A recent ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) report emphasised that to contribute in tackling climate change, ASEAN countries don’t need to immediately phase out all of their coal fleet.
The report asserted that coal will continue to be an essential part of the energy transition. It also stated that by allowing ASEAN countries more time to improve electricity grids to accommodate more renewables could help smooth the transition to cleaner energy. Put the two together, and it strongly hinted that coal might be squeezed in to buy said time.
In order to reduce damage from coal, ACE urged ASEAN member states to use clean coal technologies in coal-fired power plants. It also recommended to use carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) to replace “old, inefficient, and unabatable coal plants”.
Interestingly, this is also a view promoted by the World Coal Association — now Future Coal – the international coal lobbying group.
At first glance, this plan seems promising. However, relying heavily on technology oversimplifies potential risks and assumes full delivery of promises without thorough risk assessments. In this article, we provide evidence that ACE’s chosen pathway is not as good as it seems and could face significant problems in the future.
False solution
The first “clean coal technology” proposed by ACE – termed “high efficiency, low emissions (HELE)” – is mostly supercritical coal power plant. This means it uses less coal while producing more energy. This is why they’re claimed to be more environmentally friendly than sub-critical or “regular” coal power plants.
But using supercritical technology doesn’t guarantee the emission problem is solved; it has varying degrees of success in reducing coal emissions.
For example, a 2019 Australian paper found supercritical coal power plants underperformed against regular power plants with higher breakdown rates, leading to frequent electricity price spikes during 2018-2019. This was a decade after the technology was first launched in 2007.
Failing to deliver steady electricity supplies would contradict ACE’s stated goal to prevent energy shortage and provide smoother transitions towards renewable energy.
Risks of carbon capture
Another technology that ACE advocates is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which captures carbon emissions from power plants and stores them underground.
However, CCS appears to replicate past project failures. Opponents of CCS often suggest its success rate is relatively small.
The industry claims the technology can capture 95% carbon from each project. Yet, the 2023 reports from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that no current project has consistently managed to capture more than 80% of carbon emissions. Some of them only succeeded in capturing 15% of carbon emissions.
Leakage from captured carbon underground is the other risk we might bear. This will have tremendous consequences not only by netting off the so-called mitigated emissions but also by contaminating groundwater and risking communities nearby.
According to carbon capture proponents, when done properly, the risk of leakage is minuscule. Even when it occurs, they claim it will not be catastrophic.
Some other evidence suggests that CCS is not economically viable. One of the strongest arguments against CCS is probably the diminishing returns. As one of the leading experts in carbon capture claims:
The closer a CCS system gets to 100% efficiency, the harder and more expensive it becomes to capture additional carbon dioxide.
More importantly, chasing increasingly expensive CCS technology merely prolongs the life of coal-fired power plants, which pose significant environmental risks. The same money and effort could be used to build more renewable energy infrastructure such as wind turbines or solar panels.
In addition to its potential high costs, captured carbon must be sold in the market – for various uses ranging for oil extraction to food preservation – to increase its economic viability.
The conversion will also result in approximately 25-35% of energy losses. Although there have been more research on how to improve the efficiency of the process, CO₂ utilisation has yet to be scalable.
Why the half measure?
ACE must be wary of its reliance on technological solutions. Instead, the centre should consider a double-down on less-risky and less-capital-intensive solutions with many positive impacts, such as setting up community-based renewable energy, aggressive reforestation, or even better, significant halt of deforestation.
Community-based renewable energy offers to help people in energy-poor areas to build their own energy sources. Moreover, people living in close geographical proximity can share costs and resources to install and maintain off grid renewables, encouraging more widespread adoption of cleaner energy sources with minimum problem of land use.
ACE can also reconsider replacing the “old, inefficient, and unabatable coal plants” with renewables, such as solar and wind, especially those for non-industrial electricity facilities. Those electricity generation costs have been falling rapidly for years.
As most of the ASEAN member states are developing countries, they must carefully select the most suitable technologies to adopt. With limited fiscal capacity, rashly importing an advanced technology that will require substantial startup costs potentially becomes a costly effort, yielding limited benefits.
It is puzzling why we should replace our old coal plants with new ones. It is like when we are replacing our old mobile phone with a slightly better mobile phone – instead of jumping straight to a smartphone. Why the half-measure?
Para penulis tidak bekerja, menjadi konsultan, memiliki saham atau menerima dana dari perusahaan atau organisasi mana pun yang akan mengambil untung dari artikel ini, dan telah mengungkapkan bahwa ia tidak memiliki afiliasi di luar afiliasi akademis yang telah disebut di atas.
The reef manta ray (Mobula alfredi) is a tough swimmer. They can travel hundreds of kilometres to feed themselves. The longest recorded movement for an individual reef manta ray was 1,150km, observed in eastern Australia.
But even though they are able to swim long distances, our study on reef manta rays in Raja Ampat, Southwest Papua, discovered they are more likely to swim short distances. They appear to prefer staying close to their local habitats, strengthening their social bonds and forming distinct populations.
Our research – involving researchers from Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia and published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in April – increases our understanding of this globally vulnerable species.
Policymakers can use our findings to enhance conservation efforts for the species in Raja Ampat waters, which currently are facing challenges due to fishing and tourism.
Why don’t reef manta rays roam far?
Our study found reef manta rays occupy three distinct habitats within Raja Ampat. As of February 2024, we recorded 1,250 individual manta rays around Waigeo Island’s extensive coral reef ecosystem in the northwest of Raja Ampat; 640 manta rays around the coral reef ecosystem in the southeast of Misool, southern Raja Ampat; and no more than 50 manta rays in the Ayau atoll ecosystem up north.
Within their own habitat, the manta rays tend to move around from one area to another, sticking to relatively short distances within 12 kilometres. They only occasionally make longer trips to similar areas in other habitats across Raja Ampat.
We believe there are a few reasons why reef manta rays in Raja Ampat do not often venture far. The first reason is the presence of natural barriers, such as deep waters – over 1,000 metres below sea level – between Ayau Atoll and Waigeo Island, as well as the sea between Misool and Kofiau, which is 800-900 metres deep.
Travelling through deep waters poses increased risks to reef manta rays due to potential encounters with natural predators, such as killer whales (Orcinus orca) and large sharks, which frequently inhabit deep open water.
The second reason is that each habitat is well-equipped with sufficient resources, such as food and cleaning stations, reducing the need for the reef manta rays to travel extensively.
The habits of reef manta rays in Raja Ampat are gradually forming a unique population.
We have found that they do not form a single large population, but instead split into three local populations, creating a metapopulation. A metapopulation consists of several local populations of the same species, each occupying its own habitat but all situated within the same geographic region.
Think of a metapopulation as a small town, consisting of three hamlets. When each hamlet has enough food and water, the people prefer to stay in their own settlement. But they still live in the same town and occasionally visit each other.
We found this movement pattern based on our tracking process from 2016 to 2021 using acoustic telemetry, which functions similarly to office check-in systems.
In the tracking process, we combined this acoustic tracking with network analysis to map out the movement network of the manta rays, consisting of nodes and links. Nodes represent important areas for the manta rays, like cleaning stations and feeding areas, and links represent the movement between these key areas.
The metapopulation occurs because individual manta rays migrate between local populations. Based on our observation, the migrating manta rays usually head back to their original area — it is often seasonal – while those that spread out generally do not return.
This movement pattern means there is less mixing of individuals between local populations compared to within a single local population.
But increased human activities such as fishing and tourism in eastern Indonesia still pose challenges. While manta rays are not directly caught or hunted, they often get entangled in fishing lines and nets, which may cause harm and sometimes death.
Additionally, with the increasing popularity of Raja Ampat as a top tourism destination, overcrowding and aggressive behavior by divers and snorkelers in Raja Ampat disrupt manta ray cleaning and feeding, which may affect their health and fitness.
Conservation strategies for reef manta rays require a more precise and targeted approach to effectively address these growing challenges.
The recognition of these rays as a metapopulation comprising three distinct local populations can inform a strategy shift in conservation management.
Recently, we have presented our research findings and recommendations to the authorities responsible for managing the Raja Ampat Marine Protected Area (MPA) network.
We recommend the MPA management authority in Raja Ampat create and implement three separate management units, each tailored to the specific needs of one of the local manta ray populations.
Separate units are necessary because each habitat has different demographics and is far apart, making it difficult to manage them as a single unit. This strategy is feasible because local rangers in each habitat already conduct regular patrols and monitoring.
We also see the urgent need to protect a critical area for various activities of reef manta rays in Raja Ampat called Eagle Rock, which is currently outside existing protected zones. Located in west of Waigeo, Eagle Rock could be effectively safeguarded by expanding the Raja Ampat MPA network to encompass this area.
Protecting Eagle Rock is crucial, not only because it serves as a vital migration corridor connecting significant areas and habitats within the South East Misool MPA, Dampier Strait MPA, Raja Ampat MPA, and West Waigeo MPA, but also due to the increased threat from nickel mining activities on Kawe Island.
MPAs prohibit industrial fishing, restrict tourism and all unsustainable activities — including mining — to minimise environmental impact.
Besides mapping out the movement patterns and networks of key areas and habitats of reef manta rays in Raja Ampat, our research lays the groundwork for future studies, including genetic analysis and satellite tracking.
These advanced techniques can offer deeper insights into the population structure, home range, and distribution of reef manta rays in the region, helping to enhance management and conservation strategies.
Edy Setyawan has received funding from the Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) New Zealand, and the WWF Russell E. Train Education for Nature Program (EFN), United States.
Source: The Conversation – Indonesia – By Andini Pramono, Research officer, Department of Health Economics, Wellbeing and Society, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University
Research shows that six months of exclusive breastfeeding, and continuing until two years old or beyond, provide multiple benefits for the baby and mother.
According to the WHO, less than half of babies under six months old worldwide are exclusively breastfed.
In Indonesia, research shows 83% of mothers initiate breastfeeding, but only 57% are still breastfeeding at around six months. In Australia, 96% of mothers start breastfeeding, but then there is a rapid fall to only 39% by around three months and only 15% by around five months.
Among the key reasons for low rates of exclusive breastfeeding are the difficult work conditions women face when they return to paid work.
So how can governments and workplaces – especially in countries that have yet to do enough, like Indonesia and Australia – better support breastfeeding mothers, particularly at work?
In some countries, protections are aligned with the ILO Conventions. For example, in Denmark and Norway, the governments offer maternity leave of at least 14 weeks. During leave, mothers’ earnings are protected at a rate of at least two-thirds of their pre-birth earnings. Public funds ensure this is done in a manner determined by national law and practice, so the employer is not solely responsible for the payment.
A Canadian study highlights the proportion of mothers exclusively breastfeeding to six months increased by almost 40% when paid maternity leave was expanded from six to 12 months. At the same time, average breastfeeding duration increased by one month, from five to six months.
For example, welfare reforms in the US encouraging new mothers’ return to work within 12 weeks led to a 16–18% reduction in breastfeeding initiation. It also saw a four to six week reduction in the time babies were breastfed.
Indonesia and Australia aren’t doing enough
Neither Indonesia or Australia are currently doing enough to meet the ILO’s maternity protection standards.
In Indonesia, the 2003 Labour Law urges companies to give 12 weeks of paid maternity leave for women workers to support breastfeeding. Furthermore, the 2012 regulation on exclusive breastfeeding obligates workplace and public space management to provide a space or facility to breastfeed and express breast milk. However, the monitoring of its implementation is weak.
In Australia, paid parental leave (PPL) policy supports parents who take time off from paid work to care for their young children.
Eligible working mothers or primary carers are entitled to up to 20 weeks (or 22 weeks if the child is born or adopted from 1 July 2024) of government paid parental leave within the first two years of the birth or adoption of a child.
Some mothers can combine the government payment with additional paid leave from their employer. However in 2022-2023, only 63% of Australian employers offered this, leaving nearly half of new mothers with only minimum financial support.
Unlike Indonesia, Australia has no legal requirement for employers to offer paid breastfeeding breaks in their workplace, so mothers can express and take home their breastmilk. This can badly impact women’s and children’s health.
While Australia’s support for breastfeeding mothers is welcome, it’s still inadequate to meet the ILO’s international standard – particularly Australia’s low payment rate of government PPL (at the minimum wage, rather than two-thirds of previous earnings) and the lack of legislation for paid breastfeeding breaks.
How employers and colleagues can help
Globally, the barriers to maintain breastfeeding include not only lack of maternity leave duration and pay, but also unavailability of breastfeeding and breast pumping facilities at workplaces, sometimes unsupportive colleagues and supervisors, and lack of time at work to breastfeed or expressing breastmilk.
Breastfeeding a baby should not preclude women from earning a living. In 2022, female workers were 39.5% of total workers globally, while in Australia and Indonesia they made up 47.4% and 39.5% respectively.
An accessible facility or space for breastfeeding or breast pumping is vital to support breastfeeding working mothers.
In Indonesia, a 2013 Ministry of Health regulation outlines the procedure for an employer to provide a space and facility for mothers to breastfeed and breast pump.
The minimum specifications of this facility are described as a lockable, clean and quiet room, with a sink for washing, suitable temperature, lighting and flooring. While these specifications are technically mandatory, monitoring is weak, meaning if employers fail to meet the requirements there are no specific consequences.
But a breastfeeding space alone is not enough. In many jobs, mothers cannot leave their tasks during working hours, even if there is a lactation room.
Supportive employers need to regulate time and flexibility to breastfeed and express breastmilk, including providing flexible working arrangements and paid breastfeeding breaks during working hours. Supportive attitudes from co-workers and managers are also important.
Suitable staff training on breastfeeding and policies supporting mothers, such as providing time and facility to express breastmilk in work hours, are crucial. Training on how to support co-worker can include anything from basic information breastfeeding, to what to say (or not say) with a breastfeeding co-worker.
The program assesses workplaces for three aspects: time, space and supportive culture. This means, workplaces are encouraged to provide a special space and time for breastfeeding and breast pumping in a supportive culture and flexible working hours.
Mothers should consider to prepare how to align breastfeeding with work early – during pregnancy. Start by discussing your breastfeeding goals with healthcare professionals and finding a baby-friendly hospital.
Discuss your breastfeeding plan with your supervisor at work during your pregnancy, including finding out your maternity leave (paid and unpaid) entitlements. Also consider childcare arrangements that will work best for you with breastfeeding.
Julie P. Smith is a qualified breastfeeding counselor and honorary member of the Australian Breastfeeding Association.
Andini Pramono dan Liana Leach tidak bekerja, menjadi konsultan, memiliki saham, atau menerima dana dari perusahaan atau organisasi mana pun yang akan mengambil untung dari artikel ini, dan telah mengungkapkan bahwa ia tidak memiliki afiliasi selain yang telah disebut di atas.
Invermay man charged with firearms and drug offences
Saturday, 5 July 2025 – 10:13 am.
A man has been charged with multiple firearms and drug offences after police seized two illegal firearms, ammunition, a stolen vehicle and a quantity of drugs in a search in Bridgenorth. Police attended and searched an address in Bridgenorth on Thursday 3 July while investigating reports that two vehicles, a grey Mitsubishi Outlander and a red Mitsubishi Mirage, had been stolen from the residence. Subsequent investigations led to a person of interest being located and arrested a short time later. During the search and arrest police located a .22 rifle, a loaded pistol, ammunition, one of the stolen vehicles (Mitsubishi Outlander), and a quantity of illicit drugs. The 39-year-old Invermay man was arrested and has since been charged with multiple offences including breaches of bail, drug and firearm offences, and resisting arrest. He was detained to appear in court at a later date. Anyone with information about the outstanding stolen vehicle, a red Mitsubishi Mirage (registration D28SU), is urged to contact police on 131 444 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1800 333 000 or online at crimestopperstas.com.au. Please quote OR779172.
We all need to learn how to place trust in others. It’s easy to be misled. Someone who doesn’t deserve trust can appear a lot like someone who does – and part of growing up in a society is developing the ability to tell the difference.
An important part of this is learning about the signals people give about themselves. These might be a smile, a style of dressing or a way of speaking. In particular, we use accents to make decisions about others – especially in the UK.
But what if people adapt or change their accents to fit into a certain social group or geographical area? Our past research has shown that native speakers are pretty good at spotting such speech. We’ve now published a follow-up study that supports and further strengthens our original results.
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We associate accents with places, classes and groups. Research shows that even infants use accents to determine whether they think someone is considered trustworthy. This can be a problem – studies have demonstrated that accents can affect someone’s odds of getting a job – and potentially the likelihood of being found guilty of a crime.
As with most topics in the social sciences, evolutionary theory has a lot to say about this process. Scientists are interested in understanding how people send and receive signals like accents, how those signals affect relationships between people and how, in turn, those relationships affect us.
But because accents can affect how we treat each other, we’d expect some people to try to change them for personal gain. A social chameleon who can pretend to be a member of any social class or group is likely to win trust within each – assuming they are not caught.
If that’s true, though, then we’d expect people to also be good at detecting when someone is “faking” it – what we call mimicry – setting up a kind of arms race between those who want to deceive us into trusting them and those who try to catch deceivers out.
Over the last few years, we’ve looked into how well people detect accent mimicry. Last year we found that generally speaking, people in the UK and Ireland are strong at this, detecting mimicked accents in the UK and Ireland better than we’d expect by chance alone.
What was more interesting, though, was that native listeners from the specific places of the imitated accent – Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin – were a lot better at this task than were non-natives or native listeners from further away in the UK, like Essex.
Beyond the UK
Our new findings went further, though. Of the roughly 2,000 people that participated, more than 1,500 were this time based in English-speaking countries outside the UK, including the US, Canada and Australia. And on average, this group did a lot worse at detecting mimicked accents from seven different regions in the UK and Ireland than did people from the UK.
In fact, people from places other than the UK barely did better than we’d expect by chance, while people who were native listeners were right between about two-thirds and three-quarters of the time.
As we argued in our original article, we believe it’s local cultural tensions — tribalism, classism or even warfare — that explain the differences. For example, as someone commented to me some time ago, people living in Belfast in the 1970s and 80s – a time of huge political tension – needed to be attuned to the accents of those around them. Hearing something off, like an out-group member’s accent, could signal an imminent threat.
This wouldn’t have put the same pressures on people living in a more peaceful regions. In fact, we found that people living in large, multicultural and largely peaceful areas, such as London, didn’t need to pay much attention to the accents of those around them and were worse at detecting mimicked accents.
The further you move out from the native accent, too, the less likely a listener is to place emphasis on or notice anything wrong with a local accent. Someone living in the US is likely to pay even less attention to an imitation Belfast accent than is someone living in London, and accordingly will be worse at detecting mimicry. Likewise, someone growing up in Australia would be better at spotting a mimicked Australian accent than a Brit.
So while accents, and our ability to detect differences in accents, probably evolved to help us place trust more effectively at a broad level, it’s the cultural environment that shapes that process at the local level.
Together, this has the unfortunate effect that we sometimes place a lot more emphasis on accents than we should. How someone speaks should be a lot less important than what is said.
Still, accents drive how people treat each other at every level of society, just as other signals, be they tattoos, smiles or clothes, that tell us something about another person’s background or heritage.
Learning how these processes work and why they evolved is critical for overcoming them – and helping us to override the biases that so often prevent us from placing trust in people who deserve it.
Jonathan R. Goodman receives funding from the Wellcome Trust (grant no. 220540/Z/20/A).
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University
A remarkable documentary is providing insight into the propaganda found within Russian schools. Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein, premiered at the 2025 Sundance film festival in January, where it won the world cinema documentary special jury award.
The film was recorded over two years by Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, an events coordinator and videographer at a high school in Karabash, a heavily polluted town in central southern Russia. The documentary records the intensification of Kremlin-directed ultra-nationalist and pro-war propaganda within the Russian schooling system, which has intensified since the escalation of the war against Ukraine in February 2022.
Talankin makes clear his view that this approach to “education” represents a moral wrong, and he is very much on point with the writings of the key ethicists on the subject. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, wrote that “education is both a tool of propaganda in the hands of dominant groups, and a means of emancipation for subject classes”.
Niebuhr was writing about the education system in the US during the 1920s, when there was a widespread understanding that education was used in these two ways. Talankin’s concern is that Russia has moved to a position of imbalance, where the “dominant groups” have too much influence and are using their power to corrupt the minds of children through disingenuous narratives about national servitude, sacrifice and conformity, coupled with the unsubtle threat that those who are not patriots are “parasites”.
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In their highly respected book Propaganda & Persuasion (1986), propaganda experts Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell state that “to analyse propaganda, one needs to be able to identify it”. This is a difficult task because propaganda thrives through symbols, the subliminal and in fictional works precisely because the audience is not conscious of it.
However, the creation of an environment that uses propaganda is also dependent upon who is given the oxygen of publicity and who is marginalised. These are the conditions under which ideological indoctrination occurs and power is achieved or maintained.
As such, a critical analyst of propaganda must assess the linguistic strategy, the information strategy, the eminence strategy (how to ensure that the target audience are watching, reading or listening to the desired content) and the staging strategy of the communicator. This can be remembered through the helpful L.I.E.S. mnemonic.
