Category: Asia Pacific

MIL-OSI Security: Justice Department to Surge Resources to Indian Country to Investigate Unresolved Violent Crimes

Source: United States Attorneys General 2

Operation Not Forgotten Will Surge 60 FBI Personnel to 10 FBI Field Offices to Support Investigations of Indian Country Violent Crimes

The Justice Department today announced that it will surge FBI assets across the country to address unresolved violent crimes in Indian Country, including crimes relating to missing and murdered indigenous persons.

FBI will send 60 personnel, rotating in 90-day temporary duty assignments over a six-month period. This operation is the longest and most intense national deployment of FBI resources to address Indian Country crime to date. FBI personnel will support field offices in Albuquerque; Denver; Detroit; Jackson, Miss.; Minneapolis; Oklahoma City; Phoenix; Portland, Oreg.; Seattle; and Salt Lake City. The FBI will work in partnership with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Tribal law enforcement agencies across jurisdictions.

FBI personnel will be assisted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, and they will use the latest forensic evidence processing tools to solve cases and hold perpetrators accountable. U.S. Attorney’s Offices will aggressively prosecute case referrals.

“Crime rates in American Indian and Alaska Native communities are unacceptably high,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “By surging FBI resources and collaborating closely with U.S. Attorneys and Tribal law enforcement to prosecute cases, the Department of Justice will help deliver the accountability that these communities deserve.”

“The FBI will manhunt violent criminals on all lands – and Operation Not Forgotten ensures a surge in resources to locate violent offenders on tribal lands and find those who have gone missing,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

Indian Country faces persistent levels of crime and victimization. At the beginning of Fiscal Year 2025, FBI’s Indian Country program had approximately 4,300 open investigations, including over 900 death investigations, 1,000 child abuse investigations, and more than 500 domestic violence and adult sexual abuse investigations.

Operation Not Forgotten renews efforts begun during President Trump’s first term under E.O. 13898, Establishing the Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives. This is the third deployment under Operation Not Forgotten, which has provided investigative support to over 500 cases in the past two years. Combined, these operations resulted in the recovery of 10 child victims, 52 arrests, and 25 indictments or judicial complaints.

Operation Not Forgotten also expands upon the resources deployed in recent years to address cases of missing and murdered indigenous people. The effort will be supported by the Department’s MMIP Regional Outreach Program, which places attorneys and coordinators in U.S. Attorneys’ Offices across the United States to help prevent and respond to cases of missing or murdered indigenous people.

MIL Security OSI –

April 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: Adolescence has sparked fears over teen slang – but emoji don’t cause radicalisation

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Kruk, Lecturer in Indonesian Studies and Linguistics, The University of Western Australia

Shutterstock

Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s crime drama Adolescence has earned widespread praise for its portrayal of incel culture and male violence.

But the show’s portrayal of 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) being radicalised by misogynistic online content has a lot of parents concerned about their own kids and how they talk online.

For many, this concern is amplified by the fear that, just like the adults in Adolescence, parents are often ignorant of the online language kids use to spread dangerous beliefs.

Journalists have produced a flurry of articles that promise to decode the “hidden meaning” of teen language by focusing on emoji featured on the show. One headline references supposedly “sinister emojis used by incel teenagers”.

Such concerns reflect a long history of moral panic around youth language. But defining or banning emoji won’t solve the deeper issues at play.

Emoji in Adolescence

Adolescence follows Jamie and his family after the teenager is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie.

The second episode shows Adam (Amari Bacchus), the teenage son of detective inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), correcting his father’s misunderstanding of a series of emoji Katie posted on Jaime’s Instagram profile.

While Bascome assumes the 💯 and 💥 emoji are flirtatious, Adam explains that, in this context, they are connected to the online “manosphere”.

Bascome is initially resistant to this explanation, but Adam convinces him by citing examples of different meanings associated with different coloured heart emoji; red is specifically used for “love”, while orange means “you’re going to be fine”. He stresses “it all has a meaning”.

This scene highlights key generational divides in the perception and use of emoji. For Adam and Jamie’s parents’ generation, emoji are largely treated as decorative. For teenagers, they can carry important meanings.

Are the kids actually alright?

It’s important to remember this isn’t the first time we’ve seen concerns about generational communication differences reflecting larger social rifts.
There are numerous examples in the media linking slang with issues of education, moral decline and even crime.

These attitudes have sparked debate over whether Australian schools should ban gen alpha and gen Z slang from classrooms.

While the frustration of parents and teachers is understandable, linguistic research shows aggressively negative attitudes towards teen language demotivate young people, exacerbate inequality and unnecessarily stoke intergenerational tension.

Emoji are highly context dependent. Much like gestures that are used with speech, we need to understand emoji in the specific conversations and communities they are used in. There is no consistent relationship between emoji use and inner emotional state that can be generalised across groups of teens or other emoji users.

Instead of fearing or banning emoji, we can try and understand how and why they are used in various contexts. And there are plenty of online resources to help with this. EmojiPedia, for example, describes the pill emoji 💊 as potentially referencing medicine, drugs, or an awakening to a controversial perspective (the “red pill” beliefs referenced in Adolecensce).

Emojis are also highly contextual. While the pill emoji may be present in misogynistic talk, it could also be referencing medication in another context.
Shutterstock

Emoji are intentionally flexible and intended to be used creatively. In fact, Unicode, the organisation that assesses proposals for new emoji, requires that items encoded as emoji are able to hold multiple meanings.

Research has also shown different people react to emoji differently. One survey from 2018 found older men were most likely to view emoji as confusing and annoying, while young women were most likely to view emoji positively in communication.

Times change, and stay the same

Intergenerational differences, and the tensions they evoke, are nothing new.

Back in the 2000s, parents and teachers voiced concerns that “netspeak”, with its creative punctuation and capitalisation, would diminish young people’s grasp of “proper” English. This did not come to pass.

Does this mean parents have nothing to worry about when it comes to their kids communicating online? Of course not.

Online misogynistic movements and red pill communities can bring great harm to vulnerable young people. Their growing popularity is something we all have to reckon with – but online language is not to blame.

Parents can’t realistically prevent the radicalisation of young men by simply referencing an emoji dictionary, nor can teachers stamp out the spread of misogyny by banning emoji and slang in classrooms.

Instead, as one scene between Adam and his dad shows, we need to collectively shift our focus towards facilitating open conversations between generations.

By doing so, we can not only better understand our differences, but can reduce the feelings of social isolation that leave young people vulnerable to becoming radicalised.

Lauren Gawne is affiliated with Unicode as a member of the Emoji Standard & Research Working Group.

Jessica Kruk 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.

– ref. Adolescence has sparked fears over teen slang – but emoji don’t cause radicalisation – https://theconversation.com/adolescence-has-sparked-fears-over-teen-slang-but-emoji-dont-cause-radicalisation-253218

MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

April 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: A ban on price gouging and new powers to break up supermarkets are on the table this election. Would either work?
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbora Jedlickova, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, The University of Queensland

wisely/Shutterstock

With the federal election campaign now underway, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised that if re-elected, Labor would seek to make price gouging illegal in the supermarket sector.

A new taskforce would be set up to examine the best way to do so, drawing on the experience of other countries. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) would then enforce the new “excessive pricing regime”.

Labor’s proposal comes despite the fact the final report from the ACCC’s supermarkets inquiry didn’t make any explicit accusation of price gouging.

Meanwhile, the Coalition and Greens still want new divestiture powers to break up the supermarkets, a course of action also not recommended by the ACCC’s report.

Read more:
Policy tracker: how will Labor, the Coalition, the Greens and the independents make Australia better?

Price gouging

Price gouging, also referred to as “excessive pricing”, isn’t illegal in Australia. As long as prices are set independently by an individual business – and not in collusion with supposed competitors – they can be set as high or low as desired.

However, the Australian Competition and Consumer Act does allow the ACCC to monitor and regulate the price of some “notified” goods or services – with approval from the relevant federal minister.

One current example are postal services. The ACCC assesses proposed price increases, and can make an objection.

Price gouging isn’t illegal in Australia.
doublelee/Shutterstock

The legal situation on price gouging differs around the world.

The European Union, for example, prohibits abuse of a dominant market position by “directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices”.

It can be difficult to define an “unfair price”. Typically, it’s an excessive, monopolistic price higher than what would be set in a competitive market.

A landmark EU judgement defines an excessive price as one with “no reasonable relation to the economic value of the product supplied”.

Despite this ban, enforcement cases are somewhat rare. The European Commission has been more focused on tackling “exclusionary conduct” in recent decades.

This is when a competitor with significant market power uses restrictive means to directly hurt its competitors and exclude them (and future competitors) from competing in the relevant market.

An example is predatory pricing, where a company sets prices unrealistically low to drive out competitors – then becoming able to set them as high as they would like.

What about divestiture?

Both the Coalition and Greens have pledged to create new “divestiture” powers to break up supermarkets if they were found to be abusing their market power.

In competition law, divestiture is when a commercial entity is ordered to sell a portion of its assets or its business to a third party, to improve competition in the affected market.

Australian law has divestiture powers to address anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions. But currently, there aren’t powers to break up businesses for misuse of market power.

It’s a different picture in the United States, where the government has had powers to break up businesses in the context of “monopolisation” for more than a century.

The risks of splitting up

Divestiture powers were not recommended in the ACCC’s final report. That may be linked to market structure here.

The Australian grocery retail market is highly concentrated. The majority of retail sales are shared among only a few supermarket chains, primarily Woolworths (38%) and Coles (29%).

However, the combined share of these two retail giants has declined over the past 14 years, from 80% to 67%. Meanwhile, Aldi’s market share has grown to 9%, showing these two retailers face some competition.

This suggests divestiture may be a misguided approach. There are specific risks that come with divestiture remedies.

For instance, who would purchase the assets under a specific divestiture order? When considering the structure of the current grocery retail market, there is a high risk it would be another powerful retailer interested in purchasing its competitor’s assets. This would defeat the purpose entirely.

Other measures already in motion

Any ban on price gouging or new divestiture powers should be implemented with caution and used as a temporary tool. Directly interfering with free markets comes with risks.

Other actions are already underway to boost competition in the sector and improve supermarkets’ dealings with suppliers.

The federal government has previously announced incentives for the states to “cut planning and zoning red tape”, with the aim of making it easier for smaller supermarkets to enter the market and compete.

And from April, the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct will be made mandatory and enforceable, in line with a key recommendation of the independent Emerson review.

The Food and Grocery Code of Conduct for dealing with suppliers is now mandatory.
Nita Corfe/Shutterstock

Certain restrictive and unfair practices in dealing with suppliers will be directly prohibited and enforced.

The new code gives the ACCC a range of useful tools to enforce against a breach by a powerful supermarket chain.

These include:
- a confidential channel for whistleblowing suppliers
- effective dispute resolution to address lengthy and costly litigation
- heavy penalties – as high as A$10 million or 10% of annual turnover – for serious breaches of the code.
Rather than bring in measures that have not been independently recommended – like a price gouging ban or divestiture powers – it would be worth first seeing how these new enforceable rules work to deliver a better deal for supermarket customers.

Barbora Jedlickova 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.

– ref. A ban on price gouging and new powers to break up supermarkets are on the table this election. Would either work? – https://theconversation.com/a-ban-on-price-gouging-and-new-powers-to-break-up-supermarkets-are-on-the-table-this-election-would-either-work-253429
MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –
April 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: Giving up a daily coffee or weekly parma? How the cost-of-living crisis is reshaping our spending habits

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meg Elkins, Senior Lecturer, School of Economics, Finance and Marketing and Behavioural Business Lab Member, RMIT University

Bangkok Click Studio/Shutterstock

Remember when grabbing a coffee was just… grabbing a coffee? When a parma at the local was a budget meal? When Friday night takeaway was a reward for getting through the week? It didn’t require a financial spread sheet.

For many families navigating the cost-of-living crisis these small indulgences now have to be accounted for. They’re not just automatic purchases.

We’re not just cutting back on buying large discretionary items, like new cars. The impact of inflation on household budgets has fundamentally reshaped our relationship with food, social connection and small pleasures.

The current cost-of-living crisis can also create new spending habits. The ways we restructure our budgets can have lasting effects on our lives and local economies.

Price anchors

What five years ago was a A$3.80 coffee has now become $5.50 with some options as high as $7.00.

Despite the price change, customers have a mental reference point of what a coffee should cost from the pre-inflationary period.

Behavioural economists refer to this as “anchoring” – a rule of thumb price that purchase decisions are judged upon.

