to school increases the likelihood of poor engagement and academic problems. These are well-known risk factors for antisocial behaviour.
The long-term impact of Pathways to Prevention on youth offending means it could be a model for similar programs across Australia.
This is especially the case given our nation’s chronic under-investment in community-based developmental crime prevention. We need more programs in disadvantaged communities that are open to everyone and don’t stigmatise people.
Overwhelmingly, efforts across the country are devoted to early intervention with children identified as “at risk” in some way (such as showing disruptive behaviour), or to the treatment of young people who become enmeshed in the youth justice system.
In Queensland, there is an over-reliance on youth detention, which is often very harmful for children and of no preventative value.
Using Pathways as a model for other communities doesn’t necessarily mean exactly replicating what we did (though this is also important). Any early prevention initiative will have the best chance of success if it includes evidence-based strategies that improve children’s life chances.
These can be implemented cost-effectively through existing systems including preschools, schools and primary care. Ideally, they should operate through local partnerships involved at all stages of planning, data collection, implementation and evaluation.
Jacqueline Allen received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Institute of Criminology Research Grants.
Kate Freiberg holds an unpaid position at RealWell and received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Institute of Criminology Research Grants.
Emeritus Professor Ross Homel received funding from the Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Criminology Research Grants, the Queensland Government and the John Barnes Foundation. He is affiliated with the Justice Reform Initiative as a Queensland Patron and provides honorary research support to RealWell Pty Ltd.
Lee, the feature film debut from director Ellen Kuras, explores the rawness of authentic image making and the impact of gender in war reporting.
Kate Winslet stars as the world weary photojournalist Elizabeth “Lee” Miller – better known for featuring in an iconic photograph, rather than taking one.
The same day Adolf Hitler committed suicide at his Berlin bunker in 1945, photojournalist David E. Scherman took a photograph of Miller sitting in the bath in Hitler’s Munich apartment.
But Miller was also a trailblazing, feminist photojournalist who managed to shift Vogue magazine from beauty and aesthetics to capturing the reality of the second world war. She gave us images of the frontline, fearful women and children, concentration camps, and the aftermath of war.
Here’s what you should know about the real woman behind the film – and what we can learn about war correspondents today through her story.
In front of and behind the camera
Miller was born in New York in 1907, and began her bohemian life as a model for Vogue before the war, and as a muse to her surrealist mentor Man Ray.
The film follows Miller from her work as a fashion photographer pre-war, through to her photographing the second world war and then the liberation of Paris in 1945.
Lee explores tensions with other renowned photographers at the time, such as Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett); her relationship with the second husband, English artist, historian and poet, Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård); and her connections to the French resistance.
When Miller was in her 30s, her photographs for Vogue leaned towards the surreal. This was also seen in her Blitz images, where two staff from the magazine wearing creatively designed gas masks about to enter a bomb shelter was published in the London edition.
When the war broke out, Miller was accredited as one of four American female photojournalists. Like fellow American Margaret Bourke-White, Miller was known for the horrific images of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps in Germany, reinforcing the fact that photojournalism tells a story that is more powerful than any other form of journalism.
Ethics and photojournalism
A 2019 study examined how professional photojournalists apply ethics to their work.
Photojournalists believe photographs should be published alongside news, that photographers are key in supporting the public’s “right to know”, and they must balance “their obligation to the truth, while minimising harm”.
You can see these ethical frameworks all at play in Miller’s work, especially in her images of Dachau just after the war.
Lee faced similar issues around ethics that photojournalists face today. STUDIOCANAL
The editor of British Vogue, Audrey Withers (played in the film by Andrea Riseborough), refused to publish the photos. But American Vogue published them in June 1945, with the headline “Believe it”, as a modern memorial to the war.
But photojournalists also take actions that prioritise themselves. Sherman’s image of Miller sitting in Hitler’s bath, though a visual metaphor for the end of the war, has been criticised as a “look at me” moment.
In 2006, the New York Times described the photograph as “a woman caught between horror and beauty, between being seen and being the seer”.
The place of the woman photographer
Contemporary research suggests female photojournalists are more empathetic and have better access to vulnerable subjects than their male counterparts.
In the film, Miller’s gentle photo of a French woman publicly accused of being an informant to the Germans illustrates empathy, while masking the hidden contradictions of war.
Befriending a frightened girl in a bomb shelter, Miller has flashbacks of her youth as a victim-survivor of sexual violence. “There are different kinds of wounds, not just the ones you see,” she says in the film.
A survey in 2019 of 545 female photojournalists from 71 countries found women faced more obstacles than their male counterparts, are still considered subordinate in the profession and subject to sexism.