The trailer for Mr. Nobody versus Putin.
Talankin’s footage shows how Russian schools now promote distorted versions of European history. The well-trodden narrative that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis is referred to several times in lessons. Russian flags appear with greater frequency around the school as time goes on, and assembly time becomes an exercise in pledging allegiance to the fatherland.
Teachers are expected to read from scripts prepared for them by the ministry of education. Pupils then respond with choreographed answers – some even glancing down at notes under their desks. The children are told about how dreadful life in France and the UK is because of their reliance on Russian fossil fuels.
Interestingly, the Kremlin has asked that all of this be videoed and uploaded to a central database to ensure compliance with national regulations on what is taught in schools. Indeed, Talankin complains at one point that much of his time is now spent uploading the videos rather than actually teaching the students and helping them to be creative – as his job previously was.
Shared humanity
Talankin takes us on a tour of his city. He shows a pro-war rally that is broadly supported by the townsfolk. Or at least those in opposition dare not say anything or engage in an equivalent demonstration. He takes us to the civic library, theoretically a site of independent learning but which has been hijacked by these propaganda efforts.
Perhaps the most important moments of the documentary though are the snippets of critique and the sense of “knowing” that Talankin is keen to show. The young girl who jokingly tells her teacher to “blink twice if you’re lying”, and to which all her class then laugh. His interactions with other teachers who confide in him that they know that the propaganda is bullshit, but, worried for their status and prosperity, go along with it.
The propaganda is pretty poor though. It is clunky and obvious, and, while it might generate some short-term influence, it smacks of both arrogance and desperation on the part of the Kremlin. Indeed, it shows that there is no desire on the part of central government for Russian people to thrive intellectually.
This scenario is reminiscent of the end of the Soviet era, when communist propaganda continued to prevail, but few still believed it. Nevertheless, without a clear alternative to follow, or obvious alternative leader to guide them, most people continued to abide.
The most harrowing part of the documentary comes towards the end when Talankin provides an audio recording of the funeral of a local lad who has been killed in Ukraine. He did not dare film the funeral as this is a cultural faux pas, but the screams and wails of the mother as her son is laid to rest are piercing. The scene seems intended to bring our shared humanity to bare.
Talankin is a nice guy with intelligence and ethical fortitude. The kids are funny, charming and talented. The mother is doing what we would all do if we had lost a child to a violent death. As such, Mr. Nobody Against Putin might better be called Mr. Everybody Against Putin, as it should be of grave concern to everyone that Russia’s education system is resorting to such techniques.
Colin Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The UK has historically been held up as leading democracy with free and fair elections. However, our new report shows election quality in the UK is now ranked in the bottom half of countries in Europe.
The Global Electoral Integrity Report provides scores for election quality around the world. It defines electoral integrity as the extent to which elections empower citizens.
Iceland received the highest score for an election that took place in 2024, the “year of elections” during which 1.6 billion people went to the polls, according to Time Magazine. This was an unprecedented concentration of democratic activity in a single year. Iceland has a successful system of automatic voter registration and an electoral system that is judged to be fair to smaller parties.
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Countries that scored highly based on their most recent election include Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Finland and Lithuania. Those at the opposite end of the scale include Syria, Belarus, Egypt, and Nicaragua. The UK is ranked 24th out of 39 countries in Europe. It is below Estonia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg and Slovakia. It is ranked 53rd out of 170 countries overall.
The US also saw a decline. The beacons for electoral democracy are therefore now found in mainland Europe (most notably Scandinavia), Australasia, South America and the southern parts of Africa – rather than the UK and US. The centre of global democratic authority has shifted away from Westminster.
There remain many areas of strength in UK elections. UK electoral officials show professionalism and independence and there is no concern about the integrity of the vote counting process. There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.
A major weakness is in the fairness of the electoral rules for small parties. The electoral system generated a very disproportional result in 2024. Labour took nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament, a total of 412, with less than 10 million votes (only 34% of votes cast). Labour won a massive majority in terms of parliamentary arithmetic but the the government did not enter office with widespread support.
By contrast, Reform and the Greens received 6 million votes between them, but only nine MPs. The electoral system may have worked when Britain had a two-party system – but the two-party system no longer holds. Today’s Britain is more diverse, and political support is more distributed.
The UK also scores poorly on voter registration. It is estimated that there are around 7 million to 8 million people not correctly registered or missing from the registers entirely. This is not many less than the 9.7 million people whose votes gave the government a landslide majority. The UK does not have a system of automatic voter registration, which is present in global leaders such as Iceland, where everyone is enrolled without a hiccup.
Another problem is participation. Turnout in July 2024 was low – with only half of adults voting. Voting has been made more difficult as the Elections Act of 2022 introduced compulsory photographic identification for the first time at the general election. This was thought to have made it more difficult for many citizens to vote because the UK does not have a national identity card which all citizens hold.
Meanwhile, there are further swirling headwinds. The spread of disinformation by overseas actors in elections has become a prominent challenge around the world and there was evidence of disinformation in this campaign too. Violence during the electoral period was thought to have been removed from British elections in Victorian times. But more than half candidates experience abuse and intimidation during the electoral period.
Action needed
One year into its time in office, the government is yet to act on this issue. The word “democracy” was missing from the prime minister’s strategic defence review, despite the emphasis on protecting the UK from Russia, a country known for electoral interference and other forms of attack on democracies.
This was a sharp contrast to the former government’s 2021 review, which emphasised that a “world in which democratic societies flourish and fundamental human rights are protected is one that is more conducive to our sovereignty, security and prosperity as a nation”.
In its election manifesto, Labour promised to “address the inconsistencies in voter ID rules”, “improve voter registration” and give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all elections. There needs to be firm action on electoral system change, automatic voter registration, campaign finance reform, voter identification changes and other areas.
There are a complex set of challenges facing democracy and elections. New technological challenges, change in attitudes, international hostility and new emergencies are combining to batter the door of democracy down.
International organisations are increasingly stressing that political leaders need to work together and take proactive action to protect elections against autocratic forces. This means not only supporting democracy in their messages on the world stage – but also introducing reforms to create beacons of democracy in their own countries.
Toby James has previously received funding from the AHRC, ESRC, Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Electoral Commission, Nuffield Foundation, the McDougall Trust and Unlock Democracy. His current research is funded by the Canadian SSHRC.
Holly Ann Garnett receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Defence Academy Research Programme. She has previously received funding from: the British Academy, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the NATO Public Diplomacy Division, the American Political Science Association Centennial Centre, and the Conference of Defence Associations.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History, Newcastle University
Each is the main political subject in their country, and one is the main political subject in the world. Each rode the populist wave in 2016, campaigning for the other. In 2024 the tandem surfers remounted on to an even greater breaker. Yet, though nothing has happened to suggest that bromance is dead, neither Donald Trump nor Nigel Farage publicly now speak of the other.
Trump’s presidential campaign shared personnel with Leave.eu, the unofficial Brexit campaign. Farage was on the stump with Trump, and his “bad boys of Brexit” made their pilgrimage to Trump Tower after its owner’s own triumph in the US election. Each exulted in the other’s success, and what it portended.
Trump duly proposed giving the UK ambassadorship to the United States to Farage. Instead, Farage became not merely MP for Clacton, but leader of the first insurgent party to potentially reset Britain’s electoral calculus since Labour broke through in 1922.
Then, Labour’s challenge was to replace the Liberals as the alternative party of government. It took two years. Reform UK could replace the Conservatives in four.
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Trump, meanwhile, has achieved what in Britain has either been thwarted (Militant and the Labour party in the 1980s) or has at most had temporary, aberrant, success (Momentum and the Labour party in the 2010s): the takeover of a party from within. Farage has been doing so – hitherto – from without.
At one of those historic forks in a road where change is a matter of chance, after Brexit finally took place, Farage considered his own personal leave – to go and break America.
The path had been trodden by Trump-friendly high-profile provocateurs before him: Steve Hilton, from David Cameron’s Downing Street, via cable news, now standing to be governor of California; Piers Morgan, off to CNN to replace the doyen of cable news Larry King, only to crash, but then to burn on, online. Liz Truss, never knowingly understated, has found her safe space – the rightwing speaking circuit.
But Farage remained stateside. He knew his domestic platform was primed more fully to exploit the voter distrust that his nationalist crusade had done so much to provoke.
The Trump effect
Genuine peacetime transatlantic affiliations are rare, usually confined to the leaders of established parties: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. One consequence of the 2016 political shift is that the US Republicans and the British Conservatives, the latter still at least partially tethered to traditional politics, have become distanced.
During the first Trump administration, and even in the build up to the second, it was Farage who was seen as the UK’s bridge to the president. But today, at the peak of their influence, for Farage association can only be by inference, friendship with the US president is not – put mildly – of political advantage. For UK voters, Trump is the 19th most popular foreign politician, in between the King of Denmark and Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is, moreover, the “Trump effect”. Measuring this is crude – circumstances differ – but the trend is that elections may be won by openly criticising, rather than associating with, Trump. This was the case for Mark Carney in Canada, Anthony Albanese in Australia, and Nicușor Dan in Romania.
Trump’s second state visit to the UK will certainly be less awkward for Farage than it will be Starmer, the man who willed it. Farage will likely not – and has no reason to – be seen welcoming so divisive a figure.
Starmer has no choice but to, and to do so ostentatiously. It is typical of Starmer’s perfect storm of an administration that he will, in the process, do nothing to appeal to the sliver of British voters partial to Trump while further shredding his reputation with Labour voters. Farage would be well served in taking one of his tactical European sojourns for the duration. Starmer may be tempted too.
Outmanoeuvring the establishment
Reflecting the historic cultural differences of their countries, Trump’s prescription is less state, Farage’s is more. The Farage of 2025 that is. He had been robustly Thatcherite, but has lately embraced socialist interventionism, albeit through a most Thatcherite analysis: “the gap in the market was enormous”.
Reform UK now appears to stand for what Labour – in the mind of many of its voters – ought to. Eyeing the opportunity of smokestack grievances, Farage called for state control of steel production even as Trump was considering quite how high a tariff to put on it. Nationalisation and economic nationalism: associated restoratives for national malaise.
Aggressively heteronormative, Trump and Farage dabble in the natalism burgeoning in both countries – as much a cultural as an economic imperative. Each has mastered – and much more than their adversaries – social media. Each has come to recognise the demerits in publicly appeasing Putin.
And Reform’s rise in a hitherto Farage-resistant Scotland can only endear him further to a president whose Hebridean mother was thought of (in desperation) as potentially his Rosebud by British officials preparing for his first administration.
Given their rhetorical selectivity, Trump and Farage’s rolling pitches are almost unanswerable for convention-confined political opponents and reporters. These two anti-elite elitists continue to confound.
Unprecedentedly, for a former president, Trump ran against the incumbent; Farage will continue to exploit anti-incumbency, despite his party now being in office. Most elementally, the pair are bound for life by their very public near-death experiences. Theirs is, by any conceivable measure, an uncommon association.
Farage’s fleetness of foot would be apparent even without comparison with the leaden steps of the leaders of the legacy parties. His is a genius of opportunism. That’s why he knows not to remind us of his confrere across the water.
Martin Farr 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.
As war continues to rage in Gaza and Ukraine, there is concern about how the related trauma might be transmitted to future generations of people in those regions.
More generally, interest in the idea of transgenerational trauma has recently surged. For example, earlier this year, National Geographic magazine asked whether genes carry past family trauma.
But while this might be a catchy question, it’s also slightly misleading. Because while trauma can ripple across generations, shaped by how our bodies respond to their environments, its effects aren’t hard-coded in our genes.
Plastic minds and bodies
At the heart of this process is what’s known as phenotypic plasticity.
This is the capacity for organisms to produce different outcomes from the same genes, depending on their environment. These outcomes, called phenotypes, can include stress sensitivity and body shape.
One way different phenotypes can arise from the same genes is via epigenetics: small chemical changes to the DNA molecule that make particular genes more or less active. Think of these like a director’s notes on a script. These notes guide the cell on which lines to emphasise or soften, without changing the script itself.
But epigenetics is just one way this plasticity is expressed.
Understanding how trauma is passed across generations means looking beyond genes and cells to the environments that shape and influence them.
Human development is sculpted by lived experience, from caregiving and community to stress, safety and belonging.
These factors interact to produce lasting – but not always fixed – effects. By focusing on how they interact, rather than on single causes, we can better understand why trauma echoes across generations. This also helps us identify how that cycle might be disrupted.
Widespread in nature
Phenotypic plasticity is widespread in nature.
In honeybees, genetically identical larvae become queens or workers depending on what they eat while developing. In three-spined stickleback fish, early exposure to predators reshapes their stress physiology and body shape, making them harder for predators to grasp.
These aren’t genetic differences – they’re environmental effects on development.
In humans, early-life conditions similarly shape development. A child raised in an unsafe setting may develop heightened vigilance or stress sensitivity – traits that help in danger but can persist as anxiety or chronic stress in times of safety. This is known as environmental mismatch.
Across generations, plasticity becomes more complicated. In some of my past research, I studied how diet in one generation of fruit flies shaped health, reproduction and longevity in their offspring and grand offspring.
The results varied depending on diet, generation and trait. Traits that appeared to be useful in one generation weren’t always so in the next. This highlights how difficult transgenerational effects are to predict – precisely because of this plasticity.
In three-spined stickleback fish, early exposure to predators reshapes their stress physiology and body shape. drakiragavon/iNaturalist, CC BY-ND
Too narrow an explanation
Epigenetics often reflect environmental exposures – such as stress, trauma, nutrition or caregiving. But they’re not necessarily permanent “scars”. Many are dynamic and can shift with changing environments – especially early in life.
Studies show that epigenetic patterns linked to early childhood adversity vary depending on later environments such as family stability and social support. This suggests the biological imprint of early stress is shaped by what happens next.
It’s tempting to treat epigenetics as the key to explaining inherited trauma – but that’s too narrow. Trauma can influence the next generation through altered hormones, immune function or in utero conditions – all of which shape brain development and stress reactivity.
Genetic variation also plays a major role. It doesn’t encode trauma itself, but it shapes traits such as sensitivity to threat or emotional regulation. These traits aren’t chosen – they arise from a web of biological and social influences beyond our control.
But how they unfold, and whether they’re amplified or softened, depends on the systems that surround us.
Connection to culture
Connection to culture plays an important role too.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori-led initiatives that centre land, language and whakapapa (ancestral lineage) have shown promise in restoring wellbeing after generations of colonisation-related trauma.
For Holocaust survivors and descendants, connection to cultural identity through ritual and shared narrative can reduce the psychological burden of transmitted trauma.
But not all trauma is collective or institutional. Interventions such as trauma-informed parenting and early relational therapies have been shown to improve outcomes in the next generation.
These psychological supports affect biology. Feeling safe in our relationships, having stable routines and a sense of meaning can reduce stress hormones, modulate immune function, and buffer against long-term disease risk.
In this way, culture, caregiving and connection are all biological interventions. When they soften the effects of earlier stress, they may help interrupt its transmission.
Trauma-informed parenting has been shown to improve outcomes in the next generation. fizkes/Shutterstock
Reframing inherited vulnerability
This matters, because it changes how we understand inherited vulnerability.
Rather than a permanent wound passed down through DNA, the effects of trauma are better understood as changeable responses shaped by context.
Thanks to plasticity, our biology is always in conversation with the environment – and when we change the context, we can change the outcome.
Tara-Lyn Camilleri receives funding from from Australian Graduate Women, a not-for-profit organisation that advocates for education and supports women in postgraduate education with scholarships. Her research has also been supported by Australian Research Council grants and Royal Society funding. She is a volunteer committee member for Graduate Women Victoria.
Some 252 million years ago, almost all life on Earth disappeared.
Known as the Permian–Triassic mass extinction – or the Great Dying – this was the most catastrophic of the five mass extinction events recognised in the past 539 million years of our planet’s history.
Up to 94% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate families were wiped out. Tropical forests – which served, as they do today, as important carbon sinks that helped regulate the planet’s temperature – also experienced massive declines.
Scientists have long agreed this event was triggered by a sudden surge in greenhouse gases which resulted in an intense and rapid warming of Earth. But what has remained a mystery is why these extremely hot conditions persisted for millions of years.
Our new paper, published today in Nature Communications, provides an answer. The decline of tropical forests locked Earth in a hothouse state, confirming scientists’ suspicion that when our planet’s climate crosses certain “tipping points”, truly catastrophic ecological collapse can follow.
A massive eruption
The trigger for the Permian–Triassic mass extinction event was the eruption of massive amounts of molten rock in modern day Siberia, named the Siberian Traps. This molten rock erupted in a sedimentary basin, rich in organic matter.
The molten rock was hot enough to melt the surrounding rocks and release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere over a period as short as 50,000 years but possibly as long as 500,000 years. This rapid increase in carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and the resulting temperature increase is thought to be the primary kill mechanism for much of life at the time.
On land it is thought surface temperatures increased by as much as 6°C to 10°C – too rapid for many life forms to evolve and adapt. In other similar eruptions, the climate system usually returns to its previous state within 100,000 to a million years.
We looked at the fossil record of a wide range of land plant biomes, such as arid, tropical, subtropical, temperate and scrub. We analysed how the biomes changed from just before the mass extinction event, until about eight million years after.
We hypothesised that Earth warmed too rapidly, leading to the dying out of low- to mid-latitude vegetation, especially the rainforests. As a result the efficiency of the organic carbon cycle was greatly reduced immediately after the volcanic eruptions.
Plants, because they are unable to simply get up and move, were very strongly affected by the changing conditions.
Before the event, many peat bogs and tropical and subtropical forests existed around the equator and soaked up carbon
Enclaves of larger plants remained towards the poles, in coastal and in slightly mountainous regions where the temperature was slightly cooler. After about five million years they had mostly recolonised Earth. However these types of plants were also less efficient at fixing carbon in the organic carbon cycle.
This is analogous in some ways to considering the impact of replacing all rainforests at present day with the mallee-scrub and spinifex flora that we might expect to see in the Australian outback.
Post-extinction lycopod fossils. Zhen Xu
Finally, the forests return
Using evidence from the present day, we estimated the rate at which plants take atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it as organic matter of each different biome (or its “net primary productivity”) that was suggested in the fossil record.
We then used a recently developed carbon cycle model called SCION to test our hypothesis numerically. When we analysed our model results we found that the initial increase in temperature from the Siberian Traps was preserved for five to six million years after the event because of the reduction in net primary productivity.
It was only as plants re-established themselves and the organic carbon cycle restarted that Earth slowly started to ease out of the super greenhouse conditions.
Maintaining a climate equilibrium
It’s always difficult to draw analogies between past climate change in the geological record and what we’re experiencing today. That’s because the extent of past changes is usually measured over tens to hundreds of thousands of years while at present day we are experiencing change over decades to centuries.
A key implication of our work, however, is that life on Earth, while resilient, is unable to respond to massive changes on short time scales without drastic rewirings of the biotic landscape.
In the case of the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, plants were unable to respond on as rapid a time scale as 1,000 to 10,000 years. This resulted in a large extinction event.
Overall, our results underline how important tropical and subtropical plant biomes and environments are to maintaining a climate equilibrium. In turn, they show how the loss of these biomes can contribute to additional climate warming – and serve as a devastating climate tipping point.
Zhen Xu was the lead author of the study, which was part of her PhD work.
Andrew Merdith receives funding from the Australian Research Council as part of the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.
Benjamin J. W. Mills receives funding from UK Research and Innovation.
Zhen Xu receives funding from UK Research and Innovation and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The number of tourists heading to Antarctica has been skyrocketing. From fewer than 8,000 a year about three decades ago, nearly 125,000 tourists flocked to the icy continent in 2023–24. The trend is likely to continue in the long term.
Unchecked tourism growth in Antarctica risks undermining the very environment that draws visitors. This would be bad for operators and tourists. It would also be bad for Antarctica – and the planet.
Over the past two weeks, the nations that decide what human activities are permitted in Antarctica have convened in Italy. The meeting incorporates discussions by a special working group that aims to address tourism issues.
It’s not easy to manage tourist visitors to a continent beyond any one country’s control. So, how do we stop Antarctica being loved to death? The answer may lie in economics.
Future visitor trends
We recently modelled future visitor trends in Antarctica. A conservative scenario shows by 2033–34, visitor numbers could reach around 285,000. Under the least conservative scenario, numbers could reach 450,000 – however, this figure incorporates pent-up demand from COVID shutdowns that will likely diminish.
The vast majority of the Antarctic tourism industry comprises cruise-ship tourism in the Antarctic Peninsula. A small percentage of visitors travel to the Ross Sea region and parts of the continent’s interior.
Antarctic tourism is managed by an international set of agreements together known as the Antarctic Treaty System, as well as the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO).
The Treaty System is notoriously slow-moving and riven by geopolitics, and IAATO does not have the power to cap visitor numbers.
Even when cruise ships don’t dock, they can cause problems such as air, water and noise pollution – as well as anchoring that can damage the seabed.