So if you are used to paying $5 for a daily coffee, any price above this is beyond what you see as reasonable value for money.

Look at parents at weekend sports matches. You’ll notice the increasing presence of the insulated mug full of homemade coffee, replacing the takeaway coffees from the local cafe.

For my family, Friday night was pizza night and $50 would easily feed a family of four. Then the inflationary price creep started. For us $70 was the tipping point. When the same order cost more we started making pizzas at home.

Mental accounting

Nobel laureate Richard Thaler introduced the concept of mental accounting in 1985, as a model of how we allocate money into to different categories for spending.

If the price is above our threshold point we mentally reassign its purchase to one of our other spending categories. It might shift from being an everyday item in our household budget to an occasionally purchased item.

Decision fatigue

During an inflation-fuelled cost-of-living crisis, we face not only financial strain but also significant decision fatigue from constant price revaluations.

This cognitive burden emerges as mental exhaustion when making even routine purchases.

Increasing pressure on our finances can trigger a scarcity mindset that consumes our thinking and affects our decision making.

Our focus shifts to immediate needs, such as paying weekly grocery bills, instead of long-term financial planning for a holiday or retirement.

The social cost

These new purchasing habits and economic shifts also have implications for our social connections. The cafe, the pub and takeaway night are not only about food but they are about community and building social connections.

The so-called third place is the place between work and home where you can be part of the community.

Buying goods is often accompanied by an exchange of conversation. As the cost-of-living crisis continues making fewer purchases reduces opportunities to connect.

If higher costs change our spending habits such as a weekly night at the pub, opportunities to connect are also affected.
Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock

If the little pleasures we consume as a daily or weekly ritual become luxuries, this can increase the loss of the third space. It means spaces such as cafes, restaurants and pubs no longer foster community cohesion and increase social capital.

As these goods become luxuries, social division intensifies. Rising prices exclude certain groups and may restrict social mixing across income levels.

What it means for businesses

A big question here is how much longer can some hospitality services survive as the cost-of-living crisis continues?

Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals big changes for Australia’s café, restaurant and takeaway food industry.

After a severe downturn during early COVID-19 lockdowns (-35.3% in March-April 2020), the sector rebounded to pre-pandemic levels by March 2021. This was followed by extraordinary expansion during 2021-2022 (26.8% growth) as pent-up demand was unleashed.

But recent figures reveal a problem: while spending rose 3.76% from January 2024 to January 2025, real growth (adjusted for inflation) was negative at -0.43%.

Inflationary psychology explains how customers’ behaviour changes and they buy less over time. Eventually a point is reached where they won’t pay the higher price.

This means, in the case of the hospitality industry, fewer actual meals are being served due to higher prices.

The industry faces a tough situation with costs rising faster than general inflation due to expensive ingredients, higher wages from worker shortages, and increased energy prices.

Our happiness threshold

Humans have a set-point of happiness. When economic pressures mean we adjust to new spending patterns to save money for an extended period, the new patterns, become the norm.

Inflation, complicates social comparison. If everyone’s purchasing power falls simultaneously, relative positions may remain stable.

As the current cost-of-living crisis continues our little pleasures such as a weekly parma or daily coffee are increasingly becoming conscious choices rather than automatic purchases.

This has the potential to permanently change the way Australian households budget.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Giving up a daily coffee or weekly parma? How the cost-of-living crisis is reshaping our spending habits – https://theconversation.com/giving-up-a-daily-coffee-or-weekly-parma-how-the-cost-of-living-crisis-is-reshaping-our-spending-habits-253424

MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

April 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: Australians want nature protected. These 3 environmental problems should be top of the next government’s to-do list
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

Christina Zdenek

Australia is a place of great natural beauty, home to many species found nowhere else on Earth. But it’s also particularly vulnerable to introduced animals, diseases and weeds. Habitat destruction, pollution and climate change make matters worse. To conserve what’s special, we need far greater care.

Unfortunately, successive federal governments have failed to protect nature. Australia now has more than 2,000 threatened species and “ecological communities” – groups of native species that live together and interact. This threatened list is growing at an alarming rate.

The Albanese government came to power in 2022 promising to reform the nation’s nature laws, following a scathing review of the laws. But it has failed to do so.

If re-elected, Labor has vowed to complete its reforms and introduce a federal Environment Protection Agency, in some other form.

The Coalition has not made such a commitment. Instead, it refers to “genuine conservation”, balancing the environment and the economy. They’ve also promised to cut “green tape” for industry.

But scientific evidence suggests much more is required to protect Australia’s natural wonders.

Fighting invaders

Labor has made a welcome commitment of more than A$100 million to counter “highly pathogenic avian influenza”. This virulent strain of bird flu is likely to kill millions of native birds and other wildlife.

The government also provided much-needed funding for a network of safe havens for threatened mammals. These safe-havens exclude cats, foxes and other invasive species.

But much more needs to be done. Funding is urgently needed to eradicate red imported fire ants, before eradication becomes impossible. Other election commitments to look for include:
- increased biosecurity funding, to prevent new incursions
- long-term investment in eradicating major pests and weeds from key sites
- support for research into new tools to control invasive species such as feral cats, for which no broad-scale solution is currently possible
- no reversal or weakening of policies aimed at curbing invasive pests such as feral horses in national parks
- new laws to ensure threat abatement plans must be implemented
- adequate funds to manage invasive species across the expanded protected areas system to meet the key global commitment to nature conservation
- national coordination and leadership to stop the indiscriminate use of poisons that can spread through ecosystems and food-chains, killing non-target animals such as owls, quolls, Tasmanian devils, reptiles and frogs.
Stopping land clearing and habitat destruction

The states are largely responsible for controlling land clearing. But when land clearing affects “matters of national environmental significance” such as a nationally listed threatened species or ecological community, it becomes a federal matter.

Such proposals are supposed to be referred to the federal environment minister for assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

But most habitat destruction is never referred. And if it is, it’s mostly deemed “not a controlled action”. That means no further consideration is required and the development can proceed.

Only about 1.5% of the hundreds of thousands of hectares of land cleared in Australia every year is fully assessed under the EPBC Act.

This means our threatened species and ecological communities are suffering a “death by a thousand cuts”.

How do we fix this? A starting point is to introduce “national environmental standards” of the kind envisaged in the 2020 review of the EPBC Act by Professor Graeme Samuel.

A strong Environment Protection Agency could ensure impacts on biodiversity are appropriately assessed and accounted for.

Habitat destruction at Lee Point, Darwin.
Martine Maron

Protecting threatened species

For Australia to turn around its extinction crisis, prospective elected representatives and governments must firmly commit to the following actions.

Stronger environmental law and enforcement is essential for tackling biodiveristy decline and extinction. This should include what’s known as a “climate trigger”, which means any proposal likely to produce a significant amount of greenhouse gases would have to be assessed under the EPBC Act.

This is necessary because climate change is among the greatest threats to biodiversity. But the federal environment minister is currently not legally bound to consider – or authorised to refuse – project proposals based on their greenhouse gas emissions. In an attempt to pass the EPBC reforms in the Senate last year, the Greens agreed to postpone their demand for a climate trigger.

Key threats to species, including habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change, and pollution, must be prevented or reduced. Aligning government policies and priorities to ensure environmental goals aren’t undermined by economic and development interests is essential.

A large increase in environmental spending – to at least 1% of the federal budget – is vital. It would ensure sufficient support for conservation progress and meeting legal requirements of the EPBC Act, including listing threatened species and designing and implementing recovery plans when required.

Show nature the money!

Neither major party has committed to substantial increases in environmental spending in line with what experts suggest is urgently needed.

Without such increased investment Australia’s conservation record will almost certainly continue to deteriorate. The loss of nature hurts us all. For example, most invasive species not only affect biodiversity; they have major economic costs to productivity.

Whoever forms Australia’s next government, we urge elected leaders to act on the wishes of 96% of surveyed Australians calling for more action to conserve nature.

Read more:
Protecting salmon farming at the expense of the environment – another step backwards for Australia’s nature laws

Euan Ritchie receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Department of Energy, Environment, and Climate Action. Euan is a Councillor within the Biodiversity Council, a member of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Mammal Society, and President of the Australian Mammal Society.

John Woinarski is a Professor at Charles Darwin University, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, co-chair of the IUCN Australasian Marsupials and Monotremes Specialist group, a councillor with the Biodiversity Council, and a member of the science advisory committee of Zoos Victoria and Invertebrates Australia. He has received funding from the Australian government to contribute to the management of feral cats and foxes.

Martine Maron has received funding from various sources including the Australian Research Council, the Queensland Department of Environment and Science, and the federal government’s National Environmental Science Program, and has advised both state and federal government on conservation policy. She is a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a councillor with the Biodiversity Council, and leads the IUCN’s thematic group on Impact Mitigation and Ecological Compensation under the Commission on Ecosystem Management.

– ref. Australians want nature protected. These 3 environmental problems should be top of the next government’s to-do list – https://theconversation.com/australians-want-nature-protected-these-3-environmental-problems-should-be-top-of-the-next-governments-to-do-list-253336
MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –
April 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: Cancer patients from migrant backgrounds have a 1 in 3 chance of something going wrong in their care

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ashfaq Chauhan, Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University

SeventyFour/Shutterstock

More than 7 million people in Australia were born overseas. Some 5.8 million people report speaking a language other than English at home.

But how well are we looking after culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) Australians?

In countries around the world, evidence suggests people from CALD backgrounds are at increased risk of harm as a result of the health care they receive when compared to the general population. Common problems include a higher risk of contracting a hospital-acquired infection or medication errors.

People receiving cancer care are at particularly high risk of harm associated with their health care.

In a recent study, we found CALD cancer patients in Australia had roughly a one-in-three risk of something going wrong during their cancer care. This is unacceptably high.

We reviewed medical records

We worked with four cancer services (two in New South Wales and two in Victoria) that provide care to high proportions of people from CALD backgrounds. These four cancer services offer a combination of care to patients in hospitals, clinics and in their homes.

We analysed de-identified medical records of people from CALD backgrounds who received care at any of the four cancer services during 2018. To identify CALD patients, we used information from their medical records including “country of birth”, “preferred language”, “language spoken at home” and “interpreter required”.

We reviewed a total of 628 medical records of CALD cancer patients. We found roughly one in three medical records (212 out of 628) had at least one patient safety event recorded. We defined a patient safety event as any event that could have or did result in harm to the patient as a result of the health care they receive. We also found 44 patient records had three or more safety events recorded over a 12-month period.

Medication-related safety events were common, such as the wrong medication type or dose being given to a patient. Sometimes the patients themselves took the wrong type or dose of a medication or stopped medication all together. We also observed a variety of other patient safety events such as falls, pressure ulcers and infections after surgery.

The number of incidents could even be higher than what we observed. We know from other research that not all patient safety events are documented.

Our research looked at patient safety incidents among CALD patients at four Australian cancer services in 2018.
Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

We didn’t have a control group, which is the main limitation of our study. In other words, we didn’t examine medical records of patients from non-CALD backgrounds to compare how common patient safety events were between groups.

But looking at other data suggests the rate of incidents is much higher in CALD patients.

Studies over many years indicate around one in ten patients admitted to hospital experience a safety event.

One study from Norway found cancer patients have a 39% greater risk of experiencing adverse events in hospital when compared to other patients (24.2% compared to 17.4%).

Why is the risk of incidents so high for CALD patients?

We identified miscommunication as a key factor that put cancer patients from CALD backgrounds at risk.

For example, we observed from one patient’s notes that the patient didn’t take their medication because they were confused by the instructions given by different clinicians. This confusion might have stemmed from language barriers or health literacy issues.

In some medical records, we also saw interpreter requirements were unmet. For example, at the time of admission, assessment for language needs noted an interpreter was not required. However, later notes mentioned the patient had poor English or needed an interpreter.

Also, with the limited availability of interpreters, they’re often reserved for specialist appointments, and not used for “routine” tasks, such as during chemotherapy treatment. This may result in side effects from cancer medications not being properly identified and responded to, potentially leading to patient harm.

Risks may increase if a patient needs an interpreter but doesn’t have one.
THICHA SATAPITANON/Shutterstock

What can we do to improve things?

To make care safer, patients, their families and the clinicians who care for them should come together so that any solutions developed are practical, relevant, and informed by their combined experiences.

As an example, we developed a tool with consumers from CALD backgrounds and their clinicians that seeks to ensure that when patient medications are changed, there is common understanding between the clinician and the patient of their medication and care instructions. This includes recognising the side effects of the medications and who to contact if they have concerns.