During the war, Miller used the gender-neutral Lee as her first name, instead of Elizabeth, fearing press accreditation on the frontline would not be approved if she was a woman.
The National Press Photographers Association say gender bias and assumptions still continue to hinder female photojournalists. These commonly held assumptions include women are weaker, less skilled and will eventually leave the profession to raise a child.
Living through her archive
Lee begins and ends with the 70-year-old Miller reflecting on her career to a young male journalist, while continuously gulping down alcohol, perhaps illustrating undiagnosed post traumatic stress syndrome, all too common among news photographers.
Returning to London after the war, Miller gave up photojournalism.
After her death in 1977, more than 60,000 negatives of her work were discovered in her attic at home. These images of surrealist photography, Vogue editorials, second world war photojournalism and portraits of important 20th century figures formed the basis of her 1985 biography, The lives of Lee Miller, written by her son Antony Penrose.
Lee is a visually, brave story about a female photojournalist whose images alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at – and what we have a right to observe.
Andrea Jean Baker 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.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina.
In a repetitive, anxiety-inducing mantra, media coverage of the US presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris recites these seven states over and over again.
The winner will almost certainly be decided by these states – perhaps a few of them, or maybe just one.
Depending on your particular interpretation of the electoral map, the mantra might just be Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. Or could it be Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin? Or perhaps it’s Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.
Some analysts argue that to win, Harris needs to hold on to the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, three predominantly white states with large numbers of working-class voters. In 2016, Democrats were devastated by Trump’s sundering of this wall – he narrowly won all three.
The Democratic victor in 2020, Joe Biden, rebuilt the wall with three wins in these states. (In fact, Biden won six of the seven battleground states in 2020, losing only North Carolina.)
In this year’s campaign, Harris needs to keep it standing, while the Trump campaign is hoping to break it down again.
But it’s also possible for some cracks to appear in the “blue wall” – if Harris can hold on in Pennsylvania, there is a path to victory for the Democrats through the remaining battleground states.
The Trump campaign is, meanwhile, hoping it can repeat 2016 and break down the blue wall, particularly by winning the iconic rust-belt state of Michigan.
An outsize focus on ‘swing voters’
The critical role these seven states will play of course means they are the overwhelming focus of both campaigns and the media that covers them. Trump and Harris and their running mates have visited Pennsylvania and Michigan dozens of times, while residents of these states are being subjected to wall-to-wall television advertising.
The other states are, effectively, stitched up for one side or the other.
There’s no real possibility of Trump winning solidly Democratic New York or California. And no chance Harris will could win deep-red Wyoming or Tennessee.
In the American democratic system, presidential elections are decided not via a national popular vote but the enslavement-era Electoral College (alongside widespread voter suppression). As a result, vast swathes of the American electorate are effectively disenfranchised.
In the states that are in play, the polling margins are razor-thin, just as they have been in most elections this century.
In 2020, for example, Biden won the popular vote by a four-point margin – seven million votes. But in the Electoral College, which is what actually decides the winner, Biden won by around 45,000 votes: 10,457 in Arizona, 11,779 in Georgia, and 20,682 in Wisconsin.
While polls are only one indicator – and they aren’t always that reliable – they do suggest the result in the seven battleground states in 2024 may be that close again.
That’s why both Harris and Trump have been spending so much time in those states. And it’s why their campaigns – as well as the media’s attention – are focused on finding as many voters in those places as they can.
And because of the way the American electoral system works, this focus is disproportionately placed on certain types of voters – or “swing voters”.
Both campaigns are chasing voters who may have gone for Trump in 2016 and then Biden four years later. They’re chasing “shy” Republicans or Democrats – voters who may be generally inclined to vote for one party or the other, but for whatever reason (usually, the particular candidate) are quiet about their choices.
Since the role of the “blue wall” in both electoral politics and the American imagination is so pronounced, this means there’s an inordinate focus (often unconsciously) on white swing voters, in particular.
Chasing the swing voters
These voters may indeed turn out to be the critical deciding factor.
But in American politics, it’s rarely one single thing that decides the outcome.
In a system that does not have compulsory voting, in which small numbers of voters in a small number of states can change the result, voter turnout is the main game. This election cycle, it could matter a great deal.
And that is why there is a hidden tension in both campaigns.
In Trump land, there has been consistent pressure (and unsolicited advice) on Trump to “moderate” his stances on particular issues in order to appeal to those “shy” or swing voters.