Then there’s carbon emissions. Each cruise ship traveller to Antarctica typically produces between 3.2 and 4.1 tonnes of carbon, not including travel to the port of departure. This is similar to the carbon emissions an average person produces in a year.
Global warming caused by carbon emissions is damaging Antarctica. At the Peninsula region, glaciers and ice shelves are retreating and sea ice is shrinking, affecting wildlife and vegetation.
Of course, Antarctic tourism represents only a tiny fraction of overall emissions. However, the industry has a moral obligation to protect the place that maintains it. And tourism in Antarctica can compound damage from climate change, tipping delicate ecosystems into decline.
Market-based tools – such as taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and certification – have been used in environmental management around the world. Research shows these tools could also prevent Antarctic tourist numbers from getting out of control.
One option is requiring visitors to pay a tourism tax. This would help raise revenue to support environmental monitoring and enforcement in Antarctica, as well as fund research.
Such a tax already exists in the small South Asian nation of Bhutan, where each tourist pays a tax of US$100 (A$152) a night. But while a tax might deter the budget-conscious, it probably wouldn’t deter high income, experience-driven tourists.
Alternatively, a cap-and-trade system would create a limited number of Antarctica visitor permits for a fixed period. The initial distribution of permits could be among tourism operators or countries, via negotiation, auction or lottery. Unused permits could then be sold, making them quite valuable.
Caps have been successful at managing tourism impacts elsewhere, such as Lord Howe Island, although there are no trades allowed in that system.
Any cap on tourist numbers in Antarctica, and rules for trading, must be based on evidence about what the environment can handle. But there is a lack of precise data on Antarctica’s carrying capacity. And permit allocations amongst the operators and nations would need to be fair and inclusive.
Alternatively, existing industry standards could be augmented with independent schemes certifying particular practices – for example, reducing carbon footprints. This could be backed by robust monitoring and enforcement to avoid greenwashing.
Looking ahead
Given the complexities of Antarctic governance, our research finds that the most workable solution is a combination of these market-based options, alongside other regulatory measures.
So far, parties to the Antarctic treaty have made very few binding rules for the tourism industry. And some market-based levers will be more acceptable to the parties than others. But doing nothing is not a solution.
The authors would like to acknowledge Valeria Senigaglia, Natalie Stoeckl and Jing Tian and the rest of the team for their contributions to the research upon which this article was based.
Darla Hatton MacDonald receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Forest and Wood Innovations Centre, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the Soils CRC. She has received in-kind support from Antarctic tour operator HX.
Elizabeth Leane receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, and DFAT. She also receives in-kind support and occasional funding from Antarctic tourism operator HX and in-kind support from other tour operators.
Emojis, as well as memes and other forms of short-form content, have become central to how we express ourselves and connect online. Yet as meanings shift across different contexts, so too does the potential for misunderstanding.
A senior colleague of mine recently encountered some commentary about the “slightly smiling” face emoji: 🙂
They approached me, asking whether it represented joy, as they had assumed, or if it had a more ominous meaning.
As a chronically-online millennial, who unironically identifies as a gen Z, I bore the news that I, along with most younger internet users, only ever use it sarcastically.
“It doesn’t actually signify happiness – more so fake happiness, or dry humour,” I explained.
I also told them how the thumbs up emoji is often interpreted as passive aggressive, and that the only time I’d use the laughing-crying (“face with tears of joy”) emoji is under duress.
Despite seeming like a universal language – and sometimes they do function that way – emojis can be at once more vague, and more specific, than words. That’s because you can’t separate the meaning of a smiley from the person who sent it, nor from the person receiving it.
Markers of age and identity
While emojis were originally developed in the late 1990s by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita to add emotional nuance to text-based messaging, their function has since evolved.
Today, emojis are not just emotional cues; they also operate as cultural symbols and markers of identity.
Research published last year highlights how these symbols can create subtle communication barriers across age groups. For instance, a study of Chinese-speaking WeChat users found younger and older people differed not only in how frequently they used emojis, but in how they interpreted and aesthetically preferred them.
One emoji that’s increasingly becoming a distinct marker of age is the previously mentioned laughing-crying emoji (😂). Despite being named Oxford Dictionary’s 2015 word of the year, and frequently topping the most-used emoji charts, this smiley is on the decline among gen Z – who decided in 2020 that it wasn’tcoolanymore.
Instead, they prefer the skull emoji (💀), which is shorthand for the gen Z catch phrase “I’m dead”. This means something is funny (not that they’re literally deceased).
Such shifts may understandably be perplexing for older generations who are unfamiliar with evolving norms and slang.
A digital body language
Emojis can also take on distinct meanings on different platforms. They are embedded within “platform vernaculars”: the ever-evolving styles of communication that are unique to specific digital spaces.
For example, a thumbs up emoji (👍) from your boss at work is seemingly more acceptable, and less anxiety inducing, than from a romantic interest you’ve just sent a risky text to.
This dilemma was echoed in a recent viral TikTok by user @kaitlynghull, which prompted thousands to comment about their shared confusion over emoji use in the workplace.
This reaction highlights a deeper communication issue.
A survey of 10,000 workers across the US, France, Germany, India and Australia, conducted by YouGov and software company Atlassian, found 65% of workers used emojis to convey tone in the workplace. But while 88% of gen Z workers thought emojis were helpful, this dropped to 49% for baby boomers and gen X.
The survey concluded some emojis can be interpreted in multiple ways, and these double meanings aren’t always safe for work.
In with the ‘it’ crowd
Another example of platform-specific emoji use comes from social media content creators who deploy emojis to curate a certain aesthetic.
Under the Tiktok tag #emojicombo, you’ll find thousands of videos showcasing emoji combinations that provide aesthetic “inspo”. These combinations are used to represent different online identities or subcultures, such as “that girl”, “clean girl” or “old money”.
Users may include the combinations in their captions or videos to signal their personal style, or to express the mood or vibe of their online persona. In this way, the emojis help shape how they present themselves on the platform.
This example of emoji use is also a display of symbolic capital. It signals social alignment, in an environment where a user’s visibility (and popularity) is determined by their platform fluency.
Emojis, then, aren’t just tools for expression. They are badges of identity that index where a user stands in the online cultural hierarchy.
There’s a fragmentation in how we relate
A single emoji might communicate irony, sincerity or sarcasm, depending on who is using it, what platform they’re using it on, and what generation they belong to.
This gap points to deeper questions around online access and participation, and the systems that shape online cultures.
And when the meaning of an emoji is platform-dependent and socially stratified, it can become as much about fitting in with a cultural in-group than conveying emotion.
Brittany Ferdinands 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.
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, turns 90 this week – a milestone that’s reigniting speculation over his eventual successor.
While the Dalai Lama is the face of Buddhism to many people across the world, he is actually the head of just one tradition within Tibetan Buddhism known as the Gelug school.
Tibetans believe the Dalai Lama to be the manifestation of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, and the “one who hears the cries of the world”.
In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person, or a mythic representation of a person, who denies themselves enlightenment until all beings can achieve enlightenment. Avalokiteśvara appears to living beings in whatever form could best save them.
Although Avalokiteśvara originated in India as a man, they can be depicted as either a man, woman, or non-binary being. This gender fluidity has led to them being revered as a trans icon in the West.
I have spent the past five years investigating the lives of queer Buddhists in Australia. As part of this research, I have surveyed and interviewed 109 LGBTQIA+ Buddhist Australians.
The words of these individuals, and my own experience as a genderqueer Buddhist person, reveal how the Dalai Lama emerges an an unlikely inspiration for individuals sharing a trans and Buddhist identity.
The Big Buddha is a large bronze sculpture located near the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. Joshua J. Cotten/Unsplash
Letting go of binaries
Through my work I have found LGBTQIA+ Buddhist Australians are generally reluctant to disclose their queer identities to their Buddhist communities, and may be told to remain silent about their identities.
For some, Avalokiteśvara’s gender fluidity has been important for reaffirming both their queer and Buddhist selves.
One Buddhist trans woman, Annie*, told me Guanyin had special significance for her. Annie spoke about Avalokiteśvara travelling from India to China as a male, before “transitioning” to the mainly female presentation of Guanyin over centuries. Annie said:
I pray to her regularly and often find I get a response. Of course the enlightened state is beyond all manner of worldly binaries, including gender, and is immensely important in letting go of binaries in my journey towards enlightenment.
Walter* has had a long fascination with depictions of Avalokiteśvara that “showed ‘him’ looking effeminate and handsome, with a cute moustache […] A little bit homoerotic, a little bit provocatively gender fluid, as seen through my eyes”.
Walter adds:
A great many people in different cultures, across history, worship these figures. Clever how this figure can morph into a radical trans! We all want to feel comforted, safe and saved from suffering.
As queer Buddhists, we turn to to Avalokitesvara to feel “comforted, safe and saved”.
Another interviewee, Brian*, told me about a Tibetan invocation practice he did with a senior Tibetan monk, in which he encountered Guanyin:
[She] took my right hand and passed some sort of power into it. She never spoke to me but just returned the way she had come. I was given some sort of gift, that’s all I know.
Since this experience, Brian has “always felt a strong connection to the feminine through her”. He has a special Guanyin altar on his farm.
You can’t be what you can’t see
Some Buddhists deny Avalokiteśvara’s queerness.
Asher*, a genderqueer Buddhist I interviewed, told me about a teacher who said to them, “there was absolutely no way a gay person could be enlightened”.
Asher retorted:
What about Kanzeon, the bodhisattva of compassion, who has manifested as both male and female and, in the stories from Japan, has had erotic relationships with monks?
The teacher dismissed this, replying, “those are just stories”.
A black statue of Avalokiteśvara outside a Japanese temple. Wikimedia, CC BY
In her 1996 book Transgender Warriors, trans activist Leslie Feinberg writes: “I couldn’t find myself in history. No one like me seemed to have ever existed.”
Similarly, Annie evoked the statement: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
I, too, experience this need to see myself as a genderqueer, non-binary practitioner of Zen Buddhism. It was only through doing these interviews with other queer Buddhists that I came to realise Guanyin, a trans icon, is a statuette which adorns the altar of the Buddhist group I belong to.
Knowing Avalokitesvara may be depicted as a man, woman, or non-binary being lets us queer Buddhists know we exist – and have always existed – within Buddhism.
Despite being a cisgender man who has been somewhatinconsistent in his support of queer people, the Dalai Lama, as the manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion, is a possible spiritual link between today’s queer Buddhists and centuries-long traditions of gender transition and fluidity.
*Names have been changed.
Stephen Kerry 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.
Side effects from taking too much vitamin B6 – including nerve damage – may be more widespread than we think, Australia’s medicines regulator says.
In an ABC report earlier this week, a spokesperson for the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) says it may have underestimated the extent of the side effects from vitamin B6 supplements.
However, there are proposals to limit sales of high-dose versions due to safety concerns.
A pathologist who runs a clinic that tests vitamin B6 in blood samples from across Australia also appeared on the program. He told the ABC that data from May suggests 4.5% of samples tested had returned results “very likely” indicating nerve damage.
So what are vitamin B6 supplements? How can they be toxic? And which symptoms do you need to watch out for?
What is vitamin B6?
Vitamin B6, also known as pyridoxine, plays an important role in keeping the body healthy. It is involved in the metabolism of proteins, carbohydrates and fats in food. It is also important for the production of neurotransmitters – chemical messengers in the brain that maintain its function and regulate your mood.
Vitamin B6 also supports the immune system by helping to make antibodies, which fight off infections. And it is needed to produce haemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen around the body.
However, most people don’t need, and won’t benefit from, a vitamin B6 supplement. That’s because you get enough vitamin B6 from your diet through meat, breakfast cereal, fruit and vegetables.
Currently, vitamin B6 supplements with a daily dose of 5–200mg can be sold over the counter at health food stores, supermarkets and pharmacies.
Because of safety concerns, the TGA is proposing limiting their sale to pharmacies, and only after consultation with a pharmacist.
Daily doses higher than 200mg already need a doctor’s prescription. So under the proposal that would stay the same.
What happens if you take too much?
If you take too much vitamin B6, in most cases the excess will be excreted in your urine and most people won’t experience side effects. But there is a growing concern about long-time, high-dose use.
A side effect the medical community is worried about is peripheral neuropathy – where there is damage to the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. This results in pain, numbness or weakness, usually in your hands and feet. We don’t yet know exactly how this happens.
In most reported cases, these symptoms disappear once you stop taking the supplement. But for some people it may take three months to two years before they feel completely better.
There is growing, but sometimes contradictory, evidence that high doses (more than 50mg a day) for extended periods can result in serious side effects.
A study from the 1990s followed 70 patients for five years who took a dose of 100 to 150mg a day. There were no reported cases of neuropathy.
But more recent studies show high rates of side effects.
A 2023 case report provides details of a man who was taking multiple supplements. This resulted in a daily combined 95mg dose of vitamin B6, and he experienced neuropathy.
Another report describes seven cases of neuropathy linked to drinking energy drinks containing vitamin B6.
The current advice is that someone who takes a dose of 50mg a day or more, for more than six months, should be monitored by a health-care professional. So if you regularly take vitamin B6 supplements you should discuss continued use with your doctor or pharmacist.
There are three side effects to watch out for, the first two related to neuropathy:
numbness or pain in the feet and hands
difficulty with balance and coordination as a result of muscle weakness
heartburn and nausea.
If you have worrying side effects after taking vitamin B6 supplements, contact your state’s poison information centre on 13 11 26 for advice.
Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and was previously a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. He is a member of the Haleon Australia Pty Ltd Pain Advisory Board. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design and testing.
Slade Matthews provides scientific evaluations to the Therapeutic Goods Administration as a member of the Therapeutic Goods Assessment and Advisory Panel. Slade serves on the NSW Poisons Advisory Committee for NSW Health as the minister-nominated pharmacologist appointed by the Governor of NSW.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University
A remarkable documentary is providing insight into the propaganda found within Russian schools. Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein, premiered at the 2025 Sundance film festival in January, where it won the world cinema documentary special jury award.
The film was recorded over two years by Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, an events coordinator and videographer at a high school in Karabash, a heavily polluted town in central southern Russia. The documentary records the intensification of Kremlin-directed ultra-nationalist and pro-war propaganda within the Russian schooling system, which has intensified since the escalation of the war against Ukraine in February 2022.
Talankin makes clear his view that this approach to “education” represents a moral wrong, and he is very much on point with the writings of the key ethicists on the subject. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, wrote that “education is both a tool of propaganda in the hands of dominant groups, and a means of emancipation for subject classes”.
Niebuhr was writing about the education system in the US during the 1920s, when there was a widespread understanding that education was used in these two ways. Talankin’s concern is that Russia has moved to a position of imbalance, where the “dominant groups” have too much influence and are using their power to corrupt the minds of children through disingenuous narratives about national servitude, sacrifice and conformity, coupled with the unsubtle threat that those who are not patriots are “parasites”.
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In their highly respected book Propaganda & Persuasion (1986), propaganda experts Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell state that “to analyse propaganda, one needs to be able to identify it”. This is a difficult task because propaganda thrives through symbols, the subliminal and in fictional works precisely because the audience is not conscious of it.
However, the creation of an environment that uses propaganda is also dependent upon who is given the oxygen of publicity and who is marginalised. These are the conditions under which ideological indoctrination occurs and power is achieved or maintained.
As such, a critical analyst of propaganda must assess the linguistic strategy, the information strategy, the eminence strategy (how to ensure that the target audience are watching, reading or listening to the desired content) and the staging strategy of the communicator. This can be remembered through the helpful L.I.E.S. mnemonic.
The trailer for Mr. Nobody versus Putin.
Talankin’s footage shows how Russian schools now promote distorted versions of European history. The well-trodden narrative that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis is referred to several times in lessons. Russian flags appear with greater frequency around the school as time goes on, and assembly time becomes an exercise in pledging allegiance to the fatherland.
Teachers are expected to read from scripts prepared for them by the ministry of education. Pupils then respond with choreographed answers – some even glancing down at notes under their desks. The children are told about how dreadful life in France and the UK is because of their reliance on Russian fossil fuels.
Interestingly, the Kremlin has asked that all of this be videoed and uploaded to a central database to ensure compliance with national regulations on what is taught in schools. Indeed, Talankin complains at one point that much of his time is now spent uploading the videos rather than actually teaching the students and helping them to be creative – as his job previously was.
Shared humanity
Talankin takes us on a tour of his city. He shows a pro-war rally that is broadly supported by the townsfolk. Or at least those in opposition dare not say anything or engage in an equivalent demonstration. He takes us to the civic library, theoretically a site of independent learning but which has been hijacked by these propaganda efforts.
Perhaps the most important moments of the documentary though are the snippets of critique and the sense of “knowing” that Talankin is keen to show. The young girl who jokingly tells her teacher to “blink twice if you’re lying”, and to which all her class then laugh. His interactions with other teachers who confide in him that they know that the propaganda is bullshit, but, worried for their status and prosperity, go along with it.
The propaganda is pretty poor though. It is clunky and obvious, and, while it might generate some short-term influence, it smacks of both arrogance and desperation on the part of the Kremlin. Indeed, it shows that there is no desire on the part of central government for Russian people to thrive intellectually.
This scenario is reminiscent of the end of the Soviet era, when communist propaganda continued to prevail, but few still believed it. Nevertheless, without a clear alternative to follow, or obvious alternative leader to guide them, most people continued to abide.
The most harrowing part of the documentary comes towards the end when Talankin provides an audio recording of the funeral of a local lad who has been killed in Ukraine. He did not dare film the funeral as this is a cultural faux pas, but the screams and wails of the mother as her son is laid to rest are piercing. The scene seems intended to bring our shared humanity to bare.
Talankin is a nice guy with intelligence and ethical fortitude. The kids are funny, charming and talented. The mother is doing what we would all do if we had lost a child to a violent death. As such, Mr. Nobody Against Putin might better be called Mr. Everybody Against Putin, as it should be of grave concern to everyone that Russia’s education system is resorting to such techniques.
Colin Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The UK has historically been held up as leading democracy with free and fair elections. However, our new report shows election quality in the UK is now ranked in the bottom half of countries in Europe.
The Global Electoral Integrity Report provides scores for election quality around the world. It defines electoral integrity as the extent to which elections empower citizens.
Iceland received the highest score for an election that took place in 2024, the “year of elections” during which 1.6 billion people went to the polls, according to Time Magazine. This was an unprecedented concentration of democratic activity in a single year. Iceland has a successful system of automatic voter registration and an electoral system that is judged to be fair to smaller parties.
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Countries that scored highly based on their most recent election include Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Finland and Lithuania. Those at the opposite end of the scale include Syria, Belarus, Egypt, and Nicaragua. The UK is ranked 24th out of 39 countries in Europe. It is below Estonia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg and Slovakia. It is ranked 53rd out of 170 countries overall.
The US also saw a decline. The beacons for electoral democracy are therefore now found in mainland Europe (most notably Scandinavia), Australasia, South America and the southern parts of Africa – rather than the UK and US. The centre of global democratic authority has shifted away from Westminster.
There remain many areas of strength in UK elections. UK electoral officials show professionalism and independence and there is no concern about the integrity of the vote counting process. There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.
A major weakness is in the fairness of the electoral rules for small parties. The electoral system generated a very disproportional result in 2024. Labour took nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament, a total of 412, with less than 10 million votes (only 34% of votes cast). Labour won a massive majority in terms of parliamentary arithmetic but the the government did not enter office with widespread support.
By contrast, Reform and the Greens received 6 million votes between them, but only nine MPs. The electoral system may have worked when Britain had a two-party system – but the two-party system no longer holds. Today’s Britain is more diverse, and political support is more distributed.
The UK also scores poorly on voter registration. It is estimated that there are around 7 million to 8 million people not correctly registered or missing from the registers entirely. This is not many less than the 9.7 million people whose votes gave the government a landslide majority. The UK does not have a system of automatic voter registration, which is present in global leaders such as Iceland, where everyone is enrolled without a hiccup.
Another problem is participation. Turnout in July 2024 was low – with only half of adults voting. Voting has been made more difficult as the Elections Act of 2022 introduced compulsory photographic identification for the first time at the general election. This was thought to have made it more difficult for many citizens to vote because the UK does not have a national identity card which all citizens hold.
Meanwhile, there are further swirling headwinds. The spread of disinformation by overseas actors in elections has become a prominent challenge around the world and there was evidence of disinformation in this campaign too. Violence during the electoral period was thought to have been removed from British elections in Victorian times. But more than half candidates experience abuse and intimidation during the electoral period.
Action needed
One year into its time in office, the government is yet to act on this issue. The word “democracy” was missing from the prime minister’s strategic defence review, despite the emphasis on protecting the UK from Russia, a country known for electoral interference and other forms of attack on democracies.
This was a sharp contrast to the former government’s 2021 review, which emphasised that a “world in which democratic societies flourish and fundamental human rights are protected is one that is more conducive to our sovereignty, security and prosperity as a nation”.
In its election manifesto, Labour promised to “address the inconsistencies in voter ID rules”, “improve voter registration” and give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all elections. There needs to be firm action on electoral system change, automatic voter registration, campaign finance reform, voter identification changes and other areas.