This tool uses images and simple language to support common understanding of medication and care instructions. It takes into account specific cultural expectations and is available in different languages. It’s currently being evaluated in two cancer clinics.

To make cancer care safer for patients from CALD backgrounds, health systems and services will need to support and invest in strategies that are specifically targeted towards people from these backgrounds. This will ensure more equitable health solutions that improve the health of all Australians.

Ashfaq Chauhan’s PhD was funded by Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship and Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. He receives funding from Medical Research Future Fund.

Melvin Chin has received funding from South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, Cancer Institute NSW, Cancer Australia, National Health and Medical Research Council, AstraZeneca, and Avant Foundation.

Reema Harrison receives funding from Cancer Institute NSW, Medical Research Futures Fund, NHMRC and ARC.

Meron Pitcher 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.

– ref. Cancer patients from migrant backgrounds have a 1 in 3 chance of something going wrong in their care – https://theconversation.com/cancer-patients-from-migrant-backgrounds-have-a-1-in-3-chance-of-something-going-wrong-in-their-care-250931

MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Statement on organised immigration crime
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments

Government response

Statement on organised immigration crime

Statement from the representatives of the governments of Albania, China, Sweden, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.
We, the representatives of the governments of Albania, China, Sweden, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, united as an international community in the fight against organised immigration crime (OIC), meeting within the framework of the Border Security Summit hosted by the United Kingdom, hereby affirm our collective responsibility to address the threat posed by organised criminal groups exploiting online platforms for the facilitation of irregular immigration including human trafficking.

Acknowledging the scope of the threat

We recognise the role that online platforms can play in the facilitation of OIC. Organised criminal groups are exploiting these platforms to advertise and facilitate illegal immigration services, generating illegal profits at the expense of vulnerable migrants. Inaccurate information is spread online, with claims to guarantee passage with shared ‘success stories’ of being able to remain in country despite illegal entry.

These stories are shared despite the increasing risk of fatalities from clandestine entry by boats and lorries. As online platforms evolve, criminal networks adapt their methods, making a co-ordinated global response essential. We recognise the harm that irregular migration can cause nations’ citizens.

Commitment to collective action

The fight against OIC requires collaboration across borders, sectors, and jurisdictions to effectively counter the global scale of the threat. No single government can combat this threat alone. We call upon all governments, international organisations, and industry partners to join us in this endeavour to work together to prevent the misuse of online platforms for illegal immigration services.

Disrupting the facilitation of OIC

The online environment should not be permissive for immigration crimes. We call on industry partners to design out from platforms opportunities for exploitation and to prevent the proliferation of glorifying illegal migration. Fatalities as a result of people smuggling are increasing globally and we must ensure those seeking illegal entry are aware of the grave risks.

A collective responsibility to prevent exploitation

We commit to strengthening our collective efforts to prevent, disrupt, and degrade the capacity of organised criminal groups to exploit online platforms for OIC. Online platforms should not enable facilitation of organised crime, and we are committed to working together to prevent this.

International governments, industry partners, and international organisations should join forces in a global effort to stop criminals from exploiting online platforms.

Platforms should invest in strong detection and moderation tools, while governments must back them with effective laws and international cooperation.

Collaborative framework for action

We commit to share trends in use of the online environment by organised criminal groups and the principle approaches for detecting and disrupting the facilitation of OIC online. Following this summit, the UK will provide opportunities for global collaboration, learning from the approach taken to other tech-enabled harms.

Towards a secure digital environment for all

Looking ahead, we recognise that addressing OIC in the digital age requires innovation, prevention, and sustained cooperation. Only through collective action can we prevent criminal groups from exploiting online platforms for irregular immigration. Together, we will work to ensure that online spaces remain secure and safe for everyone and do not provide the opportunity for people smuggling services to be advertised and accessed by vulnerable migrants.

A call to action

In conclusion, we call for ongoing dialogue and swift action to address the challenges posed by OIC online content and the threat it presents to the integrity of our borders. We reaffirm our commitment to a global response that prevents the exploitation of online platforms for criminal purposes.

We call for global action to prevent the spread of OIC content and protect the integrity of online spaces. By acting decisively, we can safeguard vulnerable people and uphold the security of our collective borders.

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Published 1 April 2025
MIL OSI United Kingdom –
April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Business Ethics Expert to Discuss Evolving Role of Religion, Ethics, and the Workplace

Source: US State of Connecticut

It was, perhaps, the most talked-about wedding cake in the history of marriage ceremonies.

In 2012, Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., refused to make a custom wedding cake for the marriage of a same-sex couple. The bakery owner objected, saying that the ceremony conflicted with his religious beliefs.

Although the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found the bakery had discriminated against the couple, the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned that decision in 2018. The ruling said the Commission failed to maintain religious neutrality, sidestepping questions about anti-discrimination laws and human rights.

“The case arose when two populations wanted vastly different outcomes,’’ said professor Eric D. Yordy of the W.A. Franke College of Business at Northern Arizona University. “The LGBTQ community was unhappy that the bakery told the couple to find a cake somewhere else. And others felt that the bakery shouldn’t be forced to do something that conflicted with the owner’s religion.’’

Social Media Has Put Religious Conflict in the Spotlight

Yordy will be the guest presenter at the School of Business’ Equity Now Speaker Series at 6 p.m. April 16. His presentation, which will be virtual, is open to students, faculty, alumni and friends of the university. To register for the program, please visit the Equity Now Website

Despite being a nation that embraces religious freedom, the parameters are still evolving.

“We are a country founded on religious freedom, but this issue is what are the boundaries of religious freedom and how do they impact business?,’’ he said.

The cake dispute is just one of many.

Hobby Lobby, the 1,000-store arts and crafts retailer, was founded on evangelical Protestant beliefs. It found itself in the crosshairs of law and religion when it denied employees access to contraceptives and the morning-after pill. The company argued that the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act serve to protect its religious beliefs. The Supreme Court ruled in the company’s favor.

What might have once been an internal conflict to resolve, today frequently leads to publicity and public outcry.

“With the way the world is now and so much that has happened in the last 20 years with social media, company decisionmakers need to be much more careful about what they’re doing,’’ Yordy said. “They can be crucified by social media. Now more than ever, consequences are bigger. Twenty years ago, most people wouldn’t have known about these disagreements.’’

Professor Designed Ethical Model

Yordy is a professor of business covering business law and ethics at Northern Arizona University and he has served in a variety of executive roles there, including as associate dean. He is also the founding director of the college’s Institute for Public and Professional Ethics in Leadership, an interdisciplinary initiative to increase ethics work both on campus and in the community.
Yordy and a colleague devised the ethics COVER model, a framework for ethical decision-making that helps users identify and analyze decisions with ethical ramifications by incorporating managerial decision-making and philosophical approaches. It address values, outcomes, and legal requirements.

He has authored or co-authored numerous case studies using the COVER model and other decision-making tools on topics as far ranging as the ethics of reverse mortgages, conflicts of interest, censorship in mobile application development, and the marketing of sugary cereal to children.

“We were seeing a lot of arguments that asked, ‘If everyone else is doing it, is it a bad decision?’ he said. “Well, yes, if you polluted something, even ‘just a little bit,’ it is still unethically sound. One of the questions we pose is: ‘If people heard about what you’re doing, would it influence who they think you are?’ ’’

The Equity Now Speaker Series is produced by the UConn School of Business in coordination with the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, Virginia tech, Indiana University and Temple University. This is the final installment of five programs during the 2024-25 academic year.

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: DRI Relays Inc. to Pay $15.7M to Settle False Claims Act Allegations Involving the Sale of Non-Military Grade Parts to Department of Defense

Source: US State of California

DRI Relays Inc. (DRI), a subsidiary of TE Connectivity Corporation (TEC), has agreed to pay $15.7 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by supplying military parts that did not meet military specifications, the Justice Department announced today.

TEC acquired DRI in October 2020. DRI manufactures electrical relays and sockets for numerous military platforms and has manufacturing locations in Long Island, New York, and Bangalore, India. In January 2011, TEC disclosed to the Department of Defense that DRI had not conducted certain required tests on MIL-PRF-83536 relays and MIL-DTL-12883 sockets, and cooperated with the government’s investigation. The United States subsequently alleged that between 2015 and 2021, under various Department of Defense (DoD) contracts and subcontracts, DRI invoiced for military grade electrical relays and sockets when it knew those parts had not met the testing requirements to be deemed military grade.

“It is essential to the safety and operational readiness of our military that contractors comply with applicable military specifications,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Yaakov M. Roth of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “We will continue to hold accountable those who knowingly supply equipment to the U.S. military that fails to meet their contract obligations.”

“Maintaining the integrity of the U.S. Department of Defense supply chain is a top priority for the DoD Office of Inspector General’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS),” said Special Agent in Charge Patrick J. Hegarty of the DCIS Northeast Field Office. “The DoD expects its suppliers to adhere to contract specifications and perform required testing on products sold to the U.S. military. We are committed to working with our law enforcement partners to investigate allegations of contractors failing to meet testing protocols and disclose product deficiencies.”

“This settlement demonstrates the resolve of the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division (Army CID) and our law enforcement partners to ensure the integrity of the equipment and materiel procured or used by the United States Army,” said Special Agent in Charge Keith K. Kelly of the Department of the Army CID Fraud Field Office. “Failures to adhere to established standards when providing military parts can place our Soldiers at significant risk and adversely impact the Army’s warfighting capabilities.”

This matter was handled by Senior Trial Counsel Art J. Coulter of the Civil Division’s Commercial Litigation Branch, Fraud Section. DCIS, Army CID, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency assisted in this investigation.

The claims resolved by the settlement are allegations only, and there has been no determination of liability.

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI: ESET Transforms Cyber Threat Intelligence Offering with New Feeds and APT Report Tiers
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)
- Initially developed for governments, Fortune 500 companies and critical infrastructure organizations, ESET Cyber Threat Intelligence has expanded offerings to provide actionable intelligence and address modern cybersecurity requirements faced by businesses of all sizes.
- ESET offers 15 proprietary intelligence feeds and two sub-feeds, including ransomware, smishing, cryptoscams, IoCs, botnets, phishing URLs, and more.
- ESET has also added two new APT report tiers to ensure organizations of all sizes and budgets can access these essential intelligence services.
- ESET Cyber Threat Intelligence services are standalone, customizable, and able to be seamlessly integrated into multi-vendor security solutions.
LAS VEGAS, April 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — ESET, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, has expanded its award-winning Cyber Threat Intelligence services, including new feeds and APT Report tiers. ESET’s offerings address modern cybersecurity needs with features like APT monitoring, threat hunting, and built-in AI that automates threat investigation. Announced at ESET World 2025 in Las Vegas, ESET enhanced its services to accommodate the requirements of companies of all sizes that now view threat intelligence as an essential component of a next-gen, prevention-focused cybersecurity stack.

“ESET continues to expand its cyber threat intelligence offerings to accelerate incident response and reduce data breach impacts — delivering a holistic view of threat actors, attack vectors, indicators of compromise, and malware behavior,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET. “Because cyberattacks know no borders, many organizations mix and match multiple threat intelligence services to gain global visibility and leverage best-in-class capabilities. ESET’s renowned visibility across Europe and Asia gives organizations a distinct advantage in preempting sophisticated threat actors and safeguarding their critical assets.”

New Feeds
ESET has expanded its Cyber Threat Intelligence from eight to 15 threat feeds, delivering actionable, highly curated, metadata-rich, detailed data to defend against timely threats, including ransomware, malicious email attachments, cryptoscams, phishing URLs, smishing, SMS scams, and more. Quality is better than quantity in threat intelligence. Rather than struggling to sift through huge, noncurated external datasets, ESET telemetry is carefully deduplicated and delivered in real time — enabling threat analysts to act immediately and quickly identify emerging business risks and previously unknown threats.

Additional APT Report Tiers
ESET is enhancing its APT Reports to cover new tiers, extending this crucial intelligence to SMBs. The tailored formats cater to various organizational roles. SOC or threat analysts can use Technical Analysis reports and Activity Summary reports for in-depth details on attacks and post-compromise activity along with details about attacks, Indicators of compromise (IoCs), YARA rules, Snort rules, Shodan, Censys queries, and more. Beyond just IoCs, these reports provide context and expert advice. For high-level strategic intel, CISOs can refer to our Monthly Overviews or Digests.

