Category: Education

MIL-OSI Global: From Roman drains to ancient filters, these artefacts show how solutions to water contamination have evolved

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rosa Busquets, Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, Pharmacy and Chemistry, Kingston University

Thirst: In Search of Freshwater, an exhibition at Wellcome Collection. Benjamin Gilbert., CC BY-NC-ND

A new exhibition in London (open until February 2026) called Thirst: In search of freshwater highlights how civilisations have treasured – and been intrinsically linked to – safe, clean water.

As a chemist, I research how freshwater is polluted by modern civilisation. Common contaminants in rivers include pharmaceuticals,
microplastics
(which degrade further when exposed to sunlight and wave power), and forever chemicals or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (some of which are carcinogenic).

Synthetic toxic chemicals are introduced into the environment from the products we make, use and dispose of. This wasn’t a problem centuries ago, where we had a totally different manufacturing industry and technologies.

Some, such as PFAS from stain-resistant textiles or nonstick materials such as cookware, can be particularly difficult to remove from wastewater. PFAS don’t degrade easily, they resist conventional heat treatments and can easily pass through wastewater treatments, so they contaminate rivers or lakes that are sources of our drinking water.

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Testing for pollutants is even more critical in developing nations that lack sanitation and face drought or flooding.
Having to protect and conserve drinking water and its sources is as relevant today as it always has been.

For this exhibition, curator at the Wellcome Collection in London, Janice Li, has selected 125 historical objects, photographs and feats of engineering that link to drought, rain, glaciers, rivers and lakes. These three artefacts from Thirst illustrate how our relationship with water contamination has evolved:

1. Ancient water filters

Made from natural materials such as clay, water jug filters have been used for hundreds of years in every continent by ancient civilisations. They show that purifying water for drinking was commonplace. The sand and soil particles that naturally get suspended in water and removed by these filters would have carried microbes.

Water jug filters with Arabic inscription, found in Egypt, dating back to 900-1,200.
Victoria and Albert Museum London/Wellcome Collection, CC BY-NC-ND

But in ancient times, pharmaceuticals and other drugs, pesticides, forever chemicals and microplastics would not have been a problem. Those filters could work relatively well despite being made of simple materials with wide pores.

Today, those ancient filters would no longer be effective. Modern water filters are made using more advanced materials which typically have small pores (called micropores and mesopores). For example, filters often include activated carbon (a highly porous type of carbon that can be manufactured to capture contaminants) or membranes that filter water. Only then is it safe for people to drink.

Read more:
Forever chemicals are in our drinking water – here’s how to reduce them

2. Roman water pipes

Lead water pipes (known as fistulae) were useful parts of a relatively advanced plumbing system that distributed drinking water throughout Roman cities. They are still common in water systems in our cities today. In the US, there are about 9.2 million lead service lines in use. Exposure to lead causes severe human health problems. Lead exposure, not necessarily from drinking water only, was attributed to more than 1.5 million deaths in 2021.

A Roman lead water pipe that dates back to 1-300CE.
Courtesy of Wellcome Collection/Science Museum Group., CC BY-NC-ND

It’s now understood that lead is neurotoxic and it can diffuse or spread from the pipes to drinking water. Lead from paints and batteries, including car batteries, can also contaminate drinking water.

To protect us from lead leaching or flaking off from pipes, some government agencies are calling for the replacement of lead pipes with copper or plastic pipes. Water companies routinely add phosphates (mined powder that contains phosphorus) to drinking water to help capture potential lead contamination and make it safe to drink.

3. The horror of unhealthy water

One caricature titled The Monster Soup by artist William Heath (1828) is part of the Wellcome Trust’s permanent collection. The graphics read “microcosms dedicated to the London Water companies” and “Monster soup, commonly called Thames Water being a correct representation of the precious stuff doled out to us”. The cartoon shows a lady so terrified at the sight of microbes in river water from the Thames that she drops her cup of tea.

Monster Soup by William Heath.
Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection., CC BY-NC-ND

Even today, many people remain shocked at the toxic contamination in rivers and sewage pollution prevents people from swimming.

By 2030, 2 billion people will still not have safely managed drinking water and 1.2 billion will lack basic hygiene services. Drinking water will still be contaminated by bacteria such as E. coli and other dangerous pathogens that cause waterborne diseases. So advancing technologies to filter out contamination will be just as crucial in the future as it has been in the past.

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Rosa Busquets receives funding from UKRI/ EU Horizons MSCA Staff exchanges Clean Water project 101131182, DASA, project ACC6093561. She is affiliated with Kingston University, UCL, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, UNEP EEAP.

– ref. From Roman drains to ancient filters, these artefacts show how solutions to water contamination have evolved – https://theconversation.com/from-roman-drains-to-ancient-filters-these-artefacts-show-how-solutions-to-water-contamination-have-evolved-253876

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: How Trump plays with new media says a lot about him – as it did with FDR, Kennedy and Obama

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sara Polak, University Lecturer in American Studies, Leiden University

There is a strange and worrying parallel between the breakneck speed at which Donald Trump has operated in the first few months of his presidency and the ever-accelerating pace at which information moves on social media platforms. Where in his first term he used Twitter, now, the 47th US president is using his own platform, TruthSocial, to announce changes of direction that are sometimes so fundamental that they change decades of US policy.

Social media has become a key tool of governing for Trump’s administration. He uses it both to make announcements and to drum up support for those announcements. His social media posts can move the markets and make or break careers. They can even, it seems, stop wars.

So when he used TruthSocial to announce a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on June 23, giving the two countries a deadline to stop firing missiles, it appears that neither of the antagonists were fully aware of the situation, given they carried on attacking each other. So an all-caps message followed: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” he posted. “BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” – adding, just in case anyone had any doubt he was serious: “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”

Trump’s use of his TruthSocial platform began as he sought to re-establish himself from the political wilderness after the insurrection of January 6 2021. It has now become a tool of his extreme power and his willingness to use (and abuse) it – globally as well as domestically.

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He’s the latest in a string of US presidents known for their adroit use of whichever is the medium most guaranteed to connect with the greatest number of people. From Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt’s adept cultivation of print journalists in the early 20th century through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s comforting use of radio as it gained popularity and John F. Kennedy’s mastery of the rising medium of television, presidents have expanded their reach and influence through adept use of media.

FDR’s “fireside chats”, broadcast on the radio throughout the US in the 1930s, reached an estimated 80% of the population, showing he understood the key media principle of reach. Roosevelt would address his listeners as “my friends” and Americans came to understand them as seemingly intimate conversations with their president.

FDR dominated the airwaves at a time when many Americans hardly understood the important role that the federal government played in their own lives – and millions of households were only just getting mains electricity (thanks to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936). But radios were becoming a common mass medium and FDR perfectly understood how to use it. If you listen to the fireside chats, FDR may sound patrician – and at times formal – but his tone is also friendly, thoughtful and reassuring.

In Germany at around the same time, Adolf Hitler’s massive stadium speeches were very effective for people who were in the stadium and being lifted by the intensity of the crowd and all the carefully thought out visual cues. But when broadcast on radio, Hitler had nothing like Roosevelt’s ability to connect with people on a personal level.

Roosevelt was hardly the first leader – or even the first US president – to speak on the radio. But he was the first to master the medium. He figured out how to use its potential to deliver a key implicit message: that his government should and did take on a central role in people’s lives.

Equally, John F. Kennedy can be said to have “discovered” political television. Not just as a medium for political campaigns, debates and speeches – but also for putting across to a mass audience his role as the embodiment of American decency, beauty and masculinity: JFK’s White House as Camelot.

JFK was considered a master of the fast-growing medium of television.

Both Roosevelt and Kennedy were in several ways physically disabled and lived with chronic illness, yet through the “new medium” of their time were able to project an image of quintessentially American strength and trustworthiness. In part this was their own doing – but it’s also a testament to the power of the media they used for their time.

Mastering the medium

These possibilities of a medium used to its best advantage – for example, to be heard around the US, but still to project a sense of intimacy – have become known as the “affordances” of a medium. The medium afforded Roosevelt space to be authentic without showing his disability. Kennedy appeared young, fit and handsome – even when dependent on painkillers.

When a new medium is introduced, people start to play around with its affordances – and this applies to politicians too. Political leaders who develop a special aptitude for using the new medium to emphasise their unique style can become particularly successful, as has Donald Trump with his use of social media.

The US president rose to power helped by his adept use of many of Twitter’s attributes – the imposed brevity of his messages, the ease of retweeting, the tendency for other users to “pile on” (and the user anonymity, which tends to encourage pile-ons) to polarise American public debate.

Trump was forced off Twitter after the Capitol Hill insurrection of January 6 2021. So he came back with his own platform, TruthSocial, where he can also make the rules. And now he uses the platform to make foreign policy, trumpeting his positions (which can change with bewildering speed) on TruthSocial well before they can be announced by the White House press team, which often has to scramble to catch up.

When Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan penned his famous phrase: “The medium is the message” in his groundbreaking 1964 study, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he meant to say that media form and content are not as distinct from one another as one might think and that the form of a medium of communication can shape society as much as its content. In Donald Trump’s use of social media, we are seeing this idea at work.

Sara Polak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How Trump plays with new media says a lot about him – as it did with FDR, Kennedy and Obama – https://theconversation.com/how-trump-plays-with-new-media-says-a-lot-about-him-as-it-did-with-fdr-kennedy-and-obama-248923

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Why Asos should be wary of banning customers returning unwanted goods

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nic Sanders, Senior Lecturer in Management and Marketing, University of Westminster

‘Now where’s that returns label?’ Cast of Thousands.Shutterstock

Shopping for clothes online is a risky business. How do you know if that top will be a good fit, or those shoes will definitely be the right colour? One popular solution to this predicament is to order lots of tops and lots of shoes, try them on at home, and send back all the ones you don’t want – often at no cost.

But that tactic can be expensive for the fashion retailer, which needs to pay for all those deliveries and returns. And now Asos, which sends millions of shipments every month, has started banning some customers for over-returning items – prompting something of a backlash.

The response by the retail giant, which says it wants to maintain a “commitment to offering free returns to all customers across all core markets”, also raises questions about the sustainability of the online fashion business model which Asos helped to create.

Many online retailers rely on the emotional highs of shopping. The excitement of placing an order, the anticipation of delivery, and the dopamine hit of unpacking a purchase is central to its popular customer experience.

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Online shopping generally has thrived on impulsive buying, with the option of returning items treated as a normal part of the process. Of course, even in the days before online shopping there would be customers who routinely returned items.

But by digitising and simplifying the process, the likes of Asos have helped this to happen on a massive scale. Shoppers have become completely used to ordering multiple sizes or styles with the express intention of returning most of the items they receive. Their homes effectively become fitting rooms.

And those customers could reasonably argue that online retailers often use digital strategies which encourage multi-item purchases.

Some sites remind shoppers of recently viewed products and provide suggestions of similar items, for example. There may be are prompts and nudges towards clothes which are frequently bought together.

Items are then sometimes temporarily reserved in a shopper’s basket for 60 minutes, creating a sense of urgency. Targeted emails and limited time offers drive bulging shopping baskets, encouraging more risk purchases and returns.

Yet returned items carry a significant cost. They may be unfit for resale and ultimately disposed of, which beyond the financial burden, has an environmental price.

In addition to creating landfill, each delivery and return has a carbon footprint. And although many younger consumers express support for sustainable practices, their buying behaviour continues to prioritise price and convenience.

But free returns have become part of the online fashion industry landscape. Research suggests that customers are simply more likely to buy something if returns are free.

And today’s tricky financial climate, marked by inflation and rising living costs will surely have made consumers even more cautious. Many will be reluctant to buy items that incur delivery and return costs.

Shopping around

Frustrations can then arise from unclear return policies, often buried in lengthy terms and conditions documents. Some of those banned by Asos say they were confused about the rules.

Automated customer service systems offering generic responses may then leave shoppers with no clear way to challenge these decisions.

Perhaps the wider issue here is that online shopping cannot fully replicate the benefits of shopping in store. In physical shops, customers can try on items before deciding.

But online, this can’t happen, so returns become fundamental to the decision-making process. For cost-conscious shoppers, avoiding unnecessary spending is essential. But if returns policies become harder to access, they may turn to other retailers which offer more certainty.

Return to sender?
A08/Shutterstock

For example, retailers such as Zara and H&M, with a business model which mixes online convenience with a high street (or shopping mall) presence, offer the option to order online and then return in person.

This hybrid (or “omni-channel”) model appears to be driving consumers to physical shops for a blended experience which provides convenience and helps reduce return costs.

For Asos, doing something similar would require major investment (in bricks and mortar) and increased operational costs – so is perhaps an unlikely solution for the company.

But to balance sustainability, cost and customer satisfaction, Asos could explore other options. These might include clearer, more visible communication regarding “fair use” policies and their consequences. It could aim for more human interactions and better dialogue with customers it plans to ban.

Offering physical retail locations or return collection points to simplify the process and reduce the environmental impact and costs will provide customer flexibility. Overall, these areas will help create a better customer service experience.

Ultimately, Asos and other similar online clothing retailers must evolve. With changing consumer expectations, a challenging economic climate and rising operational costs, the model that defined these retailers’ early success cannot remain unchanged.

If they make adjustments, they may emerge stronger. If they do not, they risk sparking a customer exodus that would be hard to reverse.

Nic Sanders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why Asos should be wary of banning customers returning unwanted goods – https://theconversation.com/why-asos-should-be-wary-of-banning-customers-returning-unwanted-goods-259952

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Humans and animals can both think logically − but testing what kind of logic they’re using is tricky

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Olga Lazareva, Professor of Psychology, Drake University

For some mental processes, humans and animals likely follow similar lines of thinking. Catherine Falls Commercial/Moment via Getty Images

Can a monkey, a pigeon or a fish reason like a person? It’s a question scientists have been testing in increasingly creative ways – and what we’ve found so far paints a more complicated picture than you’d think.

Imagine you’re filling out a March Madness bracket. You hear that Team A beat Team B, and Team B beat Team C – so you assume Team A is probably better than Team C. That’s a kind of logical reasoning known as transitive inference. It’s so automatic that you barely notice you’re doing it.

It turns out humans are not the only ones who can make these kinds of mental leaps. In labs around the world, researchers have tested many animals, from primates to birds to insects, on tasks designed to probe transitive inference, and most pass with flying colors.

As a scientist focused on animal learning and behavior, I work with pigeons to understand how they make sense of relationships, patterns and rules. In other words, I study the minds of animals that will never fill out a March Madness bracket – but might still be able to guess the winner.

Logic test without words

The basic idea is simple: If an animal learns that A is better than B, and B is better than C, can it figure out that A is better than C – even though it’s never seen A and C together?

In the lab, researchers test this by giving animals randomly paired images, one pair at a time, and rewarding them with food for picking the correct one. For example, animals learn that a photo of hands (A) is correct when paired with a classroom (B), a classroom (B) is correct when paired with bushes (C), bushes (C) are correct when paired with a highway (D), and a highway (D) is correct when paired with a sunset (E). We don’t know whether they “understand” what’s in the picture, and it is not particularly important for the experiment that they do.

In a transitive inference task, subjects learn a series of rewarded pairs – such as A+ vs. B–, B+ vs. C– – and are later tested on novel pairings, like B vs. D, to see whether they infer an overall ranking.
Olga Lazareva, CC BY-ND

One possible explanation is that the animals that learn all the tasks create a mental ranking of these images: A > B > C > D > E. We test this idea by giving them new pairs they’ve never seen before, such as classroom (B) vs. highway (D). If they consistently pick the higher-ranked item, they’ve inferred the underlying order.

What’s fascinating is how many species succeed at this task. Monkeys, rats, pigeons – even fish and wasps – have all demonstrated transitive inference in one form or another.

The twist: Not all tasks are easy

But not all types of reasoning come so easily. There’s another kind of rule called transitivity that is different from transitive inference, despite the similar name. Instead of asking which picture is better, transitivity is about equivalence.

In this task, animals are shown a set of three pictures and asked which one goes with the center image. For example, if white triangle (A1) is shown, choosing red square (B1) earns a reward, while choosing blue square (B2) does not. Later, when red square (B1) is shown, choosing white cross (C1) earns a reward while choosing white circle (C2) does not. Now comes the test: white triangle (A1) is shown with white cross (C1) and white circle (C2) as choices. If they pick white cross (C1), then they’ve demonstrated transitivity.

In a transitivity task, subjects learn matching rules across overlapping sets – such as A1 matches B1, B1 matches C1 – and are tested on new combinations, such as A1 with C1 or C2, to assess whether they infer the relationship between A1 and C1.
Olga Lazareva, CC BY-ND

The change may seem small, but species that succeed in those first transitive inference tasks often stumble in this task. In fact, they tend to treat the white triangle and the white cross as completely separate things, despite their common relationship with the red square. In my recently published review of research using the two tasks, I concluded that more evidence is needed to determine whether these tests tap into the same cognitive ability.