This is particularly the case with reproductive rights. It’s led to contradictory messaging from Trump – he’s taken full, individual credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade while simultaneously insisting he is not supportive of extreme, right-wing positions on abortion bans.
Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate suggests his campaign decided not to focus mostly on swing or shy voters, but on mobilising and expanding their core voter base of white men. That is reflected in much of Trump’s media strategy and his consistent presence on right-wing podcasts.
But that is contradicted occasionally, and quite deliberately, by high-profile surrogates, including his wife.
The Harris campaign, on the other hand, seems to be attempting to divide its focus more evenly. Harris is chasing swing voters by going on Fox News and sharing a stage with former Representative and harsh Trump critic Liz Cheney. She also appeared with 100 Republicans at an event in Pennsylvania this month.
At the same time, the campaign is also attempting to drive turnout in key demographics for Democrats. Harris is targeting young women, particularly in the South, by going on popular podcasts like Call Her Daddy. Similarly, she is reaching out to Black men by appearing on platforms like Charlamagne tha God’s podcast in a live event in Detroit.
Does the strategy work?
The question for both campaigns is: does one of these tactics undermine the other?
Might the alliance between Democrats and the Cheney family’s deeply conservative stances on foreign policy, for example, further undermine or depress turnout in a state like Michigan, where outrage and betrayal over Democratic support for Israel may well be a deciding factor?
Alternatively, will Harris’ more hardline message on immigration depress enthusiasm amongst Black and Latino voters?
Similarly, might the Republican Party’s position on reproductive rights, and the consequences of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, mean Trump continues to lose support with women, which might not be countered by a sizeable boost in men’s turnout?
The answer is: we don’t know. And if the margins are indeed as close as the polling suggests, we may not know for some time after election day.
Until then, the mantra keeps repeating:
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina.
Emma Shortis is senior researcher in international and security affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Feleti Teo took to a stage in Apia, Samoa, on Thursday morning to say something pointed. Planned fossil fuel expansions in nations such as Australia represented, for his nation, a “death sentence”. The phrase “death sentence”, Teo said, had not been chosen lightly. He followed up with this: “We will not sit quietly and allow others to determine our fate.”
Teo chose the moment for this broadside well – on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), attended by both King Charles and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The speech came at the launch of a new report on moves by the “big three” Commonwealth states – the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia – to expand fossil fuel exports.
These three states make up just 6% of the population of the Commonwealth’s 56 nations, but account for over 60% of the carbon emissions generated through extraction since 1990, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative report shows.
Canada and the UK are no climate angels, given their respective exports of highly polluting oil from oil sands and North Sea oil and gas. But Teo and others in the movement to stop proliferation of fossil fuels have reserved special criticism for Australia. That’s because Australia is now second only to Russia based on emissions from its fossil fuel exports and has the largest pipeline of coal export projects in the world – 61% of the world’s total.
The elephant in the room
Tuvalu, like many other small Pacific nations, is laser-focused on the threat of climate change. Across the Pacific, rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion are already pushing people to consider migration or retreat.
Australia has long been influential in the Pacific, even more so as Western states try to outcompete Chinese funds and influence in the region. But fossil fuel exports are a very large elephant in the room.
morally obliged to ensure that whatever action it does [take] will not compromise the commitment it has provided in terms of climate impact.
Teo pointed out the “obvious” inconsistency between Australia’s commitment to net zero by 2050 and ramping up fossil fuel exports.
This year, Australia and Tuvalu’s groundbreaking Falepili Union treaty came into force. The treaty includes some migration rights for Tuvaluans as well as a controversial security agreement. But Teo has now flagged using this as leverage to “put pressure on Australia to align its activities in terms of fossil fuels”.
Tuvalu’s diplomatic pressure is a small part of broader efforts by island states facing escalating climate damage to be seen not as passive victims but to emphasise, as Teo said, they are also “at the forefront of climate action”.
Echoing these sentiments was Vanuatu’s climate envoy, Ralph Regenvanu. He called on Commonwealth nations to “not sacrifice the future of vulnerable nations for short-term gains”, and “to stop the expansion of fossil fuels in order to protect what we love and hold dear here in the Pacific”.
Vanuatu and Tuvalu have led the campaign for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, committing signatories to ending expansion of fossil fuels. So far, 12 other nations have joined, including Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Republic of Marshall Islands, Colombia and the CHOGM host, Samoa.
Australia all alone?
It’s not surprising to see Australia facing these calls for action. The meeting is being held in Samoa, the first time a Pacific Island state has hosted Commonwealth leaders.