The APT Report Advanced and Ultimate tiers provide access to the ESET AI Advisor, a generative AI chatbot that addresses security inquiries, offers APT summaries, compiles IoCs and TTPs, and generates YARA rules for swift threat understanding and prevention. Leveraging ESET’s 20+ years of AI and ML expertise, AI Advisor enables security and intelligence leaders to better analyze and act upon emerging threats with SOC team-level advisory. Finally, organizations with the APT Report Ultimate tier gain access to ESET Analysts to directly resolve issues and collaborate directly with the company’s security threat hunters who are on the front lines.

Integrations
The development of ESET’s API gateway, ESET Connect, has enabled ESET to double down on integrations and ecosystem partners, which help customers to simplify cybersecurity management, increase visibility across a variety of attack surfaces, and bring industry leaders together under common architectures. ESET Cyber Threat Intelligence is highly interoperable and is already integrated with several key vendors, including Microsoft Sentinel, IBM QRadar, Elastic, MISP, Filigran’s OpenCTI, Threat Quotient, Stellar Cyber, and others.

“ESET Cyber Threat Intelligence is built upon our greatest strength — ESET researchers working across 11 research and development centers worldwide,” said Jean-Ian Boutin, Director of ESET’s Threat Research. “ESET does not buy data from others; we generate it ourselves. Our primary source is the vast user base of ESET security solutions — over 110 million users in more than 190 countries. ESET telemetry samples undergo in-depth behavioral and structural analysis, yielding additional useful indicators that enrich our threat intelligence, thus providing a more comprehensive understanding of the threat landscape. By aligning with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, ESET threat intelligence users can operationalize their visibility and response.”

Awareness and information sharing is critical in cybersecurity. ESET researchers have built a multilayered detection engine that processes more than 300,000 unique, new malware samples daily. Top research and discoveries are presented regularly at major global conferences like RSA, Black Hat, and ESET shares information on new threats and campaigns with the public and security enthusiasts via its industry-leading security blog, welivesecurity.com (cited by prominent media, such as BBC, CNBC, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Guardian, TechRadar, Wired, and more).

For more details, visit the ESET Cyber Threat Intelligence page.

About ESET
ESET provides cutting-edge digital security to prevent attacks before they happen. By combining the power of AI and human expertise, ESET stays ahead of known and emerging cyber threats — securing businesses, critical infrastructure, and individuals. Whether it’s endpoint, cloud, or mobile protection, its AI-native, cloud-first solutions and services remain highly effective and easy to use. ESET technology includes robust detection and response, ultra-secure encryption, and multifactor authentication. With 24/7 real-time defense and strong local support, we keep users safe and businesses running without interruption. An ever-evolving digital landscape demands a progressive approach to security: ESET is committed to world-class research and powerful threat intelligence, backed by R&D centers and a strong global partner network. For more information, visit www.eset.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.

The MIL Network –
April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Security: DRI Relays Inc. to Pay $15.7M to Settle False Claims Act Allegations Involving the Sale of Non-Military Grade Parts to Department of Defense

Source: United States Attorneys General

DRI Relays Inc. (DRI), a subsidiary of TE Connectivity Corporation (TEC), has agreed to pay $15.7 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by supplying military parts that did not meet military specifications, the Justice Department announced today.

TEC acquired DRI in October 2020. DRI manufactures electrical relays and sockets for numerous military platforms and has manufacturing locations in Long Island, New York, and Bangalore, India. In January 2011, TEC disclosed to the Department of Defense that DRI had not conducted certain required tests on MIL-PRF-83536 relays and MIL-DTL-12883 sockets, and cooperated with the government’s investigation. The United States subsequently alleged that between 2015 and 2021, under various Department of Defense (DoD) contracts and subcontracts, DRI invoiced for military grade electrical relays and sockets when it knew those parts had not met the testing requirements to be deemed military grade.

“It is essential to the safety and operational readiness of our military that contractors comply with applicable military specifications,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Yaakov M. Roth of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “We will continue to hold accountable those who knowingly supply equipment to the U.S. military that fails to meet their contract obligations.”

“Maintaining the integrity of the U.S. Department of Defense supply chain is a top priority for the DoD Office of Inspector General’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS),” said Special Agent in Charge Patrick J. Hegarty of the DCIS Northeast Field Office. “The DoD expects its suppliers to adhere to contract specifications and perform required testing on products sold to the U.S. military. We are committed to working with our law enforcement partners to investigate allegations of contractors failing to meet testing protocols and disclose product deficiencies.”

“This settlement demonstrates the resolve of the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division (Army CID) and our law enforcement partners to ensure the integrity of the equipment and materiel procured or used by the United States Army,” said Special Agent in Charge Keith K. Kelly of the Department of the Army CID Fraud Field Office. “Failures to adhere to established standards when providing military parts can place our Soldiers at significant risk and adversely impact the Army’s warfighting capabilities.”

This matter was handled by Senior Trial Counsel Art J. Coulter of the Civil Division’s Commercial Litigation Branch, Fraud Section. DCIS, Army CID, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency assisted in this investigation.

The claims resolved by the settlement are allegations only, and there has been no determination of liability.

MIL Security OSI –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: McConnell Statement on Burma Earthquakes and On-Going Repression

US Senate News:

Source: United States Senator for Kentucky Mitch McConnell

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) released the following statement today regarding humanitarian aid to the Burmese people and pressure on the junta:

“This weekend’s earthquakes in Burma have heaped new tragedy on a people already beset by grinding hardship. For most of Burma’s independent history, its people have struggled under the jackboot of a totalitarian junta. The search for survivors of these latest disasters adds a new and bitter challenge to the task of unwinding the current military coup.

“The people of Burma have displayed tremendous resilience and commitment to democracy since the 2021 coup. Unprecedented cooperation among Burma’s ethnic groups and pro-democracy movement have put the junta on the back foot. The Tatmadaw’s decision to drop bombs on impacted villages instead of sending urgent material assistance will go down among its most callous offenses.

“To the extent that emergency aid from abroad is reaching the hardest-hit areas around Mandalay, the absence of robust and coordinated American participation will not go unnoticed. Neither will the major and visible role played as of now by the PRC, especially if Beijing continues to enable the Junta’s war against Burma’s people. With U.S. networks of humanitarian workers and regional experts in tatters, pledges of assistance to the people of Burma will be less efficient and less effective.

“As I have repeatedly urged administrations of both parties for years before this weekend’s events, the United States and its allies must apply urgent and concerted pressure on the military to cease its slaughter and restore power to the people of Burma.”

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Australia: Meet the 2024 ACT Women’s Awards winners

Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services

Winners Glenda Stevens, Joanne Farrell and Mijica Lus

The recipients of the 2024 ACT Women’s Awards have been announced.

The awards recognise women and gender diverse people who have made an outstanding contribution to the lives of women and girls in the ACT.

Meet the 2024 ACT Women’s Awards winners:

2024 ACT Woman of the Year: Joanne Farrell – Founder and Director, Build Like a Girl

Joanne (Jo) Farrell is a champion for women in the building industry.

In 2020, she founded Build Like a Girl, a not-for-profit program that supports women of all backgrounds and ages to work in trades. Since then, Jo has helped 33 women gain full-time employment. She regularly assists with programs, initiatives and services aimed at improving the participation rate of women in trades, which is currently just 2 per cent.

“I’m really honoured to be nominated and recognised for the work,” Jo said.

“I just turn up every day and try and do the work and promote the industry for other women to work in and try and change the negative cultural behaviour we have across the board.

“For me it is a recognition of that work and hopefully other women feel encouraged to come and work in our industry with us.”

Jo is not only the recipient of 2024 ACT Woman of the Year but was also named 2024 ACT Australian of the Year.

2024 ACT Senior Woman of the Year: Glenda Stevens – CEO, Fearless Women

Glenda is a community leader and expert in a range of social policy areas.

Glenda started Fearless Women, a program that provides girls and young women in the ACT with a support service to help them find their voice. It offers short-term counselling, equips girls and women with the tools and resources they need, and offers longer term mentoring support.

“It’s really exciting to see a young person who was frightened and stressed to be able to feel the exhilaration of achieving something,” Glenda said.

“For her to feel that sense of achievement and satisfaction is really good for her growth, and it’s good for all of us because we’re receiving the benefits of a wonderful young person.”

2024 ACT Young Woman of the Year: Mijica Lus – Founder, Aurosokwo Project

For the last six years, Mijica Lus has volunteered her time and effort with various not-for-profits in the ACT in areas of education, media, health care and human services.

Mijica leads the Aurosokwa Project, which supports multicultural communities through cross collaboration.

“If it’s helping with food pantries, decreasing homelessness, supporting mental health initiatives and youth services as well, that’s what the project is about,” Mijica said.

“I’m really excited to contribute to a city that has given me so much, and this is one way of showing my appreciation.”

2024 ACT Woman of the Year – Special Commendation Award: Delfina Shakespear, football match official

Delfina Shakespear is a National and State-level Football Match Official. She volunteers as a mentor, educator, and administrator, and provides strategic advice to Capital Football.

She is committed to empowering the next generation of female referees.

Delfina fearlessly speaks up against abuse and poor treatment faced by referees. She actively promotes cultural change through media engagement and initiatives like Reduce Abuse.

“Seeing the girls and women that I’ve mentored succeed, strive for their goals and push through all the challenges is the most rewarding thing,” Delfina said.

Get ACT news and events delivered straight to your inbox, sign up to our email newsletter:

MIL OSI News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Australia: 2024 ACT Women’s Awards almost here
Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services

Finalist Mijica Lus is the Founder of the Aurosokwo Project.
The 2024 ACT Women’s Awards will be announced on Thursday 7 March.

The awards recognise those who have demonstrated an outstanding contribution to improving the status and lives of girls and women in the ACT.

They celebrate the achievements of women who are excelling in their field and making a significant impact in helping girls and women achieve their full potential.

The award categories are:
- ACT Woman of the Year
- Senior Woman of the Year (aged over 60 years)
- ACT Young Woman of the Year (aged between 16 and 24 years).
Congratulations to the 2024 ACT Women’s Awards’ finalists:
- Dr Lubna Alam – Co-founder, ALO Enlightened Women
- Joanne Farrell – Founder and Managing Director, Build Like a Girl
- Mijica Lus – Founder, Aurosokwo Project
- Philippa Moss – CEO, Meridian ACT
- Delfina Shakespear – Football Match Official
- Glenda Stevens – Founder, Fearless Women
- Prof Dipti Talaulikar – Founder, Sakhi
- Selina Walker – Ngunnawal Leader.
Finalist Delfina Shakespear, an elite match official with Capital Football and Football Australia, thinks the annual awards are important.

“It enables women to have a platform to talk about what they do, because as women sometimes we go about our business and don’t really talk about it more broadly,” she said.

Fellow nominee Professor Dipti Talaulikar, a clinical haematologist and professor at the ANU, as well as being the Founder of Sakhi said: “I was very touched with the nomination when I first heard about it. But the journey, the support that the government and the ACT’s Women Office provides is just amazing. The things you get to learn, the other women you get to meet, to hear their stories is just absolutely amazing. So, if you know anyone who is doing good work in the community, please nominate them.”

For more information on the ACT Women’s Awards and Honour Roll, visit ACT Woman of the Year and Honour Roll – ACT Government

Dr Lubna Alam – Co-founder, ALO Enlightened Women

Joanne Farrell – Founder and Managing Director, Build Like a Girl

Philippa Moss – CEO, Meridian ACT

Delfina Shakespear – Football Match Official

Glenda Stevens – Founder, Fearless Women

Prof Dipti Talaulikar – Founder, Sakhi

Selina Walker – Ngunnawal Leader

Get ACT news and events delivered straight to your inbox, sign up to our email newsletter:
MIL OSI News –
April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Innovation key to water-secure future

Source: Hong Kong Information Services

Chief Executive John Lee

I am pleased to join you today for the opening of the International Water Pioneers Summit. Gathered here are nearly 400 high-profile professionals and senior government officials from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Asia and around the world. Present here to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Dongjiang’s water supply to Hong Kong and to work together to ensure a sustainable water supply for us all.

Hong Kong’s water story is one of transformation, illustrating how a city with a limited water resource, can turn geographic and resource limitations into engineering triumphs.

Hong Kong’s water story is also one of deep and abiding ties. Because without the strong bonds and blood relations between Hong Kong and the Mainland, the engineering, and the water it made possible, would not have taken place. Certainly not in the 1960s.

As for the engineering, the main challenge was geography. Dongjiang is more than 50km away from Hong Kong. That meant building an 83km water channel, crossing half a dozen mountains. The water had to be lifted, via multi-stage pumping stations, from 2m above sea level to 46m at the highest point.