There are a complex set of challenges facing democracy and elections. New technological challenges, change in attitudes, international hostility and new emergencies are combining to batter the door of democracy down.
International organisations are increasingly stressing that political leaders need to work together and take proactive action to protect elections against autocratic forces. This means not only supporting democracy in their messages on the world stage – but also introducing reforms to create beacons of democracy in their own countries.
Toby James has previously received funding from the AHRC, ESRC, Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Electoral Commission, Nuffield Foundation, the McDougall Trust and Unlock Democracy. His current research is funded by the Canadian SSHRC.
Holly Ann Garnett receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Defence Academy Research Programme. She has previously received funding from: the British Academy, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the NATO Public Diplomacy Division, the American Political Science Association Centennial Centre, and the Conference of Defence Associations.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History, Newcastle University
Each is the main political subject in their country, and one is the main political subject in the world. Each rode the populist wave in 2016, campaigning for the other. In 2024 the tandem surfers remounted on to an even greater breaker. Yet, though nothing has happened to suggest that bromance is dead, neither Donald Trump nor Nigel Farage publicly now speak of the other.
Trump’s presidential campaign shared personnel with Leave.eu, the unofficial Brexit campaign. Farage was on the stump with Trump, and his “bad boys of Brexit” made their pilgrimage to Trump Tower after its owner’s own triumph in the US election. Each exulted in the other’s success, and what it portended.
Trump duly proposed giving the UK ambassadorship to the United States to Farage. Instead, Farage became not merely MP for Clacton, but leader of the first insurgent party to potentially reset Britain’s electoral calculus since Labour broke through in 1922.
Then, Labour’s challenge was to replace the Liberals as the alternative party of government. It took two years. Reform UK could replace the Conservatives in four.
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Trump, meanwhile, has achieved what in Britain has either been thwarted (Militant and the Labour party in the 1980s) or has at most had temporary, aberrant, success (Momentum and the Labour party in the 2010s): the takeover of a party from within. Farage has been doing so – hitherto – from without.
At one of those historic forks in a road where change is a matter of chance, after Brexit finally took place, Farage considered his own personal leave – to go and break America.
The path had been trodden by Trump-friendly high-profile provocateurs before him: Steve Hilton, from David Cameron’s Downing Street, via cable news, now standing to be governor of California; Piers Morgan, off to CNN to replace the doyen of cable news Larry King, only to crash, but then to burn on, online. Liz Truss, never knowingly understated, has found her safe space – the rightwing speaking circuit.
But Farage remained stateside. He knew his domestic platform was primed more fully to exploit the voter distrust that his nationalist crusade had done so much to provoke.
The Trump effect
Genuine peacetime transatlantic affiliations are rare, usually confined to the leaders of established parties: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. One consequence of the 2016 political shift is that the US Republicans and the British Conservatives, the latter still at least partially tethered to traditional politics, have become distanced.
During the first Trump administration, and even in the build up to the second, it was Farage who was seen as the UK’s bridge to the president. But today, at the peak of their influence, for Farage association can only be by inference, friendship with the US president is not – put mildly – of political advantage. For UK voters, Trump is the 19th most popular foreign politician, in between the King of Denmark and Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is, moreover, the “Trump effect”. Measuring this is crude – circumstances differ – but the trend is that elections may be won by openly criticising, rather than associating with, Trump. This was the case for Mark Carney in Canada, Anthony Albanese in Australia, and Nicușor Dan in Romania.
Trump’s second state visit to the UK will certainly be less awkward for Farage than it will be Starmer, the man who willed it. Farage will likely not – and has no reason to – be seen welcoming so divisive a figure.
Starmer has no choice but to, and to do so ostentatiously. It is typical of Starmer’s perfect storm of an administration that he will, in the process, do nothing to appeal to the sliver of British voters partial to Trump while further shredding his reputation with Labour voters. Farage would be well served in taking one of his tactical European sojourns for the duration. Starmer may be tempted too.
Outmanoeuvring the establishment
Reflecting the historic cultural differences of their countries, Trump’s prescription is less state, Farage’s is more. The Farage of 2025 that is. He had been robustly Thatcherite, but has lately embraced socialist interventionism, albeit through a most Thatcherite analysis: “the gap in the market was enormous”.
Reform UK now appears to stand for what Labour – in the mind of many of its voters – ought to. Eyeing the opportunity of smokestack grievances, Farage called for state control of steel production even as Trump was considering quite how high a tariff to put on it. Nationalisation and economic nationalism: associated restoratives for national malaise.
Aggressively heteronormative, Trump and Farage dabble in the natalism burgeoning in both countries – as much a cultural as an economic imperative. Each has mastered – and much more than their adversaries – social media. Each has come to recognise the demerits in publicly appeasing Putin.
And Reform’s rise in a hitherto Farage-resistant Scotland can only endear him further to a president whose Hebridean mother was thought of (in desperation) as potentially his Rosebud by British officials preparing for his first administration.
Given their rhetorical selectivity, Trump and Farage’s rolling pitches are almost unanswerable for convention-confined political opponents and reporters. These two anti-elite elitists continue to confound.
Unprecedentedly, for a former president, Trump ran against the incumbent; Farage will continue to exploit anti-incumbency, despite his party now being in office. Most elementally, the pair are bound for life by their very public near-death experiences. Theirs is, by any conceivable measure, an uncommon association.
Farage’s fleetness of foot would be apparent even without comparison with the leaden steps of the leaders of the legacy parties. His is a genius of opportunism. That’s why he knows not to remind us of his confrere across the water.
Martin Farr 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.
Good afternoon NEA! And an extra-special hello to my folks right up front here. Aaron, Jeff, Rachael, and all of the PSEA delegation. I’m so happy to be here with you. You will tire of my voice long before I tire of your support!
President Pringle and the entire NEA leadership team, thank you for this invitation. It is an incredible honor to be here, among these people, in this moment.
I know what’s at stake today. We all do. And I know how this speech is supposed to end. But before we get going, I think we ought to take a pause. It is July, another school year has come to a close, and we deserve to acknowledge that achievement.
The work we do—in classrooms and libraries and nurses’ offices and school buses—is extraordinary. It’s complicated and demanding and ever-changing, but it is also joyful, unexpected, deeply human—and incredibly collaborative.
We are the cultivators of learning and belonging. We are the ones who unlock potential, who nurture talent, who stay after the bell and show up before the sun. At every level and in every facet of American education, we challenge, we question, we adapt, we create—and we do so together.
I am a first generation college graduate, my education is my most valuable possession. But I didn’t earn it alone. I owe my success to my teachers who demanded my very best, to my counselors who guided my path, to my grandmother who was a school secretary, my grandfather who was a custodian, my great grandmother who was a cafeteria worker. I stand here as living proof of our collective influence and our fundamental belief:public education is a public good.
This union works tirelessly on so. many. issues. The list of areas in need is never-ending. But let us celebrate where we all began, where we will always belong. We are educators. We are mentors. We are stewards. We guide. We lead. We serve.
That’s what binds us here today—not just strategy or slogans, but an unwavering love for our kids and our communities. Education is a noble calling and an incredible life of service. Please, let us take a moment to give this affirmation the round of applause you all deserve.
Okay…let’s begin.
What’s good for educators is what’s good for students.
That’s the gospel according to Adam Weber, one of our UniServ reps in Pennsylvania. Two years ago, he repeated it again and again to our Bargaining School at PSEA’s summer leadership conference until every one of us could recite it like a nursery rhyme.
Since then, it has become a mantra I will not whisper.What is good for educators is what is good for students.
But I wasn’t always so certain. For my first decade or so in teaching, like so many of us, I believed the best way to serve my students was to neglect myself. I wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. I poured every ounce of energy into my classroom, convincing myself that if their cup was full, then surely mine was too.
But there’s a difference between being altruistic and being self-sacrificing. And through the work of my union—through the solidarity and support of educators like you—I came to understand something transformative:the best way to advocate for our students truly is to advocate for ourselves.
All of us have a union “origin story.” It’s the moment in our careers when our place shifts from passive dues-payer to active participant. For my mentor, hers was instantaneous—it was the day she signed her teaching contract, because as a child, she watched her parents stand on the picket line. But for me, it took longer. I joined the union because she told me I had to, not because I understood the power it held.
The pandemic washed away my naivety. As I sat at home in nearly-empty Zoom rooms, suddenly, the job I had given so much of myself to was unrecognizable; the public had become increasingly critical, and the future had never been so uncertain. I started to confront a brutal question:Who am I if I’m not teaching?What happens if I walk away?
But then, something shifted.
Because while the world was spinning, my local was centering. They fought for COVID sick banks, 1:1 laptops, robust contact tracing, and the grace we deserved as we navigated the unknown.
For our members, they became the leaders we needed. But forme—they became my solid ground.
And that solid ground became a launching pad. Once I started paying attention—once I realized how deeply political our profession had always been—I knew I could no longer simply stay on the sidelines.
So I stepped up. I got involved. I found my people. And my people helped me to find my voice.
A lot has changed since that ah-ha moment I had two years ago.
My first state-wide union event was our political institute in January 2024 followed a few months later by our PA House of Delegates. I remember in those spaces, in those moments, there was such a collective enthusiasm and optimism. In PA, Senator Bob Casey was still our ally on the hill, and President Pringle was telling us we deserved to win all the things.
But this past March, at our National Leadership Summit in Detroit, I encountered a different NEA. I could still feel the energy, but looming overtop of it was a sense of urgency, a tenacity, a burden of what the future may hold.
It is difficult to feel any sense of assurance when the best path forward has become an ever-moving target. But amidst the unknown, I am confident we can find comfortand resiliencein what we do know.
And what we know is this:Respect doesn’t begin with a soundbite or a promise—it begins with us.
In how we show up.
In how we raise our voices.
In how we refuse to accept anything less than what our students and our colleagues deserve.
We stand here, resolved, not just for ourselves, but for our communities, our schools, and our students.
I stand here for CJ and Tucker, because the internet company refused to provide service to their rural address.
I stand here for Jayden, Gavin, and Luz who needed a support system more than they needed the student handbook.
I stand here for my sister, Sydney. Born in Vietnam and raised in central PA. In her 16 years of education, she never had a teacher who looked like her.
I stand here for the 70 teachers furloughed from my district during the great recession, and for my friend, Marissa, who resigned from her dream job to save herself.
We are the guardians—not just of our curricula and our classrooms—but of the conditions that allow our schools to thrive. I say this with full conviction, every day, but especially today:
Protecting education is how we protect our democracy.
America’s schools are one of the greatest democratic institutions we all share.
They are where kids learn to think critically, collaborate respectfully, and dream boundlessly.
They are where voices are heard, where differences are explored, and where possibility begins.
I teach in a rural, well-established community. My best friend’s house is older than our country. You can drive 40 minutes in either direction from our football field and you will still be in our school district. Out of pure curiosity, I did some Googling: there are three times as many cows in Mifflin County as there are kids. Chickens outnumber humans almost 3 to 1.
It can be easy for kids to feel confined to the expectations of their hometowns, especially where I come from. But school is where every kid learns—their upbringing is not a limitation, it’s a foundation. And that transformational shift comes from the opportunities we so carefully design. It comes from the efforts of educators.
Two weeks ago, one of our athletes ran a national championship-winning, 4-minute mile. For the past two years, our Technology Student Association has taken top honors at their national competition. Last month, 20 of our kids joined a growing group of alumni who have stamped their first passports on their school trip to Europe. And last week, those students and their families overflowed our board room in defense of their music program.
In my small town, I have celebrated with graduates as they earned their acceptance to military academies, Ivy-league schools, and community colleges. As they’ve received full ride scholarships and their family’s first-ever high school diplomas.
These stories, these moments of courage, accomplishment, and pride—they are why education is so important. In our classrooms, a child’s possibility transforms into potential and blossoms into prosperity.
We know what’s at stake. If our schools falter—if education is disrupted by disinvestment or division—then we don’t just lose a school system. We lose our future.
But we don’t have to ask, “What do we do now?” We know this lesson plan. We’ve passed this test before. We. Have. All. The. Answers.
We recite, we repeat, we embody the undeniable, inalienable truth: What’s good for educators is what’s good for students.
NEA is what’s good for educators; union solidarity is what’s good for educators; dignity in our contracts and respect in our expertise and regard for our humanity is what’s good for educators. Equity in our classrooms is what’s good for educators. Investments in teacher retention and recruitment is what’s good for educators. Safe schools are what’s good for educators.
And when educators have what is good and necessary to do their jobs, America’s children become the real benefactors. That support is what enables us to recognize, to validate, to empower, to celebrate our students.
In this moment of challenge and consequence, I keep coming back to a poster that has hung in my classroom since my first day of teaching, Margaret Mead’s words of truth: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
We are that group. In every classroom, on every playground, at every board meeting.
We are thoughtful. We are committed. And we are powerful.
A union of educators is a union of advocacy, of camaraderie, of empathy. And it is one more opportunity for us to lead by example for the students we serve.
Now, more than ever, we are tasked with building a better future. With the strength of our union, a resilience that dares to endure, and a heart that has no bounds, I know we can find common ground. I know we can build forward progress. I know we can meet this moment. For our kids, for our colleagues, for our country.
Ancient wooden tools found at a site in Gantangqing in southwestern China are approximately 300,000 years old, new dating has shown. Discovered during excavations carried out in 2014–15 and 2018–19, the tools have now been dated by a team of archaeologists, geologists, chronologists (including me) and paleontologists.
The rare wooden tools were found alongside an assortment of animal and plant fossils and stone artifacts.
Taken together, the finds suggest the early humans at Gantangqing were surprisingly sophisticated woodworkers who lived in a rich tropical or subtropical environment where they subsisted by harvesting plants from a nearby lake.
The location of the Gantangqing site and excavation trenches. Liu et al. / Science
Why ancient wooden tools are so rare
Wood usually decomposes relatively rapidly due to microbial activity, oxidation, and weathering. Unlike stone or bone, it rarely survives more than a few centuries.
Wood can only survive for thousands of years or longer if it ends up buried in unusual conditions. Wood can last a long time in oxygen-free environments or extremely dry areas. Charred or fire-hardened wood is also more durable.
At Gantangqing, the wooden objects were excavated from low-oxygen clay-heavy layers of sediment formed on the ancient shoreline of Fuxian Lake.
Wooden implements are extremely rare from the Early Palaeolithic period (the first part of the “stone age” from around 3.3 million years ago until 300,000 years ago or so, in which our hominin ancestors first began to use tools). Indeed, wooden tools more than even 50,000 years old are virtually absent outside Africa and western Eurasia.
As a result, we may have a skewed understanding of Palaeolithic cultures. We may overemphasise the role of stone tools, for example, because they are what has survived.
What wooden tools were found at Gantangqing?
The new excavations at Gantangqing found 35 wooden specimens identified as artificially modified tools. These tools were primarily manufactured from pine wood, with a minority crafted from hardwoods.
Some of the tools had rounded ends, while others had chisel-like thin blades or ridged blades. Of the 35 tools, 32 show marks of intentional modification at their tips, working edges, or bases.
Two large digging implements were identified as heavy-duty digging sticks designed for two-handed use. These are unique forms of digging implements not documented elsewhere, suggesting localised functional adaptations. There were also four distinct hook-shaped tools — likely used for cutting roots — and a series of smaller tools for one-handed use.
Nineteen of the tools showed microscopic traces of scraping from shaping or use, while 17 exhibit deliberately polished surfaces. We also identified further evidence of intensive use, including soil residues stuck to tool tips, parallel grooves or streaks along working edges, and characteristic fracture wear patterns.
The tools from Gantangqing are more complete and show a wider range of functions than those found at contemporary sites such as Clacton in the UK and Florisbad in South Africa.
The team used several techniques to figure out the age of the wooden tools. There is no way to determine their age directly, but we can date the sediment in which they were found.
Using a technique called infrared stimulated luminescence, we analysed more than 10,000 individual grains of minerals from different layers. This showed the sediment was deposited roughly between 350,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Dating the different layers of sediment excavated at the site produced a detailed timeline. Liu et al. / Science
We also used different techniques to date a mammal tooth found in one of the layers to roughly 288,000 years old. This was consistent with the mineral results.
Next we used mathematical modelling to bring all the dating results together. Our model indicated that the layers containing stone tools and wooden implements date from 360–300,000 years ago to 290–250,000 years ago.
What was the environment like?
Our research indicates the ancient humans at Gantangqing inhabited a warm, humid, tropical or subtropical environment. Pollen extracted from the sediments reveals 40 plant families that confirm this climate.
Plant fossils further verify the presence of subtropical-to-tropical flora dominated by trees, lianas, shrubs and herbs. Wet-environment plants show the local surroundings were a lakeside or wetlands.
Animal fossils also fit this picture, including rhinoceros and other mammals, turtles and various birds. The ecosystem was likely a mosaic of grassland, thickets and forests. Evidence of diving ducks confirms the lake must have been at least 2–3 metres deep during human occupation.
The site contained evidence of plants such as storable pine nuts and hazelnuts, fruit trees such as kiwi, raspberry-like berries, grapes, edible herbs and fern fronds.
There were also aquatic plants that would have provided edible leaves, seeds, tubers and rhizomes. These were likely dug up from shallow mud near the shore, using wooden tools.
These findings suggest the Gantangqing hominins may have made expeditions to the lake shore, carrying purpose-made wooden digging sticks to harvest underground food sources. To do this, they would have had to anticipate seasonal plant distributions, know exactly what parts of different plants were edible, and produce specialised tools for different tasks.
Why the Gantangqing site is important
The wooden implements from Gantangqing represent the earliest known evidence for the use of digging sticks and for the exploitation of underground plant storage organs such as tubers within the Oriental biogeographic realm. Our discovery shows the use of sophisticated wood technology in a very different environmental context from what has been seen at sites of similar age in Europe and Africa.
The find significantly expands our understanding of early hominin woodworking capabilities.
The hominins who lived at Gantangqing appear to have lived a heavily plant-based subsistence lifestyle. This is in contrast to colder, more northern settings where tools of similar age have been found (such as Schöningen in Germany), where hunting large mammals was the key to survival.
The site also shows how important wood – and perhaps other organic materials – were to “stone age” hominins. These wooden artifacts show far more sophisticated manufacturing skill than the relative rudimentary stone tools found at sites of similar age across East and Southeast Asia.
The excavation, curation, and research of the Gantangqing site were supported by
National Cultural Heritage Administration (China), Yunnan Provincial Institute of
Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Yuxi Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism,
Chengjiang Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, Australian Research Council
(ARC) Discovery Projects, Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), National Natural
Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
In 1962, poet and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur took the stand in Jerusalem in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Dinur was a much-anticipated witness, bearing the audience’s hope this man, a poet, would be able to explain – to capture and to transmit – the experience of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust; that he could speak the unspeakable. Prosecutor Gideon Hausner hoped such a witness might “do justice to the six million personal tragedies”.
Dinur used the name Katzetnik 135633 in his writings, also translated as “Prisoner 135663”. On the stand, he said: “I believe wholeheartedly that I have to continue to bear this name until the world awakens.”
Awakening, understanding, empathy and change are the sentiments many survivors hope for, or ask for, during and after periods of trauma. The 20th century saw many of those pleas. The 21st century has done no better at honouring the promise, captured in the title of the 1984 Argentinian commission report on forced disappearances, Nunca Mas: never again. No matter how many such pleas appear before the courts, before the aggressors, before those in solidarity, the horrors of war, torture, starvation and genocide seem to happen again – and again.
Three recent books from the region where war was been raging since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, are part of these pleas.
Review: Eyes on Gaza – Plestia Alaqad (Macmillan), Letters from Gaza – edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq & Mahmoud Alshaer (Penguin), Gates of Gaza – Amir Tibon (Scribe)
Eyes on Gaza is an on-the-ground account of the death and destruction of the first 45 days of the war by now 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, who moved to Melbourne with her family in November 2023. Letters from Gaza is a collection of 50 stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers enduring the past 20 months. And Gates of Gaza is the story of Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, a resident of Nahal Oz, one of the border kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7.
Plestia Alaqad. Plestia
These are all first-person testimonies of experiences of being under attack, though those attacks differ. We might say they fit into the genre adopted in truth commissions, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: a response to the nation’s years of living under the apartheid laws, discarded when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994.
The commission was one effort to heal from this past. But, like the Eichmann trial, it needed stories to explain the histories of violence, and it needed the pain to be voiced to explain its impacts on communities, families and relationships.
The use of people’s narratives to “bear witness” to the complex layers of legally sanctioned and militarily executed pain, loss and the traumas they can produce, is sometimes effective in helping audiences understand them. The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 used this form to explain the incidence and impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous children by the Australian state. It was effective as one form of creating a shared reality for all in Australia, who then understood the term “stolen generations” and the pain, loss and genocidal intent to which this phrase refers.
More recently, the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing systemic injustices perpetrated against First Nations Peoples by colonisation, has also brought histories of loss, dispossession and abuse to light, using stories. Stories can make sense of the impact incurred through the intertwined web of policies, statistics, discrimination and quotidian violence at the hands of the state.