Small differences, big consequences

Why does the difference between transitive inference and transitivity matter? At first glance, they may seem like two versions of the same ability – logical reasoning. But when animals succeed at one and struggle with the other, it raises an important question: Are these tasks measuring the same kind of thinking?

The apparent difference between the two tasks isn’t just a quirk of animal behavior. Psychology researchers apply these tasks to humans in order to draw conclusions about how people reason.

For example, say you’re trying to pick a new almond milk. You know that Brand A is creamier than Brand B, and your friend told you that Brand C is even waterier than Brand B. Based on that, because you like a thicker milk, you might assume Brand A is better than Brand C, an example of transitive inference.

But now imagine the store labels both Brand A and Brand C as “barista blends.” Even without tasting them, you might treat them as functionally equivalent, because they belong to the same category. That’s more like transitivity, where items are grouped based on shared relationships. In this case, “barista blend” signals the brands share similar quality.

How researchers define logical reasoning determines how they interpret results.
Svetlana Mishchenko/iStock via Getty Images

Researchers often treat these types of reasoning as measuring the same ability. But if they rely on different mental processes, they might not be interchangeable. In other words, the way scientists ask their questions may shape the answer – and that has big implications for how they interpret success in animals and in people.

This difference could affect how researchers interpret decision-making not only in the lab, but also in everyday choices and in clinical settings. Tasks like these are sometimes used in research on autism, brain injury or age-related cognitive decline.

If two tasks look similar on the surface, then choosing the wrong one might lead to inaccurate conclusions about someone’s cognitive abilities. That’s why ongoing work in my lab is exploring whether the same distinction between these logical processes holds true for people.

Just like a March Madness bracket doesn’t always predict the winner, a reasoning task doesn’t always show how someone got to the right answer. That’s the puzzle researchers are still working on – figuring out whether different tasks really tap into the same kind of thinking or just look like they do. It’s what keeps scientists like me in the lab, asking questions, running experiments and trying to understand what it really means to reason – no matter who’s doing the thinking.

Olga Lazareva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Humans and animals can both think logically − but testing what kind of logic they’re using is tricky – https://theconversation.com/humans-and-animals-can-both-think-logically-but-testing-what-kind-of-logic-theyre-using-is-tricky-253001

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Russia: A memorial plaque in memory of Alexander Shirvindt will be installed in Moscow

Translation. Region: Russian Federal

Source: Moscow Government – Government of Moscow –

A memorial plaque in memory of the People’s Artist of the RSFSR, director and teacher, artistic director and president of the Moscow Academic Satire Theater Alexander Anatolyevich Shirvindt will be installed on the house where he lived. The Moscow Government order on this issue was signed by Sergei Sobyanin.

The memorial plaque will be installed at the address: Kotelnicheskaya Embankment, Building 1/15, Block A. The work is planned to be completed by the end of 2025.

Alexander Anatolyevich Shirvindt (1934-2024) left a large and bright mark in the history of Russian art. He played dozens of roles in plays and films that became classics of theater and cinema. In addition, as a director, Alexander Shirvindt staged more than 20 plays on the stage of the Satire Theater.

Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

Please Note; This Information is Raw Content Directly from the Information Source. It is access to What the Source Is Stating and Does Not Reflect

https: //vv.mos.ru/mayor/tkhemes/13017050/

MIL OSI Russia News –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Europe: AFRICA/SUDAN – Insecurity and lack of services worsen the situation in the capital: teachers disagree in the reopening of schools

Source: Agenzia Fides – MIL OSI

Tuesday, 1 July 2025

Internet

Khartoum (Agenzia Fides) – Most areas of Khartoum are without electricity and water, exacerbating the country’s already precarious security situation and the lack of other services such as internet and telecommunications.Recently, the humanitarian organization LIZENFO raised the alarm which reported that a large number of people in the Sudanese capital have been forced to return to displacement areas, with the exception of areas of Omdurman. According to the director of the organization, several civilians from Khartoum have returned to the United States after facing great difficulties during the conflict in the capital.Against a backdrop of general insecurity, the Sudanese Teachers’ Committee has voiced its disagreement with a decision by the Khartoum state government’s decision to reopen schools, saying that the move ignores the deteriorating security, health, and economic reality, and post a direct threat to the lives of education workers and their families. Furthermore, telecommunications networks are fluctuating, and the internet is not available most of the time. The teachers pointed out that they are forced to charge their phones, at great expense, at shops that rely on solar energy, and warned of a terrible deterioration in the humanitarian situation, and the high cost of food.Furthermore, civilians in the south and west of Khartoum are being detained and taken to unknown locations without giving reasons. Most neighborhood markets remain closed, and the public are forced to go to the central market, in addition to traveling long distances to get drinking water. (AP) (Agenzia Fides, 1/7/2025)
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MIL OSI Europe News –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI: John Snow Labs Launches Martlet.ai, Setting New Standards for Risk Adjustment with Healthcare Large Language Models

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

The first of several new spinoff companies, Martlet.ai reimagines how payers and providers approach HCC coding with an on-premise, secure, AI-based solution

LEWES, Del., July 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, today announced the launch of Martlet.ai, a healthcare AI company focused on redefining how payers and providers approach Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) Coding. Founded by engineers and payment experts from John Snow Labs, this is the first of several planned spinoff companies that will address specific, high-impact, healthcare industry challenges with AI.

HCC coding plays a vital role in patient risk adjustment, directly influencing reimbursement structures and ensuring the financial sustainability of value-based care models. This is becoming even more crucial in light of the CMS Medicare Advantage rate hikes announced for 2026, which will further tie reimbursement to precise documentation and coding.

Martlet.ai’s state-of-the-art HCC engine is the answer to this challenge. Co-founded by CTO Hasham Ul Haq and CRO Ritwik Jain, this venture was born from years of hands-on success delivering AI solutions to leading healthcare enterprises. Run fully behind the customers’ firewalls, models are trained directly on patient charts to deliver unmatched accuracy, auditability, and speed. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Martlet.ai was built for clinical documentation, making it highly effective for powering coding workflows.

West Virginia University (WVU) Medicine is already realizing the value of Martlet.ai to uncover missed HCC codes, improve risk adjustment factor (RAF) scoring, and streamline physician workflows. The implementation includes seamless two-way integration into the electronic health record (EHR) system with full compliance. As shared in their NLP Summit session “Maximizing Patient Care through AI-Enhanced HCC Code Discovery,” WVU experienced a notable increase in HCC code accuracy and a significant reduction in manual review time.

“Martlet.ai gives healthcare organizations the power to take HCC coding into their own hands with a level of customization and compliance that is unmatched,” said David Talby, CEO, John Snow Labs. “The combination of state-of-the-art, healthcare-specific, proprietary medical language models, an optimized human-in-the-loop workflow, and enterprise-grade validation layers, Martel.ai was engineered by industry leaders to be compliant, effective, and production-ready from day one.”

To learn more or schedule a demo, visit Martlet.ai.

About John Snow Labs
John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, provides state-of-the-art software, models, and data to help healthcare and life science organizations put AI to good use. Developer of Medical LLMs, Healthcare NLP, Spark NLP, the Generative AI Lab No-Code Platform, and the Medical Chatbot, John Snow Labs’ award-winning medical AI software powers the world’s leading pharmaceuticals, academic medical centers, and health technology companies. Creator and host of The NLP Summit, the company is committed to further educating and advancing the global AI community.

About Martlet.ai
Martlet.ai is an AI platform created to automate Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) coding and streamline risk-adjustment workflows for high-compliance environments. Medicare Advantage and Medicaid MCOs, commercial insurers, ACOs, provider organizations, and revenue-cycle management (RCM) firms trust Martlet.ai for its secure, on-premise coding engine, ensuring accuracy, auditability, and transparency at every step. Made possible with domain-specific LLMs, Martlet.ai optimizes reimbursement while maintaining regulatory alignment.

Contact
Gina Devine
Head of Communications
John Snow Labs
gina@johnsnowlabs.com

The MIL Network –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI: John Snow Labs Launches Martlet.ai, Setting New Standards for Risk Adjustment with Healthcare Large Language Models

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

The first of several new spinoff companies, Martlet.ai reimagines how payers and providers approach HCC coding with an on-premise, secure, AI-based solution

LEWES, Del., July 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, today announced the launch of Martlet.ai, a healthcare AI company focused on redefining how payers and providers approach Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) Coding. Founded by engineers and payment experts from John Snow Labs, this is the first of several planned spinoff companies that will address specific, high-impact, healthcare industry challenges with AI.

HCC coding plays a vital role in patient risk adjustment, directly influencing reimbursement structures and ensuring the financial sustainability of value-based care models. This is becoming even more crucial in light of the CMS Medicare Advantage rate hikes announced for 2026, which will further tie reimbursement to precise documentation and coding.

Martlet.ai’s state-of-the-art HCC engine is the answer to this challenge. Co-founded by CTO Hasham Ul Haq and CRO Ritwik Jain, this venture was born from years of hands-on success delivering AI solutions to leading healthcare enterprises. Run fully behind the customers’ firewalls, models are trained directly on patient charts to deliver unmatched accuracy, auditability, and speed. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Martlet.ai was built for clinical documentation, making it highly effective for powering coding workflows.

West Virginia University (WVU) Medicine is already realizing the value of Martlet.ai to uncover missed HCC codes, improve risk adjustment factor (RAF) scoring, and streamline physician workflows. The implementation includes seamless two-way integration into the electronic health record (EHR) system with full compliance. As shared in their NLP Summit session “Maximizing Patient Care through AI-Enhanced HCC Code Discovery,” WVU experienced a notable increase in HCC code accuracy and a significant reduction in manual review time.

“Martlet.ai gives healthcare organizations the power to take HCC coding into their own hands with a level of customization and compliance that is unmatched,” said David Talby, CEO, John Snow Labs. “The combination of state-of-the-art, healthcare-specific, proprietary medical language models, an optimized human-in-the-loop workflow, and enterprise-grade validation layers, Martel.ai was engineered by industry leaders to be compliant, effective, and production-ready from day one.”

To learn more or schedule a demo, visit Martlet.ai.

About John Snow Labs
John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, provides state-of-the-art software, models, and data to help healthcare and life science organizations put AI to good use. Developer of Medical LLMs, Healthcare NLP, Spark NLP, the Generative AI Lab No-Code Platform, and the Medical Chatbot, John Snow Labs’ award-winning medical AI software powers the world’s leading pharmaceuticals, academic medical centers, and health technology companies. Creator and host of The NLP Summit, the company is committed to further educating and advancing the global AI community.

About Martlet.ai
Martlet.ai is an AI platform created to automate Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) coding and streamline risk-adjustment workflows for high-compliance environments. Medicare Advantage and Medicaid MCOs, commercial insurers, ACOs, provider organizations, and revenue-cycle management (RCM) firms trust Martlet.ai for its secure, on-premise coding engine, ensuring accuracy, auditability, and transparency at every step. Made possible with domain-specific LLMs, Martlet.ai optimizes reimbursement while maintaining regulatory alignment.

Contact
Gina Devine
Head of Communications
John Snow Labs
gina@johnsnowlabs.com

The MIL Network –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Africa: First Arab scholarship launched to support students at Tsinghua University in China
- The Hazem Ben-Gacem Arab Scholars Program will support up to 15 students every year for five years through Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programmes at Tsinghua University in China.
- The Scholar’s Program is available to students from Arab League countries.
- The scholarship strengthens ties between the Arab States and China, giving students access to one of the most prestigious universities in China.
Distinguished ambassadors, dignitaries, and academic leaders gathered on Thursday, 26^th June, at Tsinghua University in China (www.Tsinghua.edu.cn) to mark the official launch of the Hazem Ben-Gacem Arab Scholars Program, a landmark initiative to empower students from Arab League countries through world-class education while fostering academic excellence and cross-cultural collaboration.

This year, the Scholars Program will support six students from Arab League nations who are pursuing postgraduate courses at the historic university. This program is understood to be the first scholarship established at Tsinghua University specifically for students from Arab nations and aims to strengthen Sino-Arab relations.

Tsinghua University is a top-ranked Chinese university with a strong reputation in technology and engineering, often compared to MIT. Established in 1911, Tsinghua University has 20 colleges and 90 undergraduate programs, enabling it to offer a wide array of academic disciplines. Tsinghua alumni have made significant contributions to the economic, cultural, and technological development of China and also represent many of the nation’s political elite.

Hazem Ben-Gacem, Founder and Chief Executive of BlueFive Capital, said: “For more than a thousand years, the Arab region and China have been bound by a vibrant exchange of goods, knowledge, and cultural dialogue. By enabling exceptional Arab students to study at Tsinghua, China’s pinnacle of academic excellence, we aim to develop leaders who will carry forward this agelong spirit of curiosity and collaboration, ensuring that the Arab-China relationship evolves as a beacon of cooperation in an increasingly fragmented world.”

Professor Yang Bin, Vice Chancellor of Tsinghua University Council, expressed the university’s sincere gratitude for Mr. Hazem Ben-Gacem’s generous donation. He noted that in recent years, Tsinghua has implemented a series of strategic initiatives to enhance its global impact, with particular emphasis on deepening engagement and cooperation with Arab League member states, which has significantly advanced cultural exchanges between both sides. The newly established Hazem Ben-Gacem Arab Scholars Program, funded by Mr. Hazem Ben-Gacem’s donation, will support six incoming full-time master’s students from Arab League countries. Professor Yang emphasized that this initiative will not only motivate recipients to pursue academic excellence but also serve as an important milestone in strengthening the friendship between Tsinghua and the Arab world. It vividly embodies the shared values of openness, inclusiveness, mutual respect, and the pursuit of common progress across cultures and borders.

The Hazem Ben-Gacem Arab Scholars Program will begin this academic year (2025-2026).

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Tsinghua University Education Foundation (TUEF).

Media contact:
Leila Ben Hassen
leila@Bluejaycommunication.com

Hashtags:
#Education #Scholarship #ArabScholarsProgram #Philantropy #TUEF

About Hazem Ben-Gacem:
Hazem Ben-Gacem is the Founder and Chief Executive of BlueFive Capital. Until September 2024, he was co-Chief Executive Officer at Investcorp, the Middle East’s largest non-sovereign private equity firm, chairing most of its private equity and infrastructure investment committees and overseeing all Investcorp’s activities in the Middle East, South East Asia, Japan, and China. Prior to that, Hazem led Investcorp’s European private equity and its global technology investment businesses. During his 30-year tenure, Hazem directly led over 40 private equity investments across most world regions. Hazem began his career in New York as a member of the M&A team at Credit Suisse First Boston.

Hazem has previously been a donor for different scholarship programs with Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Oxford University.

Hazem serves on the Executive Boards of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and St Anthony’s College at Oxford University, and the Dean’s Council of the Harvard Medical School. In 2017, he founded the Harvard Office in Tunisia, the first formal presence for Harvard in the Arab world.

For more information, please visit www.BlueFiveCapital.com

About Tsinghua University Education Foundation (TUEF):
Founded in 1994, it is the first university education foundation established in China following the reform and opening up of China. The objective of TUEF is to foster the development of education in China, improve educational quality and academic research, advocate the culture and vision of Tsinghua University, and strive for philanthropic support from domestic and international organizations and individuals.

TUEF actively raises social resources, constantly optimizes project management, and steadily promotes the preservation and appreciation of value in efforts to help Tsinghua University move towards the goal of becoming a globally leading university. TUEF fully leverages the advantages of scientific and technological talents in Tsinghua University, supports public welfare services, and boosts social progress and human welfare through the development of education.

For more information, please visit www.Tsinghua.edu.cn

MIL OSI Africa –
July 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: Antarctic summer sea ice is at record lows. Here’s how it will harm the planet – and us

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Edward Doddridge, Senior Research Associate in Physical Oceanography, University of Tasmania

An icebreaker approaches Denman Glacier in March, when there was 70% less Antarctic sea ice than usual. Pete Harmsen AAD

On her first dedicated scientific voyage to Antarctica in March, the Australian icebreaker RSV Nuyina found the area sea-ice free. Scientists were able to reach places never sampled before.

Over the past four summers, Antarctic sea ice extent has hit new lows.

I’m part of a large group of scientists who set out to explore the consequences of summer sea ice loss after the record lows of 2022 and 2023. Together we rounded up the latest publications, then gathered new evidence using satellites, computer modelling, and robotic ocean sampling devices. Today we can finally reveal what we found.

It’s bad news on many levels, because Antarctic sea ice is vital for the world’s climate and ecosystems. But we need to get a grip on what’s happening – and use this concerning data to prompt faster action on climate change.