And the project was completed in less than one year. At 4pm on March 1, 60 years ago, the supply of Dongjiang water to Hong Kong began.

For the past six decades, Dongjiang has provided 70% to 80% of the water needed by Hong Kong.

And the engineering feats continued. Because of our increasing demand for water, the Dongjiang-Shenzhen Water Supply Scheme, as it is presently known, was expanded three times from the 1970s to the 1990s. It was improved again in the early 2000s. These raised Hong Kong’s annual water supply ceiling from the original 68.2 million cu m, to today’s 820 million cu m, a rise of 12 times.

We are eternally grateful for the enormous commitment and technical ingenuity, by the country and all our compatriots involved.

We like Dongjiang water. For good reason. It meets the highest national standard for surface water used for human consumption. No less essential, it continues to flow, fuelling Hong Kong’s economic miracle, supporting our economy and community, while helping to ensure our city’s sustainable development and long-term prosperity.

The theme of this summit is “Smart Water, High-Quality Development”. That tells me that if we want to ensure a sustainable water supply, we need to invest in its future, and do it innovatively.

Hong Kong has long been recognised for its infrastructure prowess. Indeed, Hong Kong’s infrastructure was ranked among the top 10, globally, in the World Competitiveness Yearbook last year.

Our major water supply projects include High Island Reservoir, Hong Kong’s largest reservoir, and the Tseung Kwan O Desalination Plant, the first waterworks in Hong Kong to adopt advanced reverse osmosis desalination technology.

As an international centre of innovation and technology (I&T), we are keen on applying I&T to water management. Last year, we set up a Digital Water Office to drive the digitalisation of our water supply services.

The office promotes the use of smart devices, digital twin technology and artificial intelligence, to gradually gain full automation of operations in our waterworks installations.

Innovation in infrastructure development will power our water-secure future. Our goal is to establish Hong Kong as an international infrastructure centre, that serves our city and China, our country.

Speaking of our country, let me add that it has built numerous water conservancy projects. And I am sure you will hear more about them in today’s summit.

I am grateful to the organisers of today’s International Water Pioneers Summit. Grateful too, to our distinguished speakers and moderators, here in Hong Kong from all over the world.

While you are here, I invite you to take full advantage of all that Hong Kong has to offer, in arts and culture. You can start right here, in West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong’s largest arts development.

Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you all a rewarding summit and an enjoyable and memorable stay in Hong Kong.

Chief Executive John Lee gave these remarks at the International Water Pioneers Summit on April 1.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: South and Central Asia Subcommittee Chairman Huizenga Delivers Opening Statement at Hearing on Censorship

Source: US House Committee on Foreign Affairs

Media Contact 202-321-9747

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee Chairman Bill Huizenga delivered opening remarks at a subcommittee hearing titled, “How the Global Engagement Center Censored Americans.”

Watch Here

-Remarks-

This subcommittee is tasked with examining the public diplomacy functions of the State Department, commonly referred to as the R family of bureaus and offices. In December of 2024, Congress terminated an office within that family—the Global Engagement Center, also known as GEC—after its exposure coming out of an investigation that was done by this committee. The GEC was initially authorized for the statutory purpose of countering foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts.

Despite that mandate, for years the GEC instead deployed its shadowy network of grantees and sub-grantees to facilitate the censorship of American voices—especially if those voices were conservative and refused to align with the left-leaning establishment politics. Worst of all, this was being done using U.S. taxpayer dollars—your dollars.

In the same month the GEC was terminated, the Biden State Department restructured the office into a “counter-foreign information manipulation and interference hub,” also known as R-FIMI. The question we will be exploring today is whether this restructuring is actually in name only. Put simply: whether you call it GEC or R-FIMI, the State Department should never—and if I can help it, will never again—be in the business of silencing American voices.

Freedom of speech is a God-given right enshrined in the First Amendment of our nation’s Constitution. It is a right that President Trump and his administration are committed to zealously protecting. On his first day in office, President Trump signed the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship executive order. This executive order makes clear that no federal government employees or taxpayer dollars may be used to engage in or facilitate the unconstitutional censorship of American citizens.

As the chairman of the subcommittee, I plan to introduce legislation that will codify that executive order. I’m hopeful that my colleagues will join me in enshrining these vital First Amendment protections into law.

I want to thank the panel for being here today. Ms. Jankowitz, thank you for your time. You publicly supported and even spearheaded censorship efforts under the previous administration—out of what some called the “Ministry of Truth.” Some had labeled you the Disinformation Czar—or I guess technically, Czarina. It is crucial that the American public receive answers and accountability for the actions taken by their own government to silence their voices.

Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Weingarten, your valiant reporting helped unearth the GEC’s role in the censorship of Americans. Mr. Taibbi, your groundbreaking work on the Twitter Files pulled back the curtain on how the federal bureaucracy colluded with—and in some cases pressured—social media companies to target American citizens engaged in protected political speech. Mr. Weingarten, your impactful work has unearthed how the GEC and its implementing partners deployed blacklists to obliterate conservative news publications—publications that the Biden administration disagreed with.

We, as Americans and as policymakers, must never allow these dark days of mass censorship to happen again. That is my goal.

###

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: ICYMI: Mullin Joins Meet the Press, Highlights the Return of Real Leadership

US Senate News:

Source: United States Senator MarkWayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma)
“We have terrorist organizations coming after the United States everywhere because the Biden administration has done nothing for four years.”
Washington, D.C. –On Sunday, U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) joined NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press to discuss the Trump administration’s return to peace through strength, successful Houthi strikes, pending newsanctions on Russia, and the president’s efforts to level the playing field for American workers through reciprocal tariffs. Highlights below.

Sen. Mullin’s full interview can be found here.
On the success of the strikes against the Houthis:
“There was no war plans that The Atlantic put out. What they did was have a very successful attack against the Houthis, who’s a terrorist organization, that’s been harassing our Navy since 2023. They had attacked our Navy 174 times and the Biden Administration did nothing but sit on their hands. But what the Trump administration did was take the fight directly to the Houthis. So what the conversation should be is why didn’t the Biden Administration do something in the last two years instead of us being focused on this Signal chat. Which there was no classified information given out…
“Tell me where the location was at, what part of the region was it at, what part of the world was this at? We have a lot of conflicts, a lot of issues going on around the world, from Africa to anywhere in the Middle East, to even in Asia, or possibly in Europe. This could have been going on any place in the world. There was no specific information except that a target was gonna be hit. We have terrorist organizations coming after the United States everywhere because the Biden administration has done nothing for four years.”
On President Trump standing up to Russia:
“What President Trump is trying to do is negotiate an end to the deal of individuals dying in Ukraine…
“What President Trump has said right now is, if [Putin] continues to play games, he’s going to get tough on Russia just like he did in 2017.”
On our trade partners needing to abide by a two-way street:
“[Canada] needs us more than we need them. The fact is we have been subsidizing their economy by the tunes of billions of dollars every single year, and they know that. What President Trump is saying is that enough is enough. If you’re gonna have a relationship with the United States, it’s gonna be an even playing field, a two-way street. We want reciprocal tariffs; we want to be treated the same. We want to have access to your economy like you have access to us.”

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Attorney General Alan Wilson asks Trump administration to close loophole allowing drug traffickers to flood US with fentanylRead More

Source: US State of South Carolina

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – Attorney General Alan Wilson joined a coalition of 25 state attorneys general asking the Trump administration to close a loophole used by adversaries and drug traffickers to flood deadly fentanyl into the United States. In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem and Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Pete Flores, the attorneys general call for greater scrutiny of an import pilot program called Entry Type 86, which allows small packages to enter the U.S. with minimal customs screening.

“Fentanyl is killing our family members, friends, and neighbors, and we can’t afford to leave the door open for drug traffickers to exploit weak spots in our system,” said Attorney General Wilson. “The Entry Type 86 program has become a Trojan horse, allowing deadly drugs to flood into our communities with minimal oversight. I’m proud to stand with my fellow attorneys general and President Trump’s administration to demand immediate action to close this loophole and protect American lives. South Carolina will not sit back while drug cartels poison our families.”

In just a 10-year period, imports under the Entry Type 86 program skyrocketed from 153 million packages in 2015 to over 1.2 billion in 2024. Any surge of this magnitude requires further study because of serious concerns about the amount of fentanyl and other deadly drugs that could be coming into the country. Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid narcotic up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. As little as two milligrams of fentanyl – smaller than the tip of a pencil – can be lethal.

In addition, some shippers use the Entry Type 86 program to dodge regulations and avoid paying required duties, raising concerns about security risks, illegal trade, and weaknesses in our supply chain.

Attorney General Wilson joined Kentucky, which led the letter, alongside attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

You can read the letter here.

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Is the risk of brain injury from contact sports being overstated by the media?

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christian Yates, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Biology, University of Bath

PeopleImages/Shutterstock

More and more people are worried about the long-term effects of contact sports on the brain. In football (soccer), studies have found that repeatedly heading the ball can lead to memory problems and an increased risk of serious brain diseases. This has led to rules limiting heading the ball in youth leagues and calls to protect professional players in similar ways.

In American football, research shows a high number of former players have a brain condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This has prompted the National Football League (NFL) to change some rules and introduce better safety equipment.

Rugby, a sport known for its hard collisions, is also becoming more aware of head injuries. As a result, new rules require players to rest after a concussion – and there are stricter rules about preventing head contact during games.

Some older players are taking legal action because of the brain injuries they suffered. Lawyers are representing over 500 former players from both rugby union and rugby league, claiming that repetitive head impacts during their careers caused long-lasting brain damage.

The lawyers argue that the sports’ governing bodies failed to protect these former players from the effects of blows to the head.

A recent BBC article said that “almost two-thirds of the claimants in a concussion lawsuit against rugby league authorities” had symptoms of CTE. Two-thirds is a lot, but is it really that surprising?

It’s important to remember that the players in this lawsuit are a self-selecting sample. These people have been chosen for inclusion in the class action lawsuit precisely because they have evidence of brain damage. We should expect a high prevalence of conditions like CTE in this sample. So we must be careful not to infer something about all rugby players that is not supported by the data.

However, perhaps the BBC article is not so troubling, since the condition for selection – that the players were part of the lawsuit – is clearly stated. More problematic are articles in which the conditions for the selection of the studied sample are not so clearly laid out.

Another BBC article, published in 2023, summarised the results of studies investigating the prevalence of CTE in the brains of deceased rugby players. It reported that “68% of the brains had traces of the brain condition CTE”. This might suggest to readers that CTE is very common among all rugby players.

In American football, the problem appears to be even more prevalent. In 2017, the BBC ran an article with the headline: Brain disease affects 99% of NFL players in study. The piece led with the sentence: “A study of American football players’ brains has found that 99% of professional NFL athletes tested had a disease associated with head injuries.”

This sounds extremely alarming and might lead readers to surmise that nearly all professional NFL players will develop CTE. The study also surveyed the brains of college and high-school students, concluding: “Of the 202 total players, 87% were found to have traces of CTE,” giving the impression that most American football players at all levels might expect to develop CTE.

Selection bias

CTE research is difficult because the disease can only be diagnosed by examining samples of a patient’s brain tissue after their death. Consequently, for the NFL study, researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine, who conducted the research, drew their sample from the VA Boston Healthcare System’s “brain bank”.

The bank, established to better understand the long-term effects of repetitive head trauma, holds hundreds of donated brains potentially damaged through sporting or military activities.

And herein lies the problem. Many of the brains held in the bank were donated by families who suspected that their loved ones had CTE. The study hugely overrepresented players who were likely to have CTE in comparison to the general American football-playing population.

To their credit, the scientists who conducted this research were at pains to point out their sample was not representative and should not be used to draw population-level conclusions.

In particular, the conclusion that many sports fans reading the headlines will have come to – that a huge proportion of American football players will suffer from CTE – is not supported by the study. Somehow, that message got lost between the research article and the media’s reporting of it.

The eye-catching statistics about the prevalence of CTE in rugby players, derived from a study at the University of Glasgow, are the result of a similar misrepresentation of the underlying research. In this case, the brains that were analysed came from three brain banks (from Scotland, the US and Australia).

All of these repositories take donations of brains from people who were more likely to have suffered from neurological conditions, and so are unlikely to be representative of the underlying population of ruby players.

The weight of evidence linking repetitive blows to the head to brain harm (particularly to CTE) is growing stronger. Studies comparing footballers to the general population show the increase in neurological conditions among football players is probably not a statistical fluke.