The work of testimony
The narratives in these books written since October 7 2023 are part of this genre of testimony or storytelling. But at least two of these books are not attempting to explain the past. They might be described better as pleas to stop what the International Court of Justice has called “a plausible genocide” happening in the present.
They are, in one reading, wishes for the world to understand the experience of pain, rage, loss, fear, distress and defeat that accompanies destruction and unbearable loss. A wish for the world to hear, or perhaps feel, the words on the page – and make the pain stop.
They wish the world would “awaken” to what is happening right now.
The dynamic of awakening is the stock in trade of truth commissions. One party testifies or speaks to an experience, and the audience wakes up to what has been happening. As a result, they either change or facilitate change. The truth, captured as testimony, is supposed to set people free. Not just the speaker, but the community of speakers weighed down by history – or by the struggles of the past or the present.
In legal forms the reason to speak is clear. The reason to speak in literature, biographies and works of nonfiction is less clear. What does the author want from us, the readers? But perhaps more importantly, what can we offer?
She wants the genocide to stop. She wants a free Palestine. She wants her home and her life back. The stories in this book show readers outside Gaza some of the life and death of those first six and a half weeks.
Her last entry before she leaves Gaza for Egypt – and then Australia – is dated Day 45. During those 45 days, she puts on a press helmet and jacket, which both give her protection and weigh her down. And then she speaks: to cameras, to followers, to anyone who will listen. Her social media feeds documenting the war gained worldwide attention, her Instagram following rising from around 3,700 to 4.1 million today.
There are too many deaths to be witnessed – by her and the reader. She describes genocide as an understatement for what is occurring in Gaza: “we lose more people than our hearts can handle”. She has seen so much death, heard so many screams. By day 30,
all you can hear is a voice crying for help from under the rubble. You turn your back and walk away, because there’s nothing you can do to help.
But Plestia’s project is more than documenting death. She is careful to show many aspects of life in Gaza. She shows how Palestinians retain relationships, family and pets. How a young boy just needs his “pot plant” from his destroyed house, under skies filled with drones and bombs. This is a plea for the genocide to stop, but it is also a celebration of being Palestinian. It is an homage to life in Gaza.
It is also a plea to see Palestinians as more than numbers – and more than how they are depicted by Israel.
“The world,” she says, “sometimes treats us like terrorists, trying to justify its complacency in allowing us to be massacred. And we know the perception, we read the propaganda just like everyone else. But the reality is that we’re the opposite.”
She describes gentle moments of love and care between her fellow journalists and the people they interview. The children they bring sweets for, the “bird lady” who renames her tortoise “Plestia” after her. Both Plestia the tortoise and the “bird lady” are now living in a tent. She speaks of the doctors who work tirelessly.
In the midst of brutal amputations and unimaginable burns, she recounts the care of a doctor giving cream for a skin rash that has tormented her, diagnosed as a product of her anxiety. Anxiety seems a gentle diagnosis for symptoms produced by witnessing and documenting such brutality.
Anxiety over her helplessness, perhaps, over the lack of sleep, of nourishing food: dwindling even in those first 45 days. Anxiety seems like a Western preoccupation, from this writing distance. What Plestia experiences seems more like layers of embodied distress. Her empathy allows her to feel, perhaps too much. Empathy can be an enemy.
Around page 100, she begins to deteriorate. “It’s funny how genocide changes a person,” she writes, describing herself as “Genocide Plestia”. She’s devastated, exhausted. She has lost hope. The journal entries are shorter, more repetitive.
They recite her helplessness with what Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, has called the “repetitive thud of referentiality”.
You feel Plestia’s effort to try to speak with some life in the pages, to use writing as a therapeutic tool. You wish it for her, but she has trouble summoning the energy, the life, any hope. As she poignantly quips: “Fake it till you make it doesn’t work during a Genocide”. What is there to say in such relentless days of loss?
You want Plestia to get up, you want a happy ending, for a conclusion to the painful story, but the problem is time. The reader’s time, the reality of time since she wrote her book.
Day 45, her last day in Gaza, is Monday November 20 2023. I read this book in June 2025, 646 days later – and it hasn’t stopped. When Plestia leaves Gaza and finally arrives here in Melbourne, the conditions she describes have been ongoing for more than 20 months. A recently released survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research estimates almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025, as a result of the war. And that was six months ago.
50 letters from Gaza
The numbers are a way of reducing the experience of grief, devastation, loss (and the viewer’s guilt) to simple digits. Digits have no face and no sound. This is helpful to viewers, but it does not do justice to the 84,000, as Gideon Hausner knew well. No one awakens by hearing the numbers. But they matter.
In Letters from Gaza, psychologist Ahmed Mortaja fears becoming a news story, “a dull number … I don’t want my name and my family name to be reduced to mere numbers, whether odd or even”.
This book, a fragmented collection of 50 poems, stories and accounts, is devoted to giving life to those numbers. To animating the loss, so readers can apply their own imaginations, so we can understand the incomprehensible. It is a collection of fragments of lives since October 7 2023, squeezed into expressive pages. There is no “letter” more than six pages long. They are backed up against each other, permeating one another.
Each letter tells a different story and the same story. Each finds a detail that has no language: flowers in a girl’s hair, dreams of careers that will perhaps never be, the sounds of explosions. They are stories of the impossible search for bread, the longing for a bed and a pillow. And, as in Plestia’s account, they evoke the relentless buzz of the drones in the sky in Gaza: everywhere, all day, every day since October 7 2023. Like tinnitus, like torture.
The book begins with an effort to give names to numbers. On the first page, in the publisher’s note, we read that two of the authors, Sara al-Assar and Basma al-Hor, cannot be contacted. Because of communication lines and constant displacements, the details “may not reflect their current location or circumstances”. Authors may have died or been further displaced. Communication towers are destroyed. Tents are moved as people are moved on. Tents are destroyed.
In Plestia’s accounts, there are displacements to safe zones that then become unsafe, so they move again and again – until the only choice is tents, often without food or blankets. She describes seeing 33,000 people in a displacement shelter, this number increasing daily. Just as numbers are not people, tents are not homes. In Letters from Gaza, the displaced tents are character, metaphor and reality.
The stories are different, as are the deaths and losses within them, but these painful accounts help explain each other. The personal stories help animate words like displacement, refugee camp, genocide, so they do not fall into the pile of legal terms disconnected from names.
But after the United Nations declarations in the opening pages, we hear no more of law – and little of justice. As Palestinian human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani said: Gaza is in danger of becoming “the graveyard of international law”. What is left are stories. The short stories, poems and brief accounts are packaged so they do not ask too much of the reader – just enough to provoke tears, and perhaps donations. Many readers will feel some of the helplessness in these pages.
There are stories of hunger; the loss of grandmothers and children. I cried many times reading this book, but the next story would quickly arrive and sometimes bring relief. There is something sad, but ordinary, about details like a cat who finds a tent too hot. Unlike Plestia’s clear analysis and summation of the genocide in Gaza, the politics of this book are comparably quiet. Not absent, but quiet. The word genocide is mentioned four times, “Holocaust” only once. (I counted.)
In Letters from Gaza, no one says Israel, only “the occupiers”. Husam Maarouf writes, “we no longer want anything from you […] Only to die in safety.” His entry is dated March 1 2024; he may well be dead. Batool Abu Akleen makes simple requests of the reader (or perhaps of God): “I want a grave, I don’t want my corpse to rot in the open road.” But the book seems to intentionally not accuse. We are told:
this is not a book about war. It is a book about human souls that strive to avoid being hunted down by war. It is about how innocents are forced to learn how to survive when everything around them is about killing, destruction and death.
But the accusation is there. How could it not be? Against Israel as occupier and aggressor – and the reader as bystander.
Accusation sometimes comes embedded in questions. “Is one person’s pain greater than another’s?” asks Gaza poet and teacher Doha Kahlout. This question resonates with one inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial Tree in Hungary: “Whose agony is greater than mine?”
When comparing agony, only one can live
Jewish author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, writing on Palestine and Israeli peace struggles, cautions against pitting stories from Israel and Palestine against each other, such that “only one can live”. Only one story, one narrative, one version of pain and loss.
Holding multiple stories of suffering in mind is very difficult: for the survivor, for the listener and even for the psychoanalyst. Many survivors suffer symptoms of trauma that reduce the world to interpretation through their experience of its painful histories.
In Eyes of Gaza, writing from Melbourne, Plestia shows a moment of this:
On the train home, I see a lady with a suitcase, and the first thing that I think of is displacement, imagining how everyone in Gaza carries their whole life in their bag […] Then the announcement: Next Stop […] And I’m snapped back into reality.
In this moment, the suitcase is only read through the lens of the past. It’s what is described colloquially as living in the past – a type of banal flashback, often a symptom of trauma. But when pain colonises bodies and narratives, recognising the pain of others is difficult to see. It may be impossible to see the experiences of the other’s world through any other lens than one’s own pain. Whose agony is greater than mine? is a competitive statement, not a question.
In the war of greater pain, an Israeli child in fear may be read against a Palestinian child enduring the loss of their limbs and their whole family. Only one (story) can live.
To hold two competing stories of pain, loss and agony in mind requires a feat of mental health endurance few are capable of: the Nelson Mandelas of this world. Working in the field of transitional justice, I have met a few.
Most have experienced great loss and know there is no comparison at the level of agony. They resist “the repetitive thud of referentiality” because it drowns out conversation, annihilating curiosity and empathy alike. They know all stories must have their time.
In October 2023, “liberal” London Jewish journalist and filmmaker Michael Segalov, once a “staunch defender of Israel”, tried to hold competing stories. He wrote about seeing Israel–Palestine through the lens of “fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear”.
Early Jewish settlers were not “imperial soldiers”, but “a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust”, he points out. But by 1948, the year after the UN resolution that called for Palestine to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, “more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, 15,000 killed”.
“While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home,” he wrote, “within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority.” In 1922, in the first census carried out under the British Mandate, the population of Palestine was 763,550: 89% were Arabs and 11% Jewish.
As Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj stressed while talking with Jessica Benjamin during peace negotiations, we must “stand simultaneously for the recognition of all injuries, while at the same time being clear that one side was coming from the position of Occupied and less powerful, the other Occupying and dominating”. Stories matter, politics matters.
And some stories take more time than others – some stories are given more time than others. This is a matter of politics and practicality.
Surviving the October 7 attacks
Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border; they are now internal refugees in northern Israel. He and his partner settled in Nahal Oz and raised a family. On the morning of October 7, they heard the sounds of the attack and raced to their safe room, spending the next five hours in there trying to keep their children – Galia, 3 years old and Carmel, aged 19 months – quiet.
Amir Tibon and his family survived the Oct 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border. Scribe
In discussing Tibon’s book, Gates of Gaza: a story of betrayal, survival and hope in Israel’s borderlands, I risk comparison and competition. Sometimes stories speak to each other, even when they speak to the silences. I resisted this one’s proximity to the above stories. But that is also to resist reality. It is to resist the importance of difference. All experience is valuable, but sometimes comparison reveals inequality.
Plestia knows this well. The survivor guilt of which she writes is part of the hierarchy experienced by all survivors of mass violence. That she and her family survived, that she migrated, is to feel guilt for escaping the fate of those who have been starved, tortured, obliterated.
Yehiel Dinur spoke from this position of guilt on the stand in 1962, saying he was speaking for those who died in Auschwitz. In the face of others’ death, all survivors struggle with justification. Competition is one form of this: Whose agony is greater than mine?
Tibon was a resident of Nahal Oz, having moved there with his partner because of its beauty, nine years before October 7. He describes it as having “a strong, left-wing, liberal political leaning”, and says residents of the border areas are “some of the strongest advocates of Israeli–Palestinian peace”. He writes that the kibbutz movement has, “for decades”, been in favour of “a compromise that would allow Jews and Arabs to share this land, with agreed-upon borders – borders that, of course, would have to be protected”.
In the 300-plus pages, Tibon describes the morning of October 7 in detail. The fear of his children and his partner as they stayed quiet in a safe room for some five hours. The sounds of shootings and desperation as he read pleas and accounts from other residents on the community’s WhatsApp group as the attacks unfolded.
The narrative of that morning is interspersed with accounts from people who survived in his community: his parents, some of those who attended the Nova music festival, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The narrative moves between that morning and a history of the kibbutz, framed in a history of Israel’s political lurching between right and left – and back again – over the 87 years since its recognition as a nation state by the UN.
In one reading, this is a history book of 87 years – not just an account of five hours. It is a particular history.
The narrative of those five hours is intense, peppered with stories of his parents racing from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz. Tibon’s father is a crucial figure in this narrative. A retired IDF general with “more than three decades” in the military, including combat experience, he seemingly has the capacity to assess situations and navigate a war zone with skill. It is his father who finally knocks on the “safe room” door in the afternoon (about halfway through the book). Tibon reports hearing “a strong bang and a familiar voice” from inside.
The father, we could say, is the embodiment of Tibon’s feelings for – and belief in – a strong, kind Israel. An army general, protective husband and grandfather (in Hebrew, Saba), he is longed for by Tibon’s young children, who “loved their grandparents”, particularly his father, “who pampered and spoiled them at every opportunity”. This grandfather’s presence at the safe-room door allows the family to re-enter the safety of Israel.
If the father is Israel, the sleeping children are its citizens. Carmel and Galia slept through much of the conflict, barely awakened by gunshots. They were rushed to the safe room the moment the shots were heard.
Once you know the stories from Letters of Gaza, it is hard not to compare this to the waking of Mohammed Al Zaqzooq’s three boys – Baraa, Jawad and Basil – to the sound of “Huge missiles in large numbers making terrifying sounds” and the need to flee. Not least, because Amir’s children were barely awakened by shots outside. Their safe room kept the noise muffled and the danger at bay. This is not to say their fear won’t impact on their actions later. Transgenerational trauma has a way of influencing the future.
Mohammed’s children moved quickly, within half an hour, to a refugee camp. At the time of writing, they remain there. His story is five pages long. Amir’s is 300-plus. Amir, an author and award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s liberal paper of record, has access to a computer, electricity and the security required to think, research and write.
But why does he write this book? In the acknowledgements, he describes himself as needing to be encouraged, unsure of the worth of telling the story of his five hours in the safe room. But he describes much more than five hours.
His book is a story of Israel – and particularly, of its informal settlements. In the early 1950s, he writes, 20 young soldiers – ten men and ten women – were taken by bus to this site to settle it. Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza, it has “agricultural lands which literally touch the border fence”. The kibbutzim functioned as a kind of human border, with increased populations: the 20 broke into couples, then families. Within a few years, they had a small farming community, with a person devoted to security.
Empty land?
This is not a story of military invasion and colonisation, however. It is a story of settlement on land represented as empty. We know this story well in Australia. In this context, it can be a plea for a recognition of innocence.
As Amir tells it, there were no Palestinians in the place before: no one was removed or relocated. Only in passing does he mention the Bedouin who passed through the area before.
In Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have, in different ways, explained lands do not need to be sites of permanent agriculture to be crucial to the survival of some groups or nations. Borders and settlements can disturb land, law and life regardless of whether houses are demolished or not.
The beauty of Nahal Oz, Amir writes, was due to its access to water and its site on fertile land, where trees provided shelter and probably food. Its loss was likely no small thing to people who required sustenance and shelter as they moved through. After the settlement, they no longer could.
After Israel set up its border there, only Israelis could pass through without being subject to the checkpoints that are well documented sites of humiliation and arbitrary punishment for Palestinians.
By 1997, the walls went up near Nahal Oz. But the walls to shield Nahal Oz from Gaza – and particularly from its people – were not enough. Amir describes the elaborate and extensive tunnels used by Palestinian soldiers to enter Israel (he calls them “terrorists” and “suicide bombers”).
The tunnels became the problem of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. To deal with this problem, the concrete walls were built, reaching 160 metres underground, preventing any permeation. Then, on October 7, the walls could not provide security. Then, there was only the safe room.
The safe room is an obvious metaphor in this book. It is Israel under attack. One of these rooms has been built into every house in the kibbutz, so families can be safe from the mortar attacks from Gaza – a regular occurrence since the 1987 Intifada.
Plestia tells us that the materials for a safe room are not allowed to be brought into Gaza. There are no safe rooms there. Tibon doesn’t mention this; maybe he doesn’t even know this fact, which is its own symptom of the political and social environment in Israel.
He does describe “the unimaginable destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza in the aftermath” of the October 7 attacks. He is critical of this “destruction”, though he does not use the term genocide. (There are those who wait for the International Court of Justice to decide if it was more than “plausible” – and there are those who cannot wait.)
Tibon is critical of Israel’s right wing, which cultivates war. He wants peace. But peace here is its own violence.
Like the rhetoric of reconciliation in South Africa, calls for peace can do violence to historical experiences of injustice. There, reconciliation discourse has been criticised, along with its apolitical leanings. Reconciliation in South Africa has largely meant people subject to historical injustices must reconcile themselves to their losses and their reality.
A story attributed to Father Mxolisi Mapanbani, of Tom and Bernard and the bicycle, has been used many times to critique “reconciliation” rhetoric in South Africa. It is helpful here.
Tom and Bernard are friends and live opposite each other. One day, Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle. Every day, Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After some time, Tom went up to Bernard and said, “Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.” Bernard said, “Okay, let’s reconcile – what about the bicycle?” “Oh no,” said Tom, “I’m not talking about the bicycle, I’m talking about reconciliation.”
In the Australian context, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008, human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma described this form of reconciliation as the “unfinished business of justice”.
The apology might have offered some form of acknowledgement, and gone some way toward creating a shared reality on the injustices of the past, but while justice remains unfinished, many are not at peace.
Amir wants peace. He doesn’t want to live in a safe house – but he wants his house and his family to live securely in Nahal Oz. He wants Palestinians to be at peace with this reality.
The word “peace”, like “reconciliation”, does a lot of work to present Tibon on the side of “the good”. Just like, in Letters From Gaza, the relative lack of the word “genocide” keeps the accusation at bay and politics in the background – and it keeps its calls for recognition of suffering at the fore. In this book about “human souls”, the editors call for a recognition of shared humanity.
Tibon is careful not to group “terrorists” under that name – though he uses a Hebrew word that means exactly that. (Mehablim, he calls the people who attacked Nahal Oz.) Why? Though he writes in English and undoubtably spoke Hebrew throughout the siege, why does he speak of the Palestinian attackers as Mehablim?
The answer might be found in the fact no Palestinian name, beyond former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, appears in these pages. He has interviewed many people, but none of them are Palestinian. Their narrative remains outside his text.
We must find the humanity of the Palestinians in other stories.
If the safe room is a metaphor for Israel, the tent – as described in so many of the stories in Letters from Gaza, and in Plestia’s account of those 45 days – is a metaphor for the lives of Palestinians in Israel, and perhaps the world’s eyes.
A tent is permeable, fragile, disposable. Bodies within it are subject to displacement, starvation, genocide. Every house in Tibon’s kibbutz has a safe room. There have been at least seven bombings of tent camps in Gaza. How can you not do the maths?
Stories, awakening and halting the bombs
Stories demand people are not reduced to mathematics. They place the reader in the scene and plead for identification and understanding. Writing on the Eichmann trial, Holocaust historian and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas describes “the words of the survivors that built a bridge from the accused to the world of ashes”.
Afrikaaner journalist and poet Antje Krog writes, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, “In all the stories a landscape is created.”
But this landscape, if it is to have any effect, must be mapped across previous perceptions. For that, it must do damage to the secure world – the pre-existing imaginative landscape – of the reader or of the listener.
Moral philosopher Rai Gaita describes remorse as “a dying to the world”: a little death is required of the listener or reader who is implicated as a bystander, encountering the suffering of others. A death of complacency. A small disintegration that may mean our own peaceful worlds are no longer tenable.
This is why stories, particularly, are mobilised in truth commissions. They animate the impossible numbers – the dry policies and repetitive loss – with scenes of humanity. Testimony – personal stories – link the words (genocide, massacre, terror) to an imagination of a scene, a person, a child or a parent. To people we can identify or empathise with.
Like the two worlds connected in Ahmed Mortaja’s poem, Hubb and Harb, In Letters from Gaza:
tonight I will fall asleep telling myself that the noise outside is fireworks, a celebration and nothing more.
That the frightened screams of children are the gleeful terror of suspense before something long-awaited, like Eid.
Tonight, I will fall asleep scrolling through the photos on my phone, telling myself that my evening with friends wasn’t that great – really, I was bored – so now I’m skimming through memories to pass the time.
If empathy were all it took to halt the counting of the 646 days in Gaza, then Letters from Gaza and Eyes on Gaza would achieve their aim. But empathy rarely produces political change.
Stories – the 50 voices in Letters from Gaza, accounts like Plestia’s – make us cry, perhaps make us donate, but they do not halt the bombs. This, and more, might be what Yehiel Dinur meant when he asked for the world to “awaken”, that it change, that it stop what Tibon calls “the unimaginable destruction”.
Until then, Dinur pledged to remain Katzetnik 135633. Until then, we will likely only know “Genocide Plestia”: “it’s funny how genocide changes a person”.