Leaders of other large Commonwealth states have skipped the meeting. Notable by their absence were Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Climate action is one of several background issues in Apia. One of the more significant is the call for reparations for slavery from former British colonies – calls UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is keen to put to the side. But reports on the ground suggest the issues of reparations, monarchy and the future relevance of the Commonwealth are all in the shadow of the main concern – climate change.
The meeting also serves as a precursor to November’s United Nations climate talks, the COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. Pacific nations are focused on building consensus on climate finance.
Australia has its own concerns. The host of the 2026 COP31 conference will be announced in Baku, with a joint Australia-Pacific bid in competition with Türkiye. Observers suggest Australia is in the box seat, but it has faced consistent pressure from Pacific states to reconcile its actions with its climate rhetoric.
There are domestic implications too. As the next federal election looms, the lure of a potential A$200 million windfall for the COP host city would be more than welcome.
Securing an Australia-Pacific COP could also boost the government’s environmental credentials as it comes under sustained attack from the Greens over fossil fuels and the Coalition over energy security and nuclear power.
In Apia, Pacific efforts to convince leaders of the need for greater climate action are reported to include a walk through a mangrove reserve for King Charles, guided by Samoan chief and parliamentarian Lenatai Vicor Tamapua. Tamapua told the ABC he showed leaders how king tides today were “about twice what it was 20, 30 years ago”, which he says is forcing people to “move inwards, inland now”.
For Australia, difficult questions remain. How will it balance regional demands to phase out coal and gas exports with domestic pressures to maintain jobs, public funds and economic growth? Can it walk the tightrope and be the partner of choice in the Pacific while continuing to explore for, extract and export coal and gas?
These questions will not be resolved in Apia. They might not even be resolved by the next federal government, or by the time COP31 arrives. But they will not go away.
The way Australia and other exporters resolve these tensions will, as Teo says, decide whether Tuvalu stays liveable – or goes under.
Liam Moore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The reasons for this are unclear, though there are obvious differences in the level of government and community investment in countering intimate partner violence versus awareness of and attention to stalking.
What exactly is stalking?
Stalking is a pattern of repeated and unwanted behaviour in which one person pushes their way into the life of another where they have no legitimate right to be, causing the target distress and fear.
The most common methods are unwanted communication (by phone or digital media) and unwanted contacts (such as following someone or loitering nearby).
Threats of violence and assault occur in at least a quarter of cases.
Victims of persistent stalking have described it as “psychological rape”, with the stalker invading every part of their life.
The cumulative impact of seemingly never-ending intrusions, and their social and financial toll, is probably why stalking victims report high rates of depression, anxiety and traumatic stress disorders.
Researchers have estimated being stalked for 14 months costs victims approximately $A140,000, including direct costs from lost work and legal expenses and indirect costs of physical and mental harm.
Who stalks?
Most stalking is perpetrated by people who are known to the victim, either as an acquaintance or an ex-partner, with strangers responsible for about 20-25% of stalking.
Stalking usually starts either because the person feels mistreated and stalks to take revenge or right the wrong, or they stalk to start or enact a relationship with the victim that does not exist. In a small number of cases, stalking has a sexual motivation and can sometimes be part of planning or preparation for a sexual assault.
Regardless of motivation, most stalking is communicative – the stalker wants the victim to know they exist and to feel like they must respond.
Physical violence is much more common in cases of ex-partner stalking, with the ABS survey and earlier research finding half of intimate partner stalkers used physical violence.
Thankfully, most stalking-related violence does not cause severe physical harm and homicide is extremely rare.
Stalking is a complicated problem and a comprehensive response needs multi-faceted systemic change that will be costly and take much effort and time.
Currently, there doesn’t seem to be an appetite in Australia for the work required.
However, there is one relatively straightforward thing the federal, state and territory governments could do right now to help: establish a national stalking helpline that can provide specialist information, advice and advocacy for all victims.
The helpline provides online and telephone advice to potential stalking victims, including basic risk assessment, advocacy and links to local support services. It also provides advice to mental health professionals and others who are supporting stalking victims.
The helpline serves all people, regardless of their gender or relationship with the stalker. Nearly half (45%) of its clients are stalked by a stranger or acquaintance, not an ex-partner. This highlights the importance of a specialised stalking response separate to existing services for family and intimate partner violence.
An Australian equivalent would provide immediate support for victims and a focal point for necessary research and evaluation into what works to stop stalking.
An Australian national stalking helpline would be a practical, relatively inexpensive and immediately helpful strategy that governments could implement to support the hundreds of thousands of Australians who are stalked every year.
Troy McEwan has received funding from the Australian Research Council and Victoria Police for stalking-related research.
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