However, if we seek to truly understand the risks of undertaking these contact sports, loved by billions, then we need to look beyond the startling headlines. Selection bias, caused by a disparity in the reasons why brains are donated for study, means it’s not enough just to sample from the brains we have available in order to establish an estimate of the prevalence of such diseases.

Instead, we need to understand who is missing from the studied population, and use that information to infer how a potentially biased sample might cause the statistics we read in the headlines to be unrepresentative.

Christian Yates 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.

– ref. Is the risk of brain injury from contact sports being overstated by the media? – https://theconversation.com/is-the-risk-of-brain-injury-from-contact-sports-being-overstated-by-the-media-253378

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: East Asia is challenging Silicon Valley – by being like Silicon Valley used to be

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robyn Klingler-Vidra, Vice Dean, Global Engagement | Associate Professor in Political Economy and Entrepreneurship, King’s College London

East Asia’s tech scene is enjoying considerable success. imtmphoto / Shutterstock

Silicon Valley has been a universal symbol of innovation for decades. Because of its reputation, governments around the world have tried to foster their own versions by investing heavily in tech hubs.

These efforts, which include Silicon Beach in Los Angeles, Silicon Island in Malaysia and Silicon Roundabout in the UK, have not always worked. But some places, particularly parts of east Asia, have seen their own Silicon Valleys flourish.

China has the world’s second-largest venture capital market, scores of startups, and cutting-edge tech to challenge Silicon Valley. Japan and Korea have also become some of the most active corporate venture capital investors in the world.

At the same time, these challenger ecosystems possess some of the attributes of Silicon Valley in its heyday. More, in some ways, than Silicon Valley itself does these days.

The scale of Silicon Valley remains unparalleled, at least for now. In 2024, the region’s market capitalisation (the value of companies’ publicly traded shares) had reached US$14.3 trillion (£11 trillion). This is comparable to the entire GDP of China, the world’s second-largest economy.

But Silicon Valley is no longer a counter-cultural world of startups in garages, where small, disruptive organisations build world-changing products on a shoestring. It has morphed into a land of Goliaths, not Davids.

Cups of instant noodles have, for many, been replaced by açaí bowls, and office all-nighters with wellbeing workshops and digital detox retreats. Stalwart investors, such as Sequoia’s Mike Moritz, have complained that Silicon Valley tech workers have become “lazy and entitled”.

Silicon Valley is a region in northern California that is a global centre for technology and innovation.
Peter Hermes Furian / Shutterstock

Meanwhile, the work ethic and laser focus of tech workers elsewhere has advanced. About ten years ago, Chinese tech’s working hours were described as “996” – working from 9am to 9pm six days a week. They are now referred to as “007”, a schedule where employees work from midnight to midnight, seven days a week.

‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’

The history of Silicon Valley is one of hungry challengers disrobing the big, boring incumbents. Apple raised equity investment from Xerox, then a leading print production corporation, and used the access to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center to take inspiration from the company’s plans for a computer that had a graphical user interface. Apple later refined the software for the Macintosh, giving it its edge.

In 1996, Jobs famously said: “Picasso had a saying – ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal’ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Today, the Goliaths leading Silicon Valley have huge intellectual property portfolios to defend. And they are outraged when their tech is taken. OpenAI, the American company that made ChatGPT, has even asked the US government to declare Chinese AI firm DeepSeek “state controlled” and to outlaw its use in the US. Huawei and Bytedance’s TikTok have faced similar calls in the past.

In western media, much of the focus on the moment DeepSeek disrupted the AI landscape has been about how it rattled Silicon Valley. But there has been less coverage on how it has instigated instant rivals within China.

Days after Deepseek’s release, Chinese tech company Alibaba announced that its AI model was superior. And China recently launched Manus, a fully autonomous AI agent that fully replaces rather than assists humans.

China’s answer to Silicon Valley is what Taiwanese businessman, Kai-fu Lee, calls “gladiatorial entrepreneurship”. This is where founders constantly innovate because as soon as their product is released, they know it will be copied and reverse engineered. The system as a whole benefits from the intense competition, the way Silicon Valley did in its ascent.

The students have become the teacher

Silicon Valley used to be known for its counter culture and its outsized vision of how tech can transform the globe. This is epitomised by Masayoshi Son, a former student of Silicon Valley from east Asia who is the founder and CEO of Japanese firm SoftBank.

He first came to Silicon Valley in the early 1980s and quickly integrated into the Silicon Valley way of business. Son launched his own startup when he returned to Japan, modelled on what he experienced in the few years he lived in California. With this, Softbank was born as a software distributor.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund is now the largest venture capital fund in the world, with over US$100 billion (£77.5 billion) in capital. Son’s giant fund and impatient style of investing have contributed to change in Silicon Valley. Ballooning valuations and the use of exploding term sheets (investment offers that expire within a matter of days) are increasingly the norm.

Son is stylised as a classic outsider. Gambling Man, a recently published book from the former editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, details how Son is not “really Japanese” (he’s ethnically Korean) and has long touted this challenger narrative.

Now as one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, he is pushy, confrontational and has a huge vision for how technologies such as AI can change the world. He is the purveyor of that grand vision and an advocate for the risk-taking that is synonymous with “classic” Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, China’s AI gladiators innovate constantly in their bid to overtake the once hungry American behemoths who are now forced to call on the state to help shore-up their position. The contrasting trajectories raise questions about who should now become more like whom if they are to win the global technology race.

Robyn Klingler-Vidra 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.

– ref. East Asia is challenging Silicon Valley – by being like Silicon Valley used to be – https://theconversation.com/east-asia-is-challenging-silicon-valley-by-being-like-silicon-valley-used-to-be-251854

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: GBA legal body meets

Source: Hong Kong Information Services

Deputy Secretary for Justice Cheung Kwok-kwan today chaired the first meeting of the new term of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) Task Force.

The task force had an in-depth discussion on the policy measures set out in the Department of Justice’s Action Plan on the Construction of Rule of Law in the GBA, and future key initiatives including the establishment of a panel of arbitrators to facilitate arbitrators from the three places in providing legal and dispute resolution services in the bay area as well as the setup of a platform to provide practical legal information on cross-boundary businesses and living.

Mr Cheung emphasised that innovation is important in promoting the interfaces of mechanisms, regulatory frameworks and talent training among Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau, noting that it will further facilitate Hong Kong’s integration into the overall development of the country and enhance the innovation capabilities and radiating effect of the GBA.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Attorney General Bonta Files Lawsuit Against Trump Administration Over Unlawful Termination of $11 Billion in Critical Public Health Funding
Source: US State of California

9th lawsuit against Trump Administration argues that abrupt termination of federal funds is unlawful

Funding was appropriated by Congress in response to COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that U.S. is better prepared for future public health threats

OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced co-leading a coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia in filing a lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the unlawful termination of $11 billion in critical public health funding. Beginning on March 24, 2025, HHS abruptly, with no advance notice or warning, issued termination notices to state and local public health agencies across the country, purporting to end federal funding for grants that provide essential support for a wide range of urgent public health needs, including identifying, tracking, and addressing infectious diseases; ensuring access to immunizations; and modernizing critical public health infrastructure. The federal funding was appropriated by Congress to ensure the United States is better prepared for future public health threats. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, the lawsuit by the attorneys general alleges that the termination notices are unlawful in several ways under the Administration Procedures Act (APA). The coalition is also seeking a temporary restraining order to maintain the status quo and immediately restore the public health funding due to the irreparable harm that their respective states and their local health jurisdictions would otherwise suffer. California stands to lose more than $972 million from these cancellations by HHS.

“Over and over, I’ve made clear that my office will only take legal action against the Trump Administration when it breaks the law. Unfortunately, but predictably, that has happened once again,” said Attorney General Bonta. “Congress explicitly authorized funding for the grants at issue to help keep our country healthy and protect us from future pandemics. HHS and its Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cannot unilaterally do away with that critical federal funding. My fellow attorneys general and I are committed to defending the rule of law. We know how high the stakes are in our respective states — thousands of jobs and key public health programs and initiatives could be eliminated.”

According to the Trump Administration, funding for the grants is “no longer necessary” because the grants were appropriated through one or more COVID-19 related laws, and the COVID-19 pandemic is over. In the lawsuit, the attorneys general allege:
- The termination notices violate the APA because they are contrary to law. The foreseeable end of the COVID-19 pandemic is not a lawful basis to terminate “for cause.” Terminations “for cause” are only permissible based on a grant recipient’s “material failure” to comply with the applicable terms and conditions of the grants and agreements. The Trump Administration has never alleged, much less demonstrated, any failure by the fund recipients to comply with the applicable terms and conditions of the grants and agreements. In addition, federal law requires the HHS Secretary to “provide to the State involved adequate notice and an opportunity for a hearing” prior to terminating Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grants, which fund mental health and substance abuse services. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. provided absolutely no notice or opportunity for a hearing before terminating the grants, effective immediately.
- The termination notices further violate the APA because they are arbitrary and capricious. Among other things, they assumed, with no legal or factual support, that all appropriations in COVID-19 related laws were only intended for use during the pandemic. In fact, HHS granted numerous extensions to the performance period of many grants issued to Plaintiff States and their local health jurisdictions, some of which were scheduled to end as late as June 2027. The termination notices are also arbitrary and capricious because they failed to undertake any individualized assessments of the grants or cooperative agreements, including any analysis of the benefits of this public health funding or the dire consequences of termination.
- The Trump Administration’s unlawful withholding of funds has already caused substantial confusion and will result in immediate and devastating harm to their states, their local health jurisdictions, their residents, and public health writ large.
Without this essential public health funding, vital programs that serve millions of Californians, including children, rural communities, and nursing homes, will be jeopardized. For example, the federal government terminated over $800 million that the California Department of Public Health intended to use, in part, to vaccinate 4.5 million children statewide and assist hospitals in directing injured and ill patients to available health facilities during all types of emergencies, where efficient routing saves lives. The California Department of Health Care Services is set to lose over $119 million, which the state needs to support key programs, including substance use disorder prevention and early intervention services for youth in at least 18 counties. And the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health will lose over $45 million that was slated, in part, to strengthen the County’s efforts to prevent the spread of measles, and seasonal and avian influenza.

Attorney General Bonta is co-leading the litigation with the attorneys general of Colorado, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington. They are joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, and Wisconsin, as well as the Governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

A copy of the complaint is available here.

MIL OSI USA News –
April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: From barriers to belonging: How supporting inclusivity enhances the well-being of people with disabilities

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Mohsen Rasoulivalajoozi, PhD candidate, Individualized Program, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University

To create truly inclusive cities, policy-makers and experts need to go beyond minimum standards and critically examine how our urban spaces continue to exclude people with disabilities. (Shutterstock)

What does it mean for a city to be accommodating to all its citizens?

This requires understanding how individuals feel included and valued in the places they live, and responding to their needs by emphasizing genuine inclusivity. For people with mobility challenges, it means feeling no different from others. This applies both to navigating urban spaces and engaging in social interactions.

Despite efforts to improve accessibility in Canada, many urban spaces still fall short, leaving wheelchair users facing subtle but persistent barriers. We wanted to understand the different challenges and barriers people with disabilities face when using mobility aids.

To do this, we interviewed 12 experienced physiotherapists in Iran to identify gaps in how mobility aid serve the needs of those who use them, and offer recommendations based on their extensive interactions with users.

Given the universal needs of mobility aid users — emotional well-being, social integration and functional independence — and the common challenges they face accessing health-care systems around the world, our findings can are relevant for many people around the world, including in Canada.

Inclusive design

To create truly inclusive cities, it is vital for policymakers and experts to go beyond minimum standards and critically examine how our urban spaces continue to exclude people with disabilities.

Marketing professors Vanessa Patrick and Candice Hollenbeck have developed the DARE framework — design, appraisal, response and experience — and propose three levels of inclusive design aimed to make spaces more inclusive for people with disabilities.

Level 1 ensures accessibility through industry regulations, meeting minimum standards. Level 2 fosters engagement and equity, rooted in social justice principles, by validating user experiences and emphasizing empathy. Level 3 aims to minimize mismatches between users and design, promoting human flourishing through seamless interaction among individuals, the design and their environment.

Our study outlines how people perceive the inclusivity of mobility aids based on the cost, how they are built and how effective they are in different environments.