Juliet Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The greenhouse effect was discovered more than 150 years ago and the first scientific paper linking carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with climate change was published in 1896.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists could definitively detect the effect of human activities on the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 1956, United States scientist Charles Keeling chose Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano for the site of a new atmospheric measuring station. It was ideal, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at high altitude away from the confounding influence of population centres.
Data collected by Mauna Loa from 1958 onward let us clearly see the evidence of climate change for the first time. The station samples the air and measures global CO₂ levels. Charles Keeling and his successors used this data to produce the famous Keeling curve – a graph showing carbon dioxide levels increasing year after year.
But this precious record is in peril. US President Donald Trump has decided to defund the observatory recording the data, as well as the widespread US greenhouse gas monitoring network and other climate measuring sites.
We can’t solve the existential problem of climate change if we can’t track the changes. Losing Mauna Loa would be a huge loss to climate science. If it shuts, other observatories such as Australia’s Kennaook/Cape Grim will become even more vital.
The first year of measurements at Mauna Loa revealed something incredible. For the first time, the clear annual cycle in atmospheric CO₂ was visible. As plants grow in summer, they absorb CO₂ and draw it out of the atmosphere. As they die and decay in winter, the CO₂ returns to the atmosphere. It’s like Earth is breathing.
Most land on Earth is in the Northern Hemisphere, which means this cycle is largely influenced by the northern summer and winter.
The annual cycle of carbon dioxide is largely due to plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere.
It only took a few years of measurements before an even more profound pattern emerged.
Year on year, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were relentlessly rising. The natural in-out cycle continued, but against a steady increase.
Scientists would later figure out that the ocean and land together were absorbing almost half of the CO₂ produced by humans. But the rest was building up in the atmosphere.
Crucially, isotopic measurements meant scientists could be crystal clear about the origin of the extra carbon dioxide. It was coming from humans, largely through burning fossil fuels.
Mauna Loa has now been collecting data for more than 65 years. The resulting Keeling curve graph is the most iconic demonstration of how human activities are collectively affecting the planet.
When the last of the Baby Boomer generation were being born in the 1960s, CO₂ levels were around 320 parts per million. Now they’re over 420 ppm. That’s a level unseen for at least three million years. The rate of increase far exceeds any natural change in the past 50 million years.
The reason carbon dioxide is so important is that this molecule has special properties. Its ability to trap heat alongside other greenhouse gases means Earth isn’t a frozen rock. If there were no greenhouse gases, Earth would have an average temperature of -18°C, rather than the balmy 14°C under which human civilisation emerged.
The greenhouse effect is essential to life. But if there are too many gases, the planet becomes dangerously hot. That’s what’s happening now – a very sharp increase in gases exceptionally good at trapping heat even at low concentrations.
Greenhouse gases are the reason Earth isn’t an icebox. But the rate humans are emitting them is leading to very rapid changes. Reid Wiseman/NASA, CC BY-NC-ND
Keeping our eyes open
It’s not enough to know CO₂ is climbing. Monitoring is essential. That’s because as the planet warms, both the ocean and the land are expected to take up less and less of humanity’s emissions, letting still more carbon accumulate in the air.
Continuous, high-precision monitoring is the only way to spot if and when that happens.
This monitoring provides the vital means to verify whether new climate policies are genuinely influencing the atmospheric CO₂ curve rather than just being touted as effective. Monitoring will also be vital to capture the moment many have been working towards when government policies and new technologies finally slow and eventually stop the increase in CO₂.
The US administration’s plans to defund key climate monitoring systems and roll back green energy initiatives presents a global challenge.
Without these systems, it will be harder to forecast the weather and give seasonal updates. It will also be harder to forecast dangerous extreme weather events.
Scientists in the US and globally have sounded the alarm about what the closure would do to science. This is understandable. Stopping data climate collection is like breaking a thermometer because you don’t like knowing you’ve got a fever.
If the US follows through, other countries will need to carefully reconsider their commitments to gathering and sharing climate data.
Australia has a long record of direct atmospheric CO₂ measurement, which began in 1976 at the Kennaook/Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station in north-west Tasmania. This and other climate observations will only become more valuable if Mauna Loa is lost.
It remains to be seen how Australia’s leaders respond to the US retreat from climate monitoring. Ideally, Australia would not only maintain but strategically expand its monitoring systems of atmosphere, land and oceans.
Alex Sen Gupta receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Katrin Meissner receives funding from the Minderoo Foundation and has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.
Timothy Raupach receives funding from QBE Insurance, Guy Carpenter, and the Australian Research Council.
The demise of one of Hong Kong’s last major pro-democracy parties, the League of Social Democrats, is the latest blow to the city’s crumbling democratic credentials.
The league is the third major opposition party to disband this year. The announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary this week of the national security law, which was imposed by Beijing to suppress pro-democracy activity.
The loss of this grassroots party, historically populated by bold and colourful characters, vividly illustrates the dying of the light in once-sparkling Hong Kong.
The city is now greyed and labouring under a repressive internal security regime that has crushed civil society’s freedoms and democratic ambitions.
Authoritarian crackdown
The world witnessed Hong Kong at its brightest during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters camped out on city streets for several months.
We also saw the brutal sequel in 2019, when paramilitarised police sought to put down further civil unrest and protesters fought back.
Since then, “lawfare” has been the preferred strategy of China’s national government and its Hong Kong satellite. The new approach has included a vast security apparatus and aggressive prosecutions.
When Beijing intervened in July 2020, it was nominally about national security. In reality, the new law was designed and used to bring Hongkongers to heel.
Civil freedoms were further curtailed by a home-grown security law, introduced last year to fill the gaps.
International standards such as the Johannesburg Principles, endorsed by the United Nations, require national security laws to be compatible with democratic principles, not to be used to eliminate democratic activity.
Prison or exile
The League of Social Democrats occupied the populist left of the pro-democracy spectrum. It stood apart from contemporaries such as the Democratic Party and the Civic Party, which were dominated by professionals and elites, and have since been disbanded.
The League was most notably represented by the likes of “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung– known for his Che Guevara t-shirts and banana-throwing – and broadcaster and journalism academic Raymond Wong Yuk-man, also known as “Mad Dog”.
Despite their rambunctious styles, these men had real political credentials and were repeatedly elected to legislative office. But Leung is now imprisoned for subversion, while Wong has left for Taiwan.
Leung Kwok-hung was sentenced to subversion under the national security law. Edwin Kwok/Shutterstock
Party leaders such as Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit and Figo Chan Ho-wun were also prominent within the Civil Human Rights Front. It was responsible for the annual July 1 protest march that attracted hundreds of thousands of people every year. The front is yet another pro-democracy organisation that has dissolved.
Sham and Chan have been jailed for subversion and unlawful assembly under the colonial-era Public Order Ordinance, which has been used to prosecute hundreds of activists.
Zero tolerance
The demise of these diverse organisations are not natural occurrences, but the result of a deliberate authoritarian programme.
Under China, Hong Kong’s political system has been half democratic at best. But it now resembles something from the darkest days of colonialism, with pre-approved candidates, appointed legislators and zero tolerance for critical voices.
Activists and watchdogs are stymied by the national security law. It criminalises – among other things – engagement and lobbying with international organisations and foreign governments.
Then there are the millions of ordinary Hongkongers whose dreams of a liberal and self-governing region under mainland China’s umbrella – as promised in the lead up to the 1997 handover – have been shattered.
But countless ex-protesters remain in the city, where it is impermissible to speak critically of power, and where mandatory patriotic education may ensure new generations will never even think to speak up.
Much blame lies with the British, who failed to institute democratic elections until the last gasp of their rule in Hong Kong. This was despite the colony tolerating liberalism and habit-forming democratic activity over a longer period.
Now China, after almost three decades in charge, has responded to democratic challenges by defaulting to authoritarian control. Hong Kong can only be grateful it has been spared a Tiananmen-style incident. Nor has it experienced the full genocidal extent of the so-called “peripheries playbook” Beijing has used in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Turmoil and authoritarian swings in the United States and elsewhere give China an opportunity to present as a voice of reason on the international stage.
But we should not forget its commitment to repressive politics at home, nor what its support of belligerent regimes such as Putin’s Russia might mean for Taiwan, the region and the world.
Above all, we should not forget the people, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, who made it their life’s work to achieve democracy only to be rewarded with prison or exile.
Brendan Clift does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Reuben Rose-Redwood, Professor of Geography and Associate Dean Academic, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Victoria
On March 25, 2025, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, was walking in a Boston suburb when she was detained by plain-clothed federal agents. A video of the encounter went viral, sparking fear and outrage in the United States and beyond.
Since March, a growing number of international students in the U.S. have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated for everything from engaging in political activism to minor infractions such as traffic tickets.
The tightening of restrictions is part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to impose its political will on colleges and universities. These governmental interventions have caused deep concern about the future of higher education, democracy, scientific research and the rule of law in the U.S.
Many of the revoked student visas were restored in late April as a result of nearly 100 federal lawsuits. But the Trump administration continues to target international students for deportation.
Boston Globe video: Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk detained by immigration authorities.
Other international students, scholars and permanent residents have also been detained for participating in pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.
Just before the Gaza campus encampment movement arose in April 2024, we published an edited book, International Student Activism and the Politics of Higher Education. Our book brought together interdisciplinary scholars to examine how international students have engaged in political activism and advocacy through case studies.
This leads us to consider what lessons the history of international student politics might hold for addressing current challenges.
Host and home country relations
Although the backlash against international student activism has captured headlines recently, there’s a long history of international students participating in political life during their studies abroad.
These political activities have ranged from protests against tuition hikes to involvement in lobbying and demonstrations related to global geopolitical issues.
The first key lesson we have learned is that the very presence of international students on university campuses is a political matter that depends on a measure of good will between the host and home countries.
For instance, when diplomatic relations between Canada and Saudi Arabia broke down in 2018 due to a dispute over alleged Saudi human rights violations, the Saudi government ordered its students to leave Canada and study elsewhere. Despite this order, thousands of Saudi students chose to stay in Canada even after Saudi authorities withdrew government scholarships to support them.
Political courage in face of risks
A second lesson is that international student activists have often demonstrated extraordinary political courage when the risks of government retaliation are high.
After the First World War, Korean nationals studying in the U.S. took inspiration from the American Revolution to advocate for an independent Korea. At the time, participation in the independence movement was punishable by death in Japanese-occupied Korea.
Following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Chinese students and scholars in the U.S. also protested against political repression in China at great risk of persecution if they returned to their home country.
Building political solidarity
A third important lesson is that the international student experience offers an opportunity for students to build political solidarity across national divisions.
The international solidarity movement for Palestine is a prime example.
During the 1960s, support for Palestine was widespread among international students of different nationalities in strongholds of student politics such as Paris. In recent years, international students have forged new alliances through the pro-Palestinian protest movement against the Gaza war on campuses around the world.
International students have engaged in diverse forms of “front-stage” and “back-stage” political action in different contexts.
Front-stage political activism includes participation in protests, demonstrations, occupations and other political acts that are publicly visible.
Some protests are responses to specific policy changes at colleges and universities. At the University of Victoria, where we both work, international students protested tuition increases in 2019, blockading administrative buildings and occupying the Senate chambers.
Other front-stage political actions — such as the 2024 Gaza campus protests — are part of global movements.
But front-stage protests are only half the story. They often ebb and flow throughout the school year and come with significant risks due to the precarious status of international students as visa holders.
Given the heightened risks under the Trump administration, some international students are advocating for more strategic back-stage political activism to minimize public attention.
In a recent editorial, Janhavi Munde, an international student at Wesleyan University, noted that within the current political environment, “it might be smarter and safer to create change in the background” in order to “provide more scope for impactful activism — as opposed to getting arrested the day of your first on-campus protest.”
Strengthening democratic culture
The current debate over international student activism in the U.S. raises broader questions about the very purpose of higher education in democratic societies.
When asked at a news conference why Öztürk, the Turkish student at Tufts University, was detained, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that “we gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
This narrow understanding of higher education reduces the richness of the educational experience — where learning occurs both within and beyond the classroom — to a one-dimensional focus on schooling to receive a credential.
One of the main aims of higher education in democracies is to foster critical thinking and civic engagement. When international students actively participate in campus political life, this strengthens the democratic culture of higher education and society.
More than a century ago, American philosopher John Dewey observed in Democracy and Education that education is essential to striving for the democratic ideal. He argued that “democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living.” For Dewey, education could foster democracy through “the breaking down of those barriers of class, race and national territory.”
Equal dignity of all people
As geographers, we take inspiration from Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin’s classic 1885 essay where he observed that, in a:
“time of wars, of national self-conceit, of national jealousies and hatreds … geography must be — in so far as the school may do anything to counterbalance hostile influences — a means of dissipating these prejudices and of creating other feelings more worthy of humanity.”
When international students such as Öztürk urge us to “affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people,” they are displaying political courage by embodying the ideals of freedom and democracy at a time when these founding principles of the U.S. are increasingly under threat.
Reuben Rose-Redwood has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
CindyAnn Rose-Redwood has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
Canada faces a massive shortage of physicians. According to recent reports, Canadians require about 23,000 family doctors to meet current and emerging needs.
In the absence of effective solutions, mayors and municipal councils across the country are competing with each other to entice doctors to their communities.
It seems insurmountable, but options do exist and, no doubt, multiple approaches will be needed. What’s possible?
My clinical, administrative and educational roles over the years have provided an opportunity to work within and examine the doctor “pipeline” from multiple perspectives. There’s a disconnect between that pipeline and the urgent and growing need for doctors, which was a major motivation for my book The Doctors We Need: Imagining a New Path for Physician Recruitment, Training, and Support. Based on all this, at least seven approaches seem possible. All have their pros and cons.
In Canada, doctors are in demand and enjoy an excellent standard of living. Immigration to Canada, if offered, would likely be seen as a very attractive option.
Option 2: Short-track qualification of foreign-trained physicians already in Canada
Many foreign-trained doctors have already immigrated to Canada and are working at non-medical jobs, hoping to gain residency status that would allow them to undertake examinations or complete their training.
This approach would have many of the same disadvantages as above, but at least ensures these individuals already have some familiarity with Canadian work environment and a better awareness of the expectations facing physicians.
Option 3: Repatriate Canadians who have trained (or are training) abroad
It’s generally acknowledged that there are at least as many Canadians studying medicine outside Canada as within. These are people who were unsuccessful or chose not to engage in our highly competitive admission processes that annually turn away thousands of highly qualified students. They tend to enrol in well-established medical schools in countries such as Australia, Ireland and England.
Although no rigorous analysis or statistics are available, it’s increasingly recognized that the majority remain and practise in the countries where they trained, having established relationships and support structures. In fact, many are actively recruited to take up much needed primary care positions in those countries.
Attracting them back to Canada will require a targeted recruitment strategy and expansion of available post-graduate training positions. All that being said, this is potentially a workforce already prepared and willing to address Canadian health-care needs.
Option 4: Increase the efficiency and capacity of our current physicians
All doctors, particularly family physicians, face a burden of paperwork and administrative tasks that drastically reduces their capacity to assess and treat patients. Developing innovative processes and collaborations that allow them to focus their time on direct patient care will expand their impact and reduce the number of physicians required.
Option 5: Supplement doctor roles with non-physicians
We’re already seeing this strategy play out with nurses and pharmacists providing some primary care that was previously provided only by physicians.
This approach has many merits and can allow physicians to concentrate on key essential roles, as for Option 4, above. The keys will be to ensure that the health-care teams co-ordinate and integrate their work effectively, and that all essential services are provided.
Option 6: Collaborate with high-quality medical schools outside Canada to facilitate entry and training of willing and qualified Canadian students
If we’re not able to train sufficient physicians through our own medical school structure, we could partner with foreign, well-functioning medical schools to promote access for Canadians who wish to return to Canada and engage the types of practices that are in such demand.
This would require identifying appropriate schools and developing partnerships ensuring that the admission standards, curriculum and clinical training meet Canadian standards.
Option 7: Increase medical school admissions and training in Canada
The most obvious and intuitively appealing approach would be to simply ramp up the training pipeline within Canada’s medical schools. After all, we have excellent schools and certainly no shortage of very willing and capable applicants.
There are currently 18 medical schools in Canada. Plans are in place to expand to 20 schools over the next few years, but this will not be effective unless we change the current processes of training.
The supply of family doctors provided by our current admission and training processes falls far short of our needs. Recent studies also demonstrate that graduates from our current training programs are increasingly turning away from the comprehensive and community-based practices so much in need.
Consequently, even a dramatic expansion within the current training paradigm will fall far short of addressing our needs. To be effective, expansion must occur in conjunction with new approaches to admissions and training.
The major drawback of this approach, of course, is that it will take time to even begin to address the shortfall. However, it addresses the fundamental problem most directly and establishes a framework for ongoing sustainability.
While there is no single perfect solution, there are a number of approaches, all of which have potential to relieve Canada’s medical workforce crisis. It’s time to explore and pursue them all. It’s time to develop and empower a multi-disciplinary, pan-Canadian panel to decide which mix of the options will build the reliable, sustainable physician workforce that Canada needs and deserves.
Anthony Sanfilippo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Reuben Rose-Redwood, Professor of Geography and Associate Dean Academic, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Victoria
On March 25, 2025, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, was walking in a Boston suburb when she was detained by plain-clothed federal agents. A video of the encounter went viral, sparking fear and outrage in the United States and beyond.
Since March, a growing number of international students in the U.S. have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated for everything from engaging in political activism to minor infractions such as traffic tickets.
The tightening of restrictions is part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to impose its political will on colleges and universities. These governmental interventions have caused deep concern about the future of higher education, democracy, scientific research and the rule of law in the U.S.
Many of the revoked student visas were restored in late April as a result of nearly 100 federal lawsuits. But the Trump administration continues to target international students for deportation.
Boston Globe video: Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk detained by immigration authorities.
Other international students, scholars and permanent residents have also been detained for participating in pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.
Just before the Gaza campus encampment movement arose in April 2024, we published an edited book, International Student Activism and the Politics of Higher Education. Our book brought together interdisciplinary scholars to examine how international students have engaged in political activism and advocacy through case studies.
This leads us to consider what lessons the history of international student politics might hold for addressing current challenges.
Host and home country relations
Although the backlash against international student activism has captured headlines recently, there’s a long history of international students participating in political life during their studies abroad.
These political activities have ranged from protests against tuition hikes to involvement in lobbying and demonstrations related to global geopolitical issues.
The first key lesson we have learned is that the very presence of international students on university campuses is a political matter that depends on a measure of good will between the host and home countries.
For instance, when diplomatic relations between Canada and Saudi Arabia broke down in 2018 due to a dispute over alleged Saudi human rights violations, the Saudi government ordered its students to leave Canada and study elsewhere. Despite this order, thousands of Saudi students chose to stay in Canada even after Saudi authorities withdrew government scholarships to support them.
Political courage in face of risks
A second lesson is that international student activists have often demonstrated extraordinary political courage when the risks of government retaliation are high.
After the First World War, Korean nationals studying in the U.S. took inspiration from the American Revolution to advocate for an independent Korea. At the time, participation in the independence movement was punishable by death in Japanese-occupied Korea.
Following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Chinese students and scholars in the U.S. also protested against political repression in China at great risk of persecution if they returned to their home country.
Building political solidarity
A third important lesson is that the international student experience offers an opportunity for students to build political solidarity across national divisions.
The international solidarity movement for Palestine is a prime example.
During the 1960s, support for Palestine was widespread among international students of different nationalities in strongholds of student politics such as Paris. In recent years, international students have forged new alliances through the pro-Palestinian protest movement against the Gaza war on campuses around the world.
International students have engaged in diverse forms of “front-stage” and “back-stage” political action in different contexts.
Front-stage political activism includes participation in protests, demonstrations, occupations and other political acts that are publicly visible.
Some protests are responses to specific policy changes at colleges and universities. At the University of Victoria, where we both work, international students protested tuition increases in 2019, blockading administrative buildings and occupying the Senate chambers.
Other front-stage political actions — such as the 2024 Gaza campus protests — are part of global movements.
But front-stage protests are only half the story. They often ebb and flow throughout the school year and come with significant risks due to the precarious status of international students as visa holders.
Given the heightened risks under the Trump administration, some international students are advocating for more strategic back-stage political activism to minimize public attention.
In a recent editorial, Janhavi Munde, an international student at Wesleyan University, noted that within the current political environment, “it might be smarter and safer to create change in the background” in order to “provide more scope for impactful activism — as opposed to getting arrested the day of your first on-campus protest.”
Strengthening democratic culture
The current debate over international student activism in the U.S. raises broader questions about the very purpose of higher education in democratic societies.
When asked at a news conference why Öztürk, the Turkish student at Tufts University, was detained, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that “we gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
This narrow understanding of higher education reduces the richness of the educational experience — where learning occurs both within and beyond the classroom — to a one-dimensional focus on schooling to receive a credential.
One of the main aims of higher education in democracies is to foster critical thinking and civic engagement. When international students actively participate in campus political life, this strengthens the democratic culture of higher education and society.