Sea ice around Antarctica waxes and wanes with the seasons, growing in the cold months and melting in warm ones. But this rhythmic cycle is changing.

What we did and what we found

Our team used a huge range of approaches to study the consequences of sea ice loss.

We used satellites to understand sea ice loss over summer, measuring everything from ice thickness and extent to the length of time each year when sea ice is absent.

Satellite data was also used to calculate how much of the Antarctic coast was exposed to open ocean waves. We were then able to quantify the relationship between sea ice loss and iceberg calving.

Data from free-drifting ocean robots was used to understand how sea ice loss affects the tiny plants that support the marine food web.

Every other kind of available data was then harnessed to explore the full impact of sea ice changes on ecosystems.

Voyage reports from international colleagues came in handy when studying how sea ice loss affected Antarctic resupply missions.

We also used computer models to simulate the impact of dramatic summer sea ice loss on the ocean.

In summary, our extensive research reveals four key consequences of summer sea ice loss in Antarctica.

1. Ocean warming is compounding

Bright white sea ice reflects about 90% of the incoming energy from sunlight, while the darker ocean absorbs about 90%. So if there’s less summer sea ice, the ocean absorbs much more heat.

This means the ocean surface warms more in an extreme low sea ice year, such as 2016 – when everything changed.

Until recently, the Southern Ocean would reset over winter. If there was a summer with low sea ice cover, the ocean would warm a bit. But over winter, the extra heat would shift into the atmosphere.

That’s not working anymore. We know this from measuring sea surface temperatures, but we have also confirmed this relationship using computer models.

What’s happening instead is when summer sea ice is very low, as in 2016, it triggers ocean warming that persists. It takes about three years for the system to fully recover. But recovery is becoming less and less likely, given warming is building from year to year.

Comparing an average sea ice summer (a) to an extreme low sea ice summer (b) in which there is less sea ice for wildlife and more sunlight is absorbed by the ocean. The ice shelf is more exposed to ocean waves, calving more icebergs. The ocean is also less productive and tourist vessels can make a closer approach.
Doddridge, E., W., et al. (2025) PNAS Nexus., CC BY-NC-ND

2. More icebergs are forming

Sea ice protects Antarctica’s coast from ocean waves.

On average, about a third of the continent’s coastline is exposed over summer. But this is changing. In 2022 and 2023, more than half of the Antarctic coast was exposed.

Our research shows more icebergs break away from Antarctic ice sheets in years with less sea ice. During an average summer, about 100 icebergs break away. Summers with low sea ice produce about twice as many icebergs.

Antarctic ice sheets without sea ice are more exposed to waves.
Pete Harmsen AAD

3. Wildlife squeezed off the ice

Many species of seals and penguins rely on sea ice, especially for breeding and moulting.

Entire colonies of emperor penguins experienced “catastrophic breeding failure” in 2022, when sea ice melted before chicks were ready to go to sea.

After giving birth, crabeater seals need large, stable sea ice platforms for 2–3 weeks until their pups are weaned. The ice provides shelter and protection from predators. Less summer sea-ice cover makes large platforms harder to find.

Many seal and penguin species also take refuge on the sea ice when moulting. These species must avoid the icy water while their new feathers or fur grows, or risk dying of hypothermia.

4. Logistical challenges at the end of the world

Low summer sea ice makes it harder for people working in Antarctica. Shrinking summer sea ice will narrow the time window during which Antarctic bases can be resupplied over the ice. These bases may soon need to be resupplied from different locations, or using more difficult methods such as small boats.

Supply ships typically unload their cargo directly onto the sea ice, but that may have to change.
Jared McGhie, Australian Antarctic Division

No longer safe

Anarctic sea ice began to change rapidly in 2015 and 2016. Since then it has remained well below the long-term average.

The dataset we use relies on measurements from US Department of Defense satellites. Late last month, the department announced it would no longer provide this data to the scientific community. While this has since been delayed to July 31, significant uncertainty remains.

One of the biggest challenges in climate science is gathering and maintaining consistent long-term datasets. Without these, we don’t accurately know how much our climate is changing. Observing the entire Earth is hard enough when we all work together. It’s going to be almost impossible if we don’t share our data.

Antarctic sea ice extent anomalies (the difference between the long-term average and the measurement) for the entire satellite record since the late 1970s.
Edward Doddridge, using data from the US NSIDC Sea Ice Index, version 3., CC BY

Recent low sea ice summers present a scientific challenge. The system is currently changing faster than our scientific community can study it.

But vanishing sea ice also presents a challenge to society. The only way to prevent even more drastic changes in the future is to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and reach net zero emissions.

Edward Doddridge receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Antarctic summer sea ice is at record lows. Here’s how it will harm the planet – and us – https://theconversation.com/antarctic-summer-sea-ice-is-at-record-lows-heres-how-it-will-harm-the-planet-and-us-256104

MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

July 2, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: Antarctic summer sea ice is at record lows. Here’s how it will harm the planet – and us

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Edward Doddridge, Senior Research Associate in Physical Oceanography, University of Tasmania

An icebreaker approaches Denman Glacier in March, when there was 70% less Antarctic sea ice than usual. Pete Harmsen AAD

On her first dedicated scientific voyage to Antarctica in March, the Australian icebreaker RSV Nuyina found the area sea-ice free. Scientists were able to reach places never sampled before.

Over the past four summers, Antarctic sea ice extent has hit new lows.

I’m part of a large group of scientists who set out to explore the consequences of summer sea ice loss after the record lows of 2022 and 2023. Together we rounded up the latest publications, then gathered new evidence using satellites, computer modelling, and robotic ocean sampling devices. Today we can finally reveal what we found.

It’s bad news on many levels, because Antarctic sea ice is vital for the world’s climate and ecosystems. But we need to get a grip on what’s happening – and use this concerning data to prompt faster action on climate change.

Sea ice around Antarctica waxes and wanes with the seasons, growing in the cold months and melting in warm ones. But this rhythmic cycle is changing.

What we did and what we found

Our team used a huge range of approaches to study the consequences of sea ice loss.

We used satellites to understand sea ice loss over summer, measuring everything from ice thickness and extent to the length of time each year when sea ice is absent.

Satellite data was also used to calculate how much of the Antarctic coast was exposed to open ocean waves. We were then able to quantify the relationship between sea ice loss and iceberg calving.

Data from free-drifting ocean robots was used to understand how sea ice loss affects the tiny plants that support the marine food web.

Every other kind of available data was then harnessed to explore the full impact of sea ice changes on ecosystems.

Voyage reports from international colleagues came in handy when studying how sea ice loss affected Antarctic resupply missions.

We also used computer models to simulate the impact of dramatic summer sea ice loss on the ocean.

In summary, our extensive research reveals four key consequences of summer sea ice loss in Antarctica.

1. Ocean warming is compounding

Bright white sea ice reflects about 90% of the incoming energy from sunlight, while the darker ocean absorbs about 90%. So if there’s less summer sea ice, the ocean absorbs much more heat.

This means the ocean surface warms more in an extreme low sea ice year, such as 2016 – when everything changed.

Until recently, the Southern Ocean would reset over winter. If there was a summer with low sea ice cover, the ocean would warm a bit. But over winter, the extra heat would shift into the atmosphere.

That’s not working anymore. We know this from measuring sea surface temperatures, but we have also confirmed this relationship using computer models.

What’s happening instead is when summer sea ice is very low, as in 2016, it triggers ocean warming that persists. It takes about three years for the system to fully recover. But recovery is becoming less and less likely, given warming is building from year to year.

Comparing an average sea ice summer (a) to an extreme low sea ice summer (b) in which there is less sea ice for wildlife and more sunlight is absorbed by the ocean. The ice shelf is more exposed to ocean waves, calving more icebergs. The ocean is also less productive and tourist vessels can make a closer approach.
Doddridge, E., W., et al. (2025) PNAS Nexus., CC BY-NC-ND

2. More icebergs are forming

Sea ice protects Antarctica’s coast from ocean waves.

On average, about a third of the continent’s coastline is exposed over summer. But this is changing. In 2022 and 2023, more than half of the Antarctic coast was exposed.

Our research shows more icebergs break away from Antarctic ice sheets in years with less sea ice. During an average summer, about 100 icebergs break away. Summers with low sea ice produce about twice as many icebergs.

Antarctic ice sheets without sea ice are more exposed to waves.
Pete Harmsen AAD

3. Wildlife squeezed off the ice

Many species of seals and penguins rely on sea ice, especially for breeding and moulting.

Entire colonies of emperor penguins experienced “catastrophic breeding failure” in 2022, when sea ice melted before chicks were ready to go to sea.

After giving birth, crabeater seals need large, stable sea ice platforms for 2–3 weeks until their pups are weaned. The ice provides shelter and protection from predators. Less summer sea-ice cover makes large platforms harder to find.

Many seal and penguin species also take refuge on the sea ice when moulting. These species must avoid the icy water while their new feathers or fur grows, or risk dying of hypothermia.

4. Logistical challenges at the end of the world

Low summer sea ice makes it harder for people working in Antarctica. Shrinking summer sea ice will narrow the time window during which Antarctic bases can be resupplied over the ice. These bases may soon need to be resupplied from different locations, or using more difficult methods such as small boats.

Supply ships typically unload their cargo directly onto the sea ice, but that may have to change.
Jared McGhie, Australian Antarctic Division

No longer safe

Anarctic sea ice began to change rapidly in 2015 and 2016. Since then it has remained well below the long-term average.

The dataset we use relies on measurements from US Department of Defense satellites. Late last month, the department announced it would no longer provide this data to the scientific community. While this has since been delayed to July 31, significant uncertainty remains.

One of the biggest challenges in climate science is gathering and maintaining consistent long-term datasets. Without these, we don’t accurately know how much our climate is changing. Observing the entire Earth is hard enough when we all work together. It’s going to be almost impossible if we don’t share our data.

Antarctic sea ice extent anomalies (the difference between the long-term average and the measurement) for the entire satellite record since the late 1970s.
Edward Doddridge, using data from the US NSIDC Sea Ice Index, version 3., CC BY

Recent low sea ice summers present a scientific challenge. The system is currently changing faster than our scientific community can study it.

But vanishing sea ice also presents a challenge to society. The only way to prevent even more drastic changes in the future is to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and reach net zero emissions.

Edward Doddridge receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Antarctic summer sea ice is at record lows. Here’s how it will harm the planet – and us – https://theconversation.com/antarctic-summer-sea-ice-is-at-record-lows-heres-how-it-will-harm-the-planet-and-us-256104

MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Governor Stein’s Task Force on Child Care and Early Education Release Report Proposing Initial Solutions to Child Care Crisis
Source: US State of North Carolina

Headline: Governor Stein’s Task Force on Child Care and Early Education Release Report Proposing Initial Solutions to Child Care Crisis

Governor Stein’s Task Force on Child Care and Early Education Release Report Proposing Initial Solutions to Child Care Crisis
lsaito
Tue, 07/01/2025 – 09:14

Raleigh, NC
Today Governor Josh Stein announced that the North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education co-chaired by Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt and Senator Jim Burgin released its interim report outlining six recommendations to make high-quality child care more accessible, affordable, and sustainable in North Carolina.

“Investing in child care benefits everyone. When children grow up in a supportive and nurturing environment, it sets them on the trajectory to thrive as adults,” said Governor Josh Stein. “We must come together to make child care more accessible and affordable so that we can secure a brighter future for North Carolina’s children.”

“North Carolina families are struggling to find quality child care while centers are closing their doors, making it harder for children to get the education they need and for parents to go to work without worry,” said Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt. “This Task Force has brought together industry leaders and community partners to find real solutions. While our work will continue, I believe this report lays out a path forward to make child care more accessible and affordable.”

“Child care is a business issue, a talent issue, and a health issue that must be addressed to maintain our competitiveness and to increase statewide prosperity,” said Commerce Secretary Lee Lilley. “Public-private solutions, like Commerce’s Child Care Business Liaison position, supported by the NC Department of Health and Human Services and Invest Early NC, are a critical piece of this puzzle and increase capacity for identifying collaborative solutions to addressing the multifaceted child care challenges in North Carolina.”

“Child care is the most important issue facing young families. In reality, many families start tackling this issue before conception,” said Senator Jim Burgin. “This task force has looked at all aspects of child care and early education and explored many possible solutions. I am grateful for Lt. Gov. Hunt and the task force as they work to support the well-being of the children of North Carolina. I would also like to thank Gov. Stein for placing importance on this topic.”

North Carolina’s child care system faces significant challenges associated with recruitment and retention of early childhood education professionals, and in turn availability and affordability of care. The average cost of infant care in North Carolina is more expensive than the cost of in-state college tuition. As such, many parents with young children are making difficult decisions to leave the workforce due to lack of care, costing the state over $5.65 billion in additional economic output in 2023.

The interim report outlines findings and six recommendations developed by Task Force members to explore the key factors impacting North Carolina’s child care landscape.

TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Set a statewide child care subsidy reimbursement rate floor
2. Develop approaches to offer non-salary benefits for child care professionals
3. Explore partnerships with the UNC system, community colleges, and K-12 schools to increase access to child care for public employees and students at public institutions
4. Explore subsidized or free child care for child care teachers
5. Link existing workforce compensation and support programs for early childhood professionals
6. Explore the creation of a child care endowment
A brief summary of each recommendation can be found below.

Set a Statewide Child Care Subsidy Reimbursement Rate Floor

Child care subsidies reimburse child care providers for services they deliver to low-income families, helping low-income parents stay in the workforce, and strengthening our economy. A statewide floor for child care subsidy reimbursement rates would set a minimum subsidy rate in North Carolina, ensuring child care programs across all 100 counties receive a minimum child care subsidy reimbursement to help sustain child care programs that are currently struggling to break even.

Develop Approaches to Offer Non-Salary Benefits for Child Care Professionals

Many child care providers are unable to offer non-salary benefits, such as health insurance or retirement, which makes it challenging to recruit and retain early childhood education professionals. The Task Force will explore whether early childhood professionals could be made eligible for non-salary benefits, such as the North Carolina State Health Plan, or offered other non-salary benefits like paid leave, loan forgiveness, and mental health support.

Explore Partnerships with UNC System, Community Colleges and K-12 School Systems to Increase Access to Child Care for Public Employees and Students

The Task Force will explore options for increasing access to child care for public employees, including supporting subsidized child care for public sector employees. These partnerships could increase access to child care and support training for prospective child care employees by setting up child care centers on school and community college campuses.

Explore Subsidized or Free Child Care for Early Childhood Educators

Child care as an employer benefit is a significant talent recruitment and retention tool across industries and could be particularly valuable to help grow and sustain the child care workforce. The Task Force will explore how child care workers could be made eligible for child care subsidies.

Link Existing Workforce Compensation and Support Programs for Early Childhood Professionals

The Task Force will explore how current workforce training and compensation support programs for early childhood education professionals could be improved by expanding them statewide and linking programs sequentially along a career pathway. North Carolina currently has several programs aimed at improving recruitment and retention, including the Child Care WAGE$ Program, the Teach North Carolina Early Childhood Scholarship Program, the Building Bright Futures program, Child Care Academies, and the Family Child Care Home Pilot Program.

Explore the Creation of a Child Care Endowment

A child care endowment leverages public and/or private dollars to set up an investment fund, the annual interest of which can be used for state child care needs. The Task Force will explore how a child care endowment could help address the current child care crisis in North Carolina by providing an ongoing source of supplemental child care funding for the state and maximizing child care funding through investment from private companies, philanthropy, and communities in partnership with the state.

In coming months, the Task Force will dive deeper into the recommendations outlined in this report, and work groups will examine additional challenges, opportunities, and innovations affecting our state’s child care and early education landscape. The Task Force will also produce an additional report and set of recommendations to submit to Governor Stein by the end of December 2025.

Members of the North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education include:
- Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt, State of North Carolina, Co-Chair
- Senator Jim Burgin, NC General Assembly, Co-Chair
- Senator Jay Chaudhuri, NC General Assembly
- Ashton Clemmons, Associate Vice President of P12 Strategy & Policy, University of North Carolina System
- Representative Sarah Crawford, NC General Assembly
- Amy Cubbage, President, NC Partnership for Children
- Senator Ralph Hise, NC General Assembly
- Lori Jones-Ruff, Regional Programs Manager, Southwestern Child Development Commission, Inc.
- Michelle Logan, Vice President & General Manager of Drug Product, North America, Thermo Fisher
- Amar Majmundar, Policy Director, NC Office of State Human Resources
- Beth Messersmith, NC Senior Director, Moms Rising
- Dr. Mary Olvera, State Director of Teacher Education, Public Services, and Perkins Special Populations, NC Community College System
- Ellen Pancoast, Vice President of People Operations, Cone Health
- Susan Gale Perry, Chief Executive Officer, Child Care Aware of America
- Rhonda Rivers, Chair, NC Child Care Commission
- Dan Rockaway, President, NC Licensed Child Care Association
- Gary Salamido, President & CEO, NC Chamber
- Meka Sales, Director of Special Initiatives, The Duke Endowment
- Erica Palmer Smith, Executive Director, NC Child
- Theresa Stacker, Executive Director, NC Early Childhood Foundation
- Noelle Talley, Deputy Secretary for Advocacy, NC Department of Administration
- Dan Tetreault, Assistant Director of Early Learning, NC Department of Public Instruction
- Representative David Willis, NC General Assembly
- Mary Elizabeth Wilson, Chief of Staff & General Counsel, NC Department of Commerce
- Candace Witherspoon, Director, Division of Child Development and Early Education, NC Department of Health and Human Services
Read Governor Stein’s executive order establishing the Task Force on Child Care and Early Education here.