We also considered perceptions of trustworthiness, support and contextual factors, including the social interpretations and representations of these devices. We highlight gaps in users’ needs and provide recommendations to address them. Through this analysis, we identified four key themes that offer valuable insights for enhancing inclusivity.

Financial burden

For some, mobility aids can be an added financial burden. Financial constraints may limit access to mobility aids, often forcing users to seek alternatives or delay rehabilitation, potentially worsening their conditions. For example, individuals might resort to second-hand mobility aids which may not be fitted correctly for them.

Globally, only five to 35 per cent of the 80 million people who need a wheelchair have access to one depending on where they live, with high costs being a primary barrier.

The high cost of advanced electric wheelchairs further restrict access. This marks a gap at the first level of inclusivity in the DARE framework, where market-driven prices fall short of meeting mobility aid users’ needs.

Initiatives like the European Union’s Rehabilitation Policy Action Framework have called for increased governmental financial support for mobility aid users. This framework offers 48 options across six domains to translate political goals into action, such as reallocating health-care funds to expand rehabilitation and improve inclusivity.

Mobility aid users, like all individuals, deserve equal consideration in design and planning.
(Shutterstock)

Mismatches between users and mobility aids

In using mobility aids, a user will typically evaluate two aspects: the design features of the aids themselves and how well they function in their environment.

If the mobility aid is slightly mismatched with their requirements, the user may find alternative solutions, such as adding padding to a wheelchair to relieve pressure. However, severe mismatches can lead to negative outcomes and result in unmet mobility needs. Furthermore, inadequate anthropometric and ergonomic adjustments can lead to discomfort.

Similarly, environmental mismatches, such as barriers that disrupt navigation, can reinforce negative stereotypes and condescending attitudes. These barriers can hinder a person’s mobility and ultimately deter them from going out and engaging in social activities.

New developments and technologies can not only address and mitigate certain mismatches but also positively impact users’ psychological and social needs. However, integrating new technologies requires careful consideration, as assistive devices can also attract social stigma.

Therefore, it is important to identify which technological or esthetic features of mobility aids evoke positive emotions and minimize stigma.

Mobility aid users, like everyone, deserve equal consideration in design and planning. Programs like Europe’s Design for All (DfA) and Singapore’s Barrier-Free Accessibility (BFA) promote barrier-free design for all abilities and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Improving trust

Trustworthiness is a critical factor in the use of mobility aids, particularly in unfamiliar settings where users may feel uncertain.

To address this, users seek continuous reassurance about the reliability of their aids, often depending on the support of physiotherapists to navigate mismatches between their needs and their surroundings. Such professional support enhances confidence and mental well-being. Physiotherapists, as trusted experts, can remarkably shape users’ perceptions and acceptance of mobility aids.

Ensuring trustworthy designs is also crucial, as perceived fragility can undermine user trust. Validating experiences, building trust across environments — including trust in physiotherapists and mobility aid products — is essential to alleviating doubts about how effective they might be.

Sociocultural influences

Sociocultural context and the causes of a disability play a significant role in shaping perceptions of mobility aids.

Regardless of users’ personal experiences, others tend to view mobility aids through the lens of prevailing societal attitudes toward disability. For some, mobility aids may reinforce stereotypes about disabilities. This highlights the critical role of esthetics in shaping public perceptions and social interactions.

For example, incorporating esthetic refinements into the design can help counter negative perceptions. By addressing negative representations and promoting designs that reflect dignity and inclusivity, interventions can align with inclusively goals and enhance positive social engagement.

Raising public awareness is key to challenging stereotypes and building empathy. To create an inclusive society, design and planning should consider both the physical and social barriers to accessibility. Achieving this requires a multi-disciplinary effort, and the active participation of people who use mobility aids.

This article was co-authored by Morteza Farhoudi, an inclusive designer specializing in public transportation studies.

Mohsen Rasoulivalajoozi receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Carmela Cucuzzella receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. From barriers to belonging: How supporting inclusivity enhances the well-being of people with disabilities – https://theconversation.com/from-barriers-to-belonging-how-supporting-inclusivity-enhances-the-well-being-of-people-with-disabilities-249339

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Wolverhampton to mark VE/VJ Day 80 with city wide celebrations
Source: City of Wolverhampton

To enable people to get involved across the city, the council has waived its standard road closure fees and is inviting residents to celebrate this historic milestone in their own unique way between Bank Holiday Monday 5 May and Sunday 11 May, 2025.

This year’s celebrations honour the momentous announcement made by Prime Minister Winston Churchill at 3pm on 8 May, 1945, signalling the end of the Second World War in Europe after nearly 6 years of brutal conflict. 2025 will also mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day on 15 August, 1945, which signified the Allies’ defeat of Japan.

Residents are encouraged to find their own way to mark this occasion including:
- Community gatherings, by organising events in local parks, green spaces, or community buildings.
- Street parties, by applying for free road closures to host vibrant street parties.
- Neighbourhood celebrations, by connecting with neighbours in driveways, front gardens or shared parking areas.
To further support community led initiatives, the council has allocated grants of up to £250 per event, thanks to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Applications are now open at Stepway.

Councillor Obaida Ahmed, the council’s Cabinet Member for Digital and Community, said: “VE/VJ Day 80 is a powerful reminder of our shared history and the enduring spirit of community.

“We want to see Wolverhampton come alive with celebrations, from intimate neighbourhood gatherings to grand street parties.

“By waiving road closure fees and providing grant support, we’re making it easier than ever for residents to honour this significant anniversary together. Let’s create lasting memories and pay tribute to those who sacrificed so much.”

For more details of the celebrations, visit the VE/VJ Day 80 website.
MIL OSI United Kingdom –
April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI: Waton Financial Limited Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

HONG KONG, April 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Waton Financial Limited (“WTF” or the “Company”), a British Virgin Islands-incorporated holding company that provides of securities brokerage and financial technology services primarily through its Hong Kong subsidiaries, Waton Securities International Limited and Waton Technology International Limited, today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of an aggregate of 4,375,000 ordinary shares, no par value per share (the “Ordinary Shares”), at a public offering price of $4.00 per share (the “Offering”).

In addition, the Company has granted the underwriters of the Offering a 45-day option to purchase up to an additional 656,250 Ordinary Shares at the initial public offering price (the “Over-allotment”), less underwriting discounts and commissions. The gross proceeds to WTF from the Offering (assuming that the Over-allotment is not exercised), before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses payable by WTF, is expected to be approximately $17,500,000.

The Ordinary Shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker symbol “WTF” on April 1, 2025. The Offering is expected to close on April 2, 2025, subject to customary closing conditions.

The Offering is conducted on a firm commitment basis. CATHAY SECURITIES, INC. is acting as representative of the underwriters for the offering, with Dominari Securities LLC acting as co-underwriter (collectively, the “Underwriters”). Carey Olsen Singapore LLP, Han Kun Law Offices LLP and Hunter Taubman Fischer & Li LLC are acting as British Virgin Islands legal counsel, Hong Kong legal advisers and U.S. securities counsel, respectively, to the Company. Kaufman & Canoles, P.C. is acting as U.S. securities counsel to the Underwriters for the Offering.

The Offering is being conducted pursuant to the Company’s Registration Statement on Form F-1 (File No. 333-283424) previously filed with and subsequently declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) on March 31, 2025. The Offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus and other documents the Company has filed or will file with the SEC for more information about the Company and the Offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, electronic copies of the prospectus relating to the Offering may be obtained from CATHAY SECURITIES, INC. at 40 Wall Street, Suite 3600, New York, NY 10005, or by telephone at +1 (855) 939-3888.

This press release has been prepared for informational purposes only and shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, and no sale of these securities may be made in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Certain statements in this press release are “forward-looking statements” as defined under the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to, statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements that are other than statements of historical facts. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on the Company’s current expectations and projections about future events that the Company believes may affect its financial condition, results of operations, business strategy and financial needs, including the expectation that the Offering will be successfully completed. Investors can find many (but not all) of these statements by the use of words such as “believe”, “plan”, “expect”, “intend”, “should”, “seek”, “estimate”, “will”, “aim” and “anticipate”, or other similar expressions in this press release. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent occurring events or circumstances, or changes in its expectations, except as may be required by law. Although the Company believes that the expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, it cannot assure you that such expectations will turn out to be correct, and the Company cautions investors that actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results and encourages investors to review other factors that may affect its future results in the Company’s registration statement and other filings with the SEC.

About Waton Financial Limited (“Waton”)

Waton Financial Limited is a British Virgin Islands-incorporated holding company with operations primarily conducted through its wholly-owned subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Waton Securities International Limited and Waton Technology International Limited. Waton provides a suite of financial services, including securities brokerage, asset management, and software licensing and other support services, catering to a diverse clientele of retail and institutional investors. Waton leverages technology and a client-centric approach with the aim to deliver innovative and reliable financial solutions.

For further information, please contact:

Waton Financial Limited
Investor Relations Department
Email: ir@waton.com

The MIL Network –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Africa: How do coconuts get their water?

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Gaston Adoyo, Lecturer and researcher, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Coconut trees are iconic plants found across the world’s tropical regions. They’re called “nature’s supermarket” or the “tree of life” in several cultures because every part of the coconut tree is used. Its leaves can be used to thatch homes, its heart can be eaten and its roots have medicinal uses.

The refreshing liquid found within a young green coconut is a highly prized component of the coconut palm. Coconuts are unique in the world of fruits because they have a large internal cavity filled with water. Other fruits typically store water within individual cells or pulp.

I’m a food scientist who has carried out research on the properties of coconuts.

All coconut palms produce water, though some, like tall varieties, will produce more than others, like dwarf varieties. The water is sourced from the trees’ immature, green coconuts. As the coconut matures, the developing white flesh absorbs the water, resulting in less liquid in a fully ripe brown coconut.

So, how is this water reservoir created, and what factors influence it?

A coconut’s structure

To better understand how coconut water is formed, it is essential to grasp its anatomical structure. The coconut fruit is classified as a drupe, meaning it has three layers: the exocarp (the smooth, green outer layer seen in unripe coconuts), the mesocarp (a fibrous husk beneath the exocarp), and the endocarp (the hard, woody inner shell that protects the white flesh inside).

Kerina yin/Shutterstock

Within the endocarp, there are two components: the flesh (endosperm, a soft, jelly-like material in immature coconut that hardens as it matures) and the clear coconut water that fills the cavity. This water is a nutritive fluid nourishing the developing seed and is formed naturally during the development of the coconut fruit.

The water is a filtered sap that’s drawn up from the roots and transported through the tree’s vascular system (its water and nutrient transport system), specifically the xylem tissue.

The coconut tree’s extensive root system, ranging from 1 to 5 metres deep, absorbs groundwater – with dissolved nutrients – from the surrounding soil. The absorbed water is then transported upwards through the trunk and branches and finally to the fruit.

The fruit retains this water, stored in the cavity of the coconut. The accumulated water, with its rich nutrients, provides food to the developing endosperm (white flesh).

Therefore, coconut water is neither rainwater nor seawater stored inside, but carefully filtered and nutrient-rich clear liquid formed by the tree itself.

What is coconut water made of?

About 95% of coconut water is simply water, making it an excellent hydrating fluid.

The rest of the water is made up of various components, which are useful for us too.

Minerals (like sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium) nourish human nerves and muscles; proteins (amino acids and enzymes) can help in metabolism in both the tree and humans; sugars (fructose and glucose) are responsible for the light sweetness and there are trace amounts of vitamins (vitamin C and B vitamins).

Read more: Is coconut water good for you? We asked five experts

Coconut water levels

Many factors can influence the amount and quality of water in a coconut.

The age of the coconut is a critical determining factor. Immature, green coconuts (six to eight months) are usually full of water: between 300 millilitres and 1 litre. Mature coconuts (12 months and older) have low water levels as the liquid is partially absorbed by the endosperm.

High rainfall encourages greater accumulation of water, while drought conditions reduce the amount of water that can be transported to the fruit.

Healthy soils packed with minerals lead to high-quality and nutrient-rich coconut water. Poor or salty soils, lacking in minerals that can travel up the coconut tree to the fruit, will lead to low quality water.

Finally, unhealthy or diseased trees produce smaller-sized coconuts with little water.

Protecting coconuts

Coconut trees and coconut water are important to tropical economies across south-east Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean Sea territories, as well as the coastlines of central America and Africa.

Conserving the trees and their environment is therefore essential.

Sustainable farming practices, like soil management – including soil testing and organic composting – should be implemented to maintain the proper nutrient profile, which results in high-quality coconut water.