More than a century ago, American philosopher John Dewey observed in Democracy and Education that education is essential to striving for the democratic ideal. He argued that “democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living.” For Dewey, education could foster democracy through “the breaking down of those barriers of class, race and national territory.”
Equal dignity of all people
As geographers, we take inspiration from Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin’s classic 1885 essay where he observed that, in a:
“time of wars, of national self-conceit, of national jealousies and hatreds … geography must be — in so far as the school may do anything to counterbalance hostile influences — a means of dissipating these prejudices and of creating other feelings more worthy of humanity.”
When international students such as Öztürk urge us to “affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people,” they are displaying political courage by embodying the ideals of freedom and democracy at a time when these founding principles of the U.S. are increasingly under threat.
Reuben Rose-Redwood has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
CindyAnn Rose-Redwood has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
Canada faces a massive shortage of physicians. According to recent reports, Canadians require about 23,000 family doctors to meet current and emerging needs.
In the absence of effective solutions, mayors and municipal councils across the country are competing with each other to entice doctors to their communities.
It seems insurmountable, but options do exist and, no doubt, multiple approaches will be needed. What’s possible?
My clinical, administrative and educational roles over the years have provided an opportunity to work within and examine the doctor “pipeline” from multiple perspectives. There’s a disconnect between that pipeline and the urgent and growing need for doctors, which was a major motivation for my book The Doctors We Need: Imagining a New Path for Physician Recruitment, Training, and Support. Based on all this, at least seven approaches seem possible. All have their pros and cons.
In Canada, doctors are in demand and enjoy an excellent standard of living. Immigration to Canada, if offered, would likely be seen as a very attractive option.
Option 2: Short-track qualification of foreign-trained physicians already in Canada
Many foreign-trained doctors have already immigrated to Canada and are working at non-medical jobs, hoping to gain residency status that would allow them to undertake examinations or complete their training.
This approach would have many of the same disadvantages as above, but at least ensures these individuals already have some familiarity with Canadian work environment and a better awareness of the expectations facing physicians.
Option 3: Repatriate Canadians who have trained (or are training) abroad
It’s generally acknowledged that there are at least as many Canadians studying medicine outside Canada as within. These are people who were unsuccessful or chose not to engage in our highly competitive admission processes that annually turn away thousands of highly qualified students. They tend to enrol in well-established medical schools in countries such as Australia, Ireland and England.
Although no rigorous analysis or statistics are available, it’s increasingly recognized that the majority remain and practise in the countries where they trained, having established relationships and support structures. In fact, many are actively recruited to take up much needed primary care positions in those countries.
Attracting them back to Canada will require a targeted recruitment strategy and expansion of available post-graduate training positions. All that being said, this is potentially a workforce already prepared and willing to address Canadian health-care needs.
Option 4: Increase the efficiency and capacity of our current physicians
All doctors, particularly family physicians, face a burden of paperwork and administrative tasks that drastically reduces their capacity to assess and treat patients. Developing innovative processes and collaborations that allow them to focus their time on direct patient care will expand their impact and reduce the number of physicians required.
Option 5: Supplement doctor roles with non-physicians
We’re already seeing this strategy play out with nurses and pharmacists providing some primary care that was previously provided only by physicians.
This approach has many merits and can allow physicians to concentrate on key essential roles, as for Option 4, above. The keys will be to ensure that the health-care teams co-ordinate and integrate their work effectively, and that all essential services are provided.
Option 6: Collaborate with high-quality medical schools outside Canada to facilitate entry and training of willing and qualified Canadian students
If we’re not able to train sufficient physicians through our own medical school structure, we could partner with foreign, well-functioning medical schools to promote access for Canadians who wish to return to Canada and engage the types of practices that are in such demand.
This would require identifying appropriate schools and developing partnerships ensuring that the admission standards, curriculum and clinical training meet Canadian standards.
Option 7: Increase medical school admissions and training in Canada
The most obvious and intuitively appealing approach would be to simply ramp up the training pipeline within Canada’s medical schools. After all, we have excellent schools and certainly no shortage of very willing and capable applicants.
There are currently 18 medical schools in Canada. Plans are in place to expand to 20 schools over the next few years, but this will not be effective unless we change the current processes of training.
The supply of family doctors provided by our current admission and training processes falls far short of our needs. Recent studies also demonstrate that graduates from our current training programs are increasingly turning away from the comprehensive and community-based practices so much in need.
Consequently, even a dramatic expansion within the current training paradigm will fall far short of addressing our needs. To be effective, expansion must occur in conjunction with new approaches to admissions and training.
The major drawback of this approach, of course, is that it will take time to even begin to address the shortfall. However, it addresses the fundamental problem most directly and establishes a framework for ongoing sustainability.
While there is no single perfect solution, there are a number of approaches, all of which have potential to relieve Canada’s medical workforce crisis. It’s time to explore and pursue them all. It’s time to develop and empower a multi-disciplinary, pan-Canadian panel to decide which mix of the options will build the reliable, sustainable physician workforce that Canada needs and deserves.
Anthony Sanfilippo 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.
Ancient wooden tools found at a site in Gantangqing in southwestern China are approximately 300,000 years old, new dating has shown. Discovered during excavations carried out in 2014–15 and 2018–19, the tools have now been dated by a team of archaeologists, geologists, chronologists (including me) and paleontologists.
The rare wooden tools were found alongside an assortment of animal and plant fossils and stone artifacts.
Taken together, the finds suggest the early humans at Gantangqing were surprisingly sophisticated woodworkers who lived in a rich tropical or subtropical environment where they subsisted by harvesting plants from a nearby lake.
The location of the Gantangqing site and excavation trenches. Liu et al. / Science
Why ancient wooden tools are so rare
Wood usually decomposes relatively rapidly due to microbial activity, oxidation, and weathering. Unlike stone or bone, it rarely survives more than a few centuries.
Wood can only survive for thousands of years or longer if it ends up buried in unusual conditions. Wood can last a long time in oxygen-free environments or extremely dry areas. Charred or fire-hardened wood is also more durable.
At Gantangqing, the wooden objects were excavated from low-oxygen clay-heavy layers of sediment formed on the ancient shoreline of Fuxian Lake.
Wooden implements are extremely rare from the Early Palaeolithic period (the first part of the “stone age” from around 3.3 million years ago until 300,000 years ago or so, in which our hominin ancestors first began to use tools). Indeed, wooden tools more than even 50,000 years old are virtually absent outside Africa and western Eurasia.
As a result, we may have a skewed understanding of Palaeolithic cultures. We may overemphasise the role of stone tools, for example, because they are what has survived.
What wooden tools were found at Gantangqing?
The new excavations at Gantangqing found 35 wooden specimens identified as artificially modified tools. These tools were primarily manufactured from pine wood, with a minority crafted from hardwoods.
Some of the tools had rounded ends, while others had chisel-like thin blades or ridged blades. Of the 35 tools, 32 show marks of intentional modification at their tips, working edges, or bases.
Two large digging implements were identified as heavy-duty digging sticks designed for two-handed use. These are unique forms of digging implements not documented elsewhere, suggesting localised functional adaptations. There were also four distinct hook-shaped tools — likely used for cutting roots — and a series of smaller tools for one-handed use.
Nineteen of the tools showed microscopic traces of scraping from shaping or use, while 17 exhibit deliberately polished surfaces. We also identified further evidence of intensive use, including soil residues stuck to tool tips, parallel grooves or streaks along working edges, and characteristic fracture wear patterns.
The tools from Gantangqing are more complete and show a wider range of functions than those found at contemporary sites such as Clacton in the UK and Florisbad in South Africa.
The team used several techniques to figure out the age of the wooden tools. There is no way to determine their age directly, but we can date the sediment in which they were found.
Using a technique called infrared stimulated luminescence, we analysed more than 10,000 individual grains of minerals from different layers. This showed the sediment was deposited roughly between 350,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Dating the different layers of sediment excavated at the site produced a detailed timeline. Liu et al. / Science
We also used different techniques to date a mammal tooth found in one of the layers to roughly 288,000 years old. This was consistent with the mineral results.
Next we used mathematical modelling to bring all the dating results together. Our model indicated that the layers containing stone tools and wooden implements date from 360–300,000 years ago to 290–250,000 years ago.
What was the environment like?
Our research indicates the ancient humans at Gantangqing inhabited a warm, humid, tropical or subtropical environment. Pollen extracted from the sediments reveals 40 plant families that confirm this climate.
Plant fossils further verify the presence of subtropical-to-tropical flora dominated by trees, lianas, shrubs and herbs. Wet-environment plants show the local surroundings were a lakeside or wetlands.
Animal fossils also fit this picture, including rhinoceros and other mammals, turtles and various birds. The ecosystem was likely a mosaic of grassland, thickets and forests. Evidence of diving ducks confirms the lake must have been at least 2–3 metres deep during human occupation.
The site contained evidence of plants such as storable pine nuts and hazelnuts, fruit trees such as kiwi, raspberry-like berries, grapes, edible herbs and fern fronds.
There were also aquatic plants that would have provided edible leaves, seeds, tubers and rhizomes. These were likely dug up from shallow mud near the shore, using wooden tools.
These findings suggest the Gantangqing hominins may have made expeditions to the lake shore, carrying purpose-made wooden digging sticks to harvest underground food sources. To do this, they would have had to anticipate seasonal plant distributions, know exactly what parts of different plants were edible, and produce specialised tools for different tasks.
Why the Gantangqing site is important
The wooden implements from Gantangqing represent the earliest known evidence for the use of digging sticks and for the exploitation of underground plant storage organs such as tubers within the Oriental biogeographic realm. Our discovery shows the use of sophisticated wood technology in a very different environmental context from what has been seen at sites of similar age in Europe and Africa.
The find significantly expands our understanding of early hominin woodworking capabilities.
The hominins who lived at Gantangqing appear to have lived a heavily plant-based subsistence lifestyle. This is in contrast to colder, more northern settings where tools of similar age have been found (such as Schöningen in Germany), where hunting large mammals was the key to survival.
The site also shows how important wood – and perhaps other organic materials – were to “stone age” hominins. These wooden artifacts show far more sophisticated manufacturing skill than the relative rudimentary stone tools found at sites of similar age across East and Southeast Asia.
The excavation, curation, and research of the Gantangqing site were supported by
National Cultural Heritage Administration (China), Yunnan Provincial Institute of
Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Yuxi Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism,
Chengjiang Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, Australian Research Council
(ARC) Discovery Projects, Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), National Natural
Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
The greenhouse effect was discovered more than 150 years ago and the first scientific paper linking carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with climate change was published in 1896.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists could definitively detect the effect of human activities on the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 1956, United States scientist Charles Keeling chose Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano for the site of a new atmospheric measuring station. It was ideal, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at high altitude away from the confounding influence of population centres.
Data collected by Mauna Loa from 1958 onward let us clearly see the evidence of climate change for the first time. The station samples the air and measures global CO₂ levels. Charles Keeling and his successors used this data to produce the famous Keeling curve – a graph showing carbon dioxide levels increasing year after year.
But this precious record is in peril. US President Donald Trump has decided to defund the observatory recording the data, as well as the widespread US greenhouse gas monitoring network and other climate measuring sites.
We can’t solve the existential problem of climate change if we can’t track the changes. Losing Mauna Loa would be a huge loss to climate science. If it shuts, other observatories such as Australia’s Kennaook/Cape Grim will become even more vital.
The first year of measurements at Mauna Loa revealed something incredible. For the first time, the clear annual cycle in atmospheric CO₂ was visible. As plants grow in summer, they absorb CO₂ and draw it out of the atmosphere. As they die and decay in winter, the CO₂ returns to the atmosphere. It’s like Earth is breathing.
Most land on Earth is in the Northern Hemisphere, which means this cycle is largely influenced by the northern summer and winter.
The annual cycle of carbon dioxide is largely due to plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere.
It only took a few years of measurements before an even more profound pattern emerged.
Year on year, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were relentlessly rising. The natural in-out cycle continued, but against a steady increase.
Scientists would later figure out that the ocean and land together were absorbing almost half of the CO₂ produced by humans. But the rest was building up in the atmosphere.
Crucially, isotopic measurements meant scientists could be crystal clear about the origin of the extra carbon dioxide. It was coming from humans, largely through burning fossil fuels.
Mauna Loa has now been collecting data for more than 65 years. The resulting Keeling curve graph is the most iconic demonstration of how human activities are collectively affecting the planet.
When the last of the Baby Boomer generation were being born in the 1960s, CO₂ levels were around 320 parts per million. Now they’re over 420 ppm. That’s a level unseen for at least three million years. The rate of increase far exceeds any natural change in the past 50 million years.
The reason carbon dioxide is so important is that this molecule has special properties. Its ability to trap heat alongside other greenhouse gases means Earth isn’t a frozen rock. If there were no greenhouse gases, Earth would have an average temperature of -18°C, rather than the balmy 14°C under which human civilisation emerged.
The greenhouse effect is essential to life. But if there are too many gases, the planet becomes dangerously hot. That’s what’s happening now – a very sharp increase in gases exceptionally good at trapping heat even at low concentrations.
Greenhouse gases are the reason Earth isn’t an icebox. But the rate humans are emitting them is leading to very rapid changes. Reid Wiseman/NASA, CC BY-NC-ND
Keeping our eyes open
It’s not enough to know CO₂ is climbing. Monitoring is essential. That’s because as the planet warms, both the ocean and the land are expected to take up less and less of humanity’s emissions, letting still more carbon accumulate in the air.
Continuous, high-precision monitoring is the only way to spot if and when that happens.
This monitoring provides the vital means to verify whether new climate policies are genuinely influencing the atmospheric CO₂ curve rather than just being touted as effective. Monitoring will also be vital to capture the moment many have been working towards when government policies and new technologies finally slow and eventually stop the increase in CO₂.
The US administration’s plans to defund key climate monitoring systems and roll back green energy initiatives presents a global challenge.
Without these systems, it will be harder to forecast the weather and give seasonal updates. It will also be harder to forecast dangerous extreme weather events.
Scientists in the US and globally have sounded the alarm about what the closure would do to science. This is understandable. Stopping data climate collection is like breaking a thermometer because you don’t like knowing you’ve got a fever.
If the US follows through, other countries will need to carefully reconsider their commitments to gathering and sharing climate data.
Australia has a long record of direct atmospheric CO₂ measurement, which began in 1976 at the Kennaook/Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station in north-west Tasmania. This and other climate observations will only become more valuable if Mauna Loa is lost.
It remains to be seen how Australia’s leaders respond to the US retreat from climate monitoring. Ideally, Australia would not only maintain but strategically expand its monitoring systems of atmosphere, land and oceans.
Alex Sen Gupta receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Katrin Meissner receives funding from the Minderoo Foundation and has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.
Timothy Raupach receives funding from QBE Insurance, Guy Carpenter, and the Australian Research Council.
In 1962, poet and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur took the stand in Jerusalem in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Dinur was a much-anticipated witness, bearing the audience’s hope this man, a poet, would be able to explain – to capture and to transmit – the experience of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust; that he could speak the unspeakable. Prosecutor Gideon Hausner hoped such a witness might “do justice to the six million personal tragedies”.
Dinur used the name Katzetnik 135633 in his writings, also translated as “Prisoner 135663”. On the stand, he said: “I believe wholeheartedly that I have to continue to bear this name until the world awakens.”
Awakening, understanding, empathy and change are the sentiments many survivors hope for, or ask for, during and after periods of trauma. The 20th century saw many of those pleas. The 21st century has done no better at honouring the promise, captured in the title of the 1984 Argentinian commission report on forced disappearances, Nunca Mas: never again. No matter how many such pleas appear before the courts, before the aggressors, before those in solidarity, the horrors of war, torture, starvation and genocide seem to happen again – and again.
Three recent books from the region where war was been raging since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, are part of these pleas.
Review: Eyes on Gaza – Plestia Alaqad (Macmillan), Letters from Gaza – edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq & Mahmoud Alshaer (Penguin), Gates of Gaza – Amir Tibon (Scribe)
Eyes on Gaza is an on-the-ground account of the death and destruction of the first 45 days of the war by now 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, who moved to Melbourne with her family in November 2023. Letters from Gaza is a collection of 50 stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers enduring the past 20 months. And Gates of Gaza is the story of Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, a resident of Nahal Oz, one of the border kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7.
Plestia Alaqad. Plestia
These are all first-person testimonies of experiences of being under attack, though those attacks differ. We might say they fit into the genre adopted in truth commissions, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: a response to the nation’s years of living under the apartheid laws, discarded when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994.
The commission was one effort to heal from this past. But, like the Eichmann trial, it needed stories to explain the histories of violence, and it needed the pain to be voiced to explain its impacts on communities, families and relationships.
The use of people’s narratives to “bear witness” to the complex layers of legally sanctioned and militarily executed pain, loss and the traumas they can produce, is sometimes effective in helping audiences understand them. The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 used this form to explain the incidence and impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous children by the Australian state. It was effective as one form of creating a shared reality for all in Australia, who then understood the term “stolen generations” and the pain, loss and genocidal intent to which this phrase refers.
More recently, the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing systemic injustices perpetrated against First Nations Peoples by colonisation, has also brought histories of loss, dispossession and abuse to light, using stories. Stories can make sense of the impact incurred through the intertwined web of policies, statistics, discrimination and quotidian violence at the hands of the state.
The work of testimony
The narratives in these books written since October 7 2023 are part of this genre of testimony or storytelling. But at least two of these books are not attempting to explain the past. They might be described better as pleas to stop what the International Court of Justice has called “a plausible genocide” happening in the present.
They are, in one reading, wishes for the world to understand the experience of pain, rage, loss, fear, distress and defeat that accompanies destruction and unbearable loss. A wish for the world to hear, or perhaps feel, the words on the page – and make the pain stop.
They wish the world would “awaken” to what is happening right now.
The dynamic of awakening is the stock in trade of truth commissions. One party testifies or speaks to an experience, and the audience wakes up to what has been happening. As a result, they either change or facilitate change. The truth, captured as testimony, is supposed to set people free. Not just the speaker, but the community of speakers weighed down by history – or by the struggles of the past or the present.
In legal forms the reason to speak is clear. The reason to speak in literature, biographies and works of nonfiction is less clear. What does the author want from us, the readers? But perhaps more importantly, what can we offer?
She wants the genocide to stop. She wants a free Palestine. She wants her home and her life back. The stories in this book show readers outside Gaza some of the life and death of those first six and a half weeks.
Her last entry before she leaves Gaza for Egypt – and then Australia – is dated Day 45. During those 45 days, she puts on a press helmet and jacket, which both give her protection and weigh her down. And then she speaks: to cameras, to followers, to anyone who will listen. Her social media feeds documenting the war gained worldwide attention, her Instagram following rising from around 3,700 to 4.1 million today.
There are too many deaths to be witnessed – by her and the reader. She describes genocide as an understatement for what is occurring in Gaza: “we lose more people than our hearts can handle”. She has seen so much death, heard so many screams. By day 30,
all you can hear is a voice crying for help from under the rubble. You turn your back and walk away, because there’s nothing you can do to help.
But Plestia’s project is more than documenting death. She is careful to show many aspects of life in Gaza. She shows how Palestinians retain relationships, family and pets. How a young boy just needs his “pot plant” from his destroyed house, under skies filled with drones and bombs. This is a plea for the genocide to stop, but it is also a celebration of being Palestinian. It is an homage to life in Gaza.
It is also a plea to see Palestinians as more than numbers – and more than how they are depicted by Israel.
“The world,” she says, “sometimes treats us like terrorists, trying to justify its complacency in allowing us to be massacred. And we know the perception, we read the propaganda just like everyone else. But the reality is that we’re the opposite.”
She describes gentle moments of love and care between her fellow journalists and the people they interview. The children they bring sweets for, the “bird lady” who renames her tortoise “Plestia” after her. Both Plestia the tortoise and the “bird lady” are now living in a tent. She speaks of the doctors who work tirelessly.
In the midst of brutal amputations and unimaginable burns, she recounts the care of a doctor giving cream for a skin rash that has tormented her, diagnosed as a product of her anxiety. Anxiety seems a gentle diagnosis for symptoms produced by witnessing and documenting such brutality.
Anxiety over her helplessness, perhaps, over the lack of sleep, of nourishing food: dwindling even in those first 45 days. Anxiety seems like a Western preoccupation, from this writing distance. What Plestia experiences seems more like layers of embodied distress. Her empathy allows her to feel, perhaps too much. Empathy can be an enemy.
Around page 100, she begins to deteriorate. “It’s funny how genocide changes a person,” she writes, describing herself as “Genocide Plestia”. She’s devastated, exhausted. She has lost hope. The journal entries are shorter, more repetitive.
They recite her helplessness with what Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, has called the “repetitive thud of referentiality”.
You feel Plestia’s effort to try to speak with some life in the pages, to use writing as a therapeutic tool. You wish it for her, but she has trouble summoning the energy, the life, any hope. As she poignantly quips: “Fake it till you make it doesn’t work during a Genocide”. What is there to say in such relentless days of loss?
You want Plestia to get up, you want a happy ending, for a conclusion to the painful story, but the problem is time. The reader’s time, the reality of time since she wrote her book.