Read the Task Force’s full report here.

Learn more about the Task Force here.
Jul 1, 2025

MIL OSI USA News –
July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Pop, soda or coke? The fizzy history behind America’s favorite linguistic debate

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno

‘I’ll have a coke – no, not Coca-Cola, Sprite.’ Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookouts – at least until that wayward cousin asks for a “pop” in soda country, or even worse, a “coke” when they actually want a Sprite.

Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop or coke.

The word you use generally boils down to where you’re from: Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the North and far West. Southerners, long the cultural mavericks, don’t bat an eyelash asking for coke – lowercase – before homing in on exactly the type they want: Perhaps a root beer or a Coke, uppercase.

As a linguist who studies American dialects, I’m less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy “health” drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drink’s many names and iterations.

Bubbles, anyone?

Foods and drinks with wellness benefits might seem like a modern phenomenon, but the urge to create drinks with medicinal properties inspired what might be called a soda revolution in the 1800s.

An 1878 engraving of a soda fountain.
Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images

The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, this carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as “soda water.” The word “soda” likely came from “sodium,” since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties.

Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass. A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806. Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas.

By the mid-1800s, pharmacists were creating unique root-, fruit- and herb-infused concoctions, such as sassafras-based root beer, at their soda fountains, often marketing them as cures for everything from fatigue to foul moods.

These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word “soda” with a sweetened carbonated beverage, as opposed to simple, carbonated water.

Seltzer – today’s popular term for such sparkling water – was around, too. But it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder-Selters. Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, seltzer made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water.

Many late-19th-century and early 20th-century drugstores contained soda fountains – a nod to the original belief that the sugary, bubbly drink possessed medicinal qualities.
Hall of Electrical History Foundation/Corbis via Getty Images

Regional naming patterns

So how did “soda” come to be called so many different things in different places?

It all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity.

The popularity of “soda” in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountain’s longer history in the region. Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid-to-late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them.

As for the Midwestern preference for “pop” – well, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called “ginger pop.” Such ginger-flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text. The “pop” seems to be onomatopoeic for the noise made when the cork was released from the bottle before drinking.

A jingle for Faygo touts the company’s ‘red pop.’

Linguists don’t fully know why “pop” became so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works – today known as Faygo Beverages – that used “pop” in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold. Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the “pop” sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned.

As for using coke generically, the first Coca-Cola was served in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company. In the 1900s, the Coca-Cola company tried to stamp out the use of “Coke” for “Coca-Cola.” But that ship had already sailed. Since Coca-Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for “Coke.”

No alcohol means not ‘hard’ but ‘soft.’
Nostalgic Collections/eBay

As with Jell-O, Kleenex, Band-Aids and seltzer, it became a generic term.

What’s soft about it?

Speaking of soft drinks, what’s up with that term?

It was originally used to distinguish all nonalcoholic drinks from “hard drinks,” or beverages containing spirits.

Interestingly, the original Coca-Cola formula included wine – resembling a type of alcoholic “health” drink popular overseas, Vin Mariani. But Pemberton went on to develop a “soft” version a few years later to be sold as a medicinal drink.

Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually “soft drink” came to mean only such sweetened carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to America’s enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles.

With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you what. Just don’t call it healthy.

Valerie M. Fridland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Pop, soda or coke? The fizzy history behind America’s favorite linguistic debate – https://theconversation.com/pop-soda-or-coke-the-fizzy-history-behind-americas-favorite-linguistic-debate-259114

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: In LGBTQ+ storybook case, Supreme Court handed a win to parental rights, raising tough questions for educators

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton

The parents who brought the case had requested that their children be excused when books with LGBTQ+ characters were used in class. SDI Productions/E+ via Getty Images

The Supreme Court tends to save its blockbuster orders for the last day of the term – and 2025 was no exception.

Among the important decisions handed down June 27, 2025, was Mahmoud v. Taylor – a case of particular interest to me, because I teach education law. Mahmoud, I believe, may become one of the court’s most consequential rulings on parental rights.

An interfaith coalition of Muslim, Orthodox Christian and Catholic parents in Montgomery County, Maryland – including Tamer Mahmoud, for whom the case is named – questioned the school board’s refusal to allow them to opt their young children out of lessons using picture books with LGBTQ+ characters. Ruling in favor of the parents, the court found that the board violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion by requiring their children to sit through lessons with materials inconsistent with their faiths.

Case history

The parents in Mahmoud challenged the use of certain storybooks that the board had approved for use in preschool and elementary school. “Pride Puppy!” for example – a book the schools later removed – portrays a family whose pet gets lost at a LGBTQ+ Pride parade, with each page devoted to a letter of the alphabet. The book’s “search and find” list of words directs readers to look for terms in the pictures, including “(drag) queen” and “king,” “leather” and “lip ring.” Other materials included stories about same-sex marriage, a transgender child, and nonbinary bathroom signs.

Initially, school administrators agreed to allow opt-outs for students whose parents objected to the materials. A day later, however, educators changed their minds. School officials cited concerns about absenteeism, the feasibility of accommodating opt-out requests, and a desire to avoid stigmatizing LGBTQ+ students or families.

In August 2023, a federal trial court rejected the parents’ claim that officials had violated their fundamental due process right to direct the care, custody and education of their children. The following year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed in favor of the board, finding that officials did not violate the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religious beliefs, as protected by the First Amendment.

A group of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, protest the lack of opt-outs on July 20, 2023.
Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

On appeal, a 6-3 Supreme Court reversed in favor of the parents. Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the court’s opinion, was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, plus Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Supreme Court

In brief, the court held that by denying the parental requests to opt their children out of instruction inconsistent with their beliefs, school officials violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

Alito largely grounded the court’s rationale in a dispute from 1925, Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary, and even more heavily on 1972’s Wisconsin v. Yoder. Both cases recognize the primacy of parental rights to direct the education of their children. According to Pierce’s famous dictum, “the child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

In Yoder, Amish parents – an Anabaptist Christian community that avoids using many modern technologies – objected to sending their children to school after eighth grade because this would have violated their religious beliefs. The justices unanimously agreed with the parents that their children received all of the education they needed in their communities. The justices added that requiring the children to attend high school would have violated the parents’ rights to direct their children’s religious upbringing.

Accordingly, the court acknowledged that the parental right “to guide the religious future and education of their children” was “established beyond debate.”

Similarly, in Mahmoud the court declared that “the Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion.”

Thomas agreed fully with the court, yet wrote a separate concurrence, which emphasized “an important implication of this decision for schools across the country.” Citing Yoder, Thomas contended that rather than support inclusion, the board’s policy “imposes conformity with a view that undermines parents’ religious beliefs, and thus interferes with the parents’ right to ‘direct the religious upbringing of their children.’”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, feared “the result will be chaos for this Nation’s public schools. Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools.”

Supporters of LGBTQ+ rights demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court during oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor on April 22, 2025.
Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images

She maintained that “simply being exposed to beliefs contrary to your own” does not violate a person’s free exercise rights. Insulating children from different ideas, she wrote, denies them of an experience that is crucial for democracy: “practice living in our multicultural society.”

Implications

After the decision was handed down, Montgomery County’s Board of Education issued a statement promising to “analyze the Supreme Court decision and develop next steps in alignment with today’s decision, and as importantly, our values.”

Mahmoud raises challenging questions about the scope or reach of how far parents can question curricular content.

On the one hand, parents should not be able to micromanage curricular content via the “heckler’s veto,” because this can lead to larger issues. Moreover, while Mahmoud concerns religious rights, what happens if parents question teachings based on another type of sincerely held belief – discussing war if they are pacifist, for example, or capitalism if they are socialists? While Mahmoud dealt with free-exercise rights, it may open the door to other types of First Amendment challenges from parents wishing to exempt their children from lessons.

On the other hand, Mahmoud highlights the need to take legitimate parental concerns into consideration. While educators typically control instruction, how can they be respectful of parents’ rights as primary caregivers of their children when conflicts arise?

Mahmoud may go a long way in defining parents’ free-exercise rights in public schools. Still, such disputes are likely far from over in America’s increasingly diverse religious culture.

Charles J. Russo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In LGBTQ+ storybook case, Supreme Court handed a win to parental rights, raising tough questions for educators – https://theconversation.com/in-lgbtq-storybook-case-supreme-court-handed-a-win-to-parental-rights-raising-tough-questions-for-educators-260064

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Invasive carp threaten the Great Lakes − and reveal a surprising twist in national politics

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mike Shriberg, Professor of Practice & Engagement, School for Environment & Sustainability, University of Michigan

Invasive Asian carp are spreading up the Mississippi River system and already clog the Illinois River. AP Photo/John Flesher

In his second term, President Donald Trump has not taken many actions that draw near-universal praise from across the political spectrum. But there is at least one of these political anomalies, and it illustrates the broad appeal of environmental protection and conservation projects – particularly when it concerns an ecosystem of vital importance to millions of Americans.

In May 2025, Trump issued a presidential memorandum supporting the construction of a physical barrier that is key to keeping invasive carp out of the Great Lakes. These fish have made their way up the Mississippi River system and could have dire ecological consequences if they enter the Great Lakes.

It was not a given that Trump would back this project, which had long been supported by environmental and conservation organizations. But two very different strategies from two Democratic governors – both potential presidential candidates in 2028 – reflected the importance of the Great Lakes to America.

As a water policy and politics scholar focused on the Great Lakes, I see this development not only as an environmental and conservation milestone, but also a potential pathway for more political unity in the U.S.

A feared invasion

Perhaps nothing alarms Great Lakes ecologists more than the potential for invasive carp from Asia to establish a breeding population in the Great Lakes. These fish were intentionally introduced in the U.S. Southeast by private fish farm and wastewater treatment operators as a means to control algae in aquaculture and sewage treatment ponds. Sometime in the 1990s, the fish escaped from those ponds and moved rapidly up the Mississippi River system, including into the Illinois River, which connects to the Great Lakes.

Sometimes said to “breed like mosquitoes and eat like hogs,” these fish can consume up to 40% of their body weight each day, outcompeting many native species and literally sucking up other species and food sources.

Studies of Lake Erie, for example, predict that if the carp enter and thrive, they could make up approximately one-third of the fish biomass of the entire lake within 20 years, replacing popular sportfishing species such as walleye and other ecologically and economically important species.

Invasive carp are generally not eaten in the U.S. and are not desirable for sportfishing. In fact, silver carp have a propensity to jump up to 10 feet out of the water when startled by a boat motor. That can make parts of the Illinois River, which is packed with the invasive fish, almost impossible to fish or even maneuver a boat.

Look out! Silver carp fly out of the water, obstructing boats and hitting people trying to enjoy a river in Indiana.

The Brandon Road Lock and Dam solution

Originally, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River were not connected to each other. But in 1900, the city of Chicago connected them to avoid sending its sewage into Lake Michigan, from which the city draws its drinking water.

The most complete way to block the carp from invading the Great Lakes would be to undo that connection – but that would recreate sewage and flooding issues for Chicago, or require other expensive infrastructure upgrades. The more practical, short-term alternative is to modify the historic Brandon Road Lock and Dam in Joliet, Illinois, by adding several obstacles that together would block the carp from swimming farther upriver toward the Great Lakes.

The barrier, estimated to cost US$1.15 billion, was authorized by Congress in 2020 and 2022 after many years of intense planning and negotiations. For the first phase of construction, the project received $226 million in federal money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to complement $114 million in state funding – $64 million from Michigan and $50 million from Illinois.

On the first day of Trump’s second term, however, he paused a wide swath of federal funding, including funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. And that’s when two different political strategies emerged.

A brief documentary explains the construction of a connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin.

Pritzker vs. Whitmer vs. Trump

Illinois, a state that has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1992, has the most financially at stake in the Brandon Road project because the project requires the state to acquire land and operate the barrier. When Trump issued his order, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, postponed the purchase of a key piece of land, blaming the “Trump Administration’s lack of clarity and commitment” to the project. Pritzker essentially dared Trump to be the reason for the collapse of the Great Lakes ecosystem and fisheries.

Another Democrat, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a swing state with the most at stake economically and ecologically if these carp species enter the Great Lakes, took a very different approach. She went to the White House to talk with Trump about invasive carp and other issues. She defended her nonconfrontational approach to critics, though she also hid her face from cameras when Trump surprised her with an Oval Office press conference. When Trump visited Michigan, she stood beside him as they praised each other.

When Trump released the federal funding in early May, Pritzker kept up his adversarial language, saying he was “glad that the Trump administration heard our calls … and decided to finally meet their obligation.” Whitmer stayed more conciliatory, calling the funding decision a “huge win that will protect our Great Lakes and secure our economy.” She said she was “grateful to the president for his commitment.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer greets President Donald Trump as he arrives in her state in late April 2025.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Why unity on carp?

Whether coordinated or not, the net result of Pritzker’s and Whitmer’s actions drew praise from both sides of the aisle but was little noticed nationally.

Trump’s support for the project was a rare moment of political unity and an extremely unusual example of leading Democrats being on the same page as Trump. I attribute this surprising outcome to two key factors.

First, the Great Lakes region holds disproportionate power in presidential elections. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have backed the eventual winner in every presidential race for the past 20 years. This swing state power has been used by advocates and state political leaders to drive funding for Great Lakes protection for many years.

Second, Great Lakes are the uniting force in the region. According to polling from the International Joint Commission, the binational body charged with overseeing waterways that cross the U.S.-Canada border, there is “nearly unanimous support (96%) for the importance of government investment in Great Lakes protections” from residents of the region.

There aren’t any other issues with such high voter resonance, so politicians want to be sure Great Lakes voters are happy. For example, Vice President JD Vance has been particularly vocal about the Great Lakes. And Great Lakes restoration funding was one of the few things in the presidential budget that Democrats and Republicans agreed on.

Both Pritzker and Whitmer likely had state-based and national motivations in mind and big aspirations at stake.

Their combined effort has put the project back on track: As of May 12, 2025, Pritzker authorized Illinois to sign the land-purchase agreement he had paused back in February.

And perhaps the governors have identified a new area for unity in a divided United States: Conservation and environmental issues have broad public support, particularly when they involve iconic natural resources, shared values and popular outdoor pursuits such as fishing and boating. Even when political strategies diverge, the results can bring bipartisan satisfaction.

Mike Shriberg was previously the Great Lakes Regional Executive Director of the National Wildlife Federation, which entailed being a co-chair (and, for part of the time, Director) of the Healing Our Waters – Great Lakes Coalition.

– ref. Invasive carp threaten the Great Lakes − and reveal a surprising twist in national politics – https://theconversation.com/invasive-carp-threaten-the-great-lakes-and-reveal-a-surprising-twist-in-national-politics-257707

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: 1 in 4 Americans reject evolution, a century after the Scopes monkey trial spotlighted the clash between science and religion

Source: The Conversation – USA – By William Trollinger, Professor of History, University of Dayton

The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war.

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments.

But that was not the case with all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, who held that the Bible is inerrant – without error – and factually accurate in all that it has to say, including when it speaks on history and science.

The Scopes trial occurred July 10-21, 1925. Between 150 and 200 reporters swooped into the small town. Broadcast on Chicago’s WGN, it was the first trial to be aired live over radio in the United States.

One hundred years after the trial, and as we have documented in our scholarly work, the culture war over evolution and creationism remains strong – and yet, when it comes to creationism, much has also changed.

The trial

In May 1919, over 6,000 conservative Protestants gathered in Philadelphia to create, under the leadership of Baptist firebrand William Bell Riley, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, or WCFA.

Holding to biblical inerrancy, these “fundamentalists” believed in the creation account detailed in chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God brought all life into being in six days. But most of these fundamentalists also accepted mainstream geology, which held that the Earth was millions of years old. Squaring a literal understanding of Genesis with an old Earth, they embraced either the “day-age theory” – that each Genesis day was actually a long period of time – or the “gap theory,” in which there was a huge gap of time before the six 24-hour days of creation.