Read more: The end of coconut water? The world’s trendiest nut is under threat of species collapse

Additionally, protecting freshwater aquifers from saltwater intrusion along coastlines where coconuts grow is crucial for preserving the quality of this refreshing fluid. Drip irrigation and mulching can help maintain soil moisture for the required coconut water production.

Pest and disease management techniques (like intercropping coconuts with bananas or legumes), as well as integrated pest management, can contribute to healthy trees that produce large coconuts with ample water.

– How do coconuts get their water?
– https://theconversation.com/how-do-coconuts-get-their-water-252673

MIL OSI Africa –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Attorney General James Sues Trump Administration for Slashing Vital Health Funding

Source: US State of New York

EW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James and a coalition of 22 other states and the District of Columbia today filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for abruptly and unlawfully slashing billions of dollars in vital state health funding. On March 24, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced it was clawing back more than $11 billion in funding previously allocated to states for public health, mental health, and addiction initiatives – including nearly $400 million for New York. The attorneys general argue that these sudden and reckless cuts violate federal law, jeopardize public health, and will have devastating consequences for communities nationwide. Attorney General James and the coalition are asking the court to immediately stop the administration from rescinding the funding and prevent the breakdown of crucial health services.

“The Trump administration’s illegal and irresponsible decision to claw back life-saving health funding is an attack on the well-being of millions of Americans,” said Attorney General James. “Slashing this funding now will reverse our progress on the opioid crisis, throw our mental health systems into chaos, and leave hospitals struggling to care for patients. My office is taking immediate action to stop this heartless and shortsighted move and ensure these life-saving programs remain intact.”

In the lawsuit, Attorney General James and the coalition assert that if funding is not restored, key public health programs and initiatives across the country will have to be dissolved and disbanded, and thousands of health care workers will lose their jobs. The terminated funds, which were allocated by Congress at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, include $11.4 billion in funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for pandemic preparedness, overdose prevention, and community health programs, as well as $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for addiction treatment, suicide prevention, and crisis intervention programs.

The attorneys general warn that the revocation of this funding will cause immediate and irreparable damage in communities across the nation. Programs that provide harm reduction services, medication-assisted recovery treatment, and overdose reversal drugs are set to be slashed, just as the nation begins to turn a corner on fighting the opioid crisis and reducing overdose deaths. Funding for crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and community-based mental health care is at risk while the nation is currently facing an unprecedented mental health crisis. Financial support for hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities will be eliminated, exacerbating already devastating staffing shortages. Prevention programs that combat infectious disease outbreaks and future health emergencies are already being gutted.

In New York, more than $400 million in critical funding has been terminated, including over $300 million for the New York State Department of Health (DOH), Office of Mental Health (OMH), and Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS) and over $100 million for New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH)’s infectious disease detection and surveillance work. These cuts are already causing devastating, far-reaching consequences. At least 23 public health employees have already been laid off, and further layoffs are likely. More than 200 local organizations statewide have now lost funding for their efforts to address food insecurity, mental health, maternal health, and more. DOH has been forced to halt efforts to address health disparities and shutter programs focused on LGBTQ+ and immigrant health. Funding for school immunization programs has also been cut, which could have disastrous effects on child vaccination rates. Most importantly, New York state’s ability to manage infectious diseases, support vulnerable populations, and maintain critical health infrastructure is now in jeopardy, and there are long-term risks for public health preparedness and equity.

HHS has tried to suggest that terminating this funding is necessary because the “COVID-19 pandemic is over.” This contradicts both ongoing public health data and the terms of the grants in question. In the lawsuit, the attorneys general assert that many of the eliminated funds were never intended solely for COVID-19 response – they were allocated to support long-term public health infrastructure, future pandemic preparedness, and critical behavioral health services.

Attorney General James and the coalition argue the federal government does not have the legal authority to unilaterally rescind funding it already allocated, particularly when states have built essential health programs around these commitments. The attorneys general add that the terminated funds are attached to specific congressional allocations, and that by cutting these funds, the administration is undermining Congress’s constitutional power over federal spending. The lawsuit alleges the decision to terminate these funds was made abruptly, arbitrarily, and without any opportunity for public input.

In addition to preliminary and permanent injunctions, Attorney General James and the coalition are seeking a temporary restraining order to immediately halt the chaos and destruction the administration’s funding cuts are causing.

“These federal health cuts are not only dangerous, but they undermine public health and will broaden the health disparities we have been working hard to eliminate,” said DOH Commissioner Dr. James McDonald. “It is unprecedented and unacceptable to have funding terminated retroactively without warning or regard for the impact on this important public health work. I thank Attorney General James for taking immediate action, ensuring the health of New Yorkers remains a priority, and working to get these reckless actions during the federal transition reversed.”

“The removal of these grants will affect prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery services that many New Yorkers rely on, and which have saved thousands of lives throughout the state,” said OASAS Commissioner Dr. Chinazo Cunningham. “Amid the ongoing overdose crisis, it is critical that these services remain intact and available for those who need them. We fully support these efforts to ensure that this critical funding continues to go towards these vital addiction services in New York.”

“The loss of $27 million in federal funding will impact the mental health services and supports provided through our agency, including crisis stabilization and residence programs, Assertive Community Treatment teams and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline,” said OMH Commissioner Dr. Ann Sullivan. “We are pleased that New York State is challenging these cuts in in an effort to avoid the consequences of losing this critical federal assistance. We look forward to working with the Attorney General and Governor Hochul as they challenge these cuts and fight to preserve funding for these important programs.”

This is the latest action Attorney General James has taken to protect New Yorkers and the services they rely on from the Trump administration’s illegal attacks. On March 14, Attorney General James and a coalition secured a court order reinstating federal workers subject to mass firings at 18 agencies. On March 13, Attorney General James led a coalition of 20 attorneys general in suing the Trump administration to stop the dismantling of the Department of Education. On March 10, Attorney General James secured a court order blocking the Trump administration from cutting critical grant programs for teachers and on March 6, Attorney General James secured a court order blocking the Trump administration’s freeze of essential federal funds to states. On March 5, Attorney General James and a coalition of attorneys general won a court order stopping the Trump administration from withholding vital funding to the National Institutes of Health. On February 24, Attorney General James led a coalition of attorneys general in securing a court order preventing Elon Musk and members of DOGE from accessing Americans’ private information through the U.S. Treasury and on February 13, Attorney General James and a coalition of attorneys general secured a preliminary injunction stopping the administration’s illegal revocation of birthright citizenship.

Joining Attorney General James in this lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, as well as the Governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

MIL OSI USA News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: How do coconuts get their water?

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Gaston Adoyo, Lecturer and researcher, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Coconut trees are iconic plants found across the world’s tropical regions. They’re called “nature’s supermarket” or the “tree of life” in several cultures because every part of the coconut tree is used. Its leaves can be used to thatch homes, its heart can be eaten and its roots have medicinal uses.

The refreshing liquid found within a young green coconut is a highly prized component of the coconut palm. Coconuts are unique in the world of fruits because they have a large internal cavity filled with water. Other fruits typically store water within individual cells or pulp.

I’m a food scientist who has carried out research on the properties of coconuts.

All coconut palms produce water, though some, like tall varieties, will produce more than others, like dwarf varieties. The water is sourced from the trees’ immature, green coconuts. As the coconut matures, the developing white flesh absorbs the water, resulting in less liquid in a fully ripe brown coconut.

So, how is this water reservoir created, and what factors influence it?

A coconut’s structure

To better understand how coconut water is formed, it is essential to grasp its anatomical structure. The coconut fruit is classified as a drupe, meaning it has three layers: the exocarp (the smooth, green outer layer seen in unripe coconuts), the mesocarp (a fibrous husk beneath the exocarp), and the endocarp (the hard, woody inner shell that protects the white flesh inside).

Within the endocarp, there are two components: the flesh (endosperm, a soft, jelly-like material in immature coconut that hardens as it matures) and the clear coconut water that fills the cavity. This water is a nutritive fluid nourishing the developing seed and is formed naturally during the development of the coconut fruit.

The water is a filtered sap that’s drawn up from the roots and transported through the tree’s vascular system (its water and nutrient transport system), specifically the xylem tissue.

The coconut tree’s extensive root system, ranging from 1 to 5 metres deep, absorbs groundwater – with dissolved nutrients – from the surrounding soil. The absorbed water is then transported upwards through the trunk and branches and finally to the fruit.

The fruit retains this water, stored in the cavity of the coconut. The accumulated water, with its rich nutrients, provides food to the developing endosperm (white flesh).

Therefore, coconut water is neither rainwater nor seawater stored inside, but carefully filtered and nutrient-rich clear liquid formed by the tree itself.

What is coconut water made of?

About 95% of coconut water is simply water, making it an excellent hydrating fluid.

The rest of the water is made up of various components, which are useful for us too.

Minerals (like sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium) nourish human nerves and muscles; proteins (amino acids and enzymes) can help in metabolism in both the tree and humans; sugars (fructose and glucose) are responsible for the light sweetness and there are trace amounts of vitamins (vitamin C and B vitamins).

Read more:
Is coconut water good for you? We asked five experts

Coconut water levels

Many factors can influence the amount and quality of water in a coconut.

The age of the coconut is a critical determining factor. Immature, green coconuts (six to eight months) are usually full of water: between 300 millilitres and 1 litre. Mature coconuts (12 months and older) have low water levels as the liquid is partially absorbed by the endosperm.

High rainfall encourages greater accumulation of water, while drought conditions reduce the amount of water that can be transported to the fruit.

Healthy soils packed with minerals lead to high-quality and nutrient-rich coconut water. Poor or salty soils, lacking in minerals that can travel up the coconut tree to the fruit, will lead to low quality water.

Finally, unhealthy or diseased trees produce smaller-sized coconuts with little water.

Protecting coconuts

Coconut trees and coconut water are important to tropical economies across south-east Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean Sea territories, as well as the coastlines of central America and Africa.

Conserving the trees and their environment is therefore essential.

Sustainable farming practices, like soil management – including soil testing and organic composting – should be implemented to maintain the proper nutrient profile, which results in high-quality coconut water.

Read more:
The end of coconut water? The world’s trendiest nut is under threat of species collapse

Additionally, protecting freshwater aquifers from saltwater intrusion along coastlines where coconuts grow is crucial for preserving the quality of this refreshing fluid. Drip irrigation and mulching can help maintain soil moisture for the required coconut water production.

Pest and disease management techniques (like intercropping coconuts with bananas or legumes), as well as integrated pest management, can contribute to healthy trees that produce large coconuts with ample water.

Gaston Adoyo 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.

– ref. How do coconuts get their water? – https://theconversation.com/how-do-coconuts-get-their-water-252673

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI China: Freight services launched at border ports between China, Vietnam

Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News

Freight services launched at border ports between China, Vietnam

Updated: April 1, 2025 21:53 Xinhua

The Tianpeng (China) port and Sam Pun (Vietnam) port began handling freight transportation on Monday, marking a leap of the ports’ function in both personnel exchange and freight transportation.

MIL OSI China News –

April 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Canada: Attorney general’s statement on Sikh Heritage Month

Niki Sharma, Attorney General, has released the following statement in celebration of Sikh Heritage Month:

“April marks Sikh Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the rich history of Sikhism.

“The values of Sikhism echo perfectly those that Canadians and British Columbians hold dear, from the belief that all people are created equal to understanding the importance of serving one’s community. These are the beliefs that the first Sikh migrants to B.C. in the early 1900s brought with them, and they are what have defined the contributions that Sikhs have made to this province.

“Today, nearly 300,000 Sikhs call British Columbia home, making it one of the largest Sikh populations outside of Punjab, India. Even in the face of exclusionary policies and systemic racism, Sikhs have shown resilience and have built thriving communities. They are staunch advocates for justice, compassion and inclusivity, especially in times of crisis. From health care and agriculture to business and politics, today, Sikhs are leaders in all areas of our society.

“The challenges faced by Sikhs in B.C. have changed over the years. Some of the most pressing concerns right now are anti-immigration sentiment, negative stereotyping associated with religious symbols and systemic barriers to accessing services. Our government is committed to fighting back, through investment in community-led initiatives and implementing legislation like the Anti-Racism Act.

“The best way we can eradicate hate and bigotry is by learning about each other’s cultures, highlighting our similarities and celebrating our differences. This Sikh Heritage Month, I encourage all British Columbians to explore the festivities in your communities and learn about Sikh culture and traditions.

“Happy Sikh Heritage Month!”

MIL OSI Canada News –

April 2, 2025