Day 45, her last day in Gaza, is Monday November 20 2023. I read this book in June 2025, 646 days later – and it hasn’t stopped. When Plestia leaves Gaza and finally arrives here in Melbourne, the conditions she describes have been ongoing for more than 20 months. A recently released survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research estimates almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025, as a result of the war. And that was six months ago.
50 letters from Gaza
The numbers are a way of reducing the experience of grief, devastation, loss (and the viewer’s guilt) to simple digits. Digits have no face and no sound. This is helpful to viewers, but it does not do justice to the 84,000, as Gideon Hausner knew well. No one awakens by hearing the numbers. But they matter.
In Letters from Gaza, psychologist Ahmed Mortaja fears becoming a news story, “a dull number … I don’t want my name and my family name to be reduced to mere numbers, whether odd or even”.
This book, a fragmented collection of 50 poems, stories and accounts, is devoted to giving life to those numbers. To animating the loss, so readers can apply their own imaginations, so we can understand the incomprehensible. It is a collection of fragments of lives since October 7 2023, squeezed into expressive pages. There is no “letter” more than six pages long. They are backed up against each other, permeating one another.
Each letter tells a different story and the same story. Each finds a detail that has no language: flowers in a girl’s hair, dreams of careers that will perhaps never be, the sounds of explosions. They are stories of the impossible search for bread, the longing for a bed and a pillow. And, as in Plestia’s account, they evoke the relentless buzz of the drones in the sky in Gaza: everywhere, all day, every day since October 7 2023. Like tinnitus, like torture.
The book begins with an effort to give names to numbers. On the first page, in the publisher’s note, we read that two of the authors, Sara al-Assar and Basma al-Hor, cannot be contacted. Because of communication lines and constant displacements, the details “may not reflect their current location or circumstances”. Authors may have died or been further displaced. Communication towers are destroyed. Tents are moved as people are moved on. Tents are destroyed.
In Plestia’s accounts, there are displacements to safe zones that then become unsafe, so they move again and again – until the only choice is tents, often without food or blankets. She describes seeing 33,000 people in a displacement shelter, this number increasing daily. Just as numbers are not people, tents are not homes. In Letters from Gaza, the displaced tents are character, metaphor and reality.
The stories are different, as are the deaths and losses within them, but these painful accounts help explain each other. The personal stories help animate words like displacement, refugee camp, genocide, so they do not fall into the pile of legal terms disconnected from names.
But after the United Nations declarations in the opening pages, we hear no more of law – and little of justice. As Palestinian human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani said: Gaza is in danger of becoming “the graveyard of international law”. What is left are stories. The short stories, poems and brief accounts are packaged so they do not ask too much of the reader – just enough to provoke tears, and perhaps donations. Many readers will feel some of the helplessness in these pages.
There are stories of hunger; the loss of grandmothers and children. I cried many times reading this book, but the next story would quickly arrive and sometimes bring relief. There is something sad, but ordinary, about details like a cat who finds a tent too hot. Unlike Plestia’s clear analysis and summation of the genocide in Gaza, the politics of this book are comparably quiet. Not absent, but quiet. The word genocide is mentioned four times, “Holocaust” only once. (I counted.)
In Letters from Gaza, no one says Israel, only “the occupiers”. Husam Maarouf writes, “we no longer want anything from you […] Only to die in safety.” His entry is dated March 1 2024; he may well be dead. Batool Abu Akleen makes simple requests of the reader (or perhaps of God): “I want a grave, I don’t want my corpse to rot in the open road.” But the book seems to intentionally not accuse. We are told:
this is not a book about war. It is a book about human souls that strive to avoid being hunted down by war. It is about how innocents are forced to learn how to survive when everything around them is about killing, destruction and death.
But the accusation is there. How could it not be? Against Israel as occupier and aggressor – and the reader as bystander.
Accusation sometimes comes embedded in questions. “Is one person’s pain greater than another’s?” asks Gaza poet and teacher Doha Kahlout. This question resonates with one inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial Tree in Hungary: “Whose agony is greater than mine?”
When comparing agony, only one can live
Jewish author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, writing on Palestine and Israeli peace struggles, cautions against pitting stories from Israel and Palestine against each other, such that “only one can live”. Only one story, one narrative, one version of pain and loss.
Holding multiple stories of suffering in mind is very difficult: for the survivor, for the listener and even for the psychoanalyst. Many survivors suffer symptoms of trauma that reduce the world to interpretation through their experience of its painful histories.
In Eyes of Gaza, writing from Melbourne, Plestia shows a moment of this:
On the train home, I see a lady with a suitcase, and the first thing that I think of is displacement, imagining how everyone in Gaza carries their whole life in their bag […] Then the announcement: Next Stop […] And I’m snapped back into reality.
In this moment, the suitcase is only read through the lens of the past. It’s what is described colloquially as living in the past – a type of banal flashback, often a symptom of trauma. But when pain colonises bodies and narratives, recognising the pain of others is difficult to see. It may be impossible to see the experiences of the other’s world through any other lens than one’s own pain. Whose agony is greater than mine? is a competitive statement, not a question.
In the war of greater pain, an Israeli child in fear may be read against a Palestinian child enduring the loss of their limbs and their whole family. Only one (story) can live.
To hold two competing stories of pain, loss and agony in mind requires a feat of mental health endurance few are capable of: the Nelson Mandelas of this world. Working in the field of transitional justice, I have met a few.
Most have experienced great loss and know there is no comparison at the level of agony. They resist “the repetitive thud of referentiality” because it drowns out conversation, annihilating curiosity and empathy alike. They know all stories must have their time.
In October 2023, “liberal” London Jewish journalist and filmmaker Michael Segalov, once a “staunch defender of Israel”, tried to hold competing stories. He wrote about seeing Israel–Palestine through the lens of “fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear”.
Early Jewish settlers were not “imperial soldiers”, but “a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust”, he points out. But by 1948, the year after the UN resolution that called for Palestine to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, “more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, 15,000 killed”.
“While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home,” he wrote, “within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority.” In 1922, in the first census carried out under the British Mandate, the population of Palestine was 763,550: 89% were Arabs and 11% Jewish.
As Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj stressed while talking with Jessica Benjamin during peace negotiations, we must “stand simultaneously for the recognition of all injuries, while at the same time being clear that one side was coming from the position of Occupied and less powerful, the other Occupying and dominating”. Stories matter, politics matters.
And some stories take more time than others – some stories are given more time than others. This is a matter of politics and practicality.
Surviving the October 7 attacks
Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border; they are now internal refugees in northern Israel. He and his partner settled in Nahal Oz and raised a family. On the morning of October 7, they heard the sounds of the attack and raced to their safe room, spending the next five hours in there trying to keep their children – Galia, 3 years old and Carmel, aged 19 months – quiet.
Amir Tibon and his family survived the Oct 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border. Scribe
In discussing Tibon’s book, Gates of Gaza: a story of betrayal, survival and hope in Israel’s borderlands, I risk comparison and competition. Sometimes stories speak to each other, even when they speak to the silences. I resisted this one’s proximity to the above stories. But that is also to resist reality. It is to resist the importance of difference. All experience is valuable, but sometimes comparison reveals inequality.
Plestia knows this well. The survivor guilt of which she writes is part of the hierarchy experienced by all survivors of mass violence. That she and her family survived, that she migrated, is to feel guilt for escaping the fate of those who have been starved, tortured, obliterated.
Yehiel Dinur spoke from this position of guilt on the stand in 1962, saying he was speaking for those who died in Auschwitz. In the face of others’ death, all survivors struggle with justification. Competition is one form of this: Whose agony is greater than mine?
Tibon was a resident of Nahal Oz, having moved there with his partner because of its beauty, nine years before October 7. He describes it as having “a strong, left-wing, liberal political leaning”, and says residents of the border areas are “some of the strongest advocates of Israeli–Palestinian peace”. He writes that the kibbutz movement has, “for decades”, been in favour of “a compromise that would allow Jews and Arabs to share this land, with agreed-upon borders – borders that, of course, would have to be protected”.
In the 300-plus pages, Tibon describes the morning of October 7 in detail. The fear of his children and his partner as they stayed quiet in a safe room for some five hours. The sounds of shootings and desperation as he read pleas and accounts from other residents on the community’s WhatsApp group as the attacks unfolded.
The narrative of that morning is interspersed with accounts from people who survived in his community: his parents, some of those who attended the Nova music festival, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The narrative moves between that morning and a history of the kibbutz, framed in a history of Israel’s political lurching between right and left – and back again – over the 87 years since its recognition as a nation state by the UN.
In one reading, this is a history book of 87 years – not just an account of five hours. It is a particular history.
The narrative of those five hours is intense, peppered with stories of his parents racing from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz. Tibon’s father is a crucial figure in this narrative. A retired IDF general with “more than three decades” in the military, including combat experience, he seemingly has the capacity to assess situations and navigate a war zone with skill. It is his father who finally knocks on the “safe room” door in the afternoon (about halfway through the book). Tibon reports hearing “a strong bang and a familiar voice” from inside.
The father, we could say, is the embodiment of Tibon’s feelings for – and belief in – a strong, kind Israel. An army general, protective husband and grandfather (in Hebrew, Saba), he is longed for by Tibon’s young children, who “loved their grandparents”, particularly his father, “who pampered and spoiled them at every opportunity”. This grandfather’s presence at the safe-room door allows the family to re-enter the safety of Israel.
If the father is Israel, the sleeping children are its citizens. Carmel and Galia slept through much of the conflict, barely awakened by gunshots. They were rushed to the safe room the moment the shots were heard.
Once you know the stories from Letters of Gaza, it is hard not to compare this to the waking of Mohammed Al Zaqzooq’s three boys – Baraa, Jawad and Basil – to the sound of “Huge missiles in large numbers making terrifying sounds” and the need to flee. Not least, because Amir’s children were barely awakened by shots outside. Their safe room kept the noise muffled and the danger at bay. This is not to say their fear won’t impact on their actions later. Transgenerational trauma has a way of influencing the future.
Mohammed’s children moved quickly, within half an hour, to a refugee camp. At the time of writing, they remain there. His story is five pages long. Amir’s is 300-plus. Amir, an author and award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s liberal paper of record, has access to a computer, electricity and the security required to think, research and write.
But why does he write this book? In the acknowledgements, he describes himself as needing to be encouraged, unsure of the worth of telling the story of his five hours in the safe room. But he describes much more than five hours.
His book is a story of Israel – and particularly, of its informal settlements. In the early 1950s, he writes, 20 young soldiers – ten men and ten women – were taken by bus to this site to settle it. Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza, it has “agricultural lands which literally touch the border fence”. The kibbutzim functioned as a kind of human border, with increased populations: the 20 broke into couples, then families. Within a few years, they had a small farming community, with a person devoted to security.
Empty land?
This is not a story of military invasion and colonisation, however. It is a story of settlement on land represented as empty. We know this story well in Australia. In this context, it can be a plea for a recognition of innocence.
As Amir tells it, there were no Palestinians in the place before: no one was removed or relocated. Only in passing does he mention the Bedouin who passed through the area before.
In Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have, in different ways, explained lands do not need to be sites of permanent agriculture to be crucial to the survival of some groups or nations. Borders and settlements can disturb land, law and life regardless of whether houses are demolished or not.
The beauty of Nahal Oz, Amir writes, was due to its access to water and its site on fertile land, where trees provided shelter and probably food. Its loss was likely no small thing to people who required sustenance and shelter as they moved through. After the settlement, they no longer could.
After Israel set up its border there, only Israelis could pass through without being subject to the checkpoints that are well documented sites of humiliation and arbitrary punishment for Palestinians.
By 1997, the walls went up near Nahal Oz. But the walls to shield Nahal Oz from Gaza – and particularly from its people – were not enough. Amir describes the elaborate and extensive tunnels used by Palestinian soldiers to enter Israel (he calls them “terrorists” and “suicide bombers”).
The tunnels became the problem of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. To deal with this problem, the concrete walls were built, reaching 160 metres underground, preventing any permeation. Then, on October 7, the walls could not provide security. Then, there was only the safe room.
The safe room is an obvious metaphor in this book. It is Israel under attack. One of these rooms has been built into every house in the kibbutz, so families can be safe from the mortar attacks from Gaza – a regular occurrence since the 1987 Intifada.
Plestia tells us that the materials for a safe room are not allowed to be brought into Gaza. There are no safe rooms there. Tibon doesn’t mention this; maybe he doesn’t even know this fact, which is its own symptom of the political and social environment in Israel.
He does describe “the unimaginable destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza in the aftermath” of the October 7 attacks. He is critical of this “destruction”, though he does not use the term genocide. (There are those who wait for the International Court of Justice to decide if it was more than “plausible” – and there are those who cannot wait.)
Tibon is critical of Israel’s right wing, which cultivates war. He wants peace. But peace here is its own violence.
Like the rhetoric of reconciliation in South Africa, calls for peace can do violence to historical experiences of injustice. There, reconciliation discourse has been criticised, along with its apolitical leanings. Reconciliation in South Africa has largely meant people subject to historical injustices must reconcile themselves to their losses and their reality.
A story attributed to Father Mxolisi Mapanbani, of Tom and Bernard and the bicycle, has been used many times to critique “reconciliation” rhetoric in South Africa. It is helpful here.
Tom and Bernard are friends and live opposite each other. One day, Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle. Every day, Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After some time, Tom went up to Bernard and said, “Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.” Bernard said, “Okay, let’s reconcile – what about the bicycle?” “Oh no,” said Tom, “I’m not talking about the bicycle, I’m talking about reconciliation.”
In the Australian context, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008, human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma described this form of reconciliation as the “unfinished business of justice”.
The apology might have offered some form of acknowledgement, and gone some way toward creating a shared reality on the injustices of the past, but while justice remains unfinished, many are not at peace.
Amir wants peace. He doesn’t want to live in a safe house – but he wants his house and his family to live securely in Nahal Oz. He wants Palestinians to be at peace with this reality.
The word “peace”, like “reconciliation”, does a lot of work to present Tibon on the side of “the good”. Just like, in Letters From Gaza, the relative lack of the word “genocide” keeps the accusation at bay and politics in the background – and it keeps its calls for recognition of suffering at the fore. In this book about “human souls”, the editors call for a recognition of shared humanity.
Tibon is careful not to group “terrorists” under that name – though he uses a Hebrew word that means exactly that. (Mehablim, he calls the people who attacked Nahal Oz.) Why? Though he writes in English and undoubtably spoke Hebrew throughout the siege, why does he speak of the Palestinian attackers as Mehablim?
The answer might be found in the fact no Palestinian name, beyond former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, appears in these pages. He has interviewed many people, but none of them are Palestinian. Their narrative remains outside his text.
We must find the humanity of the Palestinians in other stories.
If the safe room is a metaphor for Israel, the tent – as described in so many of the stories in Letters from Gaza, and in Plestia’s account of those 45 days – is a metaphor for the lives of Palestinians in Israel, and perhaps the world’s eyes.
A tent is permeable, fragile, disposable. Bodies within it are subject to displacement, starvation, genocide. Every house in Tibon’s kibbutz has a safe room. There have been at least seven bombings of tent camps in Gaza. How can you not do the maths?
Stories, awakening and halting the bombs
Stories demand people are not reduced to mathematics. They place the reader in the scene and plead for identification and understanding. Writing on the Eichmann trial, Holocaust historian and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas describes “the words of the survivors that built a bridge from the accused to the world of ashes”.
Afrikaaner journalist and poet Antje Krog writes, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, “In all the stories a landscape is created.”
But this landscape, if it is to have any effect, must be mapped across previous perceptions. For that, it must do damage to the secure world – the pre-existing imaginative landscape – of the reader or of the listener.
Moral philosopher Rai Gaita describes remorse as “a dying to the world”: a little death is required of the listener or reader who is implicated as a bystander, encountering the suffering of others. A death of complacency. A small disintegration that may mean our own peaceful worlds are no longer tenable.
This is why stories, particularly, are mobilised in truth commissions. They animate the impossible numbers – the dry policies and repetitive loss – with scenes of humanity. Testimony – personal stories – link the words (genocide, massacre, terror) to an imagination of a scene, a person, a child or a parent. To people we can identify or empathise with.
Like the two worlds connected in Ahmed Mortaja’s poem, Hubb and Harb, In Letters from Gaza:
tonight I will fall asleep telling myself that the noise outside is fireworks, a celebration and nothing more.
That the frightened screams of children are the gleeful terror of suspense before something long-awaited, like Eid.
Tonight, I will fall asleep scrolling through the photos on my phone, telling myself that my evening with friends wasn’t that great – really, I was bored – so now I’m skimming through memories to pass the time.
If empathy were all it took to halt the counting of the 646 days in Gaza, then Letters from Gaza and Eyes on Gaza would achieve their aim. But empathy rarely produces political change.
Stories – the 50 voices in Letters from Gaza, accounts like Plestia’s – make us cry, perhaps make us donate, but they do not halt the bombs. This, and more, might be what Yehiel Dinur meant when he asked for the world to “awaken”, that it change, that it stop what Tibon calls “the unimaginable destruction”.
Until then, Dinur pledged to remain Katzetnik 135633. Until then, we will likely only know “Genocide Plestia”: “it’s funny how genocide changes a person”.
Juliet Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The demise of one of Hong Kong’s last major pro-democracy parties, the League of Social Democrats, is the latest blow to the city’s crumbling democratic credentials.
The league is the third major opposition party to disband this year. The announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary this week of the national security law, which was imposed by Beijing to suppress pro-democracy activity.
The loss of this grassroots party, historically populated by bold and colourful characters, vividly illustrates the dying of the light in once-sparkling Hong Kong.
The city is now greyed and labouring under a repressive internal security regime that has crushed civil society’s freedoms and democratic ambitions.
Authoritarian crackdown
The world witnessed Hong Kong at its brightest during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters camped out on city streets for several months.
We also saw the brutal sequel in 2019, when paramilitarised police sought to put down further civil unrest and protesters fought back.
Since then, “lawfare” has been the preferred strategy of China’s national government and its Hong Kong satellite. The new approach has included a vast security apparatus and aggressive prosecutions.
When Beijing intervened in July 2020, it was nominally about national security. In reality, the new law was designed and used to bring Hongkongers to heel.
Civil freedoms were further curtailed by a home-grown security law, introduced last year to fill the gaps.
International standards such as the Johannesburg Principles, endorsed by the United Nations, require national security laws to be compatible with democratic principles, not to be used to eliminate democratic activity.
Prison or exile
The League of Social Democrats occupied the populist left of the pro-democracy spectrum. It stood apart from contemporaries such as the Democratic Party and the Civic Party, which were dominated by professionals and elites, and have since been disbanded.
The League was most notably represented by the likes of “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung– known for his Che Guevara t-shirts and banana-throwing – and broadcaster and journalism academic Raymond Wong Yuk-man, also known as “Mad Dog”.
Despite their rambunctious styles, these men had real political credentials and were repeatedly elected to legislative office. But Leung is now imprisoned for subversion, while Wong has left for Taiwan.
Leung Kwok-hung was sentenced to subversion under the national security law. Edwin Kwok/Shutterstock
Party leaders such as Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit and Figo Chan Ho-wun were also prominent within the Civil Human Rights Front. It was responsible for the annual July 1 protest march that attracted hundreds of thousands of people every year. The front is yet another pro-democracy organisation that has dissolved.
Sham and Chan have been jailed for subversion and unlawful assembly under the colonial-era Public Order Ordinance, which has been used to prosecute hundreds of activists.
Zero tolerance
The demise of these diverse organisations are not natural occurrences, but the result of a deliberate authoritarian programme.
Under China, Hong Kong’s political system has been half democratic at best. But it now resembles something from the darkest days of colonialism, with pre-approved candidates, appointed legislators and zero tolerance for critical voices.
Activists and watchdogs are stymied by the national security law. It criminalises – among other things – engagement and lobbying with international organisations and foreign governments.
Then there are the millions of ordinary Hongkongers whose dreams of a liberal and self-governing region under mainland China’s umbrella – as promised in the lead up to the 1997 handover – have been shattered.
But countless ex-protesters remain in the city, where it is impermissible to speak critically of power, and where mandatory patriotic education may ensure new generations will never even think to speak up.
Much blame lies with the British, who failed to institute democratic elections until the last gasp of their rule in Hong Kong. This was despite the colony tolerating liberalism and habit-forming democratic activity over a longer period.
Now China, after almost three decades in charge, has responded to democratic challenges by defaulting to authoritarian control. Hong Kong can only be grateful it has been spared a Tiananmen-style incident. Nor has it experienced the full genocidal extent of the so-called “peripheries playbook” Beijing has used in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Turmoil and authoritarian swings in the United States and elsewhere give China an opportunity to present as a voice of reason on the international stage.
But we should not forget its commitment to repressive politics at home, nor what its support of belligerent regimes such as Putin’s Russia might mean for Taiwan, the region and the world.
Above all, we should not forget the people, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, who made it their life’s work to achieve democracy only to be rewarded with prison or exile.
Brendan Clift 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.
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