This nascent fundamentalist movement initiated a campaign to pressure state legislatures to prohibit public schools from teaching evolution. One of these states was Tennessee, which in 1925 passed the Butler Act. This law made it illegal for public schoolteachers “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, to challenge the law in court. The WCFA sprang into action, successfully persuading William Jennings Bryan – populist politician and outspoken fundamentalist – to assist the prosecution. In response, the ACLU hired famous attorney Clarence Darrow to serve on the defense team.

A huge crowd attending the Scopes trial.
Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images

When the trial started, Dayton civic leaders were thrilled with the opportunity to boost their town. Outside the courtroom there was a carnivalesque atmosphere, with musicians, preachers, concession stands and even monkeys.

Inside the courtroom, the trial became a verbal duel between Bryan and Darrow regarding science and religion. But as the judge narrowed the proceedings to whether or not Scopes violated the law – a point that the defense readily admitted – it seemed clear that Scopes would be found guilty. Many of the reporters thus went home.

But the trial’s most memorable episode was yet to come. On July 20, Darrow successfully provoked Bryan to take the witness stand as a Bible expert. Due to the huge crowd and suffocating heat, the judge moved the trial outdoors.

The 3,000 or so spectators witnessed Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan, which was primarily intended to make Bryan and fundamentalism appear foolish and ignorant. Most significant, Darrow’s questions revealed that, despite Bryan’s’ assertion that he read the Bible literally, Bryan actually understood the six days of Genesis not as 24-hour days, but as six long and indeterminate periods of time.

American lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn.
Hulton Archive/Getty Image

The very next day, the jury found Scopes guilty and fined him US$100. Riley and the fundamentalists cheered the verdict as a triumph for the Bible and morality.

The fundamentalists and ‘The Genesis Flood’

But very soon that sense of triumph faded, partly because of news stories that portrayed fundamentalists as ignorant rural bigots. In one such example, a prominent journalist, H. L. Mencken, wrote in a Baltimore Sun column that the Scopes trial “serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land.”

The media ridicule encouraged many scholars and journalists to conclude that creationism and fundamentalism would soon disappear from American culture. But that prediction did not come to pass.

Instead, fundamentalists, including WCFA leader Riley, seemed all the more determined to redouble their efforts at the grassroots level.

But as Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan made obvious, it was not easy to square a literal reading of the Bible – including the six-day creation outlined in Genesis – with a scientific belief in an old Earth. What fundamentalists needed was a science that supported the idea of a young Earth.

In their 1961 book, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, fundamentalists John Whitcomb, a theologian, and Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer, provided just such a scientific explanation. Making use, without attribution, of the writings of Seventh-day Adventist geologist George McCready Price, Whitcomb and Morris made the case that Noah’s global flood lasted one year and created the geological strata and mountain ranges that made the Earth seem ancient.

“The Genesis Flood” and its version of flood geology remains ubiquitous among fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants.

Young Earth creationism

Today, opinion polls reveal that roughly one-quarter of all Americans are adherents of this newer strand of creationism, which rejects both mainstream geology as well as mainstream biology.

Replica of Noah’s Ark at the Ark Encounter, near Williamstown, Ky.
Ron Buskirk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

This popular embrace of young Earth creationism also explains the success of Answers in Genesis – AiG – which is the world’s largest creationist organization, with a website that attracts millions of visitors every year.

AiG’s tourist sites – the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky – have attracted millions of visitors since their opening in 2007 and 2016. Additional AiG sites are planned for Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

Presented as a replica of Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter is a gigantic structure – 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high. It includes representations of animal cages as well as plush living quarters for the eight human beings who, according to Genesis chapters 6-8, survived the global flood. Hundreds of placards in the Ark make the case for a young Earth and a global flood that created the geological strata and formations we see today.

Ark Encounter has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars from state and local governments.

Besides AiG tourist sites, there is also an ever-expanding network of fundamentalist schools and homeschools that present young Earth creationism as true science. These schools use textbooks from publishers such as Abeka Books, Accelerated Christian Education and Bob Jones University Press.

The Scopes trial involved what could and could not be taught in public schools regarding creation and evolution. Today, this discussion also involves private schools, given that there are now at least 15 states that have universal private school choice programs, in which families can use taxpayer-funded education money to pay for private schooling and homeschooling.

In 1921, William Bell Riley admonished his opponents that they should “cease from shoveling in dirt on living men,” for the fundamentalists “refuse to be buried.” A century later, the funeral for fundamentalism and creationism seems a long way off.

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

– ref. 1 in 4 Americans reject evolution, a century after the Scopes monkey trial spotlighted the clash between science and religion – https://theconversation.com/1-in-4-americans-reject-evolution-a-century-after-the-scopes-monkey-trial-spotlighted-the-clash-between-science-and-religion-258163

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Bill Moyers’ journalism strengthened democracy by connecting Americans to ideas and each other, in a long and extraordinary career

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Julie Leininger Pycior, Professor of History Emeritus, Manhattan University

“Bill Moyers? He’s spectacular!” George Clooney said – and no wonder.

I mentioned this legendary television journalist to the actor and filmmaker after Clooney emerged from the Broadway theater where he just had been portraying another news icon: Edward R. Murrow. Or as the Museum of Broadcast Communications put it in a tribute to Moyers, he was “one of the few broadcast journalists who might be said to approach the stature of Edward R. Murrow. If Murrow founded broadcast journalism, Moyers significantly extended its traditions.”

Moyers, who died at 91 on June 26, 2025, was among the most acclaimed broadcast journalists of the 20th century. He’s known for TV news shows that exposed the role of big money in politics and episodes that drew attention to unsung defenders of democracy, such as community organizer Ernesto Cortés Jr..

Earlier in his life, Moyers served in significant roles in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but his fame comes from his journalism.

Making a connection

Despite his prominence, Moyers was the same down-to-earth guy in person as he seemed to be on the screen. In 1986, he was commanding a television audience of millions, and I was a historian at home with a preschooler, teaching the occasional college course in a dismal job market. Seeing that Moyers would be speaking at the conference on President Lyndon B. Johnson where I would be giving a paper, I wrote to him.

To my utter amazement, he replied and then showed up to hear my paper, on Johnson’s experiences as a young principal of the “Mexican” school in Cotulla, Texas, where he championed his students but also forged links to segregationists. Cotulla was “seminal” to LBJ’s development, Moyers said. In 1993, he recommended me for a grant that helped me finish a book: “LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power.

A few years later, he asked me to head up a project researching the documents related to his time in Johnson’s administration. His memoir of the Johnson years never materialized. Instead, I edited the bestselling ”Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times.“

Part of what always impressed me about Moyers was his belief that what matters is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality.

‘Amazing Grace’

Moyers didn’t just dwell on politics and policy as a journalist. He also delved into the meaning of creativity and the life of the mind. Many of his most moving interviews spotlighted scientists, novelists and other exceptional people.

He was also arguably among the best reporters on the religion beat. Even if it wasn’t always the main focus of his work or what comes to mind for those familiar with his legacy, still, he was a lifelong spiritual seeker.

This is hardly surprising: Moyers had degrees in both divinity and journalism. As a young man, he briefly served as a Baptist minister.

He once told me that his favorite of the many programs that he produced was the PBS documentary ”Amazing Grace.“ It featured inspiring renditions of this popular Christian hymn as performed by country legend Johnny Cash, folk icon Judy Collins, opera diva Jessye Norman and other musical geniuses. As they share with Moyers their personal connections to this song of redemption, he draws viewers into the stirring saga of its creator, John Newton: a slave trader who became an abolitionist through “amazing grace.”

Bill Moyers interviews Judy Collins about singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ following the production of his PBS special about the hymn.

Life’s ultimate questions

This appreciation of the ineffable clearly informed Moyers’ blockbuster TV series exploring life’s ultimate questions, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.”

His interviews with Campbell, a comparative mythologist, evoked moments that made time stand still, and this reminded me of Thomas Merton, the American monk and poet, writing, “Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion” on beholding the immense Polonnaruwa Buddhas of Sri Lanka.

To my surprise, Moyers knew about this Trappist monk, telling me, “I always wished that I could have interviewed Merton,” who died in 1968.

It turned out that Moyers had been introduced to Merton by Sargent Shriver, founding director of the Peace Corps, where Moyers was a founding organizer and the deputy director.

Mentored by LBJ

Moyers characterized his Peace Corps years as the most rewarding of his life. When Johnson, his mentor, became president, he asked Moyers to join the White House staff. Moyers turned down the offer, so Johnson made it a presidential command.

The wunderkind – Moyers was 29 years old in 1963, when Johnson was sworn in after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination – coordinated the White House task forces that created the largest number of legislative proposals in American history. Among the programs and landmark reforms established and passed during the Johnson administration were Medicare and Medicaid, a landmark immigration law, the Freedom of Information Act, the Public Broadcasting Act and two historic civil rights laws.

Johnson’s war on poverty, in addition, introduced several path-breaking programs, such as Head Start.

Moyers served as one of Johnson’s speechwriters and was a top official in Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. The following year, the Johnson administration began escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Johnson named a new press secretary: Bill Moyers. Again, the young man tried to decline, but the president prevailed.

As Moyers had feared, he could not serve two masters – journalists and his boss – especially as the administration’s Vietnam War policies became increasingly unpopular.

President Lyndon B. Johnson confers with Bill Moyers, his press secretary, in 1965.
Corbis Historical via Getty Images

Appreciating the world around you

Moyers left the Johnson administration in 1967, turning to journalism. He became the publisher of Newsday, a Long Island, New York, newspaper, before becoming a producer and commentator at CBS News. His commentaries reached tens of millions of viewers, but the network refused to provide a regular time slot for his documentaries. He had previously worked at PBS. In 1987, he decamped there for good.

Moyers’ programs won many journalism awards, including over 30 Emmys, along with the Lifetime Emmy for news and documentary productions.

He helped millions of Americans appreciate the world around them. As he reflected in 2023, in one of the last interviews he gave, to PBS journalist Judy Woodruff at the Library of Congress: “Everything is linked, and if you can find that nerve that connects us to other things and other places and other ideas – and television should be doing it all the time – we’d be a better democracy.”

Judy Woodruff interviews Bill Moyers about his life’s work in government and the media, including his contributions to the launch of PBS, at the Library of Congress.

Today, with disinformation metastasizing, professional journalists losing their jobs by the thousands and some newspaper owners muzzling their editorial staff, thoughtful explanations can lose out. That means Americans can lose out.

“It takes time, commitment” to dig below the surface and discover the deeper meaning of people’s lives, Moyers noted. He sought to understand, for example, why so many folks in his own hometown of Marshall, Texas, have become much more suspicious – resentful, even – of outsiders than when he gave these folks voice in his poignant, prize-winning 1984 program Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas.

In this era of growing threats to democracy, what can a young person do who aspires to follow in Bill Moyers’ footsteps – whether in journalism or public life?

Woodruff asked Moyers that question, to which he responded: “You can’t quit. You can’t get out of the boat! Find a place that gives you a sense of being, gives you a sense of mission, gives you a sense of participation.”

Today, with the future of journalism – and of democracy itself – at stake, I think it would help everyone to take to heart the insights of this late, great American journalist.

Julie Leininger Pycior edited the book “Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times.” She also was hired by Moyers to direct the 18-month “LBJ Years” research project.

In addtion, she served as an unpaid, informal historical adviser for some of his public television programs.

– ref. Bill Moyers’ journalism strengthened democracy by connecting Americans to ideas and each other, in a long and extraordinary career – https://theconversation.com/bill-moyers-journalism-strengthened-democracy-by-connecting-americans-to-ideas-and-each-other-in-a-long-and-extraordinary-career-260047

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Keeping brain-dead pregnant women on life support raises ethical issues that go beyond abortion politics

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lindsey Breitwieser, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, Hollins University

Laws such as Georgia’s LIFE Act can complicate ethical and legal decision-making in postmortem pregnancy.
Darya Komarova/Moment via Getty Images

Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old woman from Georgia who had been declared brain-dead in February 2025, spent 16 weeks on life support while doctors worked to keep her body functioning well enough to support her developing fetus. On June 13, 2025, her premature baby, named Chance, was born via cesarean section at 25 weeks.

Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she suffered multiple blood clots in her brain. Her story gained public attention when her mother criticized doctors’ decision to keep her on a ventilator without the family’s consent. Smith’s mother has said that doctors told the family the decision was made to align with Georgia’s LIFE Act, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and bolsters the legal standing of fetal personhood. A statement released by the hospital also cites Georgia’s abortion law.

“I’m not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy,” Smith’s mother told a local television station. “But I’m saying we should have had a choice.”

The LIFE Act is one of several state laws that have passed across the U.S. since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision invalidated constitutional protections for abortion. Although Georgia’s attorney general denied that the LIFE Act applied to Smith, there’s little doubt that it invites ethical and legal uncertainty when a woman dies while pregnant.

Smith’s case has swiftly become the focus of a reproductive rights political firestorm characterized by two opposing viewpoints. For some, it reflects demeaning governmental overreach that quashes women’s bodily autonomy. For others it illustrates the righteous sacrifice of motherhood.

In my work as a gender and technology studies scholar, I have cataloged and studied postmortem pregnancies like Smith’s since 2016. In my view, Smith’s story doesn’t fit straightforwardly into abortion politics. Instead, it points to the need for a more nuanced ethical approach that does not frame a mother and child as adversaries in a medical, legal or political context.

Birth after death

For centuries, Catholic dogma and Western legal precedent have mandated immediate cesarean section when a pregnant woman died after quickening, the point when fetal movement becomes discernible. But technological advances now make it possible sometimes for a fetus to continue gestating in place when the mother is brain-dead, or “dead by neurological criteria”– a widely accepted definition of death that first emerged in the 1950s.

The first brain death during pregnancy in which the fetus was delivered after time on life support, more accurately called organ support, occurred in 1981. The process is extraordinarily intensive and invasive, because the loss of brain function impedes many physiological processes. Health teams, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, must stabilize the bodies of “functionally decapitated” pregnant women to buy more time for fetal development. This requires vital organ support, ventilation, nutritional supplements, antibiotics and constant monitoring. Outcomes are highly uncertain.

Adriana Smith’s baby was delivered by cesarian section on June 13, 2025.

Smith’s 112-day stint on organ support ranks third in length for a postmortem pregnancy, with the longest being 123 days. Hers is also the earliest ever gestational age from which the procedure has been attempted. Because time on organ support can vary widely, and because there is no established minimum fetal age considered too early to intervene, a fetus could theoretically be deemed viable at any point in pregnancy.

Postmortem pregnancy as gender-based violence

Over the past 50 years, critics of postmortem pregnancy have argued that it constitutes gender-based violence and violates bodily integrity in ways that organ donation does not. Some have compared it with Nazi pronatalist policies. Others have attributed the practice to systemic sexism and racism in medicine. Postmortem pregnancy can also compound intimate partner violence by giving brain-dead women’s murderers decision-making authority when they are the fetus’s next of kin.

Fetal personhood laws complicate end-of-life decision-making in ways that many consider violent too. As I have seen in my own research, when the fetus is considered a legal person, women’s wishes may be assumed, debated in court or committee, or set aside entirely, nearly always in favor of the fetus.

From the perspective of reproductive rights advocates, postmortem pregnancy is the bottom of a slippery slope down which anti-abortion sentiment has led America. It obliterates women’s autonomy, pitting living and dead women against doctors, legislators and sometimes their own families, and weaponizing their own fetuses against them.

A medical perspective on rights

Viewed through a medical lens, however, postmortem pregnancy is not violent or violating, but an act of repair. Although care teams have responsibilities to both mother and fetus, a pregnant woman’s brain death means she cannot be physically harmed and her rights cannot be violated to the same degree as a fetus with the potential for life.

Medical practitioners are conditioned to prioritize life over death, motivating a commitment to salvage something from a tragedy and try to partially restore a family. The high-stakes world of emergency medicine makes protecting life reflexive and medical interventions automatic. Once fetal life is detected, as one hospital spokesperson put it in a 1976 news article in The Boston Globe, “What else could you do?”

This response does not necessarily stem from conscious sexism or anti-abortion sentiment, but from reverence for vulnerable patients. If physicians declare a pregnant woman brain-dead, patienthood often automatically transfers to the fetus needing rescue. No matter its age and despite its survival being dependent on machines, just like its mother, the fetus is entirely animate. Who or what counts as a legal person with privileges and protections might be a political or philosophical determination, but life is a matter of biological fact and within the doctors’ purview.

The first baby born from a postmortem pregnancy was delivered in 1981.
Emmanuel Faure/The Image Bank via Getty Images

An ethics of anti-opposition

Both of the above perspectives have validity, but neither accounts for postmortem pregnancy’s ethical and biological complexity.

First, setting mother against fetus, with the rights of one endangering the rights of the other, does not match pregnancy’s lived reality of “two bodies, sutured,” as the cultural scholar Lauren Berlant put it.

Even the Supreme Court recognized this entangled duality in their 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade, which established both constitutional protections for abortion and a governmental obligation to protect fetal life. Whether a fetus is considered a legal person or not, they wrote, pregnant women and fetuses “cannot be isolated in their privacy” – meaning that reproductive rights issues must strike a balance, however tenuous, between maternal and fetal interests. To declare postmortem pregnancy unequivocally violent or a loss of the “right to choose” fails to recognize the complexity of choice in a highly politicized medical landscape.

Second, maternal-fetal competition muddles the right course of action. In the U.S., competent patients are not compelled to engage in medical care they would rather avoid, even if it kills them, or to stay on life support to preserve organs for donation. But when a fetus is treated as an independent patient, exceptions could be made to those medical standards if the fetus’s interests override the mother’s.

For example, pregnancy disrupts standard determination of death. To protect the fetus, care teams increasingly skip a necessary diagnostic for brain death called apnea testing, which involves momentarily removing the ventilator to test the respiratory centers of the brain stem. In these cases, maternal brain death cannot be confirmed until after delivery. Multiple instances of vaginal deliveries after brain death also remain unexplained, given that the brain coordinates mechanisms of vaginal labor. All in all, it’s not always clear women in these cases are entirely dead.

Ultimately, women like Adriana Smith and their fetuses are inseparable and persist in a technologically defined state of in-betweenness. I’d argue that postmortem pregnancies, therefore, need new bioethical standards that center women’s beliefs about their bodies and a dignified death. This might involve recognizing pregnancy’s unique ambiguities in advance directives, questioning default treatment pathways that may require harm be done to one in order to save another, or considering multiple definitions of clinical and legal death.

In my view, it is possible to adapt our ethical standards in a way that honors all beings in these exceptional circumstances, without privileging either “choice” or “life,” mother or fetus.

This research was supported by a grant from The Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

– ref. Keeping brain-dead pregnant women on life support raises ethical issues that go beyond abortion politics – https://theconversation.com/keeping-brain-dead-pregnant-women-on-life-support-raises-ethical-issues-that-go-beyond-abortion-politics-258457

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: Mexican flags flown during immigration protests bother white people a lot more than other Americans

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Edward D. Vargas, Associate Professor, School of Transborder Studies, Arizona State University

Protesters wave the Mexican flag in Los Angeles on June 9, 2025. Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a series of raids throughout Los Angeles and Southern California in early June 2025, sparking protests in downtown Los Angeles and other cities, including New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas.

Some demonstrators expressed growing frustration with ICE by showcasing the Mexican flag, which has become the defining symbol of the protests in Los Angeles.

The use of the flag has also become the subject of intense debate in the media.

Some outlets have depicted the flag as symbolizing ethnic pride, solidarity with immigrants and opposition to the Trump administration.

Others have called it the “perfect propaganda” tool for Republicans and conservatives, some of whom have referred to the Mexican flag as the “confederate banner of the L.A. riots.” They point to its use as evidence of anarchy and a city taken over by immigrants.

But what do Americans think about protesters waving the Mexican flag, and why?

Much of our knowledge surrounding this question is based on the 2006 immigrant rights protests across the United States, which occurred in a much less politically polarized era. Additionally, a vast majority of protesters then brought U.S. flags compared with other national flags, including the Mexican flag.

Research published in 2010 found that even though the public was more likely to be bothered by protesters waving the Mexican flag than the U.S. flag, that difference was largely absent once you divided the public into subgroups, including white people, Latinos and immigrants.

To reexamine public attitudes toward protesters waving the Mexican flag, we conducted an online survey experiment among 10,145 U.S. adults in 2016.

As political scientists who specialize in Latino politics and immigration-related issues, we tested how exposure to the Mexican flag versus the American flag shaped opinion about protests during Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016.

We found that even though much of the public continued to be less bothered by the American flag than the Mexican flag, there were also important and perhaps surprising differences in protest attitudes between white Americans and other racial and ethnic groups.

A demonstrator holds a Mexican flag in front of law enforcement during a protest on June 13, 2025, in Los Angeles.
AP Photo/Wally Skalij

More or less bothered

In the study, we randomly divided respondents into two groups: a treatment group and a control group. Respondents in the treatment group were shown an image of protesters waving a Mexican flag. Respondents in the control group were shown an image of protesters waving the U.S. flag. After viewing the image, respondents were then asked about the extent to which they supported or were bothered by the protests.

Overall, 41% of the respondents said they were bothered by protesters waving the Mexican flag, and 28% said protesters waving the U.S. flag bothered them.

Our results show important differences in opinion between racial and ethnic groups.

White respondents were more likely than any other racial and ethnic group to say they were bothered by protesters waving Mexican flags. Sixty-nine percent of white respondents said they were bothered, 31 percentage points more than the average of nonwhite respondents.

However, 51% of white respondents were also bothered by the image of protesters waving U.S. flags. By contrast, just 20% of Latinos, 33% of Black Americans and 34% of Asian Americans said they were bothered by protesters waving U.S. flags.

Put differently, large majorities of nonwhite respondents were supportive of showing U.S. flags at protests despite their more positive views toward Mexican flags.

What explains racial differences?

When taking a deeper look at what causes Americans to feel bothered about protesters waving Mexican flags, some clear patterns emerge.

On average, older Americans were more likely to be bothered relative to younger Americans. This was particularly true for Americans over 40 years of age compared with millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z respondents, born between 1997 and 2012.

However, there are some nuances when examining age groups and whether they had attended a protest, march or rally in the previous year.

Our findings suggest that older Americans who had not engaged in protests were most likely to be bothered when they saw images of protesters waving Mexican flags. Millennials and Gen Z respondents who participated in a protest were least likely to be bothered.

Given that this issue intersects nationality, race, ethnicity, gender and citizenship status, it’s logical that these factors explained why Americans supported or opposed the use of Mexican flags at immigration protests.

A woman carrying a flag with details of the United States and Mexican flags walks past members of the United States Marine Corps on June 14, 2025, in Los Angeles.
Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images

For example, racial minorities who have a stronger sense of ethnic or racial identity were more likely to be supportive of protesters waving Mexican and U.S. flags. In other words, group identity is a strong predictor of support for protests in general, regardless of what flag is being flown.

However, minorities who lack a sense of ethnic pride and identity were most likely to be upset when they saw others expressing their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

The reality is that recent immigration protests across the country are the first time many of the Latino youth who are citizens have participated in these types of protests. Anyone under age 22 would not have memory of, or been alive during, the last large pro-immigrant protests in 2006.

The Mexican flag represents more than nationalistic pride. It represents their parents’ heritage, hard work and their binational experience as Americans engaged in politics.

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

– ref. Mexican flags flown during immigration protests bother white people a lot more than other Americans – https://theconversation.com/mexican-flags-flown-during-immigration-protests-bother-white-people-a-lot-more-than-other-americans-259004

MIL OSI – Global Reports –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Global: The hidden cost of convenience: How your data pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars for app and social media companies
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kassem Fawaz, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Many apps and social media platforms collect detailed information about you as you use them, and sometimes even when you’re not using them. Malte Mueller/fStop via Getty images

You wake up in the morning and, first thing, you open your weather app. You close that pesky ad that opens first and check the forecast. You like your weather app, which shows hourly weather forecasts for your location. And the app is free!

But do you know why it’s free? Look at the app’s privacy settings. You help keep it free by allowing it to collect your information, including:
- What devices you use and their IP and Media Access Control addresses.
- Information you provide when signing up, such as your name, email address and home address.
- App settings, such as whether you choose Celsius or Fahrenheit.
- Your interactions with the app, including what content you view and what ads you click.
- Inferences based on your interactions with the app.
- Your location at a given time, including, depending on your settings, continuous tracking.
- What websites or apps that you interact with after you use the weather app.
- Information you give to ad vendors.
- Information gleaned by analytics vendors that analyze and optimize the app.
This type of data collection is standard fare. The app company can use this to customize ads and content. The more customized and personalized an ad is, the more money it generates for the app owner. The owner might also sell your data to other companies.

Many apps, including the weather channel app, send you targeted advertising and sell your personal data by default.
Jack West, CC BY-ND

You might also check a social media account like Instagram. The subtle price that you pay is, again, your data. Many “free” mobile apps gather information about you as you interact with them.

As an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and a doctoral student in computer science, we follow the ways software collects information about people. Your data allows companies to learn about your habits and exploit them.

It’s no secret that social media and mobile applications collect information about you. Meta’s business model depends on it. The company, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is worth US$1.48 trillion. Just under 98% of its profits come from advertising, which leverages user data from more than 7 billion monthly users.

Read more:
How Internet of Things devices affect your privacy – even when they’re not yours

What your data is worth

Before mobile phones gained apps and social media became ubiquitous, companies conducted large-scale demographic surveys to assess how well a product performed and to get information about the best places to sell it. They used the information to create coarsely targeted ads that they placed on billboards, print ads and TV spots.

Mobile apps and social media platforms now let companies gather much more fine-grained information about people at a lower cost. Through apps and social media, people willingly trade personal information for convenience. In 2007 – a year after the introduction of targeted ads – Facebook made over $153 million, triple the previous year’s revenue. In the past 17 years, that number has increased by more than 1,000 times.

Five ways to leave your data

App and social media companies collect your data in many ways. Meta is a representative case. The company’s privacy policy highlights five ways it gathers your data:

First, it collects the profile information you fill in. Second, it collects the actions you take on its social media platforms. Third, it collects the people you follow and friend. Fourth, it keeps track of each phone, tablet and computer you use to access its platforms. And fifth, it collects information about how you interact with apps that corporate partners connect to its platforms. Many apps and social media platforms follow similar privacy practices.

Your data and activity

When you create an account on an app or social media platform, you provide the company that owns it with information like your age, birth date, identified sex, location and workplace. In the early years of Facebook, selling profile information to advertisers was that company’s main source of revenue. This information is valuable because it allows advertisers to target specific demographics like age, identified gender and location.

And once you start using an app or social media platform, the company behind it can collect data about how you use the app or social media. Social media keeps you engaged as you interact with other people’s posts by liking, commenting or sharing them. Meanwhile, the social media company gains information about what content you view and how you communicate with other people.

Advertisers can find out how much time you spent reading a Facebook post or that you spent a few more seconds on a particular TikTok video. This activity information tells advertisers about your interests. Modern algorithms can quickly pick up subtleties and automatically change the content to engage you in a sponsored post, a targeted advertisement or general content.

Your devices and applications

Companies can also note what devices, including mobile phones, tablets and computers, you use to access their apps and social media platforms. This shows advertisers your brand loyalty, how old your devices are and how much they’re worth.

Because mobile devices travel with you, they have access to information about where you’re going, what you’re doing and who you’re near. In a lawsuit against Kochava Inc., the Federal Trade Commission called out the company for selling customer geolocation data in August 2022, shortly after Roe v Wade was overruled. The company’s customers, including people who had abortions after the ruling was overturned, often didn’t know that data tracking their movements was being collected, according to the commission. The FTC alleged that the data could be used to identify households.

Kochava has denied the FTC’s allegations.

Information that apps can gain from your mobile devices includes anything you have given an app permission to have, such as your location, who you have in your contact list or photos in your gallery.

If you give an app permission to see where you are while the app is running, for instance, the platform can access your location anytime the app is running. Providing access to contacts may provide an app with the phone numbers, names and emails of all the people that you know.

Cross-application data collection

Companies can also gain information about what you do across different apps by acquiring information collected by other apps and platforms.

The settings on an Android phone show that Meta uses information it collects about you to target ads it shows you in its apps – and also in other apps and on other platforms – by default.
Jack West, CC BY-ND

This is common with social media companies. This allows companies to, for example, show you ads based on what you like or recently looked at on other apps. If you’ve searched for something on Amazon and then noticed an ad for it on Instagram, it’s probably because Amazon shared that information with Instagram.

This combined data collection has made targeted advertising so accurate that people have reported that they feel like their devices are listening to them.

Companies, including Google, Meta, X, TikTok and Snapchat, can build detailed user profiles based on collected information from all the apps and social media platforms you use. They use the profiles to show you ads and posts that match your interests to keep you engaged. They also sell the profile information to advertisers.

Meanwhile, researchers have found that Meta and Yandex, a Russian search engine, have overcome controls in mobile operating system software that ordinarily keep people’s web-browsing data anonymous. Each company puts code on its webpages that used local IPs to pass a person’s browsing history, which is supposed to remain private, to mobile apps installed on that person’s phone, de-anonymizing the data. Yandex has been conducting this tracking since 2017, while Meta began in September 2024, according to the researchers.

What you can do about it

If you use apps that collect your data in some way, including those that give you directions, track your workouts or help you contact someone, or if you use social media platforms, your privacy is at risk.

Aside from entirely abandoning modern technology, there are several steps you can take to limit access – at least in part – to your private information.

Read the privacy policy of each app or social media platform you use. Although privacy policy documents can be long, tedious and sometimes hard to read, they explain how social media platforms collect, process, store and share your data.

Check a policy by making sure it can answer three questions: what data does the app collect, how does it collect the data, and what is the data used for. If you can’t answer all three questions by reading the policy, or if any of the answers don’t sit well with you, consider skipping the app until there’s a change in its data practices.

Remove unnecessary permissions from mobile apps to limit the amount of information that applications can gather from you.

Be aware of the privacy settings that might be offered by the apps or social media platforms you use, including any setting that allows your personal data to affect your experience or shares information about you with other users or applications.

These privacy settings can give you some control. We recommend that you disable “off-app activity” and “personalization” settings. “Off-app activity” allows an app to record which other apps are installed on your phone and what you do on them. Personalization settings allow an app to use your data to tailor what it shows you, including advertisements.

Review and update these settings regularly because permissions sometimes change when apps or your phone update. App updates may also add new features that can collect your data. Phone updates may also give apps new ways to collect your data or add new ways to preserve your privacy.

Use private browser windows or reputable virtual private networks software, commonly referred to as VPNs, when using apps that connect to the internet and social media platforms. Private browsers don’t store any account information, which limits the information that can be collected. VPNs change the IP address of your machine so that apps and platforms can’t discover your location.

Finally, ask yourself whether you really need every app that’s on your phone. And when using social media, consider how much information you want to reveal about yourself in liking and commenting on posts, sharing updates about your life, revealing locations you visited and following celebrities you like.

This article is part of a series on data privacy that explores who collects your data, what and how they collect, who sells and buys your data, what they all do with it, and what you can do about it.

Kassem Fawaz receives funding from the National Science Foundation. In the past, his research group has received unrestricted gifts from Meta and Google.

Jack West does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The hidden cost of convenience: How your data pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars for app and social media companies – https://theconversation.com/the-hidden-cost-of-convenience-how-your-data-pulls-in-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-for-app-and-social-media-companies-251698
MIL OSI – Global Reports –
July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Leeds gardener becomes Apprentice of the Year after sowing the seeds of new career

Source: City of Leeds

An apprentice gardener dedicated to changing the way people view gardens has won Apprentice of the Year at the North Yorkshire Apprenticeship Awards in the public service category.

After completing his apprenticeship with Leeds City Council’s parks and green spaces team, he is now working full time for the authority as craft gardener at locations like the historic Kirkstall Abbey.

Thirty-four-year-old Chris Cole started his horticulture apprenticeship in 2023 after a desire to change career paths and become a professional gardener.

Chris first discovered he enjoyed gardening when he took up the hobby during lockdown.

Working for Leeds City Council throughout his apprenticeship, Chris got to work on gardens, cemeteries and parks, always striving to make a difference. At one of the city’s cemeteries he created new flowerbeds, providing a peaceful place for grieving families to visit.

Alongside his work for the council Chris studied for the Level 2 Horticulture Operative at Askham Bryan College, which he passed with distinction.

He said: “I am extremely proud of my achievement winning this award, through my apprenticeship I faced quite a number of challenges including the loss of loved ones, an accident with my thumb, planned surgery and the best one of all becoming a father to my daughter.

“Horticulture has given me a new outlook in life which I can now call a career. I am so glad I decided to take the plunge and start an apprenticeship at 31 years old and achieving a distinction at the end of it I thought was the icing on the cake until winning this award.

“In future I’d love to further gain more qualifications and continue to improve my skillset. I am so proud to be one of the gardeners at Kirkstall Abbey and I implore anyone thinking of changing career at a later age to do it.”

Adele Jagger from Askham Bryan College, who put Chris forward for the award, said: “The enthusiasm and passion that Chris shows towards horticulture and his learning is second to none. He works very hard and wants to make a real change with the work that he does. We’re incredibly proud of his achievement.”

Councillor Mohammed Rafique, Leeds City Council’s executive member for climate, energy, environment and green space, said: “Our parks and green spaces bring so much joy to the city, and it’s great to see Chris being awarded for the amazing work he has done. We’re pleased to be keeping him on as a craft gardener.”

Councillor Debra Coupar, Leeds City Council’s deputy leader and executive member for resources, said: “Congratulations to Chris for his amazing achievement. Apprenticeships are a vital way for people to further develop their skills and talents, as well as supporting the local economy and help fill the skills shortages we face in some sectors. We are very proud of all our apprentices and the valuable contribution they make to our council and our city.”

In July 2024, Leeds City Council earned a place on The Department for Education’s top 100 apprenticeship employers list, published annually to showcase the most outstanding apprenticeship employers from across the UK. Only one other council made the top 100.

Apprentices earn while they learn, gaining practical skills on the job alongside fully funded study for an accredited qualification. Leeds City Council is a living wage employer, so apprentices of any age are paid at least the Living Wage Foundation minimum rate.

Read more about apprenticeships with the council at https://jobs.leeds.gov.uk/apprenticeships-council.

ENDS

MIL OSI United Kingdom –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Free Community College for In-Demand Fields
Source: US State of New York

overnor Kathy Hochul today launched New York’s free community college program for SUNY and CUNY students as part of her fight to lower costs for New Yorkers and make education more affordable. Starting this fall through SUNY and CUNY Reconnect, New York State will cover tuition, fees, books and supplies for community college students ages 25-55 pursuing select associate degrees in high-demand occupations.

“The cost of pursuing a degree should never be a barrier for New Yorkers — that’s why we’re opening the doors of opportunity at SUNY and CUNY so that students can achieve their dreams,” Governor Hochul said. “I’m fighting to make education more affordable and accessible, and the Reconnect program will continue to pave the way forward for students as they enter our State’s future workforce.”

As part of Governor Hochul’s 2025 State of the State address, free community college for adults in high-demand fields builds on her legacy of ensuring that all New Yorkers have access to a world-class and affordable education.

For the four million working-age adults in New York who do not already have a college degree or credential, the free community college program for adult students provides a valuable education at SUNY and CUNY campuses, with tuition, fees, books and supplies all covered after applicable financial aid. In addition, eligible students will have access to advising and support.

New York State has stepped up as a national leader in many emerging industries such as semiconductor and advanced manufacturing, renewable energy and AI. As a result of these investments, many of the new jobs available in New York will require workers with a degree or credential to fill these specialized positions. The SUNY and CUNY Reconnect programs will help connect eligible New Yorkers to these job opportunities.

In order to be eligible for the program, students will enroll in high-demand fields including:
- Advanced manufacturing
- Artificial Intelligence
- Cybersecurity
- Engineering
- Technology
- Nursing and allied health fields
- Green and renewable energy
- Pathways to teaching in shortage areas
In order to ensure that students have the tools they need to succeed, the program includes funding for SUNY and CUNY to support retention through wrap-around supports such as academic advising and student success coaching. In addition, it also includes funding to support marketing for effective outreach for the program.

SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. said, “The Governor’s free community college initiative will help empower eligible New Yorkers to achieve their full potential and move our state economy forward. By implementing SUNY Reconnect, campuses throughout New York have already seen promising interest and enthusiasm from adult learner students ready to seize this opportunity. We appreciate the strong support from Governor Hochul and the State Legislature to ensure New Yorkers receive the world-class education and job training opportunities they deserve, on the path to upward mobility and career advancement.”

CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez said, “Talent is abundant across our city—but access to opportunity must be intentional and inclusive. I’m grateful to Gov. Hochul and the state legislature for addressing this challenge by removing financial barriers for eligible adults to earn associate degrees in high-demand fields at CUNY’s community colleges.”

State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky said, “Everyone’s educational journey is different. Sometimes the path has hurdles and challenges. This initiative will enable students between the ages of 25 to 55 to complete their journey. It also expands workforce development in high demand fields. As a result, everyone benefits.”

State Senator Sean Ryan said, “SUNY Reconnect is a creative way to promote economic development while empowering more New Yorkers to pursue careers in fields with plenty of stable, good-paying jobs. This program builds on our public universities’ history of helping build New York’s middle class and will create the highly skilled workforce needed to position New York as a leader in emerging industries.”

Assemblymember Al Stirpe said, “Developing a workforce in these high demand fields is an essential part of the equation when it comes to driving New York’s advanced manufacturing and semiconductor industries forward. By providing sweeping supports for adult students, this program has the potential to change lives. It removes economic barriers and makes these specialized positions accessible to those aspiring to start a career. It not only empowers SUNY and CUNY students to realize their potential, but it also helps construct a future-ready workforce that will support New York’s emerging economic leadership in a technology-driven world.”

Assemblymember Michaelle Solages said, “For far too long, the cost of higher education has blocked working-class New Yorkers from reaching their full potential. That is why the free SUNY and CUNY community college program is so transformative. It will not only prepare New Yorkers for high-demand careers but also attract new employers and fuel economic growth across the state. I fully support this initiative and look forward to seeing it change lives, strengthen families, and build a more inclusive and resilient New York.”

Assemblymember Chantel Jackson said, “This is a game-changer for New Yorkers who thought higher education was out of reach. By removing financial barriers and investing in our adult learners, Governor Hochul is helping to build a stronger, more inclusive workforce. I’m proud to support the SUNY and CUNY Reconnect initiative, which will open doors for thousands of students across our state and create real pathways to economic mobility.”

New York City Council Member Eric Dinowitz said, “While our federal government continues to divest from the people and institutions that make our country thrive, Governor Hochul is showing what real leadership looks like—making smart, meaningful investments in New York’s future. This bold initiative removes financial barriers for thousands of adult learners, connects them to high-demand careers, and strengthens our workforce in critical sectors, creating a stronger New York. As a proud CUNY and SUNY graduate and chair of the NYC City Council’s Committee on Higher Education, I applaud the Governor for expanding access to opportunity and continuing to build pathways to economic mobility for working New Yorkers.”

Governor Hochul’s program will significantly expand the reach and impact of CUNY Reconnect, which launched in 2022. As of fall 2024, CUNY Reconnect has supported over 40,000 New Yorkers in their efforts to return to college. Drawing from the proven strategies of outreach, re-enrollment and support services that made Reconnect successful, the governor’s program expands this work by providing tuition-free pathways specifically aligned with labor market needs.

SUNY Reconnect, launching in fall 2025, will help empower New Yorkers and serve as a powerful engine of upward mobility for hard-working adults. Through SUNY Reconnect, community colleges will hold information sessions this summer to assist all who are interested in eligible degree programs. Information can also be found here.

MIL OSI USA News –
July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Oldbury turbine hall free of electrical hazards
Source: United Kingdom – Government Statements

News story

Oldbury turbine hall free of electrical hazards

A complex decommissioning project to cut over 750 electrical cables to isolate Oldbury site’s turbine hall power supply has been safely completed.
Oldbury cable cutting team in the turbine hall

Pioneering innovation enabled the team to cut 356 electrical cables inside the tunnels between the turbine hall and reactor building of the redundant nuclear power station over two weekends – reducing work time by 91%. This was achieved by disconnecting the site’s entire power supply to remove the risk of cutting through a live cable and the need to trace each cable to its source.

Wider safety measures avoided work near to potential asbestos which eliminated the need for scaffolding and prevented work in confined spaces or close to degrading assets.

John Alderton, Oldbury Site Director, commented:

I’m incredibly proud of how everyone collaborated to deliver this project safely and successfully. It’s a great example of how innovation and creative thinking can solve long-standing challenges. By learning from previous cable cutting campaigns and applying those insights to a new strategy, the team has truly transformed the way we work and set a new benchmark for the industry.

The learning from this innovative method of bulk cable cutting can be applied to any area of decommissioning in the right circumstances. It took 18 months to complete over 2,000 cable cuts in challenging environments and declare the building free of electrical hazards following a period of verification.

Adam Bird, Oldbury Site Senior Project Engineer, said:

Delivering this solution has been a great challenge that has really stretched our ways of thinking – not only within the team but with others on site too.

Now that the turbine hall has been isolated, we are looking forward to commencing bulk asbestos removal, followed by de-planting of the building. The turbine hall, welfare area and administration complex will then be demolished – clearing a four-acre footprint ready for its next use.

Heather Barton, NDA Head of Performance Improvement, added:

Learning from each other across the NDA group remains to be a critical enabler to deliver our mission.

It presents us with opportunities such as this where we can look at how this could be replicated elsewhere across our estate, and where we can present ourselves with more opportunities to challenge the norm.

These shared and mutual benefits can truly be realised across our group, bringing innovation, collaboration, and joint solutions to our common challenges, enhancing every business in our group.

Tom Eagleton, the Office for Nuclear Regulation’s (ONR) Head of Safety Regulation for decommissioning, fuel and waste sites, commented:

ONR was pleased to support the approach taken by NRS to de-cabling at Oldbury.

The method used at the site delivered significant safety benefits to the workers involved, including reducing potential exposure to asbestos and elimination of risks associated with inadvertently cutting live cables.

As an enabling regulator, we will always be open to holding discussions with licensees and dutyholders about novel and innovative approaches, providing they are safe and do not compromise worker or public safety.

Over its lifetime Oldbury generated 137.5 terawatt hours of low carbon electricity – enough to power one million homes for over 20 years. The site was shut down in February 2012 after 44 years of safe operation.

This most recent NRS achievement follows on from the successful de-plant and demolition of the turbine hall and adjoining structures at Sizewell A site in Suffolk. Learning from the Sizewell project is helping plans to deliver similar work at Oldbury site.

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Published 1 July 2025
MIL OSI United Kingdom –
July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI: VelocityEHS Launches New “PSIF” AI to Identify the Next Serious Injury or Fatality Before It Happens
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

CHICAGO, July 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — VelocityEHS, the global leader in EHS solutions and the pioneer in applying practical AI to workplace safety, today announced the release of AI PSIF Insights, a new feature within the company’s award-winning Incident Management solution on the VelocityEHS Accelerate^® Platform. The feature leverages machine learning (ML) to uncover high risks companies carry forward hidden in “near miss” and other “minor” events, also known as Potential Serious Injuries and Fatalities (PSIFs) before they lead to life-altering harm.

“EHS professionals have a professional and ethical responsibility to use AI and machine learning to reduce the risk of serious injuries and fatalities,” said Dr. Julia Penfield, Vice President of Research & Machine Learning at VelocityEHS.

“AI PSIF Insights is built to put advanced risk detection into the hands of safety teams, regardless of their size or digital maturity. It helps them identify the most critical risks earlier, so they can act before harm occurs,” added Penfield.

By analyzing incident and near miss reports, AI PSIF Insights identifies the potential for temporary and permanent disabilities, amputations, fatalities, and other severe outcomes without requiring any changes to workflows or additional forms. It automatically flags PSIF incidents and provides clear reasoning. Safety teams stay in control through human-in-the-loop validation, ensuring trust, transparency, and compliance.

A Smarter, Faster Way to Surface Serious Risk

Serious incidents seem to happen without warning, but the signs are often buried in incident or near miss reports when the underlying root causes are not identified or addressed. AI PSIF Insights surfaces those signals by:
- Evaluating the quality of incident descriptions and offering instant, tailored suggestions to enhance the completeness, clarity, and actionable details of your documentation
- Automatically analyzing incident reports to identify those with high potential for serious outcomes and send out automated notifications
- Standardizing detection across sites and teams, improving safety performance and reporting accuracy
- Enabling companies to focus their resources and investigations on risks hidden in minor incidents and near-misses with the highest potential for serious harm
- Reducing manual triage time by 30–50% and freeing safety teams to focus on prevention instead of paperwork
“This is not just a new release, it’s a shift in how safety gets done: helping EHS professionals get ahead of risk and act earlier, before harm happens,” said Matt Airhart, CEO of VelocityEHS. “Too often, serious injuries happen while safety teams are still trying to uncover hidden risks. AI PSIF Insights surfaces those risks sooner—no hoops to jump through, no new processes to learn, no additional set up, and no added cost.”

No Extra Cost. No Extra Burden. No Excuses.

AI PSIF Insights is especially valuable for mid-sized enterprise organizations in safety-critical industries, such as manufacturing, food & beverage, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals where near misses are common and consequences can be severe. The feature is available to all current and new Incident Management customers on the Accelerate Platform as part of their existing agreement.

AI PSIF Insights is part of a broader VelocityEHS initiative to bring the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to frontline EHS workflows.

Other Velocity Features with Embedded ML/AI Include:
- 3D Motion Capture (Industrial Ergonomics)
- Ingredient Indexing (Chemical Management)
- Automated review of Certificates of Insurance and OSHA Logs (Contractor Safety)
Groundbreaking AI-Embedded Feature Launches Coming in 2025 Include:
- Ergonomics Assessments for Hands (Industrial Ergonomics)
- Job Safety Analysis Hazard and Control Recommendations (Operational Risk)
- Hazard Type, Root Causes & Corrective Action Recommendations (Safety)
Collectively, these tools empower organizations to improve regulatory compliance and enhance safety culture across every level of their business.

For more information about the AI PSIF Insights feature and how it fits into the company’s broader AI strategy, visit https://www.ehs.com/solutions/safety/incident-management/.

About VelocityEHS

Relied on by over 10 million users worldwide, VelocityEHS is the global leader in true SaaS enterprise EHS & Sustainability technology. The VelocityEHS Accelerate^® Platform delivers best-in-class software solutions for Safety, Ergonomics, Chemical Management, and Operational Risk, along with advanced applications for Contractor Safety, Permit to Work, Environmental Compliance, and GHG Reporting.

The VelocityEHS team includes more certified professionals in health, safety, industrial hygiene, ergonomics, sustainability, and applied AI than any other EHS software provider. Recognized as a Leader in the Verdantix 2025 Green Quadrant, VelocityEHS is committed to driving innovation and industry leadership. The company maintains SOC 2 Type II attestation for top-tier data security and privacy.

Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, VelocityEHS operates offices in Ann Arbor, MI; Tampa, FL; Oakville, ON; London, UK; Perth, AUS; and Cork, IRL. For more information, visit www.EHS.com.

Media Contact

Jennifer Sinkwitts
jsinkwitts@ehs.com

The MIL Network –
July 2, 2025
President Murmu inaugurates Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University

Source: Government of India

Source: Government of India (4)

President Droupadi Murmu inaugurated the Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, on Tuesday, marking a significant milestone in the advancement of traditional medicine and medical education in India.

Addressing the gathering, President Murmu described the university as a modern embodiment of India’s rich ancient healing traditions. She emphasized that the institution would greatly enhance access to quality healthcare through AYUSH systems, benefiting over 100 affiliated colleges and the broader public. The President also lauded the state-of-the-art facilities developed at the university, calling them a step forward in holistic healthcare.

Reflecting on her own journey in public life, the President spoke of the importance of selfless service and praised Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for his efforts in improving health, education, and agricultural infrastructure in the region. She urged healthcare professionals to uphold their responsibilities and remain true to their commitments of public welfare.

Underscoring the significance of preventive care and healthy living, President Murmu advocated the regular practice of yoga, especially for those leading sedentary lifestyles. She stressed that embracing wellness through ancient Indian systems like Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, and Siddha was essential for building a healthier nation and contributing to India’s goal of becoming a developed country by 2047.

Highlighting India’s natural wealth of medicinal plants and herbs, she called AYUSH a “precious gift” to the world. She expressed confidence that institutions like the Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University would play a vital role in increasing the scientific validation and global popularity of traditional medicine systems.

July 2, 2025
President Murmu inaugurates Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University

Source: Government of India

Source: Government of India (4)

President Droupadi Murmu inaugurated the Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, on Tuesday, marking a significant milestone in the advancement of traditional medicine and medical education in India.

Addressing the gathering, President Murmu described the university as a modern embodiment of India’s rich ancient healing traditions. She emphasized that the institution would greatly enhance access to quality healthcare through AYUSH systems, benefiting over 100 affiliated colleges and the broader public. The President also lauded the state-of-the-art facilities developed at the university, calling them a step forward in holistic healthcare.

Reflecting on her own journey in public life, the President spoke of the importance of selfless service and praised Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for his efforts in improving health, education, and agricultural infrastructure in the region. She urged healthcare professionals to uphold their responsibilities and remain true to their commitments of public welfare.

Underscoring the significance of preventive care and healthy living, President Murmu advocated the regular practice of yoga, especially for those leading sedentary lifestyles. She stressed that embracing wellness through ancient Indian systems like Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, and Siddha was essential for building a healthier nation and contributing to India’s goal of becoming a developed country by 2047.

Highlighting India’s natural wealth of medicinal plants and herbs, she called AYUSH a “precious gift” to the world. She expressed confidence that institutions like the Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University would play a vital role in increasing the scientific validation and global popularity of traditional medicine systems.

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: UConn Students Combat Opioid Crisis in CT through Adopt a Health District Program

Source: US State of Connecticut

The Adopt a Health District (ADOPHD) Program provides students with internship experiences that directly support Connecticut communities fighting the opioid epidemic.

“It empowers the students to feel like they count, that they can make a difference in the world,” says Peaches Udoma, ADOPHD program coordinator and adjunct professor of pharmacy practice.

The program’s design began in 2021, when Nathaniel Rickles, project director and associate dean for admissions and student affairs in the School of Pharmacy, received a grant from the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS), funded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Since the first year, when the program included just two interns, it has grown substantially. During the 2024-25 academic year, 10 students participated. Next year, the program will expand to include the Stamford Health District, the Housatonic Valley Health District, and a total of 14 interns.

“The program is a great example of life-transformative education, as it bridges classroom learning with real-world application that can change the lives of those in our communities with the greatest needs for support and care,” says Rickles.

Students participate in a variety of activities related to the opioid crisis, including receiving and providing training to use Narcan, a medicine that can rapidly reverse an overdose, providing information about recognizing fake pills and general information about opioids, and assisting in the safe disposal of medication.

Two interns work in collaboration at each health district. Interns have worked in districts which include the towns of New London, Groton, East Hartford, West Hartford, Stratford, Bristol, Burlington, Cheshire, Prospect, and Wolcott.

“The health districts get new ideas from people who are reading the research, who are on the cutting edge, who are excited and idealistic about changing the world,” Udoma says. “The benefits of the relationship are endless, on both sides.”

While the program is administered through the School of Pharmacy, students have also come from the UConn MPH program, and more MPH students are applying this year. The majority of the interns, however, have come from the allied health sciences (AHS) program in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources.

“Our students are really trying to get experience in different areas of healthcare and health promotion, so this is a perfect opportunity for them to get out into the community and put their knowledge to use,” says Jill Skowrenski, AHS administrative lead for student placement and engagement. “It’s so vital for the students to experiment in different paths in healthcare. It’s a great mix, this program led by the School of Pharmacy connecting with allied health students.”

Eva-LaRue Barber ‘25 (CAHNR) was one of the AHS students who participated in the program last year.

Barber works as an EMT and firefighter in New Haven, and already had experience administering Narcan.

“I was really curious about how larger prevention techniques could be employed by a community,” Barber says.

Barber interned in the Chesprocott Health District, which includes Cheshire, Prospect, and Wolcott.

There, she and the other intern assigned to the district analyzed data to identify what groups were experiencing overdoses and how that compared to the district’s demographics.

Because the population in the Chesprocott district is older, the interns went to senior centers and provided information about pill sorting and how to prevent accidental overdoses.

They also hosted Narcan trainings at a school and participated in Drug Takeback Day.

Barber made a video for the program’s YouTube channel, based on the in-person trainings.

“I thought that was a really accessible way for people who couldn’t make it in for the trainings, and also to share with their friends and families,” Barber says.

Barber will be working as a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology in the fall, before eventually attending medical school. She will continue to work with ADOPHD as a student coordinator.

“I’m really interested in communities and how you can educate communities, especially with targeted approaches for their specific challenges,” Barber says. “For me, that’s something that was really important – recognizing communities and creating things for them.”

Baber says she appreciates how she was able to tailor the experience to fit her interests.

“You can really customize it to fulfill your needs,” Barber says. “You get out of it what you put into it.”

Throughout the year-long program, students also collaborate on different teams to organize the program’s marketing, data, resources, and social events.

“It’s not just academics, it’s not just what you learn in the classroom that is crucial to your success out in the world, it’s also your ability to work with others effectively and consider other opinions,” Udoma says. “So that’s why we put so much focus on the team-based approach.”

Udoma says she and Rickles hope the program can become a national model.

“If we could get students as boots on the ground all over the country bringing their ideas, their passion, and their openness to learning, we could really make a difference in the opioid crisis,” Udoma says.

This work relates to CAHNR’s Strategic Vision area focused on Enhancing Health and Well-Being Locally, Nationally, and Globally.

Follow UConn CAHNR on social media

MIL OSI USA News –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: ‘The Ability to Give and Receive Love’: Researchers Look at Effects of Acceptance, Rejection

Source: US State of Connecticut

Even at 90 years old, Ronald P. Rohner still works 365 days a year.

That’s holidays, weekends, sick days, and everything in between, he says. But the professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection knows he’s not going to be able to keep pace forever – no matter how much he wants.

He’s picked Sumbleen Ali ’21 Ph.D., a research scientist at the Center and an assistant professor at SUNY Oneonta, to carry on the Center’s global mission, as they seek to advance research on Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory, known as IPARTheory, and continue to expand its reach worldwide.

It’s part of what the two have put into their latest book, “Global Perspectives on Parental Acceptance and Rejection: Lessons Learned from IPARTheory,” published this spring.

Rohner and Ali sat with UConn Today recently to talk about interpersonal acceptance and rejection, what started Rohner’s study of it, and what their advice is for lay people.

IPARTheory, short for Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory, has a global reach with thousands of downloads from people worldwide. This map from late May shows the latest reach. (Contributed art)

How did you get started with this research?

Rohner: It all came from a passage in this 1956 book that was my favorite textbook when I was an undergraduate. The author said that, in general, rejected children tend to be fearful, insecure, attention seeking, jealous, hostile, and lonely. Because of some previous experiences I’d had working in Morocco, I thought that wouldn’t be true. That may be true for Americans, but that’s not true for people all over the world – especially the people I’d encountered in Morocco in the 1950s. One of my first assignments in graduate school was to use the cross-cultural survey method, that’s when you draw a sample of societies from around the world and code them in a certain way to see what’s true and not true for people worldwide. When I did the analysis, I discovered that some of what was said in my undergraduate book was true and some of it wasn’t. That completely captured my attention. Every class thereafter during my graduate career if I could possibly fit it in, I built on that initial cross-cultural study, and when I came to UConn in 1964, I continued doing these kinds of cross-cultural studies to find out what we’re really like as human beings.

What are some of the things you’ve found?

Rohner: We’ve worked with several hundred thousand people over the past 60-some-odd years on every continent except Antarctica, and while doing that, we’ve learned many lessons about what we’re like and not like as human beings. The beauty of the work we do is that we can now empirically document three things, among others. First, humans everywhere – in any place in the world that we’ve found so far – understand themselves to be cared about or not cared about in the same four ways. So far, no exceptions. Second, if you feel the person or people who are most important to you – these are usually parents when we’re kids and intimate partners when we’re adults, but there could be others like teachers or coaches – if you feel that person doesn’t really want you, appreciate you, care about you, love you, if you feel rejected by that person, most people will respond in exactly the same way. A cluster of 10 things start to happen. We get anxious, insecure. We have anger problems. Our self-esteem is impaired. Children can have issues of cognitive distortions, in which they start to think about themselves in distorted ways. The third important lesson comes from Sumbleen’s work.

Ali: I came to UConn as a psychology student and enjoyed working with Ron so much that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in human development and family sciences. In conversations about IPARTheory, we developed an argument that parental acceptance and rejection might be rooted in our shared biocultural evolution, and I wanted to investigate how that shows up in the brain. This became the focus of my dissertation – the first in affective neuroscience at UConn – under the guidance of my Ph.D. advisors, Preston Britner and Ron Rohner. The research examined how early parental experiences shape emotional regulation. We scanned the brains of students who reported either parental acceptance or rejection while they played a simulated ball-tossing game designed to mimic social exclusion. Those with rejection histories showed more activity in areas linked to emotion and memory, suggesting they were re-experiencing past rejection. Participants who felt loved showed more activation in regions tied to rational thinking, possibly reframing the experience. Now, we’re analyzing resting-state brain data to see whether differences in brain connectivity appear even without an external task.

Why is this research so important?

Rohner: If you bang your thumb, it’s going to hurt. Two weeks from now you’re going to remember that when you did that, it hurt – but you’re probably not going to feel the pain. With rejection, though, every time you think about it for the rest of your life, it can light up your brain in the same way it did when it was happening. I sometimes say the childhood of rejected kids can bully them for the rest of their lives. A rejected child who as an adult gets into an intimate relationship with a partner who is patient and has other supportive traits can help the rejected person to start feeling cared about, maybe for the first time in her or his life. That can go a long way, but we haven’t found anything yet that completely erases those experiences of early childhood.

Really, there aren’t any exceptions?

Ali: IPARTheory does identify a group of people we call ‘affective copers.’ These are individuals who might have experienced rejection from their parents or one parent, but they don’t show psychological maladjustment to the same degree that other rejected individuals do because they had a buffer in their life, like a grandparent, an intimate partner, a friend, or a sibling who provided them with love and shelter and protection.

Rohner: We’re exploring this theory of ‘affective copers’ because if we can find out what helps some people then maybe clinicians and other professionals can use that information with their clients to help them overcome their feelings of rejection. We have clinical partners all over the world – in the courts, schools, clinical settings. IPARTheory is being applied everywhere to help people with custody issues, parental alienation, etcetera. The reason this has become so widespread around the world is because it works for people everywhere.

People experience rejection all the time. How do how do some get through these situations better than others?

Rohner: Someone like a bus driver, for instance, you don’t really care about them, so if they’re snotty to you, you’re going to get irritated, but it will roll off easier. If you’re ostracized from a peer group, that hurts too, and it’ll light up the brain but it’s not going to have the same long-term effects as being hurt by an attachment figure. We have an adage in IPARTheory that we call the ‘emotional moon phenomenon’ that says: ‘Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blue. My mood all day depends on my relationship with you.’ An attachment figure for us in IPARTheory is someone with whom your feelings of happiness and welfare are to some extent dependent on your relationship with that other person. When things are going well between you and them, times are great. When things start going out of whack, you get upset and stay that way. That’s an attachment figure. The bus driver is not an attachment figure. The breakup of even a bad intimate relationship is painful and will have an enduring effect for many people for a long time, but if you come from a loving family when that relationship ends there will be a period of upset, but you’ll tap the resilience from your prior background to get you through the hard times.

Do you have any advice for lay people?

Rohner: There’s no single experience in human life that’s more important, that has greater impact over the entire course of your life than the experience of being cared about by the people who are most important to you. That’s the fundamental lesson behind all of this. I don’t care what somebody says about what’s going on in a relationship, it’s what you feel is going on that makes the difference in your life.

Ali: Early experiences of parental love, acceptance, or rejection leave children with far more than just memories. They fundamentally shape how children, and the adults they become, perceive themselves, relate to others, and make sense of the world. To that end, we have to keep working to understand why some parents love their children versus why others don’t, the ability to give and receive love. Our goal is for people to better understand themselves and understand those around them. Through our research and advocacy, we want to build a better community and foster healthy interpersonal relationships by improving our understanding of one another.

MIL OSI USA News –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Neag School of Education Hosts “Why Teach, Why Now” Contest for Early College Experience Students

Source: US State of Connecticut

On June 26, the Neag School of Education celebrated the winners of its “Why Teach, Why Now” contest, which encouraged high school students enrolled in its education Early College Experience courses to share why they wish to become educators in urban settings. The three winners of the contest were Aiden Tetreault from Enfield, who came in first place; Madelyn Heitmann of Milford, who came in second; and Keira Beck of Milford, who came in third.

The Neag School had 924 students enrolled in its ECE courses across 45 Connecticut high schools during the 2024-2025 academic year, and all were invited to submit for the contest. Submissions had to be either 250-500-word essays or 5-minute videos describing why they want to be urban educators and why now. A committee of faculty from the Neag School’s Office of Teacher Education — including Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Austina Lee, and Kathryn Nagrotsky — judged the submissions and selected the winners.

“At a time when teachers and teaching are often under attack, it was a true privilege to review the submissions of future urban educators who are committed to the profession,” says Dunn, who is the director of teacher education for the Neag School.

On Thursday evening, Tetreault, Heitmann, and Beck, along with their families and teachers, were invited to a celebratory reception at UConn Hartford. All three students read their winning submissions for the group before receiving small award plaques.

“Aiden, Madelyn, and Keira’s essays illustrated the importance of working for justice and equity for all children,” Dunn says. “Their ECE teachers had clearly done a great job of helping them understand the power of teachers in today’s world, and their writings beautifully linked their personal experiences with their future profession.”

Expanding its ECE course offerings and enrollment has been a priority for the Neag School for the past few years. When the School piloted two ECE courses in 2021-2022, only five school districts participated. Since then, the Neag School has expanded to offer four courses and has steadily increased its enrollment every year. The ECE courses it currently offers include: EDCI 1100: If You Love It, Teach It; EDLR 1162: Health and Education in Urban Communities; EDLR 2001: Contemporary Social Issues in Sport; and EPSY 1100: Introduction to Special Education.

“Not only do these courses allow students to earn UConn credits while still in high school, but they also offer the chance to explore careers in education,” said Neag School Dean Jason G. Irizarry during his welcome remarks at the event. “We need passionate future educators more than ever, and I’m thrilled that we’re recognizing three of them tonight.”

The event was supported by the John and Carla Klein Endowment for Urban Education through the UConn Foundation.

“The Neag School of Education has a longstanding commitment to preparing educators to work in the schools that need them the most,” Irizarry said. “We are lucky that multiple donors – most notably, Carla Klein – are also invested in that vision. We are grateful for their generosity.”

To learn more about UConn’s Early College Experience, visit ece.uconn.edu.

MIL OSI USA News –

July 2, 2025
MIL-OSI Africa: Government reaffirms commitment to support agricultural extension services

Source: South Africa News Agency

Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen has reaffirmed government’s unwavering commitment to agricultural extension services, highlighting their pivotal role in fostering inclusive rural development, ensuring food security, and facilitating vital knowledge transfer.

Steenhuisen made the commitment at the centenary celebration of the establishment of formal agricultural extension services in the country.

The Minister also officially opened the 58th annual conference of the South African Society for Agricultural Extension (SASAE) and Agricultural Extension Week, currently underway in Kempton Park, Johannesburg.

This historic centenary coincides with the inaugural South African Agricultural Extension Week and the 58 Conference of the South African Society for Agricultural Extension.

The annual conference of SASAE aims to address critical issues in agricultural extension and development.

This year’s conference is held under the theme: “Leveraging innovation and technology to enhance Extension and Advisory Services for sustainable agriculture, improved livelihoods and food security.”

The week-long event includes field visits to eight diverse agricultural projects, ranging from rooftop urban farming at Morningside Mall, to hemp farming, egg production, and both crop and livestock farming, amongst others.

During the conference, delegates will also engage with scientific presentations delivered by extension practitioners, professors, and doctoral researchers from top South African universities, to further enhance agricultural production and intensify the national fight against hunger and food insecurity.

In his keynote address on Monday, Steenhuisen said the centenary marks not only a historic achievement since the establishment of formal extension services in South Africa in 1925, but also a “renewed commitment to ensuring that agricultural extension remains at the heart of inclusive rural development, food security, and knowledge transfer in our country.”.”

“Agriculture is the bedrock of South Africa’s economy and society. It ensures food security, supports rural livelihoods, and drives employment. However, it is the work of our extension practitioners that truly unlocks the potential of our producers, particularly smallholders who depend on support, advice, and innovation,” Steenhuisen said.

He also emphasised that extension practitioners provide practical, tailored advice that helps producers improve productivity, adopt sustainable practices, manage risks, and access markets.

The Minister underscored the critical role extension practitioners play in providing practical, tailored advice that helps producers improve productivity, adopt sustainable practices, manage risks, and access markets.

“Their role underpins the entire agricultural value chain, which contributes about 12% to the national gross domestic product (GDP). Notably, the agricultural sector grew by 15,8% in the first quarter of 2025 – a growth driven in no small part by the work done by extension practitioners.”

Support for smallholders

To enhance support for producers, particularly smallholders, Steenhuisen announced the rollout of the Smallholder Horticulture Empowerment and Promotion (SHEP) approach, implemented in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

“This “market-oriented agriculture” model is already bearing fruit, with 18 extension officers trained in Japan last year and another 20 scheduled to depart this October. The department will also prioritise assistance to women, youth, and persons with disabilities in the agricultural sector as these groups often face the greatest barriers.

“To support this, the department will employ 260 assistant agricultural practitioners this year, strengthening its capacity to deliver extension services. The department’s Farmer Field School (FFS) initiative, supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is also being expanded from its current base in Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and Northern Cape,” the Minister said.

He further emphasised the need to make agriculture a career of choice for young people by showing them its breadth, “from agritech and agro-processing to entrepreneurship and policy.” – SAnews.gov.za

MIL OSI Africa –

July 2, 2025